The Rudolf Steiner Archive

This lecture, the 9th of 12 lectures published under is: A Living Knowledge of Nature, the Fall of the Intellect into Sin, the Spiritual Resurrection.

You have seen from these lectures that I feel duty bound to speak at this time about a consciousness that must be attained if we are to accomplish one of the tasks of the Anthroposophical Society. And to begin with today, let me point to the fact that this consciousness can only be acquired if the whole task of culture and civilization is really understood today from the spiritual-scientific point of view. I have taken the most varied opportunities to try, from this point of view, to characterize what is meant by the fall of man, to which all religions refer. The religions speak of this fall of man as lying at the starting point of the historical development of mankind; and in various ways through the years we have seen how this fall of man—which I do not need to characterize in more detail today—is an expression of something that once occurred in the course of human evolution: man's becoming independent of the divine spiritual powers that guided him.

We know in fact that the consciousness of this independence first arose as the consciousness soul appeared in human evolution in the first half of the fifteenth century. We have spoken again and again in recent lectures about this point in time. But basically the whole human evolution depicted in myths and history is a kind of preparation for this significant moment of growing awareness of our freedom and independence.

This moment is a preparation for the fact that earthly humanity is meant to acquire a decision-making ability that is independent of the divine spiritual powers. And so the religions point to a cosmic-earthly event that replaces the soul-spiritual instincts—which alone were determinative in what humanity did in very early times—with just this kind of human decision making. As I said, we do not want to speak in more detail about this now, but the religions did see the matter in this way: With respect to his moral impulses the human being has placed himself in a certain opposition to his guiding spiritual powers, to the Yahweh or Jehovah powers, let us say, speaking in Old Testament terms. If we look at this interpretation, therefore, we can present the matter as though, from a definite point in his evolution, man no longer felt that divine spiritual powers were active in him and that now he himself was active.

Consequently, with respect to his overall moral view of himself, man felt that he was sinful and that he would have been incapable of falling into sin if he had remained in his old state, in a state of instinctive guidance by divine spiritual powers. Whereas he would then have remained sinless, incapable of sinning, like a mere creature of nature, he now became capable of sinning through this independence from the divine spiritual powers. And then there arose in humanity this consciousness of sin: As a human being I am sinless only when I find my way back again to the divine spiritual powers. What I myself decide for myself is sinful per se, and I can attain a sinless state only by finding my way back again: to the divine spiritual powers.

This consciousness of sin then arose most strongly in the Middle Ages. And then human intellectuality, which previously had not yet been a separate faculty, began to develop. And so, in a certain way, what man developed as his intellect, as an intellectual content, also became infected—in a certain sense rightly—with this consciousness of sin. It is only that one did not say to oneself that the intellect, arising in human evolution since the third or fourth century A.D., was also now infected by the consciousness of sin. In the Scholastic wisdom of the Middle Ages, there evolved, to begin with, an ‘unobserved’ consciousness of sin in the intellect.

This Scholastic wisdom of the Middle Ages said to itself: No matter how effectively one may develop the intellect as a human being, one can still only grasp outer physical nature with it. Through mere intellect one can at best prove that divine spiritual powers exist; but one can know nothing of these divine spiritual powers; one can only have faith in these divine spiritual powers. One can have faith in what they themselves have revealed either through the Old or the New Testament.

So the human being, who earlier had felt himself to be sinful in his moral life—‘sinful’ meaning separated from the divine spiritual powers—this human being, who had always felt morally sinful, now in his Scholastic wisdom felt himself to be intellectually sinful, as it were. He attributed to himself an intellectual ability that was effective only in the physical, sense-perceptible world. He said to himself: As a human being I am too base to be able to ascent through my own power into those regions of knowledge where I can also grasp the spirit.

We do not notice how connected this intellectual fall of man is to his general moral fall. But what plays into our view of human intellectuality is the direct continuation of his moral fall.

When the Scholastic wisdom passes over then into the modern scientific view of the world, the connection with the old moral fall of man is completely forgotten. And, as I have often emphasized, the strong connection actually present between modern natural-scientific concepts and the old Scholasticism is in fact denied altogether. In modern natural science one states that man has limits to his knowledge, that he must be content to extend his view of things only out upon the sense-perceptible physical world. A Dubois-Reymond, for example, and others state that the human being has limits to what he can investigate, has limits to his whole thinking, in fact.

But that is a direct continuation of Scholasticism. The only difference is that Scholasticism believed that because the human intellect is limited, one must raise oneself to something different from the intellect—to revelation, in fact—when one wants to know something about the spiritual world.

The modern natural-scientific view takes half, not the whole; it lets revelation stay where it is, but then places itself completely upon a standpoint that is possible only if one presupposes revelation. This standpoint is that the human ability to know is too base to ascend into the divine spiritual worlds.

But at the time of Scholasticism, especially at the high point of Scholasticism in the middle of the Middle Ages, the same attitude of soul was not present as that of today. One assumed then that when the human being used his intellect he could gain knowledge of the sense-perceptible world; and he sensed that he still experienced something of a flowing together of himself with the sense-perceptible world when he employed his intellect. And one believed then that if one wanted to know something about the spiritual one must ascend to revelation, which in fact could no longer be understood, i.e., could no longer be grasped intellectually. But the fact remained unnoticed—and this is where we must direct our attention!—that spirituality flowed into the concepts that the Schoolmen, set up about the sense world. The concepts of the Schoolmen were not as unspiritual as ours are today. The Schoolmen still approached the human being with the concepts that they formed for themselves about nature, so that the human being was not yet completely excluded from knowledge. For, at least in the Realist stream, the Schoolmen totally believed that thoughts are given us from outside, that they are not fabricated from within. Today we believe that thoughts are not given from outside but are fabricated from within. Through this fact we have gradually arrived at a point in our evolution where we have dropped everything that does not relate to the outer sense world.

And, you see, the Darwinian theory of evolution is the final consequence of this dropping of everything unrelated to the outer sense world. Goethe made a beginning for a real evolutionary teaching that extended as far as man. When you take up his writing in this direction, you will see that he only stumbled when he tried to take up the human being. He wrote excellent botanical studies. He wrote many correct things about animals. But something always went wrong when he tried to take up the human being. The intellect that is trained only upon the sense world is not adequate to the study of man. Precisely Goethe shows this to a high degree. Even Goethe can say nothing about the human being. His teaching on metamorphosis does not extend as far as the human being. You know how, within the anthroposophical world view, we have had to broaden this teaching on metamorphosis, entirely in a Goethean sense, but going much further.

What has modern intellectualism actually achieved in natural science? It has only come as far as grasping the evolution of animals up to the apes, and then added on the human being without being able inwardly to encompass him. The closer people came to the higher animals, so to speak, the less able their concepts became to grasp anything. And it is absolutely untrue to say, for example, that they even understand the higher animals. They only believe that they understand them.

And so our understanding of the human being gradually dropped completely out of our understanding of the world, because understanding dropped out of our concepts. Our concepts became less and less spiritual, and the unspiritual concepts that regard the human being as the mere endpoint of the animal kingdom represent the content of all our thinking today. These concepts are already instilled into our children in the early grades, and our inability to look at the essential being of man thus becomes part of the general culture.

Now you know that I once attempted to grasp the whole matter of knowledge at another point. This was when I wrote The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and its prelude Truth and Science although the first references are present already in my The Science of Knowing: Outline of an Epistemology Implicit in the Goethean World View written in the 1880's. I tried to turn the matter in a completely different direction. I tried to show what the modern person can raise himself to, when—not in a traditional sense, but out of free inner activity—he attains pure thinking, when he, attains this pure, willed thinking which is something positive and real, when this thinking works in him. And in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I sought, in fact, to find our moral impulses in this purified thinking.

So that our evolution proceeded formerly in such a way that we more and more viewed man as being too base to act morally, and we extended this baseness also into our intellectuality.

Expressing this graphically, one could say: The human being developed in such a way that what he knew about himself became less and less substantial. It grew thinner and thinner (light color). But below the surface, something continued to develop (red) that lives, not in abstract thinking, but in real thinking.

Now, at the end of the 19th century, we had arrived at the point of no longer noticing at all what I have drawn here in red; and through what I have drawn here in a light color, we no longer believed ourselves connected with anything of a divine spiritual nature. Man's consciousness of sin had torn him out of the divine spiritual element; the historical forces that were emerging could not take him back. But with The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I wanted to say: Just look for once into the depths of the human soul and you will find that something has remained with us: pure thinking, namely, the real, energetic thinking that originates from man himself, that is no longer mere thinking, that is filled with experience, filled with feeling, and that ultimately expresses itself in the will. I wanted to say that this thinking can become the impulse for moral action. And for this reason I spoke of the moral intuition which is the ultimate outcome of what otherwise is only moral imagination. But what is actually intended by The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity can become really alive only if we can reverse the path that we took as we split ourselves off more and more from the divine spiritual content of the world, split ourselves off all the way down to intellectuality. When we again find the spirituality in nature, then we will also find the human being again.

I therefore once expressed in a lecture that I held many years ago in Mannheim that mankind, in fact, in its present development, is on the point of reversing the fall of man. What I said was hardly noticed, but consisted in the following: The fall of man was understood to be a moral fall, which ultimately influenced the intellect also. The intellect felt itself to be at the limits of its knowledge. And it is basically one and the same thing—only in a somewhat different form—if the old theology speaks of sin or if Dubois-Reymond speaks of the limits of our ability to know nature. I indicated how one must grasp the spiritual—which, to be sure, has been filtered down into pure thinking—and how, from there, one can reverse the fall of man. I showed how, through spiritualizing the intellect, one can work one's way back up to the divine spiritual.

Whereas in earlier ages one pointed to the moral fall of man and thought about the development of mankind in terms of this moral fall of man, we today must think about an ideal of mankind: about the rectifying of the fall of man along a path of the spiritualization of our knowing activity, along a path of knowing the spiritual content of the world again. Through the moral fall of man, the human being distanced himself from the gods. Through the path of knowledge he must find again the pathway of the gods. Man must turn his descent into an ascent. Out of the purely grasped spirit of his own being, man must understand, with inner energy and power, the goal, the ideal, of again taking the fall of man seriously. For, the fall of man should be taken seriously. It extends right into what natural science says today. We must find the courage to add to the fall of man, through the power of our knowing activity, a raising of man out of sin. We must find the courage to work out a way to raise ourselves out of sin, using what can come to us through a real and genuine spiritual-scientific knowledge of modern times.

One could say, therefore: If we look back into the development of mankind, we see that human consciousness posits a fall of man at the beginning of the historical development of mankind on earth. But the fall must be made right again at some point: It must be opposed by a raising of man. And this raising of man can only go forth out of the age of the consciousness soul. In our day, therefore, the historic moment has arrived when the highest ideal of mankind must be the spiritual raising of ourselves out of sin. Without this, the development of mankind can proceed no further.

That is what I once discussed in that lecture in Mannheim. I said that, in modern times, especially in natural-scientific views, an intellectual fall of man has occurred, in addition to the moral fall of man. And this intellectual fall is the great historical sign that a spiritual raising of man must begin.

But what does this spiritual raising of man mean? It means nothing other, in fact, than really understanding Christ. Those who still understood something about him, who had not—like modern theology—lost Christ completely, said of Christ that he came to earth, that he incarnated into an earthly body as a being of a higher kind. They took up what was proclaimed about Christ in written traditions. They spoke, in fact, about the mystery of Golgotha.

Today the time has come when Christ must be understood. But we resist this understanding of Christ, and the form this resistance takes is extraordinarily characteristic. You see, if even a spark of what Christ really is still lived in those who say that they understand Christ, what would happen? They would have to be clear about the fact that Christ, as a heavenly being, descended to earth; he therefore did not speak to man in an earthly language, but in a heavenly one. We must therefore make an effort to understand him. We must make an effort to speak a cosmic, extraterrestrial language. That means that we must not limit our knowledge merely to the earth, for, the earth was in fact a new land for Christ. We must extend our knowledge out into the cosmos. We must learn to understand the elements. We must learn to understand the movements of the planets. We must learn to understand the star constellations, and their influence on what happens on earth. Then we draw near to the language that Christ spoke.

That is something, however, that coincides with our spiritual raising of man. For why was man reduced to understanding only what lives on earth? Because he was conscious of sin, in fact, because he considered himself too base to be able to grasp the world in its extraterrestrial spirituality. And that is actually why people speak as though man can know nothing except the earthly. I characterized this yesterday by saying: We understand a fish only in a bowl, and a bird only in a cage. Certainly there is no consciousness present in our civilized natural science that the human being can raise himself above this purely earthly knowledge; for, this science mocks any effort to go beyond the earthly. If one even begins to speak about the stars, the terrible mockery sets in right away, as a matter of course, from the natural-scientific side.

If we want to hear correct statements about the relation of man to the animals, we must already turn our eye to the extraterrestrial world, for only the plants are still explainable in earthly terms; the animals are not. Therefore I had to say earlier that we do not even understand the apes correctly, that we can no longer explain the animals. If one wants to understand the animals, one must take recourse to the extraterrestrial, for the animals are ruled by forces that are extraterrestrial. I showed you this yesterday with respect to the fish. I told you how moon and sun forces work into the water and shape him out of the water, if I may put it so. And in the same way, the bird out of the air. As soon as one turns to the elements, one also meets the extraterrestrial. The whole animal world is explainable in terms of the extraterrestrial. And even more so the human being. But when one begins to speak of the extraterrestrial, then the mockery sets in at once.

The courage to speak again about the extraterrestrial must grow within a truly spiritual-scientific view; for, to be a spiritual scientist today is actually more a matter of courage than of intellectuality. Basically it is a moral issue, because what must be opposed is something moral: the moral fall of man, in fact.

And so we must say that we must in fact first learn the language of Christ, the language ton ouranon, the language of the heavens, in Greek terms. We must relearn this language in order to make sense out of what Christ wanted to do on earth.

Whereas up till now one has spoken about Christianity and described the history of Christianity, the point now is to understand Christ, to understand him as an extraterrestrial being. And that is identical with what we can call the ideal of raising ourselves from sin.

Now, to be sure, there is something very problematical about formulating this ideal, for you know in fact that the consciousness of sin once made people humble. But in modern times they are hardly ever humble. Often those who think themselves the most humble are the most proud of all. The greatest pride today is evident in those who strive for a so-called ‘simplicity’ in life. They set themselves above everything that is sought by the humble soul that lifts itself inwardly to real, spiritual truths, and they say: Everything must be sought in utter simplicity. Such naive natures—and they also regard themselves as naive natures—are often the most proud of all today. But nevertheless, during the time of real consciousness of sin there once were humble people; humility was still regarded as something that mattered in human affairs. And so, without justification, pride has arisen. Why? Yes, I can answer that in the same words I used here recently. Why has pride arisen? It has arisen because one has not heard the words “Huckle, get up!” [From the Oberufer Christmas plays.] One simply fell asleep. Whereas earlier one felt oneself, with full intensity and wakefulness, to be a sinner, one now fell into a gentle sleep and only dreamed still of a consciousness of sin. Formerly one was awake in one's consciousness of sin; one said to oneself: Man is sinful if he does not undertake actions that will again bring him onto the path to the divine spiritual powers. One was awake then. One may have different views about this today, but the fact is that one was awake in one's acknowledgment of sinfulness. But then one dozed off, and the dreams arrived, and. the dreams murmured: Causality rules in the world; one event always causes the following one. And so finally we pursue what we see in the starry heavens as attraction and repulsion of the heavenly bodies; we take this all the way down into the molecule; and then we imagine a kind of little cosmos of molecules and atoms.

And the dreaming went further. And then the dream concluded by saying: We can know nothing except what outer sense experience gives us. And it was labeled ‘supernaturalism’ if anyone went beyond sense experiences. But where supernaturalism begins, science ends.

And then, at gatherings of natural scientists, these dreams were delivered in croaking tirades like Dubois-Reymond's Limits of Knowledge. And then, when the dream's last notes were sounded—a dream does not always resound so agreeably; sometimes it is a real nightmare—when the dream concluded with “Where supernaturalism begins, science ends,” then not only the speaker but the whole natural-scientific public sank down from the dream into blessed sleep. One no longer needed any inner impulse for active inner knowledge. One could console oneself by accepting that there are limits, in fact, to what we can know about nature, and that we cannot transcend these limits. The time had arrived when one could now say: “Huckle, get up! The sky is cracking!” But our modern civilization replies: “Let it crack! It's old enough to have cracked before!” Yes, this is how things really are. We have arrived at a total sleepiness, in our knowing activity.

But into this sleepiness there must sound what is now being declared by spiritual-scientific anthroposophical knowledge. To begin with, there must arise in knowledge the realization that man is in a position to set up the ideal within himself that we can raise ourselves from sin. And that in turn is connected with the fact that along with a possible waking up, pride—which up till now has only been present, to be sure, in a dreamlike way—will grow more than ever. And (I say this of course without making any insinuations) it has sometimes been the case that in anthroposophical circles the raising of man has not yet come to full fruition. Sometimes, in fact, this pride has reached—I will not say a respectable—a quite unrespectable size. For, it simply lies in human nature for pride to flourish rather than the positive side.

And so, along with the recognition that the raising of man is a necessity, we must also see that we now need to take up into ourselves in full consciousness the training in humility which we once exercised. And we can do that. For, when pride arises out of knowledge, that is always a sign that something in one's knowledge is indeed terribly wrong. For when knowledge is truly present, it makes one humble in a completely natural way. It is out of pride that one sets up a program of reform today, when in some social movement, let's say, or in the woman's movement one knows ahead of time what is possible, right, necessary, and best, and then sets up a program, point by point. One knows everything about the matter. One does not think of oneself at all as proud when each person declares himself to know it all. But in true knowledge, one remains pretty humble, for one knows that true knowledge is acquired only in the course of time, to use a trivial expression.

If one lives in knowledge, one knows, with what difficulty—sometimes over decades—one has attained the simplest truths. There, quite inwardly through the matter itself, one does not become proud. But nevertheless, because a full consciousness is being demanded precisely of the Anthroposophical Society for humanity's great ideal today of raising ourselves from sin, watchfulness—not Hucklism, but watchfulness—must also be awakened against any pride that might arise.

We need today a strong inclination to truly grasp the essential being of knowledge so that, by virtue of a few anthroposophical catchwords like ‘physical body,’ ‘etheric body,’ ‘reincarnation,’ et cetera, we do not immediately become paragons of pride. This watchfulness with respect to ordinary pride must really be cultivated as a new moral content. This must be taken up into our meditation. For if the raising of man is actually to occur, then the experiences we have with the physical world must lead us over into the spiritual world. For, these experiences must lead us to offer ourselves devotedly, with the innermost powers of our soul. They must not lead us, however, to dictate program truths. Above all, they must penetrate into a feeling of responsibility for every single word that one utters about the spiritual world. Then the striving must reign to truly carry up into the realm of spiritual knowledge the truthfulness that, to begin with, one acquired for oneself in dealing with external, sense-perceptible facts. Whoever has not accustomed himself to remaining with the facts in the physical sense world and to basing himself upon them also does not accustom himself to truthfulness when speaking about the spirit. For in the spiritual world, one can no longer accustom oneself to truthfulness; one must bring it with one.

But you see, on the one hand today, due to the state of consciousness in our civilization, facts are hardly taken into account, and, on the other hand, science simply suppresses those facts that lead onto the right path. Let us take just one out of many such facts: There are insects that are themselves vegetarian when fully grown. They eat no meat, not even other insects. When the mother insect is ready to lay her fertilized eggs, she lays them into the body of another insect, that is then filled with the eggs that the insect mother has inserted into it. The eggs are now in a separate insect. Now the eggs do not hatch out into mature adults, but as little worms. But at first they are in the other insect. These little worms, that will only later metamorphose into adult insects, are not vegetarian. They could not be vegetarian. They must devour the flesh of the other insect. Only when they emerge and transform themselves are they able to do without the flesh of other insects. Picture that: the insect mother is herself a vegetarian. She knows nothing in her consciousness about eating meat, but she lays her eggs for the next generation into another insect. And furthermore; if these insects were now, for example, to eat away the stomach of the host insect, they would soon have nothing more to eat, because the host insect would die. If they ate away any vital organ, the insect could not live. So what do these insects do when they hatch out? They avoid all the vital organs and eat only what the host insect can do without and still live. Then, when these little insects mature, they crawl out, become vegetarian, and proceed to do what their mother did.

Yes, one must acknowledge that intelligence holds sway in nature. And if you really study nature, you can find this intelligence holding sway everywhere. And you will then think more humbly about your own intelligence, for first of all, it is not as great as the intelligence ruling in nature, and secondly, it is only like a little bit of water that one has drawn from a lake and put into a water jug. The human being, in fact, is just such a water jug, that has drawn intelligence from nature. Intelligence is everywhere in nature; everything, everywhere is wisdom. A person who ascribes intelligence exclusively to himself is about as clever as someone who declares: You're saying that there is water out there in the lake or in the brook? Nonsense! There is no water in them. Only in my jug is there any water. The jug created the water.

So, the human being thinks that he creates intelligence, whereas he only draws intelligence from the universal sea of intelligence.

It is necessary, therefore, to truly keep our eye on the facts of nature. But facts are left out when the Darwinian theory is promoted, when today's materialistic views are being formulated; for, the facts contradict the modern materialistic view at every point. Therefore one suppresses these facts. One recounts them, to be sure, but actually aside from science, anecdotally. Therefore they do not gain the validity in our general education that they must have. And so one not only does not truly present the facts that one has, but adds a further dishonesty by leaving out the decisive facts, i.e., by suppressing them.

But if the raising of man is to be accomplished, then we must educate ourselves in truthfulness in the sense world first of all and then carry this education, this habitude, with us into the spiritual world. Then we will also be able to be truthful in the spiritual world. Otherwise we will tell people the most unbelievable stories about the spiritual world. If we are accustomed in the physical world to being imprecise, untrue, and inexact, then we will recount nothing but untruths about the spiritual world.

. You see, if one grasps in this way the ideal whose reality can become conscious to the Anthroposophical Society, and if what arises from this consciousness becomes a force in our Society, then, even in people who wish us the worst, the opinion that the Anthroposophical Society could be a sect will disappear. Now of course our opponents will say all kinds of things that are untrue. But as long as we are giving cause for what they say, it cannot be a matter of indifference to us whether their statements are true or not.

Now, through its very nature, the Anthroposophical Society has thoroughly worked its way out of the sectarianism in which it certainly was caught up at first, especially while it was still connected to the Theosophical Society. It is only that many members to this day have not noticed this fact and love sectarianism. And so it has come about that even older anthroposophical members who were beside themselves when the Anthroposophical Society was transformed from a sectarian one into one that was conscious of its world task, even those who were beside themselves have quite recently gone aside again. The Movement for Religious Renewal, when it follows its essential nature, may be ever so far removed from sectarianism. But this Movement for Religious Renewal has given even a number of older anthroposophists cause to say to themselves: Yes, the sectarian element is being eradicated more and more from the Anthroposophical Society. But we can cultivate it again here! And so precisely through anthroposophists, the Movement for Religious Renewal is being turned into the crassest sectarianism, which truly does not need to be the case.

One can see how, therefore, if the Anthroposophical Society wants to become a reality, we must positively develop the courage to raise ourselves again into the spiritual world. Then art and religion will flourish in the Anthroposophical Society. Although for now even our artistic forms have been taken from us [through the burning of the Goetheanum building on the night of December 31, 1922], these forms live on, in fact, in the being of the anthroposophical movement itself and must continually be found again, and ever again.

In the same way, a true religious deepening lives in those who find their way back into the spiritual world, who take seriously the raising of man. But what we must eradicate in ourselves is the inclination to sectarianism, for this inclination is always egotistical. It always wants to avoid the trouble of penetrating into the reality of the spirit and wants to settle for a mystical reveling that basically is an egotistical voluptuousness. And all the talk about the Anthroposophical Society becoming much too intellectual is actually based on the fact that those who say this want, indeed, to avoid the thoroughgoing experience of a spiritual content, and would much rather enjoy the egotistical voluptuousness of soulful reveling in a mystical, nebulous indefiniteness. Selflessness is necessary for true anthroposophy. It is mere egotism of soul when this true anthroposophy is opposed by anthroposophical members themselves who then all the more drive anthroposophy into something sectarian that is only meant, in fact, to satisfy a voluptuousness of soul that is egotistical through and through.

You see those are the things, with respect to our tasks, to which we should turn our attention. By doing so, we lose nothing of the warmth, the artistic sense, or the religious inwardness of our anthroposophical striving. But that will be avoided which must be avoided: the inclination to sectarianism. And this inclination to sectarianism, even though it often arrived in a roundabout way through pure cliquishness, has brought so much into the Society that splits it apart. But cliquishness also arose in the anthroposophical movement only because of its kinship—a distant one to be sure—with the sectarian inclination. We must return to the cultivation of a certain world consciousness so that only our opponents, who mean to tell untruths, can still call the Anthroposophical Society a sect. We must arrive at the point of being able to strictly banish the sectarian character trait from the anthroposophical movement. But we should banish it in such a way that when something arises like the Movement for Religious Renewal, which is not meant to be sectarian, it is not gripped right away by sectarianism just because one can more easily give it a sectarian direction than one can the Anthroposophical Society itself.

Those are the things that we must think about keenly today. From the innermost being of anthroposophy, we must understand the extent to which anthroposophy can give us, not a sectarian consciousness, but rather a world consciousness. Therefore I had to speak these days precisely about the more intimate tasks of the Anthroposophical Society.

We will turn our attention to-day to manifestations of the life of soul able to lead us to a kind of self-observation in which a vista of our personal karma, our personal destiny, flashes into life like lightning. When we reflect upon the nature of the life of soul even with more or less superficial self-knowledge, we realise that sense-impressions and the thoughts we form about them are the only clear and definite experiences in the life of soul in which, with ordinary consciousness, we are completely awake. As well as these thoughts, sense-impressions, sense-perceptions, we also have, of course, the life of feeling. But just think how indeterminately our feelings surge through us, how little we can speak of inner, wide-awake clarity in connection with our life of feeling. Anyone who faces these facts with an open mind will certainly admit that as compared with thoughts, his feelings are indeterminate, lacking in definition. True, the life of feeling concerns us in a more intimate, personal way than does the life of thought, but for all that there is something undefined in it and also in the way it functions. We shall not so readily allow our thoughts to deviate from those of other people when it is a question of reflecting about something that is alleged to be true. We shall feel that our thoughts, our sense-impressions must somehow tally with those of others. With our feelings it is different. We allow ourselves the right to feel in a more intimate, more personal way. And if we compare feelings with dreams, we shall say: dreams arise from the night-life, feelings from the depths of soul into the light of day-consciousness. But again, in respect of their pictures, feelings are as indeterminate as dreams. Anyone who makes the comparison, even with such dreams as enter quite distinctly into his consciousness, will realise that their lack of definition is just as great as that of feelings. Therefore we can say: it is only in our sense-impressions and thoughts that we are really awake; in our feelings we dream—even during waking life. In ordinary waking life, too, our feelings make us into dreamers.

And still more so the will! When we say: ‘Now I am going to do this, or that’—how much of the subsequent process is actually in our consciousness? Suppose I want to take hold of something. The mental picture comes first, then this picture completely fades away and in my ordinary consciousness I know nothing of how the impulse contained in the ‘I want’ finds its way into my nerves, into my muscles, into my bones. When I conceive the idea, ‘I want to get hold of the clock,’ does my ordinary consciousness know anything at all of how this impulse penetrates into my arm which then reaches out for the clock? It is only through another sense-impression, another mental picture, that I perceive what has actually happened. With my ordinary consciousness I sleep through what has happened intermediately, just as in the night I sleep through what I experience in the spiritual world. I am as unconscious of the one as of the other. In waking life, therefore, there are three different and distinct states of consciousness. In the activity of thinking we are awake, completely awake; in the activity of feeling we dream; in the activity of willing we are asleep. We are in a state of perpetual sleep as far as the essential core of the will is concerned, for it lies deep, deep down in the region of the subconscious.

Now there is something that in waking life too, is always rising up from the depths of the soul, namely, remembrance, memory. When we contact immediate reality, we have thoughts. This immediate reality makes a definite impression upon us. But the past of this earthly life plays all the time into present reality in the form of thoughts and memories, of recollected thoughts. As you know, these recollected thoughts are much dimmer, much less distinct than the impressions of present reality. Nevertheless they do well up and make their way into ordinary waking life. And when we give memory free play, letting it recall all that we have passed through in life, we realise: here is our own life of soul, rising up once again. We feel that in this earthly life we are that which we can remember. Think only what becomes of a man who cannot remember some period of his life, whose memory of that period is completely obliterated. We may come across such cases and I will give just one example.—There was a man in a respectable position who while his life was pursuing its normal course, remembered his past, what he had done in childhood and during his education, what he had experienced as a student, and then in his profession. But one day his memory was suddenly blotted out. He no longer knew who he was.—I am telling you of an actual case.—Strangely enough it was not the reasoning faculty, not the mental grasp of immediate reality that failed; the memory was completely blotted out. The man no longer knew who he was as a boy, as a youth, as a grown-up; his mind could grasp only what was making an impression upon him at the moment. And because he no longer knew who he was in boyhood, youth or maturity, he could not link his present with his past life; this was impossible from the moment his memory faded.

A case like this makes it easy for us to realise just why we do one thing or another at a particular time; it is not because of the pressure of immediate circumstances but because of certain experiences we have had in the past—primarily in the past of our earthly life. Just think of all that you might do or leave undone if memory played no part in your actions! Man is dependent upon memory to a far greater extent than he imagines. The misfortune that befell the man of whom I told you, was that after the sudden obliteration of his memory he was guided only by the impulses of the present moment, not by any promptings of memory. He put on his outdoor clothes and left his home and family. He was tied to them only through memory—and now this memory was blotted out. Impulses worked in him that had nothing whatever to do with memories of his family. His reason and intelligence remained; and so—because it would have been senseless to do these things while other people were there—he waited until they happened to be absent. He had lived with his family as a sensible, rational individual, but his memory had gone. He went to the railway station and took a ticket for a place a long way off. His mind was absolutely clear in a matter where reason came into play. He got into the train and went off; but the memory of what had happened, even the memory of having taken the ticket was blotted out. He was aware only of the immediate present. The extinction of memory was a pathological condition. But he was so intensely engrossed with the present that he knew when he had arrived at his destination; he could compare this with the timetable. The ability to read—something that had already become habit and was therefore no longer a matter of memory—that too had remained. He alighted and took another ticket to a distant destination. And so he went on, travelling about the world without knowing who he was. One day his memory returned, but he knew nothing of what he had been doing since buying the first railway ticket. When his memory returned and he was himself again, he found himself in a Casual Ward in Berlin. It was only the things that had happened in the trains and the places where he had been that were blotted out, for they did not belong to the present. Just think what a state of confusion! How utterly uncertain of himself such a man must be! You will realise from this how closely our ‘I,’ our Ego, is bound up with our store of memories. We know nothing of the self within us if we are bereft of the store of memories.

What is the nature of these memories? Memories are of the nature of soul. But in the whole range of man's life and being they are present in another form as well. They work purely as soul-forces only in a human being who has reached the age of twenty one or twenty two, and continues living. Before then the memories do not work purely as forces of soul. We must be very conscious of what I have said in these lectures, namely that during the first seven years of earthly existence our physical corporality is an inheritance from our parents. At the change of teeth it is not only the first, milk teeth that are expelled—that is only the final act; the whole of the first body is discarded. We build up the second body—the body we bear until the onset of puberty—out of the soul-and-spirit we brought with us when we came down from the spiritual world to physical existence on the Earth. But from birth until the change of teeth we have received a host of impressions from the environment; Our being was absorbed in what flowed into us through having learnt to speak. Think of all the wonders that stream into us together with the power of speech! Any unprejudiced observer will agree in this respect with the statement made by Jean Paul to the effect that he had learnt more in the first three years of his life than in the three academic years. The meaning of this is clear. For even if the academic years are extended to five or six—not, presumably, because one learns too much but because one learns too little—even if this period is considerably extended we learn only the merest trifle in comparison with what we assimilate during the first three years of life, and thereafter through the years following the first three until the change of teeth. After a certain time all this remains in the form of hazy, indefinite memory. But just think how pale and indistinct are these memories of our first seven years compared with the events of later life. Just try to make the comparison. The memories often seem to loom up like erratic boulders without any obvious connection. And why? What we take in during the first seven years of life and what we take in later on have entirely different tasks to fulfil. What we take in during the first seven years works with intense activity at the plastic moulding of the brain, passes into the very organism. There is a great difference between the relatively undeveloped brain we possess when we come into earthly existence and the beautifully developed brain that is ours by the time of the change of teeth. And the result of this work penetrates from the brain into the whole of the rest of the body. This inner artist we bring with us from pre-earthly existence works in a most wonderful way upon our physical body during the first seven years of life. It is miraculous to see the facial expression, the look, the mobility of the features, the purposeful movements of arms and limbs beginning to appear in a child after the lack of definition characterising early babyhood. We see how spirit begins to permeate the child's being and the impressions he absorbs. The way in which spirit permeates the child during the first seven years of life is one of the most wonderful sights imaginable. When we observe how the physiognomy and gestures of the child develop from birth until the change of teeth, when we read and decipher it all just as we decipher something in a book from the single letters, when we know how to connect the forms of the gestures and the facial expressions appearing in succession just as we can connect the letters of a word and so read the word—then we are gazing at the workings of the brain which has been kindled into activity by the impressions received; these can form themselves only into sparse and scattered memories, because the plastic development of the brain and therewith of the physiognomy has primarily to be provided for.

As life continues its course from the time of the change of teeth to the onset of puberty, the forces working in this way are more or less lost to sight. As I said, until the beginning of the twenty-first year, work continues upon the shaping and elaboration of the organism; but from the seventh year onwards this work is less concerned with the bodily nature—and still less from puberty until the beginning of the twenties. But something else comes to our help. If we have any aptitude for this kind of observation and mellow it by contemplating the marvellous phenomenon of the child's physiognomy which reveals itself month by month, year by year in greater clarity, above all if we can perceive what the child's gestures reveal, how the awkward, unskilful movements of the limbs turn in a most wonderful way into movements filled with intelligence and purpose—this sensitive perception can be deepened and finer organs of sense will develop. Then, when we have before us a child between the ages of seven and fourteen, that is to say between the second dentition and puberty, when the changes in the physiognomy and the gestures are less marked and the development less obvious, it is possible through inner feeling which has all the certainty of an eye of soul to perceive how the child's development is proceeding in a more hidden way. And from this delicate, intimate observation of the bodily development of a child between the seventh and fourteenth years, there can arise the faculty to gaze into the life preceding the descent to earthly existence, the life between death and a new birth.

These things must again be within our reach, enabling us to affirm of a child between the ages of seven and fourteen: around you there is not only the sense-world of nature; in everything that is revealed in sense-perceptions, in colours, in forms, lives the spirit! It is truly wonderful to see the spirit becoming articulate in all things and then, as it were in a mirror-image, to perceive a reflection of this in the way in which spirituality reveals itself more and more distinctly in the physiognomy of a child. If we feel this deeply and inwardly and with a certain reverence make the experience a living power in the soul, then, as we observe the child between the ages of seven and fourteen, this reverence will lead to an understanding of how the pre-earthly existence of a human being between death and a new birth works into him here on Earth. And we shall feel that this bodily development is governed, not by the forces of the earthly environment but by the second physical organism which we ourselves mould according to the model provided by the first.

This can be of great importance in life. Humanity will have to learn to perceive the essential nature of Man. Life will then undergo the deepening without which the further progress of civilisation is simply no longer possible. Our civilisation has become totally abstract! In our ordinary consciousness we are no longer able to think in the real sense; we can only think what has been inculcated into us. We are no longer capable of perceptions as delicate as those of which I have been speaking. Hence men to-day pass each other by in ignorance. They learn a great deal about animals, plants, minerals, but nothing whatever about the subtle, impalpable processes of the development of the human being. The whole life of soul must become more intimate, more delicate, purer, and then we shall again perceive something of the real nature of human development itself; and this will lead us eventually to a vista of pre-earthly existence.

Next comes the period immediately following puberty, the period between the onset of puberty and the twenty-first or twenty-second year. Just think of all that a human being reveals to us in this phase of his life! Even with our ordinary consciousness we see evidence of a complete change in his life, but it takes a crude form. We speak of the hobbledehoy years, of the ‘awkward’ years and this in itself indicates our awareness that a change is taking place. What is actually happening is that the inner being is now emerging more clearly. But if we can acquire sensitive perception of the first two life-periods, what emerges after puberty will appear as a ‘second man,’ actually as a second man, who becomes visible through the physical man standing there before us. And what expresses itself in the awkwardness, but also in very much that is admirable, appears like a second, cloudlike man within the physical man. It is important to detect this second, shadowy being, for questions on the subject are being asked on all sides to-day. But our civilisation gives no answer.

The turn of the nineteenth/twentieth century was accompanied by momentous changes in the spiritual and physical evolution of the Earth. Men of the ancient East had divined this and said that Kali Yuga, the Age of Darkness, would come to an end at the close of the nineteenth century when an Age of Light would begin. This Age of Light has begun in very truth but men are still unaware of it because in their minds they are still living in the nineteenth century and their ideas flow on lethargically. Nevertheless around us there is clear, radiant light and if we pay heed to what will reveal itself from the spiritual world, we can become aware of this light. And because youth is peculiarly sensitive, with the turn of the century an undefined longing arose in the hearts of the young for a more intimate knowledge, a much more intimate perception of Man. Human beings born about this time—at the turn of the nineteenth century—have the instinctive feeling: we need to know a great deal more about Man than people are able to tell us. Nobody tells us what we long to know! There was this striving, this urgent, insistent striving for an understanding of Man. Children and young people were ill at ease with their elders for they longed to hear from them something about Man, and these elders knew nothing. Modern civilisation can say nothing, knows nothing about the spirit of Man. But in earlier epochs people were able, speaking with real warmth of heart, to tell the young very much about Man. When thoughts were still quick with life, the old had a very great deal to say—but now they knew nothing. And so there came an urge to run, run no matter where, in order to learn something about Man. The young became wanderers, path-finders; they ran away from people who had nothing to tell them, seeking here, there and everywhere for something that could tell them something about Man.

There you have the real origin of the Youth Movement of the twentieth century. What is this Youth Movement really seeking? It is seeking to find the reality of this second, cloudlike man who comes into evidence after puberty and who is actually there within the human being. The Youth Movement wants to be educated in a way that will enable it to apprehend this second man.—But who is this second man? What does he actually represent? What is it that emerges as it were from this human body in which one has observed the gradual maturing of physiognomy and gesture, in connection with which one is also able to feel how in the second period of life from the change of teeth to puberty, pre-earthly existence is coming to definite expression? What is making its appearance here, like a stranger? What is it that now comes forth when, after puberty, the human being begins to be conscious of his own freedom, when he turns to other individuals, seeking to form bonds with them out of an inner impulse which neither he nor the others can explain but which underlies this very definite urge. Who is this ‘second man?’ He is the being who lived in the earlier incarnation and is now making his way like a shadow, into this present earthly life. From what breaks in upon human life so mysteriously at about the age of puberty, mankind will gradually learn to take account of karma. At the time of life when a human being becomes capable of propagating his kind, impulses to which he gave expression in earlier earthly lives also make their appearance in him. But a great deal must happen in human hearts and feelings before there can be any clear recognition, any clear perception of what I have just been describing to you.

Think of the great difference there is in the ordinary consciousness between self-love and love of others. People know well what self-love is, for every individual holds himself in high esteem—of that there is no doubt! Self-love is present even in those who imagine that they are entirely free from it. There are very few indeed—and a close investigation of karma would be called for in such cases—who would dream of saying that they have no self-love in them. Love of others is rather more difficult to fathom. Such love may of course be absolutely genuine, but it is very often coloured by an element of self-love. We may love another human being because he does something for us, because he is by our side; we love him for many reasons closely connected with self-love. Nevertheless there is such a thing as selfless love and it is within our reach. We can learn little by little to expel from love every vestige of self-interest, and then we come to know what it means to give ourselves to others in the true and real sense. It is from this self-giving, this giving of ourselves to others, this selfless love, that we can kindle the feeling that must arise if we are to glimpse earlier earthly lives. Suppose you are a person who was born, let us say, in the year 1881; you are alive now; once upon a time, in an earlier earthly life, you were born, say, in the year 737 and died in 799. The man, personality B, is living, now, in the nineteenth/twentieth century; formerly this personality—you yourself—lived in the eighth century. The two personalities are linked by the life stretching between death and the new birth. But before even so much as an inkling can come to you of the personality who lived in the eighth century, you must be capable of loving your own self exactly as if you were loving another human being. For although the being who lived in the eighth century is there within you, he is really a stranger, exactly as another person may be a stranger to you now. You must be able to relate yourself to your preceding incarnation in the way you relate yourself now to some other human being; otherwise no inkling of the earlier incarnation is possible. Neither will you be able to form an objective conception of what appears in a human being after puberty as a second, shadowy man. But love that is truly selfless becomes a power of knowledge, and when love of self becomes so completely objective that a man can observe himself exactly as he observes other human beings, this is the means whereby a vista of earlier earthly lives will disclose itself—at first as a kind of dim inkling. This experience must be combined with the kind of observation I have been describing, whereby we become aware of the essential, fundamental nature of man. The urge to apprehend the truth of repeated earthly lives has been present in humanity since the end of Kali Yuga and is already unmistakably evident. The only reason why people do not speak about it is because it is not sufficiently clear or defined. But let us suppose that a thoroughly sincere member of the modern Youth Movement were to wake up one morning and for a quarter of an hour be vividly conscious of what he had experienced during sleep—and suppose one were to ask him during this quarter of an hour: what is it that you are really seeking?—he would answer: ‘I am striving to apprehend the whole man, the being who has passed through many earthly lives. I am striving to know what it is within me that has come from earlier stages of existence. But you know nothing about it; you have nothing to tell me!’

In human hearts to-day there is a longing to understand karma. Therefore this is the time when the impulse must be given to study history in the way I have illustrated by certain examples; it is this kind of study which, if earnestly and actively pursued, will lead human beings to an understanding of their own lives in the light of reincarnation and karma. That is why in these lectures I am combining studies of historical personages with indications that will gradually lead to perception of man's own individual karma. By the time we come to the last lecture we shall have gained a clear idea of how man can begin to glimpse his own karma. But the only way to achieve this is to observe things first of all in the great setting and structure of world-history. The primary aim of this lecture was to shed light on the inner nature and being of man and it has also been possible to elucidate the inner aspect of the strivings of a promising Movement of the times.—And now let me conclude with a picture drawn from world-history.

Study of history in the future must be concerned with the whole man, must realise that man himself carries over from one epoch into the next the impulses that work in history, in the development of world-history. Let us think of the days when Charlemagne was reigning in Europe—it was from 768 to 814 A.D.. Just recall for a moment everything you know about Charlemagne and what he accomplished. As so much about him is taught in school, I am sure that countless details will come into the minds of my listeners! At the same time as Charlemagne, a very important personage was living in the East, namely, Haroun al Raschid. He was a product of the scholarship associated in those days with Mohammedanism and he was fired with the will to foster and promote this oriental scholarship at a centre of learning and culture. Extraordinary results were achieved at his Court, for the highest attainments of the physical sciences, of astronomy, alchemy, chemistry, geography, as they were in those days, converged, so to speak, in him. Art, literature, history, pedagogy—all these branches of culture flourished at the Court of Haroun al Raschid. When one can perceive what was actually accomplished at this Court, the spectacle is far grander, far more impressive than that of the achievements of Charlemagne's Court, above all in respect of spiritual culture. Moreover there is a great deal in the campaigns of Charlemagne that the modern mind will not exactly admire! Living at the Court of Haroun al Raschid was another personality, one who in those days was simply a very wise man, but who in a much earlier incarnation, a long time previously, had been an Initiate. I have told you that the results of Initiation in an earlier incarnation may recede into the background in a later epoch. A most wonderful academy was established over in the East at that time and this other personality of whom I am speaking possessed real genius as an organiser. Scholarship, art, poetry, architecture, sculpture, the sciences—all were organised and brought together by this man at the Court of Haroun al Raschid. Both Haroun al Raschid and his wise Counsellor passed in due course through the gate of death and their evolution proceeded. This was the time when Arabism was spreading over Europe. The spread of Arabism came to a halt, but Haroun al Raschid himself, as well as his Counsellor, continued to be associated with its influence. Whereas the gaze of Haroun al Raschid in his life between death and rebirth was directed to Arabism as it swept through the North of Africa, across to Spain and further upwards to Western Europe, the attention of the other, the wise Counsellor, was directed from the East across the regions North of the Black Sea and from thence towards Middle Europe. It is strange that in following the life of a man between death and a new birth, one can also follow those things upon which his gaze is directed as he looks downwards. As I have told you, what he is actually beholding are the deeds of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones whose workings are connected with what is happening on the Earth. In the life between death and a new birth we look downwards to the Earth, just as on the Earth we look upwards to the Heavens. The work of these two souls continued long after the close of their physical lives. Outwardly, they were reborn as men of very different characters. Haroun al Raschid appeared again as Lord Bacon of Verulam, the originator of the modern scientific mentality. Those who are capable of unprejudiced observation can see in everything that was forced upon the world by Bacon, a new edition of what was once cultivated over in the East. In the East men had turned away from Christianity. Bacon was outwardly a Christian, but inwardly, in his real aims, unchristian. The other man, the one who had once been the wise Counsellor, followed the path which led across to Middle Europe via the regions North of the Black Sea. It was he who as Amos Comenius brought Arabism over in a quite different form—a much deeper, more inward form than that in which it was introduced by Bacon—but who did, nevertheless, bear Arabism into the modern age.

And so at the dawn of modern spiritual life, two streams intermingled. We can perceive this development of history quite clearly—it is a phase when Christianity is temporarily forgotten, when on the one side scientific culture is externalised, but on the other becomes all the more inward. In his incarnation which had its roots in the East and then ran its course amid the deeper spiritual life of Middle Europe, much of the Eastern element persisted. It is not by casually opening some book ... in a certain dialect there is an expression ‘ochsen’ (to ‘swot’) and I can think of no other word at the moment ... and then swotting up Bacon and Amos Comenius, that we can discern the inner evolution of the human race; we must rather begin to perceive how the development of the several epochs is brought about by men themselves, how the impulses are carried over from earlier into later times. Try for a moment to picture quite clearly what happened here. Christianity has spread, has taken a certain hold in the regions of Middle and Northern Europe. But through men like Bacon of Verulam, the reincarnated Haroun al Raschid, and Amos Comenius, the reincarnated Counsellor, something creeps in that is not genuine Christianity, but merges nevertheless with all that is working like so many spiritual streams in world-evolution. Only in this way is it possible to grasp what is really happening and to understand the great world-processes in which man is rooted.

If we go back to the time preceding Haroun al Raschid, to a man who was an immediate disciple of Mohammed, we must be quite clear about what it was that had been indoctrinated into oriental spiritual life through Mohammedanism. Study of original Christianity reveals the deep significance of the fact that it has the Trinity. When we think of the Spiritual in nature, the Spiritual Power which places us in the world as physical human beings and operates in the laws of nature, namely, the Father Being, we may ask ourselves: What should we be if the Father Being alone worked in us? Through the whole of life from birth till death, we should be under the same sway of necessity as prevails in the world around us. But in point of fact, at a certain age in life we become free beings, not in any way losing our manhood but awakening to a higher form of it. The principle that is working in us when we attain our freedom, when we release ourselves altogether from the sway of nature, this principle is the Son Being, the Christ—the Second Form of the Godhead. But it is the Power of the Holy Spirit that quickens within us the recognition that we live not in the body alone but having been associated with the body through its phases of development, we awaken, we are awakened as beings of Spirit. Man in the fullness of his being can be understood only through the Trinity; it is there that we perceive the concrete reality. But over against the Trinity, Mohammedanism proclaims an abstraction: There is no other Divine Being save the Father God, the one and only God. The Father is all; it is not lawful to speak of a threefold Godhead. In Mohammed himself, and in his followers, this doctrine of the one Father God was personified.

In an epoch when the highest human faculty capable of development was that of thinking in cold, barren abstractions, when men knew only the one, abstract God, they began more and more to identify this God with thinking, to deify the life of thought and the human intellect—forgetting that real thinking has an essentially altruistic tendency. In Mohammed's followers, this talent for thinking about the world in pure abstractions was expressed with a certain originality and grandeur. One of these followers was Muawija. I wish you could look him up in history. You would find there a strange mental configuration, the prototype, as it were, of men who think in pure abstractions, who want to shape the world according to tenets contained in a few simple paragraphs. Muawija, one of Mohammed's followers, appeared again in our time as Woodrow Wilson. A revival of the abstract thinking of Mohammedanism gave rise to the view that it is possible to shape a whole world by applying the principles set forth in fourteen prosaic, abstract paragraphs, void of any real substance. Truth to tell, there has been no greater illusion than this in all world-history; no other illusion has proved such a pitfall for well-nigh the whole of mankind. Before the war, when I spoke in the Helsingfors Lecture Course¹ of Woodrow Wilson's shortcomings—his fame was then just beginning—people were unwilling to understand when over and over again, wherever I had the opportunity of speaking, I indicated that the calamity looming ahead was by no means unconnected with the idolisation of Woodrow Wilson then going on in the world. Now, since the impulse of our Christmas Foundation, the time has come when such things will be spoken of openly and without reserve, when our studies of history will also be connected with matters that are potent impulses at this very time. Esotericism must permeate the whole Anthroposophical Movement in order that what lies hidden beneath the shroud of external history may be brought into the light of day. Men will not be equal to the task of coping with world-events nor of doing what needs to be done until they begin to study karma and until individuals learn to observe their own being, as well as world-history, in the light of karma.

• 1. The Occult Foundations of the Bhagavad Gita. 28th May–5th June, 1913.

Emil Bock opened the discussion hour and formulated the following questions:

1. Out of the previous lecture this morning, how can we take the power of formative speech to which we still need to gain access, and accomplish a new speech technique, perhaps new forms and a new gestural technique?
2. How do we actually now really speak of a new understanding of the Bible, of a new Bible text? Furthermore, we ask Dr Steiner on occasion to discuss in more detail the two chapters from the synoptic Gospels, Matthew 13 and Mark 13.
3. What is the reality behind the Apostolic succession, the tradition and the ordination of priests in the technical sense, and how can such a reality be made more accessible again in the future?

[ 1 ] Rudolf Steiner: With regards to the first question: You would already have seen, my dear friends, that out of what I said this morning, that in the illustration, the soul contents related to the supersensible and also what leads to the power of formative speech, must be searched for. Regarding the power of speech formation: we actually have no direct understanding of sound anymore today; we basically have no more understanding for words, so our words remain signs. Naturally our starting point needs to be out of the spiritual milieu of our time. Man must be responsible for these intimate things out of what currently is available. Precisely such a question brings us naturally into the area of the purely technical. First of all one has to make the understanding for the sound active again, within oneself. One doesn't easily manage the free use of speech when one isn't able to allow the sound as such, to stir within oneself. I would like to continue in such a way that I first draw your attention to certain examples.

[ 2 ] You see, when we say "head" (Kopf) in German, we hardly have anything else in mind than the total perception of what reaches us through the ear, which indicates the head. When we say "foot" (Fuss) it is hardly any different to what we experience in the tonality and sound content in relation to some foot. Now we only need, for instance, to refer to the Romance languages where head is testa, tête, foot is pedum, pied, and we get the feeling at the same time that the term is taken from something completely different. When we say the word Kopf in German, the term has come out of the form, from looking at the form. We are not aware of this any longer, yet it is so. When we say Fuss, it is taken from walking where furrows are drawn in the ground. Thus, it has come into existence out of a certain soul content and coined in a word. When we take a word formation like, let's say, "testament" and all other word formations which refer in Romance language terms to head, testa, then we will feel that the term Kopf in the Romantic languages originate through the substantiation and thus not out of the form, but through the human soul with the help of the head, and particularly activating the mouth organs. Pied didn't originate from walking or drawing furrows but from standing, pressing down while standing. Today we no longer question the motives which have come out of the soul and into speech formation. We can only discover what can be called, in the real sense, a feeling for the language when we follow the route of making language far more representational than it is currently, abstraction at most. When someone uses a Latin expression in terminology, some Latin expressions are even more representational, but some people use them to denote even more. For example, today one can hardly find the connection between "substance" and "subsist" while the concept of "subsist" has basically been lost. Someone who still has the original feeling for substance and subsistence would say of the Father-God, not that He "exists" but that he "subsists."

[ 3 ] Researching language in this way and in another way which I want to mention right now, in order to develop a lively feeling for language again, leads then to something I would like to call a linguistic conscience (Sprachgewissen). We need a linguistic conscience. We speak really so directly these days because as human beings we act more as automatons towards language than we do as living beings. Until we are capable of connecting language in a living way to ourselves, like our skin is connected to us, we will not come to the right symbolization. The skin experiences pain when it is pricked. Language even tolerates being maltreated. One must develop a feeling regarding language that it can be maltreated because it is a closed organism, just like our skin. We can gain much in this area, when we have a lively experience in some or other dialect.

Consider how often we have performed the Christmas Plays, and in these plays there is a sentence spoken by one or more of the innkeepers. When Joseph and Mary come to Bethlehem in search of lodging, they are refused by three innkeepers. Each one of the three innkeepers says: Ich als a wirt von meiner gstalt, hab in mein haus und ligament gwalt.—Just imagine what this means to a person today. He could hear: "I as a host of my stature ..."—and think that what the host is saying means he is an attractive man, or something like that, or a strong man who has stature within his hostel, in his house. This is certainly not meant. If we want to translate that into High German we'll have to say: "I as a host, who is placed in such a way as to have abundant comfort, I am not dependent on such poor people finding lodgings within, with me." This means: "I as a host in my social position, in my disposition." This shows them it is necessary not only to listen to him—words one often enough hears in speech—but to enter into the spirit of the language. We say Blitz" (lightening) in High German. In Styria a certain form of lightening is called 'heaven's lashers' (Himmlatzer). In the word "Blitz" there is quite another meaning than in the word Himmlatzer.

[ 4 ] So we start becoming aware of different things when we approach the sense of speech. You see, such an acquisition of the sense of language sometimes leads to something extraordinarily important. Goethe once uttered a sentence, when already in his late life, to the Chancellor von Müller, a statement which has often been quoted and is often used, to understand the entire way in which Faust, written by Goethe, originated. Goethe said that for him the conception of Faust had for 60 years been clear "from the beginning" (von vornherein); the other parts less extensively. Now commentary upon commentary have been written and this sentence was nearly always recalled, because it is psychologically extraordinarily important, and the commentators have it always understood like this: Goethe had a plan from the beginning for his Faust and in the 60 years of his life—since he was twenty or about eighteen—he used this plan, he had "from the start," to work from.

In Weimar I met August Fresenius who bemoaned the fact that it was a great misfortune, if I could use such an expression, which had entered into the entire Goethe research, and at the time I had urged an unusually thoughtful and slow philologist to publish this thing as soon as possible in order that it doesn't continue, otherwise one would have a few dozen more such Goethe commentaries. It is important to note that Goethe used the expression "from the start" in no other way than in a descriptive way, not in the sense of a priori but "from the beginning" in a very descriptive manner so that in the strictest sense one could refer to Goethe not having an overall plan, but that "at the beginning" he only wrote down the first pages (i.e. to begin with) and of the further sections, only single sentences. There can be no argument of an overall plan. It very much depends on how one really experiences words. Many people have, when they hear the word vornherein totally have no conscience that it has a vorn (in front) and a herein (in) and that one sees something spiritual when one pronounces it. This simple dismissal of a word without contemplation is something upon which a tremendous amount depends, if one wants to attain a symbolic manner of speech. Precisely about this direction there would be extraordinarily much to say.

[ 5 ] You see, we have the remarkable appearance of the Fritz Mauthner speaking technique where all knowledge and all wisdom is questioned, because all knowledge and wisdom is expressed though speech, and so Fritz Mauthner finds nothing expressed in speech because it does not point to some or other reality. [ 6 ] How harsh my little publication "The spiritual guidance of man and of mankind" has been judged in which I mention that in earlier times, all vowel formation expressed people's inner experiences, and all consonant unfolding comes from outer observed or seen events. All that man perceives is expressed in consonants, while vowels are formed by inner experiences, feelings, emotions and so on. With this is connected the peculiar manner in which the consonants are written differently to the vowels in Hebrew. This is also connected to areas where more primitive people used to dwell, where they have not strongly developed their inner life, so predominantly consonant languages occur, not languages based on vowels. This extends very far, this kind of in-consonant-action of language. Only think what African languages have from consonants to click sounds.

[ 7 ] So you see, in this way we gain an understanding for what sounds within language. One would be brought beyond the mere sign, which the word is today. Only with today's feeling for language which Fritz Mauthner believes in, can you believe that all knowledge actually depends on language and that language has no connection to some or other reality. A great deal can be accomplished when one enters into one's mother tongue and try to go back into the vernacular. In the vernacular one finds much, very much if you really behave like a human being, that is, respond to what you feel connected to the language. In the vernacular one has the rich opportunity to feel in speech and experience in sound, but also the tendency towards the descriptive, and you have to push it so far that you really, one could say, get into a kind of state of renunciation in regard to expressions that are supposed to phrase something completely separate from human experiences.

Something which thoroughly ruins our sense of language is physics, and in physics, as it is today, it only aspires to study objective processes and refrains from all subjective experience, there it should no longer be spoken at all. According to physics, when one body presses (stoßen) against another, for example in the theory of elasticity, then you are anthropomorphising, because the experience of pressure as soon as you sense sound, means you're only affected by the same kind of pressure as the pressure your own hand makes. Above all, one gets the feeling with the S-sound that nothing other can be described as something like this (a waved line is drawn on the blackboard). The word Stoß" (push/impacts—ß is the symbol for ss—translator) has two s's, at the end and beginning; it gives the entire word its colouring; so when the word Stoß or stoßen (to push/thrust) is pronounced one actually can feel how, when your ether body would move, it would not only move but be shoved forwards and continuously be kept up.

[ 8 ] Thus, there are already methods through which one comes to the power of speech formation, which is then no longer far from symbolizing, for the symbolum must be hacked out of the way so that one experiences language as a living organism, because much is to be experienced within language. Someone recently told me that there are certain things in language which only need to be pronounced and one is surprised at how they reveal themselves as self-evident.

The Greeks recited in hexameter. Why? Well, hexameter is an experience. A person produces speech, as I've already said, in his breathing. However, breathing is closely connected to other elements of rhythm in the human being; with the pulse, with blood circulation. On average, obviously not precisely, we have 18 breaths and 72 heat beats; 72 equals 4 times 18. Four times 18 heart beats gives a rhythm, a collective inner beat. In a time when man sensed in a more primordial and more elementary way according to what was taking place within him, man experienced, when he could, in uttering the relationship of the heart beat to the breathing, bring the totality of himself into expression. This relationship, not precisely according to time, this relationship can be brought to bear; you only have to add the turning point as the fourth foot (reference plate 3 ... not available In German text) then you have a Greek hexameter half-line, in the ration of 4 to 1 as a pulse beat to breathing rhythm. The hexameter was born out of the human structure, and other measures of verse were all born out of the rhythmic system of the human being. You can already feel, when you treat language artistically, how, in the process of treating human speech in an artistic way, language is alive. This makes it possible to acquire a far more inner relationship to language, yet also far more objectivity. The most varied chauvinistic feelings in relation to language stops, because the configurations of different languages stop, and one acquires an ear for the general sound. There are such things which are found on the way to gaining the power of creative speech. It does finally lead to listening to oneself when one speaks. In a certain way it's actually difficult but it can be supported. For various reasons it seems to me that for those who are affected by it, it is also necessary not to treat the Scripture in the way many people treat it today. You will soon see why I say these things.

[ 9 ] In relation to writing, there are two kinds of people. The majority learn to write as if it's a habit of staking out words. People are used to move their hands in a certain way and write like this: in the majority. The writing lesson is very often given in such a way that one just comes to it. The minority actually don't write in the sense of reality, but they draw (a word is written on the blackboard: Kann [meaning can; be able to]). They look at the signs of the letters simultaneously as being written, and as an artistic treatment of writing, it is far more an intimate involvement. I have met people who have been formally trained to write. For instance, once there was a writing method which consisted in people being trained to make circles and curves, to turn them and thus acquire a feeling of connecting them and so form letters out of them. Only in this way, out of these curves, could the letters come about. With a large number of them I have seen that they, before they start writing, make movements in the air with their pen. This is what brings writing into the unconsciousness of the body. However, our language comes out of the totality of the human being and when one spoils oneself by writing you also spoil yourself for the language. Precisely the one who is dependent on handling the language needs to get used to the meditation that writing should not be allowed to just flow out of his hand, but he should look at it, really look at what he is writing, when he writes.

[ 10 ] My dear friends, this is something which is extraordinarily important in our current culture, because we are on our way to dehumanizing ourselves. I have already received a large number of letters which have not been written with a pen but with the typewriter. Now you can imagine the difference between a letter written with a typewriter or written with a pen. I'm not campaigning against the typewriter, I consider it as an obvious necessity in civilization, but we do also need the counter pole. By us dehumanizing ourselves in this way, by us changing our relationship towards the outer world in an absolute mechanistic and dead manner, we need in turn to take up strong vital forces again. Today we need far greater vital forces than in the time in which man knew nothing yet about the typewriter.

[ 11 ] Therefore, for someone who handles words, he must also acquire an understanding for the continuous observation, while he is writing, that what he is writing pleases him, that he gets the impression that something hasn't just flowed out of a subject but that, by looking simultaneously at it, this thing lives as a totality in him. Mostly, the thing that is needed for the development of some capability is not arrived at in a direct but in an indirect way. I must explain this route because I have been asked how one establishes the power for speech formation. This is the way, as I have mentioned, which comes first of all. As an aside I stress that language originates in the totality of mankind, and the more mankind still senses the language, so much more will there be movement in his speech. It is extraordinary, how for instance in England, where the process of withdrawal of a connection with the surroundings is most advanced, it is regarded as a good custom to speak with their hands in their trouser pockets, held firmly inside so they don't enter the danger of movement. I have seen many English people talk in this way. Since then I've never had my pockets made in front again, but always at the back, for I have developed such disgust from this quite inhuman non-participation in what is being said. It is simply a materialistic criticism that speech only comes from the head; it originates out of the entire human being, above all from the arms, and we are—I say it here in one sentence which is obviously restricted—we are on this basis no ape or animal which needs its hands to climb or hold on to something, but we have them as free because with these free hands and arms we handle speech.

In grasping with our arms, creating with our fingers, we express something we need in order to model language. So it has a certain justification to return mankind to its connection with language, bringing the whole person into it, to train Eurythmy properly, which really exists in drawing out of the human organism what is not fulfilled in the human body, but is however fulfilled in the ether body, when we speak. The entire human being is in movement and we are simply transposing though the eurhythmic movements, the etheric body on to the physical body. That is the principle. It is really the eurythmization of something like a necessity which needs to be regularly brought out of the human being, like the spoken language itself. It must stand as a kind of opposite pole against all which rises in the present and alienate people towards the outer world, allowing no relationship to be possible between people and the outer world any more. The eurythmization enables people in any case to return to being present in the language and is on this basis, as I've often suggested, even an art. Well, if you take into account the things I've just proposed, then you arrive at the now commonplace speech technique basically under the scheme of pedantry.

The great importance given to teaching through recitation and that kind of thing, only supports the element of a materialistic world view. You see, just as one would in a school for sculpture or a school of painting not really get instructions of the hand movements but corrects them by life forces coming into them, so speech techniques must not be pedantically taught with all kinds of nose-, chest- and stomach resonances. These things may only be developed though living speech. When a person speaks, he might at most be made aware of one or the other element. In this respect extraordinary atrocities are being committed today and the various vocal and language schools can actually be disgusting, because it shows how little lives within the human being. The formation of speech happens when those things are considered which I mentioned. Now if the question needs to be answered even more precisely, I ask you to please call my attention to it.

[ 12 ] Now there is a question about new commentary regarding the Bible, in fact, how one can arrive at a new Bible text.

[ 13 ] You see, the thing is like this, one will first have to penetrate into an understanding of the Bible. Much needs to precede this. If you take everything which I have said about language, and then consider that the Bible text has originated out of quite another kind of experience of language than we have today, and also as it was experienced centuries before in Luther's time, you can hardly hope to somehow discover an understanding of the Bible through some small outer adjustment. To understand the Bible, a real penetration of Christianity is needed above all, and actually this can only emerge from a Bible text as something similar for us as the Gospels had once appeared for the first Christians. In the time of the first Christians one certainly had the feeling of sound and some of what can be experienced in the words in the beginning of St John's Gospel which was of course experienced quite differently in the first Christian centuries as one would be able to do today. "In the primal beginnings was the Word"—you see, today there doesn't seem to be much more than a sign in this line, I'd say. We come closer to an understanding when we substitute "Word," which is very obscure and abstract, with "Verb" and also really develop our sense of the verb as opposed to the noun. In the ancient beginnings it was a verb and not the noun. I would like to say something about this abstraction.

The verb is quite rightly related to time, to activity, and it is absurd to think of including a noun in the area which has been described as in "the primal beginning." It has sense to insert a verb, a word related to activity. What lies within the sentence regarding the primal origins is however not an activity brought about by human gestures or actions, because it is the activity which streams out of the verb, the active word. We are not transported back into the ancient mists of the nebular hypothesis by the Kant-Laplace theory, but we will be led back to the sound and loud prehistoric power. This returning into a prehistoric power is something which was experienced powerfully in the first Christian centuries, and it was also strongly felt that it deals with a verb, because it is an absurdity to say: In the prehistoric times there was a noun.—We call it "Word" which can be any part of speech. Of course, it can't be so in the case of St John's Gospel.

[ 14 ] In even further times in the past, things were even more different. They were so that for certain beings, for certain perceptions of beings one had the feeling that they should be treated with holy reserve, one couldn't just put them in your mouth and say them. For this reason, a different way had to be found regarding expression, and this detour I can express by saying something like the following. Think about a group of children living with their parents somewhere in an isolated house. Every couple of weeks the uncle comes, but the children don't say the uncle comes, but the "man" comes. They mean it is the uncle, but they generalise and say it is "the man." The father is not the "man"; they know him too well to call him "man." In this way earlier religious use of language hid some things which they didn't want to express outwardly because one had the inner reaction of profanity, and so it was stated as a generalization, like also in the first line of St John's Gospel, "in the beginning was the Word." However, one doesn't mean the word which actually stands there but one calls it something which has been picked out, a singular "Word." It was after all something extraordinary, this "Word." There are as many words as there are men, but children said, "the man," and so one didn't say what was meant in St John's Gospel, but instead one said, "the Word." The word in this case was Jahveh, so that St John's Gospel would say: "In the primal beginnings was Jahveh," so one doesn't say "God," but "the Word."

[ 15 ] Such things must be acquired again by living within Christianity and what Christianity has derived from the ritual practice of the Old Testament. There is no shortcut to understanding the Gospels; a lively participation in the ancient Christian times is necessary for Gospel understanding. Basically, this is what has again become enlivened through Anthroposophy, while such things have in fact only risen out of Anthroposophic research. We then have the following: In the primordial times was he word—in primordial time was Jahveh—and the word was with God—and Jahveh was with God. In the third line: And Jahveh was one of the Elohim.—This is actually the origin, the start of the St John Gospel which refers to the multiplicity of the Elohim, and Jahveh as one of them—in fact there were seven—as lifted out of the row of the Elohim. Further to this lies the basis of the relationship between Christ and Jahveh.

Take sunlight—moonlight is the same, it is also sunlight but only reflected by the moon—it doesn't come from some ancient being, it is a reflection. In primordial Christianity an understanding existed for the Christ-word, where Christ refers to his own being by saying: "Before Abraham was, I am" and many others. There certainly was an understanding for the following: Just as the sunlight streams out of itself and the moon reflects it back, so the Christ-being who only appeared later, streamed out in the Jahveh being. We have a fulfilment in the Jahveh-being preceding the Christ-being in time. Through this St John's Gospel becomes deepened through feeling from the first line to the line which says: "And the Word became flesh and lived among us." Even today we don't believe a childlike understanding suffices for the words of the Bible, when we research the Bible by translating it out of an ancient language until we penetrate what lies in the words. Of course, one can say, only through long, very long spiritual scientific studies can one approach the Bible text. That finally, is also my conviction.

[ 16 ] Basically, the Bible no longer exists; we have a derivative which we have put together more and more from our abstract language. We need a new starting point in order to try and find what really, in an enlivened way, is in the Bible. For this I have suggested an approach which I will speak about tomorrow, in the interpretation of Mathew 13 and Mark 13. You will have to state in any case that even commenting on the Bible makes it necessary to deal with the Bible impartially. If it is stated that something is mentioned which had only taken place in the year 70, therefore the relevant place could not have been mentioned before other than what had happened after this event, this could be said only if it is announced at the beginning of the Bible explanation that the Bible will be explained completely from a materialistic point of view; then it may be done like this. The Bible itself does not follow the idea that it should be explained materialistically. The Bible itself makes it necessary that the foreseeing of coming events is first and foremost ascribed to Christ Jesus himself, and also ascribed to the apostles. Thus, as I've said, this outlook is what I want to enter into tomorrow on the basis of Mathew 13 and Mark 13, by giving a little interpretation as it has been asked for.

[ 17 ] Another question asks about the reality behind the apostolic succession and the priest ordination. This question can hardly be answered briefly because it relates deeply to the abyss which exists between today's evangelist-protestant religious understanding and all nuances of Catholic understanding. It is important that in the moment when these things are spoken about, one must try to acquire a real understanding beyond the rational or rationalistic and beyond the intellectualistic. This is acquired even by those who have little right to live in the sense of such an understanding. In the past I have become acquainted with a large number of outstanding theosophical luminaries, Leadbeater also among them, about whom you would have heard, and some other people, who worked in the Theosophical Society. I have recently had the opportunity—otherwise I would not have worried about it again—to experience, that some of these people are Catholic bishops; it struck me as extraordinary that a part of them were Catholic priests. Leadbeater in any case had, after various things became known about him, not exactly the qualification to become a Catholic bishop. Still this interested me about how people become Catholic priests. One thing is observed with utmost severity, which is the succession. In order for me to see which people have the right to be Catholic bishops, I was given a document which revealed that in a certain year a Catholic bishop left the Catholic church, but one who was ordained, and he then ordained others—right up to Mr Leadbeater—and ordination proceeds in an actual continuation, in an absolutely correct progress; they actually have created a "family tree" by it. I don't want to talk about the start of the "family tree" but you must accept that if it would be a natural progression that there once was an ordained bishop in Rome who dropped away, who then however ordained all the others, so all these Theosophical luminaries would refer back to a real descent of their priesthood to that which once existed. Therefore, awareness of this succession is everywhere present and such things are, according to their understanding, taken completely as the reality.

[ 18 ] Something like this must be taken as a reality within the Roman Catholic Church. The old Catholic church more or less didn't have the feeling—but within the Roman Catholic church it is certain accepted this way—that the moment the priest crosses the stole he no longer represents a single personality or attitude but he is then only a member of the church and speaks as a representative, as a member of the church. The Roman Catholic Church considered itself certainly as a closed organism, where the individual loses his individuality through ordination; they see it this way increasingly.

[ 19 ] Now something else is in contrast to this. You may think about what I've said as you wish, but I can only speak from my point of view, from the viewpoint of my experience. I have seen much within the transubstantiation. Today in the Catholic Church there is quite a strict difference according to which priest would perform the transubstantiation, yet I have always seen how during the transformation, during the transubstantiation, the host takes on an aura. Therefore, I have come to recognise within the objective process, that when it is worthily accomplished, it is certainly fulfilled. I said, you may think about this as you wish, I say it to you as something which can be looked at from one hand, and on the other hand also as a basic conviction of the church being valid while it was still Catholic, when the evangelist church hadn't become a splintering off. We very soon come back to reality when we look at these things and it must even be said within the sacrament of mass being celebrated there is something like a true activity, which is not merely an outer sign but a real act. If you now take all the sacraments of mass together which had been celebrated, you will create an entirety, a whole, and this is something which stands there as a fact. It is something which certainly touches things, where the evangelical mind would say: Yes, there is something magical in the Catholic Mass.—This it does contain. It also contained within it the magical part, one can experience in the evangelist mind as something perhaps heathen. Good, talk to one another about this. In any case this underscores it as being a reality, which one can't without further ado, without approaching the bearer of this reality, celebrate a mass. I say celebrate; it can be demonstrated, one can show everything possible, but one can't celebrate with the claim that through the mass what should happen at the altar will only happen when it is read without any personal imprint, in absolute application.

You see, it is ever present there where one works with the mysteries; it is simply so, when one works with the mysteries. Just as no Masonic ceremony may be carried out by a non-Mason in the consciousness of the Freemason, nor may a non-ordained person in true Catholicism work from out of Catholicism and perform with full validity the ceremony in consciousness.

[ 20 ] This is where we are being directed and must consult. I want you to take note that in this case the Catholic rules were actually very strict. Please don't take things up in such a way as if I am saying this towards pro-Catholicism; I only want to point out the situation. It isn't important for us to be for, or opposed, to Catholicism, because it's about something quite different. Particular customs were very strictly adhered to in the Catholic Church—not at all what is today in Rome's mood and procedure. If a priest became so unworthy as to be excommunicated, then his skin would be ripped off, scraped off from his fingers where he had held the sacred host in his hands. His skin would be scraped off. Sometimes such things are referred to but legally it is so, and I know such processes quite well, that after the priest's excommunication the skin of the fingers which touched the host, were scraped off. You can certainly set the objective instead of the succession that goes from the apostles through the priesthood to the priest celebrating today. You can set that which goes through consecration and through the sacraments themselves. You can exclude priesthood, but you can only exclude that by taking things objectively, right to a certain degree, objectively, that the priest no longer may have skin on his fingers when he is no longer authorised to celebrate the sacrificial mass.

[ 21 ] Isn't it true, if you have Catholic feeling, it is something as definite to you as two plus two making four? It is something definite according to religious feeling. When you don't have that then you as modern people must have a certain piety, which says to you the Catholic church has also just preserved the celebration of mass and if this is carried outside the circle to which it had been entrusted—other circles have not preserved the sacrifice of mass—if it is being performed in other circles it is pure theft. Real theft. These things must also be understood from such concepts. I believe to some it appears very difficult to understand what I am saying but in conclusion it has as such a certain validity which needs to be achieved through understanding. We don't have to worry about it here because you can experience the mass according to what there is to experience. As far as the training of a new ritual is concerned, it would not be disturbed at all by this, that the Catholic mass regards the mass to be something so real that it may certainly not to be removed from the field of Catholicism.

[ 22 ] This is firstly something which I wanted to say during our limited time. When I speak about the mass itself, and I will do so, I will still have a few things to add.

In the gathering held here just after the Christmas Course we turned our attention to things that can deepen medicine in an esoteric sense. And we tried—to the extent to which this is possible in such brief meetings—to penetrate into the esotericism of medicine, in the way that is suitable for younger medical aspirants today. In formulae for further contemplation and elaboration, we received things that can quicken the sense for medicine and emphasis was laid upon the necessity of having this sense for medicine.

I picture to myself that you have worked upon these things for a time, my dear friends. Naturally, my idea of this work is not that people sit down and ponder about such things theoretically, but that from time to time, when the inner need is felt, they let these things work upon and develop the soul. It was inevitable, from the very way in which these things came before us, that one perfectly definite fact should emerge—a fact which I believe to be of importance for our gathering now. Because of the very concentrated form in which the esoteric things were given at the first gathering, one or another, to a greater or lesser degree, must have realized that it was necessary to face certain inner difficulties. The purpose of esoteric teachings is not always to make life as easy as possible for us. In a certain respect the opposite is certainly the case. They are also there in order to make life more difficult, to make us realize the difficulties of understanding the world, of really getting to know the world and human beings. So that when we become alive to these difficulties, we take the opposite path of development from that which is so often taken in our civilization today. We take the opposite to a superficial path of development. It is only by becoming alive to the difficulties existing as between the outside world and the human being that a person can be deepened in soul. I think, therefore, the best way now will be if, bearing these inner difficulties in mind, you will bring them forward in the form of questions and we will then make matters that can really promote the development of our subject into the theme of our discussions. I would ask you, to begin with, to tell me what inner and outer difficulties have arisen in your own circle. Difficulties will have arisen both for the practitioner and for the student. There are a number among you who are now approaching the end of their studies; they will have found quite specific difficulties and we will try to find their solution. All of you have received the first circular letter and you will have realized that in connection with definite questions there is a very great deal to say. I would like to ask if any question, definite or indefinite, has arisen, for such questions will surely lead us further. In this way we shall get away more from theoretical study and reach matters which lie in the realm of actual experience.

Question: A participant asked about the course of the year, the Calendar of the Soul, definite constellations of the stars and whether one must be consciously aware of these.

That is not essential. You mean observation of the constellations as they are at a particular time. It is, of course, a help if one is able to look at the visible constellations. But if I have understood you aright you mean: How are things, really, if we allow the formulae we have been given to work upon the soul? These things work through their own inherent mantric power; orientation in the outer world according to the stars can, of course, be a help but you must remember the following. Take the most striking example of a human-cosmic relationship that can still be observed today, namely the menses. It is obvious that they are determined cosmically yet they are not so determined in the present epoch. They were cosmically determined in a much earlier phase of cosmic evolution in which our earth was also involved. Then, in the course of time, they became independent, were emancipated from the external cosmos, so that nowadays there is no direct dependence. Therefore, one cannot say nowadays that the phases of the moon are coincident with menstruation. This cannot be said. But it is certainly true to say that there was once a time when the one coincided with the other; then they separated. The moon phases exist on their own. Menstruation takes its own independent course. Here is one example of separation. The other that I will mention is not governed by the phases of the moon but by the daily phases of the moon. Ebb and flow were once coincident with certain influences of the moon. Again there was separation. The moon is on its own, ebb and flow on their own.

These things also hold good in the working of mantric power. Mantric power is certainly of such a nature that what happens in the human being as a result of it was at one time coincident with cosmic processes, but separation has now taken place, so that a proper orientation is necessary. If we want this help from the outside world we must say to ourselves first of all: What is to happen in the inner being is inscribed in the cosmos. But in contemplating this we must make ourselves inwardly independent and be able to experience inwardly and quite on our own, emancipated from the cosmic happenings. Therefore it is not unconditionally necessary to reckon with the constellations of the stars in the working of a mantram. Equally it cannot be a question of the menses being regulated according to the external phases of the moon, because the menses have become a process of the world of nature. Today it is the case that the whole of our inner life that is to be influenced by mantrams must take place in emancipation from the outer cosmos.

In connection with other subjects I have often had to speak of this as the difference between Eastern and Western esotericism. The whole standpoint of the oriental is this: the human being has come forth from the cosmos, he must return there, he must be united with the cosmos again. Think of the posture of the Buddha. It is a return to earlier conditions. This is shown by the Buddha's whole posture, the crossing of the legs one over the other, the elimination of the limb structures. The position of the arms, too, is such that the whole relationship to the earth is paralyzed. We see how the human being again members himself into the cosmos. He goes back again. So it is, in reality, with the whole of Eastern esotericism. It is a going backwards. Our Western esotericism can only be a going forward, an ever-increasing emancipation. For this reason it is not so inwardly comfortable and when applied in certain domains particularly it does not make for inner ease.

Of course, if you have some specific, pathological condition before you, and when you look at the constellations you find, for example, that the condition definitely set in when Saturn was in opposition to the moon, this naturally has a certain significance. For if you now come as a healer with Saturn and moon, that is to say, in earthly terms, with lead and silver, saying: I will apply the lead cosmically and the silver in the earthly form, trying to pulverize it, to dissolve it; I will change it into the earthly form, thereby producing the same constellation that is expressed in the heavens in the opposition to the moon, then you can heal in the sense of the cosmic forces. But at the same time you bring the human being into a condition which throws him back into earlier stages of evolution. Whereas if you take your start directly from the given earthly state—the connection of the human being with lead, with silver—then you are working in something that is in a process of emancipating itself within the human being and you are looking not into the past but into the future. In this case you will certainly be doing something similar, but you get at it from within, by getting to know the nature of the lead and the silver, realizing that the lead works as substance, the silver through what it actually becomes when it is broken into pieces, dissolved, resolved into atoms. But you are comparing it with the human nature that is already emancipated, not with the cosmos. This is the way in which one must proceed. Therefore it may certainly be a help to think about the actual constellations of the stars. But to begin with, we shall have to use all our power to lend ourselves to the inner activation of soul by the mantric formulae we have been given, and seek for everything more from within.

Question: What must I do out of the ego when I am meditating?

From out of the ego? Meditation consists, does it not, in the following. As a modern person you feel that you must understand every sentence. This is emphatically an activity of the ego in the present incarnation. Everything you do intellectually is an activity of the ego. In the present incarnation the intellect predominates and everything else is overshadowed by the ego, works upwards at the most like a dream, and is unconscious. In contrast with this, meditation means elimination of this intellectual striving and, to begin with, taking the content of the meditation just as it is given—purely according to the sounds of the words. When you approach the content of the meditation intellectually you bring your ego into movement before you absorb the meditation, for you think about the content; it is outside you. If you let the meditation be present in your consciousness just exactly as it is given, not cogitating over it at all but simply letting it be in your consciousness, then your ego is working in you not from the present incarnation but from the past. You hold the intellect still, simply transporting yourself into the word-content which you hear inwardly, not outwardly; you transport yourself into this word-content and as you do so your inner being works within the content of the meditation—the inner being which is not that of the present incarnation. But thereby the content of meditation becomes—not something for you to understand merely—but something that works within you in reality; so that finally you become aware of: Now I have experienced something I was unaware of earlier.

Take a simple meditation which I have often given: “Wisdom lives in the Light.” If we think about this we can extract many very clever things but equally frightfully stupid things from it. “Wisdom lives in the Light” is there in order to be heard inwardly. When you hear this inwardly that within you which listens does not come from your present incarnation but what you have brought with you from former earthly lives. It is this that thinks and experiences, and after some time there lights up within you something you did not know before, that you cannot think out with your own intellect. Inwardly you are much further than your intellect. Your intellect contains only a tiny extract of what is really there.

After all, you must take what is given in Anthroposophy absolutely concretely and objectively. Just think about the following: With the change of teeth the human being really renews his whole physical body. This must be taken as a fundamental fact. That the human being gets second teeth is really only the most external symptom of all, merely, a fragment of what is going on. Just as the so-called milk teeth are replaced, so is the whole human organism replaced. After the change of teeth, so far as his physical substance is

concerned, the human being is entirely new in comparison to what he was when he was born. The modern view which jumbles everything together is that the human being is born, passes through a metamorphosis with the change of teeth and then goes on developing. It is not like this. The truth is that when the human being comes physically into the world he has, as well as the so-called milk teeth, a body that is a product of hereditary development. He has received a body that is the product of what is contained in the whole line of ancestry. The physical body of the first seven years—if we express it in figures—comes from here. From the seventh to the fourteenth year the human being has a body, too, but this body has not been produced from the first by transformation. What the human being has brought with him to the earth has intervened here.

Picture it as follows: the human being has had his body. This body which has come to him from the line of heredity is a model; he has it as a model. Into this body he takes earthly substance. If he were to work only with the forces he brings with him from pre-earthly existence he would elaborate this earthly substance which he takes into his body in the first seven years into quite a different form. He would call forth quite a different form. He does not come at birth with the tendency to give form to a being with eyes, ears, nose, like the being who stands on the earth. He enters with the tendency to structure the human being in such a way that very little is structured by way of the head through his pre-earthly being; it is especially upon everything else that the greatest care is expended. What is stunted in the embryonic life is developed in the astral, in the ego organization. Of the physical embryo, therefore, we must say: Physical nature in the embryo is developed in a wonderful way but the pre-earthly human being has very little indeed to do with it. On the other hand the pre-earthly human being plays the very greatest part in all that lies around the embryo. It lives in what is demolished in the physical world, amnion, chorion, and so on. Within this lives the pre-earthly man.

You can picture it rather like this. To begin with, the cosmos is copied. This is what the human being wants, in reality, to do when he has come down from the pre-earthly into earthly existence. Why does he not do it? Because a model is already provided. And in accordance with this model, with the substances received, he transforms the pre-earthly during the first seven years of life. His inherent tendency would be to form a more spherical being, a being organized into a sphere. This is transformed in accordance with the model and so the pre-earthly forces work out this second physical man who is there from the seventh to the fourteenth years, but to begin with, by adhering to the model which comes from the forces of heredity.

There, you see, you have two, actually distinguishable entities of forces in the human being. How can you understand these force entities? Take, with the outlook and feeling of the physician, the book Occult Science and read where the earth's evolution is spoken of. At first there is a Saturn evolution, then a Sun evolution. If you follow the description of the Earth evolution you will find that until the separation of the sun, sun, moon and earth were one, combined together in one. Afterwards there is a separation of earth and sun, earth and moon. Up to the middle of this evolution, therefore, the human being lives in the cosmos. He lives in sun and moon just as he lives in the earth. After the separation of the sun he lives outside the sun; after the separation of the moon, outside the moon. Until the separation of the sun, therefore, the cosmic forces were working upon man's nature; those forces, too, which are today outside the earth in the moon and in the sun were working in the human being because he belonged to the world in which the sun and moon were still present. There followed for the human being an evolution during which sun and moon were outside.

There was a phase of evolution which contained within it all that today is both earthly and of the nature of sun and moon; later on, the extra-earthly emancipated itself from the earthly. The earthly went on along its own path, it dried up, hardened, became physical—and you find this today in the stream of heredity; it has densified within the stream of heredity. What the human being has received since the separation of the moon and sun lies in the forces working in from the cosmos. That is the point. So that in the model that is received in order that the second man may be elaborated, you have a model that really represents a primeval, artistic principle given by father and mother, originating when sun and moon were still united with the earth. It was then that the forces which really give the human being his earthly configuration were developed. For you will readily understand that the configuration of the human being is an earthly one. Try to think of the being of man entirely removed from the earth. What could be done with it? You would be extremely unhappy if after death you were to make use of anything like legs. Legs have purpose only when the earth's forces of attraction pass through them, when the legs are within the sphere of the earth's forces of attraction. Legs—and arms and hands, too—have meaning and purpose only on the earth. So that a whole section of the human organism, in the way it is developed, has purpose only when we are earthly man. What we are as Earthly man has no meaning so far as the cosmos is concerned. Therefore when we come to the earth as beings of spirit and soul, our wish, to begin with, is to form quite a different organization. We want to build a sphere and to generate all kinds of configurations within this sphere, but we have no wish for this being with whom the cosmos itself can do nothing. This being is given us as a model and we build up the second man in accordance with this model.

In the first life-period, therefore, there is a perpetual struggle between what comes from us out of the previous incarnation and what comes from hereditary development; the two elements fight with each other. The illnesses of childhood are the expression of this fight. Just think how intimately the whole inner being of soul and spirit is bound up with the physical organization during early childhood. When the second teeth appear you can see how they push up against the first, how they still have tussles with each other, and in this same way the whole second man has tussles with the first. But within the second man there is the super-earthly being; in the first a foreign, earthly model. These two work into one another and if you observe this inter-working truly you can see how, if the inner man, who as a being of soul and spirit was present in pre-earthly existence, has too much the upper hand for a time, working into the physical very strongly and having, willy nilly, to adjust itself by dint of effort to the model, that it damages the model by striking up against it everywhere, saying: I want to get this particular form out of you—then the fight expresses itself as scarlet fever. If the inner man is tender, so that there is a continual shrinking back, a wish to mold the in-taken substances more in accordance with their own nature, and resistance is put up to the model, the struggle comes out as measles. What is, in reality, a mutual struggle expresses itself in the illnesses of childhood. Moreover, it is only possible to understand truly what comes later if these things can be properly reckoned with.

It is, of course, very easy for the materialists to say that all this is stupid, because children still retain a likeness to their parents after the change of teeth and not only up till that time. Such talk is nonsense. The fact is that one being is weaker, directs himself more in accordance with the forces of heredity, builds up the second man with a greater resemblance to the model. This naturally comes out in the appearance, but the same thing has been going on when the being has adjusted itself more in accordance with the model. On the other hand, there are human beings who after the change of teeth become very unlike what they were before. In such cases what comes from the pre-earthly life of soul and spirit is strong and they adhere less to the model. We have therefore simply to see these things in their right connection.

The following, too, must be remembered. Everything that has to be taken in must, in the first place, be taken in by the child and elaborated inwardly in such a way that the ego and astral body enter into intimate contact with the foodstuffs. Later on this need not be the case any longer. The human being is never afterwards in the position of being so strongly compelled to work out, according to a model, something that is independent as is the case during the first seven years of life. During those years he must work up in his ego and astral body everything he takes in; he must work it up in such a way that it can be molded in accordance with the model. This process must be helped; and the world has arranged for it, inasmuch as milk is able to bear a very great resemblance indeed to an etheric structure. Milk is a substance which really still has an etheric body and because this substance, when it is taken by the child, still works up into the etheric, the astral body is able at once to take hold of the milk and then there can arise the close inner contact between what is thus taken in and the astral body and ego organization. For this reason there is an inward, intimate connection in the child between the external foodstuffs and the inner organization of spirit and soul.

In the whole way in which the child drinks milk you can actually see how his astral body and his ego are taking hold of the milk you can see it with your very eyes. And now, as a physician, you must realize the remarkable process of working up what is going on. On the one side, meditate in mantrams, letting the mantram work upon you, freeing your forces of soul on the one hand; and on the other hand, meditate simply upon the child. Picture to yourself how the being of spirit and soul comes down and makes its way to the physical foodstuff, ignoring the model to begin with, and then picture what is going on between the being of spirit and soul and the foodstuff—a process that is now directed in accordance with the forms contained in the model. If you form a true picture of an excessively strong working of the spirit and soul, the picture crystallizes into that of scarlet fever. A picture of a too feeble working of the spirit and soul which wavers in the face of the model and becomes the picture of measles.If you picture these things in meditation you carry over ordinary meditation into medical meditation. It is dreadful that people today want to grasp everything with the intellect. In medicine really nothing can be grasped with the intellect. With the intellect one could at the very most grasp the diseases of the minerals—and there it is not a question of curing. Everything medical must be grasped by direct perception and the faculty for this has to be developed.

You cannot notice this process in a grown-up person. The digestive tract takes over the foodstuffs—it is a process transacted inwardly; whereas in the child, astral body and ego take over the foodstuffs. Unfinished forms of human nature have there to be directed and fashioned in accordance with the model. When you meditate upon the child, you see a mighty metamorphosis going on. You see the spirit and soul lighting up, as it were, and the in-taken foodstuffs cast into darkness and shadows; you see there how the second man is formed out of light and darkness, in colors, as it were. You see how the pre-earthly in man is a brightness and how the external foodstuffs are a darkening. In the child a brightness comes upon the darkness, a brightness that comes from the pre-earthly. The milk goes in as darkness. The brightness and the darkness together give rise to manifold colors. What is white in the physical is black in the spiritual; always the opposite.

These things make it possible for the ego to be active in quite another way than is usual in life. What a feeble effort it is that we make in the act of ordinary, intellectual thinking. Intellectual activity is man's greatest weakness. He simply carries one concept to another. But if you observe the child in the way now described you will meditate in such a manner that your ego organization is thoroughly involved in the effort.

These things, in their further course, must also be heeded in our pedagogy. In a school like the Waldorf School we have children between the ages of seven and fourteen. At this age things have changed. The second man has been developed. The child before us has been molded out of pre-earthly existence according to the model that has been cast off; forces of heredity, naturally, have remained in the child. They have been brought into the model, into the imitation of the model. The child is now much too unearthly. For now the forces that come from beyond the earth have worked on the child with special strength and the swing of the pendulum has gone to the opposite side. Formerly, this was externally visible in the human being; he was entirely the product of heredity. Now that which is to be seen externally has arisen entirely from within. It is the external world that has now to be mastered. What has hitherto worked without consideration for the earthly world, with consideration only for the human model, must direct itself to the outer world. Between the seventh and fourteenth years, astral body and ego organization must work in such a way that this super-earthly being is again adjusted to the external conditions of earth existence. This process has its culmination at puberty. At that age the human being is placed wholly within earthly conditions; he enters into his relationships with earthly conditions; the earthly is membered into his being. Therefore the element of greatest importance in the generation of the second man between the seventh and fourteenth years is what the human being brings with him from pre-earthly existence. For this reason his own specific karma only begins to work after puberty. Then the earthly works in. A culmination is reached at puberty and the third man now begins to develop.

The second man—so far as the substance is concerned—is thrown off and the third man is developed. The process does not reach so far as actual form, it only gets as far as life. If it were to get to form, we should get third teeth, because the human being is now governed by external conditions. Within these outer conditions it is the case that the human being again takes in what is extra-human. When he was being governed by the model he was directed entirely in accordance with the human. So long as he was governed by the model he was governed by something passed on by heredity. But in this there lies, in reality, something that is dried up. Since the separation of the sun it has really broken off from the root of his being and is dried up, withered. Therefore the forces of heredity contain the most pathological forces and when he is governed by the model the human being really absorbs innumerable causes of illness. He absorbs few such causes during the period after the change of teeth because then he is governed by the external world; climate, everything contained in the outer air, etc., are less harmful. Between the seventh and fourteenth years the human being is healthy; then again there begins a period when he is again susceptible.

All these conditions must be observed in such a way that you have the picture of man in your mind. If you have this picture of man in mind, then you also meditate rightly. Then you will be able to combine what you learn with what you meditate upon and what you have learned does not remain theory but becomes practice, because you uncover the power that enables you to perceive these things. This is what is so urgently needed today. It is impossible to achieve anything in medicine so long as we persist in thinking that evolution goes forward in a straight line. The human being is in reality constituted from separate streams of development which take their course in periods of seven years; what comes later is linked to what is earlier; it is not a one-sided continuation but different conditions are always intervening. Continuous evolution in this sense, where the earlier alone is the cause of the later, is only to be found in the mineral kingdom, less in the plant kingdom and least of all in the human kingdom.

Let us try to picture the plants. How do people proceed today when they picture the plants? There is the soil of the earth. The seed is pictured as being laid into the soil and then the plant grows out of this. People are naive enough to think as follows: Hydrogen is a very simple molecule, consisting of two atoms. All kinds of things are imagined to form combinations. Alcohol is certainly a very complicated molecule. Carbon is there combined with hydrogen and oxygen and then one has something more complex. And now there come still more complicated substances with more and more complicated molecules. There was a period during the eighties and nineties of the last century when the titles of these were very complicated, consisting of more than three lines in length. Yes, the molecule has become terribly complicated! And now still more so. Then it becomes a seed, and a seed is a most highly complicated combination. Then the plant grows out of the seed. But all this is nonsense. The basis of the seed formation is, in reality, that earthly matter tears itself away from the principle of structure and passes over into chaos, becomes chaotic, contains no more forces of matter in itself. Then, when no earthly structure is present, what is working out of the cosmos can assert itself. The cosmic declares its readiness to mirror the cosmic structure in the minute. In the seed formation the “nothingness” asserts itself over against the earthly and the cosmos works into the nothingness.

Frau Dr. Kolisko could tell you an interesting fact which entirely confirms this. During investigations into the function of the spleen we took small rabbits and excised the spleen. In spite of this the rabbits were quite well. They did not die of the operation, but a long time afterwards, from colds. It was quite possible to see how the rabbits live on without the spleen. When one of the rabbits died, we were able to see what had happened and in the place of the spleen there had appeared tissue which had assumed a decidedly spherical form. What had really happened? We had excised the physical spleen and by doing this had artificially driven earthly substance into chaos, made it accessible to the cosmic forces, and something resembling a seed formation had come into being. There had arisen, in an extremely primitive form, something that resembled the structure of a seed—an image of the cosmos. This quite harmless vivisection, therefore, confirmed a matter of great significance, for this is what appears to spiritual-scientific observation.

Take a quartz crystal. It is an earthly thing. Why? Why is the quartz crystal an earthly thing, retaining its form really in a very pedantic, rigid way? The quartz gets its form from an inner force and if you break it apart with a hammer the single parts always retain the tendency to be six-sided prisms, self-contained, six-sided pyramids. This tendency is present. You can as little rid the quartz of this tendency as you can get pedantry out of a man who is pedantic by nature. You may atomize a pedantic person, but he will still remain pedantic. The quartz does not allow itself to come to the point where the cosmos can do anything with its forces. Therefore the quartz has no life. If the quartz could be pulverized to such a degree that in the single fragments it no longer had the tendency to be governed, in the single fragment, by its own forces, something living and cosmic would grow out of the quartz. This is what happens in the formation of a seed. In the seed, matter is driven out to such a degree that the cosmos can intervene with its etheric forces. The world must be seen as a perpetual entering into chaos and again an emergence from chaos. What is contained in quartz also came at one time from the cosmos, but it remained at a standstill, has become Ahrimanic. It no longer exposes itself to the cosmic forces. As soon as anything enters into the realm of the living it must always pass through chaos.

This again is something which will help you to meditate in the sense of medicine. And you can also picture the developed plant—how it grows from leaf to leaf, and so on. You come to the formation of the seed in the fruit. Whereas you otherwise picture the seed plant as brightness it now becomes dark, quite dark. Then again comes the light, when the forces from outside take hold. In this way, too, you can make an imaginative picture from the being of the plant. When you are aware of an object which you call “plant”—then it is an imaginative meditation. You should not remain in the sphere of the intellectual but in the sphere of the concrete, inner picture. The intellectual element is merely there for the purpose of presenting what is known, in the form of thoughts.

Suppose you write down the word Menschenkind. This word is taken from something that has been perceived. Very well. The word Menschenkind reminds you of a Menschenkind (a human child). But suppose you take the word and say: I like the i, so I will put that first, I like the n, so I will put that next, then the sch and so on. You can put the word together in a different way but nothing that you can make anything of will come out of it. This is what people are doing with concepts all the time. The concept is only the spiritual term for the perception. People separate and combine concepts and think in acts of thinking. They do this, too, when they are observing the external world. They cover up observation with thinking and so they live today outside reality. This is possible as long as one is working with the science that stands outside reality, with geometry and arithmetic. But if we want to go in for medicine we cannot stand outside reality. If we do, then we also stand outside reality in medical practice itself.

Of peculiar importance for the understanding of the history of the West in its relation to the East is the period that lies between three or four hundred years before, and three or four hundred years after, the Mystery of Golgotha. The real significance of the events we have been considering, events that culminated in the rise of Aristotelianism and in the expeditions of Alexander to Asia, is contained in the fact that they form, as it were, the last Act in that civilisation of the East which was still immersed in the impulses derived from the Mysteries.

A final end was put to the genuine and pure Mystery impulse of the East by the criminal burning of Ephesus. After that we find only traditions of the Mysteries, traditions and shadow-pictures,—the remains, so to speak, that were left over for Europe and especially for Greece, of the old divinely-inspired civilisation. And four hundred years after the Mystery of Golgotha another great event took place, which serves to show what was still left of the ruins—for so we might call them—of the Mysteries.

Let us look at the figure of Julian the Apostate.¹ Julian the Apostate, Emperor of Rome, was initiated, in the 4th century, as far as initiation was then possible, by one of the last of the hierophants of the Eleusinian Mysteries. This means that he entered into an experience of the old Divine secrets of the East, in so far as such an experience could still be gained in the Eleusinian Mysteries.

At the beginning of the period we are considering, stands the burning of Ephesus; and the day of the burning of Ephesus is also the day on which Alexander the Great was born. At the end of the period, in 363, we have the day of the death—the terrible and significant death—of Julian the Apostate far away in Asia. Midway between these two days stands the Mystery of Golgotha.

And now let us examine a little this period of time as it appears in the setting of the whole history of human evolution. If we want to look back beyond this period into the earlier evolution of mankind, we have first to bring about a change in our power of vision and perception, a change that is very similar to one of which we hear in another connection. Only we do not often bring the things together in thought.

You will remember how in my book Theosophy I had to describe the different worlds that come under consideration for man. I described them as the physical world; a transition world bordering on it, namely, the Soul-world; and then the world into which only the highest part of our nature can find entrance, the Spirit-land. Leaving out of account the special qualities of this Spirit-land, through which present-day man passes between death and a new birth, and looking only at its more general qualities and characteristics, we find that we have to give a new orientation to our whole thought and feeling, before we can comprehend the Land of the Spirits. And the remarkable thing is that we have to change and re-orientate our inner life of thought and feeling in just the same way when we want to comprehend what lies beyond the period I have defined. We shall do wrong to imagine that we can understand what came before the burning of Ephesus with the conceptions and ideas that suffice for the world of to-day. We need to form other concepts and other ideas to enable us to look across the years to human beings who still knew that as surely as man is united through breathing with the air outside him, so surely is he in constant union through his soul with the Gods.

Starting then from this world, the world that is a kind of earthly Devachan, earthly Spirit-land,—for the physical world fails us when we want to picture it,—we came into the interim period, lasting from about 356 B.C. to 363 A.D. And now what follows? Over in Europe we find the world from out of which present-day humanity is on the point of emerging into something new, even as the humanity of olden times came forth from the Oriental world, passed through the Greek world, and then into the realm of Rome.

Setting aside for the moment what went on in the inner places of the Mysteries, we have to see in the civilisation that has grown up through the centuries of the Middle Ages and developed on into our own time, a civilisation that has been formed on the basis of what the human being himself can produce with the help of his own conceptions and ideas. We may see a beginning in this direction in Greece, from the time of Herodotus onward. Herodotus describes the facts of history in an external way, he makes no allusion, or at most very slight allusion, to the spiritual. And others after him go further in the same direction. Nevertheless in Greece we always feel a last breath, as it were, from those shadow-pictures that were there to remind man of the spiritual life. With Rome on the other hand begins the period to which man to-day may still feel himself related, the period that has an altogether new way of thought and feeling, different even from what we have observed in Greece. Only here and there in the Roman world do we find a personality such as Julian the Apostate who feels something like an irresistible longing after the old world, and evinces a certain honesty in getting himself initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries.

What Julian, however, is able to receive in these Mysteries has no longer the force of knowledge. And what is more, he belongs to a world where men are no longer able to grasp in their soul the traditions from the Mysteries of the East.

Present-day mankind would never have come into being if Asia had not been followed first by Greece and then by Rome. Present-day mankind is built up upon personality, upon the personality of the individual. Eastern mankind was not so built up. The individual of the East felt himself part of a continuous divine process. The Gods had their purposes in Earth evolution. The Gods willed this or that, and this or that came to pass on the Earth below. The Gods worked on the will of men, inspiring them. Those powerful and great personalities in the East of whom I spoke to you—all that they did was inspired from the Gods. Gods willed: men carried it into effect. And the Mysteries were ordered and arranged in olden times to this end,—to bring Divine will and human action into line.

In Ephesus we first find a difference. There the pupils in the Mysteries, as I have told you, had to be watchful for their own condition of ripeness and no longer to observe seasons and times of year. There the first sign of personality makes its appearance. There in earlier incarnations Aristotle and Alexander the Great had received the impulse towards personality.

But now comes a new period. It is in the early dawn of this new period when Julian the Apostate experiences as it were the last longing of man to partake, even in that late age, in the Mysteries of the East. Now the soul of man begins to grow different again from what it was in Greece.

Picture to yourselves once more a man who has received some training in the Ephesian Mysteries. His constitution of soul is not derived from these Mysteries: he owes it to the simple fact that he is living in that age. When to-day a man recollects, when, as we say, he bethinks himself, what can he call to mind? He can call to mind something that he himself experienced in person during his present life, perhaps something that he experienced 20 or 30 years ago. This inward recollection in thought does not of course go further back than his own personal life. With the man who belonged, for instance, to the Ephesian civilisation it was otherwise. If he had received, even in a small degree, the training that could be had in Ephesus, then it was so with him that when he bethought himself in recollection, there emerged in his soul, instead of the memories that are limited to personal life, events of pre-earthly existence, events that preceded the Earth period of evolution. He beheld the Moon evolution, the Sun evolution, beholding them in the several kingdoms of Nature. He was able, too, to look within himself, and see the union of man with the Cosmic All; he saw how man depends on and is linked with the Cosmos. And all this that lived in his soul was true, ‘own’ memory, it was the cosmic memory of man.

We may therefore say that we are here dealing with a period when in Ephesus man was able to experience the secrets of the Universe. The human soul had memory of the far-past ages of the Cosmos.

This remembering was preceded in evolution by something else: it was preceded by an actual living within those earlier times. What remained was a looking back. In the time, however, of which the Gilgamesh Epic relates, we cannot speak of a memory of past ages in the Cosmos, we must speak of a present experience of what is past.

After the time of cosmic memory came what I have called the interim time between Alexander and Julian the Apostate. For the moment we will pass by this period. Then follows the age that gave birth to the western civilisation of the Middle Ages and of modern times. Here there is no longer a memory of the cosmic past, still less an experience in the present of the past; nothing is left but tradition.

Present Experience of the Past.
Memory of the Cosmic Past.
Tradition.

Men can now write down what has happened. History begins. History makes its first appearance in the Roman period. Think, my dear friends, what a tremendous change we have here! Think how the pupils in the Ephesian Mysteries lived with time. They needed no history books. To write down what happened would have been to them laughable. One only needed to ponder and meditate deeply enough, and what had happened would rise up before one from out of the depths of consciousness. Here was no demonstration of psycho-analysis such as a modern doctor might make: the human soul took the greatest delight in fetching up in this way out of a living memory that which had been in the past. In the time that followed, however, mankind as such had forgotten, and the necessity arose of writing down what happened. But all the while that man had to let his ancient power of cosmic memory crumble away, and begin in a clumsy manner to write down the great events of the world,—all this time personal memory, personal recollection was evolving in his inner being. For every age has its own mission, every age its own task.

Here you have the other side of that which I set before you in the very first lectures of this course, when I described the rise of what we designated ‘memory in time.’ This memory in time, or temporal memory, had, so to say, its cradle in Greece, grew up through the Roman culture into the Middle Ages and on into modern times. In the time of Julian the Apostate the seed was already sown for the civilisation based on personality, as is testified by the fact that Julian the Apostate found it, after all, of no avail to let himself be initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries.

We have now come to the period when the man of the West, beginning from the 3rd or 4th century after Christ and continuing down to our own time, lives his life on Earth entirely outside the spiritual world, lives in concepts and ideas, in mere abstractions. In Rome the very Gods themselves became abstractions. We have reached a time when mankind has no longer any knowledge of a living connection with the spiritual world. The Earth is no longer Asia, the lowest of the Heavens, the Earth is a world for itself, and the Heavens are far away, dim and darkened for man's view. Now is the time when man evolves personality, under the influence of the Roman culture that is spread abroad over the lands of the West. As we had to speak of a soul-world bordering on the spiritual world, on the land of the Spirits that is above,—so, bordering on this spiritual oriental world is the civilisation of the West; we may call it a kind of soul-world in time. This is the world that reaches right down to our own day. And now, in our time, although most men are not at all alive to the fact, another stupendous change is again taking place.

Some of you who often listen to my lectures will know that I do not readily call any period a period of transition, for in truth every period is such,—every period marks a transition from what comes earlier to what comes later. The point is that we should recognise for each period the nature of the transition.

What I have said will already have suggested that in this case it is as though, having passed from the Spirit-land into the Soul-world one were to come thence into the physical world. In modern civilisation as it has evolved up till now, we have been able to catch again and again echoes of the spiritual. Materialism itself has not been without its echoes of the spirit. True and genuine materialism in all domains has only been with us since the middle of the 19th century, and is still understood by very few in its full significance. It is there, however, with gigantic force, and to-day we are going through a transition to a third world, that is in reality as different from the preceding Roman world as this latter was different from the oriental.

Now there is one period of time that has had to be left out in tracing this evolution: the period between Alexander and Julian. In the middle of this period fell the Mystery of Golgotha. Those to whom the Mystery of Golgotha was brought did not receive it as men who understood the Mysteries, otherwise they would have had quite different ideas of the Christ Who lived in the man Jesus of Nazareth. A few there were, a few contemporaries of the Mystery of Golgotha, who had been initiated in the Mysteries, and these were still able to have such ideas of Him. But by far the greater part of Western humanity had no ideas with which to comprehend spiritually the Mystery of Golgotha. Hence the first way by which the Mystery of Golgotha found place on Earth was the way of external tradition. Only in the very earliest centuries were there those who were able to comprehend spiritually, from their connection with the Mysteries, what took place at the Mystery of Golgotha.

Nor is this all. There is something else, of which I have told you in recent lectures,² and we must return to it here. Over in Hibernia, in Ireland, were still the echoes of the ancient Atlantean wisdom. In the Mysteries of Hibernia, of which I have given you a brief description, were two Statues that worked suggestively on men, making it possible for them to behold the world exactly as the men of ancient Atlantis had seen it. Strictly guarded were these Mysteries of Hibernia, hidden in an atmosphere of intense earnestness. There they stood in the centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha, and there they remained at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Over in Asia the Mystery of Golgotha took place; in Jerusalem the events came to pass that were later made known to men in the Gospels by the way of tradition. But in the moment when the tragedy of the Mystery of Golgotha was being enacted in Palestine, in that very moment it was known and beheld clairvoyantly in the Mysteries of Hibernia. No report was brought by word of mouth, no communication whatever was possible; but in the Mysteries of Hibernia the event was fulfilled in a symbol, in a picture, at the same time that it was fulfilled in actual fact in Jerusalem. Men came to know of it, not through tradition but by a spiritual path. Whilst in Palestine that most majestic and sublime event was being enacted in concrete physical reality,—over in Hibernia, in the Mysteries, the way had been so prepared through the performance of certain rites that at the very time when the Mystery of Golgotha was fulfilled, a living picture of it was present in the astral light.

The events in human evolution are closely linked together; there is, as it were, a kind of valley or chasm moving at this time over the world, into which man's old nearness with the Gods gradually disappears.

In the East the ancient vision of the Gods fell into decay after the burning of Ephesus. In Hibernia it remained on until some centuries after Christ, but even there too the time came when it had to depart. Tradition developed in its stead, the Mystery of Golgotha was transmitted by the way of oral tradition; and we find growing up in the West a civilisation that rests wholly on oral tradition. Later it comes to rely rather on external observation of Nature, on an investigation of Nature with the senses; but this after all is only what corresponds in the realm of Nature to tradition, written or oral, in the realm of history.

Here then we have the civilisation of personality. And in that civilisation the Mystery of Golgotha, with all that pertains to the spirit, is no longer perceived by man, it is merely handed down as history.

We must place this picture in all clearness before us, the picture of a civilisation from which the spiritual is excluded. It begins from the time that followed Julian the Apostate, and not until towards the end of the 19th century, beginning from the end of the seventies, did there come, as it were, a new call to humanity from the spiritual heights. Then began the age that I have often described as the Age of Michael. To-day I want to characterise it as the age when man, if he wishes to remain at the old materialism—and a great part of mankind does wish so to remain—will inevitably fall into a terrible abyss; he has absolutely no alternative but to go under and become sub-human, he simply cannot maintain himself on the human level. If man would keep on the human level, he must open his senses to the spiritual revelations that have again been made accessible since the end of the 19th century. That is now an absolute necessity.

For you must know that great spiritual forces were at work in Herostratus. He was, so to speak, the last dagger stretched out by certain spiritual powers from Asia. When he flung the burning torch into the Temple of Ephesus, demonic beings were behind him, holding him as one holds a sword,—or as it might be, a torch; he was but the sword or torch in their hands. For these demonic beings had determined to let nothing of the Spirit go over into the coming European civilisation; the spiritual was to be absolutely debarred entry there.

Aristotle and Alexander the Great placed themselves in direct opposition to the working of these beings. For what was it they accomplished in history? Through the expeditions of Alexander, the Nature knowledge of Aristotle was carried over into Asia; a pure knowledge of Nature was spread abroad. Not in Egypt alone, but all over Asia Alexander founded academies, and in these academies made a home for the ancient wisdom, where the study of it could still continue. Here too, the wise men of Greece were ever and again able to find a refuge. Alexander brought it about that a true understanding of Nature was carried into Asia.

Into Europe it could not find entrance in the same way. Europe could not in all honesty receive it. She wanted only external knowledge, external culture, external civilisation. Therefore did Aristotle's pupil Theophrastus take out of Aristotelianism what the West could accept and bring that over. It was the more logical writings that the West received. But that meant a great deal. For Aristotle's works have a character all their own; they read differently from the works of other authors, and his more abstract and logical writings are no exception. Do but make the experiment of reading first Plato and then Aristotle with inner concentration and in a meditative spirit, and you will find that each gives you quite a different experience.

When a modern man reads Plato with true spiritual feeling and in an attitude of meditation, after a time he begins to feel as though his head were a littler higher than his physical head actually is, as though he had, so to speak, grown out beyond his physical organism. That is absolutely the experience of anyone who reads Plato, provided he does not read him in an altogether dry manner.

With Aristotle it is different. With Aristotle you never have the feeling that you are coming out of your body. When you read Aristotle after having prepared yourself by meditation, you will find that he works right into the physical man. Your physical man makes a step forward through the reading of Aristotle. His logic works; it is not a logic that one merely observes and considers, it is a logic that works in the inner being. Aristotle himself is a stage higher than all the pedants who came after him, and who developed logic from him. In a certain sense we may say with truth that Aristotle's works are only rightly comprehended when they are taken as books for meditation. Think what would have happened if the Natural Scientific writings of Aristotle had gone over to the West as they were and come into Middle and Southern Europe. Men would, no doubt, have received a great deal from them, but in a way that did them harm. For the Natural Science that Aristotle was able to pass on to Alexander needed for its comprehension souls that were still touched with the spirit of the Ephesian age, the time that preceded the burning of Ephesus. Such souls could only be found over in Asia or in Egypt; and it was into these parts that this knowledge of Nature and insight into the Being of Nature were brought, by means of the expeditions of Alexander. Only later in a diluted form did they come over into Europe by many and diverse ways—especially, for example, by way of Spain,—but always in a very diluted or, as we might say, sifted form.

The writings of Aristotle that came over into Europe direct were his writings on logic and philosophy. These lived on, and found fresh life again in medieval scholasticism.

We have therefore these two streams. On the one hand we have always there a stream of wisdom that spreads far and wide, unobtrusively, among simple folk,—the secret source of much of medieval thought and insight. Long ago, through the expeditions of Alexander, it had made its way into Asia, and now it came back again into Europe by diverse channels, through Arabia, for instance, and later on following the path of the returning Crusaders. We find it in every corner of Europe,—inconspicuous, flowing silently in hidden places. To these places came men like Jacob Boehme,³ Paracelsus⁴ and a number more, to receive that which had come thither by many a roundabout path and was preserved in these scattered primitive circles of European life. We have had amongst us in Europe far more folk-wisdom than is generally supposed. The stream continues even now. It has poured its flood of wisdom into reservoirs like Valentine Wiegel⁵ or Paracelsus or Jacob Boehme,—and many more, whose names are less known. And sometimes it met there,—as for example, in Basil Valentine⁶—new in-pourings that came over later into Europe. In the Cloisters of the Middle Ages lived a true alchemistic wisdom, not an alchemy that demonstrates changes in matter merely, but an alchemy that demonstrates the inner nature of the changes in the human being himself in the Universe. The recognised scholars meanwhile were occupying themselves with the other Aristotle, with a misstated, sifted, ‘logicised’ Aristotle. This Aristotelian philosophy, however, which the scholiasts and subsequently the scientists studied, brought none the less a blessing to the West. For only in the 19th century, when men could no longer understand Aristotle and simply studied him as if he were a book to be read like any other and not a book whereon to exercise oneself in meditation—only in the 19th century has it come about that men no longer receive anything from Aristotle because he no longer lives and works in them. Until the 19th century Aristotle was a book for the exercise of meditation; but in the 19th century the whole tendency has been to change what was once exercise, work, active power into abstract knowledge,—to change ‘do’ and ‘can’ into ‘know.’

Let us look now at the line of development, that leads from Greece through Rome to the West. It will illustrate for us from another angle the great change we are considering. In Greece there was still the confident assurance that insight and understanding proceed from the whole human being. The teacher is the gymnast.⁷ From out of the whole human being in movement—for the Gods themselves work in the bodily movements of man—something is born that then comes forth and shows itself as human understanding. The gymnast is the teacher.

In Rome the rhetorician.⁸ steps into the place of the gymnast. Already something has been taken away from the human being in his entirety; nevertheless we have at least still a connection with a deed that is done by the human being in a part of his organism. What movement there is in our whole being when we speak! We speak with our heart and with our lungs, we speak right down to our diaphragm and below it! We cannot say that speaking lives as intensely in the whole human being as do the movements of the gymnast, but it lives in a great part of him. (As for thoughts, they of course are but an extract of what lives in speech). The rhetorician steps into the place of the gymnast. The gymnast has to do with the whole human being. The rhetorician shuts off the limbs, and has only to do with a part of the human being and with that which is sent up from this part into the head, and there becomes insight and understanding.

The third stage appears only in modern times and that is the stage of the professor.⁹ who trains nothing but the head of his pupils, who cares for nothing but thoughts. Professors of Eloquence were still appointed in some universities even as late as the 19th century, but these universities had no use for them, because it was no longer the custom to set any store by the art of speaking; thinking was all that mattered. The rhetorician died out. The doctors and professors, who looked after the least part of the human being, namely his head,—these became the leaders in education.

As long as the genuine Aristotle was still there, it was training, discipline, exercise that men gained from their study of him. The two streams remained side by side. And those of us who are not very young and who shared in the development of thought during the later decades of the 19th century, know well, if we have gone about among the country folk in the way that Paracelsus did, that a last remains of the medieval folk-knowledge, from which Jacob Boehme and Paracelsus drew, was still to be found in Europe even as late as the sixties and seventies of the last century. Moreover, it is also true that within certain orders and in the life of a certain narrow circle a kind of inner discipline in Aristotle was cultivated right up to the last decades of the 19th century. So that it has been possible in recent years still to meet here and there the last ramifications, as it were, of the Aristotelian wisdom that Alexander carried over into Asia and that returned to Europe through Asia Minor, Africa and Spain. It was the same wisdom that had come to new life in such men as Basil Valentine and those who came after him, and from which Jacob Boehme, Paracelsus and countless others had drawn. It was brought back to Europe also by yet another path, namely through the Crusaders. This Aristotelian wisdom lived on, scattered far and wide among the common people. In the later decades of the 19th century, one is thankful to say, the last echoes of the ancient Nature knowledge carried over into Asia by the expeditions of Alexander were still to be heard, even if sadly diminished and scarcely recognisable. In the old alchemy, in the old knowledge of the connections between the forces and substances of Nature that persisted so remarkably among simple country folk, we may discover again its last lingering echoes. To-day they have died away; to-day they are gone, they are no longer to be heard.

Similarly in these years one could still find isolated individuals who gave evidence of Aristotelian spiritual training; though to-day they too are gone. And thus what was carried east as well as what was carried west was preserved,—for that which was carried east came back again to the west. And it was possible in the seventies and eighties of the 19th century for one who could do so with new direct spiritual perception, to make contact with what was still living in these last and youngest children of the great events we have been describing.

There is, in truth, a wonderful interworking in all these things. For we can see how the expeditions of Alexander and the teachings of Aristotle had this end in view, to keep unbroken the threads that unite man with the ancient spirituality, to weave them as it were into the material civilisation that was to come, that so they might endure until such time as new spiritual revelations should be given.

From this point of view, we may gain a true understanding of the events of history, for it is often so that seemingly fruitless undertakings are fraught with deep significance for the historical evolution of mankind. It is easy enough to say that the expeditions of Alexander to Asia and to Egypt have been swept away and submerged. It is not so. It is easy to say that Aristotle ceased to be in the 19th century. But he did not. Both streams have lasted up to the very moment when it is possible to begin a renewed life of the Spirit.

I have told you on many occasions how the new life of the Spirit was able to begin at the end of the seventies, and how from the turn of the century onwards, it has been able to grow more and more. It is our task to receive in all its fullness the stream of spiritual life that is poured down to us from the heights.

And so to-day we find ourselves in a period that marks a genuine transition in the spiritual unfolding of man. And if we are not conscious of these wonderful connections and of how deeply the present is linked with the past, then we are in very truth asleep to important events that are taking place in the spiritual life of our time. And numbers of people are fast asleep to-day in regard to the most important events of all. But Anthroposophy is there for that very purpose,—to awaken man from sleep.

You who have come here for this Christmas Meeting,—I believe that all of you have felt an impulse that calls you to awaken. We are nearing the day—as this Meeting goes on, we shall have to pass the actual hour of the anniversary—we are coming to the day when the terrible flames burst forth that destroyed the Goetheanum. Let the world think what it will of the destruction by fire of the Goetheanum, in the evolution of the Anthroposophical movement the event of the fire has a tremendous significance.

We shall not however be able to judge of its full significance until we look beyond it to something more. We behold again the physical flames of fire flaring up on that night, we see the marvellous way in which the fusing metal of the organ-pipes and other metallic parts sent up a glow that caused that wonderful play of colour in the flames. And then we carry our memory over the year that has intervened. But in this memory must live the fact that the physical is Maya, that we have to seek the truth of the burning flames in the spiritual fire that it is ours now to kindle in our hearts and souls. In the midst of the physically burning Goetheanum shall arise for us a spiritually living Goetheanum.

I do not believe, my dear friends, that this can come to pass in the full, world-historic sense unless we can on the one hand look upon the flames mounting up in terrible tongues of fire from the Goetheanum that we have grown to love so dearly, and behold at the same time in the background that other treacherous burning of Ephesus, when Herostratus, guided by demonic powers, flung the flaming brand into the Temple. When we bring these two events together, setting one in the background and one in the foreground of our thought, we shall then have a picture that will perhaps have power to write deeply enough in our hearts what we have lost and what we must strive our utmost to build again.

• 1. Flavius Claudius Julianus, called the Apostate by the Christians, was Roman Emperor from 361–363.
• 2. See the 8th and 9th lectures in Mystery Knowledge and Mystery Centres.
• 3. (1575–1624), mystic. See Eleven European Mystics by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Publications, New York, 1971.
• 4. Theophrastus Paracelsus (1493–1541), physician. See Eleven European Mystics.
• 5. (1533–1588), mystic. See Eleven European Mystics.
• 6. Alchemist and Benedictine monk, lived from 1413 onwards in the Monastery of St. Peter in Erfurt. His writings were not discovered or printed till the beginning of the seventeenth century. See Eleven European Mystics.
• 7. Rudolf Steiner spoke in detail about this for instance in A Modern Art of Education by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1972 and Human Values in Education by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1971.
• 8. Rudolf Steiner spoke in detail about this for instance in A Modern Art of Education by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1972 and Human Values in Education by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1971.
• 9. Rudolf Steiner spoke in detail about this for instance in A Modern Art of Education by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1972 and Human Values in Education by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1971.

During this Winter we have prepared the ground in various ways in order to understand with greater exactitude than has hitherto been possible man's life between birth and death in the physical world on the one side and on the other between death and rebirth in the spiritual world. And there will be still more to say about this subject in the coming months.

Efforts will be needed to draw together a number of details that will contribute towards a thorough understanding of this subject and throw new light upon many topics we have already studied from a different point of view. Today, then, I will ask you to think, above all, of the course of man's physical life—about which something has also been said in my book The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy—and of how it progresses in cycles: one from birth until about the seventh year, or until the change of teeth; a second cycle from the change of teeth until puberty at about the fourteenth year; then a third cycle, and so on in periods of seven years. Even to ordinary observation it will be clear that this systematic arrangement into periods of seven years is well founded, but on the other hand it will also be evident that in the actual life of the human being other facts of incisive significance cut across these seven-year periods. We ourselves have repeatedly considered a crucial occurrence in a man's life which eludes this division into cyclic periods. It is the point of time back to which a man's memory extends in later life, the moment when he begins to feel and know himself as an ‘I’, when Ego-consciousness dawns in him. This experience does not by any means occur at exactly the same point of time, but in most cases it may be said that Ego-consciousness flashes up in the human being at some point between birth and the seventh year. And something similar can be said to hold good in the later period of a man's life. Although with less abruptness than the sudden flashing-up of Ego-consciousness, there are other occurrences which as it were invalidate the regular seven-year cycle. We shall, however, always discover that whatever comes in this way into the life of man and cuts across the cyclic periods, occurs much more irregularly than the experiences connected with the actual seven-year cycles. You will hardly find two human beings whose memories go back to exactly the same point of time, that is to say who experienced the flashing up of consciousness of ‘I’ at the same age. Nor does the change of teeth occur at precisely the same age in different individuals. But why this is so in the latter case, we shall still have to consider.

When we study the cyclic periods already referred to and mentioned in my little book, Education of the Child, we shall notice that they begin in connection with the most physical, the most external member of man's being and are then concerned with the other, more inward members of his constitution. From birth until the seventh year development is connected primarily with the physical body, then for seven years with the etheric body, then for seven years with the astral body, the sentient soul, and so on. The evolutionary factors pass over more and more decisively from the external to the inner nature of man. That is essentially characteristic of the seven-year periods.

What, then, is there to be said about occurrences which cut across these seven-year periods? The flashing-up of ‘I’-consciousness during the first cycle is an emphatically inner event. For the sake of clarity, here let us consider something that seems to be in contrast with this flashing-up of Ego-consciousness. If we observe human life with discernment we shall find that the cessation of growth may be compared with some happening which cuts across the seven-year cycles of evolution. We will therefore think about the cessation of growth which after all occurs comparatively late in life, and study its implications.

The first seven-year period ends with the change of teeth. The appearance of the second teeth is, as it were, the final act of what may be called the formative principle. The last contribution made by the forces that give the human being his form is when they drive out the second teeth. That is the culmination of the formative process, for the principle which builds up the human form is no longer in action. With the seventh year the formative principle ceases to be active. What comes about later on is only an expansion of what has already been established as form. After the seventh year there is no more remodelling of the brain. All that happens is growth of what is already established as basic form. Therefore we can say that the principle of form unfolds its activity specifically in the first seven years of the life of a human being. The principle of form stems from the Spirits of Form; thus these Spirits of Form are active in the human being during the first seven years of his life. It can therefore be said that when the human being enters into life through birth, his actual form is not complete. What happens is that the Spirits of Form continue their active intervention during the first seven years of life; the human being has then reached the point when his form merely needs to grow. The basis for the form has been established by the seventh year, and the second teeth are what the formative principle still produces out of the human being. The formative principle has now come to its conclusion. Were its activity to continue, the second teeth would inevitably make their appearance later than is now the case.

Here we may ask: When these Spirits of Form have worked on the human being until the seventh year of his life, does everything they do for him come to an end?

The answer is ‘No’, for the human being goes on growing and the basic principles of his form develop still further. If nothing else intervened, growth would be able to continue without interruption. If we think only of the principles of form that are active in the human being until the seventh year there is no more reason in the case of man than in that of other beings why these forms should not continue to grow if nothing were to intervene. But something does intervene. When the human being stops growing, certain principles of form still have an effect upon him. They have already been drawing near to him but now they unite in the fullest sense with his organism, lay hold of it, but in such a way that they now act as a hindrance, and further growth is prevented. The formative principles that are active until the seventh year of life allow the human being a certain elasticity. But at that point other formative principles approach him; their nature is such that they capture and confine what is elastic in the demarcated form, thus preventing any further growth. That is why growth stops at some point. When growth stops, this means that formative forces approaching from outside are at work. Whenever formative principles are active, whenever forms grow larger, provision must be made for the stoppage of growth by the appearance of counter-formative principles which oppose the first category as its polar antithesis. When man's form has developed until about the seventh year of life (indicated in the shaded portion of the diagram) this form can continue to grow.

The formative principles have been at work until the seventh year; these principles work from within. Then different formative principles work in opposition from outside, so that the human being can grow only to the limit indicated by the line b–b. It is really as if until the seventh year of his life the human being were given an elastic garment which he can constantly stretch and enlarge. But at a specific point of time he is given one that is not elastic; he is obliged to put it on, and thenceforth cannot grow beyond its limits.

We can therefore say that in the human being a confrontation takes place between two kinds of formative principles, one working from within and the other from without. The formative principles belonging to the first category come from the Spirits of Form, from those Spirits of Form who have passed through a perfectly normal process of evolution in the Cosmos. The formative principles working from without are not of the same kind. They come from Spirits of Form whose development has been retarded and who have acquired a Luciferic character. They are the factor which works in the purely spiritual domain, whereas the forces working in the material sphere have had a normal development; having evolved through the stages of Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon, they then pass to the Earth in the regular way and shape the human form from within. The ‘irregular’ Spirits of Form take what is presented to them and hold back its further development. Thus the process of growth in the human being is brought to a halt by these backward Spirits of Form. The Beings of the higher Hierarchies have the most varied tasks, among them the one that has been characterised today.

We have now been able to consider many different aspects of the work of the ‘regular’ Hierarchies and also of the work of the backward spiritual Beings belonging to the different Hierarchies. In the book Occult Science—an Outline¹ you can read how the human being reached the stage where through the Spirits of Form he could be endowed with the germinal foundation for the ‘I’, the Ego. We know that man received the germ of his physical body from the Thrones, of his etheric body from the Spirits of Wisdom, of his astral body from the Spirits of Movement, and the germinal foundation for the ‘I’ from the Spirits of Form. Bearing this in mind we can say that man, in his outer stature, has been organised by the regular Spirits of Form into an Ego-bearing being and that this comes into manifestation in the first seven-year cycle of his life. But then the backward Spirits of Form who are the opponents of the regular Spirits of Form, put a stop to his growth. This is actually the antithesis of the first, most deeply inward experience in the human being, namely, the kindling of the consciousness of ‘I’—the Ego. This happens in the early years of life, in the innermost realm of being. The outermost manifestation, the form, is checked at a later age, as a final act. Thus we perceive two evolutionary—but antithetical—processes in the human being. Of the one I have said that it comes from without and moves inward, taking hold of the sentient soul and so on, in the twenty-first year of life. Then there is another evolution proceeding from within outwards until the growth of the physical form is checked. The one evolution, the regular evolution, proceeds from the spiritual to the corporeal, from within outwards and is of interest especially for education. The other evolution—which is a much less regular and also more individual process—proceeds from without inwards and, when the human being has reached a certain age, it comes to expression in the completion of the outermost principle—the physical body.

It is very important that teachers should have knowledge of these two antithetical lines of evolution. Hence in the book The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy it was right to call attention to the first process of evolution which proceeds from within outwards, because it is only there that education is possible. On the other line of evolution—from without inwards—which is the line of individual development, it is impossible to make any actual impression. This is something of which account can be taken but which cannot be halted; neither can much be achieved in the way of education. And to be able to distinguish between where education is possible and where it is not, is of fundamental importance.

Just as the cessation of growth is caused by the backward Spirits of Form, the first actual manifestation of the ‘I’ in the human being during early childhood is the work of the backward Spirits of Will (Thrones). Between these two extremes there are other happenings which are to be attributed to backward Spirits of Wisdom and backward Spirits of Movement.

No adequate characterisation of man's life as a whole, including the existence between death and the new birth, is possible unless we take account of all the factors which have an effect upon him, and recognise that even in everyday life the influences of Luciferic beings take effect in many different ways. This influence is evident in other spheres as well. And as our endeavour in these lectures is to acquire a really fundamental understanding of man's life as a whole, we will not hesitate to think about matters which seem to be somewhat remote.

Attention shall first of all be drawn to a phenomenon from which it is evident that on the physical plane too, between birth and death, man's life has undergone essential changes in the course of evolution. If we realise this, it will, become evident that the life between death and rebirth has also changed. Those who think intellectually, but superficially, about life today may readily believe that, in essentials, things were always the same as they are at present. By no means was it so! And in certain cases we need go back only a few hundred years to find that conditions were very different. Thus at the present time there is something that has a very great influence upon man's life of soul between birth and death but that simply did not exist in its present form only a few centuries ago. It is what we today mean by the expression ‘public opinion’. Even as recently as the thirteenth century it would have been nonsense to speak of public opinion as we do today. A great deal is said nowadays against belief in authority, although in actual fact it exists in a much more oppressive form in our time than it did in these earlier, often despised centuries. In earlier centuries there were, of course, defects, but there was no blind belief in authority such as exists at present. This blindness of belief in authority is usually revealed by the fact that the authority in question cannot be specified. A person today will readily be floored when he is told that science has proved this or that. In earlier centuries, however, people attached more weight to authorities whom they encountered physically. Reference to an intangible ‘something’ is implied when it is said: ‘There is scientific proof of it.’ Such a saying urges belief in authority when confronted with something incomprehensible. Such belief did not exist in earlier centuries. People belonging to our civilisation usually concern themselves very little with matters about which the simplest, most, primitive human being in earlier centuries endeavoured to have some knowledge—matters relating, for example, to health and illness. Why, it is asked today, should anyone need to know about health and illness? The doctors know about these matters and the problems concerned can be left to them. This is also an example of what comes into the category of intangible but sovereign authority. But countless other influences make their way into life; from earliest youth the human being becomes dependent upon them and his trends of judgement and feeling force themselves into our life! These living currents swirling around among human beings are usually referred to as ‘public opinion’—and prompted the saying from philosophers: ‘Public opinions are mostly private errors.’ To realise this, however, is not as important as it is to be aware that public opinions exert tremendous power upon the life of an individual. It would be a complete misconception of history to speak about the influence of public opinion upon the life of an individual living in the thirteenth century. In those days there were single personalities who admittedly exerted a great deal of authority either in affairs of Government or in practical life, and in these spheres it was obeyed. But at this time there was nothing resembling what impersonal public opinion has become today. Anyone who is unwilling to believe this on the basis of the occult facts should study the history of Florence during those centuries and in later times too—when the government of the city passed into the control of the Medici. The tremendous power of individual authorities will then be apparent, but there was no such thing as public opinion. It first arose in an epoch preceding our own by four or five centuries and one can speak of its actual beginning. Such things must be regarded as realities, for a world of swirling thoughts does indeed exist.

What is the origin of this public opinion which we often accept as something that cannot be verified? What is public opinion in reality? You may remember that I have spoken of certain spiritual Beings belonging to the Hierarchy immediately above man—Beings who participate in various ways in the guidance and leadership of humanity. In my little book The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity, you will find a great deal on the subject of spiritual Beings belonging to the higher Hierarchies. Now we know that the mightiest incision in the evolution of humanity was made by the Mystery of Golgotha. In that event there came to pass something that was most wonderfully expressed in the esoteric teaching of St. Paul. Paul spoke in simple language but the actual way in which he spoke was rooted in profound esotericism. It was not possible for him always to give out openly what he, as an Initiate, knew; for in the first place he wanted to speak to a wider circle of people and, secondly, it was not possible in his day to give out everything he knew in the way of which he would have been capable. Nevertheless his very presentation was based upon profound esoteric knowledge. We find, for example, that there is a deeply significant truth in the distinction he makes between the ‘first Adam’ and the ‘higher Adam’—the Christ. According to Paul, the various generations of human beings are to be traced back to Adam, that is to say, the bodies of men descend from Adam. Hence it can be said that the physical increase of humanity over the Earth during the different periods, leads back finally to the physical body of Adam—Adam and Eve, naturally. We can then ask: What lies at the basis of the physical evolution of mankind from Adam onwards? Naturally, the evolution of souls! The physical bodies which have descended from Adam are the habitations of living souls. These souls had descended from cosmic worlds and had brought with them to the Earth a certain spiritual heritage, a spiritual endowment. But in the course of time this spiritual endowment had undergone decline. Individuals who lived, say, six or seven thousand years before the founding of Christianity had within them much stronger, more extensive spiritual forces than those who lived a mere thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha. The spiritual heritage which once came to the Earth with human beings had gradually withered away in the soul. Now the life between death and rebirth is of particular significance for this spiritual heritage. If we go back to the epoch long before the Mystery of Golgotha, we find that after death men had an active, inwardly illumined life of soul; but then this life of soul became dimmer and dimmer, darker and darker. An ever-fading life of soul came with human beings when they passed through death. This was particularly the case among the Greeks although they were the most advanced peoples then on the Earth, and their sages had every reason to say, in view of the stage reached in evolution: ‘Better it is to be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of the Shades.’ We know that this saying was true when applied to the Greeks who lived a fully satisfying life on the physical plane; but as soon as they had passed through the gate of death their life became dim and shadowy.

In the fullest sense it is true that the spiritual life which men had brought with them to the Earth and which manifested after death as a somewhat dim clairvoyant consciousness, had become even dimmer. And especially in the fourth Atlantean epoch, the Graeco-Latin epoch, during which the Mystery of Golgotha took place, the spiritual life had reached the stage of its greatest darkness.

The all-important purpose of the Baptism by John the Baptist was that some of those who sought to be baptised should be made conscious of the conditions just described. The individuals baptised by John were completely submerged in the water. As a result, the etheric body of these individuals was liberated from them and for a short time, while under the water, they became clairvoyant. John was able to reveal to them that there had been such deterioration in the life of soul in the course of time that a human being now possessed very little of the spiritual treasure that he had once been able to take with him through the gate of death and that could give him clairvoyant consciousness. A man whom John baptised in this way became aware that a revitalisation of the life of soul was essential, that something new must radiate into human souls in order that after death there might be a life in the real sense. This new impulse streamed into the souls of men through the Mystery of Golgotha. You need only read my lecture-course entitled From Jesus to Christ and you will realise that a rich and abundant spiritual life streams from the Mystery of Golgotha into the souls of individuals who develop a relationship to that Mystery.

Hence Paul could say: just as the physical bodies of men descend from Adam, so will the content of their souls in greater and greater measure ‘descend’ from the Christ who is the second Adam, the spiritual Adam. It is a profound truth that Paul uttered here, clothed in his simple words. If the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place, men would have become progressively empty in soul and would either have developed a longing only to live outside the physical body or to live on Earth with no other wishes or desires than for a purely physical life, and so would have become more and more materialistic. Because all development is a slow and gradual process there are still some peoples on the Earth who have not yet wholly lost the original spiritual treasure, who still retain some measure of it in spite of having failed to establish any relationship to the Mystery of Golgotha. Individuals belonging to the most advanced peoples, however, can become conscious after death only to the extent to which they have learnt ‘to die in Christ’, as the second line of the Rosicrucian formula expresses it. And so in actual fact the Mystery of Golgotha has acted as illumination in men's souls.

With this clearly in mind we shall understand the gist of a question relating to man's evolution. It is the question: How came it that understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha enabled the content of man's soul to be carried into the sphere of his ‘I’, his Ego? How did this soul-content differ from what existed before the Mystery of Golgotha as an ancient heritage? The difference is that, before the Mystery of Golgotha, in respect of the content of their souls men were far less independent. They were under the direct guidance of the Beings we know as the Angeloi, Archangeloi and so on. Before the Mystery of Golgotha men were under the leadership of the Beings of the nearest higher Hierarchies to a far greater extent than was the case after that event. Indeed the progress of these Beings themselves—Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai—consists in the fact that they have learnt to lead human beings in a way that respects their independence. Men were intended to live on the Earth in a state of greater and greater independence. The leading spiritual Beings of the higher Hierarchies have recognised this and therein consists their progress.

But it is possible for these Spirits too to remain behind in their evolution. Not all the Spirits who participated in the leadership of humanity have acquired through the Mystery of Golgotha the power to guide and lead men while ensuring their freedom. Among these Beings of the higher Hierarchies there are some who remained backward and have become Luciferic spirits. What we call ‘public opinion’ is an example of the way in which some of them are active. Public opinion is not created by human beings alone but also by a certain category of Luciferic spirits of the lowest rank—retarded Angeloi and Archangeloi. These spirits are only beginning their Luciferic career and have not yet risen very high in the ranks of the Luciferic spirits, but they are definitely Luciferic in character. With the eye of seership one can perceive how certain spirits of the higher Hierarchies did not keep pace with evolution after the Mystery of Golgotha, how they adhere rigidly to the old kind of leadership and therefore cannot make any direct approach to men. Those who have kept pace with evolution can make regular and direct contact with men; the other spirits are incapable of this and they manifest their activity in the muddled, turbulent thinking that comes to expression as public opinion. The function of public opinion is intelligible only when it is realised that this is how it has made its way into human life.

Thus we have among us beings who abandon the regular course of evolution and become Luciferic in character. It is important that this should be known. The work of the Luciferic beings of whom we have already spoken and who now have great power, also began on a small scale. Indeed this is true in the case of the whole host of Luciferic beings. Admittedly, on the Old Moon there was no public opinion as we know it but something that can be compared with it—a kind of guidance of men. Some among this host of Luciferic spirits of whom we have spoken are powerful and important beings, for example backward Spirits of Form who surge in upon the human being with such violence that they stop his growth. The others are merely the recruits; nevertheless this is the beginning of the career of the Luciferic spirits, a career which later on will assume a quite different dimension because the spirits become more and more powerful. Public opinion, which under the guidance and direction of certain Luciferic spirits of the lowest order, influences human beings because they absorb it between birth and death, must necessarily have its counterweight during the life between death and rebirth. That is to say, because a human being in his life between birth and death has been caught up into the current of public opinion described, he must experience the counterweight in his life between death and rebirth. Otherwise the following would ensue.

The backward spirits who are responsible for the creation of public opinion have no significance or power whatever in man's life between death and rebirth. They have relinquished all possibility of working in that sphere because they are active here, on the physical plane, in a spiritual way—indeed in a way that is only possible in the form of public opinion. A man can take no iota of anything like public opinion with him into the spiritual world and whatever element of it he might want to accompany him into the life after death would be entirely out of place. It must be said, although it will seem strange to many people, that life in Kamaloka becomes very difficult for one who clings to public opinion or has been caught in the coils of his own judgement very early in life. This applies particularly to persons who believe that within the world of public opinion there can still be independent judgement—which is an utter impossibility. For such people Kamaloka is admittedly difficult. But when the period of Kamaloka is over, public opinion has no weight or significance whatever, and after death it is irrelevant whether people adhered to nuances of it, such as liberal or conservative, radical or reactionary. This has no significance whatever in the different groupings of human beings and moreover exists on Earth solely for the purpose of hindering men from making progress towards illumination of consciousness after death. The beings behind public opinion resolved to forgo the progress made possible by the Mystery of Golgotha. But the Mystery of Golgotha will become of greater and greater importance for the Earth's evolution. We must clearly understand that the future of the Earth's evolution cannot be assured simply by rectifying phenomena such as public opinion and the like which are inevitable in the course of evolution. Men can, however, become better in their own inner nature, therefore the process of evolution must take root more and more deeply in their inner life. In the future, men will be still more exposed to the pressure of public opinion, but inwardly they will have developed greater strength. This is possible only through Spiritual Science. But if man is gradually to become a match for those spirits who are now exerting their influence in public opinion as recruits of the Luciferic beings, this will be possible only if, between death and rebirth too, he undergoes something that strengthens him inwardly, strengthens the principle in him that is independent of life on Earth. Whereas through the influence of public opinion he becomes more and more dependent upon earthly life, in the life between death and rebirth he must receive into his very self something that in the next life on Earth will make him ever freer from the influence of public opinion.

Connected with this is the fact that at the time when public opinion began to assume importance, the Buddha-realm was established in the Mars sphere—as we heard in the lecture at Christmas. Consequently between death and rebirth man passes through this Buddha-realm on Mars. Christian Rosenkreutz had entrusted to Buddha a special mission in the Mars sphere. And what would be futile on Earth, namely the desire to flee from the conditions of terrestrial existence—this is an experience which man must undergo between death and rebirth during his passage through the Mars sphere. Among other things he strips off the incubus of public opinion which takes effect only on Earth. Many, even more overbearing influences will come in the future and it will be more than ever necessary to undergo the experience that is possible for man as a pupil of Buddha in the Mars sphere. Here on Earth, men can now be pupils of the Buddha in the orthodox sense only if they refuse to participate in the progress made by the most advanced people on Earth. But between death and rebirth Buddha unfolds what has developed from the teaching he gave on Earth, which was that man should free himself from the need for further incarnations. This has been developed into a doctrine that is inapplicable to the Earth, where life must progress from incarnation to incarnation. Thus the doctrine preached by Buddha on Earth contained the seed of what man must acquire in the disembodied state of existence. In this advanced form, Buddha's teaching is right for the period between death and rebirth. The Buddha himself appeared in the astral body of the Jesus-Child of St. Luke's Gospel² and Christ Himself leads men between death and rebirth through the Mars sphere, enabling them there to receive the Buddha's advanced teaching. Thus in the Mars sphere men can be emancipated from the tendency to uniformity resulting from the effects of public opinion which are detrimental for their further progress on Earth. Whereas in earlier times Mars was said to be the planet of warlike traits, it is now the Buddha's task gradually to transform these warlike traits in such a way that they become the foundation of the sense for freedom and independence needed in the present age. Whereas nowadays men have the tendency to surrender their sense of freedom and succumb to the fetters of public opinion, on Mars between death and rebirth they will strive to throw off these fetters and not bring them again into the life on Earth when they return to new incarnations.

It seems to me that here we have something that characterises most wonderfully how wisdom holds sway in the world, how everything that progresses or remains backward is manipulated in such a way that the final outcome is harmony in the evolution of worlds. Man cannot achieve progress by keeping as it were to the middle line, although there are many who realise the uselessness of adopting a one-sided standpoint. Admittedly, we come across idealists, materialists and other ‘-ists’ who swear by their own standpoint, but truly great individuals such as Goethe do no such thing. They try to grasp material conditions by means of material thinking. When men of less eminence imagine that they have understood this, they say: truth lies in the middle, between two different standpoints. But that would be the same as if someone in practical life wanted to sit between two chairs! The truth cannot be found by a one-sided adoption of this or that standpoint but by applying the modes of knowledge appropriate either for materialism or idealism, The world does not progress by undeviating adherence to a middle course: a middle course is appropriate when the opposing sides are also present and are recognised as forces. If something has to be weighed, the two scalepans are needed as well as the beam. Thus there must be a counterbalance to public opinion; and this is provided by Buddha's teaching in the Mars sphere—which would not be necessary if public opinion had never existed. Life needs antithesis; life progresses in and through polarity. Somebody might think that as the North and South Poles are antitheses, it would be better if neither existed! They are not, of course, antithetic in the sense implied by a certain Professor of whom it was said that because he had written his books in such haste he could not think about their contents and stated that civilisation could develop only in the middle zone of the Earth because at the North Pole people would freeze through cold and at the South Pole melt through heat! In another connection, of course, North and South Poles are genuine opposites and are necessary because progress is not achieved by adopting a neutral course but by the maintenance and harmonising of opposites. Thus what develops on Earth had to undergo a process that lies below the level of progress. Public opinion is of less value than the judgements which an individual can reach on a path of progress. Public opinion is sub-human and it is this sub-human influence that is counteracted by the Buddha-stream through which man passes between death and rebirth. Both influences are necessary and it is extremely important to bear this in mind in connection with evolution.

It can therefore be said with truth: yes, there are indeed backward spirits, but everything that remains behind on the one side and on the other outstrips the evolutionary process, is manipulated by the wisdom of the Universe in such a way that harmony is the final result. The backward spirits are utilised to constitute the opposite pole to the spirits who have progressed to further stages.

If we look at life in this way it will be clear to us that in the future course of Earth evolution the human being will bring into life more and more qualities which will have greater weight and influence than the purely physical qualities. And it will be increasingly apparent that qualities other than the purely physical will have to be taken into account. Physical qualities will be evident, which—although they become manifest only gradually—can be traced back to infancy; but there will be other qualities to which this does not apply and which show themselves in a marked form only comparatively late in life. A characteristic feature of evolution in the future will be the existence of an increasing number of individuals about whom it will inevitably be asked: What can have happened to that individual at a certain age in his life? He has completely changed; it is as though he has become a different being! Qualities that were completely absent in earlier life, that appear only when a certain age has been reached, will reveal themselves. This will happen in the case of souls who are the most highly developed and in whom a certain break in their life becomes evident. For the fact that an individual was a pupil of Buddha in the life between death and rebirth reveals itself only at a certain age. This would apply to persons of whom it can be said: Up to a particular point in their lives their individual qualities were in evidence; but then entirely new trends appeared and they were able to understand matters altogether different from those for which they had previously shown understanding. These will be individuals who in the future will be the vehicles of true spiritual progress although they may simply be regarded as late developers, manifesting these qualities only late in life. In truth, however, the reason why these individuals display these qualities only in later life is that in previous incarnations on the Earth they had established the causes which enabled them to experience the spiritual life in the Mars sphere with particular intensity and so to acquire qualities which enabled them to bring a new impulse into the evolution of humanity. True spiritual culture will more and more be in the hands of individuals of this kind, who in their youth showed little aptitude for the spiritual standpoint they adopt in later life.

We now see that this is the reason why a certain fact has always been stressed in the Rosicrucian line of thought of which we ourselves have heard in the past, although it could not then be substantiated because our studies were not as advanced as they now are. Representatives of the Rosicrucian principle of Initiation in the West have always emphasised that it is impossible to discover in their childhood those who are to become leading figures, because these are individuals who give evidence of that fundamental change in later life of which I have spoken. When a seer speaks of Buddha today, he knows that Buddha has faithfully adhered to what his teaching promised; he has continued to work for that in human nature which has no direct urge for physical embodiment and therefore does not appear at the beginning of life in a physical body but only when the physical body has undergone a certain development, when a certain stage towards spirituality has been reached. Then, at a later stage of life the gift of the Buddha to man becomes an effective influence.

All this must be borne in mind if we are to understand the whole process of man's development. What it signifies for each individual in his life between birth and death—of this we shall hear later.

• 1. See pp. 180 onwards in the Rudolf Steiner Press 1963 edition.
• 2. See the lecture-course, The Gospel of St. Luke given by Dr. Steiner in Basle, September 1909, particularly lectures four to nine.

It was my task yesterday to show how the special configuration of such mythologies as the Osiris Myth, the Greek mythology—and in a certain sense even the Old Testament teachings to which we will return presently—is connected with changes in the stages of human consciousness. We know of the development of consciousness in mankind, we know that we have to look back to earlier times of man's evolution in which there existed an old clairvoyance, a perceptibility of super-earthly things. It is well to look back at such things for this retrospection gives us orientation. Mankind is again to achieve vision directed to the super-sensible; it is to be achieved on the path of Spiritual Science, through spiritual scientific thinking. The realization of what each one can do, no matter where he stands in the world, can be helped by the will to orientate oneself for what is to come by considering what has been.

In a certain sense things take place in later times in connection with events of earlier times. We look back from our Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, in the development of which we are standing, to the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch, the Greco-Latin, and to the Third, the Egyptian; we come then already to the time in which it was natural for men to express in certain mythical pictures and imaginations what they thought and felt about cosmic mysteries. In another connection we have already stated that we in our Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch have to recapitulate in a sort of inverted way what had happened in the Third, the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, so that it emerges again differently. The booklet ‘The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Mankind’, also refers, as you know, to this subject.

Now we saw yesterday that in the time of the Greco-Latin evolution, in the time that begins with the 7th or 8th century before our era, there was a kind of looking back of mankind, and this looking back to other states of consciousness in fact expressed in imaginative myths facts about the ruling spiritual beings, as we described yesterday. Men in the Fourth Epoch knew: when we look around us we see only the physical, on the other we can reflect. You know, moreover, if you have followed attentively what is said in my book The Riddles of Philosophy, that in Grecian times, and even much later, people saw Ideas—as it were—as Goethe still did, and that they could really say: we see them. Entirely abstract thinking has only come about in modern times. But at that time there was indeed a seeing of ideas, a seeing of spiritual realities, a living in spiritual realities.

In the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch this was no longer so in the full sense, but the people remembered that it had been so earlier. They said—and in fact this represented the truth:—there are, however, Beings in existence, who are not human beings, who live in super-sensible worlds and have still preserved life in the imaginative consciousness. The Greeks saw such Beings in the individuals of the Zeus-circle.

The Egyptians again said to themselves: that age in which men still lived directly with Imaginations was the age when Osiris wandered upon Earth. They meant of course not one Osiris, but it was believed that there had been a time in which men on earth lived in Imaginations. And this type of human soul which was able to live in Imaginations was described by saying: Osiris lived upon earth. Lost and slain had been this life-in-Imaginations. Osiris has been killed by his brother Typhon—that is, by that force of the human soul, which to be sure is still directed to the super-sensible, but will no longer evolve the Imaginative faculties. The ancient clairvoyance exists no more. The forces active in the old clairvoyance are now amidst the dead. Hence Osiris is the Judge of the dead; the human being meets him when he has passed through the portal of death. The figures of Osiris and Isis were brought into connection with the Death-Mystery by those people who set the Osiris myth into the centre of their thought. Moreover, in the details through which the Osiris myth has been elaborated there actually lies all that I have been stating. The point of time has also been specified in which according to the legend, Osiris was killed by Typhon.

And just as we could point to a quite definite heavenly constellation, which the Magi of the East knew as the constellation in which the new cosmic age was to approach (we have pointed out in the Christmas lectures that by a certain constellation of the ‘Virgin’ the Magi of the East knew that they were to bring their offerings to the new World-Saviour) so too have those whose thoughts centred on the Osiris myth looked back to quite definite star-constellations. They have said: Osiris was slain. They meant to say: the old life in the Imaginations vanished when the setting sun in autumn stood in seventeen degrees of Scorpio and in the opposite point of the heavens the full moon rose in Taurus or in the Pleiades. This constellation of the full moon rising in Taurus at a definite point of the year in connection with the Scorpio position of the Sun, this moment of evolution has been given by the followers of Osiris as that in which Osiris has vanished from the earth, that is, in which he was no longer there. These things naturally come about in such a way as to leave legacies behind. There have always been people, stragglers even up to recent centuries with Imaginative clairvoyance, but the point is to show when Imaginative clairvoyance disappeared from earth as a normal faculty of the human soul. And men were aware that in the ages when Imaginative clairvoyance prevailed on earth conditions were quite different from what they were later. And this too was plainly indicated in the Osiris-Isis myth. But it is just this that is so very little understood by those who explain the myth of Isis and Osiris.

It is related, as you know, that when Isis discovered that her spouse, Osiris, had been slain, she departed on a search for the dead body. She found it at last in Byblos in Phoenicia and brought the corpse of Osiris from Phoenicia back to Egypt. A deep wisdom is expressed in such a myth, a wisdom of humanity's physiology. What sort of conditions were there then during the Osiris-time? During the Osiris-time there was not yet such a script as the later script. What prevailed in Egypt during the age of Osiris was a picture-writing and this was considered sacred. And how actually was the picture-script brought about? It was brought about inasmuch as the most important signs were taken, not from animal or earthly forms, but from the star-constellations, in fact from what clairvoyance saw in the star-constellations. If I were to make a comparison from something lately in our minds, I might say: You have heard in the ‘Dream of Olaf &Åsteson’ how he experiences the spirit-snake, the spirit-dog and the spirit-bull; he describes what he feels about them. Imagine to yourselves such pictures, but in a far more perfect form, as signs—such signs then are images of Imaginations. Such signs as the signs of the earliest writing were held to be holy. In such signs was cosmic wisdom contained for ancient times, this cosmic wisdom which in fact was at the same time a heavenly wisdom, inasmuch as men read the cosmic mysteries in the star-script, as the dead alone are able to do now. The gift of possessing a writing which is really a reproduction of Imaginations only belonged to humanity at a certain period of time, and then vanished. And the ancients knew: this imaginative way of writing existed in the age of Osiris. Together with the dying away of the old life of the world in Imaginations, the ancient picture-script disappeared and there arose that which has become the abstract script. This no longer expresses mysteries, but gradually, since it has become abstract, only serves to express the sense world—namely, the ordinary letter-script. Just as Osiris was looked on in those ancient times as the hero, as the divine hero of the Imaginative script, so is Typhon, his brother but his opponent, the hero of the abstract script of letter, developed from it.

This is also indicated profoundly in the Osiris-Isis myth. Over to Phoenicia must Isis go to find the corpse; that means to find the picture-script transformed into the letter-script—to find the corpse of Osiris. The letter-script was ‘found’, invented, as we say, in Phoenicia. From Phoenicia back to Egypt the abstract-script has come, whereas the Egyptians in their old mysteries in the Osiris-time had a picture-writing reflecting Imaginations. Thus the transition from the old concrete conception in the Imaginative-script to the newer concept in the abstract script has also found expression in the Osiris-Isis myth.

All these things lie in the course of mankind's evolution. We are there looking back to an older experience in Imaginations. Real physiological wisdom is, in fact, expressed in the myths. Thinking gradually passed over to abstractions—not immediately to the quite empty abstractions of today but to the somewhat fuller abstractions of about the 6th and 5th-centuries B.C.—in the work of Thales, with whom one generally begins the history of philosophy. (You can read of it in my The Riddles of Philosophy.)

But you can see from this that humanity has to look back to earlier evolutionary periods with quite different conditions of soul. Certain Brotherhoods of modern times know, to be sure, about these entirely different conditions, but they hold that such things should still be kept under lock and key. That is not right for the present day, but it is a little dangerous to talk of these things beyond a certain degree. Up to a certain degree, however, it is not only a case of should, these things must be spoken of today, because the knowledge of ancient conditions of human consciousness helps to give orientation for what is to develop as the new. If we have knowledge of what once existed, that can help us to further the necessary new conditions of evolution, although of an entirely different kind.

Now today you find in boys who develop to the age of puberty a change of voice. It is as we know, the expression in the boys of an organic process, which occurs differently in the female sex, and which apparently makes greater inroads into the human being in the case of the female, since the process reaches more directly into the physical. But that is not true. The influence on boys is just as strong, though it lies in a different sphere, so to say, and though externally it only comes to expression physically in the change of voice.

This reaching maturity by the human being is today—in fact since the times when Osiris was dead for the outer world—almost a physical process. It was not merely a physical process in the ages when Osiris lived, no, it was a soul process. The boy of fourteen or fifteen years—as you know we have already spoken of other experiences at the time of puberty—experienced not only that his voice changed, but that what today only enters, presses into, the region of the voice, extending from the sexual essences of the organism, in those ancient times pressed also into the thoughts, the conceptual world of the young boy. We must deal with such things truthfully; the voice apparatus is simply pervaded with the sexual essences of the organism. Today the voice breaks; in those days the thoughts ‘broke’ too, since it was still the ancient Imaginative time. In those times the young boy before the age of puberty had certain Imaginations; it was a living process and all knew that the child up to nine or ten years of age had Imaginations—Imaginations of spiritual events in the atmosphere. (Today there are still slight remains of this in almost every child of tender age, it is only that people pay no attention to it, or talk the children out of it as being foolish nonsense.) In the air spiritual events are taking place around us all the time. The air is not only what physical science describes, but spiritual events are taking place. These spiritual events, essentially events of the etheric world, were perceived by children in full Imaginations up to the time of puberty. And when puberty entered—not only for the voice, but the life of concepts—the human being felt something in him (it was in fact that which shot up out of the forces which are usually called in physiology the sex forces), felt something in him of which he said: what I saw as a child through the Imaginations in the atmosphere, now comes to life in me again, it is perception, it lives in me. That took place. The man was aware that he had taken something into himself out of the atmosphere. Formerly he had seen it outside; now he felt it within him.

For woman too, in those ancient times, there had been, before puberty, a perception in Imaginations of what was outside in the atmosphere. But after puberty that which in the case of boys merely emerged in the feeling of an alteration in their mental life, in the case of the woman was like an ascent of still more inward Imaginations: it was the human image that the woman perceived within her again and again in Imagination. And then she said to herself: what I now perceive Imaginatively, is the same as I experienced in childhood before puberty, out in cosmic space, as Imaginative pictures. Both sexes, only in different ways, experienced the fact that they actually knew in the soul: in me something is born which cosmic space has fructified in me.

There you have a still more concrete form of the Osiris-Isis-myth: it is universal wisdom in so far as it is won from the atmosphere, but it is in organic connection with man, the deeper layers of the human spirit. You can get an idea of it if you seek it in the following way. You see, men think nowadays in an abstract way, inasmuch as they desire to know through the head what the world contains of laws and so on. In these old times men were clear that in this way, merely through head knowledge, one cannot know, but one knows through the whole human being. One knows what goes on outside in space, goes on etherically, by having perceived it formerly as it were, outside, and then after puberty pictured or felt it inwardly. How do you perceive then today, with the abstract perception that you have? You discover something which you see with the senses; then you think it over afterwards. That happens in rapid succession. With those mysteries, through which man in ancient times penetrated into the laws of the atmosphere present in Imaginations, it was a different matter. As child, up to puberty, he perceived, he only perceived; afterwards he worked this over inwardly. One might say it is only a perceptive process and a thinking process spread out in time; whereas today it is placed at man's own discretion to observe abstractly and to reflect, conceive abstractly. Over the whole life was spread what we now crowd together in a few moments as regards the outer physical world, perceive, conceive. That was something which in his relation to the world man thought of as spread out over the whole of human life between birth and death. To the age of puberty he perceived certain things, afterwards he reflected upon them. Such an age was once in existence.

But now think. People said to themselves: ‘this perceiving and reflecting, this is connected in a certain way with the day, with the rising and setting sun. With the rising sun, one wakes, gets up, begins to perceive and to think; with the setting sun this ceases, since one lies down to sleep.’ Thus people connected perceiving and thinking with the day; and what was spread out over the whole life between birth and death they brought into connection with more widely extended cosmic events in the heavens. Just as it depends on the sun, on the ordinary rising and setting of the sun, that I can perceive and think, so does it depend on greater, more extended star constellations which appear after centuries, after millennia, what man develops in perceiving and thinking of the kind that I have described. And as in those old times people connected the ordinary perception and thinking with the day, with sunrise and sunset—indeed as people do today though they don't think so and even believe they go by the clock—so they connected matters concerning more comprehensive cosmic mysteries with the other star-constellations, with the other events in the heavens.

You see, a deep logic, a deep wisdom lies in these things. With superficialities one cannot get at the facts. But something else too is bound up with it. These ancient peoples—and we could speak of others besides the Egyptians and the Greeks—these ancient peoples knew that the more inward-lying forces of human nature are connected with what come to expression in celestial happenings, in star-constellations. That decadence of man which is expressed in the modern attitude to the sex problem, and that greatest decadence which is expressed in the most modern attitude to sexual problems, of this nothing was yet known to those ancient peoples of the ages of which one must speak when one deals with these things. For them it was something very different when they had the feeling: it is the sexual essences which are suffused into the human being when the voice breaks and therewith the thoughts break too—or when the other appears of which I have spoken. That the divine was then pouring itself forth in man—that was the conviction of the ancients. Hence what is only viewed in a pernicious sense today is found in all old religious rites: the sex-symbols, the so-called sex-symbols, point thus to this connection—we can call it the connection between the atmosphere with its air-events and the human processes of knowledge which take place during the whole human life between birth and death.

‘Through my eye, through my ear’—so said these people—‘I am connected with what is brought by the day. Through the deeper, more inwardly lying forces, I am connected with something quite different, with the secrets of the air, which, however, are only perceived in Imaginative experience.’ And this Imaginative experience in its concrete form I have described for you with reference to these early times.

The Old Testament conception in these matters was different inasmuch as it put doctrine in the place of actual experience. The Egyptian of the Osiris-age, especially of the earlier Osiris-age, said as follows: ‘The true human being only enters me with puberty, for I then take in what formerly I saw in Imaginations. The air transmits to me the true man.’ In the doctrine of the Old Testament this was transformed into the conception: The Elohim or Jahve have breathed into man the living breath (Odem), the air. There the essence was lifted out of the direct living experience and became doctrine, theory. This was necessary, for only so could mankind be led—and that is the meaning of the Old Testament—be led from that living in union with the outer world, which still had an inner connection between the microcosm, man, and the macrocosm, the world, to their further evolution (of which I will speak later). As this connection gradually vanished, it was necessary to fall back on just such a doctrine as that of the Old Testament.

But now there came the time of the death of Osiris—and therewith the time too in which, while one thing became finer, the other thing, as it were, became coarser. How is that to be understood? Well, you can imagine it thus: When we go back into the old Osiris-time, then the human being saw or felt before puberty the Light-Imaginations within the outer air (see sketch)—if I speak for the one sex—

Thus he saw in his environment the Light-Imaginations in the air up to the time of puberty. Afterwards he had the feeling that they had entered into him, and the changes occurred of which we have spoken. For the child the air was everywhere filled with Light phenomena; for the grown man, the matured man, the air was certainly still there, but he knew that as child he had seen something else in it. He knew that the air was at the same time the bearer, the mother, of light. He knew that it was not true that when he looked out into the air there was nothing in it but what was shown physically. Beings live in it which are to be perceived in Imagination.

These Beings were for the Greeks the Being of the Zeus-circle. Thus man knew that there were Beings in the air. But all this—the fact that human states of consciousness became changed—all this is connected with the fact that even objective things became different in the finer substantiality. Naturally, for the modern clever man it is an outrage if one says such things. I know it is an outrage, but nevertheless it is true: the air has become different. Naturally it has not changed in a way that can be tested by chemical reagents; nevertheless the air has become different. The air has lost the strength to express the Light-Imaginations; the air has—one could say—become coarser. It has actually become different on earth since that ancient time. The air has become coarser. But not only the air, but man himself has become coarser. That which formerly lived spiritually in the essences which permeated the larynx and the rest of the organism, that has also grown coarser. So that in fact if one speaks today of the sexual-essences one speaks of what is different from what one would speak of in ancient times. Everyone in older times knew: ‘The perception of the day is connected with my personality; the other, which I experience from the atmosphere, experience with my whole life, that, however, is connected with mankind as such, that goes beyond the individual man.’ Hence they also sought to fathom the social mysteries under which men live together, through the link which bound them with the macrocosm, they sought for social wisdom through the star-wisdom. But what lived in man as social wisdom bound him in fact to the celestial. This came to expression in the most everyday concepts. A human pair before the death of Osiris would never have felt anything else than that they had received a child from heaven. That was a living consciousness and corresponded also with truth. And this living consciousness could develop because man knew that he received out of the air-filled space what he himself experienced.

Of all this the coarse dregs, so to say, have been left. As in the air the coarse sediment has remained behind of that power of the air that revealed itself to man in Imaginations in earlier ages, so in man himself are the coarse dregs left behind. This had to come about since otherwise men could not have attained freedom and a full consciousness of the ego. But it is the dregs that have remained. In this way, however, all that the ancients meant by the divine, which as you can now readily realize, they connected in a roundabout way with the sexual essences, all this has been coarsened, not only in idea but also in reality. But it is there nevertheless; naturally not only in the one way, but in the other way too. The reproduction of mankind was in those olden times thought to be in direct connection with the micro-macrocosmic bond of mankind, as you have seen, but the whole social life of man on earth was in fact also thought to be in connection with this micro-macrocosmic bond. Numa Pompilus went to the Nymph Egeria to receive information from her as to how he should arrange social conditions in the Roman Kingdom. This, however, means nothing else than that he had let the star wisdom be imparted to him, had let the star-wisdom tell him how social conditions should be organized.

That which men reproduce on earth, and which is connected with successive generations, was to be placed in the service of what the stars have to say. As the individual man directed his life with his ordinary perceiving and thinking, according to the rising and setting of the sun, so the interconnections of mankind which later became ‘States’, were to be placed under the star-constellations as expressions of cosmic relationships.

In our language—and languages often contain memories of old conditions—we still have a remembrance of this connection in the fact that the relation of male and female is described by the word ‘Geschlecht’ (sex) and also the successive generations as ‘Geschlechter’ (races). It is one and the same word: the ‘Geschlecht’—the family, interconnected, blood relations—and then the relation of man and woman. And so is it too in other languages, and it all points to how man sought to find a recognizable connection with the macrocosm for what lay in his nature, in the deeper strata of his being.

These things have become coarsened in the direction we have discussed. Among other things that have remained behind is the attachment in longing and feeling to nationality, the clinging to the national, the chauvinistic impulse for the national; that is the lingering relic of what in older times could be thought of in quite different connections. But only when one looks into such things does one know the truth contained in them. What is expressed by the nationalistic longing? When man develops to excess this national feeling, this sentiment for the nation, what is living in it? Exactly the same as lives in the sexual, in the sexual in one way, in national sentiment in another. It is the sexual human being that lives his life through these two different poles. To be Chauvinistic, is, nothing else really than developing a sort of group-sexuality. One could say that where the sexual essences, in what they have left behind, grip men more, there is present more national Chauvinism; for it is the very force living in reproduction that comes to manifestation too in national sentiment. Hence the battle-cry of the so-called ‘Freedom of the Peoples or of the Nations’ is really only to be understood in its more intimate connections if one said—in a most respectable sense of course—‘The Call for the Re-establishment of the National in the Light of the Sex-Problem’. It is necessary to realize as one of the secrets of the time-impulse, the fact that the sexual problem is proclaimed in quite a special form over the earth today, without people having any idea of how out of their subconsciousness the sexual clothes itself in the words: ‘Freedom of the Peoples.’ And far more than men imagine are sexual impulses present in the catastrophic events of today, far more than men imagine! For the impulses to what is happening today lie, in fact, very, very deep.

Such truths must no longer in our present age be kept under lock and key. Certain Brotherhoods have been able to keep them under lock and key, because in the strictest sense of the word they have excluded women. Although joint work with women can nevertheless lead to all sorts of bad things, as has indeed constantly been shown today, yet the time has come in which right views, general views, on these matters must be spread among humanity. Ideas are nevertheless spread abroad which are impure, foolish, empty, inasmuch as from certain directions, without knowledge of the more intimate connections, all sorts of things are treated today as sexual problems. But you see how what here is pure, genuine, honourable truth comes in contact, on the one hand, with what can be the most impure, lowest way of thinking, as is shown from time to time in the outgrowths of Psycho-Analysis or similar things. You will always find, however, that what on the one hand, rightly understood, is profound truth, needs hardly to be altered at all in words, but only to be permeated with a low-minded type of thought, and it is simply a pernicious, stupid, objectionable conception.

A former age could speak of ‘nations’, when one pictured ‘Nations’ in such a way that one nation had its guardian spirit in Orion, another in another star, and one knew that one's life was ruled from the star-constellations. One then appealed, as it were, to the ordering in the heavens. Today where there is no longer such ordering in the heavens, there is the appeal to the merely national, the Chauvinistic appeal to the merely national, that is to say, an asserting of an impulse, psycho-sexual in the most pronounced sense, a backward luciferic impulse.

If one would see clearly and plainly what is today, one must not shrink from the actual underlying truth. But one can also see from such things why people are so afraid of the truth. Just imagine if, in the outcry on the freedom of nations and so forth that is raised today, people were to hear ‘that comes from sexual impulses!’ One should just imagine that! One should picture for once the crowing cock ... I don't mean any special one, not simply Clemenceau ... one should picture all the declaimers on this theme ... and imagine that they had to realize that what they crow is after all the mating-voice of the cock, however finely it is decked out in national garments.

These are things which mankind must learn to know today, and which they do not want to hear, for, as you know, of things that are black it is asserted that they are white, and of those that are white, that they are black. The point is, that that ancient time of which I have spoken has come now to the fifth Post-Atlantean epoch in which abstraction has gradually developed. There where the boundary lies between the fourth and fifth Post-Atlantean epochs (you can read about this in my book The Riddles of Philosophy), there men strove with all their might over the intellectual value—so to say—of the abstract. Read afterwards in my The Riddles of Philosophy where I speak of the nominalism and realism of the Middle Ages. Abstraction had grown to such a pitch that they asked themselves: When I form a concept, has that any significance for the things outside, or is it only a name in my head? Today people no longer reflect on such things. Of what interest is it to people to know that men have tormented themselves in the Middle Ages, when the abstractive power of thought was felt, what role the so-called universals, the general ideas, play in the world! That one wrestled and strove about what role abstractions play! Nowadays one thinks no more about it; one has already become used to abstractions; one does not strive to get beyond the abstract impulse but, on the contrary, to get thoroughly within it. The conflict over ‘universals’—this ultimately came to the point where it was said: ‘Universals, General Ideas, are at first as certain Ideas in God: those are Universals ante rem; then the Ideas are in the objects: Universals in re; and then the Ideas are in our mind, our soul: post rem—Universals post rem.’ That was an expedient, in order to take up a stand on the question: is a man connected with reality when he thinks, when he only thinks ideas? They still felt something of how in ancient times men had been connected with reality. When they reached maturity they thought over, as it were, what as a child they had formerly perceived; they knew therefore that only then had the true human being entered in. One had to struggle desperately over the Universals, as to whether, when one thinks, there is still something of reality left in one's thought or whether it is entirely divorced from reality and has nothing to do with it. Since that time people have grown accustomed to take the universals, the abstractions, as abstractions, and are more or less completely cut off from reality in their consciousness.

Such a process is taking place continually on a small scale. Think for a moment: words which are the representatives of concepts, are originally in direct connection with what is seen. For instance, a small group of fighting men has one man at the head, they have this one man before them, they call him the foremost, the first, Fürst (Eng: Chief, Prince). There one has it linked directly with what is beheld, later it was set free, it became a word which denoted something without any sort of connection with a direct perception. Just think to how many words this applies! And the next step is that then certain words become privileged, that speech becomes monopolized, becomes the property of the State. Even in language certain things are developing in this direction, are they not? ... Take the simple case that someone has learnt a great deal, has become wise—let us say, without meaning anything foolish by it—he is a learned man. In a certain naive way one would then say: he is a ‘Doctor’. Here we have a connection with fact if we call someone ‘doctor’ who is seen to be learned. For it still has a certain significance when there is documentary evidence held by a Corporation which gives this recognition. But it loses the significance when it is monopolized ... Yet mankind is enthusiastic about such monopolizing nowadays. All possible words are to be monopolized. A man is not supposed merely through his gifts to be an ‘engineer’, but this must also become a recognized title from heaven knows where. And increasingly things are to be loosed from their connections. There you can see the abstraction-process on a small scale, but it is accomplished wholesale with infinite significance. A family has a father. What is the connection between the pater, who is the father of the family and the Pater, who is a priest? This tearing loose of what is contained in the word—I wanted to bring it forward as illustrating the abstraction-process taking place in humanity.

And in the case of ideas it is much more mischievous than in language; people often make use of concepts without having the least idea of their connection with what is perceived. Sometimes people then search for the real observation, become comic, frightfully comic in this search! Only remember how there is a whole literature today about the cross-sign, which is really a universal sign, spread over the world. Most amusing is all the learnedness applied to it! This sign

is traced back to this

That was supposed to have been the cross of former times.

Sometimes they then trace that back by saying: only the parts have been left, the swastika and so on. Yes, it is frightfully

clever what has been written about it, quite immensely clever, the way ‘cleverness’ has been applied to such things. I do not wish at all to go in for detailed criticism. But to know what is true, cleverness is not enough. One ought, of course, to know that the cross-sign means nothing else than that the human being takes his stand, stretches out his arms and then he is the cross. From above downwards goes a stream of existence that binds man with the macrocosm, and through the outstretched hands too. And the Cross is the sign for Man.

And when you find distinguishing marks of the Assyrian kings or of the Egyptian kings, medallions, for instance, then they are medallions with the cross-sign.

And two other signs (the cross on the medallion is one sign that ancient kings had) were, for instance, these.

The star in the sign is generally made in such a way that one does not immediately recognize the pentagram in it—or is it even a hexagram;—however, that is not the point.

Specially clever people have said: that is the Sun, that is the Cross, that is the moon, that is the star. But the deeper meaning lies precisely in the fact that it is man, the microcosm, who is compounded of sun and moon. You see from this ordinary cross-sign, how the concept has been separated from the real object. The direct perception is this, the sign is this: man in the form of a cross. People today know so little of how to connect the object with the sign, that, as I have said, an immensely clever literature exists which seeks to find out how this sign is connected with what it wants to express. And so one could write quite clever articles over the most everyday words without discovering how these things, these words, were connected with the realities.

Humanity had to go through the period of abstractions. We know that today we are no longer in the sign of Aries, in which the Sun stood at the beginning of Spring when the transition took place from the old Imaginative time, of which echoes still lingered, to the age of abstractions. We have entered the age of Pisces. A special characteristic of this age is that man receives the force for abstract ideas out of the macrocosm. Man receives this force today from the macrocosm. But in the meantime man does not know how he is to unite the abstract ideas again with reality. They must be united again with reality.

I said at the beginning of the lecture that in this fifth Post-Atlantean epoch there must be a kind of recapitulation of the time in the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch when one looked back to the ancient Osiris-age, when Imaginations were in existence. The reverse, as it were, must take place: man must find the way back again to the Imaginations. One could say in another form: Osiris must become alive again, we must find ways and means to bring Osiris to life. I have spoken very concretely in these studies by saying that we must find forms of experience which are common to the dead and the living. Since Osiris was slain he has been with the dead; he will remain with the dead, but he will have to come again among the living, when there are concerns which are common to the dead and the living for the social life of men.

This brings us to the fact that people must understand something which it is above all necessary for our time to understand: how will Osiris be revivified? How can Osiris come to new life? How does man approach again life and experience in the Imaginative consciousness?

We will speak of this tomorrow—how he is to rise again, and how the resurrection is to be brought about. Tomorrow's considerations shall have then, as their subject, the Imaginative consciousness.

My dear Friends,

If spiritual science is to be, as it can be, a life-draught for our souls, it must prove to be strong and also suited for times as important as our present epoch, in which so many things are taking place which widen the soul-spiritual vision of those who have dedicated themselves to spiritual science. This enables us to see events in a clearer light than our contemporaries, for their outlook is frequently—I repeat, frequently—kept within narrow limits by materialism. All that has been cultivated for so many years in our spiritual-scientific movement shows us that one of our goals is to increase the soul's life of feeling, so that we become emancipated from mere thought, thus transcending the narrower limits of our own being and its environment; we may then envisage to some extent the great impulses, the great manifestations of forces which pervade the whole development of mankind on earth. When we have thus striven to increase, as it were, the tension of our feelings, then the forces acquired through spiritual science should enable us to see something of all that remains externally invisible in the events, and still more, all that the ordinary intellect is unable to see. This is above all necessary in the present time with its tempestuous waves beating so painfully against our soul, but raising it, on the other hand, to special heights, just because they conceal so many significant things. We should be able to face above all the following question: Is there a prophetic meaning in the terrible torch of war burning above our heads, does this have a prophetic meaning for the whole development of the earth?

Only those who look upon these events in a light as significant as possible can face them in the right way. Some of our friends may often have asked themselves why we have in recent years spoken in these circles of times to which we must look ahead with special attention, times which will break in upon us daring the 20th century. The children and grand children of those who are now living will have to pass through great and important and at the same time tragic and painful events, and those who are now entrusted with the task of giving the souls of these children and grandchildren forces which enable them to hold out in the midst of the events which will befall mankind in the 20th century must realise that a strong inner spiritual force must be given to these children. In the 20th century our descendants will need strong inner forces as a support for their souls, to a far greater extent than can be imagined in the ordinary life of to-day, so that they may take along with them the treasures of mankind which have been accumulated throughout the centuries of human development. And other storms will also have to be experienced by the descendants of the present inhabitants of the earth! I have said that people may wonder why we speak of such things among ourselves, but now they will more easily have a feeling for such things because we are living in the midst of the greatest and most terrible war-events which have ever occurred in the historical course of development upon the earth, in the course of history of which mankind is conscious.

Indeed, it would be quite wrong, my dear friends, not to pervade ourselves as intensely and strongly as possible with the significance of the present moment and not to envisage the question: What has spiritual knowledge—the object of our soul's deepest longing—what has spiritual knowledge to do with the events which will break in upon the development of mankind? Even when considering things quite superficially, is it possible to ignore the storm which has arisen long ago in the East and which is now threatening to break out over the modern culture and civilisation of Europe. We should at least know that very strong and powerful forces live in the womb of the East and by the way in which they now assert themselves it is already possible to see that they are forces aiming at the destruction, at the breaking up of European culture. To-day we can only have a pale idea of the full extent of this danger.

We now live in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch of culture. This is the epoch of the consciousness soul and in it live souls that have something to give to mankind. If we look back upon the Graeco-Latin epoch, we see that it is essentially, but in an entirely different form, an echo, a repetition upon a higher stage, of what once existed upon Atlantis. Although there it appeared in a different form, the fourth postAtlantean epoch of culture is a kind of repetition of Atlantis. The fifth post-Atlantean epoch of culture in which we are now living is a new form; it is something quite new which has been added to the course of development which mankind has followed so far. We are now living in the midst of this epoch.

This should not be taken as an abstract truth, as a theory, but it should be grasped with the deepest and most intense feeling of responsibility, and we should realise that a long time will have to go by in the evolution of the earth before the hearts and souls of men can bring forth all that the divine order of the world has given mankind during the fifth post-Atlantean epoch of culture. The impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha arose during the fourth epoch of culture, as the most important event in the whole development of the earth. During the fifth epoch of culture the Mystery of Golgotha will not work in the same way in which it worked during the fourth epoch. For the task of the fifth epoch of culture is to approach the Mystery of Golgotha little by little with full spiritual understanding, with all the forces which the human soul contains, not only with the religious forces based merely upon feeling, but with all the forces of the soul. Little by little all the truths and forces of knowledge which the soul can develop of its own accord will serve to grasp Christ fully, the Christ who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, so that St. Paul's words, “Not I, but Christ in me”, will become a reality in a new way. After all, everything we develop through spiritual science prepares us to grasp the true essence of Christ with all the soul's inner forces of knowledge. This is a significant, important task of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch of culture.

Let us now try to penetrate somewhat into the meaning of these words. If this is the task of the fifth epoch of culture, let us first bring before our souls the way in which the Christ-Impulse has influenced mankind since the Mystery of Golgotha. If its influence were limited to what people have grasped in connection with the Mystery of Golgotha throughout the centuries which have elapsed since that time, the Christ-Impulse could only have exercised a weak influence upon men. Yet the Christ-Impulse does not only appeal in an intellectual way to human reason or to an understanding based on feeling, but it is a real impulse. The Christ-Impulse streams with living strength into the course of history itself. The Mystery of Golgotha, the external symbol of which is the blood that flowed on Golgotha, is a living force streaming into the history of mankind.

Let us take a historical event in order to understand how the Christ-Impulse worked in man before he was able to grasp it; let us try to understand how it worked, as a living, driving force in the evolution of mankind. The fifth epoch of culture is called upon to bring into human consciousness the whole inner nature and essence of the Christ-Impulse; but this Impulse already worked as a living force in the sub-conscious soul-forces of man before it could rise to full consciousness in him. And a historical character who picked out, I might say, the Christ-Impulse and brought about through it important events in history is, for example, the Maid of Orleans. But other characters might also be taken as an example. When we trace back the history of Europe to the event connected with the personality of the Maid of Orleans we must say, even if we only consider the external course of history: What the Maid of Orleans did, when she rose up from the heart of the French nation and vanquished the English forces—for she actually achieved this—really implied that the map of Europe took on the aspect which it afterwards gradually assumed. Any other concept of history relating to the past centuries, in so far as it refers to the European distribution of nations and states, is an invention that does not take into account the fact that the Christ-Impulse lived in the Maid of Orleans that a living Impulse brought about the distribution of the European nations and national forces.

One might say that while the learned people disputed over many things—for example, they already began to dispute on the question as to whether the Holy Supper should be eaten in this or in that form, and whether this or that should be interpreted by this or that formula,—while the learned people showed that their understanding, their conscious understanding could not the Christ-Impulse, this impulse worked through the medium of a simple country maid, through the Maid of Orleans; it worked in such a way as to mould and shape the history of Europe. The influence of the Christ-Impulse does not depend on the comprehension we have for it. I might say that the Christ-Impulse penetrated into the Maid of Orleans through Michael, its representative.

For this purpose the Maid of Orleans had to pass through a kind of initiation. To-day we speak of initiation, and in addition we give to human consciousness the rules collected in my book, “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds”. Of course, one cannot speak of such an initiation in the case of the Maid of Orleans. In her case we can only speak of an initiation which is a remnant of old initiations that took place more in man's sub-conscious soul-forces. These old initiations continued to exist up to the present time almost like elemental forces, and many things described in old legends and fairy-tales, for example that some people passed through experiences which roused their inner soul-forces so that they could perceive certain things connected with the spiritual world, indicate that independently of man, and through the influence of divine-spiritual forces which pervade the world, certain people are, I might say, predisposed by Karma to be natural initiates, thanks to the place given to them by the general Karma of humanity, where their own Karma flows together with the Karma of humanity.

A very beautiful echo of such a natural initiation, as one might call it, is contained in a Norwegian poem that speaks of Olaf Asteson, “the Son of the Sun”, who lived in a kind of sleep during the thirteen nights and days between Christmas Eve and January 6th, the festival of Christ's appearance. Olaf Asteson's very name indicates that he possessed unconscious hereditary forces of knowledge, for its real meaning The man in whose veins flows the blood of his ancestors. The Son of the Sun, Olaf Asteson, sleeps and dreams through the thirteen nights which are the darkest of the year's course on earth and which go from the day of Christ's birth to the day of Epiphany on January 6th.

These old legends dealing with the thirteen holy nights are not based on superstition. For it is indeed a fact that there are two seasons of the year which are cosmically like opposite poles in relation to the soul-life of man living in his physical body. The festival around St. John's day, which, is celebrated in the summer, is specially suited to draw out into the cosmos, through the forces of the sun which then reach their greatest strength, all the passionate impulses of the human soul, so that it becomes united with the cosmos: In ancient times, when people forgot themselves and lost themselves in the strong physical forces outside in the cosmos, the festival of St. John was called upon to pour into the human souls the divine-spiritual forces surging through the cosmos. But the spiritual forces which are also active in the darkness unfold their greatest strength in the middle of the winter, when the sun's forces reach the lowest point of their physical unfolding. And one may rightly say that it is in accordance with cosmic laws that the festival of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth should be celebrated in the winter season. When the external physical world is darkest of all, then the soul that unites with the forces spiritually pervading the aura of the earth, may have the strongest experiences. It is during these days that Olaf Asteson sleeps and sleeps and experiences everything connected with what we call Kamaloka, also what we designate as the Soul-World, and finally what we call the Spirit-land. The Norwegian legend relates that when Olaf Asteson woke up again after thirteen nights, he could describe what he had experienced and what souls he had met in the Soul-world and in the Spirit-land. These are pictures corresponding to an imaginative knowledge, but they indicate living realities which are accessible to human souls when they transcend the body during these days of physical darkness, which are, however, days of spiritual enlightenment,—when the human soul lives in forces that surge and weave through the aura of the earth. And the end of the legend describes the forces of the Christ-Impulse which strongly take hold of Olaf Asteson, but of his sub-conscious understanding.

These legends speak, as it were, of natural initiations which could still be attained in ancient times; they speak of the spiritual world into which one could still look in the darkest season of the year. The earth's aura then truly acquires forces which it does not have when it is flooded and illuminated by the physical forces of the sun. And because Christ is united with the aura of the earth ever since the Mystery of Golgotha, also the forces of the Christ-Impulse can in those days particularly influence human souls, if only they are open to receive them.

I might therefore say that before investigating anything historically, one should take for granted that the Christ-Impulse must have worked subconsciously for thirteen days also in the soul of a character such as the Maid of Orleans; she too must have experienced, as it were, what Olaf Asteson experienced in a sleeping condition during those thirteen days and nights; her sub-conscious soul-forces must, as it were, have been enlightened by the Christ-Impulse. In that case, the Maid of Orleans must once have been in a kind of sleeping condition during the thirteen days which lie between December 25th and January 6th, and on January 6th the Christ-Impulse must have taken hold of her soul, after a sleep-like state of existence.

What we may thus take for granted, really exists in a strange way, but during a special period, when the human being lives in a kind of sleep. Before he draws his first breath in earthly life, before he leaves his mother's body and is able to receive the first earthly-physical ray of light, he passes through a state of development which is really a sleeping state of experience. When we are within our mother's body, we live in a dreamlike sleep, a state of existence into which we enter at night when we fall asleep, and the last days of existence within our mother's body are those which are, so to speak, most accessible to the unconscious influences coming from the spiritual world.

In the Maid of Orleans these must have been the days chosen to implant the Christ-Impulse into her being, the days before she opened her physical eyes to the physical sunlight and before she drew her first breath outside her mother's body. This was indeed the case, for the Maid of Orleans was born on January 6th. On that day something occurred which caused a stir in her whole village; there was something undefined in its aura. This is a historical fact. The villagers did not know what had happened; they did not know that the Maid of Orleans had been born.

A great deal lies concealed in such facts. Only when these mysterious things are seen in their true light will it be possible to understand what is really taking place below the surface of the external physical world. The divine forces seek many different ways of entering human souls. Of course, the Karma of the Maid of Orleans had to be suited to these events. Because her Karma brought about the fact that she was born on January 6th, it provided the historical basis which enabled the Christ-Impulse to influence history in a special way through the Maid of Orleans. This fact gave Europe a completely new form.

When history is studied with a little more understanding it is possible to investigate such happenings. A spiritual way of looking at the world will in future enable us to refer to such facts, for by that time the fifth post-Atlantean epoch of culture will really have extracted from human souls all their latent forces of knowledge. Human souls will then experience more and more consciously the existence of the Christ-Impulse, but only if mankind will cease to look upon spiritual science as an abstract theory and will instead feel it livingly, experience it inwardly. Spiritual science will then be able to fulfill its true mission in the development of humanity.

We must be conscious, especially in a time such as the present one, that it is necessary to bridge the chasm between the human souls living here on earth in a physical body and those that have already gone through the portal of death. In a materialistic age this chasm widens. We shall more and more learn to consider as part of mankind as a whole not only the souls that live in a physical existence between birth and death, but also the souls that live between death and a new birth. The consciousness that throughout the earth's round we are united, also united with the souls that have passed on before us into the super-sensible worlds and that these souls are working in our midst, only with different forces than those of the souls still living in physical bodies,—this consciousness will gradually grow and become more intensive. It calls for an understanding of spiritually active forces and that we should learn to consider earthly phenomena in the new light which spiritual science alone can shed upon them.

Because spiritual science, my dear friends, should be something that stirs our hearts while our souls advance in knowledge, I want to speak to you of a recent occurrence here in Dornach throwing light upon the path which at the same time leads to many things that have occupied us during these last weeks and that belong to the wider compass of our spiritual-scientific stream of knowledge. I might also choose other cases, but the following are so immediately connected with our Karma that I am again able to speak of them to-day. What I shall tell you now, may then be extended also to other souls inside and outside our spiritual-scientific movement and related to it by destiny and by the way in which death occurred in it.

Last autumn we experienced a deeply moving case here in Dornach, in the surroundings of our Building. Dear friends had moved to Dornach with their children and had settled down as gardeners near the Building. Their eldest child, a boy of seven, spiritually wide-awake and with unique heart-qualities, was a veritable Sun-child. One felt deeply attracted by the child's soul, even if one only met the boy, now and then, for brief moments. When his father had to enlist, to do his duty on the battlefield as a German citizen, the boy of seven stood, I might say, whole-heartedly in the midst of this situation and he made a special effort to replace his father as best as he could by helping his mother with all kinds of small services. He went to town by train and did the shopping quite alone, although he was only seven. One evening he did not come home. There was a lecture that evening. At about ten o'clock a friend came along and told us that the boy was missing. There was no doubt that his disappearance had to be connected with a furniture-van which had overturned. This had happened near the Building, at a place where no van had ever passed before and where no van was likely to pass again for a long time. It had fallen down a small slope and capsized in the adjoining field. The drivers had given up the attempt of lifting it that same evening and had left the van there, after unharnessing the horses, for which they were very anxious. They wanted to lift the heavy van the next day, for they were sure that it would imply a whole day's work. It was now ten p.m. The child's disappearance had to be connected with that furniture-van. All kinds of tools were fetched and everyone able to work helped. In two hours the van was standing. At midnight the boy was discovered under the van—dead.

If we consider the external facts and the whole sequence of events leading up to the circumstance that the boy, who always came home by a way which would have led him past the right side of the furniture-van, on that day choose a path which led him past its left side at the very moment when the van capsized on top of him, if we consider moreover that on the way home he was held up in a friendly way by people, so that he was a quarter of an hour late (he had gone to the so-called Canteen, to fetch something for supper)—if we bear in mind that in this accident it was a question of just a few minutes which caused the boy to be on that spot at the very moment when the van capsized and that no one had noticed the accident (people were standing not far off, and although they had seen the van toppling over, no one had seen the boy)—the external facts as such will appear to us as an outstanding example of how easily we may fall a prey to a logical illusion. I have often spoken to you about this and shown you how easily we may delude ourselves in external life and mix up cause and effect. Once I described to you the following case: In the distance you see a man walking along the bank of a river. Suddenly you see him swaying and falling into the water. Soon after he is drawn out dead. The external circumstances could justify the assumption that he fell into the river and was drowned. And you will remain by this verdict if you do not investigate things further. But in the above case you could change your view simply by drawing in an external aid, although you were strengthened in it by the fact that a stone was found on the spot where the man fell into the water. But on dissecting the corpse it will appear that the man had had a stroke; consequently he had fallen into the river because he was dead; he did not die because he had fallen into the river. Here cause and effect are reversed. People with insight into such things will frequently come across such illusions—particularly in the scientific field.

In regard to the boy's death we must therefore say: The boy's Karma had ordered the van to be there; it was his Karma that had brought it to that spot. It is wrong to think that this was accidental. For in his present incarnation the boy was not to live beyond his seventh year of age. I might say that everything was arranged accordingly. We must get accustomed to see cause and effect differently than is ordinarily the case. When we look clairvoyantly upon the boy's life, upon the life of his soul, we discover a significant fact which moves us deeply, but at the same time it can throw light upon the divine-spiritual mysteries of the universe. Soon after the boy's death, the whole aura of the Dornach Building changed. In telling you this I am relating [to] you something connected with my own experience. When one has to work for the Dornach Building of the Anthroposophical Society, when one has to arrange what should take place within it, then one knows how much one owes to the helping forces that stream into one's soul from such an aura. After the boy's death, his still unused etheric body became united, really united with the aura of the Goetheanum Building. For the etheric body is something that man discards. The individuality consisting of the Ego and of the astral body continues—this is something quite different—but the etheric body put aside at such a tender age contains forces which might have sustained the physical body and physical life for many decades. These forces have gone through the portal of death unused. After a few days they are discarded. These very forces are now active in the aura of the Building and work with it. Consequently we cannot say that the soul of this individuality works in the aura, but only his unused etheric body. Nothing is lost, even in the spiritual world. That no physical forces are ever dispersed is a fact well known to physicists; these forces only undergo a change. Also in the spiritual world we must look for transformed forces; they are the unused etheric forces of men that have died young and these forces rise up to the spiritual world. We approach such things by studying concrete examples. It is for this reason that I am describing them to you.¹

You see, the essential thing is not only to absorb thoughts and ideas concerning the spiritual worlds, but we should learn a certain way of living and penetrate into it. As human beings of the 5th post-Atlantean epoch of culture we should envisage the 6th and 7th epochs. It is essential to bridge the abyss separating the living from the so-called dead; it is essential that mankind should become more and more united, not only when men are incarnated in a physical body, but also when they take on forms of existence through which they have to pass between death and a new birth. Spiritual science exists not only for the purpose of bringing new possibilities to mankind, but in the life which awaits the earth for the remainder of its post-Atlantean development spiritual science is a first, I might say, stammering, attempt: all that spiritual science is now able to give, is really a stammering, when compared with everything that future human races will experience through spiritual science.

With this description, attempting to convey through the heart's forces certain ideas on the conditions of life and death, I want to point out to you an element of spiritual science which considers life itself, so that an understanding which is not that of the head may rise up within you, the understanding of the heart. This we should seek in a living way through spiritual-scientific immersion, for this kind of understanding is the task of the 5th post-Atlantean epoch of culture. It will be followed by the 6th and 7th epochs. But we fully grasp all that the Central-European civilisation must uphold, when we feel that the civilisation of Central Europe above all, is intimately connected with the goals that must be reached during the 5th epoch of culture. This may lead to something which I have mentioned at the beginning of to-day's lecture: to a deepened insight into things which lie concealed within our times so heavily fraught with destiny.

In the East, a soul-life is preparing which will be very significant in the future. In this connection, read what I have explained in the lectures I once gave at Christiania on the mission of the Folk-souls. The soul-character of the inhabitants of Eastern Europe is fundamentally different from that of Central Europe, not to mention that of the distant Orient. It is fundamentally different. All that spiritual science means to us should enable us to have an open spiritual eye for such things. We have often heard the legend that the Russian-Slav populations called in the Varangians and said to them: “We have a fine country, but no order. Come and make order for tip, Arrange a kind of government for us.” This, tale, born out of feeling and relating to the origins of Russian history, is a legend without any historical background, for these events have never occurred. In reality, the Varangians went out as conquerors and were never invited by the Russians! Yet these legends in history have a meaning far deeper than any historical reality behind them,—they have a prophetic meaning, a truly prophetic meaning, for they indicate something that has not yet occurred, but that will occur in the future. What will unfold in the East, will have to unfold in such a way that the capacities, of the Easterners will be used to absorb what has been developed in the civilisation of the West and to elaborate it further, so that the gifts existing in the East may be fructified by what has been produced in the West. This will one day be the task of the Eastern populations. We may, as it were, briefly characterize the nature of, the Russians of Eastern Europe by saying: If we consider the Russians, not that hypocritical community which now governs it, but the people, we must realise that the Russian soul contains a whole store of gifts; it is, so to speak, gifted in every direction, but just when it unfolds its mission within the development of the world and of mankind it will appear that within it lives something which may be called talent without any productive force. These talents will grow and increase more and more. But what preeminently characterizes the Central-European, the spiritual forces that pervade his gifts and the mood of “Constantly striving”, of living, as it were, intimately united with the Spirit of his nation, the striving to grasp what he produces—a striving that appears so, sublimely in Fichte's philosophy, where he speaks of the Ego that must constantly create itself in order to understand itself (indeed, future epochs will grasp the greatness of Fichte's philosophy!):—these very qualities which characterize Central Europe are the very opposite of what exists in Russia, in the East of Europe. The Russian souls are absolutely receptive; their greatest gift consists in absorbing things, but if anyone says that they are productive, this is an illusion. They are called upon to develop gifts which have no productive force. This idea is difficult in itself, because such things have never existed in human development, yet they must gradually unfold. In future the East will call out to the West: We have a beautiful country, but no order, (disorder will increase), come and make order.—Central Europe is called upon to bring to the East the productiveness of the Spirit. And what is happening now is an unreasonable rebellion against things which must take place in [the] future. People try to tread down things which must be reached, for in future they will say: Come to us and bring us order! In the history of mankind's development we find that what we most long for and strive after, is the very thing we reject most strongly.

The greatest misfortune that could befall us is that Russia, the East, should win in this process. It would be the greatest misfortune, not only for Central Europe, but, for Russia itself—the very greatest misfortune from an inner standpoint, because this victory would have to be reverted. Its effects could not remain. We are thus facing a tragic moment in the history of mankind's development, when the East will rebel against something which in future it will long for with all its might. For it would be doomed to decay if it refused to be fructified by the spiritual life of the peoples living on its western boundary. In the further course of civilisation the West must produce a living spiritual life, not only in the form of idealism, but a 1iving spiritual life. It will be like a spiritual sun moving from West to East, in the opposite direction of the sun's ordinary course. And in the external world the Russians will more and more realise how little they are able to do through their own forces and that they must really set themselves into the whole process of human development; also that they would commit the greatest sin by laying hands on the civilisation of the West, of the peoples of western Europe. Indeed, we may see strange, foreboding flashes of light! Did not something rise up in the East which would have been impossible in the West, the so-called, “Barefooted” world-conception, This is a kind of philosophy going out from the Barefooted Brothers, which quickly spread and took hold of many circles, although a few years ago it did not exist at all. The conception of the Barefooted! It is a conception adopted by men who make a philosophy out of their own absolute lack of faith in man, and humanity, who think that man is nothing but a poor wretch wandering about between birth and death, wandering in terror—hint pain, so that the words, freedom, brotherliness, compassion, pity, love, are empty phrases. Their only wisdom consists in roaming through the world as barefooted pilgrims who look upon the whole civilisation as a great illusion—the whole foul civilisation of western Europe, to use the words of these barefooted pilgrims—who only see the World in the ragged clothes, the stuffy room and the wide road—the world through which man roams when he has reached world-conception of the Barefooted Brothers. Indeed, it affects us, strangely when a poet gives to this “barefooted” conception in significant words spoken by one of his characters, it must affect us strangely, inasmuch as our Central-European world-conception always makes us strive to discover something which may kindle for mankind the light of the future. How does it affect us when a poet lets, one of his characters utter words that appear to sum up the world-conception and the philosophy of the Barefooted Brothers?

“Indeed, what can man mean to you?—He takes you by the scruff of the neck, he squashes you like a flea with his finger-nail! Pity him if you can! Show him how foolish you are! In return for your pity he will torture you, wind your intestines round his hand, tear every vein out of your body, an inch an hour. You fool ... pity? Pray God that they may whip you pitilessly, and there's an end to it! Pity? ... Fie!”

Gorki, of whom you will already have heard many things, comments these, words with: “Cruel, but true”, by rendering not only the world-conception of a poet in a poet's words, but his own world-conception, resulting from his own observation of the world. This is the conception of a Barefooted Brother, and it may be discussed like, any other world-conception. Yet it is one that has lost the possibility of transcending itself, of reaching something greater than itself and of sending light into life; before it can fulfill its mission in the evolution of mankind, it will have to wait until it is fructified by the light. At present, however, it is rebelling against the very things it should accomplish. Many empty words have been uttered in the world, but one of the most tragic experiences I can relate is connected with the phrases uttered by the different political parties at the war-assembly of the Russian Duma in August 1914; they surpass everything in emptiness! Such empty words can only be uttered when every living productive force of the soul is exhausted. The East is really standing upon the threshold of things to come, and it is now unfolding forces which are opposed to, those which will one day be the source of its greatness. And we in Central Europe must say to ourselves: In spite of all, the East is waiting; for the spiritual wisdom which must rise up from Central Europe.

My dear friends, try to transform into feeling what I have indicated in words fraught with heavy feelings. I have shown you what spiritual science may become if we intensify feeling and penetrate with it into spiritual science, in order to grasp the true necessity, indeed the historical necessity of a spiritual-scientific world-conception. We shall then be pervaded by thoughts filled with understanding, that rise up from our souls into the world's spaces, thoughts that will meet the forces which will soon send down their influences from the spiritual worlds, when peace will once more reign over the earthly spheres.

To-day I have shown you the influence of the etheric bodies which sever themselves from the human souls before their forces have been used up, of etheric bodies that might still have worked for many years and decades within physical bodies here on earth, and on behalf of physical life. We cannot help thinking of the many unused parts of etheric bodies rising up to the spiritual world, in addition to all other influences rising up from the individualities of men passing through the portal of death on the battlefields. These etheric bodies will form a great complex of forces, of spiritual forces, that will cooperate from spiritual regions in the formation of a spiritual world-conception which will gradually take hold of mankind. But in order that the forces proceeding from the unused etheric bodies may send flown their influence from spiritual spheres, they mum be net by the thoughts of human beings on earth, by thoughts filled with understanding for the secret working of the spiritual world which is interwoven with the forces of these unused etheric, bodies. This should be a real encouragement inducing us to fill ourselves with the great truths of spiritual science. For they will stimulate within us thoughts which will go on working in other people. The burdensome, fateful content of the life now unfolding within and around us will be followed by days of peace, when the truths which we have implanted into our souls through spiritual science will rise up before us and meet the forces gathered by the etheric forces of those who have passed through the portal of death upon the battlefields of present-day events, forces which stream down to the earth. And the result; will be something which I want to recapitulate in a few words, a result that reveals itself to spiritual, scientific research. If the fruits of spiritual science can be rightly included in the development of the times, the result will be something I want to express in the following words:

Aus dem Mut der Kämpfer,
Aus dem Blut der Schlachten,
Aus dem Leid Verlass'ner,
Aus des Volkes Opfertaten,
Wird erwachsen Geistesfrucht—
Lenken Seelen geistbewußt
Ihren Sinn ins Geisterreich.

(From the courage of the, fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the grief of the abandoned,
From the nation's deeds of sacrifice,
Shall spring forth a fruit of the Spirit,
If souls, spirit-consciously
Direct their mind and soul towards the Spirit-realm.)

• 1. The description of the other concrete cases is contained in “Rudolf Steiner und unsere Toten”. They are too intimate for publication in the News Sheet.

My dear friends!

Allow me to say a few words, which are meant to be, so to speak, an interpretation of the moral and financial balance sheet that has been presented to you today. I would like to tie in a few things that I am convinced are intimately connected with this balance sheet, but the connection cannot always be seen immediately if things are not considered thoroughly.

I would like to start from something very obvious, and draw attention to something else here: the fact that the anthroposophical movement, of which the Goetheanum here is the external representative, has recently become very widespread without the movement itself having done very much directly to popularize it. Little by little, anthroposophy has actually become something that is widely taken into account, and this is precisely because people have become aware of it from the outside and have studied it. As a result, it is really already part of all the various efforts and struggles that are being waged within civilization today. This can be seen quite clearly. We couldn't have changed that. For it is precisely in the circles where anthroposophy is widely discussed today that we have basically done nothing, but have endeavored to maintain the original impulses, to work more and more in a positive way towards the given treasure. And of course it would have been different – despite some enmities arising from the movement – it would have been different than it is now, when we are exposed to the broadest public to such an extraordinary degree. But this factor simply has to be reckoned with, and in this respect the recent Congress of Vienna was particularly characteristic. There we were, if I may say so, in full public view, and we were also in public view in front of numerous people who, with regard to what is necessary to build civilization, to rebuild civilization, are also asking themselves questions.

It is quite clear today – and this must also be said in this circle – that one thing is quite clearly noticeable when one observes life on a large scale. It is noticeable today that in Western countries there is a conviction, perhaps not yet very strong, but clearly emerging, that the old cultures that have developed within Central Europe must be ferments for a spiritual reconstruction. The West's antipathy towards the spiritual life in Central Europe will decrease, while political antagonisms are currently still on the increase. Although other symptoms seem to indicate the opposite, political antipathies are steadily increasing. The same is not true – even if it is less noticeable – of the sympathies for that which can become effective in the spiritual realm in Europe for a healthy building up of civilization.

Yes, my dear friends, there are many things to be considered. I will first draw attention to just one detail. I will single out the special reception that the three eurythmy performances have now found in Vienna. If you have an ear for these things, you can distinguish between them. The reception of eurythmy in Vienna was the warmest imaginable, the warmest that has existed so far; even if it was not perhaps the most outwardly striking, it was still the warmest because people were able to see the artistic aspect in general and because did not think of all the things that we ourselves - and I in particular in every introduction to the performances - emphasize; because it did not occur to them, because they were able to take it all in as an artistic disposition of the heart. The reception of eurythmy in Vienna is actually something that marks an epoch-making event within the anthroposophical movement.

And here we must take into account the fact that there is a strong urge today for the artistic element in anthroposophy to be developed. We ourselves cannot exert a direct influence on many things because of our working conditions, because we are absorbed by the things that already need to be done. But when, for example, a number of younger people feel the need to train in the art of recitation and declamation, and also in the elements of dramatic art, when it has become necessary for Dr. Steiner to hold a course here for young people in the art of recitation, declamation and mime, at the request of young people, then it is at least a sign that the striving, however little it may be apparent today, is present.

All these things must be treated with an extraordinarily strong objectivity, because, of course, the impulses that live in such things can also be expressed in a negative way, and in the moment when, for example, the artistic is led only a little on an inclined plane, in that moment all possible luciferic and ahrimanic forces are immediately set loose, and the matter leads into a false channel.

Therefore, it is necessary, especially on this point, to pay attention to the experiences gained so far, as could be gained through the previous operation. These experiences must be carefully considered, and in this area in particular, the always inhibiting criticism and even derogatory discussion, which is very common in our circle, must be avoided, as it leads to nothing but hindrance in the real advancement of the matter. Because, of course, something can be objected to in everything, and the critic can always know better. I don't mean that ironically at all; sometimes it can be better in theory, but it can't be carried out under the conditions that we are given. But it can't be carried out at all because it is mere theory and not really artistic practice.

Such things must certainly be taken into account: that attention is paid to what the personalities have experienced so far and what ideas they have formed [about] how things could proceed, personalities who have so far mainly been involved in the issues. And the others should help them more so that they do not experience inhibitions at every turn due to knowing better and the like, which can always be very easy. These are things that are much more connected with what you have actually encountered here in the balance than is usually believed.

I would like to point out another fact. You see, it is now very natural that when such congresses or university courses and the like are held, as was particularly the case in Vienna, people talk about it everywhere. It is only natural that the education should be discussed, that the principles on which it is based should be expounded, and so on. The Vienna Congress is of such great significance because, if it is properly followed through, the success we have had, first of all with the general public, can indeed prove a great blessing for the anthroposophical movement. 'If it is not capitalized on, it can of course - because it has led to things being so widely publicized - lead to a situation in which all the things that are now coming out of all corners with it will increase the opposition considerably.

You only have to consider the following in this context: in Vienna, despite the fact that such things were not sought – on the contrary, people were somewhat shy about them – outsiders have already published quite objective descriptions of what happened at the congress. But you must not forget that at the moment when something like this occurs on one side, the malicious and harmful opposition in particular makes full use of it.

I will mention just one fact. When I was traveling back, I had a somewhat longer stay in Linz, where I bought a newspaper. You do it in such a way that you go to the kiosk, pick up a newspaper, and you can have the most interesting experiences. There was an article in it called “Steinerism”, and the article was written in such a way that it wanted to show that the congress in Vienna could show the harmful aspects of Steinerism in particular, because if you go to Germany, things are worked a little more tightly there, and then more of the beneficial aspects come out. But when you come to Vienna, everything is immersed in sloppiness, the writer of the article says, and so you perceive the special form of sloppy Steinerism. And so you can see in the sloppy Steinerism just what is really wanted. And then it is peeled out; what is actually striven for in Waldorf school pedagogy, and in fact in the form that is said: the essence of Waldorf school pedagogy consists in homosexuality.

Now, my dear friends, you see, this is carried out in every detail, and so in a relatively widely circulated daily newspaper, people are taught the judgment: Don't make any sacrifices for this Waldorf school movement, because it's just a mask for spreading homosexuality.

Now, my dear friends, these things must of course be carefully observed. I could also illustrate what I am saying to you with other examples. One need only be led, by chance or by one's karma, to become aware of such things. For example, I once had to wait for something to happen in Vienna during the last days, so I went to a coffee house to avoid waiting on the street. As I still find it most useful on such occasions, I took a fair number of newspapers. The Congress had just ended. The newspapers had a lot to say about the conclusion of the Congress. But a large part of what appeared there in the way of reports was not written in such a grotesque style as the article that I then found in Innsbruck – not in an Innsbruck paper, but in a Viennese one. This grotesque style was not achieved, but nevertheless nice things were said from various sides. And some of the newspapers that had previously published objective reports then thundered from a completely different corner.

I emphasize this because it should be understood that the word has a much greater significance; that I always say that one should know how things live in our age, how things work, otherwise one cannot really [be familiar with the realities]. Of course, in anthroposophy the impulses are so strong that one does not need to take out one's earplugs, but can go through the world with them in. But one can no longer do that when the anthroposophical movement has spread so much without our doing. And so we must see to it that we ourselves find the possibility of finding our way, while remaining constantly alert and constantly taking into account everything that is happening. We must simply come to find our way. When you look at the bigger picture, it is quite confronting. That civilization cannot continue as it is today, as many people think, is becoming fully clear to other people. That is why the most beautiful alliances are being formed today, with the most beautiful programs.

Now I have been completely convinced of the following in recent times: We have certainly also found a certain number of people at our Congress of Vienna who, through this Congress of Vienna, have become aware that we are not making any progress with the old way of thinking, that it is necessary for a completely new and spiritual approach to come. It is precisely because of what was done and implemented at the Congress of Vienna that numerous people, certainly enough people for such a congress, have come to this conclusion.

If these people have now come to this conviction and now want to translate this conviction into practical life, then, my dear friends, what has always been there on a small scale also emerges again: these people do not join the Anthroposophical Society, but they do join another of the covenants, whose external leadership, whose external organization, whose external collaboration of members they like better. So that we actually - we can say it, and today I am saying it quite decidedly, because it has come to me so decidedly in recent times - so that we actually now often work in such a way that we thoroughly win people over for the facts, but they do not join us, but enter into the other covenants that are currently being founded. So the material success is actually not lacking. You can't even say that people don't want anthroposophy, because they do want it, and those who enter into the other alliances are sometimes very good anthroposophists, they just don't join us. I'll leave it to you to think about the reasons for this, because that will be the useful thing in working out an opinion for yourself.

But now I would like to start calculating. I believe that a great deal of money is being spent today to stage such alliances, and quite a lot of money is flowing into them. I am convinced that we could have this money if our cause were properly managed. We don't get them. We could very well build the Goetheanum with them and continue to operate it if only we understood that people really join us, and don't join other [societies] after they have been convinced by us.

To do this, however, we must really pay attention to the only specific thing, we must not pass by the single specific thing. And so it must be said: other alliances are relatively successful in raising and collecting sums of money from the broadest circles. If you were to see in detail how we have been offered the opportunity to continue our work at the Goetheanum in recent times, then, apart from the respectable beginnings in raising larger sums from individual smaller contributions, the main thing that has helped us so much comes from a very few individuals, who must be approached again and again, and who have indeed given their all. So we should not be deceived by drawing up statistics according to country and so on. It is individual people who have actually helped us decisively so far. And that is what prompts me to think with an extraordinary feeling of gratitude of those individual personalities who have really understood in an extraordinarily sacrificial way to make possible the continuation of the Goetheanum building and what is connected with it.

But since I am convinced that many people who have worked in this extraordinarily sacrificial way have actually given their all, I also believe that we are currently in a particularly critical and that attention must be drawn to the moral foundations of our balance sheet, in such a way that we should take into account just such things as those I have just mentioned.

You see, my dear friends, the fact of the matter is that, given our membership, it would be absolutely possible for the journal Das Goetheanum, which appears here – and which, of course, viewed from the outside, has emerged quite respectably in relation to how other journals emerge – but that a journal like this, which actually provides an extraordinarily good picture from week to week of what is happening spiritually here, it would be possible, through our membership, for this journal to have ten times more readers than it actually has, if it were sufficiently taken into account. If people were sufficiently aware of what is actually involved in the simple fact that this magazine, Das Goetheanum, exists and is so well managed by our dear friend Steffen, if people were aware of all that is involved for our anthroposophical administration, I would say, then I would be able to do something extraordinarily good through these moral impulses, I would say.

For there is no doubt that someone could easily say that they know better: one article should have been published, the other should not have been published, and so on. I do not disagree with someone who says something like that, of course. But if the necessary support were there, which would simply consist of our being in the thick of it, really making DasiGoaheanam min an extraordinarily widespread magazine, then, in turn, the support that would be provided by that would of course make it possible to do better and better. These are, of course, things that point to the remote, but they are related to what should actually be considered above all: that we now interest the world in our sense, so that people also learn to know what the reality is of something like Waldorf school education and the like.

Do not underestimate this: if – well, I cannot say anything very decisive in this regard – but if, for all I care, a hundred thousand people read after the Congress of Vienna has concluded: It has become quite clear in Vienna that Waldorf school education is based on homosexuality. So it has been read by a hundred thousand people, and it only helps if we do not have these hundred thousand people, but other hundred thousand people who now approach things as they really are. It is much less a matter of repeatedly dealing with people who cannot be convinced, but rather of reaching the others who do not absorb the opposing poison in this way. There is no need to deal so intensively with those who might express such views, unless it is a matter of defense. No one can believe that someone who expresses such views can ever be convinced.

Not true, I have discussed it on a variety of occasions; I have discussed it very clearly when some person has once again spread the nonsense here about my magical effects on the German Kaiser and so on: there is no point in dealing with those people, whose worth is known from the outset, because they have such an immoral basis for their judgment. It is just as necessary, of course, that we spread our good things among people in every direction on the other side. And in this direction, we cannot say that the first condition, an awareness of these things, is present. There is no awareness of what it actually means to have something like the magazine Das Goetheanum. I think it is absolutely necessary to become aware of these things first, then we will really make progress. Our work begins with becoming aware of them.

In Vienna, we discussed with friends from various countries the possibility of financing the construction of the Goetheanum to such an extent that the sum is available annually that is not only necessary for the expansion, but also to to avoid constantly going around with a collection plate for every single thing, such as for eurythmy; so that the Mystery Dramas can be performed again, and so on. In doing so, it is really necessary first of all to consider these things in such a way that one does not say: the Mysteries should be performed. They will be performed as soon as it is possible. But this possibility really also requires that one does not, I would say, always have to worry from eight days to eight days about how to raise what is needed for the construction, or how to stretch and so on.

Rather, it would be necessary for us to find ways of approaching the people who, I might say, are springing up like mushrooms; people are saying: There is nothing to be gained from all the economic chatter and all the politicians are doing; the task today is to create spiritual movements. People who say this are springing up like mushrooms all over the place today. Of course, they may disagree with this or that; they fully recognize the practical work of anthroposophy, but when it comes to whether they join us or somewhere else, they join somewhere else, because, after all, [gap in the text]. Think for yourself about things, how sometimes things approach in such a strange way, how often they are so strangely barricaded, so full of clauses, not in the principles, of course, but in practical application. It is difficult for some people to get through some of the things that come their way when they should approach our movement.

Of course, we really have to pay attention to this if we don't want to have to start the managing director's report last year by saying that last year it was pointed out that the progression is declining and that we can only talk about adding around 290,000 francs to the value of the Goetheanum. Since the construction of the Goetheanum was stopped, we have only had to account for the administration of the remaining funds up to the last few months before the construction of the Goetheanum was stopped, now to those people who are still interested in the past. Please do not take this as an exaggeration. If things are not taken in hand energetically, a report like this may well be the beginning of a new tradition. For the critical moment to which I have referred has certainly arrived. But I have had to point this out in previous years as well, for I would say that the basis of our accounting is more spiritual than material.

I am always extremely reluctant to have to make such a statement, which some might call a diatribe, but it is absolutely necessary, and I am fully convinced that it is fully compatible with my deepest gratitude to those who work with me at the Goetheanum. It is indeed the case in the anthroposophical movement that a group of co-workers has come together in the most dedicated way in all fields, artistic and non-artistic, and now works in the most self-sacrificing way, so that resistance in the work of this group can never be found in earnest. I am often confronted with the fact that whenever I ask why this or that has not been done, the answer is always: We didn't think of that! It will be done the next day; there is always the will to get things done. But it is more important, above all, to consider that things should be done more rationally, more economically.

You see, if I may speak for myself: the corrections for my books are very high! I can't get to them, for the simple reason that there are always other things to be done. It is quite natural that there are other things to be done; but when you look at a lot of things in more detail, the fact is that I am very often not asked at the decisive moment about things that are being conceived somewhere, that are being done somewhere. Then they happen. Then, after some time, they do not go any further, and then one is asked about the details. That is, of course, an endless matter.

I am not at all annoyed when I am asked about all sorts of things, but it must be the main things. It should not be the case that I am not asked about the main issues, and then have to negotiate about the secondary issues in endless meetings, by which I do not just mean those of the “coming day” and the “future”; it is not the case that I am referring to these in particular. Rather, I mean that it is necessary, now that we are really facing such enormous demands from the public, that we now do things with a certain rationale, that they are considered, and that they are done in such a way that they are not just done out of momentary ideas, but that they are really done with a certain overview. Otherwise, the same thing will happen that has already become a calamity within the anthroposophical movement.

You see, something like the Congress of Vienna is particularly evident. The Congress of Vienna is closing; the most urgent requirement is to make it count. This commercialization consists, of course, in evoking a correct judgment in the world as to what the Congress had as its content. And then it is a matter of this being done by people who are collaborators. At the moment when one needs new collaborators, because the old ones have simply been overworked, it is no longer possible. In our case, the matter very often comes to a halt due to the fact that we have a number of exceptionally good workers in a particular field; when their number reaches a certain size, the result is not that the circle expands, but that people overwork, as is the case with such bodies, say, as the Waldorf school teaching staff and the like. People overwork themselves; and of course, overwork does not make a person more resilient, but less so.

Today, of course, there is the very aggravating fact that if it were a matter of founding new Waldorf schools, we would face a major difficulty. If someone were to give me, say, fifty million francs to found new Waldorf schools immediately, then things could be done very well. But if there are constant calls for Waldorf Schools to be founded without the fifty million francs being available, for instance through the establishment of a world school association, then we face the greatest difficulty of all: we cannot find teachers. If you want to found Waldorf schools today, you have to create teachers who are truly capable practically out of thin air. It is even extremely difficult to expand the teaching staff of a Waldorf school in an appropriate way.

My dear friends, I would like to illustrate to you why this is the case: You see, with the current state of the anthroposophical movement, it is simply not possible for me to deal with each individual teacher as much as is necessary to hire a single teacher here or there. It is absolutely impossible. It is not possible. The moment we are in a position to offer a joint course again for, say, a hundred or three hundred teachers, then we can do it again as it was done at the beginning of the founding of the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. Then the matter is settled; then we can move on. But for that to happen, we really need to be able to hold courses that are embedded in the bigger picture. As the movement stands today, it is impossible to fragment our energies in the way that they are fragmented when things go the way they do today.

So if there are fifty million available to found Waldorf schools, then many can be founded; because teachers are available, they just need to be trained first. You need a teacher training background and so on. And those who are the best teachers in the world today need to be trained first. If someone wants to become a teacher today, they say: they want to take the course that was held for the Waldorf school back then. That is all well and good, but it is not the same as three weeks of real teacher training! Then you would have the opportunity to establish a whole series of Waldorf schools. But if you have to do something on the side in the meantime, you face the greatest difficulties, then it simply does not work. And so you will simply end up having to keep replying, “I don't have any teachers,” to these constant small advances.

What is important is not the utopia that I am creating here, but rather my firm conviction that it can be done; but the most important things always fall through, they are rejected. The World School Association was clearly rejected in its founding. They didn't want it. But it could have helped us, because if we had really launched the World School Association as it was meant at the time, we would not have membership fees for the World School Association of fifty francs, but of five or even one franc. If there is the necessary reality behind it, then we can move forward, we can form public opinion, and that is where it must start. That is where the matter lies. We must be able to form a public opinion. Now the matter always comes to a halt because we can, to a certain extent, place personalities in the places where they need to be placed, that they overwork themselves there, and that we cannot draw on forces from outside, because of course that depends on the most diverse circumstances.

But, my dear friends, these conditions also mean that, in each individual case, when you want to bring in this or that personality, you are faced with the question: how do you pay them? And that is where it stops. You simply cannot pay them under the current conditions. You have to let them go. These are the things that must therefore be taken into account.

Marie Steiner: I would like to mention that no one has ever gone around with a collection bag for eurythmy, so as not to cause any misunderstandings. For theologians, for everything possible, one has already gone with the collection bag, just not for eurythmy.

Rudolf Steiner: That is not quite what I meant. When one says “to go with the collection bag”, it does not mean that one actually goes from one person to the next with the collection bag.

Marie Steiner: But it is easy to get that impression. I would like to take this opportunity to mention that teachers are often asked to come to various German cities to teach eurythmy. Everything is agreed, even the rather low remuneration, and then when the time comes, they are told: No, we need the money for the theologians or for the schools or for the lecturers, so please stay at home.

Rudolf Steiner: Going around with the collection bag means that the money is raised from corners that would otherwise not give anything, but which have to be sought in such a way because people do not think about the fact that these things also have to be provided for. By “collection bag” I mean that the funds have to be raised. If, as unfortunately happens time and again, a eurythmist is appointed far away and people realize how much it costs when they see the bills, then the money has to be found somehow if the people are to be sent there. That is how I mean it, that you are constantly worrying about how to get the money together for the most important things.

Marie Steiner: It would be no use at all, because for people everything else is more important than eurythmy. They have even found that something that was already intended for eurythmy has to go into the school!

Rudolf Steiner: It is indeed the case that things have to be done in this way all the time.

Marie Steiner: I have even been told that the clothes are not beautiful enough on the stage.

Rudolf Steiner: But they are very beautiful!

Marie Steiner: I am taking this opportunity to mention this for once.

Rudolf Steiner: Those who grumble are the ones who can pay the bills! Isn't it true that we actually have to go around with the collection bag for the most important things – I don't mean that in a derogatory way – that we have to go around collecting. We have to go around with the collection bag for the most important things. If I express myself in this direction, then the collection bag will also be abolished, but don't think that it offers a very uplifting sight when I now have the collection bag in front of me every time I leave the carpentry workshop! I am not saying that – except in special cases – anything of significance goes into it, it is not really noticeable. But in any case, it is not an uplifting sight. However, I would like to add, when making such a comment, that it should not lead to the elimination of the collection bag at the door or even just for oneself.

Yes, it is the case that recently we have found the courage for everything except for the things on which the anthroposophical movement was built. We have found the courage for many peripheral things, but not for the things on which the anthroposophical movement was built, and of course these are the things that would have to be taken into account in a very decisive way.

I do not have high hopes when I say this, because I have said it here almost every year and people simply do not believe it. They think it is a propaganda speech, like the ones they already hold! But now, the things that are happening are, on the one hand, extremely encouraging, but on the other hand they are really not being seen in the way they should be.

Yesterday, for example, I was confronted with a fact that really speaks volumes. I was confronted with a fact in the most beautiful way, so that I have to acknowledge that it was brought to my attention; but it does have its downsides. It told me yesterday: It would really be appropriate for a pedagogical course to be held for Swiss teachers. This is something that is of the utmost necessity.

Yes, my dear friends, not too long ago I held a pedagogical course for Swiss teachers in Basel. There was almost no one in it. Here, too, such a course was added at Christmas. Everything was there; they just failed to even look at the things, to take into account that they were there! They didn't even bother to look at them. But that's not true, you really can't just think of a pedagogical course for Swiss teachers, where there would certainly be a number of people. But it would still not lead to what I mentioned earlier – that you could really win over teachers and make progress in the Swiss school movement.

There must be an echo, a support within our movement. People must take an interest in what is happening. And this interest is of course lacking, despite everything, it is not there. And that is why, for example, something like this will not be reported, will not become known in the world, that eurythmy in Vienna has had such an elementary success and the like. Our members also go there and are witnesses to such things. But at most they find that the clothes were not beautiful enough, that they could be even more beautiful, but then they do not pay for the expensive clothes. The positive things are not emphasized, which should really be presented to the world, when we are on the other hand obliged to go before the great public.

Of course, it is due to some things that are already connected with our anthroposophical movement! But it must be emphasized again and again, so that something is thought in this direction after all, so that one really understands when something like this is demanded of us, that we have to work under the most unfavorable conditions. We will work. But the damage will become apparent, and the damage will not lie in the matter, but in the fact that we will only ever be able to have a small circle of employees who overwork and ultimately cannot catch their breath. And then we find no interest in the fact that things are like that, but then the criticism sets in, and that this is considered to be in the matter after all, not in the surrounding conditions.

This is what I would like to see propagated, I would like to say, to tell people again and again. Otherwise, we end up with a report like this: After we completed the construction of the Goetheanum so and so many months ago, at this year's annual meeting we can only report on the administration of the last funds. Repairs cannot be carried out because we have no money. We are therefore also faced with the sad fact that what has already been built will fall into disrepair and so on.

Serious thought should be given to how such a report can be avoided! I regret that I have spoken out of turn again this year. But those who have been devoted co-workers in all areas should accept my most heartfelt thanks. Because it is not at all a question of not working extremely hard, but rather of the fact that we see ourselves as being constrained in every way when it comes to really drawing the consequences of what one begins. It is certainly the case that the things that are done are good. But when something arises – I don't want to mention a positive thing – when something arises that is supposed to come out of the anthroposophical movement, then the money for it has to be sought from outside, from those who are outside. But the reasoning is always done in such a way that with each new foundation, the anthroposophists are now being shelled out and thus, of course, have no. have any money for the things the Anthroposophical movement was actually built on.

I don't want to cause misunderstandings by not naming the individual things, but it always comes back to the fact that this or that is justified and that one says: It is an urgent necessity of the time. If it is an urgent necessity of the time, then one should approach those people who are not exactly anthroposophists, but for whom one wants to fulfill an urgent necessity! And when you point out this urgent necessity, people come back and say: No one has given us much, the amounts are quite minimal; but with the anthroposophists, we have repeatedly found the opportunity to get this or that out of it. That has been the order of the day lately. Then it comes about that there is money for everything, but not for what the Anthroposophical movement is actually based on.

We are put before the public and have to fulfill the conditions of the public. We have to get to the point, my dear friends, where those who approach us say: Well, yes, there is so much evil talk about anthroposophy in the world, but actually they are quite nice people, and you can even talk to them, while everyone thinks: They are such arrogant people that you can't talk to them at all. You can see for yourself: It is possible to talk to them.

But as a rule it is not so, rather one hears again and again from the outside: I had the best will to deal with this or that person, I also approached him, but, oh dear! He has done a number on my corns! Yes, that is something with which I hint to you in pictorial form what I find in many cases, namely that people say: Anthroposophists always hold their heads so high, they are so arrogant that they then don't know where they are stepping, and then they usually always step on your corns. We prefer to go where they curtsy and don't step on our corns.

That is, in a very narrow-minded picture, what is repeatedly found. The chapter “The arrogance of anthroposophy” is something that could fill very thick books, not just individual essays. And if I were to tell you more details – I will take good care not to – but if you ask: Who has been arrogant again?, then those are named who, when I speak of arrogance in general here, are terribly astonished at how it can be! That is what one very often experiences.

Please do not consider this address as a diatribe, but as a confidential message that is not given because someone wants to give someone a piece of their mind, but because they would like them to work together in the right way, and it is believed that in the future they will think less about their own interests and many other things, but more about the problems of other people.

Emil Grosheintz: Since no one else has requested the floor, I believe that the meeting can be closed.

The original idea of any sacred festival is to make the human being look upward from his dependence on earthly things to those things that transcend the Earth. The Easter Festival especially can bring these thoughts near to man's heart. During the last three, four or five centuries humanity of the civilised world has undergone an evolution of soul and spirit which led man farther and farther away from the thought of his connection with Cosmic powers and Cosmic forces. Man became more and more restricted to those relationships alone which hold good between himself and the Earthly powers and forces. Indeed it is true to say that by the methods of knowledge recognised today, no other relationships can be considered. If a man who stood near to the sanctuaries of Initiation in pre-Christian times, or even in the first centuries of Christianity, could learn to know the character and trend of our present scholarship—if he could approach it with the mood of soul belonging to that ancient time—he simply would not understand how it is possible for man to live without a consciousness of his non-earthly, cosmic relationships.

I will now give a brief outline of certain facts, the precise details of which you will find in one or other of the Lecture-Courses. The purpose of these present lectures is to bring especially the Easter thought near to our hearts; I cannot therefore go into all the details now.

We may transplant ourselves in thought into one of the many different religious systems of antiquity. Take for example the one that is least far removed from the modern man—the Hebrew or Jewish system of religion. In such religious systems of antiquity—in so far as they are monotheistic—we shall find the reverence for, the worship of, the One God. It is the Divinity of whom we speak in the Christian conception as the First Person of the Godhead—the Father God.

Now all those religions in which this conception of the Father God was living were more or less aware—the Priests indeed were fully aware—of the connection of the Father God with the cosmic Moon forces—with all the forces that now flow down from Moon to Earth. Scarcely anything is left today of that ancient consciousness of man's connection with the Moon forces—unless it be the imaginative inspiration which the poetic mind still feels that it receives from thence, or again in Medicine the counting of the embryo period as ten lunar months. But the older world-conceptions had a clear consciousness of the fact that when man descends to this physical life from the spiritual world where he dwelt as a soul-spiritual being in his pre-earthly life, the currents of those forces and impulses which proceed from the Moon pour through him.

To understand what shapes him in the fulness of his life—what lives in him as the forces of nutrition, breathing and the like, in a word, as the general forces of growth—man must look not to the earthly forces but to forces from beyond the Earth. Man can indeed become aware, if he considers the matter truly, how the earthly forces are related to himself. If we did not hold our body together by forces from beyond the Earth—if our body did not receive its form through these what could the earthly forces do to hold our body together? The moment the forces from beyond the Earth have left it, this body is indeed exposed to the earthly forces. Then it disintegrates and dissolves; it becomes a corpse. Earthly forces can only make a corpse of man; they cannot form and mould him. But there are other forces in him which lift him out of the earthly realm. These forces make him a connected organism, a connected form and figure within the earthly realm between birth and death. They prevent him from falling a victim to the forces which take hold of him in death and destroy him. Throughout his earthly life they battle against the destruction of his form; indeed they must be battling all the time. For these forces man is indebted to the Moon influences.

While on the one hand, therefore, we may state this somewhat theoretic truth: The Moon forces contain the formative principle of the human body, we must realise on the other hand that the ancient religions revered and worshipped in these forces which guide man, so to speak, through birth into this physical existence, the forces of the Divine Father. The Initiates of the ancient Hebrew culture were clearly aware that the forces which guide man into this Earth-existence, which maintain him here, and from which—as physical man—he escapes when he passes through the gate of death, stream from the Moon.

To love the Divine Father forces with heart and mind, to look up to them and to express this reverence in sacred ritual, in prayer and praise—such was the content of certain monotheistic religions of ancient time. But the old religions were more consistent than we generally think. History describes these things quite wrongly for it only has the outer documents to go upon and is unaware of what can be observed by spiritual sight.

The religions which looked up to the Moon—to the spiritual Beings in the Moon—belonged really to a later period. The primeval religions possessed not only this conception of the Moon, but also had a clear idea of the Sun forces; nay more (as we may also mention at this point) of the Saturn forces. Here indeed we are entering a realm of history for which no outer documents exist. For the time we are now considering lies many thousands of years before the founding of Christianity. These are the epochs which I called in my Occult Science, the ancient Indian (since one must have a name and the civilisation of that first epoch existed on the soil that afterwards was India), and the ancient Persian. In those old civilisations man's evolution was very different from what it was in later times. Moreover his religious beliefs depended on this unfolding of his life.

Our lives today (and it has been so for more than two thousand years) unfold in such a way that a certain break in our earthly life and development escapes our notice. Indeed it is scarcely perceptible today. The inner change that takes place in the human being about the thirtieth year of life remains for present day humanity to a large extent in the subconscious, in the unconscious. But it was very different eight or nine thousand years before the Christian era. In those epochs man developed until about the thirtieth year of his life so that one might call this development continuous. But in the thirtieth year a far-reaching metamorphosis took place in him. I will describe it in a radical way. I admit it is radical, but this way of expressing it will serve to characterise the facts.

The following thing might well happen in those olden times. Before the thirtieth year of his life a man had made the acquaintance of another man, say, three or four years younger than himself. His friend would therefore undergo this metamorphosis about the age of thirty, a little later than he did. Now if the two had not seen one another for some time and then met once more—I am speaking in modern terms, which make it seem still more radical—it might well happen that he who had undergone the change, being addressed by the other, simply failed to recognise him. So deeply was the memory transformed.

The small communities of those very ancient times were connected with the Mystery Schools, and in these the lives of the young folk were registered. For they themselves, in that they underwent this revolutionary transformation, forgot their earlier life. They had to learn over again what they had experienced in life until about the thirtieth year. So they became aware, ‘In my thirtieth year I have become an altogether different man. I must go to the Registry (a modern expression, needless to say!) to learn what was the content of my life before this change.’ Yes, indeed it was so! And in the instruction which they then received, they learned that it was the Moon forces which had worked upon them exclusively until the thirtieth year, and that then the Sun forces had entered into the development of their earthly life. The Sun forces and the Moon forces work upon man in very different ways. What does the man of today know of the Sun forces? He knows only the outward and physical aspect. He knows—forgive me saying so—that the Sun forces make him perspire, that they make him warm. He knows, maybe, one or two other things. We have Sun baths and the like. Thus certain therapeutic properties are known and so forth; but all these ideas are quite external. The man of today simply does not conceive what the forces that are spiritually connected with the Sun are doing with him.

Julian the Apostate, the last of the pagan Caesars, had still received instruction in what was left of the ancient Mysteries, concerning these forces of the Sun. He wished once more to make this knowledge an influence in the world and for this very reason was murdered on his campaign into Persia. So strong were the powers in the first Christian centuries which intended that all knowledge of such things should disappear. No wonder if this knowledge cannot be attained in any ordinary way today!

Now the Moon forces represent that element in man which determines him, which fills him with an inner necessity, so as to act according to his temperament, his instincts, his emotions—in a word, according to the whole nature of his physical and etheric bodies. It is the spiritual Sun forces, on the other hand, which free him from this necessity. They as it were melt away the forces of necessity within him. Through the Sun forces, man becomes a free being.

In those ancient times the two things were sharply separated from one another in man's development. In the thirtieth year of his life he became a Sun man, that is to say, a free man. Until the thirtieth year he was a Moon man, that is to say, an unfree man. Today these things merge into one another. Today the Sun forces work already in childhood alongside of the Moon forces, and the Moon forces work on into a later age. Today, therefore, Necessity and Freedom are mingled; they work into one another. But it was not always so. In the pre-historic times of which I am now speaking, the Moon influences and the Sun influences were sharply separated in the course of human life. Hence in those olden times it was said: Man is born not once, but twice. This was said of the great majority of human beings—and it was considered abnormal, pathological, if a man did not experience this fundamental metamorphosis of life at the age of thirty.—This second birth was the Sun-birth of the human being; the first was called the Moon-birth. And when in the further course of evolution this Sun-birth became less clearly noticeable, certain exercises, sacred rituals and actions were applied to those initiated in the Mysteries. Thus the Initiates underwent what was no longer there for mankind in general. They were the “Twice-born”.

We can still find the term “Twice-born” in oriental writings, but the expression is already a derived one. Indeed I would like to ask any Orientalist or Sanskrit scholar (I believe our friend Professor Beckh is here and you may ask him whether these things are so according to his special studies)—I would like to ask any Sanskrit scholar whether modern scholarship can explain in clear terms what the expression “Twice-born” signifies. No doubt there are plenty of formal explanations, but of the substantial meaning of the term our scholars are quite unaware, for it can only be known by those who are aware of the real facts of life from which it is derived. Spiritual research alone can give information on these matters. But when spiritual research has had its say, I would ask any open-minded scholar who knows the available documents—who knows all that external scholarship can lay hands upon: Does not external scholarship subsequently confirm, piece by piece, the researches of spiritual science? It will do so indeed, if things are only seen in the true light. But I have to draw attention to matters which must take precedence of all documentary research; for by documentary research alone one simply cannot understand the life of man.

Thus we look back upon an ancient time when they spoke of a Moon-birth of man as of his creation by the Father. And as to the Sun-birth, they knew that in the spiritual rays of the Sun, the power of Christ the Sun is working; and this is the power that makes man free. Think for a moment: what does the spiritual Sun force bring about? We owe it to the Sun that we, as human beings upon Earth, are able to make anything of ourselves. We should be strictly determined, placed in an inexorable Necessity—a Necessity not even of Destiny but of Nature—if the liberating forces of the Sun, the impulses that melt away Necessity, did not come near to us.

In those ancient world-conceptions, as man gazed upward to the Sun he was aware of these things. “This Eye of the World, whence radiates the power of the Christ, this Eye of the World brings it about that I must not remain subject to the iron Necessity with which I was born out of the Moon forces. I need not remain, my whole life long, a human being evolving by Necessity. These Sun forces—these forces of the Christ, looking down upon me through the cosmic Eye of the Sun—bring it about that I, during my earthly life, by my own inner freedom, can make of myself something which I was not yet by virtue of the Moon forces when they placed me into this earthly life.”

The consciousness in man that he could transform himself, that he could make something of himself—this was attributed to the Sun forces.

In parenthesis and for the sake of completeness, I will add that they also looked up to the Saturn forces. In these they recognised all that maintains the human being when he passes through the gate of death—that is to say, when he undergoes the third earthly metamorphosis.

 Birth: the Moon-birth second Birth: the Sun-birth third Birth: Saturn-birth, earthly death 

In earthly death man was maintained by the forces holding sway at the outermost limit (as they conceived it) of the planetary system of the Earth—the Saturn forces. The Saturn forces hold man upright and carry him out into the spiritual world, preserving his being as a connected whole when the third metamorphosis takes place. Such indeed was the world-conception of an olden time.

But humanity evolves. There came a time when the ancient knowledge of how the Sun forces work upon man, was preserved only within the Mysteries. And it was preserved longest of all in the medical departments of the Mysteries. For the same Sun forces which in the normal course of man's development give him his freedom—give him the opportunity to make something of himself—the same Sun forces, the forces of the Christ, are also working in many different ways in certain plants upon the Earth, and in other earthly beings and earthly creatures. Here they represent medicaments and means of healing.

But mankind in general has lost this connection with the Sun. While the consciousness that man depends upon the Moon forces—the Divine Father forces—remained for a long time, the consciousness of his dependence on (or as we should rather say, his liberation by) the Sun forces was lost. What we today call the forces of Nature—the forces of which we speak almost exclusively in our modern world-conception—are indeed simply and solely the Moon forces, which have become abstract and all-powerful.

But the Sun forces were still known to the bearer of the Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, who not only knew them, but was able to direct his whole life by them. Indeed He had to know them; for the same Sun forces which had been attainable only in the ancient Mysteries by human beings looking upward to the Sun—this in their own down-pouring to the Earth, He was destined to receive into His own Body.

I described it yesterday. At the time of the founding of Christianity this was felt to be the essential point.—In the body of Jesus of Nazareth, in the thirtieth year of his life, a transformation had taken place. It was the same transformation which all human beings had undergone in primeval times, but with this difference: that in those olden times the rays of the spiritual Sun had entered into all men at this point in their life. Now the essence and Being of the Sun Himself—the Christ—descended into human evolution and took up His abode in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. This is the truth underlying the Mystery of Golgotha, as the primal foundation of all earthly life.

We shall recognise the full connection of these things by turning our attention now to the ancient Mysteries and the way in which men there celebrated the Easter Festival in its full human form, by which I mean the Act of initiation. For Initiation was in truth an Easter Festival. It took place, to begin with, in three stages. But before the candidate could attain true Knowledge or initiation, the first requirement was that through all that had come toward him out of the Mystery, he should have grown truly humble—so humble that no one today can have any real conception of such humility. True, the men of today think themselves very humble in respect of knowledge; but to anyone who can see through these things, they still appear possessed by the greatest arrogance.

At the starting point of his Initiation, this above all had to come over the human being, that he no longer considered himself a human being at all, but said: “I must first become a human being.” Of course we cannot expect the man of today at a given moment in his life no longer to consider himself a human being. But in those times it was the very first requirement. The candidate must in all truth, not consider himself a human being. He must say to himself: Certainly I was a human being before I descended into an earthly body. In the pre-earthly existence I was a human being in soul and spirit. Then the soul and spirit entered into the physical body which it received from the mother—from the parents. The soul and spirit—I will not say ‘clothed itself’, for that would be a wrong expression—the soul and spirit permeated itself with the physical body. But as to how the soul and spirit in the course of time permeates the physical—permeates the nerves-and-senses system, permeates the rhythmic system, permeates the system of metabolism in the limbs—of this the human being has no consciousness. He looks outward through the senses and becomes aware of the surrounding physical world. But what after all can a man do when at last he has so far penetrated his physical body with the soul and spirit that he considers himself a fully evolved and grown-up human being? What can he do? He can but look outward from his eyes, hear outward through his ears, feel outward with his skin, perceiving warmth and cold, roughness and smoothness. He cannot perceive inward, he cannot look through the eyes into himself. At most he can flay the physical corpse of man, and then imagine he is looking into himself. But he is not really doing so. It would be childish to believe that he is.

Suppose that I have a house before me here, and instead of looking in through the windows I pick up all manner of instruments and—if I am strong enough—break the house to pieces. There indeed I have the single bricks lying before me. I stare at the pile of bricks. This is what man does today. He flays the human being and dismembers him in the hope of knowing him. But he cannot; for it is not the human being that one learns to know in this way. If we would learn to know the human being, then even as we look outward through the eyes, so we must become able to look back again through the eyes, and to hear back again inward through the ears. All these things taken together—the eyes, the ears, the whole skin as an organ of touch, of warmth, the organ of smell, and so forth—all these together were called in the ancient Mysteries, the Gate or Portal to the human being. Indeed the starting-point of Initiation was this: Man came to realise that he knew nothing of the human being. Therefore, since he had no self-consciousness of man, he could not be one. He must first look inward through the senses, whereas in ordinary life he looked only outward.

Such was the first stage of Initiation in the ancient Mysteries. Now the moment the man learned thus to look inward he also experienced himself in the pre-earthly life. For then he knew: I am in my own being of soul and spirit.

We may draw it diagrammatically. Here is the head. Man looks outward. Now, instead, he learnt to look inward.

But in thus looking inward he became aware of what had entered into him as the pre-earthly life and being, which had entered in through eye and ear and skin, etc. Of this he now became aware. Here it was that he possessed his pre-earthly existence. Moreover it became clear to him that only now could he learn to know what we today should call Natural Science. When we study Natural Science today, how do we set about it? We are led to see the things of Nature, to describe them and so forth. But this is just as though I had known a human being for a long time; now I am about to see him again, and someone lays on me the strict injunction: “When you see him again you must forget all you had in common with him; you must not remember anything at all of what you had in common with him before.” Think of it! It is inconceivable what it would mean to husbands and wives, for instance, if on some occasion when they are about to meet again, they were strictly commanded to forget all that they had undergone together in the past. I can conceive that in some cases this might sometimes be not unpleasant to them! Still, life could not subsist under such conditions. Yet this is what is required of the modern man with regard to Nature through the very ordering of present-day civilisation. For he already knew the kingdoms of Nature—he knew them in their spiritual aspect—before he descended to the Earth. The human being of today is led to forget all that he learned of minerals and plants and animals before his descent to Earth. The ancient Initiate, on the other hand, was thus instructed in what was called the first Degree within the Mysteries: “Behold the crystal quartz!” Thereupon everything was done to make him remember what he had known of the quartz before he came down to the Earth, or again what he had known of the lily or of the rose. Recognition was taught as knowledge of Nature. And when a man had learned this Nature—lore recognition of what he had seen before he came down to earthly life—then he was received into the second Degree.

In the second Degree he learned Music; he learned the Architecture, the Geometry, the Mensuration of that time, and so forth. For what did the second Degree contain? It contained all that the human being perceives when he now no longer gazes into himself through the eyes, or hearkens inward through the ears, but when he actually enters into himself. At this stage it was said to the candidate: “Thou enterest the human Temple Grove”. He learned to know the Temple Grove of man—permeated physically by the forces of soul and spirit, of which man consisted before he descended into earthly life. Thus he entered into himself. And it was said to him: There are three chambers in this Temple Grove. The one was the chamber of Thinking. Seen from outside it is the head. It is but small, but when one sees it from within, it is great as the universe; one learns to know its spiritual nature. This was the first chamber. In the second chamber the candidate learned to know the life of Feeling, and in the third chamber the life of Willing. Moreover in discovering how man is organised in his organs of Thinking, Feeling and Willing, the candidates were learning to know what holds good on Earth.

The knowledge of Nature holds good not only on the Earth. Man already acquires it before he descends to Earth. Here on Earth he is only called upon to recollect it. But houses are not built in the spiritual world as they are built with earthly architecture. Music is yonder, it is true, but that is spiritual melody. Whatever is earthly music has been cast downwards into the earthly air; it is a projection of the heavenly Music, but in the form in which man experiences it, it is earthly. Likewise all that we measure is earthly. We measure earthly space: Mensuration, Geometry, is an earthly science. This in fact was the important thing for the candidate for Initiation in the second Degree: he became aware that all talk of knowledge by mere earthly methods is vague and void, save in so far as it be related to Geometry, Architecture and Mensuration. He saw that a real science of Nature must be pre-earthly knowledge, remembered, recognised; and that the true sciences of Earth are Geometry, Architecture, Music and Mensuration. For these can be learned here on the Earth.

Thus man descended into himself, and learned to know the three-chambered Man as against the single human incarnation which one perceives in ordinary life, when, without entering inside the human being, one merely knows him from outside.

And in the third Degree man learned to know the human being when he no longer dives merely down into himself and knows himself as a spiritual being, but when this spiritual being learns to know the body itself. Hence in all ancient Mysteries the path one had to take was through the Gate of Death. One became aware what man is like when he has laid aside the earthly body. Only there was a difference between the real death and the death of Initiation. I shall explain in the following lectures why there must be this difference; now I will only state the facts.

When man actually dies, he lays his physical body aside. He is no longer bound to it. He no longer follows the earthly forces, he is freed from them. But when he is still connected with the physical body—as was the case in the act of initiation in ancient times—then he must attain by dint of inner strength the freedom from the body which he has as a matter of course in real Death. That is to say, for a certain length of time, he must hold himself free. Hence for Initiation it was necessary to achieve the strong inner forces of the soul, whereby one could hold oneself in soul free from the physical body. And the same forces which gave man power to hold himself free from the earthly body, these same forces gave him the higher knowledge—knowledge of things which can never be seen by the senses nor conceived by the intellect. These forces transplant the human being into the spiritual world, just as his physical body transplants him into the physical world. At this stage the Initiate was able to know himself as soul-spiritual Man even during the earthly life. Henceforth, for the Initiate, the Earth was a Star—a Star external to the human being—while he himself (notably in the more ancient Mysteries) must live with the Sun instead of with the Earth. He knew now what man receives from the Sun. He knew how the Sun forces work within him.

This then was the third Degree; and it was followed by the fourth, which worked upon the candidate somewhat as follows.—When a man eats on Earth, he knows he is eating cabbage, wild-fowl, and so forth, and drinking all manner of things. He knows: These things are now outside me, and now they are within me. He breathes the air. First it is outside him, then it is within, and then it is outside again. So he stands in connection with the earthly forces; he bears within himself the forces and substances which are otherwise outside him on the Earth. “Before thou art initiated”—thus it was explained to the candidate for Initiation in ancient times—“before thou art initiated thou art an Earth-bearer, a cabbage-bearer, bearer of wild fowl, of veal, and so forth. But when thou hast been initiated into the third Degree, and art given what can be given to thee when freed from the body, then thou will be not a cabbage-bearer, a pork-bearer, a veal-bearer, but a bearer of that which the Sun forces give thee.” Now in many of the Mysteries that which the Sun forces spiritually give to man was called Christos. Hence he who had passed beyond the three Degrees was called a Christopher, or Christophorus. For he felt himself henceforth bearer of the Sun forces (even as on Earth he might feel himself as a cabbage-bearer and the rest). In most of the ancient Mysteries Christophorus was the name for those who attained the fourth Degree.

In the third Degree man had to understand certain things; above all he had to understand that for the moments of Knowledge the craving for the physical body must cease. He must perceive that while man in his physical body belongs to the Earth, yet in reality the Earth is only there to destroy the physical body, not to build it. Henceforth he learned to know the upbuilding forces, whose origin is in the Cosmos. But he learned something else besides when he became a Christophorus. Then above all he learned to know that spiritual forces are at work even in the substance of the Earth, only they are not visible to earthly sight. Speaking in modern words—though they spoke with the same meaning I can only tell you of these things in modern language, not in the words of that time—they explained to him: “If thou wouldst learn the science of substance—how the substances are combined and separated—thou must behold the spiritual forces which permeate the substance out of the Cosmos. Thou canst not know these things when thou art uninitiated. Thou must first be initiated into the fourth Degree and be able to see through the forces of the Sun-existence. Then thou canst study Chemistry.”

Just imagine, if we today required of a man wishing to take his degree as a chemist or pharmacologist that he would first feel himself in relation to the forces of the Sun even as he feels himself in relation to the cabbage of the Earth. What madness this would seem! Yet these were the realities. It became fully clear to men: With all the forces that are living in the body and that we make use of for ordinary knowledge, we can study only Geometry, Mensuration, Music and Architecture. With these forces we cannot study Chemistry; and if we do study it, we shall be talking in superficialities.

And so indeed it is. Since the time when the ancient Initiation Science was lost, all talk of Chemistry has been superficial. It drives anyone who is seeking for real knowledge to despair when he has to study the official Chemistry of today. For it rests only on external data, not on an inner penetration of things. If men only had an open mind they would say to themselves that something quite different is necessary. We must acquire a different mode of knowledge if we would truly study Chemistry. It is the present cowardice of knowledge which is instilled into the human being and prevents him from awakening to such an impulse.

When man had attained this stage he was ripe to become an Astronomos, which was a still higher Degree. To learn to know the stars outwardly by calculation and the like, was considered altogether meaningless. In the stars, spiritual Beings live. They can be known only if one has overcome bodily vision, nay, if one has even overcome Geometry and can live within the Universe, thus learning to know the spiritual essence of the stars. At this stage man was truly resurrected. And now he could behold how the Moon forces and the Sun forces work, even into the earthly man.

I have had to bring these things near to you from two sides today. In the ancient Mysteries—not at a certain season of the year but at a certain Degree in a higher development of man—Easter took place as an inner experience: Easter as the Resurrection of the man of soul and spirit, out of the physical body into the spiritual Universe. And in this way those who still had knowledge of the Mysteries at that time looked up to the Mystery of Golgotha. They said to themselves: What would have become of mankind if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place? In bygone ages there was the possibility of being initiated into the secrets of the Cosmos. For in very ancient times man had experienced as a matter of course his second birth, about the thirtieth year of his life; and in subsequent times there still remained at least the memories of this; there was a science of the Mysteries, preserving in tradition what had actually been experienced in former times.

But in the age when the Mystery of Golgotha took place, all these things had been wafted away and forgotten. Mankind would have fallen into utter decadence had not the Power to whom the Initiates in the Mysteries ascended when they became Christophorus, descended into Jesus of Nazareth to be present henceforward on the Earth; so that man might henceforward be united with this Power through Christ Jesus.

Thus what appears before our eyes in the Easter Festival today is connected with a certain chapter in the historic evolution of the Mysteries. Truly we only become aware of the content of the Easter Festival when we call this ancient sacred history to life again.

These things will be the subject of our further study. But you will now at any rate be able to draw near to what the candidate for Initiation in ancient times experienced. He could say to himself: Through my Initiation I have come to understand how the Sun and Moon work within me in their mutual and heavenly relationships. For now I know that I, as physical man, am shaped and formed in such and such a way; that I have such and such eyes and nose and other bodily forms both inwardly and outwardly throughout my body; that this bodily form could grow, and grows to this day in the process of nutrition—all this is dependent on the Moon forces. All that is Necessity depends on them. But that I can live and move as a free inner Being within my bodily nature—that I can transform myself, that I have myself in hand—this depends on the Sun forces, the forces of the Christ. These are the forces I must kindle in my inner being if I would mould with conscious knowledge, and attain by my own inner work, what the Sun forces would otherwise have to do within me, once more by a kind of Necessity.

In this way we shall also understand why man even today looks upward to the Sun and Moon and determines from their mutual constellation the time of the Easter Festival. For this alone has still remained. We calculate when is the first Sunday after the first full Moon after the Spring Equinox. The Easter Festival of the year is fixed for the Sunday following the first full Moon, indicating (as I shall explain in greater detail tomorrow) that we recognise in the form and structure of the Easter Festival something that must be determined from above, out of the Cosmos.

But the Easter thought must be regained. And it can only be regained by looking back to the ancient Mysteries, where the human being was made aware how it is when he looks within himself and beholds—the Gate of Man! And when he actually enters into himself—the Three-chambered inner Man! And when he makes himself free—the Gate of Death! When he lives and moves freely in the spiritual world, he becomes a Christophorus.

The Mysteries themselves receded in the age when the free development of man had to take place. But now the time is come when they must be found again. Of this, my dear friends, we must be fully conscious. Institutions must be created today to find the Mysteries once more.

Out of this consciousness we held our Christmas Foundation Meeting. For it is an urgent necessity that there should be a place on Earth where the Mysteries can once more be founded. The Anthroposophical Society in its further progress must become the path to the Mysteries renewed. This will also be our task: out of a right and true consciousness to cooperate towards this end. And to this end the life of man will have to be considered according to the three stages: the stage where we turn our gaze into the human being; the stage where we strive to enter right within him; and the stage where we become, in consciousness, what in the outer reality we become only in Death.

Let us then take away with us these words as a solemn remembrance of this lesson which we have held today, and let us make them active in our souls:

 Stand in the porch at Man's life-entrance, Read thereon the World's writ sentence, Dwell in the soul of Man within, Feel in its pulsing, Worlds begin. 

In ordinary life we do not see the World's Beginning, but only this or that within the World.

 Think upon Man's earthly ending. Find therein the Spirit's wending. 

Let this then, be the extract from today's lesson:

 Stand in the porch of Man's life-entrance, Read thereon the World's writ sentence. Dwell in the soul of Man within, Feel, in its pulsing, Worlds begin. Think upon Man's earthly ending, Find therein the Spirit's wending. 

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 (original text) Steh' vor des Menschen Lebenspforte; Schau an ihrer Stirne Weltenworte. Leb' in des Menschen Seeleninnern; Fühl' in seinem Kreise Weltbeginnen. Denk an des Menschen Erdenende; Find' bei ihm die Geisteswende.