The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The present lectures for members given in Dornach in June 1923 are based on the attempt by Rudolf Steiner to encourage the Anthroposophical Society to reconsider the real foundations of anthroposophy and the inner requirements for tackling the tasks of the age. After the First World War, the Society had increasingly splintered into a variety of external initiatives and practical projects. Although Rudolf Steiner had spoken warning words from 1921 onwards, and at the end of 1922 had called on leading members to make proposals for its reconsolidation, a real rethink did not take place until New Year's Eve 1922, when the destruction by fire of the first Goetheanum provided the catalyst. As a consequence, regional societies were founded in a number of countries in 1923. On 10 June, immediately preceding the first lecture in this volume, the General Meeting of the Anthroposophical Society in Switzerland decided, on the basis of a motion from the Society in Great Britain, to call a meeting of delegates from all countries for the end of July to decide the measures for the reconstruction of the Goetheanum. This international delegate meeting further decided to combine the individual regional societies into an International Anthroposophical Society at the Goetheanum at Christmas 1923. Its leadership was to be assumed by a General Secretary to be elected at that time, but shortly before Christmas Rudolf Steiner decided to take over the chairmanship himself.

Textual basis: These lectures were taken down in shorthand by Helene Finckh. Her own transcription of these notes forms the basis for this volume.

The first edition was published by Marie Steiner in 1931 with a Foreword by her. The second edition was undertaken by H.W. Zbinden. The third edition in 1981 included an expanded Contents and additional Notes.

Works by Rudolf Steiner which have not been translated and which have appeared as part of the Complete Edition (Gesamtausgabe = GA) are referred to in the Notes by their bibliographical number.

My dear friends! Yesterday I tried to lead up to the consciousness of the present time by means of a kind of historical consideration, which, however, was intended to have a spiritual-Christian content. The reflections that will now follow in this direction can be inserted into what we still have to discuss. I wanted to get that far yesterday so that today I could speak of something very specific that relates to contemporary consciousness. But I must first make a necessary preliminary remark.

You see, what the anthroposophical movement, as far as I consider it my duty to represent it, can do is never anything other than to bring into the world what is already clearly recognizable as a demand of the world, that is, what is in some sense demanded from some quarter or other; after all, the demand does not always have to consist of clearly articulated words. But it must be regarded as something that I consider necessary for the anthroposophical movement, that it does not in any way appear in the sense that one calls agitatorisch. Today, of course, all words are misunderstood, and so, if one wants to misunderstand – if one wants to cast an evil eye in the sense of yesterday's very grateful lecture [by Pastor Geyer] – one can define what is happening from the anthroposophical side as agitational. On the other hand, it can be said quite honestly and truthfully that I myself do not engage in any agitation. Giving public lectures cannot be agitation, because it is a matter of the sense in which one gives them and to what extent one can take them from the whole configuration of contemporary spiritual life to the best of one's knowledge; it is a matter of them being demanded by the times themselves. Anyone can go away after a public lecture and say, “I want nothing to do with that.” Well, in this sense, everything is held. Therefore, when I speak of the things I will speak of today, I ask you to bear in mind that these things are held in such a way that they have been directly demanded by the circumstances.

I had to say this in advance because I now want to discuss the following. When we founded the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, the intention was that the Waldorf School should absolutely not be a school of world view, but rather that it should be a school in which the teaching of what could come from anthroposophy, the institution was made so that the actual religious, in this sense the world view, was transferred to the pastors of the respective denominations. So the religious instruction of the Roman Catholic children was entrusted to the Roman Catholic chaplain, and the religious instruction of the Protestant children to the Protestant chaplains, who were mainly concerned that as many as possible should attend, so that the individual had to do as little as possible. Incidentally, we also had this experience with Catholic pastors; it took us a long time to find someone who had the courage to enter this “den of iniquity.” So this is the principle of assigning the pastoral care to the pastoral workers concerned. Of course, the children of dissidents and their parents should also be allowed to receive religious instruction in their own way; and it soon became apparent that a not inconsiderable number of them wanted religious instruction, which now flows entirely from the anthroposophical movement, to be given specifically to the children of dissidents. You have to bear in mind that this is in fact already a considerable step forward in terms of religious sentiment, because the Waldorf School was initially founded for the children of the workers at the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory, so in the vast majority of cases for children of proletarian-Social Democratic parents, and it was the dissident sentiment that was actually predominantly represented. If these children had been sent to a regular school, they would not have taken part in any religious instruction at all; they would not have been forced to do so – after all, coercion would actually have contradicted the religious belief. In our case, religious instruction was specifically requested for these children, so the religious need arose out of complete freedom. In my opinion, this represents progress in religious belief. We were forced, as it were, to set up religious instruction in the sense of the anthroposophical worldview, and I sought to do so in such a way that it was actually separated in principle from the management of the school, which was to remain absolutely neutral on these matters and consider it only its task to work in an educational and didactic way. I consider it an important matter of principle that the school management and everything that flows into the school management has nothing to do with this religious education, so that the representatives of this religious education are placed in the school in the same way as the Roman Catholic and the various Protestant religion teachers. There were no Old Catholics, otherwise they would have been taken care of.

Thus Anthroposophical religious education, as it was often called – I myself don't think much of names – was inaugurated and began in the way that Anthroposophy believes it should be taught, namely by placing it as much as possible in life, and so that, in a sense, knowledge of the Bible and especially knowledge of the Gospels emerges as the crowning glory of all religious education. Now, I say that the Gospel is considered the crowning glory, so that this religious education, in which all kinds of children are mixed together, that is, children who have grown out of Catholic, Protestant or Jewish backgrounds, is definitely given in a Christian sense, and this is of course connected with the fact that the whole of the Waldorf School has an absolutely Christian character in terms of its imponderables. Those who have a feeling for such things would notice this very quickly if they were to enter a Waldorf school.

What then became necessary – not on our part, because we want to accommodate, not agitate – was seen very quickly: the children who receive our anthroposophical religious education need what has become a Sunday act. At first there was a very lively desire to have such a Sunday event, that is, to gather the children who receive anthroposophical religious education for a kind of ceremony on Sunday. And for reasons connected with the whole basic attitude of the Waldorf School towards the public, which is not very favorable to us, we have to carry out this Sunday ceremony in front of the children in the presence of the parents, or, if they are foster parents, we say, in the case of children who are educated in Stuttgart but whose parents are far away from Stuttgart, in the presence of the foster parents who are present in Stuttgart. Those who have no business being there, who want to go to this Sunday event for the sake of mere sensation, will not be admitted, but those who are responsible for the children will be allowed to attend the Sunday event with the children.

Now it was a matter of finding a ritual for this Sunday activity. I will discuss this ritual with you a little now and would like to make the following comment: In the next few days, I will have a lot to say about the ritual itself, about devices and the like, but we are definitely in the process of becoming, so that these things, which will also come into consideration for us, are even less likely to be considered in the Waldorf school. So it is important that you see the matter as an evolving one, that you see it in such a way that only that which can be imbued with full life can be done at first. But I believe that we will be able to communicate well precisely because you will receive a report not about something lifeless, but about something alive, and we will then be able to move up all the more easily to what – if I may use a prosaic expression – has to be planned in terms of ritual, ceremony, sacrament, worship and so on. In the whole cult, for example, the garment of the celebrant is not a trivial matter, but something important; but I will speak about that later.

Please do not misunderstand the expression. When a ritual is conceived, it is really not a matter of intellectually constructing something in the ritual, but rather that this ritual is conceived from the spiritual world. The problem with the ritual is that there is still an extraordinary difficulty at present; if you look at it realistically, the difficulty is that if you were to go about it radically, communion would be necessary for such a Sunday action. Now, given the circumstances, it is not possible to go to communion for the children of the Waldorf School in such a ritual today; it cannot be done. Therefore, it was necessary to emphasize that which is to be carried out in the communion later, and to handle it more spiritually. You will see that with the gradual introduction of rituals, you will have to go from the word, I would say, from the word that potentially contains the action, to the actual execution of the action. This will be a path that you will simply have to go through. You will not be able to come straight out with it, but you will have to go through the path from the action suggested by the word, whereby you must be aware that this is a beginning to the fully completed action.

But a ritual must never be composed merely intellectually; it must live in the living world process. For this, my dear friends, one thing is necessary: It is absolutely necessary to pay strict attention to the requirements of a ritual. My dear friends, when we speak from person to person, we must be clear about the fact that our speech must always be based on the only thing that lies solely in the convincing power of the content of our speech. If we understand the present time correctly in a religious sense, we must realize that we have no other work to do through the speech we address to people or to a gathering of people than that which can flow from the speaker out of his own conviction and the power of his own personality. Speeches that contain a moment of suggestion – as we use the word in Central Europe, not as it is used in Western Europe – would be absolutely reprehensible in the context of today's world, because we have come to the point in the development of humanity that, when we can use the word in a free way, we must put into the word that which is our own personal free conviction. If spiritual life is to be taken in full reality, nothing that is suggestive may be imposed on this personal free conviction, but one must behave in such a way that the consent of the other person comes out of complete freedom. This is the prerequisite for every future religious or spiritual-scientific or other work. If anyone were to misuse speech for magic, then this would be in the most extreme sense irreligious, even ungodly, in the strict sense that Anthroposophy must understand it, it would be a sin against the Holy Spirit, and this is what Anthroposophy must represent. For the speech may only be imbued with that sanctification which may be called sanctification through the Holy Spirit, and must observe in man absolutely the principle of directly and completely free conviction, which could not have existed in the evolution of mankind before the Mystery of Golgotha, because the word would have been repulsed by the human being altogether if the word had only had the power that it alone may have had today. At that time it had to work suggestively because the human organization was designed for it. That is why there also had to be chosen leaders, as I said yesterday, and it was also allowed at that time to work through the word in a sense that only happens in the spirit, by becoming aware, one spoke in the spirit, not out of one's own power, but out of the power of the God living in one, the Nous or the Logos. One must realize that this is impossible today, and that today one may only speak out of the Holy Spirit; but that is the word to which alone the free conviction of the one who hears the word answers. Therefore, all instruction today must be given under the sign of the Holy Spirit. We must be very clear about the fact that everything that flows from words into action can only be carried out in the Christian sense if the person carrying it out has the Paul consciousness: Not I, but the Christ in me! — Nothing in an act that is carried out in this way may be done without the consciousness that the act is performed as an inward divine commandment, as that which is performed in the spirit of the Christ-commandment itself.

We must realize that we are only the instrument through which the Christ can speak to people. This is especially difficult with children, because what I have explained applies to a limited extent to children only, and not to fully developed, mature people. Therefore, we must also make a distinction in what we do towards the person who is already considered worthy of the sacrament of the altar and towards the one we consider still too childlike to receive the sacrament of the altar. What I have now discussed must be evident in every action. Without this underlying principle, the action would be absolutely impossible.

The task is to find the Sunday activity from this point of view, and I ask that, as I describe it to you, you consider it only from this point of view. In doing so, we must today still leave out some things in the discussion that have a future value, but which we do not yet need to get into today. Of course, in the future we would actually need not only the spoken word, but also what in the older sense was also part of the cult: the recitative. But this is something that cannot be done today either, because recitative would still have too suggestive an effect on people today; we would make them unfree. Therefore, the ceremonies must not be performed in any other way than as initial ceremonies, initial cults, which I will now talk to you about.

The Sunday ritual is performed in such a way that the children are to gather in front of the entrance door to the room where the Sunday ritual is performed. There is someone standing at the door who first has to make the child aware that he or she must enter this room in a very special mood. Therefore, as the child enters the room, he or she is taken by the hand and told:

You know you are going to the act that
is to uplift your soul to the spirit of the world.

I will begin by telling you. I will speak later about how the matter can be carried out in a completely Christian sense, not in an anthroposophical sense, which must shape the matter differently, but which shapes it in such a way that it is led to the Christian. I would like to point out that what is being explained here is being done precisely because an anthroposophical religious education has been requested, which can only emerge from what anthroposophy already is and is allowed to be.

So the child is received with the words, by being greeted with the touch of the hand:

You know you are going to the act that
is to uplift your soul to the spirit of the world.

Then the child enters the room, which is relatively extraordinarily simple at first. It has a kind of altar at one wall, with seven candles on it. We shall have more to say about these seven candles in this context. Above the altar there must be a picture of Christ. Since I have not yet been able to get hold of a better one, the Stuttgart Waldorf School uses the one painted by Leonardo da Vinci as the image of the youthful Christ. But that is still an imperfection, but one can only do what is possible under the real circumstances.

Now the person who is facing the altar, with his back to the children as they enter, turns around and faces the children. He now speaks words to the children that are thoroughly ritualistic, in which the formulation of the sentences is such that the sequence of words moves in an element where the person cannot say that he speaks, but rather that he expresses what the Christ has to say within him. So the person says:

We now raise our thoughts and feelings to the spirit,
To the spirit that lives and works
In stone, plants and animals;
That lives and works in human thoughts and deeds, That works in everything that works,
That lives in everything that lives,
He who leads the living into death, so that it may live anew,
He who leads the dead into the living, so that it may behold the spirit.

Every word has been weighed, not only so that it stands as a word, but also so that each word stands in its right place and in the right relationship to the other words. After the one who is speaking has spoken this, he turns to the Christ-Image and speaks with arms raised to the Christ-Image the following words:

He who works as a spirit in the universe took on body in him.
Christ died.
He came to life in the being of human beings
Who gave him a home in their hearts.
Let our heart turn to him too.
Let it be imbued with his power
So that he may work in it
So that he may permeate
our thinking, feeling and willing.

So this is the direction towards the Christ-spirit of the world. Now the person who is doing the work speaks, turning to the children and with hands that bless. The gesture for blessing consists of taking two fingers together and spreading the hands out in this way. [The gesture is demonstrated.] Now the point is that the moment has come when Communion should be administered or something similar. So it is the case that the officiant turns to the children. After saying the words that I have expressed, the person turns to the children and speaks, preparing them, as it were, for what is to be said as a substitute for receiving Communion:

My dear ones! We learn to understand the world.
We learn to work in the world.
Love among people revives all human endeavor
Without love, being human becomes bleak and empty.
Christ is the teacher of human love.

The person who is acting speaks to the children about the relationship between Christ and them. This is followed by the common prayer, which is spoken in unison:

We lift up all our feeling and thinking to the Spirit of God.
We honor the Spirit of God. We love the Spirit of God.
We will remember the Spirit of God
When we are alone,
And also when we are with people.
Then He will be with us.

You must pay attention to all the details. In particular, you must pay attention to the fact that this turning to the Spirit of God is required “when we are alone and also when we are with people”.

Now follows what must first be introduced as a kind of surrogate for Communion, which can take on different forms, insofar as it can be given to children or an indicative substitute for it can be given to them. We cannot do more than the officiant approaches each individual child and speaks, laying his hand on the child's head or extending his hand – so it is spoken to each individual child, going through the whole row [of children]; before, it was only spoken to them as a group:

The spirit of God will be with you if you seek it.

The child answers:

I will seek it.

So you don't have to take this as a lecture, but as a ceremony.

Now the officiant returns to the altar and, with hands blessing, says:

I call upon the spirit of God
to be with you when you seek it.

After this, the Gospel chapter is read, which must be read in the correct manner at the appropriate time. We will have more to say about the distribution of the Gospel chapters throughout the year. Then the children sing a hymn that is relevant to the whole service, and finally the officiant says:

Dear children! I now dismiss you,

But keep in good thoughts

What you have heard, felt and thought here.

Then appropriate music follows. The children then leave the hall after the officiant has stepped back from the image of Christ.

The person performing the act can prepare himself by saying to himself before the act:

Through Your power, O Spirit of God,
I shall direct to You
the souls entrusted to me.
Let Your light illuminate the sphere of my thinking,
Your warmth of life permeates the center of my feeling, Your soul power permeates the radiant body of my will, Be in the service I want to do for you.

With these words, which he speaks to himself in thought, the doer prepares himself before the children are admitted.

I would like to make it clear that you should understand this as a ritual; you should not interpret it as a teaching instruction. This is counteracted by the fact that religious instruction is given in the corresponding religious education lessons. There is teaching, there is no cult.

The ritual that is performed, my dear friends, works, if it is performed in the right way and with the right attitude, precisely not as teaching for humanity. This must be borne in mind. And only in this way will you be able to understand how carefully the whole matter at hand is being handled. It can only be handled in such a way that the whole spirit of the matter is only gradually advanced, and we are actually coming to the development of the matter very slowly, because we can only respond, so to speak, to the signs of the times that we seek to understand.

Now, of course, it is important that the special times of the year also be made known to the child in the way he or she must be Christian, likewise through ritual. And so I would like to give you as an example the Christmas ritual first – we will talk about others later – which is added as a special one to the Sunday rituals, or would be performed on a Sunday if the birthday of Christ Jesus fell on a Sunday. So it is for the time being. I cannot say how things will turn out in the further development. So it is for the time being, according to our ability.

This Christmas action occurs in the same way as the Sunday actions. When the children have gathered, the person performing the action turns to them and says:

Dear children,

We live in the beginning of winter.
Our eyes see little of the outer sun.
It appears late and disappears early.
But within, our soul's eye beholds
In winter's cold and winter's darkness:
The bright shining spiritual sun of Christ,
Which has appeared through Jesus to humanity
From divine realms.

In the humble soul of the shepherd
Was heard the word of heaven:
God's spirit reveals itself in heights,
And he brings peace to the people of the earth,
In whose hearts dwells good will.
And the shepherds were led
By the lofty word of heaven,
And they sought the Spirit of God
After the proclamation on earth.
At the place of poverty they found
The child Jesus, who then became
The Christ.

It was the first Christmas in the world
When the humble shepherds
With a praying heart kneeled
At the poverty site before Jesus, the infant,
Through the light of the spirit
He appeared to the people of the earth.

Through the Christ
Who is the spirit sun, we will find
The way to spiritual heights,
And so become
First true people.
So the humble shepherds thought
In their intuitive souls,
When they saw the light,
That shone from the child's eyes
In the first Christmas of the world.

And as if they saw the light
The humble shepherds
There was a new beginning of the world:
The Christmas of mankind began.
And it can be light ever since
In the hearts of men,
Who learn to love
To say: behold, it is the Christ
Through whom the soul finds
The way into the spirit's
Sunshine-bright kingdom.

And it will remain bright
In the hearts of men,
Who lovingly feel
In their deepest innermost being
The light that shines there
On the way to the Christ
Sunshine-bright kingdom.

In the hearts of men
The dark night of winter
Becomes a bright spiritual day
When the soul consecrates itself
To the light that shines through Jesus
In earthly life.

The person carrying out the action goes to each child as usual and speaks to them:

Raise your thoughts and feelings
to the Christ-Spirit.

Then, after going back to the front of the line, he speaks to the children:

You shall raise your thoughts and feelings
to the Christ-Spirit,
He is the light
That shines in the hearts of men
So that they may find
The way to the Kingdom of God.

Now a piece of music suitable for Christmas should be played, and then the person carrying out the action continues:

Through the power of the Spirit's salvation,
In the consecration of the world,
Soul light awakens,
Human strength awakens,
Courage of the heart awakens,
After it once awakened
From times of Christmas
To eternal healing power.

Man fulfills himself
With true soul meaning,
When at Christmas time
He turns within
In strong thinking
In heartfelt feeling
To the power of Christ
Man strengthens himself
Through true spiritual power
When at Christmas time
He turns within
In bright thinking
In warm feeling
To the light of Christ.

Dear children:
Hold all this in your hearts,
and bring it from the holy Christmas season
into the life of the whole year.

This can, of course, be followed, in the sense that we will have to discuss it later, by a reading from the corresponding gospel.

Since we have accepted children of all age groups into the Waldorf School, we were soon obliged to also celebrate a youth festival with the children who had completed elementary school and were about to go out into life. This youth festival will be the basis for a confirmation or confirmation ritual. The text for this youth festival is the following: Upon entering, which is done in the same way as usual, the child is said, each one individually, for each one is admitted separately:

Consider the importance of this moment in your life.

Now the children are admitted, the person performing the act turns to the children and says:

Dear children, remember the importance of this moment in your life. You are entering a new age. You are rising from childhood to youth. Your teachers have guided you. Their concern was that the Spirit of God

shine in your thinking
be powerful in your feeling
be effective in your will.

Your teachers wanted to show you the Christ who died so that human souls could live, so that He might be:

the light in your soul
the guide on your path through life
the giver of the joys of existence
the comforter in the suffering of existence.

The man turns around and raises his arms, as I showed earlier, to the image of Christ, and says:

You light of souls
You guide on our paths of life
You giver of the joys of existence
You comforter in the suffering of existence
I spoke to you with beseeching words, imploring light for these children's thoughts, longing for strength for these children's feelings, seeking the blessing of action for these children's will. So send your light, bestow your strength, let your blessings flow in this hour
upon those who were entrusted to us
and whom we now hand over to life
so that they may
think through your light
feel through your strength
work through your blessing
in all their earthly lives
until in the moment of death
you lead them into the existence of the soul.
For you have spoken:

Now follows the reading of the high-priestly prayer from the Gospel of John. The person conducting the service then goes to each individual child, takes them by the hand and speaks to them:

Through the spirit of Christ
Who conquered death
So that the soul of man
Was saved in life
You were led
Here in this school for children:
So may the spirit of Christ guide
Your life forces
Your soul powers
Your spiritual goals
Through the great school of life.

The person who is doing this returns to his or her place and speaks about Easter in a speech that has something like the following content – here he is given complete freedom, and what I will now read as a speech to the children is to be understood only as an appeal:

Dear Children,

It was in spring, when the earth finds new life in its plants, that Christ went through death on Golgotha. He died. But he overcame death. As victor over death, he lives with people: he lives in people who seek him, seek him with all their thinking, feeling and willing. And every time spring brings the high Easter festival, then man, when he sees the new life of the earth, should remember death and the resurrection of Christ.

— The youth celebration is intended for Easter. —

Dear Children, each year at this Easter time, remember the feast we celebrate with you today and celebrate it anew each year, so that the thought of the death, resurrection and indwelling of Christ in the souls of those who seek him may be revived in you.

Then a hymn follows, as in the Sunday celebrations, prepared in the appropriate way for this festival. Finally, the following is spoken again:

Dear children, every Sunday I have
released you, asking you to remember
what you have experienced here;
now I dismiss you
with a sorrowful soul
into life.
The Spirit of Christ be with you
Seek Him
and you shall find Him:
As your light
As your strength
As your guide
As your comforter.

Each child is dismissed individually, taken by the hand and spoken to:

Remember the importance of this moment in your life. Never forget it, not in joy, not in sorrow.

Then the child is dismissed, at first from the action. The rest would be instruction, would no longer belong to the actual ritual.

I have given you here some examples of how this must be grasped in a living way in religious life, how it can flow into a cult that is now also sought in a completely living way out of that which can be a renewed religious life. Everything, my dear friends, is imperfect in the beginning, and of course many, many objections can be raised against any beginning. Accept this as a beginning, and know that where there is a sincere desire for such a beginning, the strength to improve what can be given in such a beginning will also be found. I believe, my dear friends, that it is not a matter of stifling such a child in its beginning, but rather of working on what is wanted. Of course, where the living and not the dogmatic is desired, every objection can only be welcome. But it should be clear to you from this example that, wherever the living is sought, the cultic must be sought. I have already been able to draw your attention to the prayerful character of what the person performing the action can have as a preparatory prayer. In a similar way, we begin each teaching morning, of course in a correspondingly simple way. This, of course, goes beyond the principle if the principle is only grasped in a completely abstract way. If the principle were grasped in a completely abstract way, we would not be allowed to place anything at the beginning of the teaching morning at all, but would have to start [with the teaching] straight away. But that would be quite impossible, because after all, all teaching must have a mood to it, and ultimately the Christian mood cannot be something that hovers above everything as an abstraction, but must be incorporated into every detail. There can be no principle in the life of the world, only that which changes in life. This should not be seen as an inconsistency, but as a requirement of life itself.

But you also see that, in accordance with what can only be use today, we must remain with the word as much as possible, and only the word itself can be transformed into action, because action is already inherent in the word, especially when the word occurs in the context of life itself. It is absolutely the case that in such a youth celebration, not only is something discussed, but something happens, something happens to the souls, not with, but to the souls of the children.

Just compare this, my dear friends, with how strong the belief was that the main thing had to be put into the teaching material that was being taught. Basically, this is still the case today in all religious denominations and in all forms of religion; too much emphasis is placed on the teaching material as such, on its dogmatic or other content. One must gradually come out of the merely human word and, by detour, by being aware that one draws the word from the spiritual worlds for the ceremony, penetrate to the immersion of the whole ceremonial in an atmosphere where acts of worship can take place without sacrificial acts.

But in the course of time, another problem arose: the children of the dissidents also wanted to be baptized. Until now, of course, I could only help myself, at least in the main, by teaching our friends who are priests and who were also imbued with the idea of breathing new life into their profession a baptismal ritual that could only be in keeping with the spirit of the times. But, my dear friends, before I proceed to this baptismal ritual tomorrow, I must make a few remarks, without which this baptismal ritual could not be understood. You see, a baptismal ritual would be impossible to create if one did not inspire one's understanding of the world and of God through that which in earlier times, when such things still lived atavistically, flowed into a ritual at all. I have pointed out to you times when no alchemical operation (that is, in those days, chemical operation) was carried out without the alchemist (that is, in our language, the chemist) having the Book of the Gospels in front of him in his alchemical laboratory. People at that time said that one would not have considered oneself authorized to carry out an alchemical process in the true sense of the word with the right attitude without the Gospel. You must always bear in mind how far a modern chemist is from such a thing, and how a modern chemist would fare if he were expected not to act with his retorts and his heating apparatus and with all that he does if he did not have the gospel book at his laboratory table. One must penetrate something like this if one seriously wants to see through what it is all about. One must also understand the concern that was present precisely in those who had the good eye in the times when modern science was emerging and one could see that, abandoned by the Spirit of God, actions were being carried out in accordance with the external laws of nature and external natural forces. One must put oneself in the shoes of such people, who were seized by a terrible fear when they heard that Agrippa von Nettesheim or his teacher, the Sponheimer, were performing something that had to do with new powers. They were extremely concerned that this should not have anything to do with divine powers. And so one must put oneself in the frame of mind that consecrating religious services, performing ceremonies, celebrating was nothing other than the highest stage of that which one also performed in alchemy. Therefore, one must really be imbued with the realization that not only external signs were present in those things that were used in a cultic act, but that the view that was held at that time of the substantial that served one in a cultic act was present. It was not, as would be the case today, decided to devise this or that symbol for this or that, whereby human arbitrariness plays an enormous role and with which one actually has to struggle continuously today. Isn't it true that in all these things it really depends on the how. And so it is just as necessary that in order to understand rituals it is also recognized that there is nothing arbitrary in the ritual, but a deeper knowledge of the substantiality of the world than can be admitted at present in science at all.

You see, a few years ago, for example, I read in a book written with good intentions that dealt with the history of alchemy how an alchemist's recipe from around the time of Basilius Valentinus's work was cited. The recipe was presented as it could be described from the works of Basilius Valentinus, which are largely forgeries. Then the excellent chemist who had to judge it wrote his verdict and said: This is complete nonsense, it is all nonsense; today's chemist cannot imagine what it means, it is complete nonsense. — Not a single word that the historian wrote down is wrong. The man could only not imagine anything because the recipe combined words that had to be learned in their terminological meaning, of which one would first have to know how they were used. There was talk of processes that are again expressed according to the words today, of dissolution, of heating and so on. Yes, if one reads the word “loosening” as today's chemists do, it is nonsense. If you read the word 'gold' as today's chemist does, it is nonsense, and if you read the word 'mercury', today's chemist cannot imagine what it is at all; because he understands mercury to mean the mercury that we also have in thermometer tubes, for example. If we approach the formulas of the 13th and 12th centuries with this terminology, they are complete nonsense today, and it would be much better if people admitted to themselves that they appear to be nonsense than if people today , which is what is really happening, they run to the antiquarian bookshops and buy works by Basilius Valentinus, which are forgeries – but which sometimes contain correct things that are just not understood today – or they buy all kinds of works by Paracelsus. They read it and think they understand it, while it would be more honest to just say to themselves: That is the height of madness from the point of view of today. That is just what must be taken into account; in this respect people today have, I might say, basically strayed from the honest sense of truth; they write and prattle on in words and are satisfied if the words are only moved into a slightly different atmosphere from the one they are accustomed to hearing today, even if they do not understand the words. Today, because all these things are taught in school, there is definitely an atmosphere in which people say to themselves: Yes, one hears about water, salt, phosphorus, mercury; one can understand all that, one understands it if one picks up the very first chemistry textbook today. But [they think], that which one understands cannot be of any value, that is knowledge that is of no value from the outset. Now they take a work by Paracelsus or a work by Basilius Valentinus. There they find the same words, but because they cannot understand it in the context, they believe that they are now in mystical depths because they do not understand anything, but they want to believe that they are experiencing something. That is where we have to be honest. Even if we only go back that far, we still have to search a little for the key. We have to learn to read these things, because today it is extremely difficult to even get a correct idea of what the spirit, what the supernatural actually is. It helps a great deal if one prepares oneself by delving into times when the spirit was still alive in the material world, by going back to such times and asking oneself: What did people in the 12th or 13th century understand when they talked about salt, water, ash? Not at all what people understand today. What did they understand when they spoke of salt, water, ash?

This is what I wanted to point out to you first, and I will start on it tomorrow when I have more to say about ritualism.

Today I should like you really to speak out what is in your minds so that the discussion can center around it.

Question: A question in the hearts of all of us is how to succeed with the meditations that we have been given. At what times ought we to do them, ought they to be done in rhythmic sequence, how ought they to be done, ought those given at Christmas to be done at the same time as the others? We think that at any rate most of us feel rather oppressed with all the substance that is contained in the meditations and we do not yet know how to live with them properly.

In these things one really ought not to give such strict indications for this would be to encroach too much upon the freedom of the individual. If things are looked at in the right way it is not likely that there will be any feeling of oppression. When the meditations were given here at Christmas it was also indicated in which direction they move the soul. It was said—and the same applies to the meditations that are now being given in the First Class—that with these meditations it is rather different than when someone comes and wishes to have a personal meditation. In the case of a personal meditation one must naturally indicate whether the meditation should be done in the morning or the evening, how the person must act in the sense of this meditation, and so on. These meditations are intended to be part of the esoteric life of the individual according to his capacities and his karma. They then lead of themselves to the individual not remaining in isolation but unfolding within himself the impulse to recognize those who have similar aspirations. Such meditation must be regarded as a personal meditation.

So far as the other kind of meditations are concerned it would be good if they were done at a definite time or in special circumstances, or when accompanied by definite circumstances. In giving all meditations like those of the esoteric instruction given at Christmas, one has in mind the goal that is striven for. And then it is a matter of using the circumstances of one's life, the special situations of one's life, to make such meditations. Such meditations are done when one finds the necessary spare time for them—the more often the better. They will always have their effect. Precisely with such meditations the striving should be for personal development. One should try to find the link from the results that happen in the spiritual life, and one will, moreover, find it. In reality, the feeling of oppression would come if definite rules were laid down in regard to individuals or a group doing them at the same time as you say. Moreover this would lead to the meditation losing something that it really ought to have. Every meditation, you see, is impaired if one starts from the feeling that it is one's duty to do it. You must bear this well in mind. Every meditation is impaired by the feeling of being obliged to do it. Therefore in the case of the personal meditations it is absolutely necessary for this personal meditation gradually to become something that the human being feels in his soul to be like a thirst for meditation. Those who really thirst for their meditation just as a man eats when he is hungry, do their morning and evening meditations in the best way. When meditation becomes something without which a person cannot exist, when he feels that it is part and parcel of the whole life of his soul, then he has the right attitude to meditation.

With the other meditations, what matters is the inner desire, the inner will to become a physician and to say to oneself: “This is my path and I will meditate as often as I possibly can. I realize that when I do the one or the other meditation, it has this or that aim.” Out of the free, inner will of man, therefore, there must arise the urge to such meditation, to the carrying out of such a meditation. It is really inconceivable how anyone can feel a sense of oppression. For why should anything for which one thirsts inwardly, also give rise to a sense of oppression? If it oppresses, it has already been made into a matter of duty and that is just what meditation should never be. It should never be a matter of duty. Precisely when it is a question of becoming a physician, the following ought to be taken in the very deepest sense: The conception of becoming a physician ought not to be as it is today, namely, entering a profession. One ought really to become a physician because of an inner calling, an inner devotion to healing. This general urge to be able to heal is the true accompaniment, and one is then led towards the goal. Perhaps in few professions is it so harmful as it is in the profession of the physician to think of this profession as an external duty. Love for humanity must be implicit in the physician's profession. A physician should find his bearings quite naturally in his work.

Now, although in modern medicine, in modern medical studies, it is not very favorable for real healing when people become physicians just because they must become something or other and because the medical profession seems for some reason to be desirable, it is still worse when someone thinks he can become a physician artificially, through meditation, without feeling this thirst of which I have spoken. If the aim is a true one, ancient esoteric methods of development demand infinitely more than an external decision; and they do much more harm than external circumstances of life if they do not spring from the right attitude of soul. But you must also have a right conception of what I have here called the “attitude of soul.” What we call karma is not, as a rule, taken very seriously in life. An inner vocation arises, of course, because karma has put a person in a certain place. We must realize that to follow something out of a sense of duty is injurious, but to follow karma is something that accords entirely with the direction of human evolution. The karma of all of you has brought you to work in medicine, and now if only you will look deeply enough within yourselves you will find that you really do feel the thirst of which I have spoken. And you will find, too, the moments and hours when you want to do such meditations.

Now just when one takes up such a serious profession in all earnestness, the following (which has happened frequently since the Christmas Foundation Meeting) really should not be. It is not connected directly with medical work, but it is connected very strongly with the “human universal” inasmuch as it exists within the general Anthroposophical movement, and so it is also of importance to you. I shall speak about it in another place, but because it holds good very specially for you, I will say it here too. It was said at the Christmas Foundation that a new character must come into the Anthroposophical movement, that inner work must be done. Now many people drew a strange conclusion from this. There are people within the Anthroposophical movement who have definite positions and offices. Such people have written: Yes, I understand perfectly that a new character is to come into the Anthroposophical movement. I place myself entirely at the disposal of this, I do not want to remain in my old position. But this can never lead to anything. It can only lead to something when the person concerned knows that at the place at which he stands he must find his development, find it in reality, also in connection with the faculties which he uses and applies. This, naturally, is the case with you who have begun to work in the medical profession. You must regard it as karma and you must realize that your work in the future will be tremendous. You must realize, secondly, that the thirst of which I have spoken, the thirst to approach the true preparation for medicine by way of meditation, is also to be found in the soul.

This is what I wanted to say about the practice of meditation. Each meditation should enlighten and support the other. It may well be that some one meditation has worked strongly, and now you must do a different one in order to strengthen the effects still more. You do one meditation once, twice; you do another twelve times. This is something that comes when you really take to heart what is given as a meditation, when you experience it inwardly, and also when you take to heart what has been said about the goal of meditation. We must use this opportunity for developing much that was touched upon at Christmas.

Question: My conception was not that it was a question of meditating at definite times, but in spite of that I was aware of a sense of oppression because I considered it a duty to do this meditation and often I was not really fresh enough to feel it as a need. Perhaps this is due to the fact, in my case at least, that up to now I have not had the attitude that one ought to have as a physician, that I have not had the real will to heal. I think it has been the same with one or two of us. Many of us have not become physicians in order to heal, but we have become physicians because of the great interest that we had in getting to know the nature of man, his conditions of disease and his normal conditions. We approached medicine entirely from the side of knowledge. Up till Christmas the will to heal was something entirely foreign to me; and so, to begin with, my work made me very unhappy because I had a great deal to do and at the beginning was too tired for meditation. But this work brought me more together with patients so that now I have an inkling of what it means to have the will to heal, and I think that now I shall be better able to meditate because this springs from a real need. Meditation can then really be seen as a path to the goal. Precisely this devotion to human destiny, this sympathy that one feels as a physician for everyone—this, and the will to heal which was not indicated through one's studies which lead to medicine more from the side of knowledge—is surely something that, until recently, has caused difficulties to many of us.

You must remember the following. When, in the sphere of medicine you divide these two things, the side of knowledge and the will to heal, it is a contradiction of the reality. It is very important to realize what is at stake here. Knowledge of the nature of man is necessary in many different fields of human activity. In pedagogy, for example, the essential starting point is a knowledge of the nature of the human being. In other domains, too, there must be knowledge of the nature of man if we have an eye to realities. Knowledge of the nature of man is essential for everyone who wants to get beyond superficialities. It is necessary for everyone. The fact that knowledge of the real nature of man is not sought for in many fields of activity is a consequence of the errors into which modern civilization has lapsed. In a certain sense this knowledge is sought for—although it cannot be found there because it can only be found today by way of Anthroposophy. It is sought for by theologians (I mean by the ordinary theologians). All kinds of people are looking and seeking for knowledge of the being of man. The only ones who are not seeking for it are the lawyers, because jurisprudence today is something which simply cannot be said to take hold of the realities of the world. The essential thing is that knowledge of the human being has to be somewhat specialized in the various domains of life. The physician needs a rather different kind of knowledge from the educator—a rather different kind only. It is necessary for educators to know as much as possible about education. There ought certainly to be connecting threads; there should be a hither and thither between the one and the other field of activity, based upon knowledge of the human being.

So far as concrete details of knowledge of the human being are concerned, the following must be remembered. You spoke about knowing the conditions of disease in a human being. This is a preconception—the outcome of materialism. In itself it is a materialistic preconception. Taken in the concrete, what does it mean to know the conditions of disease in the human being? How can I know anything about a disease that is localized, let us say, in the liver, in the spleen, in the lungs, in the heart? How do I get knowledge of it? When I know what kind of healing process might be capable of overcoming the process of disease. In reality the process of disease is the question and one remains at a standstill at this point if one's only aim is to get knowledge of the process of disease. The answer is the healing process. We know nothing at all about a process of disease when we do not know how it can be healed. Understanding consists in the knowledge of how the morbid process can be eliminated. Without the will to heal there can be no medical study in the true sense. To know conditions of disease means nothing. Without passing on from the pathology to the therapy one would simply be concerned with the pathological aspect, imagining that one was thus getting knowledge of the human being. One would simply be describing a diseased organ. But a description of this kind is quite inadequate; is not of the least value. So far as mere description and abstract knowledge are concerned there is no essential difference between a healthy or a diseased liver. In the sense of natural science there is no distinction to be made between a healthy and a diseased liver. The most that can be said is that a healthy liver is more frequent than a diseased one. But this is an external condition. If you want to get knowledge of a diseased liver, you must go into what is able to heal the diseased liver.

Upon what does healing depend? It depends upon knowing which substances, which forces must be applied to the human being in order that the process of disease may pass over into the healthy process. Such knowledge is transmitted, for instance, by the fact that one knows: Equisetum, within the human organism, takes over the activity of the kidneys. When, therefore, the activity of the kidneys is not sufficiently cared for by the astral body, I shall see that they are cared for by equisetum. I give support to the astral body by means of equisetum arvense. Here for the first time is the answer to what is really happening. The same process in the external world which leads to equisetum also takes its course in the human kidneys. The equisetum process must be studied in connection with the kidneys. This leads us to the domain of healing.

Thus it can never be a matter of pathology in a merely abstract sense or of a description of conditions of disease—all this amounts to nothing in reality. Our picture of a condition of disease should be that such and such a remedy works in such and such a way. The feeling that we have about knowledge in all domains of life should lead on to reality, not to formalism. It was always so when knowledge was everywhere connected with the Mysteries. In the Mysteries, knowledge was inevitably withheld from those who merely desired it in the formal sense and imparted only to those who had the will to lead over this knowledge into reality. Is that an answer to your question?

Question: I may have expressed myself rather radically when I spoke only about health and disease. In point of fact, I do consider the way in which the human being should be healed also to be a part of knowledge. I meant something rather different, namely, that one may know how a person can be healed but may not have the will to heal him. Up to now I have not, inwardly, had the impulse only to understand the human being in order to heal. I had not the impulse to let the whole of my work and studies and knowledge be filled entirely with the realization: I must be capable of healing the human being.

That is hypertrophy of knowledge.

Question: This is a fact with me and I wanted to speak about it because it is so. Perhaps it sounds very strange.

What I am going to say may sound very trivial and simple. It is as well that this kind of attitude cannot make clocks, for if it could, you would have clocks put together quite correctly according to the clock maker's art, but they would not want to go. By letting his will hypertrophy towards the one side or the other, a person can develop this or that, but the result will be of such a nature that it is not in line with the healthy evolution of human nature. Knowledge of healing should simply not exist without the will to heal. Today you ought to be speaking of something quite different. You should really be saying: “Yes, I have studied medicine for a short time and now I have an ungovernable will to heal. I must restrain myself so that this will which comes from knowledge does not break loose in such a way that I want to heal all the healthy people!” This is really not a joke. The voice should be a voice of restraint. It should simply not be possible to say: “I have striven for the knowledge of healing but not the will to heal!” For a knowledge that is real cannot separate itself from the will—that is quite impossible.

Question: I think that what was expressed in the previous question is a condition brought about by the kind of studies that are pursued at the universities. It seems to me to be a final result of such studies. The aim of all medical science is really knowledge, without leading over to the therapeutic aspect. In the lecture halls and the clinical courses one hears a little about diagnosis and when the professor does not know what to do until the new patient is brought in, he throws in a few words about the therapy. In a course on gynecology once, the lecturer spoke about the work of the physician in his practice. “Has it not struck you,” he said, “that in reality so little is said about therapy? You will realize this for the first time when you begin to practice. That is what happened to me. I had a head full of knowledge and then I realized the other.” Then he said that five minutes were given to the therapy and forty minutes to the diagnosis. Nobody realized that during all their studies they had heard nothing about therapy. This leads me to a question, because this fundamental attitude of modern science causes me many difficulties and conflicts. As a physician I was looking for something different in scientific medicine. This entirely superficial attitude which leads to all kinds of things, especially in diagnosis, often gives rise to results that are really repellent. Let me give an example. A patient came to me and asked, could I not help her? She suffered from recurrent inflammation of the frontal sinuses and she had been many times to a specialist. Among other things perforation had been done by way of the nose. She said she could not bear it any longer, she felt that the whole interpretation of her condition was too physical, and she asked if I could not help her in some other way. This attitude that the patient had realized is universal. It simply gropes on the surface and leads nowhere. It can only remain on the surface and it cannot lead to the real state of the case. And so I have often asked myself: Is it really good or indeed is it necessary to go so deeply into these methods which are considered a sine qua non in medical studies—methods which simply reach the point of monstrosity in gynecological research and simply have no relation to the final outcome? Is it necessary to go through all these things? I have the feeling that any instinct for healing which may exist is suppressed entirely by going through these things. I would like to mention something told to me by a former colleague. He was speaking of a peasant doctor in the Bavarian Alps who used to perform all kinds of orthopedic cures with such skill that he became famous. An orthopedic specialist in Munich got to hear of what this man was doing, went to see him and told him that he should come to him in his clinic. This man saw all the apparatus in the clinic and the specialist told him to show him how he worked. The peasant doctor looked at it all and from then onwards he could no longer cure people. Ought we to go through all the methods of scientific medical training or ought we to avoid them as far as is at all possible?

When you approach the question in this way, it becomes extremely important. You are right in thinking that I did not want to speak about personal characteristics of the prior questioner but to describe the attitude that inevitably arises from the modern methods of study. The true kind of medical studies would never lead anyone to desire knowledge of conditions of disease or processes of healing without at the same time having the will to heal. Such a thing would never arise out of true medical studies. It arises because of the way medical studies are arranged today. It must be admitted on the one side that by far the greatest part of what the medical student has to learn today in his various courses has nothing fundamentally to do with healing as such as therefore burdens the mind with all kinds of impossible things. In modern medical training it is more or less the same as it would be to make a sculptor, let us say, learn first of all about the scientific properties of marble and wood with which, in reality, he is not concerned. A great deal of what is contained in the medical textbooks today or is done in clinics has little to do with medicine in the real sense.

The moment you pass on from the physical description—this was what the lady of whom you spoke felt to be too physical—the moment you pass on to the etheric body, most of the things in the medical textbooks lose their significance because the moment you come to the etheric body the organs present quite a different aspect. When you pass from the physical to the etheric body, intellectual knowledge alone will get you nowhere. You will learn much more if you learn how to sculpture, if you learn the hand grip, the feeling for space that is needed by the sculptor.

So far as knowledge of the astral body is concerned, you learn far more when you can apply the laws of music. From music you learn an enormous amount about the forming of the human organism, how this process of formation develops out of the astral body. Inasmuch as the human being is organized for movement, for activity, he is built up, in reality, like a musical scale. Here (back of the shoulders) begins the tonic; then it passes over into the second, then into the third in the lower arms, where there are two bones because there are two thirds. This brings you to truths quite different from those which are considered nowadays to pertain to a real knowledge of the human being and quite a different course of teaching would really be necessary for one who is approaching medicine in the true sense.

The modern form of teaching has arisen from the fact that therapy has become nihilistic. Not only in the Viennese school of medicine has this been the case, but everywhere it is the same. Among the professors and lecturers who represent the various scientific faculties there have, at least, been serious minds who, in spite of all their shortsightedness, were, at any rate, scientific. At all events a certain earnestness was present. But when one comes to those who lecture about remedies, the earnestness ceases. The lecturer himself has no fundamental belief in what he is lecturing about. The earnestness stops at the point where the therapy begins.

From where, then, is the will to heal to proceed? It must proceed from a course of medical studies such as I outlined in connection with the course given at Christmas, where I spoke of what the sequence of studies should be. That, of course, is very different from the things that go on today and do not lead to a real art of medicine. In most cases, the practitioner has to learn things by dint of great effort when he has left his medical school. This is often not an altogether easy matter because the things he has learned are not only useless but actually harmful to him. He cannot see the real process of disease because all sorts of things are memorized in his head and he cannot see the process of disease in its reality. That is the one side.

But now, you are a group of young physicians. In the spiritual sense you have to be something more. The best way to attain that would be to say: Leave all medical studies alone, there is no true medical faculty today where you can study medicine in the real sense—come here and learn the essentials. In the radical sense, that is what one would say. But where would you be then? The world would reject you, would not recognize you as physicians. The only course open to the young physician is to go through the whole thing and then be healed by what he can learn of medicine here. With all the repugnance that you may feel, you must take the orthodox and regular course of study. There is no other alternative; it is absolutely necessary. That is the other side of the picture.

People like magnetic healers and amateurs who dabble in medicine abuse the university schools, but that is no use at all. Those who know how things are and who are led by experience to real understanding—they will be the true pioneers of reasonable medical study. This should be your endeavor: to awaken public opinion about the state of affairs. You realize, of course, that it is not you alone who speak as you have done. There are many physicians who speak in the same way, but they need what can be given here. And why? When one is an intelligent person today and becomes a physician, having passed through the university, one can, of course, criticize orthodox medicine. One has passed through the whole thing and knows what one lacks. But this knowledge can become effective only when one has got something to put in its place. Only then can it be effective. This, of course, is the other side. And so you must not take what I am saying here in the sense that I have any desire to hold back young physicians from completing their study. Bad as it may be, it is still necessary today to eat the bitter apple. When it is possible to speak on the platform of things which ought not to be—then and only then will there be a gradual improvement.

In this connection, you see, there is still a great deal to be done. I think I have already told the story of how I was once invited to speak about some medical subject to a group of physicians in Zurich. A professor of gynecology was also there. I saw that he had come with the attitude: “Well, we will listen to this lunatic so that at least we can abuse him, being justified by the fact that we did actually hear what he had to say” He came quite honestly in order to be amused by listening to a lunatic. His manner grew stranger and stranger and he listened in a most peculiar way. It was very unpleasant for him to find that he was not listening to a lunatic, that it could not all be put down as pure nonsense. I myself found it most amusing. I said to him: “This has made a strange impression on you, professor.” He replied: “Yes, one simply cannot speak about it. It is decidedly a different point of view.” It is, after all, a sign of progress when one gets to the point where people say: “It is a different point of view.”

What is it that has arisen by the side of scientific medicine which, after all, still towers above anything that has been achieved by the medicine of amateurs? I know that laymen have made progress. But it amounts to nothing. The valve in a steam engine was invented by a small boy one day when he was bored. One could not say of him that he was really capable of constructing engines because he invented the valve. Those who abuse scientific medicine today are really not justified in abusing it for they are talking about something of which they have no knowledge. What we have to achieve is not to mix up anthroposophical conceptions in medicine with what is already in existence. If in doing so we succeed in showing that we are sincere and serious, then great progress will have been achieved.

As you are young, I would like especially to lay this on your hearts. Let the aim of all the esotericism you receive be to make you capable of working also in the world, so that the real will to heal may unfold. Your aim cannot be to shut yourselves off, each one in the chamber of his heart. You must work to the end that medicine shall make real progress, just as the aim of educators is to enable education to make progress.

It is not possible for me to speak in detail of how most things that go on today in medical studies are really not essential for the understanding of the healthy and the sick human being. But if you study what I have given in the various lecture courses and cycles, you will find it. Suppose when a baby is born we were to ask ourselves how it should be fed, imagining that it is not possible to feed a baby properly before one has given him some idea about the nature of the foodstuffs: so it is with many things today. What I mean to convey is that one should have the intuition to understand a process spiritually, not physically. In diagnosis it is often more necessary to go back to the early causes which may lie at a definite time, very far back in the case of some patients. Methods are taught today for recognizing the condition of the diseased or the healthy organism at the actual time when the patient comes. But what is lacking is the kind of thinking which enables one to say to the patient: Fifty years ago this or that happened to you and that is the primary cause of your illness. As a rule, physicians depend upon what the patient himself says, and that is unreliable. The first cause is the external cause—it comes from outside. A physician in Christiania once brought a man of sixty to me. He had all kinds of eczema which it was easy to diagnose. But nothing that was applied was any help. The physician brought him to me, and the state of things was quite clear—I mention one example from hundreds—if one is to help in such a case, one must know the real starting point. In this case it was not very difficult. I very soon discovered that thirty or thirty-five years previously the man must have suffered from severe poisoning. This was still working in him. I told him to try and remember what had happened to him thirty-five years before. He told me that nobody had yet asked him such a thing. He said that he was in school and beside his classroom there had been a chemical laboratory where he had seen a glass containing liquid. He was thirsty and he drank the liquid. It was hydrochloric acid and he was severely poisoned.

It is very important to know such things. They lead one beyond the condition of the moment. Thus it is often important, for example, with certain conditions of hysteria, to know whether the person concerned has undergone the shock of having been nearly drowned. These things must be gone into. We go into them quite naturally when we have real sympathy for the human being whom we want to heal, and all medicine must take its start from sympathy with the human being. If this sympathy is lacking, the most significant things will be forgotten. That is what must be remembered in this direction.

Do all of you intend to come tomorrow? If so, we will say more about these things. I wanted now—without giving any explanation, for that I will do tomorrow—to give you certain lines which may become a central meditation. If you think about these lines again and again they will help you to realize what is built into the human being out of the cosmos, out of the earth's periphery, and by earthly forces. If you ask yourselves in connection with the formation of the eye: How is the eye formed from the cosmos?—if you ask yourselves how a lung is formed out of the forces of the earth's periphery, out of the planetary forces moving in the elements of air and water—if you ask how metabolism in the human being arises in connection with the earthly—then, if you will meditate on these questions in the light of the following lines, you will learn to look into the real nature of the human being.

Translated by Steiner Online Library

We would hereby like to inform our friends of the resolutions adopted at the General Assembly on February 8, 1925, to guide the institutions grouped around the Goetheanum in Dornach in the spirit of the reorganization of the anthroposophical movement at the Christmas Conference in 1923. We begin with an excerpt from Dr. Steiner's words on these matters at the General Assembly on June 29, 1924:

"This Christmas Conference, my dear friends, was intended to bring a completely new direction to the whole anthroposophical movement, and above all, in this new direction, it should be avoided in the future that things in our society drift apart, and it should be ensured that in the future they are actually led out of the anthroposophical movement.

As you know, a board of directors was appointed at the Goetheanum during this Christmas Conference, which now feels fully responsible for what happens in the Anthroposophical Society as an initiative board. And the realization of this intention is only possible if the Anthroposophical Society in the future also stands before the full public as that which really shapes things, which really also feels fully responsible for all that exists. This can only be achieved if we now also bring about a unified constitution in the mutual relationship of the individual activities...

But then it will be necessary for the whole spirit of the Anthroposophical Society, as it now exists, to function as the registered association, so that outwardly it is the institution that represents everything here in Dornach. It will therefore be necessary to have: the “General Anthroposophical Society” as a registered association; within this Anthroposophical Society, four subdivisions will have to be distinguished. These four subdivisions are planned by me in such a way that I take into account not at all abstract programmatic things, but only the purely real things.

We have real institutions that have been active in living, organic activity from the very beginning in four currents: firstly, in the Anthroposophical Society itself. This will continue to exist as the Anthroposophical Society in the narrower sense as the first subdivision. It is completely independent of everything that has emerged in the way of programs since 1919. Secondly, within our movement, we have the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House, which has now moved to Dornach and cannot be treated as anything other than an integral part of the Anthroposophical movement itself. Again and again, efforts have been made to undermine this view, which actually lies at the heart of the matter, from there or from elsewhere. But if I wanted to compare one or other of the institutions working from the real and not from the programmatic in the field of national economy, for example, I could only ever cite the Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag, which did not develop from a grand program, but from the small, starting with two books and then working very slowly, so that it was always based on reality and never received any kind of subsidy from any source other than that which arose from the matter at hand, and which had absolutely real coverage options. So that in terms of national economic leadership, this Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House could even be cited as an example back then, to which one could adhere if one wants to base national economics on life. That would be the second subdivision.

The third subdivision – as I said, I am counting historically – would be the building to be erected by the present-day Verein des Goetheanum, which has emerged as the third institution and has also only worked from anthroposophical principles. It would therefore also be able to form a subdivision of the General Anthroposophical Society.

And the fourth to join would be the Clinical Therapeutic Institute, which was founded by Dr. Wegman on the basis of anthroposophical principles. And since I have to justify what it is that we are dealing with here, that we are really dealing with a real anthroposophical matter, I have to do so in the following way. I have to explain to you that there is an enormous difference between this Clinical Therapeutic Institute and other similar institutions. One could almost say that if none of the programmatic institutions had been created, this Clinical Therapeutic Institute, which emerged from the intentions of anthroposophy, and of course from medical intentions, this Clinical Therapeutic Institute would have been created anyway. If we disregard everything that has emerged since 1919, the Clinical Therapeutic Institute has not only had no need to take all this into consideration, but on the contrary has even stepped in for the other things at a crucial moment, so that here we have an institution that differs in its entire development and in its entire existence, also in the way it presents itself; it is a fruitful institution, one that is self-supporting and economically viable in itself. So this institution definitely belongs to those that are now to be subdivisions of the Anthroposophical Society. That is why the clinic is incorporated as such into the Anthroposophical Society and will form an integral part of the anthroposophical movement in the future.

These are the things that arise purely out of the matter itself. I would like to say that one cannot think differently about the further development of things here if one wants to put the matter on a healthy footing for the future. All other measures arise as necessary consequences.

The “General Anthroposophical Society” thus comprises (according to General Assembly of February 8, 1925 and entry in the Swiss Commercial Register of March 7, 1925) the following four subdivisions: a) the administration of the Anthroposophical Society, b) the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Press, c) the administration of the Goetheanum construction, d) the Clinical-Therapeutic Institute.

The functions of the former “Goetheanum Association”, which no longer exists under that name, will in future be taken over by the “Administration of the Goetheanum-Banes” (sub-division c of the General Anthroposophical Society). The previous division into full, associate and contributing members will be discontinued in this way.

In future, the members of the “General Anthroposophical Society” will be: a) “full members” (these are all members of the General Anthroposophical Society), b) “contributing members” (i.e. those who make annual contributions, in particular for the construction of the “Goetheanum”).

The full members pay through their national society or independent group (as before) an annual contribution of 15 Swiss francs to the “Administration of the General Anthroposophical Society”.

(“Individual members” who do not belong to a national society, etc., but are directly affiliated to the headquarters in Dornach: 30 Swiss francs.)

The contributing members (i.e. the former members of the Association of the Goetheanum and the new members) pay an annual contribution of at least 50 Swiss francs to the “Administration des Goetheanum-Baues”.

We would like to take this opportunity to ask members to keep all correspondence regarding questions about the General Anthroposophical Society, the reconstruction fund, book orders from the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House, etc., and orders of the magazine “Das Goetheanum”, etc. (even if in the same envelope), but as far as possible each on a separate sheet, and when sending contributions and cheques, always indicate exactly what they are for, because this both facilitates and speeds up the fulfillment of our friends' wishes and considerably lightens the workload of the Goetheanum leadership, thus freeing up resources for both sides to address important issues of the anthroposophical movement.

The spirit of the anthroposophical movement in these four streams that have emerged from it will be permanently effective in a unified way through the now completed integration of these institutions into the overall organism of the General Anthroposophical Society.

The Executive Council of the General Anthroposophical Society.

There is a significant contrast between the Christmas thought and the Easter thought. Understanding of the contrast and also of the living relationship between them will lead to an experience which, in a certain way, embraces the whole riddle of human existence.

The Christmas thought points to birth. Through birth, the eternal being of man comes into the world whence his material, bodily constitution is derived. The Christmas thought, therefore, links us with the super-sensible. Together with all its other associations, it points to the one pole of our existence, where as physical-material beings we are connected with the spiritual and super-sensible. Obviously, therefore, the birth of a human being in its full significance can never be explained by a science based entirely upon observation of material existence.

The thought underlying the Easter festival lies at the other pole of human experience. In the course of the development of Western civilisation this Easter thought assumed a form which has influenced the growth of the materialistic conceptions prevailing in the West. The Easter thought can be grasped—in a more abstract way, to begin with—when it is realised that the immortal, eternal being of man, the spiritual and super-sensible essence of being that cannot in the real sense be born, descends from spiritual worlds and is clothed in the human physical body. From the very beginning of physical existence the working of the spirit within the physical body actually leads this physical body towards death. The thought of death is therefore implicit in that of birth.

On other occasions I have said that the head-organisation of man can be understood only in the light of the knowledge that in the head a continual process of dying is taking place, but is counteracted by the life-forces in the rest of the organism. The moment the forces of death that are all the time present in the head and enable man to think, get the upper hand of his transient, mortal nature—at that moment actual death occurs.

In truth, therefore, the thought of death is merely the other side of that of birth and cannot be an essential part of the Easter thought. Hence at the time when Pauline Christianity was beginning to emerge from conceptions still based upon Eastern wisdom, it was not to the Death but to the Resurrection of Christ Jesus that men's minds were directed by words of power such as those of Paul: “If Christ be not risen, then is your faith vain.”

The Resurrection, the triumphant victory over death, the overcoming of death—this was the essence of the Easter thought in the form of early Christianity that was still an echo of Eastern wisdom. On the other hand, there are pictures in which Christ Jesus is portrayed as the Good Shepherd, watching over the eternal interests of man as he sleeps through his mortal existence. In early Christianity, man is everywhere directed to the words of the Gospel: “He Whom ye seek is not here.” Expanding this, we might say: Seek Him in spiritual worlds, not in the physical-material world. For if you seek Him in the physical-material world, you can but be told: He Whom you seek is no longer here.

The all-embracing wisdom by means of which in the first centuries of Christendom men were still endeavouring to understand the Mystery of Golgotha and all that pertained to it, was gradually submerged by the materialism of the West. In those early centuries, materialism had not reached anything like its full power, but was only slowly being prepared. It was not until much later that these first, still feeble and hardly noticeable tendencies were transformed into the materialism which took stronger and stronger hold of Western civilisation. The original Eastern concept of religion came to be bound up with the concept of the State that was developing in the West. In the fourth century A.D., Christianity became a State religion—in other words, there crept into Christianity something that is not religion at all.

Julian the Apostate, who was no Christian, but for all that a deeply religious man, could not accept what Christianity had become under Constantine. And so we see how in the fusion of Christianity with the declining culture of Rome, the influence of Western materialism begins to take effect—very slightly to begin with, but nevertheless perceptibly. And under this influence there appeared a picture of Christ Jesus which at the beginning simply was not there, was not part of Christianity in its original form: the picture of Christ Jesus as the crucified One, the Man of Sorrows, brought to His death by the indescribable suffering that was His lot.

This made a breach in the whole outlook of the Christian world. For the picture which from then onwards persisted through the centuries—the picture of Christ agonising on the Cross—is of the Christ Who could no longer be comprehended in His spiritual nature but in His bodily nature only. And the greater the emphasis that was laid on the signs of suffering in the human body, the more perfect the skill with which art succeeded at different periods in portraying the sufferings, the more firmly were the seeds of materialism planted in Christian feeling. The crucifix is the expression of the transition to Christian materialism. This in no way gainsays the profundity and significance with which art portrayed the sufferings of the Redeemer. Nevertheless it is a fact that with the concentration on this picture of the Redeemer suffering and dying on the Cross, leave was taken of a truly spiritual conception of Christianity.

Then there crept into this conception of the Man of Sorrows, that of Christ as Judge of the world, who must be regarded as merely another expression of Jahve or Jehovah—the figure portrayed so magnificently in the Sistine Chapel at Rome as the Dispenser of Judgment. The attitude of mind which caused the triumphant Spirit, the Victor over death, to vanish from the picture of the grave from which the Redeemer rises—this same attitude of mind, in the year 869 at the Eighth Ecumenical Council in Constantinople, declared belief in the Spirit to be heretical, decreed that man is to be conceived as consisting only of body and soul, the soul merely having certain spiritual qualities. Just as we see the spiritual reality expelled by the crucifix, just as the portrayals of the physical give expression to the pain-racked soul without the Spirit triumphant by Whom mankind is guarded and sustained, so do we see the Spirit struck away from the being of man by the decree of an Ecumenical Council.

The Good Friday festival and the Easter festival of Resurrection were largely combined. Even in days when men were not yet so arid, so empty of understanding, Good Friday became a festival in which the Easter thought was transformed in an altogether egotistic direction. Wallowing in pain, steeping the soul voluptuously in pain, feeling ecstasy in pain—this, for centuries, was associated with the Good Friday thought which, in truth, should merely have formed the background for the Easter thought. But men became less and less capable of grasping the Easter thought in its true form. The same humanity into whose creed had been accepted the principle that man consists of body and soul only—this same humanity demanded, for the sake of emotional life, the picture of the dying Redeemer as the counter-image of its own physical suffering, in order that this might serve—outwardly at least—as a background for the direct consciousness that the living Spirit must always be victorious over everything that can befall the physical body. Men needed, first, the picture of the martyr's death, in order to experience, by way of contrast, the true Easter thought.

We must always feel profoundly how, in this way, vision and experience of the Spirit gradually faded from Western culture, and we shall certainly look with wonder, but at the same time with a feeling of the tragedy of it all, at the attempts made by art to portray the Man of Sorrows on the Cross. Casual thoughts and feelings about what is needed in our time are not enough, my dear friends. The decline that has taken place in Western culture in respect of the understanding of the spiritual, must be perceived with all clarity. What has to be recognised to-day is that even the greatest achievements in a certain domain are something that humanity must now surmount. The whole of our Western culture needs the Easter thought, needs, in other words, to be lifted to the Spirit. The holy Mystery of Birth, the Christmas Mystery once revealed in such glory, gradually deteriorated in the course of Western civilisation into those sentimentalities which revelled in hymns and songs about the Jesus Babe and were in truth merely the corresponding pole of the increasing materialism. Men wallowed in sentimentalities over the little Child. Banal hymns about the Jesus Babe gradually became the vogue, obscuring men's feeling of the stupendous Christmas Mystery of the coming of a super-earthly Spirit. It is characteristic of a Christianity developing more and more in the direction of intellectualism that certain of its representatives to-day even go as far as to say that the Gospels are concerned primarily with the Father, not with the Son. True, the Resurrection thought has remained, but it is associated always with the thought of Death. A characteristic symptom is that with the development of modern civilisation, the Good Friday thought has come increasingly to the fore, while the Resurrection thought, the true Easter thought, has fallen more and more into the background. In an age when it is incumbent upon man to experience the resurrection of his own being in the Spirit, particular emphasis must be laid upon the Easter thought. We must learn to understand the Easter thought in all its depths. But this entails the realisation that the picture of the Man of Sorrows on the one side and that of the Judge of the world on the other, are both symptomatic of the march of Western civilisation into materialism. Christ as a super-sensible, super-earthly Being Who entered nevertheless into the stream of earthly evolution—that is the Sun-thought to the attainment of which all the forces of human thinking must be applied.

Just as we must realise that the Christmas thought of birth has become something that has dragged the greatest of Mysteries into the realm of trivial sentimentality, so too we must realise how necessary it is to emphasise through the Easter thought that there entered into human evolution at that time something that is forever inexplicable by earthly theories, but is comprehensible to spiritual knowledge, to spiritual insight.

Spiritual understanding finds in the Resurrection thought the first great source of strength, knowing that the spiritual and eternal—even within man—remains unaffected by the physical and bodily. In the words of St. Paul, “If Christ be not risen, then is your faith vain,” it recognises a confirmation—which in the modern age must be reached in a different, more conscious way—of the real nature of the Being of Christ.

This is what the Easter thought must call up in us to-day. Easter must become an inner festival, a festival in which we celebrate in ourselves the victory of the Spirit over the body. As history cannot be disregarded, we shall not ignore the figure of the pain-stricken Jesus, the Man of Sorrows, on the Cross; but above the Cross we must behold the Victor Who remains unaffected by birth as well as by death, and Who alone can lead our vision up to the eternal pastures of life in the Spirit. Only so shall we draw near again to the true Being of Christ. Western humanity has drawn Christ down to its own level, drawn Him down as the helpless Child, and as one associated pre-eminently with suffering and death.

I have often pointed out that the words, “Death is evil,” fell from the Buddha's lips as long before the Mystery of Golgotha as, after the Mystery of Golgotha, there appeared the crucifix, the figure of the crucified One. And I have also shown how then, in the sixth century, men looked upon death and felt it to be no evil but something that had no real existence. But this feeling, which was an echo from an Eastern wisdom even more profound than Buddhisn, was gradually obscured by the other, which clung to the picture of the pain-racked Sufferer.

We must grasp with the whole range of our feelings—not with thoughts alone, for their range is too limited—what the fate of man's conception of the Mystery of Golgotha has been in the course of the centuries. A true understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha is what we must again acquire. And be it remembered that even in the days of Hebraic antiquity, Jahve was not conceived as the Judge of the world in any juristic sense. In the Book of Job, the greatest dramatic presentation of religious experience in Hebraic antiquity, Job is presented as the suffering man, but the idea of the execution of justice from without is essentially absent. Job is the suffering man, the man who regards what outer circumstances inflict upon him, as his destiny. Only gradually does the juristic concept of retribution, punishment, become part of the world-order. Michelangelo's picture over the altar of the Sistine Chapel represents in one aspect, a kind of revival of the Jahve principle. But we need the Christ for Whom we can seek in our inmost being, because when we truly seek Him, He at once appears. We need the Christ Who draws into our will, warming, kindling, strengthening it for deeds demanded of us for the sake of human evolution. We need, not the suffering Christ, but the Christ Who hovers above the Cross, looking down upon that which—no longer a living reality—comes to an end on the Cross. We need the strong consciousness of the eternity of the Spirit, and this consciousness will not be attained if we give ourselves up to the picture of the crucifix alone. And when we see how the crucifix has gradually come to be a picture of the Man of suffering and pain, we shall realise what power this direction of human feeling has acquired. Men's gaze has been diverted from the spiritual to the earthly and physical. This aspect, it is true, has often been magnificently portrayed, but to those, as for example Goethe, who feel the need for our civilisation again to reach the Spirit, it is something, which, in a way, rouses their antipathy. Goethe has made it abundantly clear that the figure of the crucified Redeemer does not express what he feels to be the essence of Christianity, namely, the lifting of man to the Spirit.

The Good Friday mood, as well as the Easter mood, needs to be transformed. The Good Friday mood must be one that realises when contemplating the dying Jesus: This is only the other side of birth. Not to recognise that dying is also implicit in the fact of being born, is to lose sight of the full reality. A man who is able to feel that the mood of death associated with Good Friday merely presents the other pole of the entrance of the child into the world at birth, is making the right preparation for the mood of Easter—which can, in truth consist only in the knowledge: “Into whatever human sheath I have been born, my real being is both unborn and deathless.”—In his own eternal being man must unite with the Christ Who came into the world and cannot die, Who when He beholds the Man of Sorrows on the Cross, is looking down, not upon the eternal Self, but upon Himself incarnate in another.

We must be aware of what has actually happened in consequence of the fact that since the end of the first Christian century, Western civilisation has gradually lost the conception of the Spirit. When a sufficiently large number of men realise that the Spirit must come to life again in modern civilisation, the World-Easter thought will become a reality. This will express itself outwardly in the fact that man will not be satisfied with investigating the laws of nature only, or the laws of history which are akin to those of nature, but will yearn for understanding of his own will, for knowledge of his own inner freedom, and of the real nature of the will which bears him through and beyond the gate of death, but which in its true nature must be seen spiritually.

How is man to acquire the power to grasp the Pentecost thought, the outpouring of the Spirit, since this thought has been dogmatically declared by the Eighth Ecumenical Council at Constantinople to be an empty phrase? How is man to acquire the power to grasp this Pentecost thought if he is incapable of apprehending the true Easter thought—the Resurrection of the Spirit? The picture of the dying, pain-racked Redeemer must not confound him; he must learn that pain is inseparable from material existence.

The knowledge of this was a fundamental principle of the ancient wisdom which still sprang from instinctive depths of man's cognitional life. We must acquire this knowledge again, but now through acts of conscious cognition. It was a fundamental principle of the ancient wisdom that pain and suffering originate from man's union with matter. It would be foolishness to believe that because Christ passed through death as a Divine-Spiritual Being, He did not suffer pain; to declare that the pain associated with the Mystery of Golgotha was a mere semblance of pain would be to voice an unreality. In the deepest sense, this pain must be conceived as reality—and not as its mere counter-image. We must gain something from what stands before us when, in surveying the whole sweep of the evolution of humanity, we contemplate the Mystery of Golgotha.

When the picture of the man who had attained freedom at the highest level was presented to the candidates for ancient Initiation after they had completed the preparatory stages, had undergone all the exercises by which they could acquire certain knowledge presented to them in dramatic imagery, they were led at last before the figure of the Chrestos—the man suffering within the physical body, in the purple robe and wearing the crown of thorns. The sight of this Chrestos was meant to kindle in the soul the power that makes man truly man. And the drops of blood which the aspirant for Initiation beheld at vital points on the Chrestos figure were intended to be a stimulus for overcoming human weaknesses and for raising the Spirit triumphant from the inmost being. The sight of pain was meant to betoken the resurrection of the spiritual nature. The purpose of the figure before the candidate was to convey to him the deepest import of what may be expressed in these simple words: For your happiness you may thank many things in life—but if you have gained knowledge and insight into the spiritual connections of existence, for that you have to thank your Buffering, your pain. You owe your knowledge to the fact that you did not allow yourself to be mastered by suffering and pain but were strong enough to rise above them. And so in the ancient Mysteries, the figure of the suffering Chrestos was in turn replaced by the figure of the Christ triumphant Who looks down upon the suffering Chrestos as upon that which has been overcome. And now again it must be possible for the soul to have the Christ triumphant before and within it, especially in the will. That must be the ideal before us in this present time, above all in regard to what we wish to do for the future well-being of mankind.

But the true Easter thought will never be within our reach if we cannot realise that whenever we speak of Christ we must look beyond the earthly into the cosmic. Modern thinking has made the cosmos into a corpse. To-day we gaze at the stars and calculate their movements—in other words we make calculations about the corpse of the universe, never perceiving that in the stars there is life, and that the will of the cosmic Spirit prevails in their courses. Christ descended to humanity in order to unite the souls of men with this cosmic Spirit. And he alone proclaims the Gospel of Christ truly, who affirms that what the sun reveals to the physical senses is the outer expression of the Spirit of our universe, of its resurrecting Spirit.

There must be a living realisation of the connection of this Spirit of the universe with the sun, and of how the time of the Easter festival has been determined by the relationship prevailing between the sun and the moon in spring. A link must be made with that cosmic reality in accordance with which the Easter festival was established in earth-evolution. We must come to realise that it was the ever-watchful Guardian-Spirits of the cosmos who, through the great cosmic timepiece in which the sun and the moon are the hands in respect of earthly existence, have pointed explicitly to the time in the evolution of the world and of humanity at which the Festival of the Resurrection is to be celebrated. With spiritual insight we must learn to perceive the course of the sun and moon as the two hands of the cosmic time piece, just as for the affairs of physical existence we learn to understand the movements of the hands on a clock. The physical and earthly must be linked to the super-physical and the super-earthly.

The Easter thought can be interpreted only in the light of super-earthly realities, for the Mystery of Golgotha, in its aspect as the Resurrection Mystery, must be distinguished from ordinary human happenings. Human affairs take their course on the earth in an altogether different way. The earth received the cosmic forces and, in the course of its evolution, the human powers of will penetrate the metabolic processes of man's being. But since the Mystery of Golgotha took place, a new influx of will streamed into earthly happenings. There took place on earth a cosmic event, for which the earth is merely the stage. Thereby man was again united with the cosmos.

That is what must be understood, for only so can the Easter thought be grasped in all its magnitude. Therefore it is not the picture of the crucifix alone that must stand before us, however grandly and sublimely portrayed by art. “He Whom ye seek is not here”—is the thought that must arise. Above the Cross there must appear to you the One Who is here now, Who by the spirit calls you to a spirit-awakening.

This is the true Easter thought that must find its way into the evolution of mankind; it is to this that the human heart and mind must be lifted. Our age demands of us that we shall not only deepen our understanding of what has been created, but that we shall become creators of the new. And even if it be the Cross itself, in all the beauty with which artists have endowed it, we may not rest content with that picture; we must hear the words of the Angels who, when we seek in death and suffering, exclaim to us: “He Whom ye seek is no longer here.”

We have to seek the One Who is here, by turning at Eastertime to the Spirit of Whom the only true picture is that of the Resurrection. Then we shall be able, in the right way, to pass from the Good Friday mood of suffering to the spiritual mood of Easter Day. In this Easter mood we shall also be able to find the strength with which our will must be imbued if the forces of decline are to be countered by those which lead humanity upwards. We need the forces that can bring about this ascent. And the moment we truly understand the Easter thought of Resurrection, this Easter thought—bringing warmth and illumination—will kindle within us the forces needed for the future evolution of mankind.

As we are together for the last time during this Christmas Meeting which should be a source of strength and of vital importance for the Anthroposophical Movement, you will allow me to give this lecture as a supplement to the many vistas opened for us by the series of lectures just finished, while also giving tentative indications concerning the future of anthroposophical strivings.

When we look at the world to-day—and it has been the same for years now—destructive elements on a colossal scale are everywhere in evidence. Forces that are actively at work enable us to have forebodings of the abysses into which Western civilisation will continue to steer. When we think of those individuals who are outwardly the spiritual leaders in various domains of life, we shall perceive that these men are in the throes of an ominous, universal sleep. They think, or at least most of them were still thinking only a short time ago, that until the nineteenth century mankind was childish and primitive in respect of understanding and conceptions of the world. Then modern science appeared in its many branches and now—so it is thought—there exists something that must through all eternity be cultivated as the truth.

The people who think this are really giving way to extreme arrogance, only they are not aware of it. On the other hand there sometimes arises, even in men to-day, a premonition that things are not, after all, as I have described.

Some little time ago it was still possible for me to give lectures in Germany organised by the Wolff Bureau. They attracted extraordinarily large audiences so that the existence of a desire for Anthroposophy became obvious to many people. Among the many nonsensical utterances of opponents there was one voice which to be sure was not much cleverer than the others in respect of content but which nevertheless indicated a remarkable premonition. It consisted in a newspaper report of one of the lectures I had given in Berlin. The notice was to this effect: When one listens to something of this kind, one becomes attentive to the fact that something is going on not only on the Earth—I am quoting the notice approximately—but in the whole Cosmos something is happening which summons men to adopt a spirituality different from what existed previously. Now, the forces of the Cosmos—not only earthly impulses—demand something from men. A kind of revolution is taking place in the Cosmos, the result of which must be the striving for a new spirituality.

Such utterances were constantly to be heard and were very worthy of note. The fact of the matter is this: the impulse that must be working in what is now to go out from Dornach must—as I emphasised from every possible point of view during the Meeting itself—be an impulse originating in the spiritual world, not on the Earth. Our striving here is to develop the strength to follow impulses from the spiritual world. That is why, in the evening lectures during this Christmas Meeting, I spoke of manifold impulses at work in the course of historical evolution in order that hearts could be opened for the reception of the spiritual impulses which have yet to stream into the earthly world, which are not derived from that world itself. Everything for which the earthly world hitherto has rightly been the vehicle, proceeded from the spiritual world. And if we are to achieve anything fruitful for the earthly world, the impulses for it must be brought from the spiritual world.

This prompts the assertion that the impulses we ought rightly to take with us from the Meeting for our further activity must be connected with great responsibility.

Let us think for a short time of the responsibility laid upon us by that Meeting. Anyone with a sense of the reality of the spiritual world could encounter many personalities during recent decades, and observing them spiritually experience bitter feelings regarding the future destiny of humanity on Earth. One could encounter one's fellow men on the Earth in the way that is possible spiritually and observe these human beings during their sleep while they are in the spiritual world with Ego and astral body, having left their physical and etheric bodies. During recent decades, explorations connected with the destinies of Egos and astral bodies during the sleep of human beings have resulted in knowledge calling for great responsibility on the part of those who possess it. One often saw souls, who had left their physical and etheric bodies during sleep, approaching the Guardian of the Threshold.

In the course of evolution the Guardian of the Threshold has been brought to men's consciousness in very many different ways. Many a legend, many a saga—for it is in this form, not in the form of historical tradition that things of the greatest importance are preserved—many a legend tells of how, in earlier times, this or that personality met the Guardian of the Threshold and was instructed by him how to enter the spiritual world and return again into the physical world. Every legitimate entry into the spiritual world must include the possibility of being able at any and every minute to return into the physical world and to live there as a practical, thoughtful human being, not as a visionary or as an ecstatic mystic.

Fundamentally speaking, it was this that was demanded by the Guardian of the Threshold through all the ages of human endeavours to enter the spiritual world. But notably in the last third of the nineteenth century hardly any human beings who succeeded in approaching the Guardian of the Threshold in waking consciousness were to be seen. In our present time, when it is historically incumbent upon the whole of mankind to encounter the Guardian of the Threshold in some form, one finds how souls during sleep approach the Guardian of the Threshold as Egos and astral bodies, and the pictures that are revealed are full of significance. The stern Guardian of the Threshold has around him groups of human souls in the state of sleep, souls who in waking consciousness lack the strength to approach this Guardian of the Threshold. They approach him while they sleep.

When one watches the scene presented there, a thought connected with what I have called the seed of great and essential responsibility comes to one. The souls approaching the Guardian of the Threshold during the state of sleep plead with the consciousness then prevailing—in the waking state everything remains unconscious or subconscious—plead to be admitted into the spiritual world, to be allowed to cross the threshold. And in numberless cases one then hears the voice of the stern Guardian of the Threshold saying: For your own well-being you may not cross the threshold. You may not be allowed to enter the spiritual world. You must go back!—For if the Guardian of the Threshold were to permit such souls to enter the spiritual world, they would cross the threshold and enter that world with the concepts imparted to them by the schools, education and civilisation of to-day, with the concepts and ideas with which the human being is obliged to grow up from about the age of six to basically the end of his life on Earth.

The intrinsic character of these concepts and ideas is such that what a man has become through them in modern civilisation and education means that he enters the spiritual world paralysed in soul. Moreover, he would return to the physical world empty-headed in respect of thoughts and ideas. If the Guardian of the Threshold were not to reject many human souls of the modern age but allow them to enter the spiritual world, they would feel on awakening: I am incapable of thinking, my thoughts do not connect with my brain, I am obliged to go through the world void of thoughts. For such is the effect of the abstract ideas which man applies to everything to-day. With these ideas he can enter the spiritual world but not come forth from it again. And when one witnesses this scene which is experienced during sleep by more souls than is usually imagined, one feels: Oh! if only it were possible to protect these souls from having also to experience at death what they experience during sleep. For if the condition that is experienced in the presence of the Guardian of the Threshold were to be repeated for a sufficient length of time, if civilisation were to remain long enough under the sway of what current education provides, then the souls of men would pass through the gates of death into the spiritual world but would be unable to bring any mental vigour into the next earthly life. With the thoughts prevailing to-day it is possible for a man to enter the spiritual world but he can only come out of it again paralysed in soul.

You see, modern civilisation adopts the form of spiritual life that has for so long been cultivated, but real life does not allow this. Civilisation as it now is might continue to progress for a time. During waking life souls would have no inkling of the existence of the Guardian of the Threshold and during sleep would be rejected by him in order to avoid mental paralysis; and this would finally result in a race of men being born in the future with no understanding, no possibility of applying ideas in their future earthly life; and all thinking, all ideation would vanish from the Earth. A diseased, purely instinctive human race would people the Earth. Evil feelings and unbridled emotions without the guiding power of ideas would take hold of the evolution of humanity. It is not only through observation of the souls confronting the Guardian of the Threshold—souls which can gain no entrance to the spiritual world—it is not only through observing this that a sorrowful picture is presented to the seer, but in a different connection there is another factor as well.

If on the journey of which I have spoken, when the souls of sleeping human beings confronting the Guardian of the Threshold can be observed, one is accompanied by a human being belonging not to Western but to Oriental civilisation, a terrible reproach of the whole of Western civilisation may be heard from him, to this effect: If things continue as they now are, when the human beings living to-day appear on Earth in new incarnations, the Earth will become barbaric. Human beings will live devoid of ideas, in instincts only. You Westerners have brought things to this pass because you have abandoned the ancient spirituality of the East.

A glimpse into the spiritual world such as I have described may well give rise to a sense of great responsibility. And here in Dornach there must be a place where for those human beings who have ears to hear, direct and significant experiences in the spiritual world can be described. Here there must be a place where sufficient strength is generated not merely to indicate in terms of the dialectic-empirical mentality of to-day that here or there little traces of spiritual reality exist. If Dornach is to fulfil its task, actual happenings in the spiritual world must be spoken of openly. Men must be able to hear of the impulses in the spiritual world which then pour into and control the natural world and Nature itself. In Dornach men must be able to hear of actual experiences, actual forces, actual Beings of the spiritual world. Here there must be the High School of true Spiritual Science. Henceforth we must not draw back when confronted by the shallowness of the scientific thoughts of to-day which, as I have described, lead in the state of sleep to the stern Guardian of the Threshold. In Dornach the strength must be acquired to confront and experience the spiritual world in its reality.

There must be no dialectical tirades from here on the subject of the inadequacy of modern scientific theory. I was obliged, however, to call attention to the position in which human beings are placed when confronting the Guardian of the Threshold on account of these scientific theories and their offshoots in the orthodox schools of to-day. If what has been said at this Christmas Meeting is sincerely applied in the life of soul, the Meeting will be a forceful impulse which the soul can then apply in the activity that is needed in this age so that in their next incarnations men may be able to confront the Guardian of the Threshold in the right way. This will ensure that civilisation in its own right can enable men to face and hold their own when confronting the Guardian of the Threshold.

Just compare the civilisation of to-day with that of earlier times during all of which men's thoughts and concepts were directed primarily to the super-sensible world, to the Gods, to the world of productive, generative, creative forces. With concepts that were concerned primarily with the Gods, men were able to contemplate the earthly world and also to understand it in the light of these concepts and ideas. If with these concepts—worthy of the Gods as they were—a man came before the Guardian of the Threshold, the Guardian would say to him: You may pass, for you bring over the threshold into the super-sensible world thoughts that were already directed to the super-sensible world during your earthly life in a physical body. Thus when you return into the physical world of the senses you will have enough strength to protect you from being paralysed by the spectacle of the super-sensible world.

To-day man develops concepts and ideas which in accordance with the genius of the age he wants to apply only to the material world. These concepts and ideas are concerned with every possible aspect of weight, measure and the like, but they have nothing to do with the Gods and are not worthy of the Gods. Hence to souls who have completely succumbed to materialistic ideas that are unworthy of the Gods, the voice of the Guardian of the Threshold thunders when they pass before him in the state of sleep: Do not cross the threshold! You have squandered your ideas on the world of the senses. Hence you must remain with them in the world of the senses. If you do not wish to be paralysed in your life of soul you may not enter the world of the Gods as long as you hold such ideas.

These things must be said, not in order to be the subject of argument but because every individual should let his mind and soul be permeated by them and thus develop the attitude of mind that should have been generated in him by this solemn Christmas Meeting of the Anthroposophical Society. For more important than anything else we take with us is the recognition of the spiritual world which gives the certainty that in Dornach there will be created a living centre of spiritual knowledge.

Hence a really splendid note was struck this morning when Dr. Zeylmans spoke in connection with the sphere of medicine, saying that it is no longer possible to-day for bridges to be built from orthodox science to what it is our aim to found in Dornach. If we were to speak of what it is hoped to develop in the sphere of medicine here by boasting that our products can stand the test of all modern clinical requirements, then we should never reach any definite goal. For then other people would simply say: That is just a new remedy; and we too have produced plenty of new remedies!

It is of essential importance that a branch of practical life such as medicine should be taken in the real sense into anthroposophical life. That is what I certainly understood to be Dr. Zeylmans' wish when he said this morning that an individual who becomes a doctor to-day really longs for something that gives impulses from a new corner of the world. In the domain of medicine this is just what will be done from here in the future, together with many another branch of genuine anthroposophical activity. It will be worked out now, with Dr. Wegman as my helper, as a system of medicine based upon Anthroposophy. It is a dire need of humanity and will soon be available. It is also my intention to establish as soon as possible a close relationship between the Goetheanum and the Clinic in Arlesheim that is proving to be so beneficial. The work there will be orientated entirely towards Anthroposophy. That is also Dr. Wegman's intention.

In speaking as he did, Dr. Zeylmans also indicated what attitude the Vorstand in Dornach will adopt in all spheres of anthroposophical activity. In future we shall know exactly how matters stand. We shall not say: let us bring Eurythmy to this or that town, for if people first see Eurythmy without hearing anything about Anthroposophy, Eurythmy will please them. Then, later on perhaps, they will come to us, and because they have liked Eurythmy and have heard that Anthroposophy is behind it, Anthroposophy too may please them! Or again, it may be said: In the practice of medicine people must be shown that ours are the right remedies and then they will buy them; later on they may discover that Anthroposophy is behind them and then they will come to Anthroposophy!

We must have the courage to realise that such procedure is dishonest and must be abandoned. Anthroposophy will then find its way in the world. Our striving for truth here in Dornach will in the future be without fanaticism, will be advocated honestly and candidly. Perhaps in this way we can make reparation for principles that have been gravely sinned against in recent years.

We must leave this Meeting, which has led to the Founding of the General Anthroposophical Society, not with trifling but with solemn thoughts. But I think that nobody need have experienced any pessimism as a result of what took place here at Christmas. We had, it is true, to pass the tragic ruins of the Goetheanum every day but I think that all those who climbed the hill and passed the ruins during the Meeting will have become aware of what our friends have understood in their hearts and that the following thought will have become a reality to them: Spiritual flames of fire will go forth from the new Goetheanum that will come into being in the future, for the blessing of mankind, will come into being through our activity and devotion. And the greater the courage with which to conduct the affairs of Anthroposophy that we take with us from this Meeting, the more effectively have we grasped the spiritual impulse of hope that has pervaded the Meeting.

The scene that I have described to you—the scene that is so often to be seen of modern man with the results of his civilisation and education facing the Guardian of the Threshold—this scene does not actually occur among perceptive Anthroposophists. But it does sometimes happen that this warning is necessary: You must develop the resolute courage to become aware of and avow your obedience to this voice from the spiritual world, for you have begun to wake. Courage will keep you wakeful; lack of courage—that and that alone could cause you to sleep.

The voice of exhortation to unfold courage and wakefulness—that is the other variant for Anthroposophists in the life of modern civilisation. Non-Anthroposophists hear the voice which says: Remain outside the spiritual world, for you have misused the ideas which are coined for purely earthly objects; you have amassed no ideas that are worthy of the Gods. Hence you would be paralysed on your return into the physical world of the senses. To the souls who are truly anthroposophical souls, however, it is said: You have now to be tested in respect only of your courage to avow adherence to the voice which because of the trend and inclination of your souls and hearts you can certainly hear and understand.

Yesterday, a year ago, we were watching the flames that were destroying the old Goetheanum, but just as we did not allow ourselves then to be interrupted in our continuation of the work, so to-day we are justified in hoping that when a physical Goetheanum will again be there, it will be merely the symbol of our spiritual Goetheanum which we will bear with us as idea when we now again go out into the world.

Over the Foundation Stone laid here will be erected the building in which the single stones will be the work achieved in every one of our Groups all over the world. We will now turn our thoughts to this work and become conscious of the responsibility of the men of to-day when they are standing before the Guardian of the Threshold who is obliged to forbid them entrance into the spiritual world.

Quite certainly it will never occur to us to feel anything except, the deepest pain and sorrow for what happened to us a year ago. But of one thing we may be sure—everything in the world that has achieved some measure of greatness is born from pain. May our own pain be applied in such a way that a vigorous, light-filled Anthroposophical Society will come into being as the result of your work, my dear friends.

To this end we will ponder deeply on the words with which I began the Christmas Meeting and with which I want to end it. May it become for us a festival of consecration not only of a year's beginning but of the beginning of a turning-point of worlds, to which we will dedicate ourselves in selfless cultivation of the spiritual life:

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the Limbs
Which bear thee through the world of Space
Into the ocean-being of the Spirit.
Practise Spirit-Recollection
In the depths of soul.
Where in the wielding
World-Creator-Life
Thine own I
Comes to being
Within the I of God.
Then in the All-World-Being of Man
Thou wilt truly live.

For the Father-Spirit of the Heights holds sway
In Depths of Worlds begetting Life.
Spirits of Strength!
Let this ring out from the Heights
And in the Depths be echoed,
Speaking:
From God, Mankind has Being.
The Spirits hear it in East and West and North and South:
May human beings hear it!

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the beat of Heart and Lung
Which leads thee through the rhythmic tides of Time
Into the feeling of thine own Soul-being.
Practise Spirit-Mindfulness
In balance of the soul,
Where the surging
Deeds of the World's Becoming
Do thine own I
Unite
Unto the I of the World.
Then 'mid the weaving of the Soul of Man
Thou wilt truly feel.
For the Christ-Will in the encircling Round holds sway
the Rhythms of the Worlds, blessing the Soul.
Spirits of Light!
Let this be fired from the East
And through the West be formed,
Speaking:
In Christ, Death becomes Life.
The Spirits hear it in East and West and North and South:
May human beings hear it!

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the resting Head
Which from the ground of the Eternal
Opens to thee the Thoughts of Worlds.
Practise Spirit-Vision
In quietness of thought,
Where the eternal aims of Gods
World-Being's Light
On thine own I
Bestow
For thy free Willing.
Then from the ground of the Spirit in Man
Thou wilt truly think.

For the Spirit's Universal Thoughts hold sway
the Beings of all Worlds, craving for Light.
Spirits of Soul!
Let this be prayed in the Depths
And from the Heights be answered,
Speaking:
the Spirit's Universal Thoughts, the Soul awakens.
The Spirits hear it in East and West and North and South:
May human beings hear it!

At the turning-point of Time
The Spirit-Light of the World
Entered the stream of Earthly Being.
Darkness of Night
Had held its sway;
Day-radiant Light
Poured into the souls of men;
Light that gives Warmth
To simple Shepherds' Hearts,
Light that enlightens
The wise Heads of Kings.

O Light Divine,
O Sun of Christ!
Warm Thou
Our Hearts
Enlighten Thou
Our Heads,
That good may become
What from our Hearts we would found
And from our Heads direct
With single purpose.

And so, my dear friends, carry out into the world your warm hearts in which you have laid the Foundation Stone for the Anthroposophical Society, carry out into the world these warm hearts which promote strong, health-giving activity in the world. And help will be vouchsafed to you, enlightening your heads in what you would fain direct with single purpose. We will set about this with all possible strength. And if we prove to be worthy of this aim we shall see that a good star will hold sway over what is willed from here. Follow this good star, my dear friends! We shall see whither the Gods will lead us by the light of this star.

O Light Divine,
O Sun of Christ!
Warm Thou
Our Hearts
Enlighten Thou
Our Heads.

We have heard how there grew out of the Mysteries that which unites the consciousness of men with the world in such manner that this union comes to expression in the festivals of the year. We have understood above all how the Easter Festival grew out of the principle of initiation. From all this you will have realised how great a part the Mysteries have played in the whole evolution of mankind. All the spiritual life that passed through the world and evolved through mankind proceeded in ancient times from the Mysteries. The Mysteries were very powerful with respect to the whole guidance of the spiritual life.

Now mankind was predestined from the outset to evolve to spiritual freedom. The development of freedom necessarily involved a decline in the ancient Mysteries. For a period of time human beings had to stand less in connection with such a mighty guidance as proceeded from the Mysteries; they had to be left more to their own resources. Certainly we cannot say that the time has already come today when men have won true inner freedom and are ripe to pass on to what should follow the age of freedom. Decidedly we cannot say so. Nevertheless a sufficient number of human beings have passed through incarnations in which the power of the Mysteries was felt less than in former ages. And though the fruits of these incarnations are not yet ripe today, though the harvest is not yet, nevertheless it is there within the human being, it is latent in their souls.

If, as we have often said, a more spiritual age is now approaching once again, human beings will indeed evolve in time what in their dim consciousness they have not yet evolved today. But this above all will be necessary, that the knowledge, the vision, the conscious experience of the Spiritual that can arise from present-day Initiation shall be met out of the very freedom which men have gained with reverence and true respect. For if we do not revere, if we do not treasure it, true knowledge or indeed any spiritual life of mankind is in reality impossible. And in this sense we shall rightly use the times of the sacred festivals, we shall use them by trying to plant, however little, into our souls all this reverence for the spiritual life that has evolved in the course of human history. We shall learn to look as intimately as we can and see how the outer historical events signify facts and carry the spiritual life from one age into another.

We know in the first place that human individuals themselves return to the Earth again and again in their repeated earthly lives. Thus they carry with them experiences of former epochs into later ones. The human beings themselves are the most important factor in the progressive evolution of all that has taken place in human history. But the human beings of every age live in a particular environment. And the environment created by the Mysteries is among the most important. Thus it is a most important factor in the progress of mankind to carry from one age into another what human beings experienced in the Mysteries and what they then experience again, be it once more in sacred Mysteries working forth into mankind, or be it in some other forms of knowledge. Today it has to be in other forms of knowledge. For the real life of the Mysteries has more or less receded so far as the outer world is concerned and has not yet emerged again.

It is indeed the case that when that spiritual impulse which has gone forth from here, from the Goetheanum through the Christmas Foundation meeting, really finds its way into the life of the Anthroposophical Society—(the Society leading on to the Classes partially begun)—this Anthroposophical Society will provide the foundation for the Mysteries of the future. The future life of the Mysteries must consciously and deliberately be planted by this Anthroposophical Society. For this Anthroposophical Society has ever before it an event which can be turned to good account in future evolution even as a similar event was turned to good account once upon a time, namely, the burning of the Temple of Ephesus. Then and now, a great and deep wrong was done. Yet on the different planes of life these things appear in different ways and it lies in the freedom of mankind to turn to good account that which on one plane is a dreadful wrong, for it is just through these terrible events that a real progress of mankind can be achieved.

Now to enter into these things with sympathetic understanding we must grasp them, as I already said, as intimately as possible. How did the spiritual life of the world live in the Mysteries? I showed yesterday how the fixing of the yearly Easter Festival proceeds from the constellations of the Sun and Moon considered in a spiritual sense. I showed how the other planets are seen from the standpoint of the Moon. According to what is there experienced in beholding the other planets, man as he descends from his pre-earthly life into his earthly life is guided and instructed in the forming of his light-ether body.

We want to gain a true and vivid conception of how this light-ether body is created through the Moon forces, through the observation if I may put it so, in the spiritual Moon observatory. We want to understand how these ethereal forces are transmitted to the human being. To this end we may either observe it, as we have tried to do, out of the Cosmos directly, where these things are inscribed, where they exist as a real fact; but it is also important to let our hearts and minds be impressed by the part which human beings took in such a truth as this in different ages.

Never did human hearts and minds partake so intimately in this descent from the pre-earthly into the earthly life with regard to the final stage, the investment of man with his etheric body, never did they partake in this fact so intimately and deeply as in the Mysteries of Ephesus.

In the Mysteries of Ephesus the whole service that was devoted to her who is exoterically known as Diana or Artemis, the Goddess of Ephesus, was calculated to enable man to experience and enter into the spiritual life and movement within the ether of the Cosmos. We may say indeed that when the adherents of the Mystery of Ephesus approached the image of the Goddess they had a feeling, a sensation which grew into a spiritual listening and may be thus expressed. It was as though the Goddess spoke: “I delight in all things fruitful and creative in the far cosmic ether.”

A deep impression was made on those present when the Temple Goddess thus expressed her joy in all things growing, springing, sprouting in the far-spread ether of the world. And there was a feeling deeply akin to the springing and sprouting of life, a feeling that was wafted through the spiritual atmosphere of the Ephesian Sanctuary as a magic breath. For the Mystery was so arranged and instituted that we may truly say, nowhere have men lived with the growth of the plant life, with the springing and sprouting of the Earth into the plants, as they did in Ephesus.

And as a consequence a certain instruction could be given with great clearness in these Ephesian Mysteries, an instruction, if I may call it so, whose aim was to bring specially near to the heart and mind of those who belonged to Ephesus the secret of the Moon of which I told you yesterday.

This was something that every one of them had as his own experience. He knew what it was to feel himself as a form of light, for this process of receiving one's form of light through the Moon was made alive and vivid to the Ephesian pupils and Initiates. And there was a certain institution in the Ephesian Mysteries such that he who could let it work upon him in the sanctuary was altogether transplanted into this creating of one's being out of the Sunlight that wove around the Moon. And then there sounded forth towards him as though it were sounding from the Sun: J O A. (I O A).

He knew that this J O A calls to life his “I” and his astral body. J O—“I”, astral body; and then the approach of the light-ether body in the A—J O A. Now, as the J O A vibrated within him he felt himself as Ego, as astral body, as ether body.

And then it was as though there sounded forth and upward from the Earth—for man himself was transported into cosmic regions—it was as though there sounded to him upward from the Earth that which should permeate the J O A: eh-v. These were the forces of the Earth rising upwards in the eh-v.—J eh O v A.

And now in the JehOvA he felt the entire human being. He felt a premonition of the physical body which he would only have on Earth in the consonants belonging to the vowels; while the latter indicate, in the J O A, the “I”, the astral body, the etheric body. It was through this living penetration into the JehOvA that the Ephesian disciple could experience the final steps of man in his descent out of the spiritual world.

And in this feeling of the J O A one felt oneself as the very sound J O A within the light. Then one was truly MAN - resounding “I”, resounding astral body, clothed in the light-radiant etheric body. One was sound within the light. And so indeed one is as cosmic man, and as such one is able to perceive what is seen in the surrounding Cosmos just as here on Earth one is able to perceive through the eye what takes place within the physical horizon of the Earth.

And when the Ephesian pupil bore within him this J O A, when he bore this within him, he really felt himself as though transported into the Moon sphere; he partook in all that could be observed from the standpoint of the Moon.

At this stage the human being was still human being in the widest sense. Only at his descent to Earth did he become man and woman. But the disciple felt himself transported up into this region of the pre-earthly life which we pass through as we approach the Earth once more. It was in Ephesus that it became most intimately possible thus to arise into the Moon sphere, and then the disciples bore in their hearts and souls what they had witnessed and experienced, and it resounded in them somewhat as follows: [e.Ed: The original German is printed at the end of this lecture.]

 Offspring of all the Worlds! Thou Form of Light, Firm framéd by the Sun, with Luna's might, Endow'd with sounding Mars' life-stirring song, And swift-wing'd Mercury's motion in thy limbs, Illum'd with royal Jupiter's all-wisdom And grace-bestowing Venus' loveliness—That ghostly Saturn's ancient memoried devoutness Unto the world of Space and Time thee hallow! 

Every Ephesian was permeated by this experience which he felt among the greatest things that pulsated through his human being.

 Offspring of all the Worlds! Thou Form of Light, Firm framéd by the Sun, with Luna's might, Endow'd with sounding Mars' life-stirring song, And swift-wing'd Mercury's motion in thy limbs. Illum'd with royal Jupiter's all-wisdom And grace-bestowing Venus' loveliness—That ghostly Saturn's ancient memoried devoutness Unto the world of Space and Time thee hallow! 

It was indeed an experience in which the adherent of the Ephesian Mysteries felt himself as man fully and intensely, when there resounded in his ears that which lies hidden in these verses. For he felt: Now it has dawned upon me how I am connected with the planetary system in the forces of my etheric body. Pregnantly he brought this to expression, for these words are addressed to the etheric body by the great universe:

 Offspring of all the Worlds! Thou Form of Light, Firm framéd by the Sun, with Luna's might. 

Here man is feeling himself within the power of the Moonlight.

 Endow'd with sounding Mars' life-stirring song. 

The sound which has an active, a creative, quality sounded forth to him from Mars. And then came that which fills the limbs of man with strength so that he becomes a mobile being:

 And swift-wing'd Mercury's motion in thy limbs. 

And from Jupiter the light pours forth:

 Illum'd with royal Jupiter's all-wisdom, 

And from Venus:

 And grace-bestowing Venus' loveliness—

So at length Saturn may gather it all up, rounding man off both inwardly and outwardly, preparing him to descend to the Earth and clothe himself in a physical body that he may live on, on Earth, as this being who in a physical garment bears the God within him:

 That ghostly Saturn's ancient memoried devoutness Unto the world of Space and Time thee hallow! 

From all that I have here described, you will see that the spiritual life in Ephesus was filled with radiant light and colour. In this life of inner light and colour there was contained all that they knew of the true dignity of man throughout the Cosmos gathered together in the Easter thought. Many of the wanderers of whom I told you yesterday, who went from Mystery to Mystery that they might experience the life of the Mysteries in its totality, many of them declared ever and again with inner light and intimate joy how the harmony of the spheres had sounded forth to them in Ephesus when they had gazed into the Cosmos from the standpoint of the Moon, how the radiant astral light of the world had shone forth for them, how they had felt it in the Sunlight quivering around the Moon, the Sunlight filled with the spirit of the astral light, even as man himself is filled with living soul. In other places they had not experienced it thus, not at any rate with such joy and gladness and inner artistic understanding.

Now all these things were bound up with the Temple Sanctuary which then went up in the flames lit by the hand of a criminal or of a madman; but as I told you during the Christmas Foundation Meeting, [e.Ed: See: World History in the Light of Anthroposophy. (Eight lectures given at Dornach, 24^th – 31^st December, 1923. Obtainable from Rudolf Steiner Press.)] two Initiates of the Ephesian Mysteries were reincarnated in Aristotle and in Alexander. And these Individualities then came near what was still to be felt of these things in their time in the Mysteries of Samothrace.

At this point a seemingly chance event is of great spiritual significance in the evolution of the world. We have already mentioned it in our circle, indeed we mentioned it many years ago. When the Temple of Ephesus was burning it was the hour of Alexander's birth. But as the Temple burned something was really taking place.

How infinitely much had happened in the course of centuries for those who had belonged to this Temple. How much of spiritual light and wisdom had passed through these Temple spaces! Now that the flames broke forth from the Temple, all that had gone on in these Temple spaces was communicated to the cosmic ether. Thus we may truly say: The continuous Easter Festival at Ephesus which had been contained within these Temple spaces has since been written—albeit in letters less clearly visible—written in the great orb of the heavens inasmuch as the heavens are ethereal.

And it is so with many things. Very much of what is now human wisdom was in ancient times enclosed in Temple walls. It escaped the Temple walls, it is written in the cosmic ether and is visible there as soon as a man rises to spiritual Imagination. Spiritual Imagination is, as it were, the interpreter of the secret of the stars. Thus we may say, into the cosmic ether are written what were once upon a time the secrets of the Temples and we can read them imaginatively.

But we can also put it differently and it still remains the same. We can also say: I rise in the starlit night and look up to the heavens and give myself up to the impression of it all. And if I have the necessary faculty, all that is contained in the forms of the constellations and in the movements of the planets is transformed as it were into a great cosmic script.—And when we read the cosmic script a real content emerges of the kind which I described yesterday for the secret of the Moon. These things are really to be read in the cosmic writing, when the stars mean more to us than something merely to be calculated mechanically, mathematically, namely when they become for us the letters of the cosmic script.

To develop this idea still further, I must now refer to the following. In the time when the ancient Mysteries were already receding, the Mysteries of the Kabiri at Samothrace still existed. At the time of Alexander, Samothrace was still there as a place of remembrance, nay more, as a place for the active cultivation of the Mysteries, while as a general rule the life of the Mysteries was in its decline.

And there came the moment when through the influence of the Mysteries of the Kabiri there arose for Alexander and Aristotle something like a memory of the old Ephesian time which both of them had lived through during a certain century. And once more the J O A resounded and once again the words resounded:

 Offspring of all the Worlds! Thou Form of Light, Firm framéd by the Sun, with Luna's might, Endow'd with sounding Mars' life-stirring song And swift-wing'd Mercury's motion in thy limbs, Illum'd with royal Jupiter's all-wisdom And grace-bestowing Venus' loveliness—That ghostly Saturn's ancient memoried devoutness Unto the world of Space and Time thee hallow! 

But in this remembrance, in this historic remembrance of an ancient time, there lay a certain power to create something new. And from that moment there went forth the power to create a new thing, yet a strange new thing which has been little noticed by mankind. You must come to understand what was the real character of the new creation that went forth from the working together of Alexander and Aristotle.

Take any great work of poetry or any other work. Take the most beautiful works written in German if you like, take a German translation of the Bhagavad Gita, take Goethe's Faust, or Iphigenia, or anything you value highly. Think of the rich and imposing content, let us say, of Goethe's Faust, and now think, my dear friends, through what is this great content transmitted to you? Let us assume that it is transmitted to you as it is to most people. At some time in your life you read Goethe's Faust. What is it that meets you on the physical plane? What is there on the paper? Nothing else but combinations of abcdef, and so forth. The whole mighty content of Faust dawns upon you simply by using combinations of the letters of the alphabet. There is nothing there on the paper that does not coincide with one or other of its twenty or so letters. From these twenty letters there is conjured on to the paper that which awakens for you, if you can read, the abundant content of Goethe's Faust. Nay more, you are free to say that this perpetual repetition of abcdef is a dreadful bore, it is the most abstract thing imaginable. And yet these most abstract things rightly combined give us the whole of Faust.

Now when the cosmic sounding in the Moon was there again and Aristotle and Alexander recognised what the fire at Ephesus had signified, when they saw how this fire had carried forth into the far ether of the world the content of the Mysteries of Ephesus, then it was that there arose in these two the inspiration to found the Cosmic Script. Only the Cosmic Script is not founded on abcdef. As our book writing is founded on letters, so is the Cosmic Writing founded on thoughts. Now there arose the letters of the Cosmic Writing.

If I now write them down before you they are as abstract as abcd:

 Quantity Quality Relation Space Time Position Activity (or Action) Passivity (or Suffering) 

There you have so many concepts. Take these concepts which Aristotle first expounded to Alexander and learn to do the same with them as you have learnt to do with abcd. Then with Quantity, Quality, Relation, Space, Time, Position, Activity, Passivity, you will learn to read in the Cosmos.

But in the age of the abstract a strange thing happened in the logic of the schools. Imagine a school in which it was the custom not to teach people to read, but if you will, to manufacture books in which they have to learn abcd etc., again and again, in all manner of combinations, ac, ab, be, and so on. And suppose they never came to the point of using these letters in order to place before the soul rich and abundant contents. That would be the very thing which the world has done with Aristotle's Logic. In the textbooks of Logic these Categories, as they call them, are introduced. We learn them off by heart but do not know what to do with them. It is just as though we learn abcd off by heart and do not know what to do with the letters. Just as the content of Faust can be resolved into something as simple as the letters abcd and so forth, so the reading in the Cosmic Script resolves itself into these simple things which we must only learn to deal with. And fundamentally speaking, all that Anthroposophy has brought forth, and all that it can ever bring forth, is experienced from out of these concepts just as what you read in Faust is experienced from out of the letters. For in these simple concepts as the Cosmic Alphabet, all secrets of the spiritual and physical worlds are contained.

This was what happened in the further evolution of the world. Formerly there had been immediate spiritual experience for which the realities of Ephesus were still most characteristic. But now another thing came to take its place. It takes its start in the time of Alexander, but it was only in later times, throughout the Middle Ages, that it evolved in its peculiar form. It is a doubly hidden, double esoteric thing. Doubly esoteric is the meaning that dwells within these eight or nine concepts (for we may also extend the number to nine). Indeed we learn ever more and more to live in these simple concepts, and to experience them in our souls as vividly as we experience the abcd when we have before us the rich and manifold spiritual content of a book.

Thus you see, what was a mighty revelation of instinctive wisdom through thousands and thousands of years flowed at length into concepts whose inner force of life and strength must once more be revealed in time to come. In very truth the time will come when man will find again what is truly resting as in a grave, namely the cosmic wisdom and the cosmic light. Man will learn to read once more in the great universe. He will experience the resurrection of what lay hidden in the intervening time of human evolution between the two spiritual epochs.

And we, my dear friends, are here to make manifest once more the things that are hidden. We are here to create an Easter Festival as an experience of all mankind. And as on other occasions we could say: “Anthroposophy is a Christmas experience”—so we may say today: “Anthroposophy itself, in all its working, is an Easter experience, an experience of resurrection bound up with the experience of the grave.” It is important just at this present Easter Gathering for us to feel, if I may so describe it, the full festivity of the Anthroposophical striving. For we must feel that today we may go to some Spiritual Being who may perhaps be near to us immediately behind the threshold, and in face of him we say: “Ah! once upon a time mankind was blessed with a divine-spiritual revelation whose light still shone most radiantly in Ephesus. But now all this lies buried. How shall I dig out of the grave what thus lies buried? For surely one would imagine that that which has been can still be found in some historic way, can be found lying in the grave.” And then the Being will answer us as in a similar case once upon a time the corresponding Being answered: “That which ye seek is no longer here; it is in your hearts, if only ye open your hearts in the true way.”

Anthroposophy is there indeed; it lies at rest in human hearts, only these human hearts must be able to open themselves in the true way. This is what we must feel. Then in full consciousness, not instinctively as in ancient time, we shall be led back again into that wisdom which lived and shed its light in the ancient Mysteries.

This is what I would fain bring to your hearts at the present Easter time. For to permeate ourselves with this sacred, solemn feeling which can arise from Anthroposophy—this too will play its part and carry us upward into the spiritual world. This too must be united with the Christmas impulse which was given to us at Dornach. For the Christmas impulse must not remain a merely intellectual, theoretic and abstract one. It must be an impulse of the heart, it must not be dry and matter-of-fact. It must be sacred, solemn, joyful, not in sentimentality but out of the reality of the thing itself. Then even as Aristotle and Alexander used the fire of Ephesus when it flamed forth anew in their hearts, when it flamed forth in the Cosmic ether and bore down to them anew the secrets that were afterwards gathered up into the very simple concepts—then even as they could use the fire of Ephesus, so will it be our part to use what has also been carried out into the ether—for we may say so in all humility—in the names of the Goetheanum; namely all that has been intended and that shall be intended with Anthroposophy. But what does this imply? at the annual festival of mourning, at the time of Christmas and New Year, the very time in which our misfortune came upon us, it was granted us to send forth a new impulse from the Goetheanum. Why was it so? Because we may rightly feel that what hitherto was more or less an earthly thing, what was achieved and won and founded as an earthly thing, was carried forth with the names into the cosmic spaces. Just because this misfortune came upon us, when we recognise and know the consequence of it, we may justly say: henceforth we understand that we can no longer merely represent an earthly concern, but we represent a concern of the wide ethereal universe wherein the Spirit lives. For the concern of the Goetheanum is indeed a concern of the far and wide ether wherein there dwells the spirit-filled wisdom of the world. It has been carried forth and we may now fill ourselves with the Goetheanum impulses as with impulses coming in towards us from the Cosmos.

Take this as we will, take it as a picture. The picture signifies the deepest truth and this deep truth is expressed in simple words when we say: Since the Christmas Foundation impulse anthroposophical work shall be permeated with an esoteric character. This esoteric character is here because what was once earthly rayed forth into the cosmic spaces through the astral light that played its part in the physical fire, and because this returns again as a living power into the impulses of the Anthroposophical Movement if only we are able to receive them.

Then, when we can do this, we shall feel as one part of all that lives in Anthroposophy the Anthroposophical Easter mood which can never, never think that the spirit dies, but that it rises again and again. And Anthroposophy must hold to this Spirit that arises ever again out of eternal foundations.

Let us receive this as an Easter thought and as an Easter feeling into our hearts. Then, my dear friends, we shall carry with us from this Gathering feelings that will give us courage and strength to work when we stand once more in our different places when this Easter visit is over.

 (Original of verse in this lecture): Weltentsprossenes Wesen, du in Lichtgestalt, Von der Sonne erkraftet in der Mondgewalt, Dich beschenket des Mars erschaffendes Klingen Und Merkurs gliedbewegendes Schwingen, Dich erleuchtet Jupiters erstrahlende Weisheit Und der Venus liebetragende Schönheit—Dass Saturn's weltenalte Geist-Innigkeit Dich dem Raumessein und Zeitenwerden weihe!