The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Nowhere in life is there a greater need for a spiritual understanding of existence than in the face of a growing child, for anyone who has an open mind. For even if it is of infinite importance for all life and being to see through the world of the senses to the spiritual foundations of existence, it appears to be something quite special to help the still hidden spirit to its full free existence in relation to the growing child, regardless of the relationship we have with him. The child stands before us, enveloped in the material existence of his future. We know that this future is to be brought out of the material, we know that out of the material the spirit is to unfold, we are faced with the task of nurturing and caring for the spirit within the outer appearance of the senses. And if material knowledge can lead us into error with regard to our world view, we know that we will actually stray from our path when it comes to our duty to save humanity if we have no sense of the hidden spirit of the growing child. Spiritual science enables us to free the spirit from material shells.

Earlier I was allowed to speak about education, today we should be more concerned with what the child is. We should be concerned with what the child's relationship is to his future, to a full, human existence. For from such knowledge we will learn how to properly support the growing child.

It is an important question: how should we relate to the child in the past if we want to find the right path for future development?

In today's world, which is steeped in material ideas, heredity and descent play a major role. If we have an intuitive sense of how the child's qualities are passed on, first to the parents and then to the ancestors, we understand how scientific thinking about heredity has blossomed magnificently. But spiritual science will show that we cannot get by with this in relation to the important relationship between man, woman and child. Those who have the task of educating the child see how the talents and abilities, what we summarize as individual, prove to be a new mystery. Those who take their task seriously feel like a new puzzle solver in the face of each individual child's individuality.

Heredity and individuality are part of our subject. Heredity is something that has grown out of contemporary scientific ideas. These are based much less on comprehensive observation of human life than on the nature of plants and animals. Not a single word of criticism is to be said against the positive achievements of scientific research in this field. Much remains to be done in this area. But research is insufficient with regard to the human being. If one observes the individual characteristics of the human being, and first of all the purely physical ones, inherited like those of animals, one falls into abstractions. One arrives at poor concepts for the human being, whereas one arrives at extremely fruitful concepts for the animalistic. We must bear in mind the tremendous difference between humans and animals, that the concepts gained in the lower realms are not sufficient for human life. In the case of humans, we have four elements of their being and so on. The human soul and what flows from the I is independent of the two elements of physical and etheric body. If we consider that in the plant kingdom we are only dealing with the physical and etheric bodies, and in the animal kingdom with these and the astral body, that the astral body is completely devoted to the physical body, while in humans the astral body is influenced by the ego, then we will understand that we cannot transfer the concepts from the other kingdoms to humans.

There is a very simple train of thought to make this clear. The great difference between humans and animals, if we disregard everything occult, appears to us through purely logical consideration. In the case of animals, our interest is equally divided between grandfather, father, son and grandson, and what mainly interests us is the generic. Our interest in the individuality is far below our interest in the species. The species aspect far outweighs the individual. That is why animals have no biography. Only humans have a biography because, in the case of humans, the sentence applies that, in certain respects, they are their own species. Just as we are strongly interested in the species in the case of animals, we must be just as interested in the individual in the case of humans. Some dog owners will say that humans differ from animals only in degrees, and that anyone who observes an animal could also write a biography of their dog. Of course, there are transfers from one to the other. You can also write the biography of a steel spring. But in the true sense, only humans have one, and even the most insignificant ones.

Something else is connected with the fact of the biography. We see how the animal is born and has reached perfection shortly after birth, how it performs certain actions because these actions are related to heredity. Because humans are individuals, we see that we are justified in bringing out the very individuality in each person through education, which corresponds to the development of the animal, which passes through the species.

This leads us to the spiritual-scientific fact that the animal has only three bodies and the human being has the fourth in addition. When we see that movements and impulses, joy and pain, emanate from the animal body, we say that the astral body is connected to the lower bodies and receives their peculiarities through inheritance. This is shown by the similarity of the physiognomy and the individual limbs. The etheric body is the shaper of the images of the physical body. Both receive their structure through their descent.

Because the human being is an individuality, and thus has an underlying ego, the impulses of the ego express themselves in the astral body. When the astral body has inner impulses, there are things in the human being that cannot be understood if one assumes mere inheritance. Objections can easily be raised from the point of view of observation (the Bach and Bernoulli families).

Such things appear as if human inheritance existed, but in a more spiritualized, higher form than in plants and animals. One goes further and shows that in such a case the significant genius can be traced backwards. The genius is a summation of the qualities of his ancestors. — A strange conclusion, because this last genius is not inherited. From one logic, one should not be particularly surprised that a descendant, even if he is a genius, shows certain characteristics of his ancestors; but it is actually only a matter of having a correct understanding of this inheritance. With a plant, one will not be particularly surprised if it turns out differently in different soils.

But no one doubts that it was not the soil that made the plant, but the seed that was planted in the soil. So there is no need to be surprised when you come back wet from the water. To want to prove inheritance by the fact that genius appears at the end of a generation is proof that it does not continue to be inherited. People do not notice the illogicality.

We only see what we want to see. For the educator who stands before the developing child, there is no need for proof that something very individual is released from within, in addition to the inherited traits. When we see this individuality being released, we have to ask ourselves: where does this individuality come from? Materialism has a superstitious chapter on this in its findings. Here, materialism goes against all its assumptions. It would not have been a miracle if 300 years ago it had been said that the individual comes out of nothing, out of the sum of the ancestral line. 300 years ago, people believed that fish could form out of mud. Then an Italian naturalist said: “The living cannot arise from the seemingly dead.” Today, all of natural science shares Haeckel's belief that ‘the living can only arise from the living.’ But when Redi expressed this, it was considered heresy, and he only narrowly escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno.

Today it is no longer fashionable to burn such heretics; they are seen as backward people. Materialism does not burn, it uses other inquisitorial means. For spiritual science, the following applies: spiritual can only arise from spiritual. No combination of physical causes can explain the individual without appealing to a miracle. The materialist is superstitious when it comes to the spiritual. Spiritual science is firmly grounded in the fact that spiritual arises from spiritual. We trace individuality back to spiritual.

Here we are confronted with the comprehensive law that spiritual science presents us with. What appears to us as a species in the lower ranks appears to us in relation to humans as repeated lives on earth. What a person acquires in this life is the basis for their development in the following lives. Thus we see true individuality permeating many earthly lives as a spiritual unity. If we put the whole human individual together, we find that the physical and etheric bodies lie in the line of inheritance, but that the I and the astral body can be traced back to earlier earth lives and the spiritual. If we bring this before our spiritual eyes, it can give us a satisfactory explanation for the fact that the human being standing before us as a child appears to us as a combination of inheritance and embodiments.

How do we explain such phenomena of inheritance? We have to admit that the child was there long before the physical characteristics that can be inherited could be thought of. Just as there is attraction and repulsion in the physical life, there is this force between the sheaths given by man and woman.

A child is not drawn to every pair of parents, but to where it fits. Much finer characteristics than the face are inherited, but these are precisely what attract the individual. Man has not only the outer but also the inner physiognomy. The child must be driven by the bond of attraction to that embodiment which the outer instruments give to his talents. The incarnating human individuality chooses its parents. The organ of mathematical thinking is not the brain, but the three semicircular canals in the ear, which are perpendicular to each other in the three directions of space and which, when injured, impair the sense of orientation. Painting is based on the very specific structure of the eye.

There is no contradiction between heredity and re-embodiment. Men and women only inherit the physical. The child is born into a pair of parents, as it is born out of them. We see the plant absorbing the characteristic features of the soil. The child springs forth from the soil of its descent and displays everything that is in the father and mother. We also see the individual germinal, which is only sunk into this soil as a true individuality, which is a closed entity, going through various incarnations. We remember Schopenhauer: by man and woman seeking each other, the offspring are already at work.

He often had penetrating flashes of inspiration that are extremely apt, but which are only fully understood when illuminated by spiritual science. The will of the developing life already lies in the individuality of love between man and woman, and in the looks with which the lovers meet, lies the child striving into existence. But spiritual science only illuminates it in the right way. What do we see in the individuality, in the I and the astral body? What is it that plays a part in the love between man and woman, that constitutes the feeling of pleasure in each individual case? The reflex, the mirror image of the individuality that wants to enter into life. The descending individuality announces itself in feeling. The feeling of love is given to the child's individuality by father and mother.

Such things cannot be proved, but they are true for those who feel and see through to the truth. There is no proof for the law of reincarnation, it must be an experience of the inner life. In the feelings between man and woman we see the descending individuality flooding in. The child foreshadows the man and the woman. Love and desire are only emanations of the astral. The physical and etheric bodies of man and woman compose the child. The child stimulates the astral body between man and woman, and the result is the play of love sensations.

Now some may say: How can you come to terms with the actual mother and father feeling? They arise again in their child. The love that exists between parents and children appears in a higher splendor. From the child's side it played before conception. The child was drawn to its still spiritualized love, which played before the first atom of the physical came into being. The child loves the parents it seeks out, and its love casts a shadow into the act of love. Love appears to us even more refined, spiritualized.

When we look at things this way, the inheritance system becomes much more understandable. If there is feminine in the man and masculine in the woman, then we will understand that the qualities of the daughters come from the father and those of the sons from the mother. People who have a particularly strong soul often get it from their mother. We have four characteristics, from which a great combination of characteristics arises. We will not say such strange things: we need not be surprised that women now have these or those characteristics. These people always forget that women also had a father. It puts a spiritual and physical aspect in a completely different light. There must be an important consequence when we take this awareness into life. We will not only look at physical inheritance, but at individuality, which must be sacred to us, something we must redeem from its shells. Such an outlook will transform itself into a completely different and higher respect and appreciation of the enigmatic individuality, which is to be unravelled. We will not only learn to respect the freedom of adults, but also of children's individuality. Spiritual science leads us to feelings, sensations and practical creativity in the face of life's tasks. Spiritual science sees the creative spirit behind the physical, sees matter as the effect of past spirituality.

Spiritual science sees the spirit, which is still veiled, shaping itself into the future as its helper. Our knowledge leads us into the spiritual creation of the past. This leads us to an appreciation of the evolving entities. Only by respecting the freedom of the developing human being can we ensure human progress into the future. With many a sentence, Goethe captured the great circumstances that are repeated in everyday life. We look back into the past and see the creative spirit. The great yesterday of the world becomes apparent to us through knowledge, and in this way we attain respect and appreciation for the spirit that first wants to become.

If yesterday is clear and open to you,
you will be strong in today,
so you can hope for tomorrow,
which will be no less happy.

In the past I have spoken here on a variety of subjects concerning spiritual life. It may be permissible today, therefore, for me to touch upon a more prosaic theme from the standpoint of spiritual science. Problems of nutrition undoubtedly offer a more mundane subject than many we have heard here. It will be seen, however, that particularly in our age spiritual science has something to say even concerning questions that directly affect everyday life.

On the one hand, spiritual science stands accused, by those who know it only from the outside, of aspiring too loftily to spiritual realms, thus losing the firm ground under its feet. On the other hand, the opposite can perhaps also be heard again from those who have become acquainted with spiritual science or anthroposophy through only a single lecture or brochure. This consists in the statement that anthroposophists are entirely too concerned with, and talk too much about, questions of what they should eat and drink. In some respects these critics might well be called idealists in that they believe they view the common aspects of life from a certain exalted level. They raise this objection particularly by taking a stand that can be expressed in the following way. “What man eats and drinks is unimportant. It does not matter what food one takes, rather must one rise above the material dimension by the strength of one's spirit.” Even a well-intentioned idealist might level this objection against anthroposophists.

Well, at a time when these questions are being widely discussed from other angles, it might be interesting to hear what spiritual science has to say about them.

It was a German philosopher, Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, to whom the phrase, “A man is what he eats,” is attributed. Many thinkers of consequence have agreed with Feuerbach that what man produces is basically the result of foods ingested by him and his actions are influenced by the food absorbed in a purely materialistic way through his digestion. With so much discussion of eating going on, somebody might get it into his head to believe that man is indeed physically nothing more than what he eats. Now, we shall have several things to say on this point.

We must understand each other precisely as to the purpose of today's lecture and the intention behind it. We are not agitating in favor of particular tendencies, nor are we trying to be reformative. The spiritual scientist is obliged to state the truth of things. His attitude must never be agitatorial, and he must be confident that when a person has perceived the truth of what he says, he will then proceed to do the right thing. What I have to say, therefore, does not recommend one course as opposed to another, and he who assumes that it does will misunderstand it completely. Merely the facts will be stated, and you will have understood me correctly if you realize that I am not speaking for or against anything.

Bearing this in mind, we can raise the question from the standpoint of spiritual science as to whether the statement, “A man is what he eats,” does not have a certain justification after all. We must continually bear in mind that the body of man is the tool of the spirit. In discussing the various functions the body has to perform, we see that man utilizes it as a physical instrument. An instrument is useless if it is not adjusted correctly so that it functions in an orderly manner, however, and similarly our bodies are of no use to our higher organism if they do not function properly. Our freedom can be handicapped and intentions impeded.

When we as spiritual scientists consider our organism, we can ask ourselves if we do not make our bodies unfit for the execution of the intentions, aspirations and impulses of our lives if we become bound by and dependent upon our bodies through an unsuitable diet. Is it not possible to mold the body in such fashion that it turns into a progressively more suitable instrument for the impulses of our spiritual life? Will we lose our freedom and become dependent upon our bodies if we ignore what is the right nourishment for us? What must we eat so that we are not merely the product of what we eat?

By asking such questions, we come to look at the problem of nutrition from another perspective. You all know, and I only need allude to this generally familiar fact, that speaking purely materialistically, people continuously use up the substances that their organisms store and they therefore must take care to replenish them with further nourishment. Men must concern themselves with replenishment. What, then, could be more obvious than to examine those substances that are necessary for the human organism, that is, to find out what substances build up the animalistic organism, and then simply see to it that the organism is given them. This approach, however, remains an extremely materialistic one. We must rather ask ourselves what the essential task of a man's food is and in what way it is actually utilized in his organism.

I must stress that what I say about man is applicable only to him, since spiritual science does not consider man to be so closely connected with the animals as does natural science. Otherwise, one could simply state that the human organism is composed of proteins, fats, carbohydrates and mineral substances, and consequently search for the best method to satisfy man's nutritional needs of them. But spiritual science holds to the principle that every material occurrence, everything that takes place in the physical sense world, is only the external aspect of spiritual processes. Indeed, even the nutritional processes cannot be purely physical, but as material processes they are really the external aspects and expressions of spiritual processes. Similarly, man is a unity even though the composition of his physical body appears to be a conglomeration of chemical events.

Our attention has frequently been focused on how the ascent from the purely physical to the spiritual realm can be made. We have often heard that the physical body is sustained by the etheric body. This is the architect of the physical body, which must not be viewed as if only chemical processes took place in it. We will be wrong if, by observing only the chemical processes, we simply ask in a materialistic fashion what happens to the chemical substances. Beyond the etheric body, we must remember, is the astral body. Through it are expressed the instinctive feelings and in certain respects the various aspects of the soul. When we behold man from the standpoint of spiritual science, we find that his etheric body as well as his physical body are inter-penetrated by his astral body. We must not see only one side but also perceive the astral body beyond the physical. Added to these is the ego, the fourth member of the human being. We have the total man before us only when we see in him this fourfold being. Only with the total fourfold man before us can we do justice to the scope of the problem of nutrition. Only then can answers be given to the question of how these four members of man's organism react to the influences of various diets.

Now, you all know that men eat food derived from the vegetable, animal and mineral kingdoms, and with it they sustain their bodies. Let me emphasizes again for the sake of those who are more narrowly inclined toward the care of the inner life that I am not speaking to mystics nor to anthroposophists who are striving to develop themselves spiritually in particular, but to all men. Men take their sustenance from the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms. We must realize that plants represent the direct antithesis of men, and the animals represent the mean between the two. The external physical expression of this contrast is to be found in the breathing process. It is a familiar fact that men inhale oxygen, assimilate it and subsequently combine it with carbon that is finally exhaled as carbon dioxide, while in plants, which absorb carbon to sustain themselves, the reverse is true. In a sense, plants also breathe but their breathing process has a completely different significance for them. Hence, we can say that in a spiritual respect plant and man stand opposite each other.

We can become even more aware of this relationship by bearing in mind the influence of light on plants. The effect of deprivation of light on plant life is well-known. The same light that maintains life in plants makes it possible for us to perceive the light-filled world of our surroundings. Light is also the element that maintains life in plants. This is physical light but it is also something more. Just as there is a spiritual counterpart to everything physical, so there is spiritual light in the physical light that rays down on us. Each time a man rejoices over the brilliance of physical light he can say to himself, “Just as when I see another person and it dawns on me that in this man there lives a spiritual counterpart, so also I can imagine that in light there lives a spiritual counterpart.” Indeed, the spiritual light that permeates the physical sunlight is of the same kind and being as the invisible light that dwells within the human astral body. A portion of the spiritual light that permeates the cosmic realm lives within the astral body. It is, however, physically invisible and in this it can be seen that it is the opposite or complement of physical light.

The invisible light lives within us and fulfills a definite task. We might say that since they are opposites, it is to physical light what negative magnetism is to positive magnetism. We perceive it in its external expression when we realize the relationships existing between physical body, etheric body and astral body, which, in turn, is permeated by the ego. It has often been explained that throughout life the etheric body fights against the deterioration of the physical body. Men as well as animals also possess an astral body and hence the inner light. Now, the function of this inner light is the opposite of that of external light. When external light shines on a plant, the plant builds up its living organism by producing proteins, carbohydrates, etc. Conversely, the task of inner light is to break down, and this process of disintegration is part of the activity of the astral body. There is indeed a continuous dissolution and destruction of the proteins and other substances that we consume so that these substances are utilized in a sense to direct counter-effects against what external light has built up. Without this activity of inner dissolution a man could not be an ego being, and it is only by virtue of his ego nature that he can have inner experiences. So, while the etheric body is concerned with the preservation of the physical body, the astral body takes care that the food a man consumes is constantly built up and again destroyed.

Without this process of disintegration within the physical body, the astral body, in which the ego is incorporated, could not live a full life within the material world. As we have seen, there is an alternating process obtaining between men and plants, that is, exhalation of carbon dioxide in men and absorption of carbon dioxide by plants; exhalation of oxygen by plants and inhalation of oxygen by men. These processes reach such extremes only between men and plants. Animals do not have individual egos as is the case with men, but they have collective group egos. Thus, the animals of a species have one common group ego that governs them from without. The significant difference between men and animals is found in the fact that the disintegration processes within animals are directed by an entity external to them, whereas the same processes in men are conducted by their individual inner egos. Moreover, a man's individual ego can gradually become master over what takes place within him.

Let us consider how the ego can gradually take a central position within the bodily functions. Let us examine what the astral body does when it dissolves the substances assimilated by men. In regard to nourishment an entirely different viewpoint must be stressed. The body permeated by the ego performs an action in disintegrating substances, and through this action something is created inwardly. The inner activity of consciousness particularly comes about through the astral body's processes of dissolution. Actions, activities are called forth by the process of destruction. First, inner warmth is produced and second, something that is less noticeable than inner body heat the physical expression of inner light. Just as the internal warmth that permeates the blood is the result of the dissolution of proteins, so the activity of the nervous system is the expression of this inner light. In regard to its inner activity the nervous system is also a result of the disintegration process not the nerves themselves but the activity of the nerves, the actions within the nerves, that which makes possible imagination and calls forth thinking. It is this activity that can be called the physical expression of the invisible light and that is brought about through the degeneration and dissolution of substances.

Basically, as has been said, inner body heat is generated by the disintegration of protein. Inner light is produced within the organism as a result of protein. Inner light is produced within the organism as a result of processes involving fats, carbohydrates, starches and glucose that are also utilized in the production of warmth and inner movement. In all this is contained the expression of the activity originating from the astral body. Men do not nourish themselves properly simply by ingesting the correct quantity of food, but rather when these inner processes can be carried out in the right way. The inner life is founded on them. Men are beings continually occupied inwardly with movement and liveliness and their inner life consists of these. If this inner life is not produced in the right way, it cannot react properly and a man then becomes ill.

The right kind of inner flexibility offers the foundation for the right solution of the nutritional problem. This statement points to the fact that all internal processes that men must execute must be carried on in the opposite direction from the processes of plants. A man must begin his processes where the plant processes leave off. A specific example will clarify what this means. When a man eats vegetarian food, it demands a great deal of his organism. Plant food does not combine much fat. The human organism, which is able to produce fats, is thus required to produce fat from something that in itself contains no fat. In other words, when a man eats vegetarian food, he must produce an activity within himself and make an inner effort to bring about the production of fats. He is spared this task when he eats ready-made animal fats. The materialists would probably say that it is advantageous for a man to store up as much fat as possible without having to make too much of an effort. Yet, speaking from the spiritual viewpoint, the unfolding of this inner activity signifies the unfolding of the actual inner life. When a man is forced to produce the forces that make it possible for him to produce fat on his own, then, through his inner flexibility, the ego and the astral body become master of the physical and etheric bodies. When a man eats fat, he resultingly is spared the task of producing fat himself. Yet, if he takes the opportunity to unfold his own inner activity through producing his own fat, he is made free and thus becomes lord over his body. Otherwise, as a spiritual being he remains a mere spectator. Everything that takes place in him in such wise that he remains a passive spectator becomes a heavy weight in him and hinders his urge to let the astral body come to full life. Thus, the astral body's inner flexibility comes up against an internal obstacle if it is denied the opportunity to produce its own fat.

The essential question now to be asked is what internal activities are aroused by what substances. Here we shall try to throw light on the relationships of vegetable and meat substances in human diets, and thereby to gain some idea of the manner in which animal and vegetable foods react in the human organism.

For a man to eat animal protein is not the same as for him to eat plant protein. Up to a certain point the inner processes of the animal are quite similar to those of the human organism, since the animal also possesses an astral body. Even though the animal astral body causes the dissolution of the synthesized substances of its physical body the human organism carries the processes a bit beyond the limits reached by that of the animals.

In reflecting upon the animals around us and by looking spiritually into their ways and characteristics, we shall, by comparing men with the multitudes of animals, find distributed among the animals the various and manifold characteristics of men. In spite of the fact that one can point out great human differences between the various peoples, one must still conclude that each individual man represents a species. Men appear to be the spiritual consolidation of all that can be observed distributed in the various animals forms. If one were to picture all the individual characteristics of the various animal species as being mutually complementary, one would arrive at the essence of what is contained in appropriate moderation in each individual man. Each individual animal one-sidedly contains within itself something of the forces that are harmonized within men, and its whole organism is constructed accordingly. Everything down to the most minute structure of substances is so organized in the animal kingdom that it is like a tableau of human characteristics spread out before one.

If a man is to find the physical expression of the characteristics of his astral body, he must strive to utilize all its forces. He must become master of his own inner processes and activate his astral body in such wise that the plant processes will be continued inwardly. In the food we consume from the animal kingdom, we not only take into ourselves the physical meat and fat of the animal but also the product of its astral body contained in these substances. When, through a vegetarian diet, we enlist the virginal forces of our astral body, we call forth our whole inner activity. In a meat diet part of this inner activity is forestalled.

We can now proceed to consider the relationships of these two types of diet from a purely spiritual basis.

If a man desires to gain an increasing mastery over the inner processes of his body, it is important that he become correspondingly active in the external world. It is important for him to unfold certain external qualities such as stamina, courage and even aggressiveness. To be able to do [so], however, it is possible that a man may not yet find himself strong enough to entrust everything to his astral body and may have to fall back upon the support of a meat diet.

It can be said that man owes everything that liberates him internally to the substances derived from plants. Faculties, however, that enable him to be actively engaged in earthly life, need not necessarily grow out of the virginal nature of his astral body. These qualities can also be derived from a meat diet. This fact that men are to become progressively freer while at the same time needing qualities that they can acquire with the help of impulses found spread out in the animal kingdom, has induced them to resort to nourishment in animal food. If the eating habits of the people of those militant nations that have striven to develop qualities enabling them to unfold their physical forces are investigated, it will generally be found that they eat meat. Naturally, there are exceptions. On the other hand, a preference for an exclusively vegetarian diet will be found to prevail among people who have developed an introverted and contemplative existence. These two aspects of the problem should be kept in mind. A person, of course, can adopt either diet as a panacea if he wishes to propagandize rather than to act out of knowledge. Nevertheless, it is not without reason that a mixed diet has become acceptable to many people. To some extent it had to happen. We must admit, however, that even though a vegetarian diet might indeed be the correct one for some people purely for reasons of health, the health of others might be ruined by it.

I am speaking here of human nature in general, of course, but men must be considered as individuals if they are to find the right path to satisfy their needs with a vegetable or meat diet. Today, an extreme diet of meat naturally brings its corresponding results. If by eating meat a person is relieved of too large a portion of his inner activities, then activities will develop inwardly that would otherwise be expressed externally. His soul will become more externally oriented, more susceptible to, and bound up with, the external world. When a person takes his nourishment from the realm of plants, however, he becomes more independent and more inclined to develop inwardly. He will become master over his whole being. The more he is inclined to vegetarianism, the more he accepts a vegetarian diet, the more he will be able also to let his inner forces predominate. Thus, the more apt he will be to develop a sense for wider horizons and he will no longer restrict himself to a narrow life. The person who is fundamentally a meat eater, however, limits himself to more narrow vistas and directs himself more rigidly toward one- sidedness.

Naturally, it is the task of men today to concern themselves with both aspects so as not to become impractical. A man also can be so completely unprejudiced as to have no judgment at all. Still, it is a fact that everything that limits men and leads them to specialization is derived from a diet of meat. A man owes to a vegetarian diet the impulses that lift him above the narrow circles of existence. An extreme diet of meat is definitely connected with a man's increasing dogmatism and his inability to see beyond the confines into which he was born. In contrast, if men would show more interest in the food coming from the realm of plants, they would discover that they are able more easily to lift themselves out of their narrow circles. The person who abandons the task of fat formation by eating meat will notice that the activity thus forestalled erects a sort of wall around his astral body. Even if one is not clairvoyant but judges these matters only with common sense, he can tell from the look in a person's eyes whether or not he produces his own fat. It can be seen in the eyes of a person whether or not his astral body is obliged to call forth the forces necessary to produce its own fat.

Now it can be seen how two opposing conditions of character are created when a person takes his nourishment from either the plants or animals. We find that we indeed penetrate into the world through our organism and must again rise above it by means of the right kind of food. A time will come when a vegetarian diet will be valued much more highly than is the case today. Then thinking will be so flexible that men will be willing to investigate such matters knowing that what they believe today to be foolishness could, viewed from another standpoint, also have its merits. They will realize then that their whole physical and spiritual horizon can be widened through a vegetarian diet, thus counteracting the rigor of specialization within them. Particularly in certain areas of science would perspectives be widened if vegetarian diets should become prevalent.

Let me mention a few more examples to demonstrate that men are indeed what they eat and drink.

Consider, for example, alcohol, which is obtained from plants. It would take too long to explain the spiritual scientific reason showing that alcohol produces physically and in an external way out of the plant, just what a man should develop physically within himself through his ego being centered within him. It is a fact inwardly perceived through spiritual science that when a person drinks alcohol, it takes over the specific activity that otherwise belongs wholly to the person's ego. A person who drinks much alcohol needs less food and his body will require less nourishment than is normally required in the process of combustion.

It calls forth forces that otherwise would be called forth by the ego's inner penetration. Thus, a person can externalize the activity of his ego by infusing his body with alcohol. Consequently, alcohol imitates and copies the activity of the ego, and you can understand why it is that people turn to it. To the extent, however, that a man replaces his inner self with such a substitute, to that extent does he become its slave. If otherwise qualified, a man will be better able to unfold the best forces of his ego when he abstains from alcohol altogether. By drinking alcohol an inner hindrance is created behind which something takes place that actually should and would be accomplished through the activity of the ego itself if the hindrance had not been produced.

Some foods have a specific effect of their own on the organism. Coffee is an example. The effect of coffee becomes manifest through its influence on the astral body. Through caffeine and the after-effects of coffee, our nervous systems automatically perform functions that we otherwise would have to produce through inner strength. It should not be claimed, however, that it is beneficial under all circumstances for a man always to act independently out of his astral body. Men are beings who are not dependent on themselves alone. Rather are they placed within the whole of life.

Coffee is also a product of the plant kingdom that externally has raised the specific plant process up a stage. Consequently, coffee can take over a certain task of man. Trained insight perceives that everything in the activity of our nerves that has to do with logical consistency and drawing conclusions is strengthened by coffee. Thus, we can let coffee take over in making logical connections and in sticking to one thought, but this, of course, is in exchange for a weakening of our specific inner forces. What I mean can be seen in the tendency of gossips at a coffee break to cling to a subject until it is completely exhausted. This is not only a joke. It also demonstrates the effects of coffee.

Tea works in a totally different and opposite way. When large quantities are drunk, thoughts become scattered and light. It might be said that the chief effect of tea is to let witty and brilliant thoughts, thoughts that have a certain individual lightness, flash forth. So we can say, coffee helps those, such as literary people, who need to connect thoughts in skilled and refined ways. This is the positive aspect of the matter. The negative aspect can be observed in coffee table gossip. Tea, which tears thoughts asunder, is the opposite. This is why tea is not without justification a popular drink of diplomats.

It might be of interest to cite as a last example a food that plays an important part in life, that is, milk. Milk is completely different from meat in that it expresses in the weakest possible form the animalistic process brought forth by the astral body of the animal. Milk is only partly an animal product and the animal or human astral forces do not participate in its production. For this reason milk is one of the most perfect foods. It is suitable for people who want to abstain completely from meat but who do not yet possess sufficient strength to work entirely out of the inner forces of the astral body. Even from a purely external standpoint it can be seen that milk contains everything a man requires for his organism. Although this applies only in a restricted sense, it has little to do with the individual characteristics of a man.

Weak as well as strong organisms can gain support from milk. If a person were to live exclusively on milk for a time, then not only would his regular forces be awakened but it would also go beyond this. He would receive from it an influx of forces giving him additional strength. A surplus of forces would be acquired that could be developed into healing forces. In order to possess a force, it must first be acquired, and in milk we see one means of developing certain forces in ourselves. Those who are moved by the earnestness of life to develop certain psychic healing forces, can train themselves to attain them. Naturally, we must remember that what is suitable for one, is not suitable for all. This is a matter for the individual. One person is able to do it, another not. A man can if he wishes build up his organism in a wise manner. He can contribute toward the unfolding of free, independent inner forces. So through spiritual science we come back to the saying of Feuerbach mentioned at the beginning, “Man is what he eats!”

Man can nourish himself in such fashion that he undermines his invisible independence. In so doing he makes himself an expression of what he eats. Yet he ought to nourish himself in such a manner that he becomes less the slave of his nutritional habits. Here spiritual science can direct him.

The wrong food can easily transform us into what we eat, but by permeating ourselves with knowledge of the spiritual life, we can strive to become free and independent. Then the food we eat will not hinder us from achieving the full potential of what we, as men, ought to be.

Dear attendees, It is a frequently repeated and justified view that the greatest mystery of man here within our physical life is man himself. And we may say that a large part of our scientific activity, our reflection and other human musings are devoted to solving this human mystery, to discerning a little of what the essence of human nature consists of.

Natural science and, as we have already seen in these lectures, spiritual science, too, approach the solution of this great mystery from different sides. But usually, when we speak of this human puzzle, we have in mind the human being in general, the human being without distinction in relation to this or that individuality. But there is another human puzzle; we can say there are many, many other human puzzles. For, apart from the fact that man in general is a great mystery to man, does not every single individual human being we meet appear to us to be a mystery in turn? How difficult it is to get a clear idea of the different sides of the people we meet, and how much depends on it in life to get a clear idea of the people we come into contact with!

Now we can only gradually approach the solution of the very individual human riddle, of which each person presents us with a particular one, because there is a great gap between what is called human nature in general and what we encounter in each individual person. And in this gap we also see some things that entire groups of people have in common. These similarities include those characteristics of human nature that we are considering today, which are usually referred to as a person's temperament. It is true that each person has their own temperament, but we can still distinguish certain groups of temperaments.

We speak of four human temperaments: sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, and melancholic. And even if the classification is not entirely correct insofar as we apply it to the individual, we still want to divide people into four groups according to their temperaments in general. The fact that a person's temperament, on the one hand, manifests itself as something individual, as something that makes people different, and, on the other hand, unites them into groups, proves to us that temperament must be something that, on the one hand, has something to do with the innermost core of a person's being and, on the other hand, must be connected to general human nature. A person's temperament is something that points in two directions. And so it will be necessary, if we want to get behind the secret, to ask ourselves on the one hand: To what extent does temperament point to what lies in general human nature? - and then again: How does it point to the human core of being, to the actual inner being of the human being?

When we ask the question, it is natural that spiritual science seems to be called upon to provide insight. For spiritual science must lead us to the innermost core of a person's being. In so far as a person encounters us on earth, he appears to us as being placed in a generality and again as an independent entity. There are two lines that meet when a person enters into earthly existence. And here we are in the middle of the spiritual scientific consideration of human nature. We see the descendant of his father and mother, his previous ancestors and further and further; the human being is embedded in what can be called the line of inheritance, and you know that far into the core of his being, the human being carries qualities in himself that we must certainly derive from heredity. Goethe also said of himself:

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

We see how this great connoisseur of human nature, Goethe, has to refer to a person's moral qualities when he wants to point out inherited traits. This is what our own nature consists of. This is the other current in which human beings are placed, of which today's culture is not very aware. Spiritual science shows us what flows together with what is given to us in the line of inheritance; it leads us to the great fact of so-called re-embodiment — reincarnation — and of karma. It shows us how the innermost core of a person's being connects with something that is given by the line of inheritance. For the spiritual scientist, this core of being is enveloped in outer shells by what comes from the line of inheritance. And just as we have to go back to our father and mother for the qualities of a person that belong to their appearance, so if we want to grasp a person's innermost being, we have to go back to something completely different, to a previous life of that person.

Every person, when they enter physical life, has a series of lives behind them. And this has nothing to do with what lies in the line of inheritance. We would have to go back more than centuries if we wanted to examine what their previous life was when they passed through the gateway of death. After passing through, they live in other forms of existence in the spiritual world. And when the time comes again to live a life in the physical world, he seeks out his parents. And every person brings with them certain qualities from their previous life. To a certain extent, people bring with them certain qualities, their destinies. After they have performed this or that act, they bring about the counter-effect and thus feel surrounded by new life. Thus, from previous embodiments, he brings with him an inner core of being and envelops it with what is given to him by inheritance.

This one should be mentioned because it is important, since in fact our present time has little inclination to recognize this inner core of being, to regard the idea of re-embodiment as something other than a fantastic thought. It must slowly become part of human culture, similar to the teaching of the great scholar Redi, who, contrary to the then prevailing theory that fish arise from river mud, proved that living things can only arise from living things. And today, in a similar way, it is said that what is in a person all arises through inheritance.

The spiritual scientist can also point to this fact, and it has been pointed out. For example, in families of musicians, a talent for music is inherited, and so on, all of which is supposed to support the line of inheritance. It is also said, pointing to genius, that rarely does genius show itself at the beginning of a generation, but only at the end. In the case of the peculiar abilities of genius, one goes back, picks out here and there, finds this quality in one and that in another, and so on, and then shows how they finally converge in the genius who has emerged at the end of the generation. What is it supposed to prove? But nothing other than that the essence of man can live according to the instrument of the body. It is no more ingenious than when someone wants to draw our particular attention to the fact that when a person falls into water, he gets wet. This is only natural, that he takes it from the element into which he is placed. What is to be adduced as proof could much more easily be adduced as proof that genius is not inherited. For if genius were inherited, it would have to show itself at the beginning of the generation, and then it would be possible to prove that genius is inherited, but not at the end of the generation.

Thus, in the person who appears before us in the world, we see the confluence of two currents. On the one hand, we see what he receives from his family; on the other hand, we see what develops from the innermost being of the human being: a number of talents, qualities, inner abilities and outer destiny. These two currents flow together; every human being is composed of these two currents. Thus we find that, on the one hand, man must adapt to his innermost being and, on the other hand, to what he brings with him from his family line. We see how man bears the physiognomy of his ancestors to a high degree; we could, so to speak, compose man from the result of his ancestral line.

Since the human core of being has nothing to do with what is inherited, but must adapt only to what is most suitable for it, we will also realize that it is necessary for what may have lived for centuries in a completely different world and is transferred again into another world, that there must be a certain mediation; that the essence of man must have something related to it, that there must be an intermediate link, a bond between one's own individual human being and the general into which he is born through family and race. That which transmits on the one hand all the inner qualities that he brings with him from his previous incarnation and that which the line of inheritance brings him falls under the concept of temperament. It now stands between the inherited qualities and what he has taken up in his inner core of being. It is as if, when this core of being descends, it is surrounded by a spiritual nuance of what awaits it down there, so that the more the core of being adapts to the human being's shell, the more the human being's core of being is colored by what he is born into and by a quality that he brings with him.

Thus, when we look at the complete human being, we can say: This complete human being consists of the physical, etheric, and astral bodies and the I. What is initially the physical body, what the human being carries in such a way that it is visible to the senses, carries the signs of heredity clearly at first, from the outside. What lives in the etheric body of the human being, in that fighter against the decay of the physical body, is also what lies in the line of inheritance. Then we come to the astral body, which is much more bound to the essence of the human being in its properties. And if we go to the innermost core of the human being, to the actual I, we find what goes from embodiment to embodiment, appears as an inner mediator that radiates its essential qualities outwards. The fact that they have to connect means that they adapt when the person enters the physical world.

Through this interaction of the astral body and the ego, of the physical and etheric bodies, through this interweaving of the two currents, temperaments arise in human nature. They must therefore be something that depends on the individuality of the person, on that which is incorporated into the general line of inheritance. If man were not able to shape his inner being in this way, then every descendant would have to be only the result of his ancestors. And what is shaped into it, what makes it individual, that is the power of temperament; this is where the secret of temperaments lies.

Now, in all human nature, all the individual elements of being interact with each other again; they are in a reciprocal relationship. When the core of our being has colored the physical and etheric bodies, then what has been created through this coloring will have an effect on every other limb, so that it depends on how the person with his or her characteristics comes to us, whether the core of our being has a stronger effect on the physical body or whether the physical body has a stronger effect. Depending on the person, they can influence one of the four limbs, and the effect on the other limbs creates the temperament. When the human core of being embarks on re-embodiment, it is capable, through this peculiarity, of incorporating a certain excess of activity into one or other of its essential limbs. In this way, he can incorporate a certain excess of strength into his ego, or, having gone through certain experiences in his earlier life, he can influence his other limbs with it.

When the human ego has become so strong through its destinies that its powers are excellently dominant in the fourfold human nature, then the choleric temperament arises. If he succumbs to the influence of the astral body, then the sanguine temperament arises. If the etheric body has an excessive influence on the other limbs, then the phlegmatic nature arises. If the physical body has such an influence on the other limbs that the core of the being was unable to overcome certain hardships in the physical body, then the melancholic nature prevails.

Thus we have a large part of the physical body as the direct expression of the physical life principle of the human being. We can see the glandular system as the physical expression of the etheric body; the nervous system, and specifically that which is active there, we can see as the physical expression of the astral body, and the pulsating power of the blood is the expression of the actual I. Therefore, that which characterizes the I becomes active as the predominant quality. The choleric temperament will show itself as active in a strongly pulsating blood; in this way, the element of force in the human being comes to expression through the fact that it has a particular influence on his blood. In a person like this, in whom the I is active spiritually and the blood is active physically, we see the innermost strength maintaining the organization firmly and strongly. And as he encounters the outer world, so his power of the I will want to assert itself. That is the consequence of this I.

If the astral body predominates in a person, then the physical expression will lie in the functions of the nervous system, and what the astral body accomplishes is life in thoughts, in images, so that a person, if endowed with the sanguine temperament, will have the disposition to live in the images of his mental life. We must be clear about the relationship between the astral body and the ego. If only the sanguine temperament were present, a chaos of images would rise and fall. It is the forces of the ego that prevent the images from being mixed up in a fantastic way. And in the physical, it is the blood that essentially, so to speak, delimits the activity of the nervous system.

It would take us too far afield to show you all the details of how the nervous system and blood relate to each other and how the blood is the restrainer of this imaginative life. If a person's blood becomes too thin, with anemia, then fantastic images arise, including illusions and hallucinations, if the blood is not the restrainer of the nervous system. If the astral body has a certain excess of activity, then human life takes on such a form that the person cannot hold on to an idea, and the consequence of this is that such a person can be inflamed by everything that comes his way in the outer world, but that the rein is not applied to do it inwardly continuously; the interest that has been kindled quickly fades away. We see the sanguine person hurrying from one performance to the next, how he shows a flighty mind.

If a person has a predominant etheric body and the expression of this etheric body, the system that makes up the comfort and discomfort in the person, then the person will be led to want to remain comfortably in his or her inner self. The more comfortable a person feels within, the more he will create harmony between the inner and outer self. When this is the case, when it is even taken care of in abundance, then a person's entire striving is directed towards the inner self, we are dealing with the phlegmatic type.

And if a person has an especially active physical system, it is a sign that the inner man is powerless against his physical system. Thus the physical system, which is hardened, fails when it is in excess. Man cannot make that which he should make flexible; he feels inner obstacles. They become apparent in that man must turn his strength to these inner hindrances. What one cannot overcome is what causes suffering and pain; they cause man to be unable to look impartially at the world around him. This sense of dependence is a source of inner sorrow. Certain thoughts and ideas begin to become permanent; he begins to become brooding and melancholy.

And if we understand temperament through the prism of a healthy nature, many things in life will become clear to us; but it will also become possible for us to apply these principles in a practical way, which we would otherwise not be able to do. Let us turn our attention to many of the things that directly confront us in life! Take, for example, the choleric person, who has a strong, firm center within. This I is the bridler. Those images are images of consciousness. The physical body is shaped according to its etheric body, the etheric body according to its astral body. It would shape the human being in the most diverse ways, so to speak; by the fact that the growth of the I is counteracted in its blood forces, balance is maintained between an abundance and diversity of growth. But if the I has a surplus, it can hold back growth. As a rule, choleric people show themselves to be like this, that they appear to have restrained growth. You can find examples in life, for example, in the intellectual history of the philosopher Fichte. In his outward appearance, he was what one may call a person of restrained growth; there were forces in him that were held back by the surplus of the I. Take a look at the choleric person! This is a typical example of the restrained growth of the choleric person. Here you can see how the power of the I, originating from the spirit, works so that the innermost being of the person manifests itself in the outer form. Look at the physiognomy of the choleric person! Take the phlegmatic person in contrast. How blurred his features are! You can hardly say that the shape of his forehead is adapted to the choleric person!

There is one organ in particular where the astral body or the ego has a formative effect: the eye, and in particular the firm, secure position of the choleric person's eye. In the choleric person you will find a black, coal-black eye, because by a certain law, the choleric person draws exactly that to the inside, because he does not leave the possibility to the astral body to color that which is colored in another person. Also observe the person in his entire behavior. The one who is well-versed can almost tell from a distance whether a person is a choleric. The firm step, so to speak, announces the choleric. The whole person is an expression of this innermost nature, which reveals itself to us in such a way.

Take the sanguine type! The sanguine temperament is particularly evident in childhood. See how the pictorial quality manifests itself! And in the same way, the sanguine child has a certain inner potential to change his physiognomy, while the traits of the choleric person are sharply defined. A blue eye is very often the expression of a sanguine temperament.

And now let us move on! When we approach the phlegmatic type, we can tell from his shaky gait that he has little control over the forms of his inner life. This can be seen in the whole person. The melancholic soon reveals himself to you through his bowed head and downcast eyes. It shows that something is being restricted.

All this can only be hinted at here; but it will make human life much, much more understandable if we can thus observe the spirit within the forms, how the exterior of a person can become an expression of his inner being. Do we not see how everything great in life can be brought about precisely through the one-sidedness of temperaments, how these can degenerate into one-sidedness; does the child not worry us because we see that the choleric can degenerate into malice, the sanguine into flightiness, the melancholic into gloom, etc.? Is not knowledge and assessment of temperament of particular value to the educator, especially in the matter of education and self-education?

We must not be tempted to underestimate the value of temperament because it is a one-sided quality. We must be clear that temperament leads to one-sidedness, that the most radical thing about the melancholic temperament is madness, about the phlegmatic temperament, imbecility; about the sanguine temperament, insanity; and about the choleric temperament, all those outbursts of pathological human nature that go as far as raving madness and so on. Temperament brings about much beautiful diversity because opposites attract; however, the idolization of the one-sidedness of temperament very easily causes harm between birth and death. It is important for the educator to be able to say: What do you do, for example, with a sanguine child? One must try to learn from the knowledge of the whole essence of the sanguine temperament how to behave. If we are to speak of the education of the child in relation to other aspects, then it is also necessary to speak individually of temperament in the education of the child.

We have a child of sanguine temperament before us, who could easily degenerate into flight mania, lack of interest in important things, and on the other hand quickly become interested in other things; this can lead to the most terrible one-sidedness and one can recognize the danger by looking into the depths of human nature; then one will say to oneself: By trying to teach this child some opposite quality right away, you do not change these qualities. You have to be considerate of these things, which are rooted in the innermost nature of the human being, so that you can only bend them. In the case of a sanguine temperament that has become one-sided, one must build on his sanguine temperament. If you want to behave correctly towards this child, then you have to pay attention, because no matter how sanguine the child is, you can still find something that this child is interested in. And what you find that the child is particularly interested in must be considered. And for the child, something that he does not pass by with flightiness, you have to try to present it to him as a special fact, so that his temperament extends to what is not indifferent to him; you have to try to present what is a hobby for him in a special light, he has to learn to apply his sanguine nature. You can work by connecting with the one thing that can always be found, the child's own strengths. It will not be able to take a lasting interest in anything through punishment and persuasion. But when interest is kindled in him, love for a person, then a miracle happens through this love for the person. This can cure a one-sided temperament in the child. The child must develop personal attachment; you have to make yourself lovable to the child. That is the task when dealing with a sanguine child. It is up to the person educating the child to help the sanguine child learn to love the personality.

Let us assume that the person should be horrified that the choleric temperament is expressed in a one-sided way in their child. However, the same recipe cannot be used as for the sanguine child, because the choleric person will not easily develop love for the personality of the person. A different approach is needed to connect with him on a human level. You have to be truly estimable, honorable in the highest sense of the word for the choleric child. You have to strive to never let the choleric child realize that he cannot get any information or advice on what he should do. You have to make sure that you hold the firm reins of authority in your hands and never expose yourself to the point of not knowing what to do. Then it is necessary, when the choleric child threatens to degenerate into one-sidedness, to bring him into education, especially the things that are difficult to overcome, by drawing his attention to the difficulties of life by bringing in things that are as difficult as possible for the child to overcome. Obstacles must be created so that the choleric temperament is not driven back, but allowed to express itself, by confronting the child with certain difficulties that he has to overcome.

With a phlegmatic child, we will have a difficult time if education has given us the task of interacting with the child in the appropriate way. It is difficult to gain influence over the phlegmatic person, but there is a way to create a detour. There is nothing that can be said to a phlegmatic child; you have to bring this child into contact with children of the same age. Just as the sanguine child needs to be attached to one personality, so the phlegmatic child needs to have friendship and contact with as many children of the same age as possible. This is the only way to awaken the power that lies dormant in him. You will not be able to interest the phlegmatic child in an object from school or home, but you can reach him indirectly through the other souls of the same age.

It is also very difficult to treat the melancholic child. What can we do? And what if we feel horror at the threatening one-sidedness of the melancholic temperament of the child, since we cannot graft in what the child does not have? We have to expect that it has the strength to cling to inhibitions and to resist. If we want to steer this peculiarity of its temperament in the right direction, we have to divert this strength from the inner to the outer. It is particularly important for the educator of a melancholic child to place emphasis on how one deals with the child, to show him that there is suffering in the world. The melancholic child is capable of feeling pain; if you want to amuse him, then drive him back into his own narrowness. Distract the child by showing him that there is suffering! The melancholic is happiest when he can grow up at the side of someone who, through difficult experiences, has a lot to say, because soul works with soul in the happiest way. In general, it is good not to try to heal the young melancholic by bringing entertaining company into his environment, but to let him experience justified pain.

So we may say: the sanguine person is best off when he grows up in a firm hand, when a person from outside can show him sides of character that allow him to develop personal love; love for a person is best for the sanguine person. Not just love, but respect and appreciation for what a person can achieve, that is best for the choleric person.

A melancholic can count themselves lucky if they can grow up under the wing of someone who has a difficult fate. The appropriate distance, which is created by the new way of looking at things, by the compassion that arises with authority, in the empathy for the justified painful fate, is what the melancholic needs. They grow up well if they can indulge less in attachment to a person, less in respect and appreciation of a person's achievements, and more in compassion for suffering and justified painful fates.

The phlegmatic person is the easiest to get along with if we can teach them to take an interest in the interests of others, if they can be inspired by the interests of others.

The sanguine person should be able to develop love and affection.

The choleric person should be able to develop appreciation and respect for the achievements of the person.

The melancholic should be able to develop a compassionate heart for the fate of others.

And the phlegmatic should be shown the interests of others as a role model.

And when it comes to taking our self-education into our own hands, they can also be particularly useful. We realize with our mind that our sanguinity is playing all kinds of tricks on us, that we are in danger of degenerating into an unstable way of life, rushing from object to object. This can be counteracted if we only take the right approach. No matter how often a person speaks to his conscience, hold on to something for once, his sanguine temperament will play evil tricks on him over and over again. He can only count on one strength that he has. There must be other forces behind the intellect. Can a sanguine person count on anything other than his sanguine temperament? And even in self-education, it is necessary to try to do what the intellect could do indirectly. You have to try not to be interested in certain things that you are interested in. You try to artificially put yourself in such a situation, to bring as much as possible that does not interest you into your path. Then you will realize, if you do it long enough, that this temperament develops the strength to change.

If you realize that melancholy can drive you to one-sidedness, you have to try to create justified external obstacles and want to see through these justified external obstacles in their entirety, so that you deflect what you have in terms of pain and capacity for pain onto external objects. The mind can do that.

In the same way, the choleric person can cure themselves in a special way if we look at it from a spiritual scientific point of view. When he notices that his raging inner self wants to express itself, he must try to find things that require little energy to overcome; he must try to bring about easily surmountable external facts and must always try to express his energy in the strongest way possible in insignificant events and facts. If he seeks out such insignificant things that offer him no resistance, then he will in turn bring his one-sided choleric temperament in the right direction.

The phlegmatic person would do well to imagine that he must be interested in something, that he must seek out objects that have a right to it, that man does not care about them. He should seek out activities in which phlegm is justified, in which he can live out his phlegm. In this way he overcomes his phlegm, even if it threatens to degenerate into one-sidedness.

Those who are realists believe, for example, that it is best for a melancholic to be provided with what one has to provide in the opposite way. But anyone who really thinks realistically appeals to what is already within him.

Thus you see that it is precisely spiritual science that does not draw us away from real and actual life, but will shine forth for us at every turn to the truths and can also give us guidance in life to take account of the real everywhere. For those who believe that they can cling to the outer appearance of things are the fantasists. We must seek deeper causes if we want to enter into this reality, and we will acquire an understanding of the manifoldness of life if we engage in such considerations. Our practical sense will become more and more individualized if we are not obliged to apply a general recipe – you should not drive out levity with severity – but to see: what qualities are there in man that need to be kindled? And we must go to the individuality.

And there we can also let spiritual science work from our innermost core of being, make spiritual science the greatest impulse of life. As long as it remains only theory, it is worth nothing. It is to be applied in the life of man. The way to do this is possible, but it is a long one. It is illuminated when it leads to reality. Then our views change and we notice it, insights change. It is prejudice when man believes that knowledge must remain abstract; but when it enters into the spiritual, then it permeates our whole life's work, then our whole life is permeated by it, then we face life in such a way that we have knowledge for the individuality, which goes right into feeling and sensation and is expressed in them, which has great respect and esteem. It is easy to recognize templates. And it is easy to want to control life according to templates, but it cannot be treated as a template. Then only knowledge is enough, then it transforms into a feeling that one must have towards the individuality of the human being, towards the individuality in all of life. Then, so to speak, our conscientious spiritual knowledge will flow into our feeling in such a way that we can judge the riddle that confronts us in every single person to the right extent.

But this is the right foundation that can provide the true, the fruitful, the genuine love of humanity. This is the foundation on which we become aware of what we have to seek as the innermost core of being in each individual person. And when we are imbued with this spiritual knowledge, our social life will be regulated from person to person in such a way that each individual, by approaching every other person with appreciation and respect and by penetrating the mystery of the human being, will learn to find and regulate their behavior towards other people. Only those who live in abstractions from the outset can speak of sober concepts, but those who strive for genuine knowledge will find it and will find the way to the other person; they will find the solution to the riddle of the other person in their own behavior, in their own conduct. In this way we solve the individual puzzle of how we relate to others. We can only find the essence of the other person with a view of life that comes from the spirit. Spiritual science should be a way of life, a spiritual factor in life, all practice, all life, and not a gray theory.

Answering questions [excerpts]

Question: There are also people in whom no temperament comes to the fore. What prevails in such a person?

Answer: That is correct. There are people in whom, so to speak, a particular shade of temperament does not emerge to any great extent. However, the keen observer will be able to find out that a temperament is present in a certain respect. We must realize that when such a theme is developed, not everything can be said in any detail. If one wanted to explain certain phenomena that occur in life, I would also have to explain the individual complicated temperaments to you, and show how certain characteristics of one of his limbs stand out in every person, so they have a prominent temperament. But it is also possible that another aspect of the human being can have an effect on other aspects of the person. Thus, anyone studying the temperament of Napoleon could find that he must have been very phlegmatic in relation to certain things, so that we have to say: nuances of the four temperaments will be found in every person, and what stands out is precisely what comes from a particular surplus.

When it is said of the astral body that it functions in excess – this is not the same as saying that it functions in such a way that it exercises an absolute domination over the others – it means that it functions in this person more than its normal level of functioning. It is possible that the astral body is working in excess, that it cannot find its way into the right harmony, and the same applies to the physical body. Then the surpluses can neutralize each other, and something like an absolute lack of temperament can occur. This is based on the fact that things that are present from one side or the other balance each other out. With a good power of observation of the soul, one will always be able to observe a prominent temperament in a person.

Question: Which temperament does a gray eye indicate?

Answer: I have to appeal to your good nature a little. It cannot be discussed here in such detail; it would take many hours. I can only answer without being able to tell you the derivation. Therefore, I would like to say: when asking about the correspondence of a gray eye to temperament, you have to take into account that the gray eye usually has a certain nuance according to one color or another. There is a gray-greenish, a gray-brownish, and a gray-bluish eye. As a rule, gray-bluish eyes may indicate a melancholic temperament, and gray-greenish eyes may indicate a phlegmatic temperament. However, this should not be stereotyped.

Munich, March 7, 1909

It is now my task to speak to the various groups about the more intimate aspects of reincarnation and various matters related to it because deep inside we must become more and more familiar with this subject matter and allow it to penetrate our being. In this context, we will also have to say a few things about the significance of the topic for the life of all humanity. Although we will also little by little discuss relevant questions of importance to the present age, we shall have to take very ancient times as our starting point. This is necessary because the method of inquiry in Spiritual Science differs from that employed by other theories of life or by the disciplines studying social problems. We in Spiritual Science treat the facts of life first in a general way, and then we elaborate on the details.

First of all, we express our world view in the most elementary sense through the statement that the human innermost core—an individual's divine ego—continues to develop from one life to another in successive incarnations. In the second instance, however, such a statement covers the question of reincarnation only in a very elementary way, and that is why we now want to speak about these things in greater detail and in a more intimate sense. Just saying that the ego of a human being hurries from one incarnation to another is not enough; there are many other phenomena connected with the subject of reincarnation, and only a discussion of how they are related to life itself will shed the right light on the issue. Let us begin to characterize reincarnation from this point of view by looking back into ancient times.

We have often talked about the fact that humanity must consider its ancestors to have come from ancient Atlantis, a former geographical region situated between what is today Africa and Europe on the one hand and America on the other. All the souls that are present today had already been incarnated in Atlantis, but in bodies that were in part considerably different from the ones we are accustomed to seeing. The Atlantean humanity had its own special form of leadership, and the soul-forces—indeed all the faculties—of the Atlanteans differed greatly from those of human beings. Hence, leadership as we know it today was nonexistent. In Atlantis, for example, there were no churches, ceremonial centers, or schools in the modern sense, but there existed an intermediate institution between ceremonial center and school; that is what we call the mystery sanctuaries or centers. Leadership of the Atlanteans with respect to learning and the conditions of external life was vested in these sanctuaries, and one could say that the spiritual leaders were at the same time kings of the Atlantean tribes. Initiates, whose mission can be circumscribed by a word of later coinage, by the word oracle, imported knowledge and exercised leadership in the mysteries. We therefore designate the great centers of Atlantean culture as the “Atlantean Oracles.”

We have to get a clear understanding of the function of these oracles. They had to impart knowledge to human beings about the spiritual world behind the physical world. Knowledge such as this is different from ordinary knowledge in many ways; to stress only one difference, spiritual knowledge is not confined to space as is our present knowledge of the physical world. Anyone who, for example, knows about the mysteries of Mars also knows a great deal about the spiritual mysteries of the entire universe. All the heavenly bodies of our solar system are interconnected, and as such they are the exterior expression of spiritual beings. The individual who knows these spiritual beings also knows the forces that are at work from one planet to another as well as in the spiritual world during the time between death and rebirth. And so it was the primary task of one oracle in Atlantis to transmit and proclaim to human beings the mysteries of Mars, whereas the primary task of another was to communicate the mysteries of Jupiter, and so on; and these compartmentalized insights made it possible to lead certain sections of the population. We shall speak about the reason for this at another occasion since our task today is a different one.

The Atlanteans were divided into groups, and part of the whole developmental process was that one group of human beings had to be governed especially by the forces that could be acquired through the knowledge of Mars. Other groups had to be governed by the forces acquired through the knowledge of Venus, or Mercury, and so on. In ancient Atlantis there were actually human beings alive whom we could call “Jupiter People” or “Mars People,” and there were seven oracle centers because the populace in ancient Atlantis was divided into seven groups according to racial characteristics. The names applicable to these oracle centers corresponded to the names of the planets, but they were assigned to the oracles at a later time. The leadership of, and supreme sovereignty over, all other oracles was vested in what we may designate as the Atlantean Sun Oracle. Whatever oracles existed in the post-Atlantean periods—in Greece, Egypt, Asia, all were successors of the Sun Oracle in Atlantis. This is true also for the Apollo Oracle in Greece. The initiate who headed this Sun Oracle was the guardian of the deepest mysteries of our solar system. Together with his subordinates, he was called upon to investigate the nature of the spiritual life on the sun itself. His role was to proclaim to Atlantean humanity the secrets of the whole planetary system and to exercise supreme authority over the other oracle centers.

A very special task devolved on the Initiate of the Sun Oracle. It was to guide humanity in such a way that when the great catastrophe culminating in the submergence of Atlantis was over, the human race would be able to propagate and establish what we have often discussed as the postAtlantean cultures. Specifically, the task of the Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle was to prepare human beings during the Atlantean time in such a way that they could enter the ancient Indian, Persian, Egypto-Babylonian-Hebraic, and Graeco-Roman cultures. To put it differently, the Great Initiate had to see to it that enough suitable soul material was available for these cultural epochs.

We must now inform ourselves a little about the task of this Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle. What were the essential features of Atlantean culture? Certainly it was quite different from later cultures. In ancient Atlantis, an individual belonging to the highest level of cultural life—the levels at which today's great leaders in, say, scholarship, art, industry, or commerce can be found—was one who possessed extraordinary clairvoyant faculties and who was especially skilled in the use of magical powers. The qualities usually attributed to a leader or to a scholar were nonexistent in those days, or they were known only in the most primitive form. But although modern arithmetic, counting, logical reasoning, and intellectual deduction were unknown to the Atlanteans, they did possess primitive clairvoyant faculties and powers with which they could pierce into the spiritual worlds. Without the modern ego-consciousness, the Atlanteans saw into the spiritual world, and those whose vision was the most penetrating became the pillars of Atlantean culture. We have already stressed that the Atlanteans were able to manipulate certain inner forces of nature, for example the seed forces of plants; they propelled their vehicles with them, just as we utilize coal to propel our vehicles.

To repeat, the leaders of the Atlantean culture were not the people who tried, as the leaders of our time try, to unlock the secrets of the universe with their intellectual powers; rather, the leading individuals in Atlantis were those who excelled as clairvoyants and magicians. And those human beings who had the first rudimentary inkling about arithmetic, counting, logical reasoning, and intellectual deduction were in a certain sense despised because of their simplicity and were not considered as belonging to the aristocracy of cultural life. But it was precisely those human beings who possessed the very first rudimentary knowledge of the aforementioned skills and who were the most lacking in clairvoyant and magical powers whom the Great Leader of the Sun Oracle gathered from all regions. Yes, he assembled the most simple and, in a sense, the most despised people of ancient Atlantis—those who had first developed intellectual capacities. But those who were then at the highest level of cultural life and who were the acknowledged masters of a dimmed clairvoyance were not suitable material to be led through and beyond the great Atlantean catastrophe. No, the call of the Initiate went out to the simple people.

Incidentally, it may be said that we are living in an epoch today when a similar call is once again going out to humanity. To be sure, this appeal is what is appropriate for today, a time when humanity sees only what is in the physical world. The call to humanity issues from unknown depths of the spirit, depths that humanity will gradually become acquainted with, asking that humanity prepare itself for a new culture of the future, which will be permeated with clairvoyant powers. As with Atlantis, a catastrophe will occur, and afterwards a new culture imbued with spiritual capacities will arise, and it will be linked to what we call the idea of the universal brotherhood of humanity.

But today, as in Atlantean times, the call cannot go out to those who stand at the highest levels of cultural life because they will not understand. The Atlantean clairvoyants and magicians, who were in a way destined to die out with their culture, occupied a position similar to that of people in contemporary life who occupy the highest positions in the realms of scholarship and external industrial life—the great inventors and discoverers of our time. No matter how much the present leaders feel there is still to be done, they nevertheless occupy the same position as their Atlantean counterparts. Contemptuously they look down on those who are beginning to feel something of the spiritual life to come. The consciousness of this fact must be awakened in the soul of anyone whose cooperative efforts in the theosophical workshops are to be strengthened. When leading representatives of modern culture look contemptuously down at these small circles, those who are participating diligently in the preparation of future conditions must say to themselves that the intellectual giants of today cannot be counted on to lead the way in this task. It is precisely the people who are held in contempt because they are not considered to have reached the heights of contemporary erudition who are being assembled today, just as the leader of the Sun Oracle once gathered around him the simple of Atlantis. These disdained people are being assembled to prepare the dawn of a new culture whereas erudition of the modern form will bring about the twilight of our culture. This is mentioned in passing to fortify those who have to endure and hold their own against the attacks of the people who consider themselves to be on the cutting edge of contemporary culture.

The Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle gathered his simple people in a region approximately to the west of present-day Ireland. Now we have to get a clear picture of the situation. It took Atlantis a long, long time to come to its end. Great masses of people were continually moving from the West toward the East. In the various regions of Asia, Europe, and Africa there were tribes who had arrived at different times and had intermingled. Then the Great Leader of the Sun Oracle took His small group of chosen people and made His way to Central Asia, where he established a colony from which the currents were to emanate that would later found the post-Atlantean cultures. However, in addition to His simple people, the Great Leader has taken something else with Him. And here we arrive at one of the chapters of human evolution, the truth of which we can comprehend only if we draw on the inner assurance gained by a steadfast engagement in Spiritual Science.

The Great Leader inspected, as it were, the other oracle centers for the purpose of finding in them the most notable initiates. Now there is a certain method by means of which “spiritual economy,” as it may be called, can be put into practice. As you know, it is quite correct to say that the etheric body dissolves after a human being has died; what remains is an extract, and that is taken along. But the extract is only the elementary truth, which must be modified as one advances to higher levels of spiritual knowledge. It is not the case that the etheric bodies of all human beings are dissolved in the universal ether. Etheric bodies such as those possessed by the most notable initiates of the seven Atlantean Oracles are valuable. The spiritual achievements of these initiates were woven into their etheric bodies, and it would be against the principle of spiritual economy if the etheric bodies of the great initiates had simply been dissolved. They were to be preserved as prototypes for a later time, and it was incumbent upon the Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle to preserve the etheric bodies of the seven greatest initiates for this purpose. While leading His small group of simple people to Asia, He carried the etheric bodies of the seven most significant initiates of Atlantis with Him. Such a thing is possible through the methods that had been developed in the mystery centers. You have to visualize this as purely a spiritual process and not in the way as if one could wrap up etheric bodies and put them into boxes for safekeeping. What is certain, however, is that etheric bodies can be preserved for later times.

Over in Asia, the following happened. The simple people around the Leader propagated from one generation to another. Above all, these people had a tremendous devotion to and affection for their Great Leader. Their education was guided with wisdom and insight so that after many generations certain things occurred through one of the methods worked out in the mystery centers. Such methods are employed behind the scenes of external life, and we shall presently see how they take effect. Today's lecture will be the first in a series of several lectures designed to explain some of the details.

When a human being is descending to a new incarnation, he must envelop himself again with a new etheric body. Now, through the methods alluded to above, it is perfectly possible to weave into this new etheric body an old one that was preserved. And so after a diligent educational process, when the time had come, there were to emerge from the immigrants and their descendants seven individuals whose souls at their birth were sufficiently prepared to have the preserved etheric bodies of the seven greatest initiates of the Atlantean Oracles woven into their own etheric bodies. Thus, the preserved etheric body of the most important Saturn initiate was woven into that of one of the individuals gathered around the Great Leader of the Sun Oracle, the etheric body of the Mars initiate into another, the etheric body of the Jupiter initiate into a third, and so on. Hence the Great Leader of the Sun Oracle had seven individuals whose etheric bodies were interwoven with those of the most important initiates of the ancient Atlantean Oracles.

If you had met these seven individuals somewhere in everyday life, you would have found them to be simple human beings, for they were not the reincarnated egos of the Atlantean initiates; they were merely simple human beings possessing the new faculties of the post-Atlantean era. Their egos were not much different from the egos of those who became the bearers of the first primitive and simple culture immediately after the Atlantean catastrophe. What made them different was that their etheric bodies contained the forces of the seven great Atlantean initiates, so we are dealing here not with a re-embodiment of the ego, but rather of the etheric bodies of these great initiates. Thus we see not only that the ego but also that the second member of the super-sensible constitution—the etheric body—is capable of reincarnation. The seven individuals from among the followers of the Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle were inspired human beings simply by the fact that they had received these etheric bodies containing the forces and powers of the Atlantean era. At certain times their etheric bodies were capable of letting the forces stream into themselves that unveiled the mysteries of the Sun, Mars, Saturn, and so forth. Hence they appeared to be inspired individuals, but their utterances certainly exceeded anything their astral bodies or egos were able to understand.

What these seven inspired individuals taught from various parts of the world sounded like a wonderful harmonious choir, and after the seven had been united in the Lodge of the Seven Rishis, they were sent to India to inspire that country's ancient culture. Much that was profound in this culture has been preserved in a magnificent form in the Vedas,²⁷ and just as many wonderful ideas that give testimony to the deeply scientific nature of Indian culture have been preserved in the Upanishads,²⁸ in the Vedanta philosophy, and so on. However, the teachings of the ancient Holy Rishis, given in times when nothing was recorded, far exceed in beauty anything conveyed to us by the Indian scripts. What was written down in later times is at most a faint echo, for no records were kept of the primeval, sacred culture inspired by the Rishis; everything they taught was transmitted in a spiritual way through the mysteries.

We are interested today in learning how etheric bodies can be reincarnated, how the legacies of the ancient Atlantean epoch were transmitted by the Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle into the post-Atlantean era, and how they were then carried into the first culture of that era—into the resplendent Indian culture.

The mysteries of the Sun Oracle itself could not be directly revealed in ancient India, and that is why the seven Rishis spoke of a Being beyond their cognitive reach. They spoke of a Being who is the Leader of the Sun and directs its forces to the earth; they spoke of Vishva-Karman as a Being beyond the range of their knowledge. Vishva-Karman is none other than the Christ who was to appear later and whose coming had already been proclaimed in the ancient Indian culture.

The most important disciple of the Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle to receive the secrets of the Sun's essence was Zarathustra, who was subsequently to establish the second post-Atlantean culture. He was not the Zarathustra history talks about however. It was customary in ancient times that the successor of a great teacher or humanity took the name of his esteemed predecessor. No document contains any reference to the Zarathustra of whom we are now speaking; only his last successor is mentioned in history books. Yet it was the original Zarathustra who founded the primordial Persian culture and who was the first to point out to his Persian peoples that the sun not only possesses physical energy but also spiritual power that streams down to earth. In his endeavor to awaken in his people a realization of this truth, Zarathustra's argument was as follows: If we direct our eyes to plants and everything else around us that contains life, we have to ask ourselves what we would be without sunlight. But together with the physical sunlight, a spiritual force also streams down to earth under the direction of a great sublime Being. Just as a human being has his or her physical body and an aura—we call it the small aura—so the sun has its physical body and its aura. Ahura Mazdao, the “great aura,” consists of the group of great sun beings and their leader. Zarathustra spoke of this Ahura Mazdao, or Aura Mazdao—the Great Aura—and proclaimed the power of the sun aura by which the flow of evolution was made possible. However, Zarathustra also proclaimed that the forces of Ahriman would oppose the Sun Being. This then is what can be said about the external teachings of Zarathustra, but there is more to be said about him.

Zarathustra had some close disciples whom he initiated into the great mysteries of the world. We shall mention two of them in this context. To begin with the first, Zarathustra communicated to him all the wisdom necessary to bring about clairvoyance in the astral body, as well as the ability to perceive in one's present time frame simultaneously everything that is happening and all the mysteries spread out in both physical and spiritual space. To the second disciple Zarathustra transmitted what one might call the power to read the Akasha Chronicle, and this is nothing less than the clairvoyant power of the etheric body enabling the human being to perceive the successive phases of evolution in time. Thus, one disciple received the ability to perceive simultaneous events, and the other the vision of the Akasha Chronicle to perceive successive events that could lead to an understanding of the evolution of the earth and sun. By imparting these faculties to these disciples, Zarathustra had a profound effect on the continuation of culture in the postAtlantean era.

The first disciple was reincarnated as the great individual who was to inspire and inaugurate the new currents of Egyptian culture, the being whom we know by the name of Hermes or Hermes Trismegistos. Through processes that are known, the astral body of Zarathustra was transmitted to Hermes so that he could proclaim the message of the higher worlds and their mysteries and incorporate them into Egyptian culture. Thus by processes we will gradually learn to understand, the astral body of Zarathustra was preserved and was transmitted to one disciple when he was born again as Hermes. Hermes wore Zarathustra's astral body as if it were a garment.

The other disciple was also reincarnated, and in him everything was meant to be revealed that is presented to the earth in the Akasha Chronicle. Since the etheric body of Zarathustra was to be woven into that of a disciple, a very special event had to take place to make this possible. The forces of the new etheric body somehow had to be illuminated in the disciple for his awakening. The Biblical story relates to us in a beautiful and marvelous way what this special event was. Allow your souls to visualize how it had to unfold.

You must first realize that this reborn disciple of Zarathustra possessed his own astral body and ego, and he was now to have the etheric body of Zarathustra woven into his soul. As a small child, he first had to feel how the forces of the etheric body of Zarathustra became active in him, and he had to feel this before the powers of judgment could be activated by his own astral body and before his own ego was able to interfere. So the special event that had to take place was some sort of initiation. The forces of Zarathustra's etheric body had to be awakened in this reborn disciple when he was a very small child, that is before his own individual development could come into play. For this reason, the child was placed into an ark of bulrushes that was then put into the water, so that he was completely cut off from the rest of the world and was unable to interact with it. That is when the forces of Zarathustra's etheric body that had been woven into him germinated and, as we said earlier, became illuminated.

I am sure you know by now that this reborn disciple of Zarathustra was none other than Moses. The Biblical story about his abandonment is really a presentation of that profound mystery behind the scenes of the external world dealing with the preservation of Zarathustra's etheric body and its reawakening in Moses. And this is how Hermes and Moses were able to guide the post-Atlantean culture through its recorded stages.

After hearing about these examples of the reincarnation of etheric bodies and of an astral body, we know it is insufficient to speak only of the reincarnation of the ego. Rather, the other members of the human constitution that we have become acquainted with—the etheric body and the astral body—can also be reincarnated. It is a principle of spiritual economy that what has once been gained cannot perish, but is preserved and transplanted on the spiritual soil of posterity. However, what we have described can be accomplished in another way. We shall see from an example that there are still other methods whereby the past is transported into the future.

You will remember a personality mentioned in the Bible: Shem, a son of Noah and progenitor of the Semitic people. Occult research confirms that there is an individual behind Shem that must be regarded as the tribal individuality of all Semitic peoples. When a number of human beings are to descend from a particular progenitor, a special provision must be made for this in the spiritual world. In the case of Shem, the provision was that an etheric body was specially woven for him from the spiritual world, which he was to carry. This enabled him to bear in his own etheric body an especially exalted being from the spiritual world, a being who could not otherwise have incarnated on earth because it was incapable of descending into a compact physical body. This being was capable of incarnating only by virtue of the fact that it could now enter the etheric body of Shem. Since Shem had his own physical, etheric, and astral body, as well as his ego, he was first an individual in his own right. Beyond that, however, he was an individual whose etheric body was interwoven with the etheric body of another high being of the spiritual world, specially prepared for the purpose of founding a nation, as characterized above. If clairvoyant perception had confronted Shem, it would have seen Shem himself, but with a second entity extending out of him like a second being, yet still united with Shem's etheric body. This higher being was not Shem, but it incarnated in Shem—the human being—for a special mission. Unlike ordinary human beings, this higher being did not undergo various incarnations, but descended only once into a human body. Such a being is called an avatar. An avatar does not feel at home in the world as a human being would; he descends but once into this world for the sole purpose of carrying out a certain mission.

The part of a human being that is indwelled by such an avatar being acquires a special character in that it is able to multiply. When a grain of seed is sown into the ground, the stalk grows from it, and the grain is multiplied into the ears of grain. In the same way, the etheric body of Shem multiplied into many copies, and these were woven into all his descendants. That's what happened, and thus the copies of the etheric body that had been specially prepared in Shem as the prototype were woven into the etheric bodies of his direct descendants.

But this etheric body of Shem was later used in yet another way. How this was done can best be placed before our souls by the visualization of an analogy. You may be a highly cultured European, but if you want to acquaint the Hottentots with your culture, you simply must learn their language. By analogy, the exalted beings that descend to earth to guide humanity must weave into themselves the forces by which they will be put into a position to communicate with human beings on earth. Now in the later phase of the evolution of the Semitic people, it became necessary that a very exalted being descend to earth in order to communicate with them and provide an impetus to their culture. Such a being was the Melchizedek of Biblical history who, as it were, had to "put on" the preserved etheric body of Shem—the very etheric body that was still inhabited by an avatar being. Once it was woven into him, Melchizedek was able to transmit to Abraham the impulse necessary for the continued progress of Semitic culture. Here, then, we have become acquainted with another unique way in which an etheric body develops in a particular human being and is subsequently allotted to a specially selected individuality for the fulfillment of a mission.

Such examples can be found up to the most recent times, and as we trace them, we gradually realize the truth of what occultism is able to say today about this subject matter. Occultism conveys to us that most human beings living at present no longer have etheric or astral bodies that were originally woven anew from the general fabric of the world Almost every human being has in his or her etheric and astral body a fragment that has been preserved from ancient times because the principle of spiritual economy is at work preserving useful elements for repeated utilization.

Let us mention two more examples from the modern age that can illustrate to us how mysteries are at work from one epoch to another. The first example is related to the personality who is discussed in my book Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age: Nicholas of Cusa. He called one of his writings De docta ignorantia, a Latin title that can be translated “Learned Ignorance”; yet it contains more erudition than many a book claiming to contain learned knowledge. There were certain reasons for the title. If you read other writings by Nicholas of Cusa, you will find that a prophetic presentation of the Copernican picture of the universe is woven into them in a curious way. Those who read carefully cannot fail to recognize it. Yet it was not until the time of Copernicus that the world was mature enough to accept this view of the universe in its actual form. Investigation into the connection reveals the following: One of the members of Cusa's super-sensible constitution contained an ancient individuality of the highest rank, and that made it possible for the astral body of Nicholas of Cusa to be preserved and then to be woven into the astral body of Nicholas Copernicus. The wisdom once possessed by Nicholas of Cusa could, as it were, be resurrected in Copernicus, and that is an example of how the astral body has reincarnated.

The second example deals with Galileo, who has been immensely important for modern thought, as many of you who have thought about the matter know. Without him, there would have been no physics in the modern sense because the whole mode of thinking in terms of physics today must be attributed to Galileo. Every schoolboy today will read in the most elementary books of Galileo's law of inertia, of continuity, which indicates that a body in motion tends to continue its movement until it encounters an obstacle. Thus, if we throw some object, it will travel forward by its own momentum until it is stopped by an obstacle or outer force. This is how we think today, and this is what children in school learn from their textbooks. However, people living before Galileo thought in a different manner. They thought that if a stone were thrown, its flight could not continue unless the air drove or pushed it from behind. So we see that the laws of falling bodies, of the pendulum, and of simple machines are all derived from Galileo.

Galileo received his insights through a certain inspiration. I need only to remind you of how he discovered the law of the pendulum by observing the swinging lamp in the Cathedral at Pisa—a stroke of genius. Many people had walked past this lamp without noticing a thing, but when Galileo observed it, the fundamental laws of mechanics dawned on him. A human being who can be inspired in such a profound way has an etheric body of enormous richness; to allow it to perish would contradict the law of spiritual economy.

It is for this reason that Galileo's etheric body too was preserved and reappeared after a comparatively short period of time in an individual whose achievements were also to be of great significance. It was woven into a personality who grew up in a remote peasant village in Russia, ran away from his parents, and journeyed to Moscow. The great talent of this young man became apparent very soon, and he rapidly absorbed the knowledge of his day in the schools of Russia and Germany, so that he had soon encompassed the total of the general knowledge available in the culture of his time. All he had to do was to accumulate the knowledge developed on earth since he had died—in his etheric body—as Galileo. And then this very same person became, so to speak, the founder of the whole classical literature movement in Russia, creating lasting literary treasures practically out of the void. But more than that, he also provided important stimuli to every scientific discipline related to physics and chemistry, and particularly to all areas of mechanics. This individual was none other than Michail Lomonosov, whose achievements and reforms were possible only because the etheric body of Galileo had been woven into him. Galileo died in the middle of the seventeenth century, and Michail Lomonosov was born early in the eighteenth century with Galileo's etheric body, representing one of those intimate reincarnations where a member of the super-sensible constitution of the human being other than the ego is reincarnated. Such things lead us toward a deep understanding of the entire evolutionary process and of many other factors that have developed in the course of time, leading to the conditions prevailing at present.

The greatest avatar on earth was Christ Himself, who lived for three years in the three bodies of Jesus of Nazareth. Because Christ lived in the three bodies of the super-sensible constitution of Jesus of Nazareth, it was possible for the latter's etheric and astral bodies, and of the ego too in a lesser degree, to multiply in the same way as we have discussed it before. After the Mystery of Golgotha and as a result of the wonderful laws of spiritual economy, quite a few copies of the astral body and of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth were present as archetypes in the spiritual world. If an avatar enters a human sheath, the essence of the host is dispersed into many replicas. In contrast to the copies of Shem's etheric body, the copies of the astral and etheric bodies of Jesus of Nazareth had another special characteristic. The copies of Shem's etheric body could be implanted only into his own descendants whereas the copies of the etheric body and the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth could be implanted into all human beings of the most diverse peoples and races. A copy of the archetypal astral and etheric bodies of Jesus of Nazareth could be implanted in anyone who through his or her personal development had become ready for this transfer, no matter what race such an individual belonged to. And we see how in this subsequent evolution of Christendom, strange developments take place behind the external historical facade, and only such developments can render the external course of events intelligible.

Now, how did Christianity spread? We can say that in the first few centuries the dissemination of the idea of Christianity depended on what happened on the physical plane. In this era we see that Christianity is decidedly propagated through everything that lives on the physical plane. The Apostles stressed the fact that the propagation of Christianity was based on direct physical perception of eyewitnesses. "We have laid our hands into His wounds" was a statement of proof that the Christ had walked on earth in a human body. In other words, the stress was put on anything on the physical plane that could serve as documentation for the development of Christianity. Time and again during those first few centuries, it was asserted that those who had been disciples of the Apostles themselves were responsible for the continuing propagation of Christianity, and it was emphasized that they had known the immediate followers of the Lord Himself. So we see that people in this era relied, as it were, on eyewitness reports, and this continues in a still deeper sense up to the time of St. Augustine, who said: “I would not believe in the truth of the Gospels if the authority of the Catholic Church did not compel me to do so.” Why, then, did he believe? Because it was his conviction that the visible Church has propagated the Gospel on the physical plane from one decade and from one century to another. However, in the following centuries, from the fifth to the tenth, Christianity was propagated in a different way. Why and how? It is instructive to learn the answer to this question if we are interested in following the spiritual progress of human evolution.

You can visualize the method of propagation in this next period by considering, for example, the Old Saxon gospel epic entitled Heliand. In this work, a kind of initiate presents his readers with his version of the Christ idea and with his perception of the Christ-Being. The Heliand, the Savior, presented by this Saxon initiate is a super-sensible being. Yet, He is portrayed not within the context of the events in Palestine, but rather as a prince of a Germanic tribe. The disciples are individuals from Germanic lands, and the whole of Christianity is clothed in Central European imagery. Why was this done? It was done because the initiate who wrote the Heliand at the suggestion of Louis the Pious had clairvoyant faculties, so that he was able to see Christ in a way similar to Paul's perception of Christ at Damascus. Through the event at Golgotha the Christ-Being had united Himself with the astral body of the earth, thereby infusing His power into the aura of the earth; and when Paul became clairvoyant, he could clearly perceive: The Christ is present! Paul did not allow himself to become a believer merely on the strength of what was reported to have happened in Palestine. Only after he had seen the being that was woven into the earth with his own eyes did he change from Saul to Paul. In a similar vision, the Risen Christ, the eternal Christ living in the spiritual world after Golgotha, was revealed to the writer of the Heliand, and He was more important to him than was the historical Christ of Palestine. And so he presents Him in another setting because the spiritual Christ was more important to him than was the external image of the Christ. You may want to ask why the author of the Heliand was able to communicate such an image from clairvoyant perception. He was able to do this because a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth was woven into his own etheric body. This was the case because during these centuries—starting with the fifth or sixth and ending with the ninth or tenth century—the etheric bodies of those who were destined to do something for the advancement of Christianity were interwoven with a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth, and one of these special individuals was the writer of the Heliand.

Since there were many others who had a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth woven into their own etheric body, we can readily see that human beings in these centuries lived in imaginations that were closely related to the events in Golgotha. All those who created the original artistic portrayals of the Savior on the cross and of Mary with the Jesus Child had been inspired to do pictorial representations of anything connected with the event in Golgotha by one and the same thing: a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth was woven into the etheric body of each of these individuals. If the paintings of the events in Golgotha seemed like representations of a type, this points to the fact that all the artists were clairvoyant; what they created was then transmitted to posterity by the forces of tradition. In these early centuries, not all the inspired individuals destined to propagate the idea of Christianity were, of course, artists. Take, for example, John Scotus Erigena,²⁹ the scholastic philosopher, who in the days of Charles the Bald wrote the famous De Division Naturae. He, too, had a copy of the etheric body of Jesus woven into his own etheric body.

If human beings were born during the period from the fifth to the tenth centuries who had a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth woven into their own etheric bodies, human beings living in the period from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries received copies of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth rather than copies of His etheric body. Only by considering this fact do we fully understand some of the important personalities of that time. How will a personality whose own astral body is interwoven with a copy of the astral body of Jesus appear to the outside world? After all, the ego of Jesus is not incarnated in such an individual; each personality retains his or her own ego. Ego judgment can cause many an error to creep into the life of such an individual; but because the copy of the great prototype has been woven into his or her astral body, devotion, all the feelings, everything in short that permeates and weaves through this astral body will come to the fore as the intrinsic essence of the astral body, even though it may perhaps be at variance with the ego itself. Think of Francis of Assisi. There you have a personality into whose astral body a copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth was woven. You may have found many extremes in the biography of Francis of Assisi, and if you did, you should consider that they were caused by his ego, which was not on the same level with his astral body. But the moment you study his soul under the assumption that his ego was not always capable of making the right judgments about the wonderful feelings and the humility contained in the astral body, then you will understand him. A copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth was reincarnated in Francis of Assisi, and this was the case with many individuals of that time—Franciscans, Dominicans, and all other personalities of that time who will be intelligible only when studied in the light of this knowledge. For example, one of those personalities was the renowned St. Elisabeth of Thüringen.

And so what has happened in the external life of our existence becomes fully intelligible only when we see how spiritual impulses are conveyed in each era and how they are propagated in the course of time.

When Christ incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth, something like an imprint of the ego was made in the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth. When the Christ-Being entered the astral body, we can easily conceive that something like a replica of the ego could be produced in the surrounding parts of the astral body. This copy of the ego of Christ Jesus produced many duplicates that were preserved, so to speak, in the spiritual world. In the case of a few individuals who were to be prophets for their own age, something was woven into their ego. Among them were the German mystics who proclaimed the inner Christ with such fervor because something like a copy of the ego of Christ was incarnated in them—only a copy or image of Christ's ego, of course. Only human beings who prepare themselves gradually for a full understanding of the Christ and who understand through their knowledge of the spiritual worlds what the Christ really is, as He surfaces time and again in ever changing forms during the course of human evolution—only those human beings will also gradually gain the maturity necessary to experience Christ in themselves. They will be ready to absorb, so to speak, the waiting replicas of the Christ-Ego, ready to absorb the ego that the Christ imprinted in the body of Jesus.

Part of the inner mission of the universal stream of spirituality is to prepare human beings to become so mature in soul that an ever-increasing number of them will be able to absorb a copy of the Ego-Being of Christ Jesus. For this is the course of Christian evolution: first, propagation on the physical plane, then through etheric bodies, and then through astral bodies that, by and large, were reincarnated astral bodies of Jesus. Now the time is at hand when the ego-nature of Christ Jesus will increasingly light up in human beings as the innermost essence of their souls. Yes, these imprinted copies of the Christ Jesus individuality are waiting to be taken in by human souls—they are waiting!

And now you see from what depths the universal stream of Spiritual Science flows into our souls. Spiritual Science is not a theory, not the sum total of concepts given merely for the intellectual enlightenment of human beings; it is a reality, and it intends to offer realities to the human soul. Those who wish to gain a spiritual understanding of Christianity and experience it within themselves will strive to make a personal contribution so that either in the present or in a later incarnation a copy of the Christ Jesus individuality can be woven into their own egos. A person who understands the true, inmost essence—the actuality—of the universal stream of Spiritual Science will prepare himself or herself not just for knowledge, but rather for an encounter with actual reality. You must develop a feeling that we in our world movement are not concerned with the mere communication of theories, but rather with preparing human beings to accept facts. We are also concerned that human beings receive what is waiting in the spiritual world and what they have the power to receive, provided they prepare themselves for this task in the right way.

• 27. The Vedas are the oldest scriptures of Hinduism. The Veda is the literature of the Aryans who invaded NW India about 1500 B.C. and pertains to the fire sacrifice central to their religious beliefs.
• 28. The Upanishads constitute the last section of the Hindu Veda and are said to have been composed around 900 B.C. As the wellspring of Hindu speculative and religious thought, they became the basis for the later schools of Vedanta. “Vedanta” literally means “The end of the Veda” and refers to how the Upanishads are to be taught and interpreted.
• 29. John Scotus Erigena (c. 810–c. 877) was an Irish scholastic philosopher.

Patience, or the ability to wait, is the inexorable demand in all departments of life. Failures are inevitable, and we must not grieve over them. Nature is not concerned over her countless failures, for the beings behind Nature know that the higher spiritual law is bound to bring to pass the things which have been determined. Even so must students of Anthroposophy learn to wait in faith for events which are to mature in the womb of time. And the central point of this faith, its firm foundation, is the symbol of the Cross—as elucidated by a comprehension of the Christ principle. If we have come to know the reality of the Christ principle, we understand that this Christ principle is a force, a living force, and that it has been connected with human life on earth since the time that in the body of Jesus of Nazareth it united itself with one special human being. Since that time it has been with us, working among us, and we may become participators of its working if we endeavour to apply all means at our disposal to its understanding, in such a way that we make it the very life of our own souls.

When, however, we understand the Christ principle in this way, and know it to be in humanity, here on earth, and are able to come to it and draw water of life from the source, we then have the kind of belief which knows how to wait, not alone for everything which has to mature in the womb of time, but also for that which surely and certainly will mature for us human beings, if we but have patience. When within this transitory existence we grasp the Christ principle, there will mature for us—in the womb of the transitory—the intransitory, the eternal, the immortal. Out of the womb of time there is born for us human beings that which is beyond time. If we stand on this firm support, we base upon it, not a blind belief, but a belief permeated by wisdom, truth and knowledge, and we may say: What must, will come; and nothing prevents us from throwing our best energies into what we believe to be inevitable. Belief is the real fruit of the cross; it is that, which always calls out to us: ‘Look at your failures, which seem to imply the death of your creative work; then look from your failures to the cross, and remember that on the cross hung the source of boundless eternal life, which defeats death not only for itself but for all mankind.’ From belief spring courage and perseverance. But courage, perseverance and belief alone are not sufficient; another necessary factor will have to be established more and more the further we progress towards the future, and must form an increasing part of everything that may be achieved for the future of humanity. And this is that we must become capable of never being confused about an idea when once we have recognised its correctness. We may have to admit a thousand times that it cannot be realised immediately, that we must wait in patience and without faltering, though we believe that the Christ-force is working in the unfolding life of humanity in a way which will bring everything to birth at the right moment in the womb of time. We must, notwithstanding this, be able to judge of the rightness, of the indubitable rightness of the contents of our spiritual life. If we can wait for results, the occasions on which we have merely to wait when it is a question of deciding what is true, wise and right, will become fewer and fewer. The cross alone gives vital courage and belief to our right understanding; but the star of the light-bearer, the star of Lucifer, if we surrender ourselves to it, can enlighten us every moment as to the rightness and the indubitableness of the spiritual ideas within us. That is the other centre of force on which we must take a firm stand; we must be capable of acquiring knowledge which goes into the depths of life, which goes behind the outer, material appearances, which sends its rays from the place where there is light, even when to human eyes and understanding all is dark. It was necessary for the progress of humanity that darkness should reign for a time, and the next chapters will show more and more clearly how necessary it was. This necessity is indicated in a profound way in the Gospel of St. John. This darkness was illumined by what we call the Christ principle, the Christ.

A wonderfully beautiful legend tells us that when Lucifer fell from heaven to earth a precious stone fell from his crown. This precious stone—so the legend proceeds—became the vessel from which Christ Jesus took the holy Supper with His disciples; the same vessel received the Christ's blood when it flowed on the Cross, and was brought by angels to the western world, where it is received by those who wish to come to a true understanding of the Christ principle. Out of the stone, which fell from Lucifer's crown, was made the Holy Grail. This precious stone is in a certain respect nothing else—I will just mention it here, as the fact will be laid more plainly before your souls in the course of the next chapters—than the full power of the Ego. In darkness this human Ego had to be prepared for a new and more intelligent beholding if the radiance of Lucifer's star. This Ego had to school itself by means of the Christ principle, it had to ripen by the aid of the stone fallen from Lucifer's crown, that is to say through Anthroposophical wisdom, in order to become capable once more of bearing the light which comes not from without. This light, which only shines in us when we ourselves have the power to do what is requisite for acquiring it, must shine again in the world. Thus people who look at the future with full understanding know that anthroposophical work is work on the human Ego, which will make it into a vessel capable of again receiving the light which lives in a region where today our sight and intellect apprehend merely darkness and night. An old legend tells us that night was the original ruler. This night, however, is what today is filled with darkness. But if we permeate ourselves with the light which rises for us when we understand the light-bearer, the other spirit Lucifer, then will our night be turned into day. Our eyes cannot see if the outer light does not illuminate the objects round us; our intellect fails if asked to penetrate beyond the outer nature of things. The star of Lucifer, however, which comes to us when clairvoyant investigation speaks, throws its light on what only seems to be night and changes it into day. And this also takes from us all deadening and paralysing doubt. Then we understand the cross of the Christ in the star of Lucifer. It may be said to be the mission of anthroposophical spiritual life for the future to give us on the one hand certainty and strength whereby, firmly rooted in spiritual life, we may become recipients of the light of the Light-bearer, and on the other hand to make us lean firmly on the rock of unquestioning conviction that nothing which is due to happen through the interaction of forces which are in the world shall fail to happen. Only through this two-fold certainty shall we be able to accomplish what we have to do in the world; only through this two-fold certainty shall we succeed in transplanting Anthroposophy into life.

Therefore we must clearly recognise that we have not only the task of understanding the star of Lucifer, as it shone throughout human evolution till the precious stone fell out of Lucifer's crown, but that we have to receive this precious stone in its transformed character as the Holy Grail, that we must understand the Cross in the star; we must know that we have to understand the luminous wisdom which shone in the world during primeval ages, and which we deeply revere as the wisdom of pre-Christian times. To this we must indeed look up in full devotion, and add to it that which could be given to the world through the mission of the Cross. Not the least fraction of pre-Christian wisdom, of the light of the East, must be lost to us. We look up to Phosphoros, the Light-bearer; and indeed we revere this Light-bearer as the being through which alone we learn to understand the whole of the deep, inner meaning of the Christ; but side by side with Phosphoros we see Christophoros, the Christ-bearer, and we try to conceive of the mission of Anthroposophy in such a way that it only can be fulfilled if the symbols of these two worlds really ‘unite themselves in love.’ If this is our conception of the mission of Anthroposophy, Lucifer will guide us to the safety of a luminous spiritual life, and the Christ will guide us to the inner warmth of the soul which trusts and believes that that will come about which may be called the birth of the Eternal out of the Temporal.

And we shall further recognise that there is a light of the West, that shines in order to make that which originates in the East more luminous than it is through its own power. A thing becomes luminous through the light by which it is illuminated. Therefore let no one say that any falsification whatever of Eastern wisdom takes place when the light of the West shines on it. It will appear that what is beautiful and sublime seems most beautiful and sublime when illuminated by the noblest light. If we feel this idea and receive it into our souls, letting it fill them, we shall be able to learn in small things, through feeling and realisation, what will come to pass in great matters. We shall say: we stand firmly rooted in our truths and wait patiently for their realisation, however long deferred it may be.

Thus we work from one point of time to another in the firm belief that if we comprehend our mission rightly; we are working for that for which man ought to work, for eternity. For as far as human work is concerned, Eternity is the birth of that which has matured in Time.

In this and the succeeding chapters we shall make it a special point to consider the wisdom of the Eastern world, that is to say humanity's treasures of ancient wisdom in general, in the light which may be kindled by the knowledge of the Christ impulse and all that the course of the centuries has gradually evolved from this Christ impulse in the form of the wisdom of the Western world. If Anthroposophy is to be a living thing it must not consist in views and opinions of the higher worlds which are already in existence, taken from history and then taught, but it must comprise all the knowledge obtainable by us today about the nature of the higher worlds. Not only in olden times were there people who could turn their gaze towards these higher worlds and see them in the same way as we see the outer world with our physical eyes and understand it with our intellect. There have been such people at all periods of human evolution and there are such today. Humanity never has been dependent on the mere study of truths recorded in history, nor is man dependent on receiving these teachings about the higher worlds from any special physical place. Everywhere in the world the current of higher wisdom and knowledge may be tapped. It would be no wiser for our schools to teach mathematics or geography today by means of old documents, written in ancient times, than it is for us, when studying the great wisdom of the super-sensible worlds, to consider only ancient, historical accounts. Therefore it will be our present task to approach the things of the higher worlds, the beings of the super-sensible regions themselves, to review many things that are known, less known, or quite unknown about these higher worlds, and then to ask ourselves what the people of older and of ancient times had to say about these things. In other words, we shall allow Western wisdom to pass before our souls, and then enquire how that which we learn to know as Western wisdom accords with what we may learn to know as Eastern wisdom. The point is that the wisdom of the super-sensible worlds, if related to man, may be grasped by the intellect. It has often been emphasised by me, that any unprejudiced mind may grasp and comprehend the facts of the higher worlds. Although this unprejudiced common sense is a very rare faculty in our present time it does exist, and whoever is willing to exercise it can understand everything that is related of the result of clairvoyant investigation. It is true that these facts of the higher worlds can only be collected and investigated by so-called clairvoyant research, through the ascent into the higher worlds of people who have prepared themselves for this special purpose. And as in these higher worlds beings live which, in relation to man, we may call spirits or gods, the investigation of the higher worlds is in reality an association of the clairvoyant or the initiate with spirits or gods. Consequently a clairvoyant can only investigate the higher worlds by ascending the stages which lead to intercourse with the spirits or gods.

Much already has been said about these things at different times and places, and only the most essential part is here repeated. The first requisite for a person who wants to become clairvoyant in order to penetrate the higher worlds is nothing less than the acquisition of the faculty of seeing, knowing and experiencing without the help of the outer senses, not only without the help of instruments which have been built into our body such as eyes and ears, etc., but also unaided by the instrument which more especially serves our intellect, namely, our mind. No more than we can see the super-sensible worlds with physical eyes, or hear in them with physical ears, can we learn to know them through the intellect which is bound up with our physical brain. Thus man has to become independent of the activity which he exercises when using his physical senses and his physical brain.

Now we know already that in normal human life there is a condition in which man is outside the instrument of his physical body, viz. the condition of sleep. We know that of the four principles of human nature, the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the Ego, the latter two, the astral body and the Ego, gain a certain independence during sleep. During our waking life, from morning till we fall asleep at night, they are closely connected with the other two principles, with the physical and etheric bodies. But when we are asleep these four principles separate in such a way that the physical body with the etheric body remain lying on the bed, and the astral body and the Ego are liberated and live in another world. Thus in the normal course of his life man is for some hours out of every twenty-four in a condition in which he is free from the instruments which are built into his physical body; but he has to pay for this liberation from his sense-body in a certain way with darkness; he cannot perceive the world in which he lives during sleep.

The organs and instruments necessary for man when he wishes to see in the spiritual world, in which he lives with his Ego and his astral body at night, must of course be built into his astral body—relatively speaking into his ego. And the difference between a normal person of our time and a clairvoyant investigator consists in the fact that the astral body and the ego of the normal person are in a certain way unorganised and lacking organs of perception when they withdraw from the physical and etheric bodies at night, while in the astral body and ego of the clairvoyant investigator organs have been similarly developed to the eyes and ears of the physical body, though the organs are of a different kind. Thus the first task which the person who wants to become a clairvoyant investigator has to undertake is that of building into his hitherto unorganised astral body, and ego, spiritual eyes, spiritual ears, etc., and of doing all that is necessary to develop these spiritual organs. But that is not the only thing necessary. Let us suppose that a person has progressed so far that, by the methods, which we shall presently mention, he has equipped his astral body and ego with spiritual eyes and ears, etc. Such a person would then have an astral body different from that of an ordinary person since he would have an organised astral body. He would, however, not yet be able to see in the spiritual world, or at any rate he would not be able to reach certain stages of seeing. Therefore something more is necessary. If in our present conditions man really wishes to ascend to conscious clairvoyance, it is not only necessary for spiritual eyes and ears to be developed in his astral body, but also for all that is thus plastically formed in this astral body to be imprinted upon the etheric body, even as a seal is stamped on sealing-wax. Real, conscious clairvoyance begins when the organs, the spiritual eyes and ears, etc. formed in the astral body imprint themselves on the etheric body.

Thus the etheric body has to help the astral body and the ego if clairvoyance is to be brought about; or in other words, all the principles of man's nature that we possess—the ego, astral body and etheric body, with the sole exception of the physical body, have to work together to this end. Now there are greater difficulties for the etheric body than for the astral body in this respect. For the astral body and ego are, we might say, in the fortunate position of being free from the physical body once every twenty-four hours. From morning when we wake till evening when we go to sleep they are united with the physical body, and, all that time the astral body and the ego are bound up with the forces of the physical body, which prevent the astral body and ego from developing their own organs. The astral body and ego are delicate soul-beings; they follow, by their own elasticity, the forces of the physical body, conforming themselves to it and taking on its form. Therefore at night the astral body and ego of normal persons still have these forces of the physical body within themselves as after-effects, and only by special measures can we free the astral body and ego from these after-effects and enable the astral body to develop its own form, that is to say its spiritual eyes and ears, etc. But we are at least in the fortunate position of having the astral body free in the course of every twenty-four hours; that is to say we have the possibility of working on it in such a way that it no longer follows the elasticity of the physical body at night but its own elasticity.

The preparatory exercises taken up by the clairvoyant investigator consist essentially in spiritual activities performed during waking life, which strongly influence the astral body and the ego, and which have such strong inner effects that when at the moment of falling asleep the astral body and ego withdraw from the physical and etheric bodies, they experience the after effect of what has been done by way of special preparation for clairvoyant research.

Let us now consider two cases. The ordinary person living a normal life surrenders himself from morning till evening to the impressions of the outer world, which works on the outer senses and the intellect. He falls asleep at night, his astral body goes out of his physical body and is then given over entirely to the experiences of the day, following the elasticity of the physical body, but not its own. But when through meditation, concentration and other exercises given to those who wish to tread the path to higher knowledge a person strongly influences his soul, that is his astral body and ego, during waking life; in other words, when he has certain moments which he sets apart from ordinary daily life and in which he does something entirely different from the pursuits of ordinary waking life, and when in these particular moments he does not surrender himself to what the outer world has to say to the senses and to the intellect, but to what is a revelation from and a product of the spiritual worlds, a marked change takes place. When a man surrenders himself to such things, when he spends part of his daily waking life in meditation, concentration and other exercises, for however short a time it may be, they affect his soul so strongly that the astral body experiences the effects of this meditation, concentration, etc., at night when it leaves the physical body, and follows an elasticity different from that of the physical body. The method for the attainment of clairvoyant powers employed by the teachers of this research is drawn from the knowledge which has been tested for thousands of years in the way of exercises, meditations and concentrations, which have to be followed in waking life in order that they may have after-effects in sleeping life and produce a different organisation of the astral body. It is a great responsibility, which the person who gives such exercises to his fellow men takes upon himself. Such exercises are not invented, they are the result of spiritual labour in the mysteries, in the occult schools. It is known that that which is prescribed in these exercises works on the soul in such a way that when this soul withdraws from the physical body in sleep it develops its spiritual eyes and ears and its spiritual thinking in the right way. If something wrong is done, or wrong exercises are practiced, certain results also follow. Effects do not fail to appear, but in this case abnormal forms (or if we want to use an expression of the sense-world we might say ‘unnatural’ forms) are built into the astral body. What is the meaning of unnatural forms being built into the astral body? It means that forms are built into it, which contradict the great universe, which do not harmonise with it. It would correspond in this sphere to building organs in our physical body which could not hear outer sounds in the right way or see the outer light in the right way, and which would not be in accord with the outer world. Through wrong meditation and concentration man would therefore be brought into a position of contradiction to the universe, with regard to his astral body and his ego; and he would, instead of receiving organs through which the spiritual world could gradually reveal itself, be shattered by the influences of the spiritual world. He would experience these influences of the spiritual world not as something which benefited and enriched him, but as something which shattered his life, and, if the methods were quite wrong, tore his being asunder.

It is important to take particular notice that we are here confronted with the fact that something which exists in the outer world—and we speak now of the spiritual outer world—may be beneficial to man in the highest degree, as well as harmful in the highest degree, according to the way in which he brings his own being to meet it. Let us suppose that a man with a wrongly developed astral body exposes himself to the spiritual world around him. This world works in upon him. Whereas this spiritual world would flow in on him and enrich him with the mysteries if he has cultivated his organs in the right way, it will tear him asunder and shatter him if he has developed them in the wrong way. It is one and the same outer world which in one case carries man upwards to the highest, in the other case shatters and ruins him; the same external world, of which he will say that it is a divine and beneficent world when he carries within himself the right organs of perception, and a world of ruin and destruction when he has within himself an inner being which is not developed in the right way. In these words lies much of the key to an understanding of good and evil, of what is fruitful and what is destructive in the world. And this should enable us to see that the effect which any kind of beings of the outer world have on us is no standard by which to judge these beings themselves. According to the way in which we confront the outer world, the same being may either be beneficial or destructive to us, god or devil to our inner Organisation, and it is therefore imperative to bear this continually in mind.

We have now placed before our minds what the preparation for clairvoyant investigation is like with regard to our astral body and ego. And we have emphasised that we human beings are in a certain respect in a fortunate position, because we have our delicate astral body and ego outside our physical and etheric bodies for at least a certain time during each twenty-four hours. But the etheric body does not leave the physical body at night; it remains united with it. We know that not till the moment of death is the physical body deserted by the etheric body, which then withdraws along with the astral body and the ego. We need not mention today what becomes of these three principles of human nature between death and a new birth; we will only clearly present to our minds the fact that at death man is set free from his physical body and from all that is built into this physical body, free from the physical sense-organs and free from the brain, the instrument of the intellect which works physically. The ego, the astral body and the etheric body are then united in an appropriate fashion and can work together. Therefore it is that from the moment of death true clairvoyance sets in with regard to the previous life, although this at first lasts only for a short time. This has been often stated. Such a co-operation as normally only takes place at the moment of death must be made possible to the ego, the astral body and the etheric body during life if complete clairvoyance is to be brought about. The etheric body must be liberated from the condition in which it is imprisoned during normal life; it must arrive at being able to use its elasticity and to become independent of the elasticity of the physical body, as the astral body is at night. For this purpose more intense, more strenuous and in a certain respect higher exercises are required. All these things will be mentioned again in their corresponding connection in the course of the next chapters; for the present it will suffice to understand that such exercises are necessary, and that it is not sufficient to have practiced the preparatory exercises which have the effect of developing spiritual eyes and ears in the astral body, but that exercises for giving the etheric body independence and freedom from the physical body are also required. Just now, however, we will only consider the result. It is not difficult to imagine, from what has been said what this result must be. In normal cases it is only at the moment of death that the astral body and the etheric body can work together, free from the physical body. So if clairvoyance is to be aroused, something must take place which can only be compared with what sets in for man at the moment of death; that is to say, man must, if he wishes to become consciously clairvoyant, reach a stage of development where he is just as independent of his physical body and the use of the members of his physical body during life as he is at the moment of death.

By what means can man acquire such independence of his physical body, and bring himself into a condition which resembles the moment of physical death? Only by cultivating certain feelings and shades of feeling which stir the soul so forcibly that by their power they seize the etheric body and lift it out of the physical body. Such strong impulses of thought, feeling and will must work in the soul that an inner force is aroused which frees the etheric body from the physical body, at any rate for certain moments. In these moments, however, the physical body must absolutely be as if dead to ordinary, normal human life. But this cannot be brought about by external, physical methods in our period of human evolution. Anyone who thinks that such things can be brought about by physical methods would become the victim of a stupendous delusion. Such a person would wish to enter the spiritual worlds by adhering to the methods of the physical world; that is to say he would not yet have attained to a real belief in the force of the spiritual worlds. For purely subjective experiences, impulses proceeding from the strong, energetic life of the soul, are alone competent to bring about this death-like condition. And speaking in the abstract, we may say for the present that the most essential thing for bringing about such a condition is that man experiences a change, as it were, a turning upside down of his sphere of interests. For ordinary life provides man with certain interests. These interests play their part from morning till night. Man is interested and quite rightly, for he must live in the world—in things that appeal to his eyes, his ears, his physical intellect, his physical feelings, etc.; he is interested in what confronts him in the outer world; one thing interests him more, another less; he pays more attention to one thing and less to another; and that is natural. In these fluctuating interests, binding him to the tapestry of the outer world by a certain power of attraction, man lives, and by far the greater part of our present humanity lives in these interests alone. Nevertheless it is possible for man, without detriment to the freshness and intensity of these interests, to bring about moments in his life in which these outer interests are not at all active, in which, if we wish to express it radically, this whole outer sense-world becomes absolutely indifferent to him, in which he kills out absolutely all the interest forces which fetter him to this or that object in the world of the senses. It would be wrong for a man not to reserve this deadening of his interests in the outer world for certain ‘festival moments’ in life, it would be wrong to extend it over his whole life. He would then become incapable of taking part in the work of the outer world, whereas we are called to take part in the outer world and in its life.

We must therefore reserve for ‘times of high festival’ this possibility of letting all interests in the surrounding world die out; we must, so to say, acquire this twofold nature. On the one hand we must feel a fresh and vital interest in everything which goes on in the outer world in the way of joy and sorrow, of pleasure and pain, and of life which is blossoming and flourishing and of life which is dying. This freshness and originality of our interest in the outer world must be kept alive in our earthly life; we must not become strangers upon earth, for then we should act from egoism and deprive the stage to which our forces must be devoted in our present evolution of these forces. But on the other hand we must, if we wish to ascend into the higher worlds, cultivate the other side of our being, which consists in killing out during ‘moments of Holy Day’ all our interests in the outer world, of letting them die out. And if we have patience and perseverance and energy and strength to practice this as long and as much as our Karma demands, this deadening of interest in the outer world at last liberates a strong energetic force in our inner being, because that which we kill out in this way in the outer world reappears as higher and more abundant life in the inner world. We experience an entirely new kind of life; we experience the moment in which we can say: That which we can see with our eyes and hear with our cars is only a small part of life. There is an entirely different life, life in the spiritual world; a resurrection in the spiritual world, a transcending of what we usually call life, a transcending in such a way that not death but a higher life is the result. As soon as this pure spiritual force has grown strong enough in our inner being, we may gradually experience moments in which we become rulers and lords over our etheric body, when this etheric body does not take on the shape forced upon it by the elasticity of the lungs and the liver, but the shape forced upon it from above downwards by our astral body. Thus we imprint on our etheric body the shape which, through meditation, concentration, etc., we have first imprinted on our astral body. We imprint the plastic form of our astral body on the etheric body, and we ascend from ‘preparation’ to ‘illumination’—the next stage of clairvoyant research. The first stage, by which our astral body is changed in such a way that it receives organs, is also called ‘purification,’ because the astral body is purified and purged from the forces of the outer world, and conforms to the inner forces—purification, cleansing, Catharsis. But the stage at which the astral body succeeds in imprinting its own form on the etheric body implies that in a spiritual sense, light begins to shine around us, that the spiritual world around us is revealing itself and that ‘illumination’ is setting in.

What I have just described goes hand in hand with certain experiences which man goes through, with typical experiences which are the same for everyone, and which everyone who treads this path experiences the moment he is ripe for it, if he pays the necessary attention to certain things and occurrences which are beyond the physical. The first experience, which occurs through the organisation of the astral body and which therefore comes about as an effect of meditation, concentration, etc., might be called an inner experience of the feelings describable as an inward division of the whole of our personality. The moment this is experienced one can say to oneself: Now you have become something like two personalities, you are like a sword in its scabbard. Formerly you might have compared yourself with a sword which does not lie loosely in its scabbard but is one with it, the two consisting of one; you felt yourself one with your physical body; but now you seem, although lying in your physical body like a sword in its scabbard, to be a being which feels itself to be something apart from the sheath of the physical body, in which it is lying. You feel yourself to be within the physical body, but not grown into one with it, not as if consisting of one piece with it. This inward liberation, this inward realisation of oneself as a second personality, which has emerged from the first, is the first great experience on the way to clairvoyant vision of the World. The fact must be emphasised that this first experience is an experience of the inner feelings: One must feel that one is lying within one's old personality, and yet feel free and mobile within it. The analogy with the sword and its scabbard is of course rough. For the sword feels itself cramped on all sides by the scabbard, while man, when he has this experience, has a strong feeling of inner mobility, as if he might break on all sides through the limits of his physical body, as if he could forsake it by falling through the skin of his physical body and stretch out his feelers far, far into a world which, although still dark, begins to be perceptible to his feeling in the darkness, one might say, begins to be knowable through inner touch. This is the first great experience man has.

The second great experience is that this second personality which now exists within the first, gradually becomes capable of really leaving this first personality, of stepping out of it. This experience expresses itself in the fact that, although often only for a short time, one feels as if one could see oneself, as if one stood confronting oneself like a double. This is the second experience, and it is moreover of much greater importance than the first. With it something is connected which it is very difficult for man to bear. It must never be forgotten that in normal life man is contained within his physical body That which lives within man's physical body as astral body and ego, accommodates itself to the forces of the physical body; it yields as it were to them; it conforms itself to the bodily forces, assuming the shapes of the liver, the heart, the brain, etc. And this is also true of the etheric body, so long as it remains within the physical body. Now we all know what is indicated by the expression brain, heart, etc., what wonderful instruments and organs they are, how complete in themselves, how perfect as creations! What is all human art and human creative work compared with the creative work, the art and technique necessary for constructing such wonderful instruments as the heart, the brain, etc. What is everything which man can accomplish at the present stage of his evolution in the way of art and technical skill, compared with that divine art and technique which have built up our physical body and which, therefore, also guard us as long as we are within it. So we are not merely in an abstract sense devoted to our physical bodies during daily life, but interwoven with a concrete creation of the gods. Our etheric and astral bodies are fitted into forms created by the gods. If we now become free and independent there will be a change. We free ourselves at the same time from a wonderful instrument of divine creation. Thus we do not leave the physical body as some imperfect thing to be looked down upon, but as the temple which the gods have built for us and in which normally we live during our waking life. Such a temple do we leave on abandoning the physical body. What are we then?

Let us suppose that at a certain moment we could leave this physical body without further preparation, let us suppose that some magician (of whatever kind he might be) could assist us to leave our physical body, and that our etheric body accompanied our astral body, and that we, in a certain respect, went through an experience comparable with the moment of death; let us suppose that we could do this without the preparation of which we have spoken; what should we be when, outside the physical body, we confront ourselves? We are then what in the course of the world evolution we have made of ourselves from incarnation to incarnation. As long as from morning to night we are within our physical body, this divine creation, the temple of our physical body, corrects what we have incorporated within ourselves in the course of our incarnations on earth; but the moment we step out of it, our astral and etheric bodies show what they have accumulated from incarnation to incarnation and appear as they are according to what they have made of themselves. If a man thus unprepared leaves his physical body, he is not a spiritual being of a higher, nobler and purer form than the form was which he had in his physical body, but a being laden with all the imperfections heaped up in his Karma during his incarnations. All this remains invisible so long as the temple of our body encloses our etheric body, our astral body and our Ego. It becomes visible the moment we step out of our physical body with the higher principles of our being. Then there appear before us, if at the same moment we become clairvoyant, all the inclinations and passions, which still remain with us as the result of our former incarnations. In the course of the future evolution of our earth we have still to go through many incarnations, full of activities and accomplishment. The inclinations, instinct and passions for much that you will do later are already within you, developed through incarnations in former times. Everything that man is capable of accomplishing in the world in certain directions, all obligations to others incurred by offences against them for which reparation has to be made in the future, are already incorporated in the astral body and the etheric body when he leaves his physical body. We confront ourselves so to say naked as a soul-being, if at the moment of leaving our body we are clairvoyant; that is to say we stand before our spiritual vision in such a way that we know how much worse we are than would be the case if we had attained the perfection possessed by the gods, which made them capable of creating the wonderful building of our physical body. We perceive at this moment how far we are from the perfection which we must hold before us as our future ideal of development.

We know at this moment how deeply we have sunk below the world of perfection.

This is the experience which is connected with ‘illumination’; it is the experience which is called the meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold. That which is real does not become more or less real according to our seeing or not seeing it. That shape which we see in the moment just described is always there, is always within us; but because we have not yet got loose from ourselves, because we do not confront ourselves but are within ourselves we do not see it. In ordinary life, that which we see at the moment that clairvoyantly we step out of ourselves, is the Guardian of the Threshold. He shields us from an experience that we must first learn to bear. We must first acquire a strong enough force to enable us to see a world of the future before us, and to look without fear and horror upon what we have become, because we know for certain that we can make it all right again. The capacity, which we must possess for experiencing this moment without being depressed by it, must be acquired during the preparation for clairvoyant investigation. This preparation consists, abstractly expressed, in making the active, positive qualities of our souls strong and energetic, in bringing our courage, our feeling of freedom, our love, our energy of thought and our energy of lucid intellect to the greatest possible height, so that we step out of our physical body not as weak people but as strong. If, however, there is too much left in man of what is called anxiety and fear, he will not be able to endure this experience of encountering the Guardian of the Threshold without harm.

Thus we see that there are certain conditions to be fulfilled before looking into the spiritual worlds, those worlds which in a certain respect hold out a prospect of the highest that we can think of for life in our present development of humanity, but at the same time demand of man a complete transformation of his being such as he has to attain in the solemn ‘Holy Day moments’ before mentioned. It is a real blessing in our present time for the aspirant, before he proceeds to this experience, to be told what those who have gained experience in the higher worlds have seen. We can understand even when we cannot see. But by making increasing efforts to reach an intellectual comprehension of what the clairvoyant tells us, and coming to the conclusion, after a survey of everything life brings us, that the clairvoyant's reports are quite sensible after all, we shall be doing the right thing at the present time. We must become Anthroposophists before aspiring to clairvoyance, and we must learn to know Anthroposophy thoroughly. If we do this, the great, comprehensive, strengthening, encouraging and refreshing ideas and thoughts of Anthroposophy give to the soul not only a working hypothesis, but also qualities of feeling, will and thought, which make the soul like tempered steel. If the soul has gone through this process, the moment of meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold becomes something quite different from what it would have been otherwise. Fear and terror, states of anxiety and care, are conquered in quite a different way if previously we have learned to understand and to grasp what is related about the higher worlds. And later, when a person has had this experience, when he has confronted himself and thus has met the Guardian of the Threshold, the world begins to show itself to him in quite a different way. Everything in the world may be said to wear a new aspect. And a justifiable opinion might be expressed by the following illustrations. I had supposed up till now that I knew what fire is but that was only an illusion. For what I have called fire up till now, would be like calling the tracks of a carriage on a road the only reality, and denying that a carriage in which a person was sitting must have been passing that way. I declare these tracks on the road to be the signs, the outer expression of the carriage which has passed there and in which a person was sitting. I have not seen the person who passed there, but he is the cause of these tracks, he is the reality. And a person who believed the marks left by the wheels to be something complete in themselves, something real and basic, would be taking the outer expression for the thing itself.

That which our senses see as flashing fire bears the same proportion to its reality, to the spiritual being which stands behind it, as do the tracks on the road to the person who was sitting in the carriage which passed there. In fire we have only an outer expression. Behind what our eyes see as fire and what we feel as heat is the real spiritual entity, which has only its outer expression in the outer fire. Behind what we inhale as air, behind what enters our eyes as light, and behind what our ears perceive as sound, are active beings spiritual and divine, whose outer garments only we behold in fire, in water and in what surrounds us in the different realms of nature.

In the so-called secret teaching, in the teaching of the mysteries, the experience which is then gone through, is called the passage through the elementary worlds. Whereas previously one had lived in the belief that what we know as fire is a reality, one then becomes aware that living beings are hidden behind the fire. We become, so to say, acquainted with fire, more or less intimately as something quite different from what it appears to be in the world of the senses. We become acquainted with the fire-beings, with what is the soul of the fire. Just as our souls are hidden behind our bodies, so the soul and spirit of the fire are hidden by the fire which we perceive with our outer senses. We penetrate into a spiritual domain when we experience the soul and spirit of fire in this way, and the experience by which we realise that the outer fire is no reality, that it is a mere illusion, a mere garment, and that we now move among the fire-gods just as we did formerly among people of the physical world, is called ‘living in the element of fire,’ to use the terms of occult science. It is the same with that which we breathe. The moment that what we breathe as outer air becomes to us only the garment of the living beings within it, we live in the element of air. And so when one has passed through the meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold, that is to say, when one has acquired true self-knowledge, one can ascend to experiencing the beings in the so-called elements, in the elements of fire, of water, of air and of earth. These four classes of gods, or spirits live a real existence in the elements, and a person who has reached the stage which has just been described, is in touch with the divine spiritual beings of the elements. He lives in the elements; he experiences earth, water, air and fire. That which in ordinary life is designated by these words, is only the outer garment, the outer expression of divine spiritual beings behind it. It becomes plain, therefore, that certain spiritual divine beings live in that which meets us (speaking according to spiritual science) as solid matter or earth, as fluid matter or water, as volatile matter or air, and as warm fiery matter or fire.

These, however, are not the highest spiritual beings. When we have struggled on through the experiences of the elementary world, we ascend to the entities which stand in the relation of creators towards the spirits who live in the elements. For let us consider our physical surroundings. We find that they consist of the four outer principles of the elementary world. Whether we take plants, or animals or stones or anything else on the physical plane, they consist according to spiritual science either of the solid element, that is earth, or the fluid element, water, or the gaseous element, air, or the fiery element, fire. Of these elements the things which physically surround us in the world of stones, of plants, of animals and of men are composed. And we know that behind what physically surrounds us there are, as creative and fructifying forces, those forces which for the most part come to us from the sun. We know that the sun calls forth budding and germinating life out of the earth. Thus the sun sends to the earth forces which—considered physically for the moment—make it possible for us to perceive on earth with our physical senses that which lives in fire, in air, in water and in earth. We see the sun physically because it radiates physical light. This physical light is sustained by physical matter. Man sees the sun from sunrise to sunset, and he does not see it when the physical earth substance hides it; he does not see it from sunset to sunrise. In the spiritual world there is no such darkness as reigns in physical life from sunset to sunrise. When the clairvoyant has gained what has been described, when he perceives behind fire the spirits of fire, behind air the spirits of air, behind water the spirits of water, and behind earth the spirits of earth, in that moment he sees behind these divine spiritual beings their higher ruler, their higher Lord, the entity which in comparison to these beings of the element is like the warming, illuminating beneficent sun as compared to the budding and germinating life on our earth. That is to say, the clairvoyant ascends from a contemplation of the elementary gods to the contemplation of those higher divine beings which in the spiritual world may be symbolically compared with the sun in its physical relation to the earth. Behind the beings of the elements a high spiritual world is seen, the spiritual sun. When for the clairvoyant that which otherwise is darkness becomes light, when he attains to clairvoyance, to ‘illumination,’ he realises the spiritual sun, that is to say the higher divine spiritual beings in the same way as the physical eye realises the physical sun. And when does he penetrate to these higher divine spiritual beings? At the moment when, as it were, for other people the spiritual darkness is at its densest. When man's astral body and Ego are free, that is to say, from the moment of falling asleep to that of waking, man lives surrounded by darkness because he does not see the spiritual world which then surrounds him. This darkness increases gradually, reaches its densest point and decreases again until the morning when he awakes. It comes, as it were, to a point in which it reaches its densest degree. This densest degree of spiritual darkness may be compared with what in outer life is called the hour of midnight. Just as normally the outer physical darkness is then at its densest, since it increases towards this moment and then decreases, so there is a densest degree of spiritual darkness, a midnight. At a certain stage of clairvoyance it happens that the spirits of the elements are seen during the time when for other people the spiritual darkness begins to increase, and similarly during the time in which darkness decreases again. In other words if only a lower stage of clairvoyance has been reached, one experiences, so to say, certain gods of the elements, but just at the time of the highest spiritual moment, the midnight hour, darkness may still set in and ‘illumination’ only begins again after this moment has been passed. When, however, a definite stage of clairvoyance is reached, the midnight hour becomes so much the more ‘illuminated’; and just at this midnight-hour, at the time when the normal person is, so to say, most shut off from the divine spiritual world, most entangled in maya, or illusion, one ascends into the light. At this time one beholds those spiritual beings which, compared to the gods of the elements, are like the sun compared to the physical earth. One beholds the higher creative gods, the sun gods, in the moment which is technically called: ‘Beholding the sun at midnight.’

These are the stages which today, as at all times, have to be lived through by those who wish to work themselves up to clairvoyant investigation, who wish to look through the veil which in the shape of the earthly elements is drawn over the real world. They are: the feeling of freedom inside one's ordinary personality, like that of a sword in its sheath; the feeling of being outside the physical body, as if the sword were drawn out of its sheath; the meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold; the experiencing the gods of the elements, that is, experiencing the great moment when the beings of fire, air, water and earth become beings among whom we walk and with whom we associate as in ordinary life we associate with human beings, and lastly, experiencing the moment when we behold the king, the commander, the leader of these beings of the elements. These are the stages which could be experienced at all past times and which can still be experienced today. These are the stages (already often described, for they can be described in many ways, and still the description always remains imperfect) leading upwards into the spiritual worlds. We were obliged to present them to our souls so as to see what man at all times has had to do himself, in order to learn to know the divine spiritual beings. And we shall further have to place before our souls what it is which man experiences in these divine spiritual worlds we shall have to realise some of the more concrete preparations to be gone through in order to meet the gods. And when we have presented this to our souls and the way in which it can be attained by western initiation, we shall compare what we have thus gained with what has been given to humanity in the way of oriental tradition and ancient wisdom. And in making this comparison, we shall be shedding the light of the Christ upon the wisdom of pre-Christian times.

Our attention has been called to the fact that to human beings at a certain stage of evolution, the external phenomena of warmth, air, water, etc., become living and permeated with spirit, and it has been said that this stage may be designated as that of ‘penetration into the world of Spirits of the Elements.’ I would ask those who have been students of Spiritual Sciences for some time to note the words carefully, and to realise that they are used, not in an approximate, but in an exact sense. ‘Spirits of the Elements’ was the expression I used, and not ‘Elementary Spirits.’

It must be pointed out that when we ascend into super-sensible realms, other worlds, two of which shall be named, are added to the ordinary world experienced by means of the sense organs they are to be found behind what is perceptible by the senses and comprehensible to the intellect. There are certain striking characteristics which give an idea of the difference between our world and the two higher ones adjoining it. The first region hidden behind our ordinary world is named, as everyone knows, the Astral or Soul world; the Spiritual world is still more deeply hidden. In the physical world one of the most comprehensive laws is that of growth and decay, of coming into being and passing away. Look where we will in the physical world we find that a characteristic of its highest beings is that they are born and that they die within it; the inanimate kingdom of the minerals, belonging to the lower realms of nature, may arouse an illusion of permanence within the physical world, but if the mineral kingdom be observed over long periods of time, the law of growth and decay is found there.

Observation of the astral world, however, reveals the fact that here the capacity of transformation or metamorphosis is as predominant as is the law of birth and decay in the physical world. In the astral world we have to do with moving images changing one into the other, in a state of perpetual metamorphosis. Even the astral body of man, which is of all astral phenomena the most intimately bound up with us, visible to the seer as a kind of aura or cloud-like formation around the physical body, shares this characteristic of continual transformation. That which envelopes and penetrates the human being in the form of an astral auric cloud changes practically every moment as higher or lower impulses develop in him, as he experiences wilder or calmer passions, or cultivates thoughts of different nature according to the character of the will impulses. Images and shapes arise in the astral auric cloud, and as different thoughts rise and fade away, its colour and form may continually change. There is, however, a certain fundamental character and colour in the astral aura of every individual, corresponding to his more or less permanent type of character. Self-metamorphosis, then, is of the very nature of the human astral body. We have seen that the beings visible to a man in the astral world after he has reached the stage of illumination meet him as good or as evil beings according to his own preparation. So strong is the capacity of metamorphosis in those Beings which are invisible upon the physical plane and only perceptible in the astral and higher worlds, that they may change from good into evil, from light into dark.

In the real spiritual world there is permanence, even if it is relative. For this reason the inner being of man, if it is to exist without a break from one incarnation to another, must pass through the spiritual worlds, because only there is to be found a certain—not external—but relative permanence or continuity.

The rhythm of growth and decay is the pre-dominant characteristic of the physical world; metamorphosis from one form to another of the astral world; permanence or continuity of the spiritual world. First we must realise that the materials for the building up of the human being have been obtained from these worlds; man has been constructed out of them. The physical world lies before him the other worlds open up to him through initiation—through preparation and development of super-sensible faculties of perception. Man then first learns to know what is hidden from him in the ordinary world, but what has just as real an existence. When in ordinary life an outer sheath or expression of some being is found, as for example, fire or air, the being itself is to be sought in a higher world. In order to meet the beings whose expression is physical fire, man must ascend to a region higher than the physical world. That which is the cause and origin of fire, for instance, can only be discovered by rising from the physical plane to the world above it, because the Beings in question send down an expression of themselves into the lower world, but remain as to their essential nature in the higher region. This holds good not only for external phenomena such as fire, air, water or earth, but also for everything living within us in the physical world. Our feelings, perceptions and thoughts exist in the physical world along with phenomena of colour, sound, tastes, scent, etc. It must be clear to us that everything which constitutes man in an incarnation, every feeling experienced between birth and death, every thought, every idea, is a phenomenon of the physical world. And spiritual beings live behind our feelings and the whole of our soul life just as they do behind the external phenomena of colour, sound, scent, or as we say in Spiritual Science, behind fire, air, water and so on. In the same way, the ego, the self within the physical world is not our real being, is not what is called our Higher Self, for that is to be found in a super-sensible world behind our feelings and sensations. This Higher Self is experienced in a true sense only by attaining to super-sensible worlds, where it manifests itself in quite another form. I will show you by a definite example the relation of the self of man living in the physical world to the Higher Self; this example holds good for present conditions of life only since anyone who has spiritual sight knows that the nature of these things changes in the course of time. Let us suppose that a man has done an injustice to another and experiences the pang of conscience. I refer here to those special psychic experiences usually expressed by the word conscience. In ordinary life, conscience is a term used of certain inner voices demanding that we should set right any wrong we may have committed. Most people hardly ever come to the point of thinking about the nature of conscience; they recognise as a kind of vague feeling that an injustice should be righted; the soul is uneasy when this has not been done. For men in the physical world conscience is an inner experience of the soul. The spiritual Seer, however, observing from the astral world the man who has done the act of injustice, sees the pang of conscience surrounding him in remarkable astral shapes—shapes which are absent if no pang of conscience has been felt. The origin of these forms may be explained as follows: Suppose somebody has done an injustice: from thoughts which have led to the unjust act other thought-forms develop as the metamorphosis of the first. Everything that a man thinks and feels exists in his astral aura as a form or shape of the nature of thought or of feeling. A thought which is, let us say, distinct, definite, can be seen in sharp outline hovering round a man, and wild thoughts or passions in confused outlines. At the time when a man is doing an injustice he has certain thoughts and feelings; these forms detach themselves from him and live in his environment, but the essential point is that they do not remain in this condition but draw nourishment from certain worlds. Just as the wind rushes into empty spaces, beings from definite regions (of which more later) rush into the forms created by the pang of conscience and fill them with living substance. Thus in his own thought-forms a man offers opportunity for other beings to live in his environment, and these beings are really the cause of the sting of conscience. If the beings were not present the conscience would not sting. When a man begins to feel these beings unconsciously, the first gnawing of an uneasy conscience is experienced.

This example shows us that spiritual sight reveals a reality very different from that presented to physical sight. If a man is to contact the spirits of conscience, who live upon the Astral plane, he must look through his conscience into the higher worlds in the same way as would be necessary in order to perceive the spiritual beings who animate physical life.

From different lectures we know that the human soul has changed in the course of long periods of time;—human consciousness of today is different from the consciousness, let us say, of the ancient Indian people in the first Post Atlantean epoch, and it in its turn was very different from the consciousness of the Atlantean age. The clear waking consciousness of the physical world has developed from a dim, primitive clairvoyance. The farther we go back in evolution, the more traces do we find of this primitive clairvoyance.

We need not go further than some thousands of years, and we shall find that many people were then able not merely to perceive physical, fire, but to look through it to the spirits of the element of fire. Gradually it came about that the higher world withdrew from human consciousness and the latter came to be limited to the physical world. This holds good not merely for the external sense world, but for the whole of the life of the soul in the physical world. So it is stated that in a phenomenon like conscience a modern spiritual seer perceives astral forms around human beings, and the ancestors of this modern man, being endowed with clairvoyance, must have been able to see these astral forms. Just as fire conceals, the spirits of the fire, so does human conscience—the inner voice—conceal the world of the spirits of conscience. The astral phenomena must have been perceptible to men of ancient times; but they could at that time have had no inner conscience, since it had not yet developed. What we of today call the psychic phenomenon of conscience was not present in our forefathers, but on the other hand they could see in the Astral aura what is now only perceptible to the eye of the seer; modern men feel the inner voice of conscience and the spirits of conscience are hidden behind it.

I have brought forward this example deliberately, because it affords concrete evidence of these matters. It is possible to indicate precisely the epoch in external history when the transition took place from perception of the outer spirits of conscience, to the awakening of conscience as an inner voice. Compare the Orestes of Aeschylus with the same theme as treated by Euripides, who lived a short while later. Between the age of Aeschylus and that of Euripides—a few years only—occurred the transition which confirms what I have just said. In the story of Orestes as related by Aeschylus, Agamemnon returns home after the war and is murdered by his unfaithful wife. His son, Orestes, who is absent, returns and takes vengeance upon his mother for the death of his father, because one of the gods demands that he shall do so; his act is in harmony with the national feeling of those times that declares that his act is righteous and that he has done his duty. But as the result of the murder of his mother, Orestes sees the Erinyes, the avenging goddesses, approaching. These avenging goddesses of Greek mythology are simply a pictorial image of what has just been described as a reality for spiritual perception. And now let us see whether in this old drama there is any phenomenon which could be described by the modern word conscience. There is not even a word for it in any ancient language, as research would testify. In the poem of Euripides who used the same story a few decades later, we find no Furies, no avenging goddesses; there men hear instead the inner voice of conscience. Concretely perceptible, in the interval between the lives of these two poets, conscience arose. Clairvoyance was so vivid and real in human evolution before this age, that the feeling experienced by man, as the result of an unrighteous act, was entirely different from what it became later. Man's clairvoyant vision was still open; he saw in his environment what I have described in Greece as the Erinyes. The inner feeling which he experienced in presence of this vision was one in accordance with the character of the astral world he wanted to change, to transform the images surrounding him. As soon as an unrighteous or unjust deed has been wiped out by turning it into a good one, the Erinyes change into the beneficent Eumenides. Man felt that an evil deed brought about a terrible result in the astral world, that it must be transformed, and that he must by a positive act bring about the metamorphosis. His actions then were in accordance with what he saw in his environment. The inner voice of conscience was non-existent.

Everything in the world and in the inner life of the soul as well has developed or evolved, conscience among the rest. If anyone were to go back some thousands of years in search of an instance of our modern soul life, he would make a great mistake. For transitions such as this take place with considerable suddenness. Just as in the plant there is a sudden metamorphosis from leaf to flower, so does one occur in spiritual evolution. The phrase ‘nature makes no jumps’ is untrue; Nature continually makes jumps at decisive moments. And such sudden transitions are perceptible in spiritual life. For centuries and millennia there is slow and gradual development; but then there is a sudden change, as in the case of the conscience in the fifth century BC where an earlier tragic poet makes no mention of conscience in his dramas and only a few decades afterwards it is introduced for the first time. With this is connected the fact that clairvoyant perception of the spirits of conscience, the Erinyes, has disappeared. The spiritual beings are of such a nature that our inner experience of conscience comes between us and them in the same way as the outer expression of fire hides the spirits of the element of fire.

This points to the fact that so far as the physical world is concerned, limits of experience are set in two directions. The external phenomena of external colour form, and so on, form the boundary line at which the external spirits are to be found. But behind the inner phenomena of conscience, memory, feeling, will and thought, a spiritual element exists as it does behind fire, air, water or earth. The spirit is hidden behind them. When conscience came to be a voice speaking in the human soul, it interposed itself in front of the world of the Furies and hid that from human sight. The historical life of humanity becomes intelligible only when considered from this inner point of View. Mankind can understand nothing of what has come to pass in the world if it leaves spiritual facts out of sight in considering evolution, or becoming.

We may now ask, what is the relation of the inner and the outer spiritual realms to each other? We know that Man as a fourfold being is composed of Physical, Etheric, Astral bodies and ego, and that this fourfold constitution is to be traced back to the very source and origin of humanity. Man did not originate on the Earth, for the Earth itself has passed through other incarnations, that of Saturn, of Old Sun and Old Moon. The first germ of the physical body of man arose on Old Saturn, on Old Sun the Etheric body was added, and on Old Moon, the Astral body. The ego was first incorporated into this threefold constitution on Earth. Evolution is by no means such a simple matter as to involve merely a transition from the Saturn period into the Sun period, thence to Old Moon and thence again to Earth; the process is much more complicated than that. Even if we speak of the transition from Saturn to Old Sun and of this to Old Moon, we could not speak thus simply of the Old Moon evolution itself. I have said that during the Old Moon evolution there was a separation of Earth and Sun (the Earth was then Old Moon) or properly speaking, of Moon and Sun. Saturn and Sun may perhaps be spoken of as single bodies, but during the Old Moon period two bodies emerged from the one; the Old Moon existed at the same time as the Old Sun. These two bodies united again after a time, passed through an intermediate condition and arose later as Earth. During the earliest period of Earth evolution the substances and beings now to be found in the present Sun and Moon were united with the Earth; the present Sun beings separated from Earth, which remained in connection with what later separated off as our Moon; after the separation of Moon, Earth remained alone, between it and Sun. These three bodies were one in the beginning; only later did the Sun and the Moon develop out of the Earth.

Let us now enquire as to the spiritual meaning of this separation. We will leave-out of consideration the first separation occurring during the Old Moon period and look at what happened in this connection during the Earth period.—Certain beings pass through their evolution on Earth, and Sun and Moon afford evolutionary opportunities to others. Beings at a different stage of development from that of man separated from the Earth with the Sun, because their evolution could not proceed otherwise. At the time, therefore, of the separation of Sun from Earth, we are faced with the fact that man was left behind, since the nature of his evolution demanded the conditions afforded by Earth. The other beings, whose evolution could not proceed upon Earth, separated from it the substances necessary for them, and built their Sun abode. Thence they influence and work upon the Earth. In the physical sunbeams as they lighten and warm the Earth, we see streaming the activities of the sun spirits; the sunbeams are the outer, corporal manifestation of sun beings. That is the meaning of the separation of Sun from Earth.

What was the meaning of the separation of Moon? Man could not have kept pace with the evolutionary tempo of the sun-beings if they had remained in union with Earth. The evolutionary tempo of Earth was slackened by the separation of Sun, but still it was not suitable for human beings—it was too slow. Man would have become hardened or mummified, if Moon had remained in connection with Earth. Earth would gradually have become a planetary body from which the men would have developed with forms like dead bodies that lack inner spiritual and psychic life. Moon had to withdraw from Earth in order that the right evolutionary tempo for the being of man might be set up. If Sun had remained with Earth, man would have been forced into an outer life and activity which he could not have endured; if Moon had remained he would have become impervious to stimulus, he would have dried up, lacking vital force. The stimulus received by man from Sun was an external one which would have produced too rapid a tempo. In the same way as Sun stimulates the life of the flowers in the fields, would man's thoughts, feelings and will have been stimulated from without, but at such a rate that he would have been burnt up by physical and spiritual sun fire. The source of this stimulus left Earth and in this way its influence was weakened. At first, because of the hardening tendency inherent in Earth, the Sun's influence had too little effect, and a portion of these hardening factors had to leave with Moon. Therewith came into the evolution of Earth and of man a new vitalising principle, the stimulating influence of which was exactly contrary to that of Sun from without. The new stimulus came from within. The life of the soul in the physical world could develop only because man was saved from this hardening and mummification by the withdrawal of Moon.

Ask of one whose spiritual sight is able to penetrate into the Cosmos as to the origin of man's perception of the external world, and his answer will be that it is to be found in the physical or spiritual sun elements. Ask what lies at the basis of inner experience, of thought, of feeling, of conscience, for example, and it will be found that all this is due to the moon, to those beings who separated their substance from the earth with the moon. The presence of moon substances in the earth would have prevented the inner mobility of soul life.

We must remember that it was not merely for the sake of man that the separation of the sun and moon from the earth came to pass, but also for the sake of those beings whose evolution was at first bound to that of humanity. In the sun dwell beings who need the sun for their evolution, just as the evolution of man needs the earth. To remain with the earth would have been death to their existence; but the separation resulted in their becoming able by degrees to reach a stage where their beneficent influences could flow down to the earth from without. When the seer observes the light, when her perceives external objects, he realises at a certain stage of his evolution that it is the sun beings which live behind the physical phenomena of colour, sound, and so on, but that these beings themselves had to develop to their present stage. These sun spirits are the upper spiritual beings contacted through the phenomena of the sense world.

Let us now ask how the inner stimulus was given to save mankind from hardening, from ossification. Certain beings were needed which at the appropriate time, withdrew the moon substances from the earth. These beings realised that the act of the sun beings was not sufficient, and that they must protect the earth from ossification by withdrawing the moon from the earth. They were in a certain respect higher than the sun spirits. These latter, when the sun was still united with the earth, felt themselves obliged for the sake of their development to find another dwelling place, but the other spirits were able to remain with the Earth even after the sun spirits had gone out. And this made it possible for them to save human evolution at a certain point of time by separating the moon from the earth. Thus they were in a certain respect higher than the sun beings ... they were able to separate a substance from the earth relatively coarser than that connected with the sun spirits and by becoming rulers of this coarse substance to prove their greater power. For those who are able to transform evil into good are more powerful than those who rule over the good and make it, possibly, a little better.

Those are the beings behind the phenomena of the life of the soul, who by separating the moon from the earth, made thinking, feeling, willing, and conscience possible. They come from the moon region, a spiritual kingdom which in a certain respect is higher, more powerful than that of the sun spirits, which are to be found behind external Maya. Maya is twofold; there is the external Maya of the sense world, and the inner Maya of soul life. Behind the first stand those spiritual beings who have their centre in the Sun; behind the Maya of the inner life stand the other beings who belong to a more powerful kingdom. Just here we can see the truth of Greek mythology as portrayed in the story of Orestes. Orestes is told by the ruling gods that he has performed a good deed, but the Erinyes approach him, and they are felt to be older beings than those belonging to the kingdom of Zeus. Goddesses who take vengeance even though the external goddesses of the sun kingdom (the kingdom of Zeus) had given their consent to the act. Man is here confronted by beings of an older spiritual race, who intervene as a corrective in what he undertakes under the guidance and leadership of the beings who withdrew from the earth with the sun. This remarkable example clearly shows how the conceptions of ancient peoples, expressed in their mythology, confirm what spiritual investigations of today teach in another way.

At this point I ask you to bear in mind the fact that at a certain point of time during the Earth evolution, a spiritual being, Whom we name the Christ, a being previously united to the Sun, descended from the Sun, and at the time of the life of Jesus of Nazareth united Himself to the earth. The Christ being entered into the body of Jesus of Nazareth. This is an absolutely unique phenomenon and cannot be thought of in the same connection as other occurrences here mentioned. It has been said that after the separation of the sun, the earth would have hardened if the moon had not also been ejected; human beings would have mummified. This is perfectly true for a very large part of earth life, but not for the whole of it. In spite of the withdrawal of sun and moon, something in the earth would have fallen a prey to death if the Christ event had not come to pass. Though the withdrawal of the moon made an inner soul life possible, yet it was the Christ's descent from the sun which gave this inner life a new stimulus.

When a spiritual seer looks back to the time preceding the Christ event, a striking vision comes before him. The external form of the earth, confronting the physical senses as Maya, vanishes and something comparable to the human form appears, but only a form, a figure. To spiritual vision the outer Mayavic earth (and I say the earth deliberately) changed into the form of man with arms outstretched in the shape of a cross, a male-female form. This reminds us of the wonderful words of Plato, words that he drew from the Mysteries, that the world soul is crucified on the cross of the world's body. This is exactly the image which presents itself to the eye of the spiritual seer: the Christ died on the cross, and thereupon the earth, which had been mere form and figure, became filled with life. The coming of the Christ principle into the earth had something in common with the withdrawal of the moon; life poured into what otherwise would have remained mere form. To understand ancient times aright is to realise that they all lead up to the Christ event. Just as men of today look back to the Christ as a being Who at a certain point of time entered into human evolution, so pre-Christian initiates all pointed to the coming of the Christ as fore-shown by events. Nothing could have been a surer herald of the Christ than the mighty phenomenon, visible under certain conditions to spiritual sight, of the disappearance of the physical form of the earth and the vision of the world soul crucified on the world's body. In dim Indian antiquity it was said by the sages that when their spiritual vision arose, they saw, deep down under the mountains of the earth, near its central point, a cross, and upon it a male-female human being, having on its right side the symbol of the sun and upon its left side the symbol of the moon, and over the rest of the body the various land and sea formations of the earth. That was the clairvoyant vision which the sages of ancient India had of the form waiting until our earth could be brought to life by the Christ principle. And inasmuch as those ancient sages pointed to the most important prophecy of the Christ event, they were justified, when they looked still more deeply into existence, in saying: the Christ will come because that which points to Him is in existence. Ancient wisdom at its highest level becomes prophetic; it looks towards that which will come to pass in the future. What the future holds is entirely the result of the present and so present spiritual vision can receive intimations of a spiritual event, which is to take place in the future. Indications of the Christ event were not given in any outwardly abstract way, but were revealed to spiritual sight by the phenomenon of the world soul crucified on the cross of the world's body, waiting to receive the life of the Christ when He should unite Himself with the earth. The wisdom of all egos is a harmonious unity if considered in its fundamentals. Starting from this point let us look at the wisdom of different epochs in a light that will reveal it in its true aspect.

In view of what has been said we may ask whether all the spiritual beings in existence are to be found behind the phenomena of the sense world, or whether there are others having no expression or manifestation in the physical world. Supersensible consciousness knows that although it is true that a spiritual being or spiritual fact is to be found behind every external phenomenon, yet there do exist spiritual beings having no expression in the physical world. Experiences await the initiate other than those whose projections or shadow images are thrown into the physical sense world. There exist, moreover, spiritual beings and spiritual facts that have no expression in the inner life of the soul, in the phenomena of conscience, thought, feeling, and sensation ... The spiritual world is seen by the higher consciousness to embrace much more than can be experienced in the physical world.

Those of my readers who have studied earlier lectures on these subjects, will realise that a host of spiritual beings, at different stages of evolution, have been involved in what has come to pass in the human, animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms during the course of our Earth evolution All such beings intervene in some way or other in the evolutionary texture of the Earth and of the kingdoms belonging to it. Behind the phenomena surrounding us is a richly constituted spiritual world, just as there was during the periods of Old Saturn, Old Sun, and Old Moon. We must not attempt to understand these spiritual kingdoms by inventing permanent names for these spiritual beings. The names used are not, for the most part, intended to designate individualities, but offices or spheres of duties. So if a particular name is used in connection with a being active during the Old Sun period it cannot be applied in the same sense to that being as regards its work or function in the Earth evolution; it has progressed by that time. It is necessary to speak of these matters with great accuracy and precision.

The Earth period was not only preceded by three embodiments of the Earth globe, but by three mighty spiritual kingdoms, essentially different from one another when examined by super-sensible consciousness. Investigation of the Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon periods reveals many things which cannot be compared with anything we can name on the Earth, and of which one can only speak by analogy.

It will be remembered that I have spoken of the Old Saturn period as being essentially one of warmth, or of fire; on Old Sun this warmth condensed to air; on Old Moon the air condensed to water, and on Earth the earth element appeared for the first time. But the application of our concept of fire or warmth directly to the evolution of Old Saturn would result in an incorrect picture, for the fire of Saturn differed essentially from the fire of our Earth. There is only one phenomenon which can legitimately be compared to the Saturn fire, and that is the fire which permeates the blood as warmth. This vital warmth, or life principle, is more or less comparable to the substance of which Old Saturn was entirely composed, and the physical fire of today is a descendant, a later product of the Saturn fire; in its external form as perceived in space, it has appeared for the first time on the Earth. The warmth of the blood, then, is the only thing which can be compared to what was present during the physical evolutionary period of Old Saturn. There is very little indeed in the realm of our present day experience which can be compared in any way with the qualities of these earlier evolutionary periods, all of which were very different from our present Earth existence.

It must be understood, however, that everything in the Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon periods is comprised within the Earth evolution, only it has changed in character. What was laid as a germ on Old Saturn and evolved through the Sun and Moon periods, is to be found in the Earth evolution, although in a changed condition; we can, however, instance the fundamental elements brought over from the earlier evolutionary periods by examining what is not to be found in this transformed state.

When the Earth first appeared it had absorbed into itself three preceding evolutionary conditions, and all the degrees of spiritual beings involved in them. The beings were at different stages of evolution, however, so it is obvious that distinction must be made between these three different realms of spiritual beings and of spiritual substances; we must realise, in considering the beginnings of the Earth, that certain things which we find there could come into existence only because the Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon periods preceded our Earth evolution, and at its beginning the three are united within it.

This fact was always present in the ancient, instinctive consciousness of man, which connected him with the spiritual world. And when the number Three was mentioned as characteristic of the higher worlds, those individuals who looked at things in the concrete and not in the abstract, who had facts rather than conceptions or ideas in their mind's eye, always felt in their souls the truth that our Earth has received, into her womb, as it were, everything that came over from Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon. That is the so-called higher, pre-terrestrial triad ... This triad consisting of Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon has evolved into our Earth. In its concrete meaning the higher triad signifies these three pre-terrestrial states; but the quaternary refers to the gradual transformation of these three into the Earth. Accordingly men whose instinctive consciousness brought them into touch with the realities of the spiritual world felt the mystery of the birth of the Earth to be expressed by the relation of three to four. And they turned reverent eyes to the sacred triad of Saturn, Sun and Moon, which had become the quaternary manifested by the Earth period. It is obvious that the modern expressions Saturn, Sun and Moon had other equivalents in the instinctive consciousness of ancient humanity.

If we now follow up the course of the Earth evolution we may ask how the separate classes of spiritual beings participate in its progress. Spiritual beings at different stages of evolution directed the processes of the separation of the Sun and Moon from the earth, as a result of which that progress came to pass. We have first to consider a class of spiritual beings which attained a certain stage of evolution during the Old Sun period; they belong to the Old Sun evolution because it was destined to provide a field of action for them. These are beings which separated the sun from the earth during the Earth period, because during Old Sun they were Sun-bound in the same way as humanity is now Earthbound. As we have seen, they needed the Sun for their further evolution and with the Sun they left the Earth in order to work upon the latter from without. When the Sun spirits had withdrawn the Saturn and Moon spirits were left on the Earth. The development of the Saturn spirits was such that they could direct and guide the separation of the Moon from the Earth; they had passed through the same stage on Old Saturn as the Sun spirits had done on the Old Sun; their maturity had preceded that of the Sun spirits, and they were therefore able to separate the Moon from the Earth and to stimulate from within the inner development of man, who, otherwise, would have hardened and become mummified. It may be said that the withdrawal of the Sun was brought about by the Sun spirits, and that of the Moon by the Saturn spirits. The Sun is a cosmic symbol for the act of the Sun spirits, the Moon for that of the Saturn spirits. And what is left upon the earth itself Spirits of the Old Moon period.

It will be useful at this point to bear in mind a definite epoch of the Earth evolution; that at which the Moon had just left the Earth. The Earth, from which the Sun had withdrawn still earlier, was then in a very different condition from that of today. If the Earth had then been in an exactly similar state to that of today, the whole process would have been unnecessary.

It was compared to the present mineral vegetable, animal and human kingdoms—very imperfect in that early period. The various continents had not separated off from each other everything was in a kind of chaos. Super-sensible sight would search in vain at that period for the mineral, vegetable, animal and human kingdoms as they are today. These forms have all developed as a result of the influence of the Sun and the Moon from without, and this was the purpose of the withdrawal of these two bodies. The influences which worked upon the Earth from the Sun and the Moon charmed from it, as it were, everything that has since arisen upon it and all that surrounds us today. The outer forms of the minerals, the plants, the animals and of physical man have been produced by the beings which work from the Sun; whereas the beings which work from the Moon have stimulated the soul life of men and of animals. This is an approximate and broad sketch of evolution from the so-called Lemurian epoch on into that of Atlantis. It was during the Atlantean epoch that, very slowly and gradually, the Earth began to wear an appearance more or less similar to that which we see around us today. It is necessary, therefore, to distinguish in the course of the Earth evolution since the withdrawal of the Moon, between a chaotic Earth and an organised one which has been influenced by the Spiritual beings in its environment.

What is here stated need not necessarily be acquired from historical tradition. Suppose for example that the initiate wisdom of ancient and venerable India, of the Persian sages, of the Egyptian initiations, or of the Greek Mysteries had all been lost; suppose no external documents of any kind whatever were left to tell us of the pristine teaching concerning the spiritual foundations of our earth evolution. Even then the possibility of developing super-sensible consciousness would not be lost; everything that is said here can be discovered by means of super-sensible investigation without the aid of any historical document. We have to do with something, which at the present time can be studied at its source; even mathematics may also be learnt from original sources.

Let us now try to find a link between the results which super-sensible investigation has given us and life in ancient times. It is obvious that some other method might be adopted, but the purpose of this course of lectures is to compare what can be found irrespective of any historical record, with what has been handed down by another kind of tradition. We will go back, not so very far, to a historical personage who lived in a comparatively ancient period of Greek culture, of whom history knows very little and the length of whose life even is veiled in much uncertainty. Pherecydes of Syros is in a certain respect the forerunner of the other Greek sages.

He lived at a time in Greek spiritual development called the epoch of the Seven Sages.—This period preceded that of all historical Greek philosophy. The little that external history tells us of Pherecydes of Syros is very interesting; he, among others, is spoken of as the teacher of Pythagoras; and many of the teachings of Herakleitos, of Plato and of later sages can be traced back to him. It is said that he taught the existence of three principles fundamental to the whole of evolution, and called them Zeus, Kronos and Chthon. Now what precisely did he mean by these names? It will at once be realised that Kronos is only another name for the Old Saturn evolution. In the teaching of Pherecydes, Kronos is the totality of spiritual beings belonging to the kingdom of Old Saturn, who during the course of the Earth evolution were able to bring about the separation of the Moon. Now for Zeus! Zeus is a word of uncertain meaning when used in ancient times, for it was applied to spiritual individualities at very different stages of evolution. But men in ancient Greece who know something of initiation recognised in Zeus the ruler of the Sun spirits. Zeus lives in the influences which came to the Earth from the Sun. Chthon is a designation of the somewhat chaotic condition of the earth after the withdrawal of the moon, at which time neither plant nor animal nor human forms were to be found. In most remarkable words, Pherecydes spoke of the holy primordial triad, of Zeus, Kronos and Chthon, principles fundamental to the earth, having come over from pre-terrestrial ages; he also speaks of a further evolution. But in ancient times men did not clothe matters of this kind in such dry, crude concepts as they do today, they drew vivid pictures of what they saw and recognised in spiritual realms. Pherecydes said: ‘Chthon becomes Gea (today called earth), because of the gift of Zeus whereby she came to be covered as with a garment.’ This is a wonderful description of that evolution which I have just outlined in a few short words. The earth was alone; outside it were the sun and the moon, the spiritual kingdoms of Zeus and of Kronos. The sun from without began to work upon the earth and to fructify it in its then chaotic state; or, in the language of the old Greek sage, Zeus fructified Chthon. The beneficent influences of the kingdom of Zeus were sent down to the physical earth in the warmth and light of the sun. This was the gift made by Zeus to the earth. The earth covered herself with the garment of plant and animal forms, and with the forms of physical men. Chthon becomes Gea; therefore, because of the gift of Zeus the earth covers herself with a garment.

This is a wonderful picture, expressed in beautiful language, of what super-sensible consciousness is able today to rediscover in the epoch of the Seven Greek Sages. And Pherecydes could not have made such strikingly vivid statements, which can be verified by modern super-sensible consciousness, without definite personal knowledge. This knowledge he derived from the so-called Phoenician initiation. He was an initiate of the temples of ancient Phoenicia and had brought over into Greece the Temple wisdom which he was at liberty to teach. A great deal of oriental wisdom came over in this way.

This is one example, among many, of the things that may be re-discovered in the words of the old sages independently of historical tradition. In this instance we have not gone back so very far in human history. If we are able rightly to interpret the expressions used, it is also possible to re-discover original teachings of very ancient times. It would, however, be false to accept the simple explanation that this or that Eastern teaching concerning the evolution of the world is found under the same form in Pherecydes of Syros, in the old Egyptian epoch, in the days of the Chaldean sages, and in the ancient Indian period. If this were the case, it might well be imagined that a wisdom rediscovered today is to be found, in different form, wherever humanity has striven after it; that wisdom is one and the same at all times and in all places. In its abstract sense there is not the slightest objection to be raised to this statement; it is true, but it expresses only a portion of the whole truth. Just as from the rest of a plant to the fruit there is not a regular succession of similar forms, but a variety, composed of green leaves, coloured petals, stamens, etc., of higher and higher development, so does diversity appear in the progress of human life on earth. Correct though it is to say that the sense wisdom appears again and again in different forms, an evolution or a development does nevertheless take place; and it is not at all correct to say that we find in ancient Indian times exactly the same conditions as exist today. That would be as inaccurate as to state that the blossom of a plant is the same as the root. True, the same force exists within it, but the reality emerges only if progress and development are recognised to be fundamental expressions of the secrets underlying human evolution. The teachings of the first post-Atlantean epoch may still be given today; what Pherecydes of Syros taught can be repeated today; but the earth evolution has also been enriched, and impulses have since been poured into it.

The importance of the Christ impulse in human evolution has already been indicated. That is a thing apart, standing alone in the evolution of the earth; there is nothing which can be compared with it. It has come to my knowledge that people have spoken of injustice in connection with human evolution if it were true that, for so many thousands of years before the coming of the Christ, full wisdom could not be imparted to mankind. Why was it, these people ask, that anything could be withheld from pre-Christian men? They seem to think, in view of the fact that justice is universal, that although the forms of truth have changed, new truths cannot have been added to the old; for if it were otherwise, men living in post-Christian days would be destined to receive something higher than men of pre-Christian times. Now it is understandable that such things should be said in the outer world, but it is not understandable that students of spiritual science should make such statements. And why? Because the men who incarnate during the post-Christian epoch are those who have passed through previous incarnations, and what they could not possibly learn before the appearance of Christ on earth they must learn after that event. Anyone who believes that man incarnates again and again only to learn exactly the same wisdom, has no serious appreciation and feeling for reincarnation in his soul; for to believe in reincarnation seriously means to realise its goal and its purpose and to know that there is good reason for our returning to earth repeatedly. We come back in order to have new experiences. It is a platitude to say that exactly the same wisdom is to be met with again and again in different conceptions of the world. The concrete fact is that wisdom develops, that it takes on higher and higher forms, until there comes into being on the Earth something that is ripe to pass over into another condition, in the same way as Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon passed over to the Earth condition. There is real progress and not mere repetition—that is the whole point. And here lies the difference between Eastern and Western modes of thought. Western thought, in face of the whole task and mission of the West, can never separate itself from an actual, a concrete historical conception of the evolution of the Earth; and an historical conception implies the idea of progress, not of mere repetition. It was in the West that the real concept of historical development arose. If anyone falls into a purely oriental way of thought (and its truth is not in any way questioned, only the historical sense must be added to it) because he has not grasped the idea of historical progress, he may easily lose sight of the meaning of history altogether. He may find himself faced with the question: ‘What is the purpose of this eternal repetition or recurrence of the same thing?’ That was a problem raised by Schopenhauer who had no understanding of history in its real sense, and whose exoteric teaching was influenced in high degrees by what he had absorbed from Oriental life. Statement of a higher truth in no way impugns a lower, lesser truth; spiritual science fully assents to statements of a non-historical nature in Oriental spiritual life. But the point at issue here is that of raising a mode of thinking to a higher level; or, as we may say, of illuminating Oriental thought by the light of the West.¹

What I have said here in general terms I should like to illustrate by an example. From what has been said it will be realised that the discoveries of modern super-sensible investigation are to be found under another form in ancient times, if we look for them there. It is only possible to throw light on antiquity by starting from the present. Let us in this connection take a definite spiritual individuality. If we go back to a time when men brought down into the Vedas what was in a certain respect an echo of the sublime wisdom of the Holy Rishis, we find, among many appellations of divine beings, the name of Indra. If, from the point of view of modern super-sensible investigation I were to give an answer to the question: ‘What kind of being is the Indra mentioned in the Vedas?’ it would be best for me to explain how it is possible for a modern man to acquire a conception of that being by means of spiritual sight. We have already seen that by rising from the physical to the soul world, Spiritual beings can be perceived behind everything surrounding us in the world, behind fire, air, water and earth, which are their external expressions or manifestations. In the spiritual realm behind the element of air, for instance, a host of spiritual beings appear, beings which do not descend so far as the physical world, but express themselves—therein through the air. In the soul-world we meet them as entities, as individualities, and the mightiest of them is still to be found today in him who in ancient India was named ‘Indra.’ Indra is associated with the whole regulation of man's breathing process, and to his activity we owe the fact that we breathe as we do today. Humanity may look up to this being forever and realise that it is the mighty Indra who has endowed them with the instrument of breath. The activities of such a being are not however limited to one sphere, and humanity owes much else to Indra; they owe to Indra the force which must pour through their muscles if their enemies are to be conquered in war. Hence men were able to pray to mighty Indra for power to be victorious in battle, since this also was one of his functions. To this same being (which needs no name if only its presence is realised) is to be ascribed the flashing of the lightning effects of storms. For these things, too, prayers may be raised, if, in the praying, the gods are thought of.

Indra exists for us today as he existed in ancient Vedic times, but we must now pass on to another consideration. Suppose we take this being named Indra as actually seen by the Old Indian initiates when their spiritual sight was opened in the soul world, and ask ourselves whether the initiate of modern days sees him in the same form? The answer is that he does, in fact, see everything perceptible to the ancient initiate, but something else as well. To take a rather trivial example, suppose we consider a man in the fortieth year of his life and call him Muller. He is the same person who thirty years previously was a boy of ten, but he has changed, even if his name is the same. It would be incorrect to describe this man Muller as a man of forty if we took his appearance at the age of ten; he has passed through a certain development, which must be taken into account when speaking of him in his present condition. Is it to be imagined, then, that while men on the earth continually develop during their single lives and also from life to life, spiritual beings remain at the same stage at which they manifested themselves to the spiritual consciousness of an ancient Indian initiate? Is it right to conceive of the gods as remaining unchanged through thousands of years? It certainly is not; Indra has passed through an evolution since the days when seers of ancient India looked up to him with reverence. Now what has happened to this mighty figure of Indra, and how does his evolution manifest itself if we look back upon it with spiritual consciousness? At a certain moment in evolution something very remarkable with regard to Indra comes to pass. In order to have a clear conception we must repeat certain things. We will direct our spiritual consciousness in the soul world to the ancient Indian god, Indra and follow him through thousands of years. We come to a point of time when there is an appearance of rays of light falling from an entirely different spiritual being upon Indra, who is himself illumined by them and ascends to a higher stage of development. It is rather like learning something important from another individual at a certain age, which changed one's whole life. This happened in the case of great Indra, and since that time there has streamed from him the same influence as was to be found in ancient India, only enriched by the spiritual light of another being which was shed upon him. It is possible to indicate the precise moment in the history of the evolution of humanity when this took place. The God, Indra, is to be found in the soul world at a time when the Christ was not yet perceptible to Earth evolution, although the Christ light shone upon him. A man who is able to perceive Indra may well say that this Being now reveals something different from his earliest revelations; for at first the Christ light did not ray back from him. Since the point of time in question, Indra has not shed his own light into the spiritual evolution of the earth, but has reflected the light of Christ, just as the moon reflects the light of the sun. The light thus rayed back by Indra, not directly perceptible on earth and in which therefore we cannot actually recognise Christ, was proclaimed by Moses to his people. Moses gave the name of Jahve or Jehovah to this Christ light rayed back by Indra as the sunlight is reflected by the moon. In lectures upon the Gospel of St. John, I have spoken about another aspect of this matter. The Christ is heralded, and Jahve or Jehovah is the name of the Christ light rayed back by an ancient deity. It is a prophetic heralding of Christ. Indra himself passed to a higher stage of evolution through this contact with the Christ light. He did not of course become Jehovah. It is not correct to say that Jehovah is Indra. But we can understand that as Indra manifests himself in lightning and thunder, even so does Jehovah manifest himself therein, because a being can only reflect in accordance with its own nature. Jehovah therefore was manifested in lightning and thunder.

This is an instance of spiritual being accomplished in its own realm in the same way as human evolution in our world, and of the fact that the same picture of the spiritual beings is not forthcoming after the lapse of thousands of years. History is being made in the spiritual world, and earth history is only the outer expression of this spiritual history. Every earthly occurrence has its course in events of the spiritual world, and it is necessary to understand these spiritual events in detail.

By this example I have tried to show what it means to throw light upon antiquity from a modern point of view. History is a concept which must be taken quite seriously, and the instance given should elucidate spiritual life. If we bear in mind the fact that there are wisdom-beings to be found today by occult research which we encounter again when we go back in time, only under different names and different manifestations—and at the same time remember that historical evolution and progress are realities in spiritual life—which underlie all that is physical, we have grasped two principles of fundamental importance to all progressive spiritual science that is to influence the future of humanity.

• 1. This seemingly rather sweeping statement is justified by the fact that it deliberately opposes the oft-repeated declaration of mystical world-conceptions that fundamentally the, different religions, etc., are only the transformation of a single primordial wisdom and nothing more than that.

In the preceding lecture it has been shown to what extent the external world is an illusion, concealing the spiritual world behind it. The consciousness of the seer penetrating through this illusion represents one path to the spiritual world. It has, however, also been shown that everything in the inner life of the soul, thinking, feeling, sensations, as also the more complicated phenomena of conscience, and so on, form a kind of veil concealing a spiritual world. And the consciousness of the seer penetrating these veils represents the other path into the spiritual world. The existence of these two different paths has been known at all times to men who sought for initiation. Hence we find that a distinction was made by ancient peoples between upper and lower gods. In the Mysteries of all epochs it was taught that at a certain stage of initiation man enters the world of the upper and of the lower gods, but a great distinction was made between them. Man has no influence upon the way in which the outer world confronts him in the many coloured tapestry of colour impressions, warmth impressions etc., or in the phenomena of the elements of fire, air, water and earth. The sun rises in the morning; it sheds its rays of light over the earth, and according to the different conditions set up the external world of the senses appears; when man penetrates through these outer phenomena, he reaches the spiritual world.

Man is not in a position to destroy this world of the senses through his own resources, because he cannot materially affect the outer phenomena surrounding him; the sense world is placed before him by the spiritual beings of whom it is an expression and manifestation; through his own power he cannot impair it. At initiation he is able to penetrate the veil of the sense world, but he must leave it just as the spiritual beings have shaped and fashioned it.

The relation of a man to his own inner life is different. His perceptions, feelings, will, his thinking and the development of his conscience depend upon the extent to which he has worked upon the evolution of his soul life. Man cannot evoke a pure or an impure red or green colour from the dawn or from a plant: but the corruption of his soul life may well give rise to grotesque feelings and bad moral judgements; he can submit in a greater or lesser degree to the dictation of his conscience; in his fancies he can devote himself to beauty or to ugliness, to true or to false thought images. Through his own conduct a man modifies or changes the veil spread over the spiritual world by the inner life of the soul. And because what we see behind the veil of our own soul-life depends upon whether this veil itself is pure or corrupt, it is easy to understand that in cases where the inner life is corrupt or but slightly developed when the ascent into the spiritual worlds, or descent to the realm of lower spiritual beings takes place, grotesque images in the form of false, nonsensical abnormal concepts and forces, may be called into being. For this reason it came about that in every age a distinction was made between the ascent to the upper gods and the descent to the lower gods, and that this descent was regarded as more essentially dangerous than the ascent to the upper gods, and on this latter path, through the veils of the inner life to the spiritual worlds, very high demands were made of the pupil of the Mysteries and of Occult Science.

Mention had to be made of this, because these two paths to the spiritual world have played a great role in human evolution and because the East and the West and the relation between the ‘Children of Lucifer’ and the ‘Brothers of Christ’ can only be rightly understood if their existence is taken into account. In the outer world, which to the ordinary human eye is apt to appear a motley web of many and varied facts and phenomena, there is nothing which is not guided by wisdom, nothing in which spiritual beings, spiritual forces and facts do not come into play; and we understand the matter aright only when we have realised that the spiritual events have been brought together under the direction of those powers which have been described from many different aspects. To understand why a certain form of wisdom has flourished in the East and why the future of the Christian impulse depends upon the development of powers residing in the West, we must consider the origin and historical trend of the two worlds (East and West).

We know that the spiritual life of the present had its origin in old Atlantis. That an ancient spiritual life developed upon a land in the West lying between modern Europe and America, and that such Asiatic, African and American civilisations as exist are the last remnants of those of ancient Atlantis. Atlantis is the Father and Motherland of all the cultured life of today. Before the mighty catastrophe which changed the face of the globe into its present configuration, there were to be found in old Atlantis species of men very different from those of the present time, men guided by high initiates and leaders. A civilisation developed there essentially under the influence of an ancient clairvoyance, and men possessed a natural and instinctive faculty for penetrating through the outer veils of the sense world to the higher spiritual world as well as through their own soul life to the lower gods. Just as it is natural to men of the present day to see with their eyes, hear with their ears, and so on, it was natural for men of that time not only to see colours and hear in the outer world, but to be aware of spiritual beings as realities behind these colours and tones. In the same way it was natural for men at that time not only to hear the voice of conscience but also to perceive those spiritual beings called Erinyes by the Greeks. The old Atlanteans were intimately acquainted with a spiritual world. The purpose of human evolution implies that men are gradually to rise up out of this old instinctive but spiritually perceptive consciousness and push forward to the consciousness proper to our modern time. It was necessary for men to go through this stage of life on the physical plane. It was not possible to guide the whole evolution of mankind from the spiritual world in such a simple way that one stream of humanity should pass from old Atlantis over the regions of Europe and Africa into Asia, and that everything should develop, as it were, along straight lines. Evolution is never a simple, straight line of development from a single germ; another factor has to come in, and a very simple analogy will show that this is the case. Consider a plant. The seed is put into the earth and out of it develop the elementary organs of the plant, the leaves, and later, the calyx, stamen, pistils and so on. Now if development is to continue in plant life, as we know it, it is essential that something else should happen. The formation of the fruit from the blossom depends upon fecundation the fertilising substances of one plant must pass over to another, for the fruit could not develop simply out of the blossom. A stream of influences from outside has to be introduced in order that development may progress. What may be perceived in the plant is a picture of universal life and is also an indication of the laws of spiritual life. It is quite false to believe that in spiritual life a stream of culture arises here or there and continually produces new offshoots from itself. This may happen for a time, but it would no more suffice to bring about what is to come to pass, than would the blossom, without fertilisation, be able to produce the fruit. At a certain definite point of cultural evolution, a side influence must come in, a spiritual fertilisation of human development. Just as in plant life the male and female elements develop independently, so in human evolution from the time of Atlantis there had to be formed not one stream but two, passing from old Atlantis towards the East. It was necessary that these streams of civilisation should develop separately for a while, and then meet again to fertilise each other at a definite period. We can follow these two streams of human evolution if we examine the records of spiritual seer-ship. One stream of evolution is formed by the transmigration of certain peoples from old Atlantis to more northerly regions, touching territories which now include England, the north of France, and thence extend to the present Scandinavia, Russia and into Asia as far as India. In this movement were to be found peoples of various kinds, forming the vehicle of a definite spiritual life. A second stream went a different way, in a more southerly direction, through southern Spain and Africa to Egypt and thence to Arabia. Each of these two streams of civilisation goes its own way until they meet to fructify each other at a later point of time.

Now wherein consists the difference between these two streams of culture? Men belonging to the northern stream were more adapted for the use of the outer senses of external perception their tendency was to look outwards to the veil of the surrounding world. There were initiates among these northern men who showed them the way to the spiritual worlds where the upper gods were to be found—gods who are reached by penetrating through the veils of the outer sense world. To this category belong the beings reverenced as the Northern Germanic gods. Odin, Thor, etc., are the names of divine beings to be found behind the outer veil of the sense world. Men belonging to the southern stream were differently constituted. These peoples had a greater tendency to delve into their soul life, into their inner nature. Let us say—and do not take the word amiss—the northern peoples had a greater gift for observing the world, the southern peoples for brooding over their own soul life, seeking the spiritual world through this inner veil. Hence it is not a matter for wonder that the gods of the descendants of the southern stream belonged to the Nether World and were rulers of the soul life. Consider the Egyptian Osiris. Osiris is the divinity found by man on Passing through the gate of death; Osiris is the god who cannot live in the external sense world. He lived there in ancient times only, and as the new era approached he was overcome by the powers of the sense world, by the evil Set; and since then he has lived in the world entered after death, accessible only by plunging into the immortal, permanent human principle which passes from incarnation to incarnation. This was why Osiris was felt to be most intimately bound up with the inner life of man.

Here we have the fundamental difference between the northern and the southern peoples. There was, however, one race who in the first period of the post Atlantean epoch combined both qualities. This race was specially selected to follow both paths leading to the spiritual world and along each of them to discover that which was serviceable and right for that epoch, being possessed of the capacity both for attaining the spiritual world behind the external sense world and also for finding the spiritual world behind the veil of their own soul life by sinking into the mystical depths of their inner nature.

This faculty, in the first epochs at all events of the old Atlantean era, was possessed by all men—and connected with it was a very definite experience. If a man who is only able to reach the spiritual world through the external sense world and to find the upper gods hears that somewhere else on the earth there are other gods, he does not understand them aright. But where the two faculties of penetrating through the external sense world and through the veil of the soul life are united, a man makes the very significant discovery that what is to be found behind the veil of the soul life is exactly the same, in essence, as that behind the veil of the outer sense world. A uniform spiritual world is revealed from without and from within. If a man should get to know the spiritual world by both paths, he realises their unity. The people of ancient India were in a position to realise the unity of spiritual life. When the super-sensible sight of the ancient Indian was directed outwards he perceived spiritual beings holding together and coordinating external phenomena. When he sank into his inner nature he found his Brahman; and he knew what he found behind the veil of his soul life to be identical with that which, passing through the Cosmos on mighty pinions, created and fashioned the external world. Such mighty conceptions—fruits of ancient Atlantean culture, preserved over the post Atlantean times—still influence us. But evolution, remember, does not progress by the mere transformation of preservation of the old, but by the bringing to birth of other streams of evolution so that mutual enrichment may take place. If we follow up the northern stream of evolution into Asia, we find that the Indian people traveled the farthest, and after amalgamation with other elements, built up ancient Indian culture. But more to the north, in the region of Persia, we find an ancient civilisation known in later history as the Zarathustrian culture. When we investigate this Zarathustrian culture with super-sensible sight, we find that the characteristic of its people was to look more to the outer world, and to advance towards the spiritual world by this path. In view of this characteristic it is evident why Zarathustra, the leader of this ancient Persian culture, attached less importance to inner, mystical absorption, and why he was in a way opposed to it. Zarathustra pointed more particularly to the external sense world and to the visible sun, in order to call men's attention to the existence behind this visible sun of a spiritual Solar Being, Ahura Mazdao. This is an exact instance of the path followed by initiates of the northern peoples. The highest form of this more external realisation of the spiritual world was developed in ancient Persian culture under the leadership of the original Zarathustra. This form of outer perception was less and less perfect the further the peoples had lagged behind the ancient Persians who pressed on to Western Asia.¹ Other peoples remained behind in Asia and Europe, but the tendency of them all was to look more towards the external world, and all their initiates chose the path of pointing out to their followers the spiritual world behind the veil of the outer sense world. In Europe, if we make use of spiritual sight, we find in that wonderful Celtic culture which really underlies all other European culture the remnant of what arose as a result of the cooperation of the mind of the peoples with the wisdom of the initiates. Today Celtic wisdom has very largely been lost, and can be deciphered only to a certain extent by those who have spiritual vision. Wherever ancient Celticism still shines out as the fundamental basis of other European civilisations, there you have an echo of still older European civilisations which, although their paths were in reality the same, remained with the mighty Zarathustrian culture in so far as the characteristics of their peoples were concerned. According to the external distribution of the people their path to the spirit differed.

It must be understood that the interplay of man with the external world, whether it be the external spiritual world or the external sense world, has no effect upon him. Experiences that arise are not a kind of cosmic reflection, but exist in order to bring about the progress of humanity in a perfectly definite way. Now what, in reality, is man of a particular epoch? Man is the result or product of the activities of cosmic powers surrounding him, and is fashioned according to the way in which these cosmic powers permeate him. A man who inhales healthy air develops his organs correspondingly, and the same thing happens to the spiritual organism of a man who absorbs one or another kind of spiritual life and culture. Since the bodily organism is a product of the spiritual it is affected accordingly. Human evolution is a continuous process and so it is clear that in all the peoples of this northern stream he development of the external bodily qualities is noticeable, for the forces and powers of the outer world—everything that can fashion from without—were the special ones which streamed into them. Through these outer forces was developed what can be seen and perceived outwardly. Hence in these peoples, we find not only a development of warlike qualities, but also an instrument of ever increasing suitability for penetrating the external world; the brain itself grows to greater perfection under the influence of these external forces. The fundamental factors, therefore, for understanding the external world are present in men belonging to this northern stream, and only from them could be derived that spiritual culture which led finally to the mastery of the powers and forces of external nature. It may be said that the principal task of these people consisted in perfecting man's outer instrument, that part of him Which is perceptible from without, not only in a physical but also in an intellectual, moral and aesthetic sense. More and more of the spirit was poured into the outer corporeality. Physical corporeality was developed to greater and greater perfection, and so the individual souls passing from one incarnation to another were generally able to find better vehicles in succeeding births, not only in a physical, but also in a moral sense.

Now let us enquire what special characteristic developed among the peoples who took the more southern way. It was of course the refinement of the life of the soul, the inner life. The conception of conscience is not to be found in olden times among those peoples whose task was the spiritualisation of the outer corporeal qualities. Conscience as a conception arises from among the southern peoples; among them the inner life of the soul was enriched with ideas and conceptions to such an extent that it finally developed into that wealth of secret hermetic science possessed by the ancient Egyptians which amazes us even today. The wisdom of the Egyptians, held in such high honour by those who have knowledge of such matters, could only arise as the result of the development of the inner soul life. All the art and the wisdom which man had to develop from within appeared in the stream of evolution, wherein less importance was attached to the spiritualisation of the external corporeality than to the refinement and elaboration of the inner forces of the soul.

Let us now consider Greek sculpture. When a Greek sculptor wished to represent a physical body purified and spiritualised; he produced a type of the northern peoples. All the external forms of Zeus, of Aphrodite, of Pallas Athene, are racial types of the north. Where it was a matter of indicating the inner development of the life of the soul, it was necessary to show that forces develop invisibly within the soul, and then such a figure as Hermes or Mercury was produced. The form of Hermes is that of the African peoples, and it differs from the figures of the other gods; the ears are different, so is the hair, and the eyes are narrow and unlike the eyes of the northern types.—It was known that this type of humanity represented the vehicle of the scientific element, of wisdom, of everything which works upon the soul, and with this was connected the conception of Hermes as messenger to the lower gods.

Again we might characterise the difference between the two evolutionary streams by saying that the northern peoples worked at the production of a human being whose outer bodily form is an image of the spirit; whereas the southern peoples were busy developing the invisible forces of soul, perceptible only when the gaze is directed inwards (to the inner life). The northern races created the outer aspect of the image of divinity in man; the southern peoples created the invisible soul-image of the godhead in the inner life.

Thus the gods of the southern peoples are invisible divinities which man contacts in his inner nature, who arouse a certain fear and dread, but who from another aspect inspire trust and confidence. It has been pointed out that a man sees these gods of the inner world according to his own nature; if he is morally, developed he confronts these gods with moral qualities of soul and their true image is revealed; their essence flows into him and he experiences inner illumination and enlightenment. If a man is immoral and his conceptions are bad, or ugly, or untrue he perceives a distorted image of this world of the gods; fearful demoniacal shapes and figures appear, even as the most beautiful face is twisted and caricatured if observed in a spherical mirror. This is why a man confronting these inner gods might feel them to be friendly, intimate spiritual companions, pouring forces into the very depths of soul life, belonging to him in the most intimate sense, strengthening and illuminating him; but if he saw them in images distorted by his own qualities, horror and terror might arise; he could be tormented, persecuted and led to the wildest excesses of life just because of their manifestation in the grotesque image of his lower passions. From this we may judge why care was taken that no unprepared human being should meet these particular gods; but where access was made possible to the spiritual world a preliminary development of the moral nature was imperatively demanded, and a very thorough preparation was ensured; the initiates were never tired of giving warning about the dangers awaiting weak souls at the meeting with these gods.

In accordance with the nature of the powers holding sway in the spiritual world accessible to the southern peoples it is called the world of Lucifer, the Light-bearer. It is a world, spiritual and divine in its nature, illumined in the inner being of man by a light invisible to outward sight and which has to be acquired by the process of individual perfecting. This was the path which people of the southern evolutionary stream took to the world of Lucifer.

As we have seen, the ideal before the more northern stream was the production of a human individuality, so perfect, so full of spirit, so noble in regard to everything in life between birth and death, that the outer body should be a worthy vessel for spirituality of the very highest order. And in Zarathustra,² the being who had most truly shown the way to the spiritual world behind the veil of sense phenomena, there arose the thought that an outer body must be created by so moral, intellectual and spiritual a force as should bring it to the highest point of spirituality of which an external body is capable. And since this thought first arose in Zarathustra, he set himself the task of reaching an increasingly lofty standard of perfection, living through every succeeding incarnation in bodies of higher moral, aesthetic and intellectual qualities. Zarathustra, then, brought these physical qualities to such a point of excellence that his body became not a mere image of the divine world of spirit, but a vessel for the reception of the Godhead otherwise to be seen only behind the veil of the sense world. That to which the old Zarathustra had pointed as the world of Sun Beings behind the physical sun, as the hidden spirit of the Good—Ahura Mazdao, needed, as it approached nearer and nearer to the earth, to find a dwelling place within a body of great spiritual perfection. And so in one of his incarnations, Zarathustra appeared in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, a body so spiritualised, so noble that into its external corporeality could be poured that spiritual essence formerly to be found only behind the veil of the sense world. [This will show how erroneous is the statement that Dr. Steiner has ever identified Christ with Zarathustra. This he has never done, any more than he has declared Christ to be the same being as Buddha.] The human body which had been developed in the northern evolutionary stream by the turning of the external gaze to the spiritual world was prepared for the reception of the spiritual essence concealed behind the sense world. For in this manner, preparation was made for the mighty event of the reception of the spirit behind the sense world, invisible to all save spiritual sight, upon earth, and its maturing there for three years in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Hence it devolved upon the northern peoples not only to develop an understanding of what lay behind the sense world, but to prepare for the possibility of that spirit flooding our earthly world, of the being heretofore hidden behind the sun, treading the earth for three years, as man among men. Thus Lucifer had entered into humanity in the southern peoples, and Christ into the northern peoples, each in conformity with the characteristics of the two streams of evolution. We ourselves live at a time when the two streams must unite as the male and female fertilising substances of plants coalesce; we live at a time when the Christ who was drawn from outside as an objective Being into the purified body of Jesus of Nazareth must be understood through deep contemplation on the part of the soul, and its union with the world of spirit to be discovered in the inner being, the world arising from Lucifer's kingdom. In this way will come to pass the mutual fertilisation of these two evolutionary streams of men. It has already begun; it began at the moment indicated in the story which tells us that the sacrificial blood of the Christ flowing from the Cross was received into the vessel of the Holy Grail and brought to the West from the East, where preparation for the understanding of the incarnation of Christ had been made in a very definite way by cultivating that which represents the light of Lucifer. In this way the union of these two streams in humanity will become more and more complete. Whatever mankind of the present time may say or do, the healing of the future humanity will be accomplished by the fact that within the union of the two streams, the mighty Christ Being, guiding as He does the evolution of the universe and of man, is understood through the light received by the soul from within, out of the kingdom of Lucifer.³ Christ will give the substance, Lucifer the form, and from their union will arise impulses which shall permeate the spiritual evolution of mankind, and bring about what the future has in store for the healing and the blessing of the peoples.

• 1. These are not the Persians of whom history tells but ancient, pre-historic peoples, inhabiting the region which, in later times, was known as Persia. The ‘Ancient Indians’ mentioned in these lectures are even earlier.
• 2. The Zarathustra to whom reference is here made, is not, of course, the historical figure, but an ancient pre-historic ancestor. In olden times it was the custom for the successors of a great Individuality to retain his name through long periods of time.
• 3. The above statement has led some of Dr. Steiner's critics to infer that he sees the human soul as an union of the Christ with Lucifer. A careful study of Dr. Steiner's lectures will show there is no reason for the inference.

We have spoken of two spiritual streams, flowing through different peoples, and passing from old Atlantis towards the East. We saw the difference in their development and how they were enabled to prepare future events; and we observed how the southern stream more particularly tended to deepen the power of penetration to the spiritual world which lies behind the soul world of man, while the other more northerly spiritual stream directed man's attention to his earthly environment in order to make him aware of the spiritual world behind the world of the senses. Mention has been made of the development in the southern stream of qualities which led to spiritual beings connected with the Luciferic principle, and of the gradual approach to earth, on the other side, of the kingly spiritual being behind the sun in order finally to incarnate in a physical body, which, through many incarnations of a certain individuality, had been so purified that the Godhead found in it not merely an image of itself, but was able actually to incarnate within it. The incarnation of the Christ, the sun spirit, in the body of Jesus of Nazareth was the great event which took place in the northern stream of peoples. Now these two streams of peoples may, be said to have moved towards each other in order to be mutually enriched, and during their progress there arose, in the first epoch after the great Atlantean catastrophe, the ancient Indian race in the south of Asia, a race in which the human soul was in a certain sense able to look out towards the external world of the senses as well as into itself to find the spirit, because it instinctively recognised the unity between the spirit in the external world and the spirit within man. Let us picture to ourselves the feelings of the ancient Indian when he looked out at the sense world, at the earth with its mountains and forests, its tapestry of plant life, its animal and human kingdoms.

Possessed in high degree of spiritual sight, this ancient Indian soul perceived, underlying everything, a spiritual world consisting of beings of etheric substance, who did not descend to the density of a physical body. In the mountains, trees and stars the soul of the ancient Indian saw not only the dense elements but also the finer, etheric nature, in the shape of the external world of the gods. It should not of course be imagined that these spirits were composed merely of ether but just as the etheric, the astral and the ‘I’ principles are within the physical body of a man, so these spirits had an etheric body for their lowest principle and their other, higher principles in higher worlds. The Indian, looking into this world, felt that he stood upon the Earth; that as man he had through long periods of time developed from the first germ of human existence on ancient Saturn down to the Earth evolution; that it was necessary for him to descend to dense physical matter in order to acquire self-consciousness within it. He said: ‘I, speaking to myself, am an Ego being; formerly I was a companion of all those spiritual beings visible around me to spiritual sight from the etheric world upwards. I have descended from these worlds to denser matter, yet in them all human perfection's are to be found, not only those now possessed by man, but those which he will have to attain through his own efforts. But there is one thing which no being who does not descend to the physical plane can attain. There are in the universe other lofty perfections as well as the recollection peculiar to human consciousness. There are other kinds of consciousness, but in order to develop that of a man on earth, it is necessary for a being to descend to this earth and for a number of incarnations to be embodied in dense matter.’ The soul of the ancient Indian further realised that whatever infinitely higher perfections than man on the Earth these spiritual beings possessed, there was one thing they had not in their world, namely, the human ego consciousness that to say ‘I’ as a man does, was not natural in those higher worlds. The Indian felt himself to originate from these realms and everything existing in the spiritual worlds to be summed up for him in his human ‘I’ consciousness. He knew that to speak of a human ego consciousness in the spiritual world had neither meaning nor content. Hence only a word which excludes this ‘I’ can be applied to everything that in a spiritual sense is spread out in the surrounding world, a word which is not in contact with the ‘I’ ... And the Indian consciousness named that which spread itself out externally, the ‘Tat,’ the ‘That’ in contradistinction to the ‘I.’ In order to express the fact that man is of the same nature and essence as the ‘That,’ the ‘Tat,’ or the ‘It’—that the ‘I’ or ego had only developed because of the descent to the Earth—the Indian said: ‘I am Tat, Thou art That.’ Thus man's relationship to the surrounding spiritual world (to this clairvoyant penetration of the ultimate nature of our world) was combined in the words: ‘It exists; but thou thyself art that.’

But the ancient Indian realised at the same time that the reality without designated as ‘Tat’ is also to be found by a man looking into his own inner being, that this reality manifests at one time from without, at another time from within. Therefore men of those ancient times knew that by sinking down into the soul they came to the same primordial spiritual reality as the external ‘Tat,’ but that the right relationship between them and what was living within them as their original ‘cause,’ so to speak, veiled by the life of the soul, was expressed by saying instead of ‘Thou art That,’ ‘I am Brahman,’ and ‘I am the All.’ And they took the two together to mean the following: ‘When I look out into the world of “Tat” I find a spiritual world, and if I dip down into my own soul life I find a spiritual world, and the two are one.’

As we have seen, in ancient India, a perception of the unity of the outer and of the inner was the typical outlook of the soul; and it is to be expected that the other extreme will consist in turning the gaze outwards, and in penetrating through the tapestry of the sense world to the spiritual world lying hidden behind it. And this is what actually happened to a different people. They saw the outer spiritual world, but could not realise immediately that it was the same as the inner spiritual world. Hence it is not surprising that religious conceptions and philosophical thoughts spring up, all fervently directed to the gods and spirits behind the sense world; that mythical and other descriptions for these divine spiritual beings behind the tapestry of the sense world were given to the people; and that in the mysteries of that age men were led into the spiritual world which is behind the sense world. Nor will it be a matter for wonder that side by side with such mysteries and such racial gods something else is to be found; that at the same time there were mysteries leading man along the path through the inner soul life to its deepest foundations. And in very fact we find a region of post Atlantean civilisation where those two kinds of mysteries existed contemporaneously—a region where on the one side the so-called Apollonian culture and mysteries were developed, and on the other the culture and mysteries of Dionysos. Such a division is to be found in ancient Greece. There we have on the one hand the path which was shown to the people as well as to the Initiates, the path leading out into the spiritual world, to what is behind the senses, to the spiritual world behind the sun. So far as the Greek knew this world, he gave it the name of the realm of the Apollonian beings. Apollo, the Sun god, was the representative of the divine spiritual beings which exist behind the tapestry of the sense world. But there was also a class of mysteries pointing the way through the soul life into its spiritual foundations, mysteries concerning which we already know that man may enter them only, after careful preparation, and after having attained a certain degree of maturity. For this reason the second kind of mysteries was more carefully guarded against immaturity than were the Apollonian. The Apollonian gods were indicated to the masses of the people, whereas the spiritual beings to be found along the path through the inner nature were reserved for those who, through spiritual, intellectual and moral training of their inner life had reached a certain state of maturity. This second kind of mystery cult was known as the Dionysian mystery and its central spiritual being was Dionysos. So it is natural that in Dionysos, this central figure of the inner circle of gods, men perceived a being standing in near and intimate relationship to the human soul; a being not unlike man, but one who did not descend so far as the physical plane; a being to be found by sinking from the physical plane into the depths of the soul life. Here we have in point of fact the deeper causes of the Apollonian and the Dionysian division in the spiritual culture of the Greeks. In more modern times a dim consciousness that something of the kind had existed in Greece made its appearance in several places. The group gathering round Richard Wagner realised the existence of something of the kind although without definite knowledge of its spiritual foundations. And Friedrich Nietzsche, a member of this group, founded his first remarkable and inspired work: ‘The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music’ on this very division of Greek spiritual life into the Apollonian and Dionysian mystery cults. These occurrences were a dim realisation of what may be known to an ever-increasing degree through spiritual meditation. In the minds of many men today there is a kind of yearning for such a deepening of the spiritual life. There is a widespread feeling that this deepening alone can give an answer to man's yearning. Thus in ancient Greece these two divine spiritual worlds are side by side. In ancient India they appeared as a unity, in a state of reciprocal permeation.

Now let us turn again to evolution. We have already seen that only the most advanced group of the northern stream of nations, namely the ancient Persian civilisation of Zoroaster, could originate the ideal of creating a body in which the spiritual being approaching humanity and the earth from outside could incarnate. And Zarathustra took upon himself the task of passing through his incarnations in such a way as to take later re-birth in a body spiritualised to such a degree that it was able to receive into itself the sublime sun-spirit in its most perfect form, in its Christ form. Zarathustra was reborn as Jesus, having made himself ripe through his various incarnations to be the vehicle of the Sun spirit for the space of three years.¹

We may now ask: What is the relation of Apollo to the Christ? When a Greek uttered the name of Apollo, he referred to the spiritual realm behind the sun. But men's conception of a being or of a fact differs according to their capacities. The man who has cultivated a rich inner life within his soul is capable of seeing in a truer form things which a less developed person also sees, so when the Greek uttered the name of Apollo he was indeed referring to the being which later was revealed as the Christ, but he could only conceive of it in a kind of veiled form, as Apollo. Apollo is in a certain sense a garment of the Christ, resembling in its form the being within it. Veil after veil had to fall from that figure conceived of by the soul as Apollo before the Christ could become visible and intelligible to the intuition of men. Apollo is an intimation of the Christ, but not the Christ Himself.

Now what is the most essentially characteristic quality of the Christ so far as our cycle of evolution is concerned? To consider all those divine spiritual beings to which men of ancient times looked up to as the upper gods behind the tapestry of the sense world, as the rulers and lords of the spheres and functions of the universe, is to realise that their characteristic quality is that they do not descend so far as the physical plane; they only become visible to the consciousness of the seer, which transcends the physical plane and is able to see on the etheric plane. There Zeus, Apollo, Mars, Wotan, Odin, Thor, who are all real beings, became visible. It was characteristic of these spiritual beings not to descend so far as the physical plane, but at the most to manifest temporarily in some kind of physical embodiment, a fact which is cleverly indicated in the myths when mention is made of momentary appearances of Zeus or other gods in human or some other form, when they descended to the world of men in order to carry out some purpose. It is not permissible to speak of a permanent physical incarnation of these spiritual beings behind the sense world. We may say that Apollo is a figure incapable of descending into physical incarnation. For this descent requires a higher power than Apollo possessed, namely, the Christ power. And in the Christ all the qualities of the other beings out in the universe were united, all the qualities which are revealed to the consciousness of the seer; but above and beyond all these He possessed the ability to break through the barrier separating the world of the gods from the world of man, and was able to descend into a physical body and become man in a human physical body that had been prepared for Him upon the earth. In the divine spiritual world this ability was possessed by the Christ alone. Thus one being, and one being only of the divine spiritual world descended so far as the stage of taking up its abode in a human body in the sense world, and living as man among other men. This is the great and mighty Christ event, and this is how we have to conceive it. Whereas therefore all gods and spirits can be found only by the consciousness of the seer and beyond the physical world, the Christ is to be found within the physical world, although He is a being of the same nature and essence as the other divine spiritual beings. The other gods can only be found in the external universe: the Christ is He who was born within the human soul, Who, as it were, leaves the outer world of the gods and enters into the inner nature of man. This has been an event of great significance in the evolution of the world and humanity. Before the Christ event it—had been necessary to descend to the sub-terrestrial gods hidden behind the veil of soul experiences if an inner god was sought; the Christ is a God Who may be found without as well as within. This is the essence of what happened in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, after the Indian, the Persian and the Egyptian periods. The contemplative vision and abstract perception in ancient India of the fact that the divine spiritual world was a unity, and that Tat and Brahman, streaming to the soul from two sides, were an unity, became a living life through the Christ event. Formerly men could say that the divinity to be found on the outward path and the divinity to be found on the inward path were one. After the Christ event it was possible to say that if the soul participates in the Christ, a descent to the inner life will reveal a being which is Apollo and Dionysos united in one.

Another question arises here. We have seen that divine spiritual beings of the external world are, for man, represented by the mightiest of them, by the Christ, Who, as an outer being, at the same time becomes an inner being. But what of those other beings designated in the last lecture as ‘Luciferic?’ Knowledge gained as the result of spiritual development teaches us that it would not be correct to say that the beings under the leadership of Dionysos work themselves through into the human soul life, and that, as it were from the other side, a Dionysos—a Luciferic being—incarnated as a man. Here we arrive at something vitally and essentially connected with the evolution of humanity and of the universe. If we go back to very ancient times, we find that the soul looking outwards sees the external spiritual world, and looking inwards, sees the inner divine spiritual world; the Apollonian world objectively, and the Dionysian world subjectively, to use the Greek expressions. Later on in evolution matters change somewhat. In the most ancient times, when a vast majority of men were possessed of spiritual vision, facts were as I have just described them. Objectively the upper gods were seen; subjectively, the lower gods; and there were these two paths into the spiritual world. In later times man's capacity for spiritual vision decreased; he gradually lost his original dim clairvoyance. But let us take a period in which a few men still possessed a natural spiritual vision. We need not go so very far back, for in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch such natural sight still existed. At that time men, on penetrating through the tapestry of the sense world, saw the upper gods, and on descending into the depths of their own souls, the lower gods. Those who had passed through a certain degree of initiation felt these impressions more clearly and powerfully. I should mention of course that at all times there have existed initiates with full knowledge of the unity of these two worlds; but they are men who have reached the apex of humanity. Centuries therefore before the appearance of Christ on earth, there were men who still had the old spiritual sight, and initiates who by following one path were able to find the upper gods, or following the other were led to the lower gods. But there came an age where the region which we call the world of the lower gods gradually withdrew from human life and was difficult of attainment even for those who had passed through the early degrees of initiation; but in this period it was comparatively easy at an early stage of initiation to attain to what we call the upper gods behind the outer world of the senses. Take, for instance, an initiate of the ancient Hebrew people. Such an initiate could, even if he had not attained a very high degree of initiation, look into a region where Jehovah was not merely an idea, a concept, but an etheric reality, a being which spoke to them as a man in their spiritual consciousness.

While therefore the existence of Jehovah was proclaimed to the people, to the initiates he was a reality. On the other hand it had become more difficult for an initiate of the ancient Hebraic world to find anything by dipping down into his own soul life, and searching there for the domain of the lower gods. In that region he would have felt no solid ground, but everywhere would have encountered the thick crust of his soul life through which he could not penetrate to the lower gods. The lower gods had withdrawn into a certain unknown obscurity. This was the time of the Christ's descent to the earth, when the Luciferic spirits had to a certain extent withdrawn into the darkness. And at that time men in the outer world only knew that the mysteries existed, and that those initiated into them acquired the faculty of penetrating through the forces of the soul life into the Dionysian world. There was just a vague inkling of the deep secrets which could be investigated by man in the mysteries. But the subject was merely alluded to and very few people had a clear idea of it at the time when the Christ was expected. Their ideas of the outer gods were much more definite. There were many men who still had living experience of these gods. But the evolution of humanity progresses. And with what result? There is a history of outer humanity, and in the future there will also be a history of the mysteries. Outer humanity will transform its spiritual culture and the Christ will enter into it more and more. In the mysteries, too, the nature of the Christ being, which today is hardly appreciated at all, will come to be understood. The god who could be perceived at the time of Zarathustra when spiritual sight was directed to the sun, and who descended to the earth, will be understood with ever growing intimacy by the human soul. The god who was the ruler of the outer world will become more and more an inner god. The Christ traverses the world in such a way that from a cosmic god who descended upon earth, He becomes an inner mystical god, Whom man will gradually be able to experience in the depths of his soul life. Therefore it was, that at the time of the descent of the Christ there could be accomplished what His disciples, the Apostles, described in the words: ‘We have laid our hands in His wounds, and have heard His words on the mountain.’ The essential point is that the Christ was on earth in a physical body. At that time He could not have been experienced physically within, or understood in His Dionysian nature; He had first to be experienced as the outer, historical Christ. But the progress of man's consciousness of the Christ consists in His ever deeper descent into the soul, and it will become possible for man to live through his own soul experiences subjectively, finding the mystical Christ within his own soul, in addition to the knowledge he has of the outer Christ. It will be observed how in the so-called mysticism which arose in the early days of Christianity, through Dionysius the Areopagite, a friend and pupil of St. Paul, the Christ is first understood by external occult faculties. And all the descriptions of this first occult Christian school are of a kind that depict the Christ essentially as having those qualities which he unfolds in the external worlds, and which may be experienced by instinctive spiritual sight when it is turned outwards. Then let us proceed a few centuries further in human evolution and see what has come about; let us enquire into mediaeval mystical development, into the deep inner experiences of Meister Eckhart, of Johannes Tauler, etc., and to our more modern mystics. Here are men who look down into their own souls. Just as in ancient times men looked within themselves in order to penetrate through this inner life to Dionysos, so the more modern mystics, piercing inwards, could say like Meister Eckhart: ‘The historical Christ is in very truth a fact; His development takes place in outer history but there is a possibility of descending into one's own inward life, and of there finding the inner mystical Christ.’ Thus the human soul developed the capacity of finding the Christ not only in the outer world, but also within, of finding the mystical Christ in His Dionysian nature. First the historical Christ came into being, and then through the work of the historical Christ, influences were brought to bear on the human soul of such a nature that a mystical Christ within human evolution has become possible. Therefore we may, with regard to modern times, speak of an inner mystical experience of the Christ; but we must also understand that the Christ was a cosmic god before His descent upon earth. If, in those former times, man plunged into his inner soul life, he found not Christ, but Dionysos. Today if development has come about in the right way, we find an inner Christ Being there. The Christ, at first a divinity external to the soul, has become a divinity within the soul, who will take fuller possession of it, the more the soul experiences draw near to the Christ. Here we have an example of a transformation of principles during the development of the world. When modern men speak of the mystical Christ within the soul, they should not forget that everything in the world has developed, and that mystical consciousness has not been the same through all time, but has also evolved to its present state. When the holy Rishis of antiquity looked up into the spiritual worlds they spoke of Vishvakarman, who was the same cosmic being to whom Zoroaster referred when he spoke of Ahura Mazdao. It was the Christ Being. Today this being may also be found in the inner life as the mystical Christ. This is the result of the Christ's own deed on the earth. This is the true relation of the cosmic, astronomical Christ to the mystical Christ. The outer god has gradually become an inner god.

But since every event in the external physical world is an effect of a spiritual occurrence, this penetration of the soul by the Christ has also its effect upon the other life. This effect will manifest first of all in the mysteries, and has already partly done so since the foundation of the Western mystery schools of the Rosicrucians. When by means of the discipline of the old mystery schools a man had sunk more deeply into his soul and descended to the lower gods, he found Dionysos, which is only another name for the world of the Luciferic gods. But at the time when the Christ in His glory was approaching the earth, the Luciferic reality sank into darkness even for spiritual consciousness, if the latter had not attained the very highest stages. Only the highest initiates were still able to descend to the Luciferic gods. Other men had to be told that if they descended while yet unpurified and immature, these Luciferic beings would only appear in distorted images, as wild demons who would tempt them to all sorts of evil. This is the original of all the terrible descriptions of this subterranean realm, and of the fear of the mere name of Lucifer at a certain time. And as everything is transmitted hereditarily to men who do not progress with evolution, there are still some who have inherited the fear of the name of Lucifer. But for spiritual consciousness the Luciferic world emerges again after the Christ principle has for some time been working in the soul. As soon as the Christ has worked in the soul for a while, the soul, permeated by the Christ substance, becomes mature enough to penetrate again into the realm of the Luciferic beings. The Rosicrucian initiates were the first to be able to do this. They strove to understand and see the Christ in such a form that as the mystical Christ He permeated their souls, and lived within them, and that this Christ substance in their inner being became a bulwark of strength against all attacks. It became a new light within them, an inner, astral light. Historical experience of the Christ in His true being illuminates the soul to such an extent that men again become able to penetrate into the realm of Lucifer at first only the Rosicrucian initiates were capable of this, and they will gradually carry out into the world what they have been able to experience with regard to the Luciferic principle, and will pour out over the world that mighty spiritual union which consists in the fact that the Christ, Who has poured Himself as Substance into the human soul is understood henceforth by means of the spiritual faculties that mature in the spirit of individual men through a new influx of the Luciferic principle. Let us consider an initiate of the Rose Cross. He first prepares Himself by the continual direction of the feeling, conceptions and thoughts within his soul to the great central figure of the Christ, by allowing the mighty figure of the Christ, as depicted by the Gospel of St. John, to work upon him, and in this way he purifies and ennobles himself. For our souls change fundamentally when we gaze in reverence upon the figure depicted by the Gospel of St. John. If we receive within us what streams forth from this figure, as described by St. John, the mystical Christ comes to life within us. And if we further this process by the study of other Christian documents, the soul is gradually permeated by the spiritual substance of the Christ, is cleansed and purified and reaches higher worlds. Feelings more especially are purified in this way. We either, like Meister Eckhart and Tauler, learn to conceive of the Christ in a universal sense, or else to experience Him with the tenderness of Suso and others; we feel united with that which streamed to the earth from the wide expanse of the heavenly worlds through the Christ event. Thereby a man makes himself ready to be led as a Rosicrucian initiate consciously into those regions which in ancient times were called the Dionysian worlds and may now be called the Luciferic worlds.

What is the effect upon modern Rosicrucian initiates of this introduction into the Luciferic worlds? If their feelings glow with enthusiasm for the divine as soon as they are permeated with the Christ substance, the other faculties through which we understand the world are illuminated and strengthened by the Luciferic principle. In this way the Rosicrucian initiate ascends to the Luciferic principle. His spiritual faculties are intensified and elaborated through initiation, so that he not merely feels the Christ mystically within His soul, but can also describe Him, can speak of Him and picture Him in spiritual images or thought pictures; so the Christ is not merely dimly felt and experienced but stands before him in concrete outlines, as a figure of the outer sense world. It is possible for man to experience the Christ as soul substance when he directs his gaze to that figure of the Christ which meets him in the Gospels. But to describe and understand Him in the way that other phenomena and events in the world are understood, and thereby to gain an insight into His greatness, His significance and His causative connection with world evolution, is only possible when the Christian initiate advances to knowledge of the Luciferic realms.

Thus in Rosicrucian science it is Lucifer who gives us the faculty for describing and understanding the Christ.²

What the centuries have been able to do is to propagate the Gospels; so that the Word streaming forth from them enabled hearts and souls to be warmed by their message, to be permeated by the fire and enthusiasm which flow out from them. Today we stand at a stage of human evolution when it can no longer suffice to receive the Gospels as a tradition in the old way; today men need something else. Those who decline to accept this new teaching will have to bear the Karma of opposition to the introduction of the Luciferic principle into the interpretation of the Gospels. There may be many who say: ‘We are content to accept the Gospels as simple Christians; we feel that they satisfy us; the Christ speaks through them, and He does so even when we receive them as traditionally handed down for centuries in religion.’ Although these people may imagine themselves to be good Christians, they are in reality enemies of the Christ, who on account of their personal egoism, and because they still feel themselves satisfied by what is offered in the traditional interpretation of the Gospels, would sweep away that which in future will bring Christianity into glory. Those who today believe themselves to be the best Christians are often the most effective exterminators of real Christianity. Those who today understand the development of Christianity think quite differently. They say that they do not wish to be the egoists who think that the Gospels suffice and assert that they will not have anything to do with abstractions. What spiritual science has to offer is far removed from being an abstract teaching. Real Christians today know that humanity needs something more than the Christianity of the egoists; they realise that the world can no longer be satisfied with the old Gospel tradition, and that the light from Lucifer's kingdom must be thrown upon it. They listen to the teachings proceeding from Rosicrucian schools of initiation, wherein the spiritual faculties have been intensified by the Luciferic principle, in order to penetrate more and more profoundly into the Gospels, and these initiates have found the Gospels to be of such infinite depth that it is impossible to imagine that they can ever be exhaustively dealt with. But today the time has already arrived when the Rosicrucians must let their teachings flow out into the world; they are called upon to spread abroad what they have gained from the Luciferic world in the form of intensification of spiritual forces and faculties, and to pour this into the Gospels. The spiritual science of the West consists in letting the light which streams forth and may be gained from Lucifer's kingdom be cast upon the Gospels. Spiritual science should be an instrument for the interpretation of the Gospels. So it is part of our work to bring to man the joyful message about the substance of the Christ Being, which permeates the world, and to allow the light which may be gained in Lucifer's kingdom on the path of Rosicrucian initiation to fall upon the Gospels. Thus we see that the Christ, Who formerly was a god living in the outer world, became the mystical Christ, and that by His ennoblement of the human soul, He has brought it back again to the realm called in ancient times the Dionysian world, which for awhile had to be shut off and which will be re-attained in the future by man. The interpretation of the Christ by spiritual faculties illuminated by Lucifer, is the inner and essential kernel of the spiritual stream which must flow through the western channel. And what I have said represents the mission of Rosicrucianism in the future.

What is it therefore that comes to pass in human evolution? Christ and Lucifer, the one as a cosmic god and the other as a god within the human soul, dwelt side by side in ancient times, one to be found in the upper regions and the other in the nether regions; then the evolution of the world progressed and for some time it was known that Dionysos or Lucifer, was far away from the earth; on the other hand the cosmic Christ was felt to be penetrating the earth to a greater and greater degree; Lucifer again became visible, and was once more able to be known. The paths taken by these two divine spiritual beings may be pictured more or less in the following way: they approached the earth from two different sides; Lucifer became invisible at the time when his path cut across that of the Christ—his light was overpowered by the Christ light. The Christ entered the human soul, became the planetary spirit of the earth, growing more and more to be the mystical Christ within human souls, and can be felt and realised through inner experiences. In this way the soul becomes gradually more capable of again beholding the other being, who took the reverse way, from within to without. Lucifer, from a being within man's inner nature, a purely earthly being such as he was when he was sought in the mysteries leading to the underworld, becomes a cosmic god. He will appear in ever-greater radiance in the outer world which we behold when we look through the tapestry of the sense world. Man's vision will become reversed. In the past Lucifer was seen behind the veil of the inner soul world, and the Christ, as by Zarathustra, behind the veil of the sense-world, but in the future the Christ will to an ever greater degree be realised by inner spiritual meditation and Lucifer will be found when the gaze is directed outwards into cosmic regions. Thus we have to record a complete reversal of the conditions by which man can acquire knowledge in the course of human evolution. The Christ, an erstwhile cosmic god, has become an earthly god, who is henceforth the soul of the earth; Lucifer, an erstwhile earthly god, has become a cosmic god. And when in the future, man desires again to ascend to the external spiritual world hidden behind the veil of the sense-world, and is not willing to stop short at the external and material, he must penetrate through the sense-world into the spiritual world and must allow himself to be borne to the light by the ‘Light Bringer.’ No faculties for penetration into that region can arise in man if he does not create them out of the forces flowing to him from Lucifer's kingdom. Men would be drowned in the sea of materialism, would persist in the belief that there is nothing except the outer world of matter, if they did not ascend to inspiration through the Luciferic principle. Just as the Christ principle exists to strengthen our inner being, so the Luciferic principle intensifies and develops those faculties by means of which we have to penetrate into the spiritual worlds fully and completely.

Lucifer will intensify our understanding and comprehension of the world; the Christ will strengthen us perpetually within.

• 1. Dr. Steiner has in many lectures gone more fully into the difference between the Jesus of Bethlehem and the Jesus of Nazareth, and explained to some extent the deep mystery here referred to. The translation of a small work by Dr. Arenson on this subject, and called the “History of the Child-hood of Jesus,” is strongly recommended to those interested. It is published simultaneously with this volume by the Anthroposophical Publishing Company, price 2p.
• 2. It is easy to see how, conformably with the use of the ordinary word ‘Lucifer,’ ill will or ignorance may throw calumny on what has been here said; that however cannot prevent these things being stated. Anyone, who understands by Lucifer what is here meant, must necessarily have other conceptions.