The Rudolf Steiner Archive

We are about to embark on an important cycle of lectures, and it may be said in advance that this cycle of lectures can only be undertaken now, after years of work in the field of spiritual science. And it may be said further that the great ideas to which we will devote ourselves in the coming days need, in a certain respect, the mood that we were able to achieve through the two performances that took place in the last days. These performances were intended to lead our hearts into that mood, into that emotional state, which is necessary so that what is to confront us in the anthroposophical field is imbued with the right warmth and the right intimacy. It has often been emphasized that the abstract thoughts and ideas that confront us in our field can only develop their full potency in our soul when they are immersed in this warm intimacy of experience. Only this allows our soul to feel that through our anthroposophical ideas we are approaching realms of existence to which we are drawn not only by a certain yearning for knowledge but also by our hearts, and in relation to which we can have what we call a sacred mood in the fullest sense of the word. And perhaps never in all these years have I felt more so than at this moment, as we stand on the threshold of a lecture cycle that may not unjustifiably be said to venture a little towards approaching human thoughts to what, like primal words, have been and has occupied human minds, to direct human hearts and human minds to that which man, as the highest, as the most powerful, can perceive for him: his own origin in his greatness.

Before this lecture cycle begins, I would like to touch on something anthroposophically familiar, precisely because we were able to let the preparation for this cycle pass us by. At the beginning of last year's cycle, I was already able to point out how symbolically significant these events in Munich are for our anthroposophical life. And I was able to point out how, over the years, what we might call the patience of waiting in a truly anthroposophical sense has carried us until the forces for any work have matured. And let me remind you once more that the presentation of 'The Children of Lucifer', which we were able to stage last year and which we were so happy to repeat these days, had to be awaited patiently by us for seven years. The work of seven years in the field of anthroposophy had to precede this presentation. Last year I recalled how I had given a lecture at the founding of our German Section in Berlin that was linked to the drama 'The Children of Lucifer', and how at that time it was an ideal floating before my soul, to be allowed to present this drama on the stage. After seven years of anthroposophical work, we have succeeded in doing so, and we can say that last year's performance was, in a certain sense, a milestone in our anthroposophical life. We were able to present an artistic interpretation of anthroposophical feeling and thinking to our dear friends. And it is precisely in such moments that we feel most at home in our anthroposophical environment, when we feel the anthroposophical life reaching out to and permeating us. The author of 'Children of Lucifer', whom we had the pleasure of seeing here last year at that performance and at last year's cycle, and whose presence we are delighted to enjoy again this year, has created a structure of ideas for the spiritual life of the present in his epochal work 'The Great Initiates', the effect of which on the souls and minds of the present can only be put into the right perspective by the future.

You would certainly be surprised in many cases if you were to compare the esteem in which spiritual forces and spiritual works of the past are held today in this or that period with that which prevailed in the consciousness of contemporaries at the time. It is so easy to mistake our own way of thinking about Goethe, Shakespeare or Dante for what their contemporaries were able to grasp and comprehend of the spiritual forces that have been incorporated into the advancing human spirit through such personalities. And we, as anthroposophists, must especially realize that man in his own time can least of all appreciate how significant and invigorating the spiritual work of contemporaries is for the soul. If we reflect that the future will judge things quite differently than the present can, then it may well be said that the appearance of the “Great Initiates” for the spiritual content and for the spiritual deepening of our time will one day be seen as something tremendously significant. For today, from many souls in the widest periphery of our present-day culture, the soul echoes are already radiating, which were made possible by the fact that these ideas have found their way into the hearts of our contemporaries. And these echoes are truly significant for our contemporaries, for they give countless people security in life, consolation and hope in the most difficult moments of this life. And only when we know how to rejoice in the right way in such a great spiritual deed of the present time, then we may say that we carry anthroposophical feeling and mood in a somewhat larger measure in our breasts. And out of that depth of soul from which the ideas of the “Great Initiates” shone, the figures of the “Children of Lucifer” are also formed and shaped, figures who lead us before the soul's eye to a great time of humanity, a time in which the old and the new, the old-established and the newly blossoming, collide in world evolution. And anthroposophists should understand how two things radiate together in this drama: human life, human work and human activity on the physical plane, as it is carried out by the figures who confront us in the “Children of Lucifer”, and into this work and activity shines that which we call the illumination from the higher worlds. And by staging a drama in which we show not only how human striving and human strength are rooted in the heart and in the mind, but also how inspiration from the holy places, from the sanctuaries of the temples, how the invisible powers glow and inspire human hearts. By showing this interweaving of supersensible worlds with our sensory world, we were able to establish a milestone in our anthroposophical movement.

For I may repeat this year at the starting point of our lecture cycle: the most important thing, the most essential thing in such an undertaking, is the hearts of those who have the understanding to take on such a work. That is the great error of our time, that one can believe that a work can be created and that it must have an effect. It is not only a matter of the tremendous works of Raphael or Michelangelo being in the world; it is a matter of there being hearts and souls in the world that can bring the magic of these works to life within themselves. Raphael and Michelangelo did not create for themselves alone; they created in resonance with those who were imbued with that culture, who were able to receive what they entrusted to the canvas. Our contemporary culture is chaotic, our contemporary culture has no unity of feeling. Let the greatest works have an effect on such a culture: they will leave hearts untouched. This must be the special feature of our anthroposophical movement: that we gather as a circle of people in whom similar feelings live, who are inspired by similar thoughts, in whom a similar enthusiasm becomes possible. On the boards, a drama unfolds in the image; in the hearts of the audience, a drama unfolds whose forces belong to the time. What the hearts in the auditorium felt, what took root in every heart, is a seed for the life of the future. Let us feel this, my dear friends, and above all, let us feel not only a sense of satisfaction, which might be cheap, but let us feel the responsibility that we thereby take upon our souls. That responsibility that tells us: Be exemplary for what must happen, for what must become possible, that the time culture of humanity becomes imbued with the consciousness that man here on the physical plane is the mediator between physical deeds, physical becoming and that which can only flow through him from the supersensible worlds into these worlds of the physical plane.

In a sense, we are only a spiritual family because we are drawn to the common paternal archetype that lives in our hearts and that I have just tried to characterize in this moment. And when we grasp what we are experiencing with our hearts, with our whole soul, when we grasp it by feeling it as belonging to our anthroposophical family, then we also feel in the right sense the happiness and see it with the most intimate satisfaction that we were now able to have the author of “Children of Lucifer” among us at the two performances and in the days that followed.

Please accept this in such a way that we can truly feel: long live the living anthroposophical forces of the present in the circle from which that which we have allowed to pass through our soul in recent days was allowed to flow.

My dear friends, it was already a great pleasure for me last year to point out the very place of work where we have been able to develop such a milestone of our anthroposophical activity. And it was a dear duty for me — and I emphasize the word “dear” and would like to explicitly note that you must not take “duty” in the trivial everyday sense — it was a dear duty for me and it is a dear duty for me to point out in this hour as well how our friends here worked not only with zeal but with devotion of all their strength to make these our anthroposophical events happen.

Those who see such performances may not always think about the fact that it takes a long time for what is ultimately presented to the eye in a few hours to actually be staged. And the way in which our dear friends here in this place worked together to bring the work about can, in a certain respect, be held up as a model for anthroposophical work, and perhaps also for human cooperation. This is especially true because a true anthroposophical approach would resist any kind of command in this work. Progress is only possible if the individual friends are fully committed, in a completely different way than could ever be the case in a similar artistic field. And this full commitment, not only in the few weeks available to us to prepare the performances, but this full commitment, this free and warm collaboration, it lasted for years. And since we have gathered here from the most diverse regions for this occasion, and since anthroposophists should not only get to know each other by exchanging a few words, so to speak, but also by knowing what is sacred to each other in their work, it is therefore appropriate on this occasion, we may well take a few moments to point out how we have been working here for years, grouping together at the appropriate moment what was needed to establish an anthroposophical achievement, as we were able to do in the last few days. And even if it were not required by external circumstances alone, my heart would urge me to point out at this hour the dedicated work of our friends that has made possible what we have been able to experience. Because you can believe it: only through this dedicated work has it become possible.

I said I would begin the lecture cycle with a kind of family discussion of what is on our minds. Above all, we can mention the many years of dedicated work of the two ladies, who work here purposefully and in close harmony with everything one could want in the anthroposophical field. For many years, Miss Stinde and Countess Kalckreuth have devoted their entire energies to the anthroposophical work here in this place. And that only through this dedicated, purposeful work in close harmony with the anthroposophical impulses has it become possible for us to give our satisfaction, that is something that I, above all, know best of all. And so you will find it all the more understandable that I am speaking these words for the two colleagues here in Munich on this occasion, from a heart full of gratitude. Then there is the dedicated work of those who, so to speak, directly expose their strengths in the weeks dedicated to our work.

Yesterday we tried to present to you an artistic image of the path to the heights where the human being can experience what is to flow through anthroposophical development, what the soul researcher must experience, so to speak. Perhaps in connection with some of what is to be said in this lecture cycle, there will be an opportunity to refer to this or that which was to be presented to your soul's eye yesterday. The life of one who strives towards spiritual knowledge had to be shown, it had to be shown how he outgrows the physical plane, how everything that happens around him, and which might seem quite ordinary to another person, becomes significant to him already here on the physical plane. The soul of the spiritual seeker must grow out of the events of the physical plane. And then it had to be shown what this soul must experience within itself when everything that happens around us in human destiny, human suffering, human desire, human striving and human illusions pours into it; how this soul can be crushed and can be crushed, how the power of wisdom can struggle through this shattering, and how only then, when man believes that he has become alienated from the sensual world in a certain respect, do the great deceptions approach him.

Yes, with the words that the world is Maja or illusion, or: “Through knowledge we penetrate to truth,” with these words much is said and yet again very little. What is meant by this must be experienced by each person in their own individual way. Therefore, what is generally true could only be shown, one might say, in a way that truly filled the soul, by showing it in the life of a single figure. Not how everyone approaches initiation, but how the very individual figure of Johannes Thomasius can approach the gate of knowledge from his own circumstances, that is what should be shown. And it would be quite wrong for anyone to believe that he could present the event shown in the meditation room, the ascent of Maria from her earthly body into the devachan, as a general event. The event is absolutely real, spiritually real, but it is an event through which precisely a personality of the kind that Johannes Thomasius presents, should receive the impulse to ascend into the spiritual worlds.

And I would like to draw your attention in particular to the moment when it is shown how the soul, when it has already found the strength to rise above the ordinary illusion, is then confronted with the possibility of the great deceptions. Assume that Johannes Thomasius would not be able to see through – even if he does not do so consciously, but only feels it with an inner eye – that the figure that remains in the meditation room and hurls the curse at the hierophant no longer contains the same individuality that he has to follow. Assume that the Hierophant or even Johannes Thomasius might be troubled by this for a moment. Then it would be impossible for an unforeseeable time to continue the path of knowledge for Johannes Thomasius in any way. In that case, the whole thing would be over at that moment, not only for Johannes Thomasius but also for the hierophant, who would then not have been able to develop the strong powers in Johannes Thomasius that could have led him over this cliff. The hierophant would have to resign from his office, and Johannes Thomasius would have lost an enormous amount of time in his ascent. If you try to visualize the scenes that just precede this moment and the feelings that have been working in the soul of John Thomasius, the special kind of pain, the special kind of experiences, then you may come to the conclusion that the power of wisdom, without him even knowing it, has become so strong in him that he can survive this tremendous jolt in his life. All these experiences, which take place without anything being visibly present before the eye of the soul, must precede before what objectively presents itself to the soul, initially in a pictorial way, may follow in the right way before the spiritual eye. This then takes place in the next scenes. It is pain that first shakes the human being to the core; it is the force of the impulse that arises from resisting the possibility of the greatest deception. All this develops into a tension in the soul that, if we may say so, turns our gaze around and allows what was previously only subjective to step before our soul with the force of the objective.

What you see in the next scenes, which is attempted to be described in a spiritually realistic way, represents what the soul gradually growing into the higher worlds feels as the outer reflection of what it first experiences in its own soul, and what is true without the one who experiences it being able to know how much of it is true. First, the human being is led to see how the time in which we live as sensual people, in terms of its causes and effects, borders on everything. One does not just see the small section presented by the material world, but one learns to understand that what appears before our eyes in the material world is only the expression of a spiritual reality. Therefore, Johannes Thomasius sees with his spiritual eye the man who first approached him on the physical plane, Capesius, not as he is now, but as he was decades before as a young man. And he sees the other, Strader, not in the form he has in the present, but he sees him prophetically ahead, as he must become if he continues to develop in the same way as he is in that present. Only then do we understand the moment when we can extend this moment beyond the present into the past and the future. But then we are confronted with the spiritual world, with which man is always in relationship, even if he is unable to see through it with his outer physical mind, with his outer sensuality.

Believe me, it is not an image, not a symbol, it is realistically described, when in the scene where the young Capesius develops his ideals out of full, justified for the sensual world, heartfelt feelings – but which have the one thing against them in the spiritual world, namely, that they are rooted only in the outer world, in that which can be perceived by the senses. Man is not an isolated being. What man expresses in his words, what he brings about in his thoughts, what lives in his feelings, all this is connected with the whole cosmos, and every word, every feeling, every thought has its continuation. Without man knowing it, his error, his false feeling is destructive in the elemental realms of our existence. And what weighs most heavily on the soul of anyone who treads the path to knowledge, based on these first experiences in the spiritual world, is the great sense of responsibility that tells us: “What you do as a human being is not done merely in the isolated place where your lips move, where you think, where your heart beats: it belongs to the whole world. If it is fruitful, it is fruitful throughout the world; if it is a destructive error, it is a destructive force throughout the world.

Everything we can experience in this way during our ascent continues to work in our soul. If it has worked in the right way, it pushes us up into higher regions of spiritual life, as they have been tried to be described in the devachanic realm, where the soul of Maria with her companions was preceded by Johannes Thomasius. Do not take it as an abstract thought, but as a spiritual reality, when I say that these three helpers, Philia, Astrid and Luna, are the forces that we describe in abstracto, when we speak of the physical plane, as sentient soul, mind soul and consciousness soul. But do not be under the illusion that something has been achieved by attempting to symbolize the individual figures in an artistically conceived work with abstract terms. They are not meant in that way. They are intended as real forms, as active forces. In Devachan you will not find tablets bearing the words sentient soul, intellectual soul, consciousness soul; you will find there real entities, as real for the spiritual world as a human being in flesh and blood can possibly be on the physical plane. Man should realize that he robs things of their richness when he tries to cover everything with symbolic abstractions. In the world he has traversed up to this point, Johannes Thomasius has only experienced what one might call: the spiritual world spread out in pictorial form before the eye of his soul. Whether he himself, as a subjective entity, is the cause of this world, or whether it has a truth grounded in itself, he could not decide until then. How much of this world is illusion and how much is reality, he had to bring to a decision only in that higher realm where he encountered the soul of Mary.

Imagine that one night, when you fell asleep, you were suddenly transported to a completely different world and you could not find anything in this other world that would give you a point of contact with what you had experienced before. You would not be the same person, the same being at all. You must have the possibility of taking something over into the other world and seeing it there again, so that the truth is guaranteed to you. This can only be done for the spiritual world by acquiring a firm base in this world, which gives you certainty of truth. In a dramatic presentation, this should be given in such a way that Johannes Thomasius on the physical plane is connected not only with his affects, with his passions, but with the depths of his heart, with the essence of Maria, so that he experiences a most spiritual in this connection already on the physical plane. Only for this reason could that center of gravity also be in the spiritual world, from which everything else in the spiritual world is true. The certainty of truth radiates over everything else in the spiritual world, so that Johannes Thomasius finds a point of support that he has already come to know in the physical world other than through the mere 'illusions of sensuality or of the mind. In this way the two worlds become linked for him, and he becomes ripe to expand his memory in a real way, to transcend the course of his life and thus to grow spiritually beyond the sensory world that surrounds us.

Therefore, at this point something occurs that, if one may say so, encompasses a certain mystery of the spiritual world. Theodora, who sees into the future on the physical plane and is able to foresee the momentous event we are about to describe, the new appearance of the Christ-figure, is able on the spiritual plane to summon the significance of the past before the soul. Everything, if realistically depicted, must be presented in the spiritual world as it really is. The past, with its forces, becomes significant for the beings living in Devachan in its significance in that the opposing forces that we perceive here on the physical plane as prophetic forces are unfolded there. It is a realistic description that Theodora is the seer into the future on the physical plane and the conscience and memory awakener for the past on the spiritual plane, and thus brings about the moment through which Johannes Thomasius looks back into his own past, in which he was already connected with the individuality of Maria. In this way he is prepared to undergo everything in his further life that leads him to a conscious realization of the spiritual world. And you see how, on the one hand, the soul becomes something completely different when it is permeated and permeated by the experiences of the spiritual worlds, how all things appear in a new light. How what otherwise causes us agony and pain, when we experience it as another self in our own self, gives us comfort and hope, how being poured out into the world makes us great and significant; and we see how man, so to speak, grows into those parts of the universe. But we also see how man must not become proud at all, how error and the possibility of error have not yet left his side, and how it is possible that Johannes Thomasius, who has already much of the spiritual worlds, could nevertheless feel spiritually as if the devil in the flesh were entering the room, while his greatest benefactor, Benedictus, was approaching him.

Just as this is possible, so are countless deceptions of the most diverse kinds possible on the spiritual plane. This should not make anyone faint-hearted; but it must make everyone so that, on the one hand, they must exercise caution with regard to the spiritual world, and on the other hand, they must look forward with courage and boldness to the possibility of error and must not become faint-hearted in any way when something presents itself that looks like an erroneous report from a spiritual world. Man must go through all these things in reality if he really wants to approach what can be called the temple of knowledge, if he wants to ascend to the real understanding of the four great powers of the world that guide and direct world destiny in a certain way and that are represented by the four hierophants of the temple.

If we have an inkling that the soul must undergo such trials before it is able to see how the sensual world flows out of the spiritual world, and if we attune ourselves to the fact that we not in a banal way, using everyday words, but that we first want to acquire the inner value of the words, then only can we get a sense of how the primal words are meant, with which creation is characterized at the beginning of the Bible. We must feel that we must unlearn the ordinary meaning that we carry in our souls of the words “heaven and earth,” “create,” “light and darkness,” and all the other words. We must unlearn the feelings that we entertain in our daily lives towards these words, and we must make a little effort to place new shades of feeling, new word values, into our souls for this lecture cycle, so that we not only hear what is in the ideas, but to hear it as it is meant and as it can only be understood if we meet what speaks to us from dark regions of the world with a soul attuned to it.

In a very brief sketch of words, I tried to tell you what we had shown you yesterday. That we were able to show this under relatively difficult circumstances was again only possible through the loyal, dedicated work of many of our anthroposophical friends. And let me also say what is closest to my heart: that I myself and probably all those who know something about it cannot thank enough all those who have worked with us to dare to make this attempt, because it was only an attempt. It was not attempted under the easiest of circumstances; those who worked with us had to work with full commitment of their strength for weeks and especially in the last week. And we can count it a beautiful achievement of our anthroposophical life that we have artists in our midst who have been faithfully supporting us with their artistic strength for two years now. Above all, let me mention our dear friend Doser, who not only took on the difficult task of bringing Phosphorus to the stage last year and this year, but who also took on the role of the character who was particularly close to my heart this year and who is infinitely important for what we tried to show yesterday: the character of Capesius. Perhaps you will gradually feel why this Capesius character is particularly important. And the other character, the character of Strader, played by our dear Mr. Seiling, who has been faithfully at our side for two years now, is also of great importance in this context. I must not forget to mention how our dear Mr. Seiling, through his very special vocal talent, I cannot call it anything else, supports us when it comes to allowing the spiritual world to enter the physical world in a symbolic way. We owe all the love and wonderful satisfaction that you could hear in the voices of the spirits to this extraordinary gift, especially in this direction.

And it is my duty, above all, to thank those who have devoted their full strength to the main roles, despite the fact that they still had a great deal to do in the anthroposophical field during this period and in general over the years. It may be said that perhaps only in the anthroposophical field can the strength arise to enable Ms von Sivers to bring such great roles as those of Kleonis and Maria to the stage in two consecutive days. Such a feat is only possible when the full strength of a person is brought to bear. And with a particularly grateful heart, I would like to commemorate the actress who played Johannes Thomasius herself at this place, and it will give me particular satisfaction if this figure of Johannes Thomasius, in whom lies so very, very much of what we call anthroposophical life, if this figure remains somewhat associated with the first actress to play this Johannes Thomasius. That this has become possible at all under difficult circumstances that need not be further characterized here is due entirely to the very intensive, devoted way in which our dear Miss Waller feels about the anthroposophical cause. And if I were to tell you the difficulties that Ms. Waller had to overcome in the short time available to get into the role of Johannes Thomasius, you would probably be quite astonished. All these things that happen among us, that take place in our anthroposophical work, concern us, since we are an anthroposophical family in a spiritual sense. Therefore, we should feel obliged to those who have dedicated themselves to such a task for all of us in such a devoted way, a task that perhaps could not have been solved in this way by another person — I ask again and again to bear in mind that an outsider is not able to judge the difficult circumstances at all. And from these words you may recognize and appreciate the full extent of the dedication that the performers have developed in the last days and weeks, and how justified it is to speak of a deep thank you at this moment as well.

I would have to speak for a long, long time if I wanted to mention in detail all those who united with us in yesterday's work. Above all, let us remember the man who, when it comes to doing something in the spirit of anthroposophy in our ranks, is always there with all his heart and all his skills, let us remember our dear friend Arenson, who supported us both last year and this year with his beautiful musical skills and who made it possible for us to transition from “The Children of Lucifer” as well as from what we tried yesterday, in the appropriate places, in a dignified manner into something that can only be felt from the world of sound. And let me mention our dear artistic friends here in Munich. They have had ample opportunity during the past two days to see how we have tried to harmonize everything, even for the outward eye, with the spoken word and the music heard. They have seen how we have tried, down to the last color spot, down to the last form, to make everything a unity. If this has been possible in any way, we owe it to the sympathetic way in which our artistic friends here, Mr. Volkert, Mr. Linde, our dear Mr. Haß, have worked with all their hearts on everything that was at stake, to make what was to be done happen in a dignified way.

And such things are only possible, as I said at the beginning, when everyone works from a free and devoted heart. This year, too, we can commemorate in a very special way the work that can hardly be easily overlooked, but which took up a whole person, a whole soul and a whole heart for weeks, the work of creating all the costumes that were needed in the right way. And just as in the previous year, this was the sole responsibility of our dear Fräulein von Eckardtstein. She devoted herself to it, not only with dedication, but also, and most importantly, with the most intense understanding of every detail and of the big picture, which must never be lost sight of.

But all this is only a brief indication of what, as I said, had to be said today out of the anthroposophical sense of family, so that each and every one of us knows how this cooperation and collaboration is meant. And if you felt some satisfaction for your soul and for your mind the day before yesterday and yesterday, then let the feelings that permeate your soul flow a little to those whose names have now been mentioned and to those whom you saw on the stage as friends well known to you.

With this, if I may say so, milestone of our anthroposophical work, we wanted to show how anthroposophical ideas and anthroposophical life flow into culture. And even if humanity today is not yet inclined to incorporate into the rest of its outer culture that which can flow from spiritual life, we would at least like to show artistically how what flows and permeates our soul as thoughts and inner life can become life. Such feelings can be kindled by the forefeeling that humanity will nevertheless go from its present to a future in which it will be able to feel the outpouring of spiritual life through the spiritual and soul veins of man on the physical plane; that humanity will go towards a time in which man will feel himself as a mediator between the spiritual world and the physical world. And the events were designed to awaken this anticipation.

And when we have such anticipation, then we will also find the way to restore worn-out words, which today come to people with sentimental values that make it impossible for them to understand their full meaning, to their original light and splendor. But no one will understand the monumental nature of the words that form the starting point of the Bible if he gives the words the character they have today. We ourselves will have to ascend in thought to the heights to which we tried to have John Thomasius ascend, to where spiritual life pulses, if we want to understand physical life on earth. In a sense, a completely different language must be spoken in these spiritual worlds. But we humans must at least be able to give new values to the words that we have at our disposal here, new nuances of feeling, be able to sense something different if they are to mean what the first sentences of the Bible tell us, if we want to understand the spiritual origin of our physical world.

From the lecture given here on the more complicated questions of reincarnation, you have been able to see that as we progress further in the spiritual-scientific world view, what could initially be given as elementary truths is modified, that we gradually ascend to higher and higher truths. It therefore remains true that in the beginning the general truths of the world should be presented as simply and as elementary as possible. But it is also necessary to gradually work our way up from the alphabet to the higher truths; for it is only through these higher truths that we will gradually achieve what, among other things, spiritual science is supposed to give: namely, the possibility of understanding and penetrating the world that surrounds us in the sensory, in the physical sphere. We still have a long way to go before we can begin to sketch out some of the spiritual lines and forces that lie behind the sensory world. But much of what has been said in the last few hours will have made this or that phenomenon of our existence clearer and more understandable. Today we want to make a little progress in this regard, and also there we want to talk again about more complicated questions of reincarnation, of re-embodiment.

In addition we want to realize today above all that a difference exists between the entities, which take a leading position in the development of mankind on earth. In the course of our development on earth, we have to distinguish between such leading individuals who, so to speak, have developed with humanity on our earth from the very beginning, only that they have progressed faster. One might say: if one goes back to the time of the primeval Lemurian past, one finds the most diverse degrees of development among the human beings embodied at that time. All the souls that were embodied at that time have gone through reincarnation and re-embodiment over and over again through the subsequent Atlantean period and our post-Atlantean period. The souls have developed at different speeds. There are souls that have developed relatively slowly through the various incarnations and that still have long, long distances to go in the future. But there are also souls that have developed quickly, that, one could say, have made more extensive use of their incarnations, and that are therefore today at such a high level in their soul-spiritual, that is, in their spiritual development, that the normal person of today will only reach such a level in a very, very distant future. But if we remain in this sphere of souls, we can still say that however advanced these individual souls may be, and however far they may project themselves above the normal human being, they have nevertheless gone through a similar course within our earthly development as the rest of humanity; they have just progressed more quickly.

Besides these leading individuals, who are thus similar to other people, only at a higher level, there are also other individuals, other beings, in the course of human development, who have by no means gone through various embodiments in the same way as other people. We can get an idea of the basis for this when we consider that at the time of the Lemurian evolution there were beings who no longer needed to descend as deeply into physical embodiment as the other human beings, such as all the beings that have just been described, beings, therefore, who could have continued their development in higher, more spiritual regions, who therefore did not need to descend into physical bodies for their own further progress. Nevertheless, such an entity can, in order to intervene in the course of human evolution, descend into a body such as human beings have, so to speak, as a representative. So that at any time an entity can appear, and if we examine it seerically with regard to its soul, we cannot say about it, as we can about other people, that we trace it back in time and find it in a previous incarnation in the flesh , trace it further back and find it again in another incarnation, and so on, but we have to say to ourselves: if we trace the soul of such an entity back in time, we may not come to an earlier carnal incarnation of such an entity at all. But if we do come to one, it is only because such an entity can also descend more often in intervals and embody itself vicariously in a human body. In the Eastern Wisdom, such a spiritual entity that descends into a human body in order to intervene in evolution as a human being, without itself deriving any benefit from this embodiment, without what it experiences here in the world having any significance for itself, is called an avatar. And that is the difference between a leading entity that has emerged from the evolution of humanity itself and one that is called an avatar: an avatar entity has no fruits to draw for itself from its physical embodiments or from the one physical embodiment that it undergoes, because it enters a physical body as an entity for the benefit and progress of people. So, as I said, such an Avatar-Being can enter a human body either only once or also several times in succession, and it is then definitely something other than another human individuality.

The greatest Avatar Being that has lived on Earth, as you can see from the spirit of all the lectures that are given here, is the Christ, the Being that we call the Christ and that took possession of Jesus of Nazareth's body in the thirtieth year of his life. This entity, which first came into contact with our earth at the beginning of our era, was embodied in a physical body for three years, and since that time has been in contact with the astral sphere, that is, with the spiritual sphere of our supersensible world. This entity is of quite unique significance as an avataric entity. We would search in vain for the Christ-entity in an earlier human embodiment on Earth, while other, lower avatar entities can indeed also embody themselves more often. The difference is not that they incarnate more often, but that they do not draw any fruit from the earthly incarnations for themselves. People give nothing to the world, they only take. These entities only give, they take nothing from the earth. Now, if you want to understand this matter properly, you have to distinguish between such a high avatar entity as the Christ was and between lower avatar entities.

Such avataric entities can have a wide variety of tasks on our Earth. We can initially speak of such a task of avataric entities. And so that we are not talking about something speculative, let us approach a specific case and illustrate what such a task can consist of.

You all know from the story that revolves around Noah that in the ancient Hebrew account, a large part of the post-Atlantean, post-Noah humanity is traced back to the three patriarchs Shem, Ham and Japheth. Today we do not want to go into what Noah and these three patriarchs want to represent to us in another respect. We only want to realize that the Hebrew scriptures, which speak of Shem, the one son of Noah, trace the entire tribe of the Semites back to Shem as their progenitor. An actual occult view of such a matter, of such a narrative, is everywhere based on deeper truths. Those who can research such a matter from an occult point of view know the following about this Sem, the progenitor of the Semites.

Precautions must be taken from birth, or even earlier, to ensure that such a personality can become the progenitor of an entire tribe. How is it ensured that such an individuality, as for example Shem, can be the progenitor of such a whole community or tribe? In the case of Shem, this happened because he received, so to speak, a very specially formed etheric body. We know that when a person is born into this world, their individuality is surrounded by an etheric or life body, in addition to the other limbs of the human being. For such a tribal ancestor, a special etheric body must be prepared, so to speak, which is, as it were, the model etheric body for all the descendants who follow this individuality in the generations. So that we have a typical etheric body for such a tribal individuality, so to speak, the model etheric body; and then, through blood relationship, the matter goes through the generations in such a way that, in a certain sense, the etheric bodies of all descendants belonging to the same tribe are images of the etheric body of the ancestor. Thus, something like an image of the etheric body of Shem was woven into all the etheric bodies of the Semitic people. How is such a thing brought about in the course of human evolution?

If we take a closer look at this Sem, we find that his etheric body has received its archetypal form through the fact that an avatar has woven itself into his etheric body – not an avatar of such high caliber that we can compare it to certain other avatar entities; but nevertheless, a high avatar entity had descended into his ether body, which was not connected to the astral body and also not to the ego of Sem, but it had woven itself into the ether body of Sem, so to speak. And we can study right away from this example what significance it has when an avatar essence participates in the constitution, in the composition of a human being. What is the meaning of a human being, who, like Sem, has the task of being the progenitor of the whole nation, having an avatar being woven into his body, so to speak? The purpose of this is that every time an avatar essence is interwoven with a physical human being, any limb or even several limbs of this human being can be multiplied, can be split apart.

In fact, the fact that an avatar entity was interwoven with the etheric body of Sem offered the possibility that multiple images of the original could be created and that these countless images could be interwoven with all the people who followed the progenitor in the succession of generations. So one of the purposes of the descent of an Avatar entity is to contribute to the multiplication of one or more members of the entity in question, which is animated by the Avatar. Many images of the original are created, all of which are formed afterwards. As you can see from this, there was a particularly valuable etheric body present in this Sem, a primal etheric body that was prepared by a high avatar and then woven into the Sem, so that it could then descend in many images to all those who were said to be blood relatives of this ancestor.

Now, as we have already mentioned in the hour mentioned at the beginning, there is also a spiritual economy, in which something that is particularly valuable is preserved and carried over into the future. We have heard that not only does the ego re-embody itself, but that the astral body and the etheric body can also re-embody themselves. Apart from the fact that countless copies of the etheric body of Sem were created, Sem's own etheric body was also preserved in the spiritual world, because this etheric body could later be put to very good use in the mission of the Hebrew people. After all, all the peculiarities of the Hebrew people had originally been expressed in this etheric body. Whenever something particularly important happened for the ancient Hebrew people, whenever someone was entrusted with a special task, a special mission, it was best done by an individuality who carried within himself the etheric body of the progenitor.

And indeed, an individuality who intervened in the history of the Hebrew people later carried the progenitor's etheric body. Here we have indeed one of those wonderful complications in human evolution that can explain so much to us. We are dealing with a very high individuality that had to, so to speak, condescend in order to speak to the Hebrew people in a way that would be appropriate for them and give them the strength for a special mission, rather like when a person who is particularly outstanding in spiritual terms low tribe, he would indeed have to learn the language of this tribe, but one does not therefore have to claim that language is something that elevates him; the person concerned only has to make an effort to familiarize himself with this language. So a high individuality had to familiarize itself with the etheric body of Shem himself in order to be able to give a very specific impulse to the ancient Hebrew people. This individuality, this personality is the same one that you find in the Biblical story under the name of Melchizedek. This is the individuality that, so to speak, donned the etheric body of Shem in order to then give the impulse to Abraham, which you then find so beautifully described in the Bible. So, apart from the fact that what was contained in the individuality of Shem was multiplied by the fact that an avatar entity was embodied in it and then interwoven with all the other etheric bodies of the members of the Hebrew people, Shem's own etheric body was kept in the spiritual world so that it could later be worn by Melchizedek, who was to give an important impetus to the Hebrew people through Abraham.

The facts that lie behind the physical world and that make what happens in the physical world understandable to us are so finely interwoven. We only get to know history by being able to point to such facts: spiritual facts that lie behind physical facts. History can never become understandable from within itself if we only stop at the physical facts.

What we have now discussed becomes of particular importance: that through the descent of an Avatar-being, the constituent elements of the human being who is the carrier of such an Avatar-being are multiplied and transferred to others, appearing in images of the original image. This becomes of particular importance through the appearance of Christ on earth. The fact that the Avatar-being of Christ dwelled in the body of Jesus of Nazareth made it possible for the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth to be multiplied countless times, as well as for the astral body and even the I — the I as an impulse, as it was kindled in the astral body at that time, when the Christ moved into the threefold cover of Jesus of Nazareth. But first, let us consider that the etheric body and the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth could be multiplied through the Avataric Being.

Now one of the most significant turning points in human evolution occurred, precisely through the appearance of the Christ principle in the evolution of the earth. What I have told you about Sem is basically typical and characteristic of the pre-Christian era. When an etheric or astral body is multiplied in this way, the images of it will usually pass to people who are blood related to the one who had the original image: the images of the etheric body of Shem were therefore transferred to the members of the Hebrew tribe. This was changed by the appearance of the Christ-Avatar Being. The etheric body and the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth were multiplied and these duplications were now preserved until they could be used in the course of human evolution. But they were not bound to this or that nationality, to this or that tribe, but wherever in the following period a person was found, regardless of his nationality, who was ripe and suitable for it, in his own astral body or an etheric image of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth, these could be woven into them. Thus we see how it was possible that in the following period, let us say, the images of the astral body or the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth were woven into all kinds of people like imprints.

The intimate history of Christian evolution is connected with this fact. What is usually described as the history of Christian evolution is a sum of quite external processes. And therefore, far too little attention is paid to the most important thing, namely to the distinction with regard to real periods in Christian evolution. Anyone who has a deeper insight into the development of Christianity will easily recognize that in the first centuries of the Christian era, the way in which Christianity was spread was quite different from that in later centuries. In the first centuries of Christianity, the spread of Christianity was, so to speak, tied to everything that could be achieved from the physical plan. We only need to look at the first teachers of Christianity to see how physical memories, physical connections and everything that had remained physical were emphasized. Just think of how Irenaeus, who contributed a great deal to the spread of Christian teaching in various countries in the first century, placed great value on memories reaching back to those who had themselves heard the apostles' students. Great value was placed on being able to prove through such physical memories that the Christ had taught in Palestine itself. For example, it is particularly emphasized that Papias himself sat at the feet of the apostle disciples. Even the places are shown and described where such personalities sat who were still there as eyewitnesses to the fact that Christ lived in Palestine. Physical progress in memory is what is particularly emphasized in the first centuries of Christianity.

How much everything that has remained physical is emphasized can be seen in the words of St. Augustine, who stands at the end of this period and says: Why do I believe in the truths of Christianity? Because the authority of the Catholic Church compels me to do so. For him, physical authority is something that exists in the physical world, the important and essential thing is that a body has been preserved that, linking personality to personality, reaches up to those who were companions of Christ, such as Peter. That is the decisive thing for him. We can see, then, that in the first centuries of the spread of Christianity, the greatest value was placed on the documents and impressions of the physical plane.

This changed after the time of Augustine and continued to do so until about the 10th, 11th, 12th centuries. It was no longer possible to rely on living memory and to only use the documents of the physical plane, because they lay too far in the past. There is also something quite different in the whole mood, in the attitude of the people who now adopted Christianity – and this is particularly the case with the European peoples. In this period there is indeed something like a kind of direct knowledge that a Christ exists, that a Christ died on the cross, that he lives on. From the 4th or 5th century until the 10th or 12th century, there were a great many people to whom it would have seemed extremely foolish to tell them that one could also doubt the events in Palestine, because they knew better. These people were spread out over European countries in particular. They were always able to experience within themselves something like the small-scale Paul-like revelation that Paul, who had been Saul until then, experienced on the road to Damascus, and through which he became Paul.

How was it that a number of people in those centuries were able to receive such, in a sense clairvoyant revelations about the events of Palestine? This was possible because during these centuries the images of the multiplied etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth, which had been preserved, were interwoven with a large number of people, so that they were allowed to wear them, so to speak. Their etheric body did not consist exclusively of this image of the etheric body of Jesus, but an image of the original of Jesus of Nazareth was interwoven with their etheric body. During these centuries there were people who had such an etheric body and who could therefore directly receive knowledge from Jesus of Nazareth and also from the Christ. But as a result, the image of Christ was also detached from the external historical, physical tradition. And it appears to be most divorced from it in that wonderful ninth-century poem known as the Heliand, which dates from the time of Louis the Pious, who ruled from 814 to 840, and which was written by an outwardly simple man from Saxony. In relation to his astral body and his ego, he could not possibly reach what was in his etheric body. For interwoven with his etheric body was an image of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth. This simple Saxon pastor, who wrote this poem, had the certainty from direct clairvoyant insight that the Christ exists in the astral plane and that He is the same as the One who was crucified at Golgotha! And because this was an immediate certainty for him, he no longer needed to refer to historical documents. He no longer needed physical evidence that the Christ was there. He therefore describes him detached from the whole scene in Palestine, detached from the characteristics of Judaism. He portrays him somewhat like a leader of a Central European or Germanic tribe, and those who are around him as his followers, as the apostles, he describes somewhat like the vassals of a Germanic prince. All external scenery is changed, only what is actually essential, what is eternal about the figure of Christ, what is the structure of the events, that has remained. He, who had such direct knowledge, built on such an important foundation as the imprint of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth, was not dependent on sticking very closely to the immediate historical events when speaking of Christ. He clothed what he had as direct knowledge with a different outer setting. And just as we have been able to describe in this writer of the Heliand epic one of the remarkable personalities who had woven into his etheric body an image of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth, so we could find other personalities in this time who had the same. Thus we see how the most important thing is going on behind the physical events, which history can explain to us in an intimate way.

If we now follow the Christian development further, we come up to about the 11th, 12th to 15th centuries. There was now a quite different mystery which carried the whole evolution further. First it was, so to speak, the remembrance of what was on the physical plane, then it was the etheric that interwove itself directly into the etheric bodies of the bearers of Christianity in Central Europe. In the later centuries, from the 12th to the 15th century, it was particularly the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth that was interwoven in numerous images with the astral bodies of the most important representatives of Christianity. Such people then had an ego that could have very wrong ideas about all sorts of things, but in their astral bodies lived an immediacy of power, of devotion, an immediate certainty of sacred truths. Deep fervor, very direct conviction, and possibly also the ability to substantiate this conviction, lay in such people. What sometimes strikes us as so strange about these personalities is that their ego was often not at all equal to what their astral body contained, because it had woven into it an image of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth. Sometimes their ego's actions seemed grotesque, but the world of their feelings and emotions, their fervor, was magnificent and sublime. St. Francis of Assisi, for example, is such a personality. And precisely when we study St. Francis of Assisi and cannot understand how, as modern people, we have his conscious ego and yet must have the deepest admiration for his entire emotional world, for everything he did, it becomes understandable from this point of view. He was one of those who had woven an image of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth. This enabled him to accomplish precisely what he has just accomplished. And many of his followers from the Franciscan Order, with his servants and minorites, had similarly woven such images into their astral bodies.

All the strange, otherwise mysterious phenomena of that time will become clear and luminous to you if you properly visualize this mediation in the world between past and future. It now depended on whether the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth was more interwoven with what we call the sentient soul or more with the intellectual soul or what we call the consciousness soul. For the astral body of man must, in a certain sense, be thought of as containing these, as encompassing the I. The whole sentient soul of Jesus of Nazareth was in Francis of Assisi, so to speak. The whole sentient soul of Jesus of Nazareth was in that wonderful personality, whom you will follow biographically with all your soul when you know the secret of her life: in Elizabeth of Thuringia, born in 1207. There we have a personality in which an image of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth is interwoven with the sentient soul. The riddle of the human form is solved for us precisely through such knowledge.

And above all, you will realize the significance of the fact that in this period the most diverse personalities had the sentient soul, mind soul or consciousness soul woven into them as images from the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth: it will become understandable to you that science, which is otherwise so little understood and so much maligned today, which is usually referred to as scholasticism. What was the task that scholasticism set itself? It set itself the task of finding evidence and proof for what had no historical connection, no physical mediation, and for what there was no direct clairvoyant certainty, as there was in previous centuries through the interwoven etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth. These people had to set themselves the task of saying to themselves: We have been informed by tradition that that entity known as Christ Jesus appeared in history, and that other spiritual entities intervened in the development of humanity, as attested to by religious documents. From their intellectual soul, from the intellect of the image of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth, they set themselves the task of proving with fine and sharply developed concepts all that was present in their writings as mysterious truths. Thus arose that remarkable science which the greatest acumen and intellect of mankind has endeavored to accomplish. For several centuries — one may think as one will about the content of scholasticism — simply by pursuing this subtle, subtle differentiation and contouring of concepts, the ability of human reflection was cultivated and imprinted on the culture of the time. It was in the 13th to 15th century that humanity, through scholasticism, acquired the ability to think perceptively and with penetrating logic.

In those in whom the consciousness soul was more strongly imprinted, or rather the image of it that lived as the consciousness soul of Jesus of Nazareth, there arose – because the I resides in the consciousness soul – the special realization that the Christ can be found in the I. And because they themselves had the element of the consciousness soul from the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth within them, the inner Christ shone within them. And through this astral body they recognized that the Christ within them was the Christ Himself. These were the ones you know as Meister Eckhart, John Tauler and all the bearers of medieval mysticism.

Thus you see how the most diverse phases of the astral body, multiplied by the fact that the high Avatar-being of the Christ had moved into the body of Jesus of Nazareth, continued to work in the following period and brought about the actual evolution of Christianity. Incidentally, it is also an important transition in other respects. We see how humanity in its development is also dependent on preserving these pieces of the Jesus of Nazareth being incorporated into itself. In the first centuries there were people who were completely dependent on the physical plan; then in the following centuries there were people who were receptive to having the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth incorporated into their own etheric body. Later, people were more attuned to the astral body, so to speak; therefore, the image of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth could now be incorporated into them. The astral body is the bearer of the power of judgment. The power of judgment awakens particularly in the 12th to 14th centuries. You could also see this from another phenomenon.

Until that time, it was particularly clear what mystery depths the Lord's Supper contained. The Lord's Supper was accepted in such a way — at most there was a little discussion about it — that one could understand everything that was in the words: “This is my body and this is my blood...” because the Christ pointed out that he would be united with the earth, would be the planetary spirit of the earth. And because the most precious part of the physical earth is its dust, man came to regard the bread as the body of Christ, and the juice that runs through the plants and the vines as something of the blood of Christ. This knowledge did not diminish the value of the Lord's Supper, but increased it. During those centuries something of these infinite depths was sensed, until the power of judgment awoke in the astral body. From that time doubt also first awakens. From that time also the controversy about the Lord's Supper began. Think about how it is discussed in Hussitism, in Lutheranism and its divisions into Zwinglianism and Calvinism, what the Lord's Supper is supposed to be! Such discussions would not have been possible in the past, because in those days there was still direct knowledge of the Lord's Supper. But there we see a great historical law come true, which should be particularly important for scholars:

As long as people knew what the Lord's Supper was, they did not discuss it; only when they lost the direct knowledge of the Lord's Supper did they begin to discuss it. Do you consider it a sign that you actually don't know something when you start discussing it? When there is knowledge, the knowledge is shared, and there is actually no particular desire to discuss it. Where there is a desire to discuss, there is as a rule no knowledge of the truth. Discussion begins only with not-knowing, and it is always and everywhere a sign of decline with regard to the seriousness of a matter when discussions begin. The disintegration of the current in question always announces itself with discussions. It is most important that we should learn to understand this again and again in the field of spiritual science, that the will to discuss may actually be regarded as a sign of ignorance; on the other hand, we should cultivate the will to learn, the will to gradually understand what is at stake.

Here we see a great historical fact confirmed in the development of Christianity itself. But we can learn something else as well, when we see how, in these centuries of Christianity, the power of judgment — that which is in the astral body — this keen intellectual wisdom, is developed. If we consider realities, not dogmas, we can learn from what Christianity has actually done in its development. What has become of scholasticism when we consider it not in terms of its content but as the cultivation and education of abilities? Do you know what has become of it? Modern natural science has become of it! Modern natural science is inconceivable without the reality of medieval Christian science. Not only that Copernicus was a canon, that Giordano Bruno was a Dominican friar, but all the thought forms with which one has been dealing with natural objects since the 15th and 16th centuries are nothing other than what was cultivated and bred from the 11th to the 16th centuries by the Christian science of the Middle Ages. They do not live in reality, but in abstractions, looking up things in the books of scholasticism, comparing them with the newer natural science and then saying: Haeckel and so on claim something completely different. It depends on realities! A Haeckel, a Darwin, a Du Bois-Reymond, a Huxley and others would all be impossible if the Christian science of the Middle Ages had not preceded them. That they can think in this way, they owe to the Christian science of the Middle Ages. That is the reality. Mankind has learned to think in the true sense of the word.

The matter goes even further. Read David Friedrich Strauß. Try to see the way he thinks. Try to understand his train of thought: how he wants to show that the whole life of Jesus of Nazareth is a myth. Do you know where he got the sharpness of thought? He got it from the Christian science of the Middle Ages. Everything that is used today to fight Christianity so radically has been learned from Christian science in the Middle Ages. Today there could not be an opponent of Christianity who could not easily be shown that he could not think as he does if he had not learned the forms of thought from Christian science in the Middle Ages. That would mean, however, looking at world history realistically.

And what has happened since the 16th century? Since the sixteenth century, the self has increasingly asserted itself, and with it human selfishness and materialism. People have forgotten and neglected everything that the self has taken in. They have had to limit themselves to what the self can observe, what the instrument of the senses can give to the ordinary mind, and only that could be taken into the inner home. Since the sixteenth century, culture has been a culture of egoism. What must now enter into this I? The Christian development has gone through a development in the outer physical body, a development in the etheric body, one in the astral body, and it has penetrated as far as the I. Now it must absorb into this I the mysteries and secrets of Christianity itself. Now it must be possible to make the I into an organ receptive to the Christ, now that the I has learned to think through Christianity and to apply thoughts to the outer world. Now this I must in turn find the wisdom, which is the original wisdom of the great Avatar, the Christ Himself. And how must this come about? Through the spiritual deepening of Christianity. Carefully prepared by the three stages of physical, etheric and astral development, it would now depend on the organ within opening up to the human being, in order to now look into his spiritual environment with that eye that the Christ can open for him. As the greatest Avatar Being, the Christ has descended upon Earth. Let us adjust to this perspective: let us try to look at the world as we can look at the world when we have taken in the Christ within us. Then we find our entire world evolution glowing and flooded with the Christ-being. That means we describe how, little by little, the physical body of the human being came into being on Saturn, how the etheric body appeared on the sun, the astral body on the moon, and then the I and we find how all this strives towards the goal of becoming ever more independent and individualized in order to incorporate the wisdom that passes from the sun to the earth, the earth's development. For the liberated I of the modern age, Christ and Christianity must become the perspective center of the world view, so to speak.

Thus you see how Christianity has gradually prepared itself for what it is to become. Christianity was taken up by the human being with his physical faculty of knowledge in the first centuries, then later with his etheric faculty of knowledge and with his astral faculty of knowledge throughout the Middle Ages. Then Christianity in its true form was pushed back for a while until the I had been educated by the three bodies in the course of post-Christian development. But now that the I has learned to think and to look out into the objective world, it is also ripe to see in this objective world, in all its manifestations, the spiritual facts that are so intimately connected with the central being, with the Christ-being: to see the Christ in the most diverse forms everywhere as the foundation.

This brings us back to the starting point of spiritual-scientific understanding and knowledge of Christianity, and we recognize what task, what mission, this movement has been assigned for spiritual knowledge. At the same time, we recognize the reality of this mission. Just as the individual human being has a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and an I, and gradually ascends to ever higher heights, so it is also in the historical development of Christianity. One might say that Christianity also has a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and an ego. This ego can even deny its origin, as it can in our time, and it can become selfish. But it is still an ego that can at the same time take in the true essence of Christ and ascend to ever higher levels of existence. What the human being is in detail is what the great world is in its totality as well as in the process of its historical becoming.

When we look at it this way, a broad perspective of the future opens up for us from a spiritual-scientific point of view. And we know how this can capture our hearts and fill them with enthusiasm. We understand more and more what we have to do, and we also know that we are not groping in the dark. We have not concocted ideas that we want to arbitrarily impose on the future; rather, we want to have and follow only those ideas that have been gradually prepared by the centuries of Christian development. Just as it is true that the I must first appear and gradually develop upwards to a spirit self, spirit of life and spiritual man, after the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body were first present, so it is true that the modern human being with his ego form, with his present-day thinking, could only develop out of the astral, etheric and physical forms of Christianity. I has become Christianity. Just as this was a true development from the past, so it is true that the ego-figure of humanity can only emerge after the astral and etheric forms of Christianity have been developed. Christianity will continue to develop in the future, it will offer quite different things to humanity, and the Christian development and the Christian attitude to life will arise in a new form: the transformed astral body will appear as the Christian spirit self, the transformed ether body as the Christian life spirit. And in a radiant future perspective of Christianity, the star shines before our soul, towards which we, the spiritual man, are heading, completely illuminated and aglow with the spirit of Christianity.

30. Eurythmy PerformanceThis performance took place especially for the workers on the Goetheanum construction site; Rudolf Steiner had previously shown them around the building. The start of the performance was delayed because the lights went out, so Rudolf Steiner improvised a lecture until the light came back on. The program was the same as for the performance in Zurich on October 31, 1919, see p. 194.

Dear attendees!

I would very much like to give you a warm welcome in the light, if there were light here. But since we don't have any light yet, allow me to warmly welcome all of you who are here today and do us the honor of being our guests. It is always a special pleasure for us to see guests here, even now, at a time when our building cannot possibly be finished for a long time yet. For what will be necessary for the endeavors that this building is to serve will be the interest of our contemporaries, the interest in that which, as we believe, is being sought by a real human need of the present through that spiritual movement that this building, the Goetheanum, the School of Spiritual Science is to serve. For many people today, spiritual science and knowledge of the spirit as such are still somewhat dubious concepts. Since what we will present to you as a sample of our eurythmic art, insofar as we receive light, is connected with our spiritual endeavors as a whole, I would like to briefly introduce some characteristics of these spiritual endeavors. Here, through everything connected with this building, we will attempt to reintroduce a real knowledge of the spiritual worlds into human culture. I say a real knowledge, because many people admit that the world can be traced back to spiritual causes, which can be believed. But here it is not a matter of giving mankind some kind of creed - we are not thinking at all of giving some new religious or other creed - but what is to be attempted here is a real knowledge of the spiritual life, which is present in the world just as much as the outer life of the sense world. However, my dear attendees, the time is behind us – and for many people it is still present – when it was considered the hallmark of an educated person if they could say, out of their supposed conviction: Yes, man cannot achieve anything of a spiritual nature through his knowledge; man cannot, through his knowledge, come to prove that he really carries a spiritual soul within himself that is connected to the spiritual-secluded that permeates the whole world. To a certain extent, this was the conviction of many people, especially in the age that is considered the scientific age, which we have left behind and which, as I said, still exists for many today. The time will come when this view must be accepted as something very general. Of course, many people today will still either doubt or treat with a certain amount of scorn when one speaks of knowledge of the spirit. But those who have followed the paths of spiritual knowledge, which are being sought here, know that everything that wants to fit into the development of mankind will initially find opponents, people who ridicule it, and that it will then, when it gains popularity, be taken for granted. And as something taken for granted, the realization of the spiritual world will be accepted in a relatively near future.

The human being, as he is born into the world, can perceive the outer world through his senses, which he calls nature, the outer world that offers him minerals, plants, animals, the world of stars above him, the world of the sun and moon, and so on. If a person seeks nothing throughout his life but what can become him, if he simply lets himself go, does nothing further to develop something deeper in his being, then he will naturally have to come to a rejection of all spiritual science.

However, a certain, I might say reasonable modesty of mind is required to recognize the science of the spiritual. It looks strange to speak of this reasonable modesty to people today. For today's people, especially if they have learned a little something, they think they are extraordinarily clever. But one need only think about how a five- or six-year-old child stands, let's say, in front of a globe or a map: at most, they will run their hand over the globe, try to tear the map apart, and the like. It cannot be said that the child knows how to use this map properly. But if the child is then developed, if the forces that are not yet present in this five- or six-year-old child are brought out of its inner being, then the child — after ten years, let us say — knows quite a lot to do with this map or this globe, knows how to unravel what it sees on it. I mention this only as an analogy to show that it is not entirely foolish to say that the whole world around us, with its stones, plants, animals, stars, sun and moon, is initially so similar for a person who is simply left to themselves as they are born and grow, as the map or globe is for a five-year-old child. One can see something quite different in the world, in so-called nature, if one is able to see beyond what the five-year-old child sees when he picks up the map and [gap in the text], which simply arises for the human being by itself. And that it is possible for people to undergo certain developments that enable them to see much more of nature than they would be able to see without these developments. This is precisely what spiritual science, as referred to here, is meant to prove.

Anyone who shares the point of view of this spiritual science knows very well why so many people reject it. What is necessary is that one admits: a person can develop beyond what he achieves simply by being born as a human being; then things become spiritually visible, soulfully visible to him that he cannot see without this development.

Now, it really takes something to undergo such a development. I have described in various books what it takes for a person to undergo such a development, through which, to use Goethe's word, his spiritual eyes, his soul eyes, open. What is described there, ladies and gentlemen, is something that every person can go through relatively easily if they just have patience and stamina and take the time to do so. Of course, one will not always be able to make great discoveries in the spiritual world, but these spiritual discoveries, these discoveries in the spiritual world, can always be made by individual contemporaries. And the book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' is not written in order to, I would say, enter the spiritual world with full sails, but it is written to give one an inner strength that otherwise really does lie dormant in the soul, an inner strength to comprehend what the spiritual researcher can really find in the spiritual world.

So we have to distinguish between two things: firstly, that there really can be people who are able to make certain discoveries in the spiritual world that are intimately connected with human life. Of course, not everyone will be able to make these discoveries, but anyone can, if they just use their common sense and then observe what is said, for example, in my writing on How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds. Anyone can really understand what spiritual science claims. Of course one could say: Yes, then there will be a few individuals who penetrate into the spiritual world; the others will only be able to learn the truths that are valuable for human life from such people. — Especially in this day and age, one should understand the significance it has for human life that it is precisely this way and that it will actually perhaps become more and more so in the future. Today we are talking about the fact that a certain social life must spread among humanity. But social life, that means living together, living with each other, means living in such a way that what the individual produces is accepted by the other, is valid for the other, that we human beings should work for each other, live for each other – but people should not only work for each other materially, but also spiritually.

And a true social life will develop precisely because there will be individuals in the future who will undergo that which leads to discoveries in the spiritual world, and others who will only acquire that development through which one can understand what the researchers of the spiritual world have to communicate. But what the researchers of the spiritual world have to share is of immense importance for human life. Humanity would gradually come to no longer recognize the spiritual at all if there were no spiritual science in the present and for the future. What currently prevents the great damage of a lack of knowledge of the spirit from occurring is that spiritual knowledge still exists from ancient times, even if it was in a different form from that which can be found today in enlightened humanity. Today, humanity works with them as with an heirloom. Without spiritual knowledge being truly gained, man cannot really advance in physical, material culture either. I would like to make this clear to you by means of a comparison.

Consider, for example, the many tunnels in Switzerland; these tunnels could not be built today without the foundation provided by the art of engineering. Indeed, this art of engineering is connected with the fruit of solitary thought work by people who, at the time, did not think they were producing anything like tunnels. But the tunnels could not be there, and much else could not be; everything that surrounds us today - not at this moment, but otherwise today in the world - as electric light, everything else that surrounds us in the present, you see, it could not be there if it had not taken its starting point from the thoughts of lonely thinkers. But these thoughts – one does not believe this today, one thinks that the thoughts of the practical world simply grow out of human brains, but that is not the case – the thoughts that have been conceived could only be conceived because humanity had an old spiritual heritage. A person who receives no spiritual inspiration from a spiritual world cannot actually work spiritually for the outer material culture. People today just do not see this because they do not recognize it in the whole context. Our material culture would disappear, nothing new would be added to it, and the old would also gradually disappear if real spiritual progress could not take hold in humanity. But real spiritual progress is only possible if real spiritual knowledge becomes more and more widespread and if the prejudice ceases, which has been increasingly asserted, especially in the age of enlightenment: that actually only the one is a clever person who does not believe in the spiritual and the soul.

So it is a matter of exploring the spiritual world, that apart from our world, which we see with our eyes and touch with our hands, there is a spiritual world. Now, in recent times, more and more people have felt the need to gain knowledge of the spiritual world, but they have satisfied this need with quite unsuitable means. And when you hear today that there is something like our anthroposophical movement, which is erecting such a structure, then very many people say: Well, that's something as obscure as the spiritualists; they seek the spirit with all sorts of mystical means. No, my dear ladies and gentlemen, everything you can hear in the world today as spiritualism, as false mysticism, is most vehemently rejected by our spiritual movement. We have nothing to do with any obscure things, as they are often practiced today to explore the mind and which are also passed off as scientific. We are dealing with something that is just as clear and sharp as science itself. We are dealing with something that is as clear and sharp as that by which a Copernicus, a Galileo, a Giordano Bruno have worked in more recent times. We are dealing with something that is indeed spirit and soul, but we are using the methods of thought that have just celebrated their great triumphs in science.

You see, until the time when such minds as Copernicus, Galileo, Giordano Bruno were active at the beginning of modern times, people looked up, saw the vault of heaven above, , the blue vault of heaven, the blue, like a blue glass dome placed over the earth, the stars painted on it; and what was outside, that, people said, well, that is the eighth sphere. But that has become quite different when such minds as Copernicus, Galileo, Giordano Bruno have worked. Then people have finally realized: Up there, where the apparent blue firmament appears, there is in fact nothing, although our eyes see it. Due to the limitations of our own vision, a blue vault of heaven appears to us; this is due to the fact that we cannot see further. But space is infinite. And what appears to be painted on the vault of heaven is what is spread out over infinite expanses of space. Now, in terms of space, that has been overcome. Today, it is considered foolish to believe that there is a blue glass dome up there as a firmament and that the stars are pinned on it. But it is still true for many as a sign of enlightenment when they say: Oh, we can't know anything more about man than that he is born of a father and a mother and then dies again; we can't know anything beyond that.

Just as people in the Middle Ages said: Up there, there is a boundary, the blue firmament – so people still often say about knowledge: There is a boundary, birth and death, that cannot be seen beyond. It is just as untrue that one cannot see beyond birth and death as it is untrue that one cannot see beyond the blue firmament and cannot think beyond it. And just as it would be considered a sign of a limited mind today to see the blue firmament up there as something fixed, so in the not too distant future it will have to be considered a sign of a limited mind to say: You cannot recognize anything that extends beyond birth and death. Man carries within himself the eternal powers of his existence. And if he really develops these eternal powers of his existence, then he will be able to point beyond birth and death just as Giordano Bruno pointed beyond the firmament. He will be able to point beyond birth and death in such a way that one can know: Just as the stars are embedded in infinite space, so our own human existence is embedded in immeasurable time. We were there before we were born and we will be there after we die.

Of course, for many people today this is a belief, but in the future it will be knowledge, it will be insight. And to this degree of maturity, that this will become insight, that this will become something that a person can know in the same way that he knows, say, arithmetic and geometry, a movement such as this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is to contribute to this. And this is not achieved through some external events or external experiments, but by working on oneself, by awakening that which otherwise slumbers within oneself, and by becoming aware of the eternal forces within. In the moment when people dared to think beyond the firmament, in that moment they were happy to recognize space as infinite. In the moment when they will have the courage to research beyond birth and death, in that moment they will know their own soul as eternal.

You see, with this I am just sketching for you in a few words what an extensive science is, what such an extensive science is that one might say all other sciences can be fertilized by this spiritual science. Only when we are able to delve into this spiritual science will certain riddles that weigh heavily on people's minds be solved. And much of what is sought today – we believe we can seek it out on the basis of the old assumptions – we will only be able to seek it out when we are able to delve into the spiritual science meant here.

I would like to draw your attention to one thing, dear attendees. It was a long time ago, more than a century and a half, that the theory was formulated that our entire solar system emerged from a primeval nebula. A primeval nebula was there, so it was thought, rotating, turning. This is called the Kant-Laplace theory. The planets formed from the sun, these planets then orbited the sun and so on, and over long, long periods of time, the planets, preferably our Earth, would have formed – which, at least initially, is what was thought to be the case – plants, animals, and finally man and so on. Yes, there are indeed individual minds that have recognized the utter folly of this much-admired view of nature. The great art writer Herman Grimm once spoke very beautifully about this Kant-Laplacean theory. He said: People today imagine that they can assume, on the basis of some, especially this natural science, that once such a primeval nebula was there, and out of this primeval nebula, through agglomeration, that which we admire on earth today formed itself. And then, that is also said, after again immeasurably long periods of time, all that is on earth will perish, fall to the sun and so on. —Herman Grimm says: A carrion bone, around which a hungry dog circles, would be a more appetizing sight than this so-called scientific achievement. In the future, people will not understand, he says, how such a scientific delusion could have taken hold in our time at all, how it could have attacked people at all.

You must just consider, my dear attendees, what is actually meant by such a thing. It means a great deal, because people today who are taught by our much-vaunted science consider it a superstition, something thoroughly backward, if one does not swear by the existence of this Kant-Laplace nebula. Now, I know very well all the reasons that such people put forward, who swear by this Kant-Laplacean primeval nebula. I also know that it is quite understandable that when someone speaks as I do, it is portrayed as madness, and that under certain circumstances one can be regarded as a limited mind or even as a delusional person. But one only becomes capable of judging these things when one really penetrates into what is meant here as spiritual science. For it turns out that just as man does not arise out of matter at birth, but as he, as spirit and soul, only connects with matter and as he, after passing through death, emerges into the spiritual world as a spiritual entity, so that which we today recognize as our earth did not emerge from a material primeval nebula, but our planet, our earth, emerged from a spiritual state, is spiritual. That is what preceded all material things. Today, people are investigating how spirit develops in matter. In truth, all matter has developed out of spirit. And you get refined, purified concepts when you engage with what is meant here as spiritual science.

You see, what people today recognize as matter, as the material world – what is it? I would like to explain this to you again by means of a comparison. Imagine you have a large basin in front of you, in which you see pieces of ice; you do not see that there is also water; I assume you could not see the water. You then see the pieces of ice. You don't know, if you only saw the pieces of ice – I mean, if you had never heard of this thing, only saw the pieces of ice – you would not know that this ice is nothing more than what has emerged from the water, what has emerged from the water through condensation.

This is how the outer man behaves in relation to the material world. He looks at this material world and believes that it exists in its own right. This material world has in fact also come into being through condensation, condensation of the spiritual, just as ice has come into being through condensation of water. And in that, somewhere in the way I have indicated, man discovers the powers within himself that allow him to see the spiritual, to perceive the spiritual, in that moment he sees all matter as a condensation of the spiritual. All matter ceases to have an independence. And that which we have to recognize as earth, as material earth, with all material things on it, has emerged from a spirit-earth and will in turn transform back into a spirit-earth, so that we recognize that the material is an intermediate state between spiritual states. I am more or less just describing the results to you; of course, I cannot show you in a short consideration all the methods that are just as reliable as those used in the observatory to gain knowledge of the external material stars or those used in the clinic to get to know the human anatomy. The methods, insofar as they are practiced here, are entirely spiritual methods, but they lead to the realization of that in man which, being of a spiritual-soul nature, is connected with the spiritual-soul nature of the world. You see, by becoming aware of his spiritual nature again, man attains a certain inner security, a certain inner center of gravity, I might say. Today there are still many people who are quite rightly convinced that the soul-spiritual passes through the gate of death and then remains in a spiritual world. But little thought is given to the fact that when a person comes into existence through birth, he comes from the spiritual world. What he receives from the material world is only a covering of what comes from the spiritual world, comes down from the spiritual world. And just as one must say: what remains after death is a continuation of the physical life we led on earth, so one can also say: what is here on earth between birth and death is a continuation of a spiritual life that we have led earlier. But if that is the case, then it follows that our attitude towards a person will be quite different from the way we would treat that person if we only believed that the person came into being at birth directly out of the material world. Just think what it means to look at a developing child from the moment of its birth, to say to oneself: with each day, with each week, with each year, the spirit that has come from the spiritual works its way out, working its way through the material limbs. If this becomes the real principle of educating and teaching people, then you can see what influence can really be exerted on pedagogy, on the art of education. In this respect, what we call spiritual science can already be used today.

We were recently able to set up a project in a town in southern Germany that is intended to serve the purposes of our spiritual science as an art of education. In Stuttgart we have set up the Waldorf School, a primary school that, on the one hand, is intended to serve all the social demands that are now being made, where only consideration should be given to what a person is as a human being, but which, on the other hand, should also serve as an example of a real educational art for the future, from a true knowledge of the human being, educating the human being from the sixth to the fifteenth year, especially during the school years, so that at each particular age level – the seventh, ninth, eleventh, fifteenth year – consideration is always given to what is revealed by human nature. Only in this way can all the powers of human nature be truly developed. I will only hint at this. Because we are now so fortunate as to have light again, we will try to get to our eurythmy presentation as soon as possible. It is this that allows us to carry out practical experiments today, and it is a great and profound satisfaction for me to be training a college of teachers for this school, a college of teachers that is developing a true art of education based on spiritual science. An art of education that takes into account the whole human being, not just the physical part, that takes into account the human being as body, soul and spirit.

And you see, it is the case that what can penetrate the human soul through spiritual science is able to offer people a completely different support than what is often prevalent today as a materialistic attitude. Mankind will yet be able to convince itself of this. The intention here is not to indulge in idle play with all kinds of supposed sciences, but to honestly and sincerely serve the very demands that have taken root in numerous human souls today. It is just that people have not yet realized what kind of longing is actually in them. Instinctively, people today are already striving for such spiritual knowledge. Everything that this building represents is intended to serve this spiritual knowledge. The entire artistic design of this building is such that it is clear at first glance that it represents a new spiritual movement, something that must come among people if culture is to truly progress, not regress, and remain backward with what has come up from ancient times.

Now, I wanted to characterize for you with a few words the honest and sincere striving for a knowledge of the spirit, which is meant here, according to that side, which many people today still believe is some kind of delusion. But, my dear attendees, when the first railroad was built in Germany, from Fürth to Nuremberg, a council of physicians was asked for an expert opinion on whether such a railroad should be built. And the medical council said – this is not a fairy tale, it is a true fact, it happened in 1837, so it is not even a hundred years ago – the medical council said that no railroad should be built because the people who travel in it will ruin their nerves and become very ill. But if there are people who are willing to travel on the railways, then at least high wooden walls should be erected on both sides so that those who live near the railroad will not suffer from concussions.

Yes, my dear attendees, this is not a fairy tale, this is a verifiable report from a learned society. Of course, today you can ask numerous materialistically minded people whether what is being done here at this School of Spiritual Science should be done at all? And these learned people will give the verdict today: it should not be done, because people could, I don't know, lose their minds as a result. This is just as well founded as the medical report of that Bavarian Medical Council in 1837, which believed that people would become ill from the railroad. If you listen to people who think like that, you won't get anywhere at all. Those who today reject the kind of intellectual progress meant here should be put in the same boat as those who, when Columbus wanted to equip his ships to sail out into the wide world, said: It's madness to sail out there! Where could you get? He just discovered America, and if he hadn't gone out, America wouldn't have been discovered. Imagine how different the world would look today.

Of course, there are many people today who say: It is pure madness that is being done there. But there will come a time when this madness will be seen as something that was very necessary for the development of humanity. Of course there are many people who say: You cannot eat and drink what is offered as spirit. From a certain elementary point of view, they are right, but from a deeper point of view they are not. For that which is done for the outer material culture of mankind can only be done in the right way if mankind knows how to behave spiritually. But humanity can only behave spiritually if it can truly penetrate into the spirit. Here, we are not only talking about the spirit, but the spirit is to be truly recognized. Not only is it said, 'There is spirit in the world', but the spiritual methods are to be understood in such a way that one can say with conviction and certainty: Our Earth did not emerge from a Kant-Laplacean primeval nebula, but from a spiritual state of being, and returns with us all to a spiritual state of being – and much more.

You see, what we want to offer you as a piece of the artistic work that is being done here, as a sample of our eurythmy, is basically something that can only be offered if you understand much of what is otherwise only viewed materially, what is otherwise only viewed with the outer senses, if you understand it from the point of view of spiritual knowledge. Man speaks through his larynx and its neighboring organs, tongue, palate, and so on. We turn our attention through the ear to what is heard by listening to the person. But while we speak, the larynx and its neighboring organs are constantly moving without being seen, at least in the layout. Even physics knows that there is movement involved. For while I am speaking to you here, the air in the hall moves in certain patterns.

Through the same spiritual vision that allows one to recognize the spirit in nature and in man, one also recognizes the spiritual that underlies human language. This spiritual can then be applied to the movements of the whole person, as we do here in the art of eurythmy. And so today you will see people moving on the stage who are not moving in movements that we have thought up, oh no, but when you hear a poem recited, when you hear artistic language, then the people up here make the same movements with their whole bodies that they otherwise perform when they speak the thing. Only otherwise one listens to the spoken language, to the sounds, to what can be heard. Here, language is visible. But the same movements that are otherwise performed are brought to view here through the whole human being. They get to know, I would say, the whole human being like a larynx that has come to life, language that has become visible. And art is always that which arises from the fact that certain secrets of nature are revealed.

We named this School of Spiritual Science the Goetheanum in honor of Goethe. He said, “When nature reveals her secrets to us, we long for her most worthy interpreter, art.” This is especially true when we stand before a human being. Oh, there is so much that is mysterious in the human being! When we bring forth that which invisibly underlies language through the movements of the arms, through the movements of the whole person, through the movements of groups of people, then that which lives as such a great miracle in human language is revealed. People tend to overlook, especially today, the great miracle that underlies natural existence everywhere. Those who get to know the miracle that the human larynx and its neighboring organs are, and who try to awaken what lives in the larynx and its neighboring organs, what is preserved as a miracle in the individual human being, can understand that Goethe actually expresses it: for by being placed at the summit of nature, man sees himself again as a whole nature, which in itself has to produce a summit again. To do so, he elevates himself by permeating himself with all perfections and virtues, invoking choice, order, harmony and meaning, and finally rising to the production of the work of art. And when he makes an instrument out of himself and reveals what can come to the fore for his own limbs, then very deep natural secrets, spiritual secrets and secrets of the soul come to light for the immediate human perception. What is practised today in schools as gymnastics is merely thought out of the body; one day eurythmy will take the place of gymnastics. This eurythmy will be spiritualized gymnastics, inspired gymnastics. People will not only make those movements in gymnastics that they do because the anatomist, the physiologist, the scientist tells them that it is physically healthy. One will realize how health also originates in the soul and spirit and how the human being actually makes soulful movements, spiritualized movements. And one has already seen it when one has said, in relation to Waldorf school education, that wherever a lesson is only devoted to ordinary gymnastics, and the other lesson is devoted to eurythmy with the children, for example, , one could see how the children are in the process, how they feel enthusiastic about the fact that they are now making movements that are not just thought out of the body, but that are thought out of the spirit and soul. Even in this small part - it is only a very small part of what we mean by our spiritual science, but it also shows what we want: spiritualization and ensoulment in all areas. And so I ask you to consider what is offered here as a beginning. Everything must first be perfected. Take it with forbearance as a beginning, but one can already see from it where, I would say, the path leads. It leads to a real spiritual culture that can bear fruit in all areas of life.

And now I would like to show you, my dear audience, a small sample of this eurythmic art. You will see how the whole human being performs the movements that are otherwise not seen but only heard. You will see a visible language and you will hear how, at the same time, the music expresses through sound what you see on the stage through the movements of the human body. You will hear the poems recited, which express through language that which you will see on the stage through the movements of the human being: language made visible. You will recognize it as something that is to be brought forth from nature, from the mysterious depths of the human being. And so I ask you to take what is only a beginning with indulgence, just as our building is only a beginning. For we believe that if people show interest in these things, what is being done here will increasingly lead to more and more, so that what is still regarded by many today as only something foolish , fantastic, will one day be taken for granted as true art, something that is necessary for every human existence and will be recognized as a spiritual light because people will need it.

After a short break, we will now present two short scenes from “Faust”: “Midnight”. This second part of “Faust” is, as you may know, Goethe's most mature work of poetry. The manuscript for the second part of “Faust” was only completed shortly before Goethe's death, and the second part was only published after Goethe's death. It can be said that the “Faust” poem actually accompanied Goethe throughout his entire life. Perhaps the very first scenes of the first part belong at least almost to the very first poems of Goethe. And again and again in the course of his long life, Goethe took up the “Faust” poem and only completed it in his very old age. The story of the creation of Faust is a particularly good example of what it means to live through a constantly evolving life. We know that even today there are still people who take great pleasure in dwelling only on Goethe's youthful works, which were actually written entirely within the sphere of ordinary life. Goethe then went on to create works at various levels, with each level becoming more and more mature. When Goethe was in Italy and was able to see great works of art, he believed that he had truly penetrated the essence of art. And he spoke the great, beautiful, meaningful words at the time: “I have now come to know the art of the Greeks and believe that the Greeks proceeded according to the same laws when creating works of art as nature itself, which I am trying to grasp.” Goethe himself knew how he matured more and more into an ever higher conception of art.

Therefore, it must touch us strangely when we see how there were contemporaries of Goethe who repeatedly rejected the first parts of Goethe's “Faust” when Goethe had written his “Iphigenia”, his “Tasso” and his “Natural Daughter”, which he himself regarded as much more important works of art than the first part of “Faust”. There were many who said: Well, Goethe has just grown old, he can no longer keep up with himself. - People didn't know what the problem actually was, namely: they could not rise to the level of Goethe and therefore repeatedly pointed back to what Goethe had written in his youth. The same thing happened long after Goethe's death, for example, that a great esthete, even people whom one can certainly appreciate from a certain point of view, the so-called Schwaben-Vischer - V-Vischer because he wrote with V - who wrote thick volumes of art history and who, despite being an important scholar in art, repeatedly said: Yes, the first part, that is a real work of art; but the second part of Faust, that is a cobbled together, glued together concoction of old age. You see, one must point out such things, because there are people among the great connoisseurs – well, you see, just as there are upper-class daughters, there are upper-class philistines, and although I do hold the Swabian Vischer, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, in very high regard from a certain point of view, when it comes to “Faust” he is still an upper-class philistine. He even tried to write another part of Faust II. And it must be mentioned that Goethe himself often had a bitter resentment about the people who did not like his later poems – “Faust II” was published only after his death, but it would have been the same for him – for example, “Tasso”, his “Iphigenia”, his “Natural Daughter” and so on, and repeatedly rejected them in favor of the first part of his “Faust”. Then Goethe said:

They praise Faust
And what else
In my writings
Brings forth
The old Mick and Mack,
That is very pleased,
It means the pack of ragamuffins
You would no longer be.

Goethe would probably have said the same if he had known what Schwaben-Vischer or other scholars thought of the second part of his “Faust”. In the first part of “Faust” - with the exception of those scenes in which he also ascends with the world of human feeling into the supersensible, in order to depict human life in the following - as beautiful as the Gretchen scenes are in the earthly sphere, in the second part, indeed, to penetrate into the supersensible world itself, to point to the world of spiritual experiences, one must say that it is difficult to present this second part of “Faust” with ordinary means and to present the highest experiences of man on the stage. Anyone who has seen a lot of things, like me – I saw the charming adaptation of the second part of “Faust” by Wilbrandt at the Burgtheater in Vienna in the 1880s, in his unique, charming directing, and then saw many other things on the stage, for example in Devrient's mystery adaptation of “Faust” with Lassen's music and so on – but you can always see: the means of the stage, you see it everywhere, they are not enough here.

Now we have already tried to tackle various characteristic aspects in our eurythmic art performances and the two small scenes where Faust is approached with regard to those inner experiences that Faust has with these soul forces and forces of destiny. This is something where human life is definitely raised into a higher sphere. And here one can say: Goethe wanted to bring much, much more into this poetry of his life, according to his imaginations. But this must also be brought out in the right way on the stage. It cannot be brought out by ordinary theatrical means. Now we take the help of the art of eurythmy, the presentations that I described to you earlier and that you have seen in a few rehearsals here.

We then present the scene 'Faust' at 'midnight', where he experiences all the depths and horrors of life. Of course, what Faust speaks must be presented with the usual stage means; but then, when these four figures, the four grey women, namely worry, appear, eurythmy should be used to help, so that what Goethe so beautifully and mysteriously into his “Faust” poetry of the deepest human soul impulses and experiences, so that this comes out through the very art that seeks to develop and reveal itself out of human nature.

The public lectures in these days have dealt with the social problem, with the social demands of the present, as they arise not only, I would like to say, from observation in thought, but as they occur in the facts, in the events of contemporary world life.

All these things that relate to human life and whose consideration today in the broadest sense and for the broadest circles is absolutely necessary can be further deepened by people with an anthroposophical orientation. For we, who feel we belong to the anthroposophical movement, must never forget that it must be part of our most intimate feeling to view all things of the world in such a way that we penetrate the outer appearances, the outer facts for our own contemplation with the insights that we gain from the spiritual world. Only by thinking about all things as permeated by the spiritual, by that essence which is primarily hidden in the external earthly world but which really also lives in this earthly world, do they take on the right view of reality for us.

When I was last here among you, I gave you some indications, also from the point of view of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, of the social impulses of human life. We have already tried to consider man as a social being, as a being with social and anti-social instincts. But we must never lose sight of the fact that, by being human beings on this earth, we bring into this earthly existence the effect, the result of what we go through in the time that elapses between death and a new birth. We bring into our earthly life the results of our last spiritual life, our last stay in the purely supersensible world. And we do not consider our earthly life completely if we do not consider how what we do, what happens to us in the world as we live with people, also carries something of what arises as the effects of our life in the spiritual world from which we have emerged through birth, but whose traces, whose forces we take with us into this world.

On the one hand, this is what reaches into the physical world for us humans from the spiritual world. On the other hand, however, we must not forget that things happen in the life we lead here on earth that do not initially fully enter our consciousness, that happen to us, around us, without us taking occasion to grasp them clearly in our consciousness , and that we carry the most important of these experiences, which remain in our subconscious during our earthly life between birth and death, through the gate of death back into the supersensible world, which we in turn experience when we step through death out of the earthly world. Much takes place in our earthly life that is not important for this earthly life, but as a preparation for the after-death life - if I may use this expression “after-death life” in contrast to “prenatal life”.

Now, in particular, such a consideration, of which I spoke yesterday in the public lecture, only emerges with full concrete clarity when one is able to illuminate it from the direction from which the light comes from the supersensible world. And it is in this direction that I would like to deepen our understanding of this topic, which is so relevant to the present day, from an anthroposophical perspective. I would like to consider the social problem today as a problem of humanity as a whole. For us, however, humanity as a whole is not only the sum of the souls that are living together socially on earth at a particular point in time; but also those who are in the supersensible world at this particular time are connected to people by spiritual bonds and belong to what we can call the totality of humanity. Let us first consider what is called human spiritual life in an earthly sense.

In an earthly sense, human spiritual life is not the life of spiritual beings, but rather what people go through in their social lives as a spiritual life. Above all, this spiritual life includes everything that encompasses science, art and religion. But the spiritual life also includes everything that concerns schooling and education. Let us first consider what people experience in their social life as a spiritual cultural life. You know from a communication like the one I gave yesterday that this spiritual life — all schooling, all education, all scientific, artistic, literary life, and so on — must form a separate social structure in itself. For the outside world, this can only be made clear on the basis of the reasons that this outside world admits today. It can become completely clear: common sense must be enough to fully understand these things. But to look at them concretely becomes especially possible for those who engage in anthroposophically oriented observation of the world. For what is called the earthly spiritual life appears to such a person in a very special light.

Through the modern development, however, this spiritual life, which under the influence of the bourgeoisie, the intellectuals of the bourgeoisie, has degenerated into a mere ideology, which the proletarians have therefore adopted in their world view as a mere ideology, and which encompasses the branches that I have discussed, is not something that arises from economic life alone. This is approximately how the proletarian world view presents itself today: Everything that is religious conviction and religious thought, everything that is artistic achievement, everything that is legal and moral belief, that is, as the proletarian worldview says, a superstructure, something that rises like a cloud of smoke from the only true reality, the economic reality. This earthly spiritual life becomes an ideology, something that is merely imagined. For those who are familiar with the foundations of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, however, what encompasses people as a cultural life of the spirit is a gift from spiritual beings themselves. For them, it does not rise up from the economic undercurrents, but flows down from the life of the spiritual hierarchies. This is the radical difference between what is expressed by the bourgeois world view and its legacy in the proletarian world view – that basically, for that which has developed in humanity since the 15th or 16th century, the spiritual world is ideological, a mere haze that rises from the economic harmonies and disharmonies — and the world view that must come, the only one that can bring salvation, which leads out of the present chaos, for which what is flowing down is streaming from the real spiritual life of the world, to which we belong as much as we belong to the physical-earthly world through our senses, through our minds. But now that we have arrived in the fifth post-Atlantean period, we, as social beings, can only find our way into the social human organism with this spiritual life if we are prepared for this earthly spiritual life by those relationships that we enter into with other spiritual beings of the hierarchies before we are born, when we have not yet descended to earthly existence, as we have often mentioned. This is what spiritual research reveals as an important fact of life.

We enter into a twofold relationship with people when we come into existence through birth. Distinguish precisely these two relationships in which we come into contact with people. The one relationship that we enter into with people, that we have to enter into with people, is the fateful one. We come into a fateful relationship with one or other person, or with a greater or lesser number of people. We enter into a particular family through our birth into earthly existence. We come into a fateful relationship with our father and mother, our brothers and sisters, and our extended family.

We come into fateful relationships with other people, as an individual human being in relation to an individual human being. We live out our karma as individuals in relation to other people. How does this karma come about? How do these fateful relationships come about? They come about because they have been prepared by this or that life fact of previous earthly lives. So please take this in: when you enter into existence through birth, you come into a fateful connection with other people, as an individual human being with an individual human being, in accordance with what you have lived with this person in past lives. That is one way in which you enter into relationships with other people: by fate.

But you also enter into other relationships with people. As a member of a nation, you belong to a group of people with whom you are not connected by fate in the way just described. You are born into a nation, as into a specific territory. On the one hand, this is certainly connected with your karma, but as a result you are, so to speak, forged together in the social organism with many people with whom you do not belong by destiny. In a religious community you may have the same religious feelings as a number of other people with whom you are not at all bound by destiny. Spiritual and earthly-spiritual life brings about the most diverse social and societal connections among people, not all of which are based on fate. These connections are not all prepared in previous earthly lives, but in the time you live through between death and a new birth. Particularly when you are in the second half of this life between death and a new birth, you enter into a relationship with the beings, especially the higher hierarchies, through which you are so influenced by the forces of these hierarchies that you are spiritually welded together with different groups of people. What you experience as spiritual life in religion, in art, in the context of a people, in a mere language community, for example, what you experience through a very specifically directed education and so on, all this is already prepared outside of pure karmic currents in prenatal life. You bring into your physical and earthly existence what you have already experienced in your prenatal life. And what you experience in your prenatal life is reflected, albeit in a completely different way, in what intellectual life and spiritual cultural life is in the earthly.

Now, for someone who is able to take such a fact of the spiritual world completely seriously, a very specific question arises: How can we do justice to this earthly spiritual life in the higher sense, when we know that this earthly spiritual life is a reflection of what we have already experienced in the true, concrete spiritual life before birth? We can only do justice to this earthly spiritual life if we do not look at it as an ideology, but if we know that the spiritual world lives in it. And we can only relate to this earthly spiritual life in the right way if we realize that the forces of the spiritual world itself can be found everywhere in it. Imagine hypothetically: what the beings — be they the beings of the higher hierarchies, who never take on an earthly body, or be they even the not yet born human beings, human beings who have not yet entered earthly life through the portal of birth — what these beings belonging to the supersensible world think, what they experience in their soul life, that lives; that lives in a kind of dream-like image in the earthly-spiritual cultural world. So that we can justifiably always ask the question when any artistic, any religious, any educational fact of life comes to us: What lives in it? Not only what people have done here on earth, but what flows in from the forces, from the thoughts, from the impulses, from the whole soul life of the higher hierarchies, that lives in it. We will never see the world in its entirety if we deny these thoughts of spiritual beings that are not embodied on this earth, either not embodied at all or not embodied at this moment, which are, as it were, reflected in our spiritual-earthly culture. If we can acquire, I would like to say, this sacred contemplation of the spiritual world around us in a way that we can hold this spiritual world for what the spiritual beings themselves give us, with what the spiritual beings surround us, then we will be able to be truly grateful for this gift of the supersensible world, which we experience as an earthly-spiritual cultural world. In this way, this spiritual cultural world necessarily enters the entire social structure of humanity as something independent, as the continued effect of what we partake of in the spiritual world before birth. When social life is illuminated with the light of spiritual knowledge, it becomes a matter of course to assume a separate, independent reality in this spiritual life.

The second area of the social structure is what could be called the external rule of law, political life in the narrower sense, that which relates to the ordering of the legal relationships between people, that in which all people should be equal before the law. This is the actual life of the state. And the actual state life should basically be nothing other than this. Certainly, on the basis of pure, healthy human understanding, one can again see the necessity that this state life, this life of public law, this life that refers to the equality of all people before the law, to the equality of people in general, that this link of the social organism must stand independently for itself. But if we look at the matter again with the eyes sharpened by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, something quite different becomes apparent.

This life, the actual life of the state, is the only one within the social organs that has nothing to do with the prenatal or the afterlife. It is only in the world that man lives through between birth and death that it finds its order, its orientation. The state is only a self-contained whole with its primordial existence when it does not extend to anything that reaches into the supersensible world, whether on the side of birth or on the side of death. “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's.” But, one must add, not in prayer, but in deed, render unto God the things that are God's, and unto Caesar the things that are God's. He will reject it!

The things must be clearly distinguished, like the individual system structures in the human natural organism. Everything that can be included in the life of the State, that can be discussed or decided upon by the State, has to do only with the life between man and man. That is the essential thing. In all ages, the more deeply religious natures have felt this. But other men, who were not deeply religious natures, did not even allow people to speak freely, honestly, and sincerely about these things. For a conception has become fixed in the deeper religious natures about these things. These deeper religious natures said to themselves: State, it encompasses life, which, as far as humanity is concerned, has to do only with everything that lies between birth and death, that which relates to the mere earthly. It is bad when that which relates only to the earthly wants to extend its rule to the supernatural, to the supersensible, to that which lies beyond birth and death. But earthly spiritual life goes beyond birth and death, because it contains the shadows of the soul experiences of the supersensible beings. When that which pulses in mere state life takes hold of the life of earthly spirituality, then deeper religious natures call this: the power exercised by the unlawful prince of this world. Behind the expression “the unlawful prince of this world” lies what I have just hinted at. This is also the reason why in those circles that have an interest in confusing the three members of the social organism, this unlawful prince of this world is not spoken of gladly, it is even frowned upon to speak of it.

The situation is somewhat different with regard to the thinking, feeling and impulses of the soul that develop in a person because of their belonging to the economic part of the social organism. This is something highly idiosyncratic. However, you will already have become accustomed to the fact that, through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, you must expect some things that initially appear paradoxical in your views. When we speak today of the economic aspect of the social organism, we must be clear about the fact that the way we are speaking now is precisely a peculiarity of the fifth post-Atlantic period. In earlier epochs of human development, these things were different. Therefore, what I have to say in this regard applies particularly to our present and to the future. But with regard to our present and future, it must be said that In earlier times, man instinctively immersed himself in economic life. Now, however, this immersion must become ever more conscious and aware. Just as man learns the multiplication table in school, as he learns other things in school, so in the future he must learn things in school that relate to life in the social organism, to economic life. Man must be able to feel that he is a member of the economic organism. Of course, for some people it will be uncomfortable because other habits of thought and feeling have already taken root, which must undergo drastic changes. It is not true that if today someone did not know how much three times nine is, he would be considered an uneducated person. In some circles, someone is already considered an uneducated person if he does not know who Raphael or Leonardo was. But in general, in certain circles today, you are not considered uneducated if you cannot provide a proper explanation of what capital is, what production, what consumption is in its various forms, what the credit system is, and so on, not to mention the fact that very few people have a clear idea of what a Lombard transaction is and the like.

Now, under the influence of social transformation, these concepts will certainly change, and in the future people will be better placed to seek and want appropriate information about these things. Today, people are quite at a loss when they want to get rational information about these things. For what would be more natural than for someone to take a textbook on political economy by a famous political economist in order to find out what capital actually is? If you take three different textbooks on political economy today, you will find three different definitions of what capital actually is. Just think what a peculiar view you would have of geometry if you were to take three works on geometry by three different authors and find the Pythagorean theorem presented in each of them in a different way, with a different meaning in each case. These are the facts of the matter, and it is true that even the authorities in the field of economics are unable to provide much real insight into these matters. So it is not to be held against the general public if they do not seek such an explanation. But it will have to be sought, it will have to happen. Man will have to build the bridge from himself to the structure of the social organism, especially the economic structure. He will have to consciously integrate himself as a subject into the economy, into the social organism. There he will learn to think about how he relates to other people simply by managing a wide range of economic affairs with them in a particular territory. This thinking, which is developed there and into which the whole relationship between the natural order and man flows, is a completely different thinking from that which develops, for example, in the world of spiritual culture. In the world of spiritual culture, you experience what the beings of the higher hierarchies think, what you yourself have experienced in your prenatal life. In the thinking that you develop as a member of the social economic struggle, another human being in you is always thinking along with you, a deeper human being in you, as paradoxical as that may seem to you. Precisely when you feel like a member of an economic body, a deeper human being in you is thinking along with you. You are instructed to use your thinking to bring together external factors of life. You must think: What will be the price of this or that? How do I get one product, how do I get another product, and so on? In a sense, your thoughts flit over external facts; there is no spirituality in your thinking, only externals and material things. Precisely because externals and material things live in your thinking, because you have to experience things mentally, not just instinctively like an animal, what goes on in economic life, that is why another, deeper human being is constantly thinking about these things within you; he is the one who first continues the thoughts, he is the one who first forms the thoughts in such a way that they have an end, a context. And this is precisely the human being who plays a significant role in all that you carry with you into the supersensible world through death. However paradoxical it may appear to some, it is precisely the reflection on material things here in the world, to which man is forced, that arouses in him, because it is never finished, because it is never something closed, another inner spiritual life, which he carries through death into the supersensible world. Thus the feelings and impulses that we develop in economic life are more closely connected with our afterlife than people realize. To some people this may seem strange and paradoxical today; but it is, only transformed into consciousness, what developed in people in atavistic times of human evolution, precisely because the spiritual world entered into human instincts at that time. I would like to draw your attention to the following.

Among individual so-called primitive peoples, there are striking institutions. Now, we must not have the nonsensical and foolish idea of primitive peoples that today's ethnology, today's anthropology, has. Today's anthropology thinks: there are such primitive peoples, for example the indigenous Australians, who are at the most primitive stage of humanity, and today's civilized peoples were once like these primitive peoples today. — That is nonsense! The fact of the matter is that what we call primitive peoples today have descended into decadence; they have sunk from a higher level. It is just that today's primitive peoples have preserved within them the earlier times, which have become masked in the so-called civilized peoples. That is why there is still much to be studied in the so-called primitive peoples that existed in a different form in the times of ancient atavistic clairvoyance. And so there were, for example, the following institutions: in one tribe, the members of this tribe were divided into smaller groups; each of these smaller groups had a specific name that was borrowed from a plant or an animal that occurred within the area in which this group lived. The following was associated with this naming of smaller groups within larger contexts: for example, a group – now we use modern names just to make ourselves understood – a group that bore the name “Rye” had to ensure that rye was properly cultivated on that terrain so that the other people who did not have the name “Rye” could be supplied with rye. These people, who bore the name “Rye,” were responsible for overseeing the cultivation and distribution of rye. And the others, who had different names, assumed that they would be supplied with rye by this one group. Another group, for example, had the name “cattle”: they had the task of practicing cattle farming and providing the others with cattle and everything that went with it. These groups not only had the task of providing for the others, but at the same time the others were forbidden to cultivate the plant or animal in question, which was a right of the one totem, as it was said. This is the economic sense of the totem, which in the area where this totem prevailed was at the same time a mystery culture. Mystery culture, which, contrary to the dreams of modern man, is not only in higher regions, but which, precisely because of the conclusions of the gods, which could be researched by the members of the mysteries, ordered this human life down to the last detail. They organized the tribe according to totemic figures and totemic groups, and in so doing brought about a corresponding economic organization, in addition to revealing to people in a certain way how the spiritual world is constituted and how the spiritual world penetrates into earthly spiritual life, just as it was right for the times in question. In their way they took care of the legal life, which has only an earthly character, and in this way they prepared people here on earth through the order of economic life so that through death people could then enter into another world in which they had to develop connections that they could only prepare here on earth through their dealings with the extra-human beings of the other natural kingdoms. Under the guidance of their initiates, these people of old learned to place a true economic link in their cosmic life.

Later on, although it is not too difficult, this more or less became confused, even into Greek culture, and even into medieval culture, the instinctive threefoldness of the social organism can be demonstrated, demonstrated from this point of view, which I have now given, as the rudiments can still be found at least until the 18th century. Oh, this modern man is so comfortable with his thinking, he wants everything, everything to be presented as superficially as possible before his thinking! If one were to study the life of earlier times, not according to what is called history today and which is often a fable convenue, but according to how it really was, then one would see: There was an instinctive threefold structure; only in the one limb, in the spiritual life, did everything emanate from the spiritual center and thereby separate itself from mere state life.

When the Catholic Church was at its height, it already formed an independent link, and in turn organized the other earthly spiritual life as an independent link, founded schools, organized the education system, also founded the first universities, made the earthly spiritual life independent, and ensured that the state life was not permeated by the unlawful prince of this world. And in economic life, even in later times, there was at least a feeling that if fraternity was developed among people in economic life, something was being prepared that would continue in the life after death. That brotherliness among men is rewarded after death is indeed a selfish reinterpretation of the higher conceptions that were held in totemism, but at least there is still an awareness that brotherly life in human economic activity finds a spiritual continuation in the afterlife. Even the excesses in this field must be judged from this point of view. That excesses occur is human nature. The selling of indulgences is certainly one of the most monstrous excesses in this field. But it arose, even if only as an excess, from the realization that what man brings here in physical life in economic sacrifices has a significance for his after-death life. Even if it is a caricature of what really is, it arose as a caricature of the correct view of the significance of what we experience here by entering into a relationship with the beings of the other realms of the earth, the minerals, the plants, the animals. By entering into a relationship with other beings, we acquire something that only comes to full development in the after-death life. It is true that, with regard to what we are after death, we are still related to the lower, to animals, plants and minerals; but it is precisely through this experience of the non-human that we prepare something that is only to grow into the human after death. If you turn the idea around, you will understand it more easily, and you will more easily see how it is quite natural that what we experience with animals, plants and minerals is lived out in something on earth that unites human beings, that surrounds them like a spiritual air, a spiritual atmosphere in the earthly. What human beings experience among themselves only founds a pure etheric between birth and death.

What human beings experience in the subhuman, in economic life, only becomes human, only rises to the level of the humanly earthly, when we have passed through death.

This should be of the greatest interest and importance, especially for the anthroposophically oriented mind, for those who seek a deepening of life through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science: to recognize that this threefold social organism is concretely based simply on the fact that the human being is also a threefold being, in that, when he grows into the physical world as a child, he still bears something of what he experienced before birth, in that he bears something in himself that only has meaning between birth and death, and in that he, as it were, prepares under the veil of ordinary physical life here what in turn has supersensible meaning after death. What appears here as the lowest life, the life in the physical economy, here for the earth, is seemingly lower than the legal life, but this living through of the lower life compensates us at the same time by the fact that we gain time for our deeper human being, while we are in the lower economy, to prepare for the post-mortal life. By belonging with our soul to the life of art, religious life, educational life, or other spiritual life, we draw on the inheritance that we carry with us through birth into physical-earthly existence. But by degrading ourselves, as it were, to the subhuman through economic life, to the thinking that does not reach so high, we are compensated by preparing in our deepest inner being that which only after death reaches up into the human. This may sound paradoxical to modern man, because he likes to look at things one-sidedly and does not really want to have any idea that every thing unfolds its essence in life in two ways. What is high on one side is low on the other, what is low on one side is high on the other. In real life, I could also say in the reality of life, every thing always has its other side. Man would gain a better understanding of himself and the world if he were aware that every thing always has its other side. Sometimes it is unpleasant to be fully aware of this, it imposes various duties on us. For example, with regard to certain things we have to be wise, but we cannot develop this wisdom in relation to certain things without developing an equal amount of stupidity on another side. One always requires the other. And we should never consider a person to be completely stupid, even if he appears stupid to us in his outer life, without our being aware of it: in his subconscious there may be a deep wisdom that is only veiled to us. Reality is only revealed when this two-sidedness of everything real is done justice. And so it is: on the one hand, the life of spiritual culture appears to us as the highest; at the same time, it is the one in which we actually always overexploit, where we always live off what we bring in through our birth into physical existence. Economic life appears to us as the lowest link: it is only because it shows us the lowest aspect between birth and death. It gives us time to unconsciously develop that which is the spiritual side of economic life and which we carry into the supersensible world through death. This sense of belonging together in brotherhood with other people is what I mainly understand by the spiritual part of economic life.

Now, humanity urgently needs an understanding of these things if it wants to escape certain calamities that have arisen precisely because these things have not been taken into account. Within the intellectual leading personalities of the ruling classes, something has emerged — I spoke of it the day before yesterday — that has no power to radiate into the everyday. To acquire the right understanding of this point is especially important for the modern man. You see, the intellectual circles of the ruling classes have developed a certain moral worldview, a certain religious outlook. But this moral, this religious worldview is always to be held in a one-sided, idealistic way. It is not supposed to have the impact to penetrate into everyday life. In practice, this becomes apparent to you in that you can visit the familiar churches Sunday after Sunday and even more often: sermons will be preached to you, but they will continually fail to address the most pressing duties of the time. You will be told all sorts of things about what you should do out of a religious worldview, but these will lack any momentum. For when you leave the church and enter into everyday life, you cannot apply all that is preached there about love from person to person, what one should do, what the person who has just preached wants to experience. Where do you find an understanding, a connection between what the preacher, the moral teacher, says to his students and what happens in everyday life?

It was different in the times to which the totem cult refers: there, the initiates organized everyday life according to the will of the gods. It is an unhealthy state of affairs that today nothing is heard from the pulpits about the necessary organization of economic life. What is preached there is really like – I have often used this comparison – standing in front of a stove and saying: You stove, you stand here in the room. The way you are arranged in relation to the other objects in the room is your sacred duty to warm the room. So fulfill your sacred duty and warm the room. You can preach to the stove like this for a long time, but it won't warm the room! But you don't need to preach at all; instead, you can put wood or coal in and light it, and that way you will warm the room. So you can omit all moral teachings that merely talk about what a person should do for the sake of eternal bliss or for the sake of other things that belong to mere belief. So you can omit the sermons, which today mostly form the content of the pulpit speeches, but you cannot omit what is today real knowledge of the social organism. That would be the duty of those who want to educate the people, to build the bridge in practice from what lives and weaves through the world spiritually to what happens in everyday life. For God, the Divine, lives not only in what man dreams in the heights of the clouds, but in the most trivial everyday things. When you take the salt pot on the table, when you take a spoonful of soup to your mouth, when you buy something from your fellow human being for five pfennigs, the Divine lives in all things. And when one surrenders oneself to faith, on the one hand there is the coarse material, concrete, that which is of a lower nature, and on the other hand there is the divine-spiritual, which one should indeed keep quite far from the coarse material, concrete , because the one is sacred and the other profane, because the one is high and the other low, then one contradicts the innermost sense of a realistic world view: the impact of the highest, the sacred, down to the most mundane experiences of human beings.

This also characterizes what religious development has neglected up to our time, which only ever preaches to the stove that it should be warm, and which frowns upon entering into real, concrete spiritual knowledge. If only people everywhere would freely say what has been neglected by those who feel called to lead the spiritual life, then that alone would be a significant step towards what has to happen.

How often do we speak today of salvation, of grace, of that which is the object of faith? We speak in such a way as to make it extremely convenient for people: there are people with their human feelings. Christ Jesus once died at Golgotha and - the advanced theologians no longer believe in it today - rose again. But He does all this for Himself; people need do nothing but believe in it. — This is what many believe today, and they consider it a disturbance to their circles when people think differently. But it must be learned to think differently! A radical change must take place precisely in this area.

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One is tempted to say: Today we hear again the admonition of Christ or even that of John the Baptist: Change your minds, for the time of crisis is near. — People have become accustomed to assuming that there is a spiritual world somewhere, somewhere that takes care of them; to have religious preachers tell them that there is such a spiritual world, which is characterized as little as possible. People do not want to make an effort in their thoughts to also know something about the spiritual world, but just to believe in it. The time is past when that is allowed! The time must begin when people must know: Not just: I think – I also think perhaps about the supernatural – but: I must grant admission to the divine-spiritual powers in my thinking, in my feeling. The spiritual world must live in me, my thoughts themselves must be of a divine nature. I must give the God the opportunity to express Himself through me. — Then the spiritual life will no longer be mere ideology. That is the great sin of modern times, that the spiritual life has become lame ideology. And ideology is already today the theology, ideology is not only the proletarian, socialist world view. But people must recover from this ideology. The spiritual world must become real to them. And they must know that the spiritual world lives as a reality in one link of the social organism, as the inheritance from prenatal life, from the so-called spirit world; and that a spiritual element is preparing itself while we apparently submerge among people in economic life. It is precisely there, as compensation for this submergence, that which is to lead us back into the life that we enter by entering the spiritual world through death, if we live through it correctly, into more human, fraternal science here on earth.

A realistic view of life — that is what must come again. And he who consciously realizes that the things that must enter humanity today can be deepened for him by not merely developing anthroposophy as something that is only science, but by having it as something that penetrates all his perceptions, which permeates his whole perception of life, transforms it too, makes it so that he can enter as a worthy member into that which must begin with the present and which alone can become a salvation for the future of humanity.

These things are what is necessary for humanity, but also what has been neglected by humanity. Only by fearlessly and courageously putting ourselves in the place of those who have been neglected and in the place of those who are in need can anything beneficial be brought about for the present and the near future. That is why I wanted to add to what can be said publicly about the social problem today, here where we are among ourselves, what can be said from the point of view of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science; where we can include what protrudes from the immortal, from the supersensible life of the disembodied human being into this earthly life.

Of the social organism, only one part, the part that relates to the external state organization, is purely earthly. The other two parts are connected to the supermundane in two different ways. On the one hand, we are granted an earthly spiritual life that can be lived by us, I would say, in abundance, because it is, as it were, pressed out of the prenatal, supermundane spiritual life. And on the other hand, as physical human beings, we have to immerse ourselves in mere economic life, whereby we are connected with the animal world of the earth. But because we are not merely physical human beings, but because the soul is preparing for the next earthly lives and for the following supersensible lives in this body, that part of us that is not yet fully human here is also prepared through economic life, which leads the human being who must be involved in economic life upwards into humanity: the human being who must be involved in economic life. We have something of the superhuman in us, in that we can move within a social context that permeates earthly spiritual life. We have something of the mere human being in us by becoming citizens. We have something in us that compels us to descend below both, but we are at the same time compensated by the supersensible world in that what appears as the lowest link in social experience already prepares what in turn leads us up, in turn integrating us into the supersensible.

Reality is certainly not as superficial as one would sometimes like it to be, nor as easy to grasp. But on the other hand, it shows how human life goes through the most diverse phases, but how each phase brings new moments, new ingredients, new impulses into human life, which can only be given in these particular fields where they are given. Thus we see how the threads of the life we live here between birth and death intertwine with those threads that we draw by living life between death and a new birth. And everything fits together in the highest degree of meaning in this entire human life. What we do here in earthly life from human individual to human individual, what we do for a person here by giving him joy, by causing him suffering, by enriching his thoughts or impoverishing his thoughts, by teaching him this or that, - that is what our karmic, our fateful life prepares for the next earthly existence.

But we have to distinguish between what we need to prepare for the life that we develop immediately after death as a supersensible one. We are brought together here in certain social communities. We need to be led out of them again. We will be led out of it by something emerging from our mere economic life, from mere economics, that will guide us through the gate of death into the spiritual world, so that we do not remain in the social community in which we have settled here, but can be accepted into another one in the next life. In this way, the karmic threads intertwine meaningfully with those threads that place us in the general life of the world.

What can be gained from spiritual science through the connection of the supersensible with physical-earthly life for this threefold social organism seems to substantially deepen what must become the esoteric content of the threefold social organism. It seems to substantially deepen it. Of course, it is difficult for outsiders to understand this; no help is possible today. But anyone who is part of the anthroposophical movement should always absorb everything that can be established here on earth, and at the same time everything that connects us to the sphere into which we enter after our death, from which we came through our birth, and in which we have to seek those who have gone before us out of this world and to whom we have certain relationships. For it will be the most beautiful human achievement of all, precisely of anthroposophical deepening, that it teaches us to see through the two great mysteries of earthly life, birth and death, creating a bridge between the sensual and the supersensible, between the so-called living and the so-called dead, so that the dead becomes among us like the living and we can say of the living: Nothing but an other form of existence is that life which in the supersensible was ours before birth and which will be ours after death. It is dead here in the sense world, as the sense world is dead, in that we live through the supersensible. The things in the world are relative in relation to each other. And only when we see through these two sides of every reality do we penetrate into reality itself.

This is what I wanted to give you today as a supplement, a more esoteric supplement to the questions that are now so urgently needed to be discussed publicly, and in which discussion those who are close to the anthroposophical movement should particularly take part.

In response to a question that was not received, Rudolf Steiner remarked:

These things are such that one can truly say: this view of the social organism is a firm basis. And one has only to examine how it is incorporated into life in each individual case.

If you are familiar with the Pythagorean theorem, you will not ask: how does it justify itself in every detail? — You know, if you know it: it will be correct everywhere it can be applied, just as three times ten is thirty, everywhere you apply it: you will not have to ask whether it is correct and prove it. You have to see these things within yourself. So you will also find that in this view of social life, one starts from a certain basis that simply proves to be right; the other things that come then follow on from it correctly. The tax system, the property system, everything follows as a consequence. All this will become clear when you grasp the living social organism. And so it turns out that people, for example, will not be willing to send their children to the Free School. On the contrary, they will want to send them because they will have an interest in doing so.

And again, in the area where a relationship develops between each person and every person: It is necessary to be able to judge in the field of legal life, and no one would be elected to the representative body of the second link in the social organism who was not capable of judgment. Of course, something like this must then be examined: what relates from person to person, this taking an interest, this conscious standing within life, is maintained all by itself in the free organism, which will already become healthy.

Lecture for the Theological Association

Naturally I feel like a guest here in Norway and above all I have to thank the speaker most sincerely, who has just addressed such heartfelt words to me, and all of you who want to take an interest in some remarks that I will be able to make about the suggested problem in the short time available. I would like to say in advance that I actually feel doubly out of place within the theological movement, because I have always had to emphasize within the anthroposophical movement that anthroposophy does not want to be just any new religious foundation or even a sect, but that it actually wants to grow out of the scientific movement in general in the present day. It seeks to find the appropriate methods of research for the supersensible facts of human and world life. And only to the extent that the field of theology belongs to the general field of research is it also, so to speak, obliged, when asked, to contribute to theological research that which it believes it can bring to this area using the methods of supersensible research. That is why, when a large number of young theologians in Germany approached me, I said: I only want to help with what I can offer in the way of anthroposophy. But whatever is needed in a theological or religious movement today must be carried out by those personalities who are active in theological or religious life. The particular objection that is raised against anthroposophy from the standpoint of this life is that it seeks to ascend into the supersensible worlds by means of its research methods, that it seeks to develop certain powers of knowledge that otherwise lie latent in man in order to penetrate into the supersensible worlds by research. Theological circles, in particular, say that this is actually against religious sentiment, against religious piety, and that it must above all be rejected by Christian theology. And recently, what is meant has been expressed in such a way that it has been said that religion must work with the irrational, with the secret, which must not be unveiled by rationalism. It must work with that which does not want to be grasped, but which is to be revered as an incomprehensible mystery in deep, trusting reverence. The word has even been used: Christianity needs the paradox in order to be able to lead and educate the truly Christian religious life intimately enough and out of direct human trust.

If anthroposophy were to rationalize the irrational, in particular in the question of Christ Jesus, to pull down into sober rationality what is contained in the mystery of Golgotha, then the objections that are made in this direction would be justified. And these objections are complemented by yet another. Anthroposophy, because it is not Gnosticism, not mysticism, not unhistorical orientalism, looks squarely at the historical becoming in the development of humanity. Gnosticism is unhistorical, mysticism is unhistorical, all oriental world-views are, in a certain sense, unhistorical. Anthroposophy is thoroughly a Western world-view in relation to this

methodical point of view, and it takes the historical becoming as a real one, as one is accustomed to in the scientific life of the Occident. And so it is absolutely compelled to place the personality of Jesus in the historical life of humanity. It knows what the historical Jesus contains for humanity, and it is only compelled, for reasons that I would like to discuss today, to ascend from the human being Jesus, as observed in earthly life, to the supermundane , extraterrestrial, cosmic Christ-being, who embodied Himself in the man Jesus, and in a certain sense one can truly speak of Christ and Jesus as two separate beings.

It is said that what Anthroposophy has to say about the cosmic, even telluric Christ is actually irrelevant to the religious sensibilities of today's humanity, because when it comes to historical development, today's humanity wants to limit its view to the earthly, and the cosmic Christ is simply no longer needed alongside the historical Jesus.

Now, the first thing I will have to show is how Anthroposophy, in turn, must proceed in the face of world facts, and how it comes to a very special position regarding the Mystery of Golgotha from its research methods.

Anthroposophy seeks first of all to grasp in a very definite, clear and disillusioned way what has developed, especially since the middle of the 15th century, in Western humanity as “objective knowledge”, as I would like to call it. Through this objective knowledge, nature has already been explained, systematized, and understood in accordance with its laws in a magnificent way. The fact that the human being becomes rationalistic, I could also say abstract, in relation to knowledge is a concomitant, a subjective parallel phenomenon of a sound natural science. The world of thought increasingly takes on the character of mere images. If we go back even further than the 15th century, we find everywhere that the world of thought does not have the pictorial character, the abstract character that merely seeks to describe reality without containing it, which it has assumed since the mid-15th century, particularly since the time of Galileo, Giordano Bruno and so on. Today, at most, ideas represent a picture of reality to us. If we go back before the 15th century, man still has the feeling that a real spiritual reality is transported into himself when he devotes himself to the world of ideas. Man not only has the abstract world of ideas, he has the world of ideas imbued with spirit, permeated with spiritual reality.

In relation to rationalism, in relation to natural history, the more recent centuries have indeed achieved great things. And we see more and more how the other historical sciences are also being seized by the attitude and way of thinking that is prevailing there. And anyone who has followed the change in research methods in recent centuries, even in theology, can see that the research attitudes have been driven entirely in the direction of the natural sciences, because in modern times history has definitely taken on the character of a scientific way of thinking. And so Christology gradually became an historical “Life of Jesus” research. This is perfectly understandable in view of the entire course of the development of the spirit in modern times. One must realize that it was bound to happen. But it must also be understood that this direction, if pursued further, is at the same time likely to rob Christianity of Christ and to approach more and more to what even the historian, neutral with regard to religion, can give, such as Ranke, who, after all, included the personality of Jesus in the historical becoming as the noblest being, that has ever walked the earth. More and more, theology has approached historical research, and today we find a large number of theologians who, in their research attitude and methods, hardly differ much from historians of the rank of Ranke himself.

In contrast to this, anthroposophy asserts that certain powers of cognition, which remain latent in people in ordinary life and in ordinary science, of which one is not aware, but which are present in every human being, can be brought up can be brought forth from consciousness, that these insights then lead out of the mere world of the senses and lead to the fact that the human being can grasp a supersensible world with his cognition in the same way as the sense-gifted human being can grasp the world of the senses. In this way, through a treatment that is no longer representational, that has nothing to do with ordinary rationalism either, but that rather approaches a real experience, one comes to know the supersensible world itself.

Now it is very common to err and believe that Anthroposophy seeks to transfer the characteristic properties of knowledge, as they exist in science and rationalism, to the supersensible realm. It is therefore itself a rational system that erasing the irrational, the paradoxical, the mysterious, and demanding a logical assent to what it wants to see as the Mystery of Golgotha, and not a voluntary assent of trust, based on reverence, as must remain in religion. But now the whole picture of the world changes completely, and so does man himself, when one rises from the scientific, historical layer of knowledge to the supersensible layer of knowledge, if I may use the expression. If we want to present the most important characteristic — I can only hint at all these things — for the ordinary objective, scientifically recognized method today, it is this: for those who really honestly draw the final consequences of this natural science and this rationalism, it splits the world into two. One does not always pay attention to these two areas because one has a certain unconscious fear of drawing the final consequences. But anyone who, like me, has met people who have suffered deeply from this, I would say, two-pronged division of human nature, who have also gone to the last consequences of modern thinking with their minds, with their religious feelings, and who has seen what pain and what directional lack of soul, especially in relation to the deepest religious feeling, can be linked to this dualism of modern rationalistic natural science in its position towards man, will still be inclined to reflect on how this dualism has also led to something epistemological on religious ground. For science exerts too great an influence on the human mind. One feels too strongly responsible to its views not to want to emulate the other scientific methods, if they are to be reliable, precisely in the scientific-historical-realistic method.

But where does this method lead in its final consequence? It leads to the emergence of a deep chasm, one that is truly unbridgeable for external, objective knowledge, between what we have to recognize as scientific necessity and what we grasp in moral-ethical life, what our actual human dignity first guarantees us. And the moral-ethical life, when it is properly experienced, appears to us as a direct emanation of divinity, thus leading us directly to religious devotion, to religiosity itself. But the deep gulf between this ethical-religious life and that which knowledge of nature reveals to the physical man, can indeed be veiled by a mist for human observation, because there is a certain inward unconscious fear, but for the one who approaches human nature quite honestly, it cannot be bridged with natural science itself. On the one hand, we have the justified scientific hypothesis, the Kant-Laplace theory, regarding the beginning of the Earth. Today it is modified. Naturally I will not speak about it in detail. But even if it is modified today, it stands as something that, in the origin of the world, is indifferent to the development of humanity, in which the ethical-divine ideals arise, to which one devotes oneself as to a certainty that lives only in images. And if we look at the end of the earth from a scientific point of view, we are presented with a justified scientific hypothesis, the theory of entropy, which speaks of heat death at the end of the earth. So, out of scientific necessity, we have placed man between the Kant-Laplacean world nebula and the heat death. There he lives in the midst of it all, devoting himself to his ethical and religious ideals, but ultimately finding them unmasked as illusions, for at the end of the evolution of the earth stands nevertheless the heat death, the great corpse, which buries not only that which exists in physical and etheric form in the evolution of the earth, but also all that is contained in ethical ideals.

It is truly not out of religious rationalism, but precisely out of the knowledge that arises in me in an elementary, cognitive way, that I must reckon with the fog with which people deceive themselves about what approaches them and can become the most painful experiences of the soul that a person can be exposed to, I must also reckon with the fact that people have sought the excuse, which was not yet present in all ancient religions and also in the early days of Christian development: to distinguish between knowledge and belief. For knowledge gradually becomes a Moloch through the power it must exert on the human mind, and must gradually devour faith if that faith cannot hold on to a higher, truly supersensible knowledge, which in turn can penetrate to something like the mystery of Golgotha.

And here Anthroposophy must point out how what is given by the rigid, natural-scientific necessity becomes a mere phenomenon for its supersensible knowledge, how the world that we see with our eyes and hear with our ears is reduced to mere phenomenalism. Today I can only report on these things more or less, but anthroposophy seeks to prove that in what we see we are not dealing with a material world at all, but that we are dealing with a world of phenomena. And in supersensible knowledge the sense world, as it were, loses some of its rigid density, but on the other hand the ethical-religious world also loses some of its abstractness, its remoteness from sense necessity. The two worlds approach each other. The ethical-religious world becomes more real, the sense-physical world becomes more phenomenal. And not through speculation, not through an abstract philosophical method, but through a real experience, a world is built that lies beyond our ordinary sensory world. And this world, which is sought, no longer has that contrast between the ideal and the real. Both have approached each other. I would say that the laws of nature become moral in this world, and the moral laws condense into a natural event. And just to mention one thing: although anthroposophy also posits something like a heat death at the end of the earth, for it that which man carries within him as moral and religious ideals becomes something like a real germ, which, as with plants, carries the life of this year over into the next year. In this respect, anthroposophy comes very close to the paradoxical in relation to modern science. However, I dare to say it anyway because I believe that it will cause less offence in the circle of theologians than in the circle of rigid natural scientists, that anthroposophical spiritual knowledge recognizes how the so-called law of the conservation of force and of matter no longer holds good in this world, which is described as supersensible, and how this law of the conservation of matter and of force has only relative validity in the world which appears as the world of nature and which is grasped by rationalism.

Anthroposophy teaches us to recognize that not only matter is present and transforms in the human organism, and teaches us to recognize not only metamorphoses of matter. Outside of the human organism, in the rest of nature, the law of conservation of energy and matter applies, but in the human being itself, anthroposophy teaches us a complete disappearance of matter and a resurrection of new matter out of mere space. And anthroposophical spiritual science may, if I may use a trivial comparison, point out that the ordinary idea of matter and force in the human organism is like someone saying that he has counted how many banknotes one carries into a bank and how many one carries out again, and that if one considers long enough periods of time, the amounts are the same. This is also how one proceeds when studying the law of the conservation of matter and energy: one sees that as much energy goes into matter as comes out. But just as one cannot assume that the banknotes as such are transformed in the bank, but rather that independent work must be done there – the banknotes can even be re-stamped and completely new ones can come out – so it is also in the human organism: there is destruction of matter and force, creation of matter and force.

This is not something that is fancied lightly, but is recognized through rigorous anthroposophical research. What applies to the external world, the law of conservation of matter and energy, also applies to the intermediate stage of development; but if we go to the end of the earth and may assume with a certain justification the heat death, then we do not see a large cemetery, but we see that everything that man has developed in the way of moral and ethical ideals, of divine spiritual convictions, can truly unite within him with the newly emerging material, and that consequently one is dealing with a real germ of further development. The death of the outer material is overcome by what is emerging in man.

In anthroposophical spiritual science, we find something that clearly shows how ethical and moral forces are also directly effective within the material. In the case of humans, this initially remains subconscious for ordinary consciousness. But, to say it again, for the consciousness that is attained in anthroposophical research, one definitely comes to recognize that the ethical-moral-religious is condensed into reality, and that which lives in the external material dissolves into mere phenomenal existence. In this way, the two worlds are brought closer together. But they are also brought closer when one looks at the way in which man now behaves in this higher knowledge. We are accustomed to speak and judge logically when we apply ordinary rationalism to the external natural world and thus proceed from logical categories that are quite justified for the external sensual world. Anthroposophical spiritual science also departs from this kind, simply out of objective necessity. It must depart because it experiences and observes different things with its methods of knowledge. And two concepts arise in particular — many other concepts arise as well, but these two are particularly important to us today — which are otherwise only known indirectly, as objects, but which are not applied as logical concepts are applied. In knowledge, too, that which is otherwise formal and ideal becomes expression, revelation, and reality is approached.

The two concepts that arise are those of health and illness. You will all agree with me that it is actually impossible to speak of “healthy” and “sick” for the logical categories in the ordinary sense world, of what is not only true but is recognized because it is healthy. In organic nature, we recognize health as a principle of growth and development; we recognize sickness as deformation, as an inhibition of normal development. But we do not speak of healthy and sick when we apply logical categories. When we ascend from ordinary objective knowledge to that which anthroposophical spiritual science applies, then we must begin to speak of healthy and sick. For observation compels us to find such, no longer ideas and concepts, but experiences — because healthy and sick are experiences — in the supersensible world, into which we enter. What in the world of sense-perception we designate by the mere abstraction 'true', we must have in the supersensible world as health. And what in the world of sense-perception we designate as 'untrue', as 'incorrect', we must have in the supersensible world as disease.

And here, not by forcibly trying to draw it about, but through the very honest and sincere progress of research, Anthroposophy is offered the possibility of linking up contemporary research with the New and Old Testaments. The gulf between research and the Old and New Testaments is really bridged. A new path to understanding the mystery of Golgotha is being created. Because something is being offered that is now very paradoxical. As I said, I can only give a more or less objective report today, but what I am presenting to you in a few lines is only the result of years of research, research that did not start from religious prejudices – please allow me to note that. I myself started out with a scientific education, grew up as free-thinking as possible in my youth, and brought no religious feelings with me from my youth. Through research, through what is the ultimate consequence of scientific research, I have been pushed to say what I believe I can say from the anthroposophical side about the origin of religious problems. So there is really no question of prejudice here, subjectively either. But one really does get to know nature more precisely through anthroposophical research – especially when one does research entirely in the style and spirit of science. Of course, one does not always admit this and wants to contaminate science, as it were, with all sorts of mysticism, which is unjustified: one really does learn to recognize nature more precisely, not only in terms of its phenomena and laws, but also by being able to form certain ideas about its quality, about what it actually is. And then you say to yourself: what is going on out there in nature also continues within people. What has happened outside the skin is also present inside the human skin. We find natural processes externally. We find natural processes internally. But – and now comes the paradox that is revealed by anthroposophical research – all ascending natural processes that tend towards fertility have only limited validity in humans; in humans they become processes of degeneration and destruction. And the great, powerful sentence arises from truly diverse observation of nature and from diverse anthroposophical consideration of the human being: Nature is allowed to be nature outside of the human skin; within the human skin, that which is nature becomes that which opposes nature.

Once one has resorted to supersensible methods of research, one sees how those forces that are constructive in outer nature become destructive in the human being, and how these destructive forces in the human being become the bearers of evil. This is the difference that anthroposophy has to show in contrast to mere idealism: anthroposophy can say that Nature is allowed to remain nature; the human being is not allowed to remain nature, not even in the body. For everything in the human being that is nature acting as nature continues to do so, becomes pathological and thus evil. Nature outside of us is neutral with regard to good and evil; within us it is also destructive in the body, causing disease and evil. And, as the anthroposophical view shows, we only maintain ourselves against that which reigns as evil in us by relating to external nature in the life between birth and death in such a way that we only allow it to reach the point of a reflection of external nature, that we do not grasp in our consciousness what organically reigns in the depths of our human being as the source of evil. We fulfill our consciousness by receiving sensory perceptions from the outside. We receive the external sensory impressions, but we only guide them to a certain point. They must not go any lower. There these external natural impressions would have a poisoning effect, as supersensible knowledge shows. We reflect them back. In this way a boundary is created between the organs of consciousness in the human being, which absorb external nature, and the place where nature continues, where it develops its constructive forces in the human being. The conscious processes do not penetrate below this boundary, but are instead reflected back and form our memory, our recollection. And that which lives in our memory is external nature reflected back, which does not penetrate deeper into us. Just as a ray of light is reflected back from a mirror, so the image of nature, not nature itself, is reflected back. For if man could bring himself to realize what lies behind his inner mirror, what lies down there where nature in him becomes evil, then he would become an evil being through the rule of nature in him.

But we cannot come to a full sense of self, to a self-contained self-awareness; this becomes quite clear to us when we limit ourselves to the mirroring images, to the memories, to the mere reflection of the external nature. What we summarize as self-awareness, what comes to life in us as I, can only come from our corporeality, it originates in human nature. Therefore, rationalism becomes just as neutral towards good and evil as the laws of nature. But if that which constitutes human self-awareness were to spread beyond the other part of the human soul, then in the present period of human life, with the awakening of the ego, we would have to have an irresistible inclination towards evil, towards that which is present in us as destructive natural forces. And now a significant insight arises that leads into the religious realm. The human being — as can be seen from the ordinary physical world from a supersensible point of view — who clearly abandons himself to all that is the working of nature, to all the forces that permeate natural phenomena, comes to say to himself: atheism is not merely a logical inaccuracy, atheism is really an illness. Not a disease that can be diagnosed in the usual way, but anthroposophical spiritual science can speak of it, because it gets the concepts of “healthy and sick” for the mere concepts of “right or wrong” from its supernatural point of view, that something morbid is present in the human being's composition of fluids, which is no longer accessible to external physiology and biology, when the human being says from his or her soul: There is no God. — For the healthy human nature — although it can become evil, but the evil remains precisely in the subconscious —, it says: There is a God.

But in this awareness: there is a God – which is the direct expression of true human health, lies only that confession of God, which I would call the Father confession. Nothing else can we gain from delving into nature, from experiencing nature, than the Father consciousness.

Therefore, for those who remain within the bounds of modern science, nothing else can happen but that they come to the Father Consciousness, and the Son, the Christ Consciousness, is actually more or less lost from the series of divine entities, even if they do not admit it. And the fundamental character of Harnack's “Essence of Christianity” is, after all, that it says that it is not the Son who belongs in the Gospels, but only the Father, and the Son is only the one who sent the teaching of the Father through the Gospels into the world.

This view nevertheless gradually leads away from the real, true Christianity. For if one wants to retain Christianity, one must be able to add to the separate experience of the Father, which one attains in this way if one really has healthy human nature, the experience of the Son. This son-experience, however, is none other than that which arises, not from the experience of nature, but from the experience of something in man that exists above nature in him, an experience that belongs to what has nothing to do with nature, in contrast to which nature fades away to mere phenomenality. And then the possibility arises of adding the son-experience to the father-experience.

Just as the Father-experience is simply an experience of perfect, harmonious health, so the Son-experience is the fact that is inwardly experienced when man realizes that, in order to ascend to full consciousness of self, he must develop this consciousness of self in earthly life, and that this consciousness of self itself is thoroughly natural. And if he does not want to surrender it to evil, then this I must awaken within earthly life itself to a permeation with divine-spiritual content. It must become truth: Not I, but the Christ in me.

It must become truth because the I, which, as it is initially experienced, can still be within the experience of the Father, must by all means be transformed, metamorphosed. Man does not need to become ill from what the outer nature merely reflects, where it does not enter his consciousness himself, but only in the reflected images, in the reflections. But man must become ill in relation to his true human nature if he cannot, through his own freedom, find the cosmic power that does not merely behave like the source of what is there as healthy nature, but what becomes an ill being in man, if he cannot rise to that which now recognizes the necessary illness through the emergence of the I. The rest of the soul life could possibly remain healthy, but the firmness of the ego would have to make this soul life sick if the human being could not encounter in life, in the inner, sense-free experience, the being that can be found here on earth, but which is not of earthly nature, which can only be found through the free deed of the soul, and whose finding is therefore quite different from the finding of the father.

In Western Europe, the difference between these two experiences, the Father-experience and the Son-experience, is emphasized very little. If you go east and study something like the philosophy of the Russian philosopher Solowjow, then you will find that he actually speaks like a person of the first Christian centuries, only that he dresses what he says in modern philosophical formulas. He speaks in such a way that one clearly notices: he has a special experience of the Father and a special experience of the Son. He has an instinctive feeling for what must be recognized again from modern spiritual research: that one is born out of the Father, that it is a sickness not to recognize the Father, but that for the human being endowed with an I there must be a healing process, a supermundane Healer, and that is the Christ. Not to experience the Father means to be inwardly ill; not to experience the Christ means to see misfortune enter into one's life. The Father-question is a question of cognition. The Son-question is a question of destiny, is a question of good and ill luck. And only those epochs have been able to gain a sufficient conception of the way in which the Christ enters our lives that have regarded him as physician, as universal physician. For supersensible-anthroposophical research this is not a mere phrase, it is not something that has only allegorical and symbolic meaning: Christ the physician, Christ the savior or healer, the one who frees the I from the danger from which the Father cannot free it, because what is healthy can also become sick. And through the consciousness of self, health would have to be lost. What the Father cannot do, He has handed over to the Son. In a separate experience, the Christ enters into human consciousness quite apart from the Father.

And spiritual-scientific anthroposophical research can justify this experience quite scientifically and methodically. But here, first of all, something would arise that I would like to call: the eternally present Christ. We find him when we seek him deep enough in our soul being, we find him as an entity that we cannot extract from our own soul. We find him as we objectively find an external natural phenomenon outside of us. We encounter him after our birth in the course of our human development. We have to extract him from our moral perception. There he is the ever-present Christ.

But once one has found this ever-present Christ, once one has justified him before anthroposophical research, then one enters into historical research differently than one did before. For that is the peculiar thing: when one ascends to the higher consciousness, one must first descend again to the ordinary consciousness. One cannot investigate the world of the senses in a higher consciousness. That would lead to nothing but empty talk. He who would develop only a higher consciousness, and so would know only what anthroposophy is, should certainly not speak about natural science, for he who wishes to speak about natural science must also know nature scientifically, in the way natural science investigates. Only then can he imbue the findings of natural science with the insights of supersensible research. A layman, a dilettante in natural science, is not permitted to talk about natural science, no matter how well versed he is in the knowledge of the supersensible worlds. The supersensible worlds have fundamentally the same significance for the sensory worlds as oxygen has when it is outside the lungs. The lungs are what nature is. Spiritual science must first be poured into natural science if natural science is to be fertilized.

But another field now presents itself, again not as a result of religious prejudice. We can arrive at it without historical consideration, without the help of the Gospels. It is what I would call the epoch of human development, which coincides with the Mystery of Golgotha.

If someone who does not penetrate to supersensible concepts and ideas can approach the Mystery of Golgotha, then he is tempted to proceed more and more merely in an outwardly naturalistic-historical way and to transform the Christ Jesus into the mere personality of Jesus. The one who rises to anthroposophical spiritual research finds the necessity everywhere to first penetrate what presents itself to him in the field of nature and in the field of ordinary history. He finds this not only in the historical mystery of Golgotha. The higher concepts can be applied directly and without prejudice to this. One can grasp what has taken place in the sensory world, as it has taken place, directly with supersensible research. And then one comes to the following. Then one sees that the development of the I, of which I have spoken to you, was not always present in the development of humanity. One finds, for example, that the further back we go in the development of speech, the more and more the I-designation is contained in the verbs, and that the I-designation for the self only occurs later. But this is only an external fact. Anyone who studies the psychology of history by permeating it with supersensible views will find that the ego experience was not there until around the 8th or 7th century BC, that it then slowly emerged, that the historical development in human history actually tends towards what one must describe as the dawning of the ego.

I believe that the dawn of this self was fully felt in Greek life, not only in the fact that people were aware that this self comes from nature and is therefore subject to nature, thus killing people when it develops for itself alone. That is why people in Greece really felt that it was better to be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of shadows. That was a thoroughly sincere feeling. But it was felt in another way as well. Anyone who really studies the great Greek playwrights, not with the superficiality with which it is so often done today, knows that they wanted to be doctors at the same time, that they wanted to shape the drama in such a way that the human being could heal through catharsis. The Greeks sensed something of the healing power in art.

And when we move from this age of historical development to the Roman world, we feel how the content of the human soul in religious life, in state life and in public life otherwise stiffens into abstract concepts. We find in humanity the great danger of becoming ill from the development of the ego. And we feel what it actually meant – I am not playing with words, although it may appear so, but it is the result of anthroposophical research – that in the Orient the “therapists” appeared, a certain order that set itself the task of really bringing sick humanity to recovery.

But what we see taking place in the course of historical development is that humanity did not wither and fall ill, as one would have had to assume if one had really looked impartially at the continuation of what was present in humanity as an impulse before the 7th, 8th and so on pre-Christian centuries. It does not wither, it does not become ill, it takes up an ingredient that has a healing effect from within. An historical therapy is taking place.

Those who have no feeling for the fact that the Old Testament and also the other ancient religions do indeed point out that the process of human development is a becoming ill through sin, those who do not see this becoming ill through sin, cannot perceive the radiance of something coming from outside the earth, from outside the telluric, and giving the earth a new impulse, just as the soil is given a new impulse by the fruit germ. One learns to understand how from that time on a fertilizing seed from supermundane worlds is poured in as a healing seed, for earthly humanity was truly becoming ill. And one learns to see how that which is cosmic, which is not merely telluric, intervenes in the evolution of the earth. And equipped with this insight, with the insight of a being who, as the great invisible therapist, intervenes in historical development, one follows the personality of Jesus of Nazareth. There it emerges, and even without being influenced by the Gospels, one finds it if one seeks it with the right star, not with prejudices, but with something that is the shining of an inner light.

There are really two ways of approaching it: one is to take all of science, not only the science that knows merely in the abstract what is right and what is wrong, but also the science that knows in the historical becoming what is healthy and what is sick, and to approach the Mystery of Golgotha as the three wise men or magi of the Orient approached it with the ancient science of astrology. But one can also approach it with a simple human heart, with human feeling.

When one has encountered the ever-present Christ, whom one finds equipped with the organ in which the ever-present Christ says in a Pauline way: Not I, but the Christ in me makes me whole, and gives me back from death to life — then one finds in the history of mankind the man Jesus, in whom the Christ really lived. Thus the supermundane Christ-Being, the Healer, the great Therapist, flows together with the simple man from Nazareth, who could not have been other than simple, who could speak in his outer words to the poorest of the poor, who could also speak in his words to sinners — that is to say, to the sick — but who spoke to them words that were not merely filled with had been fulfilled in humanity up to that point – for then they would have remained as sick as they had become in Roman times, because they were permeated with mere abstractness – He spoke words of eternal life to them, which need not speak to the mind, which can speak to the heart, to that which is irrational.

Thus, one gets to know the personality of Jesus of Nazareth, and one learns to recognize all the wonderful aspects that are described to us in the Gospel of Luke. But one is also led to all that the Gospel of John describes from inner experience about the healer, about the therapist, who is also the living Logos, the healing Logos. One learns to connect the synoptic gospels with the gospel of John at the same moment when one no longer approaches historical research with the rationalistic concepts of formally correct or incorrect, but when one approaches historical development with the higher concepts of healthy and sick. Then the “human being Jesus” loses nothing. For in that He is the one who is first chosen by the extraterrestrial being to take up within Himself what is the Christ-healing impulse, He has no need of all the wisdom of antiquity, which, after all, has only developed within the process of illness process, so that humanity could not recognize the divine through wisdom, but could only have recognized the external-natural in a morbid way through wisdom. One learns to recognize the one who, through fertilization from above, has become the being who walked the soil of Palestine. One learns to look at the personality of Jesus as the outer shell for the extraterrestrial Christ-being. One learns to recognize that the earth would have lost its meaning, that it would have perished in disease, if the great recovery through the mystery of Golgotha had not occurred.

Nothing irrational or paradoxical is taken from Christianity; rather, man is led back to that which cannot be grasped by reason, but only by living knowledge, which is attempted to be brought to man through anthroposophical research. On the contrary, it can be seen that the research into the life of Jesus has gradually become rationalistic, that for many people the “simple man from Nazareth” has already become the only one, that they cannot find the Christ again. But one cannot find the Christ through mere logic, even if it is historical logic. One can only find the Christ if one is able to follow the historical process with the in this respect higher concept of healthy and sick. Then one really comes to see that the sickness that would have gradually come over the human being through the awakening of the ego would have had to lead to the death of the spirit. For through the spreading of the I, which comes out of the body, the human being would have become more and more a part of nature. Nature would have poured itself out over his soul. The human being would gradually have succumbed to what then is his earthly death and finally the heat death of the earth. If we understand the impact of the Mystery of Golgotha as giving the Earth a new meaning, then we find that the historical development through the man Jesus, through his death on the cross and through his resurrection, is precisely what has been given to the Earth anew from the heavens. We learn to recognize what it means when the saying resounds: This is my beloved Son, today he is born to me. One learns to recognize that a truly new time is dawning for the Earth. One learns to recognize how people must gradually educate themselves to understand what has actually come into the evolution of mankind through the Mystery of Golgotha. And one wonders: how does this Mystery of Golgotha continue to work?

Well, at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha was taking place on earth, there was still something of what was on earth in ancient times: a certain instinctive knowledge. This was present in man without the development of the ego having taken place. The older human being did not have a clearly defined ego, but he had an instinctive knowledge. This had come to him through an instinctive, divine inspiration. In ancient times, this was the healing, the original therapeutic revelation. This original revelation faded more and more. The human being spread his I over his being. Precisely because of this, the human being became more and more ill. But the last remnants of the old clairvoyant, instinctive knowledge of the spiritual worlds were still there. Such remnants of ancient visions were present in the apostles, were present in the Gnostics, and in some others, even if they were not perfect enough. So it happened that with the last legacies of real ancient clairvoyance, Christ was still recognized, that it was still known that an extraterrestrial being had appeared in Jesus that had not been on earth before.

Paul had this experience most intensely. As Saul, he was in a certain way initiated into all the secrets that one could be initiated into from the dying embers of the old light of wisdom. Out of this dying old light of wisdom, he fought against Christ Jesus. In the moment when a vision arose from his inner being, in the moment when the Christ arose for him as the eternal presence, he also turned to the cross on Golgotha. The inner Christ experience brought him to the outer Christ experience. And so he was allowed to call himself an apostle alongside the others, the last of the apostles. Just as the apostles and disciples were still able to rise to the Christ experience through their inheritance from ancient times of clairvoyance, and to understand the resurrection, so too could Paul understand it. But with the spread of the ego, such understanding has increasingly declined. I would like to say: Theosophy has increasingly become theology. Through logic, man steps out of his natural existence, but enters into his development of the ego, which, however, ultimately leads to the disease we have been talking about.

This development must return to where it came from if it is not to lose the understanding of Christ. It must return to the possibility of recognizing Christ as a supersensible, supermundane being, so that it can correctly evaluate the personality of Jesus. We therefore also understand what took place after the time of the apostles, the apostolic fathers. We comprehend that struggle, that living struggle through the centuries, under the dying embers of the old knowledge and under the gradual emergence of self-awareness, in order to be able to look at the historical Christ.

Anthroposophy does not want to found a new religion or be sectarian, but when it simply goes its way and rises to supersensible knowledge, then it encounters the Mystery of Golgotha among the facts of the earth, and indeed as that which gives the earth its meaning in the first place. And it teaches how to recognize through beholding what mere reason must inevitably lose sight of. She can, in turn, add to the outer historical personality of Jesus the inner divine being of Christ, through a path of knowledge that is not rationalistic. And one comes to the fact that the concept of Christ Jesus becomes more complete, only such that humanity must conquer through freedom.

One might be tempted to say that he can appear in the same way as the poor shepherds who first intuit the eternal Christ within themselves and then seek him outwardly in the child Jesus. However, it is not only possible to come to Christ Jesus through the poor shepherds, as many believe, because then science would emerge as the Moloch that would devour this naive belief. By truly developing science, one can also find the star that leads to Bethlehem again. Just as the simplest human mind can find the Christ in the innermost experience, if it only rises not only to reason, but to the feeling of inner sickness, then out of this consciousness of sickness, which is essentially the real feeling of the consciousness of sin, the Christ-experience, the meeting with Christ, can arise in a very naive way. But science cannot lead away from this experience, because when this science, as it must in all other fields, rises to supersensible vision, then the highest science, like the simplest human mind, finds Christ in Jesus.

And this is what Anthroposophy would like to accomplish in a modest way. It does not want to take away the mystery that is sought in reverent trust by the simple human mind, because the path that Anthroposophy takes may ascend to the higher regions of knowledge, but it does not lead to rationalism. As I have already indicated, it must steer clear of the pitfalls of irrationality and paradox. It must add the vital element of health and disease to the abstract right and wrong. It must add the great historical therapy to mere physical therapy.

Then this anthroposophical research, if it rises to the realization to which it wants to rise, will lead to the same thing that can be attained in the first place as the true secret, in silent trusting reverence, precisely as that which must remain unknown. For why do we speak of this unknown? Well, when you know a person not only from descriptions, when you do not just believe in his existence, but when you are led before his face, you come to see. But seeing does not become rationalistic because of that. The irrationality of the person before whom we are led does not cease. This person remains a mystery to us, because he has an intensive-infinite within him. We could not exhaust him with any ratio. Nor does anthroposophical knowledge exhaust the Christ, although it strives towards it with all longing and seeks to arrive there with all its means of knowledge, to see this Christ, not just to believe in him. He does not cease to be a being that cannot be absorbed by reason, even in vision. And just as little as a human being needs to be deprived of the earthly veneration that we show to every single human being, who remains a mystery even when we are led before his face, so the mystery of Golgotha remains a mystery; it is not dragged down into the dryness and sobriety and logism of the rational by anthroposophy. The irrational and paradoxical aspects of Christianity should not be erased by the Christ of Anthroposophy, but rather the irrational and paradoxical should be seen. And one can have just as much childlike, just as deep, and perhaps greater, childlike reverence for that which is seen as for that which one is merely supposed to believe in. Therefore, Anthroposophy is not the death of faith, but the reviver of faith. And this is particularly evident in the unravelling that Anthroposophy wants to give to the mystery of Golgotha, the connection of Christ with the personality of Jesus.

All this, however, is of course the subject of extensive research that has been going on for years, and yet it is only just beginning. And I must ask you to excuse me if I have tried to give you only a few guidelines in this already all too long lecture. But these guidelines may at least suggest that anthroposophy does not want to descend into the rationalism of ordinary knowledge and reveal the mystery of Golgotha without reverence, but that it wants to lead to it with all reverence, in all religious devotion, yes, in a deepened religious devotion, which is deepened because we only feel the right awe when we stand in direct contemplation before the cross of Golgotha. In this way, anthroposophy does not want to contribute to some kind of killing, but to a new revival, to a new inspiration of Christianity, which seems to suffer painfully from rationalism, which is fully justified for the external natural science.

This evening is to be dedicated to a poet who sought to intervene in certain secrets of poetic creation more meaningfully than he believed had been done by his time. We would like to draw attention to the reviver of the Song of the Nibelungs, to Wilhelm Jordan, who reached the height of his creative powers in the middle of the 19th century and at the beginning of the last third of the 19th century, a poet of whom it can truly be said that he has been little appreciated, especially in terms of his intentions, like so many similar artistic phenomena.

Wilhelm Jordan tried to use the material of the Nibelungenlied to simultaneously elevate the nature, I would say the essence, the art form of the Nibelungenlied to the level of contemporary poetry. I will then, when Dr. Steiner has presented some samples of Wilhelm Jordan's poetry, try to shed some light on the value and significance of this attempt to renew an old form of poetry from the point of view of our spiritual-scientific-artistic world view in a final reflection this evening. But before that, we want to let some samples pass before our souls, which should illustrate to us how Wilhelm Jordan strove to renew the old way of writing poetry from the inner power of language.

We know, of course, — for who should not be familiar with the actual content of the Nibelungen saga — how this Nibelungen saga expresses the nature, deeds, feelings and desires of people long ago. To what extent such human nature, human will and human deeds are expressed through the Song of the Nibelungs is what we will talk about later. But each of us knows that two figures are central to the Song of the Nibelungs: two female figures, Kriemhilde from Burgunderland and Brunhilde from Isenstein, from far across the sea. We know that Kriemhilde was to be married to Siegfried of the Lower Rhine, and we know that this marriage took place under difficult circumstances. We know that Kriemhilde's brother, Gunther, wants to woo Brunhilde, but that Brunhilde is very difficult to win, and Gunther is not the kind of person that Brunhilde would choose. But Gunther promises Siegfried of the Lower Rhine that he will give him Kriemhilde as a wife if Siegfried will help him, Gunther, in his courtship of Brunhilde. And Siegfried is – we will talk about this later – the strong hero who can overcome the almost invincible Brunhilde in battle. But Siegfried is also, one might say, a hero shrouded in occult forces, and this is how it comes about that when Gunther is to win Brunhilde in battle, Siegfried, having made her invisible by occult means, the magic hood, can assist him, and that it is actually Siegfried who can overcome Brunhilde. And Gunther, who is considered the conqueror because no one saw Siegfried, the real victor, at his side, can lead Brunhilde home to Worms.

And once again it is Gunther who has to fight with Brunhilde when she is already his wife. But again Siegfried has to stand up for him, and Siegfried takes the ring and belt from Brunhilde, while she has to believe that Gunther took them off her. But this is the reason why the most violent jealousy breaks out between the two, between Kriemhilde and Brunhilde. All this is so well known that I do not need to tell it at length. I would like to say that it is also clearly and distinctly presented to us in the Song of the Nibelungs, how, little by little, events make Brunhilde more and more jealous of Kriemhilde, and how this finds a kind of echo in the heart of Kriemhilde. We see the flames of rivalry between the two female personalities looming ominously. This is particularly evident when Kriemhilde, in possession of the ring and belt, Brunhilde's jewelry, shows them to Brunhilde and can prove from this possession that Siegfried, her husband, is the real conqueror of Brunhilde, and that she basically has a weakling

as her husband. The thought arises in Brunhilde that Siegfried must die because, in a sense, he has betrayed her. He should never have given the ring and belt to Kriemhilde, he should never have betrayed the secret that was only meant to be between him, Siegfried, and Brunhilde.

All this is also presented to us in a certain way in the Song of the Nibelungs. But if we follow all the motifs of the Nibelungenlied, something remains incomprehensible to us. This incomprehensible aspect becomes immediately understandable if we think of the Nibelungenlied as supplemented by what is no longer in the Nibelungenlied, but what old legends from even more remote times tell us was the time when the Nibelungenlied was written: if we pay attention to how is fundamentally the representative of an ancient being, a Valkyrie, how she is placed, as it were, this Brunhilde, as a later embodiment of an older powerful being, a Valkyrie presence, and how all this affects the present. As I said, it is not explicitly stated in the Song of the Nibelungs, but it is peculiar to the older saga.

If we take this from the older saga, we understand the demonic peculiarity of Brunhilde, but we also understand that in the events of the Song of the Nibelungs, something great and more significant is taking place than what can otherwise take place between personalities as personalities in the world. In a later incarnation, Brunhilde appears to us as having become, as it were, less than she was when she was a Valkyrie. Yet in her soul life she brings with her that which makes her a demonic being. But something similar appears in Siegfried. Here too we would like to say: let us see how Siegfried was embodied in ancient times, when he was still another human being, from whose being he brought something into the Siegfried incarnation. This enabled him to overcome Brünnhilde, who is also more than the Brünnhilde who lives in the earthly body. But this brings us face to face with Siegfried, as if in him that which makes a man a man, the power of the sun, was more developed in a previous incarnation than could be developed in a personality during the time in which Siegfried lived as Siegfried. Just as the power of the Earth Mother lived more in Brunhilde than she could live in a personality, in a female personality, during the time when Brunbilde appears as Brunhilde.

Thus the incarnated souls, the personalities, stand before us as mysterious beings. And so we understand that all this mystery, which ties in with many old legends and old forces that are not contained in the Song of the Nibelungs itself, is what Wilhelm Jordan wanted to bring out when he tried to depict what lives in the events, not in the Song of the Nibelungs itself, but in the events of the Song of the Nibelungs. and that a jealousy, which exists between Brunhilde with the Valkyrie soul and Kriemhilde, who is portrayed in the most eminent sense as the earthly woman of her time, does not break out in the same way as in the Nibelungenlied, but differently in Wilhelm Jordan, namely at the time when a festival, a solstice festival, is being celebrated for the time of which it treats: when Baldur, the god of the sun, is slain by Hödur, and when he is mourned by Nanna, his wife, from whom he has vanished from the realm of light, in order to descend, through the agency of death, which is caused by Hödur, into the realm of Hel. In Kriemhilde's soul itself, something like an inkling may arise: just as the festival play depicts how the sun god was snatched from the old goddess, so will I be snatched from the sun hero! She certainly does not call him the Sun Hero, but all this is in the subconscious of this enigmatic personality, which may have been brought up from incarnations in which there was more in the souls than in the later time, in which the souls became earthly human beings, which is also the time of the Song of the Nibelungs. We can understand, therefore, that the passions of both Brunhilde and Kriemhilde are inflamed when the play of the ancient sun-god is enacted before them. Then it happens that afterwards, during the bath, Kriemhilde reproaches Brunhilde with what she has to reproach her for, and Brunhilde decides to make Hagen, the grim one, to whom she confides, the murderer of Siegfried, who has betrayed her.

Thus does Wilhelm Jordan seek to revive what lived in ancient times; but he seeks also to revive it in such wise that in the revival may prevail that active weaving which was operative in poetry when the human soul stood more intimately with language, when this was still the case in our time; when the human soul still felt its surging and weaving and working and being, by expressing this surging and working and weaving in the words of the language. And the strangeness of it, as it is when a poet in turn brings this oneness with language to life, which was the peculiarity of the old verse, of the old art of poetry, we would like to bring before your soul with a few examples. But there is nothing in these old verses of the external synthesizing of the end rhyme, which carries the intellectual into the artistic form, which is always something that is externally architecturally built onto the language. What was poetry in the old days arose out of the organism of speech. And it sounds strange to today's man when real emphasis is placed on this poetry. And if one particularly emphasizes this inner interweaving with the weaving of the active soul, then it no longer seems natural to today's man. But Wilhelm Jordan took heart to do so: to bring out the inwardness of the word-initial rhyme in the alliteration, in our language, which is not really capable of alliteration. And when he recited his Nibelungenlied, he sought to bring this very old, peculiar essence of the verse, the alliteration in verses, to the present audience. From the sense of the speech, one could hear the alliteration:

Where now Rhenish vines the world-famous
Fiery milk for men mix
From juices of the earth and sunbeams,
In the precincts of Worms, there might formerly
Not a grave or a rake touch the ground;
For there, in the middle of the wide May field,
lay, on a gentle hill, the sacred grove.
On its edge, looking towards the Rhine,
was now erected a viewing platform,
the stately stage for the Balderspiel.

There is no sense left today of this inner, innermost relationship to language:

Where now Rhenish vines the world-famous...

We now want to present and first hear what an old song triggered, as a sample of the renewal of alliteration, the old Balderlied.

... As the setting sun bathed the river of legend,
The emerald Rhine, in a blush of parting,
With garlands of molten gold,
Numerous boats glided through the shining waves near Worms
Up and down
And led the people home from the festival.
The regular rushing and pounding of the oars
Melodiously connected on board the boats
The clear tones of
Human throats also sounded in time: in several boats,
Which floated down close together,
the people sang the song of longing, which also drove Nanna down into the realm of night, when mistletoe murdered its mate.

Listening at the window of the royal palace
Lay Krimhilde, waiting for her husband.
In anxious fear of bitterest reproach
Longed now for the distant beloved
Her caring soul full of longing and pain.
She felt guilty and sensed the fate
approaching step. So she heard, frightened
And gloomy, the funeral song.
While the euphony of the ancient melody
Resounded from the Rhine, her lips moved softly
And let the words of the song,
Which she had known since early childhood,
So hear her own ear:

"O Balder, my beloved,
Where are you hidden?
Hear how Nanna
Is overcome with nameless anguish.

Appear, you beautiful one,
And tend to Nanna,
Caressing and kissing,
Your loving mouth.

Then resound the flames
The flaming fields,
From sighing voices
And dirges:

The flower fades,
Fading, defoliated;
Summer de-energizes them
With scorching rays.

At the funeral
of the divine spring
it decays and follows him
to fiery death.

“O Balder, my beloved,
longing love,
unspeakable yearning
burns my chest.”

Then from the depths resounds
The sound of the beloved:
“I left the world of light,
You seek me in vain.

”O Balder, my lover,
O are you hidden?
Give news, like Nanna
You loving redeems!"

“You do not call me back
From the depths of death.
What you love, you must leave
And only suffering is long.”

"O Balder, my lover,
Darkness now covers you;
So take Nanna
Down into the night!"

The old clairvoyance dies, disappears; man stands alone, abandoned, and searches for what has disappeared, longs for it. Nanna, the world soul, seeks Baldur, the sun god, who has gone to Hel in Nifelland.

Now Hagen must gradually make the preparations for Siegfried's death. It is not possible to describe everything that Wilhelm Jordan has beautifully drawn from the saga and his own imagination to show how powerfully Hagen prepares Siegfried's death. It can only be pointed out that one of these preparations is the lighting of a tower. This glow of fire comes through the window into the room of Gunther. And now, in a magnificent way, Wilhelm Jordan evokes what is actually connected with something that I will also discuss later, if time permits: something of the very peculiar ancient feeling for nature is evoked for us, of which today's modern man no longer has any conception. In the glow of the fire, the conscience of the person who is still connected to what is happening outside is kindled. This person still has, so to speak, a glimpse of the dream-like appearance of the soul's release and can unite with the forces of nature outside. And the way fate befalls Siegfried, and how death is woven into his fate by the Norns, evokes from the soul of the person most concerned the ancient Norn song, the song of the elements of fate:

Had not the fire over there long since died out
And the smoke vanished? – See, it is wrested
From the black debris in a murky wisp.
Shadow-like, it rises in the shimmer of the stars
Like storm-driven dream figures.
On smoky wings over the Rhine
Three gray sisters,
giant figures, now stand resting
high in the air above the ruler's palace.
Spindle and bobbin, weaving ship and weft,
sharpening stone and scissors hold the hands.
And they spin and wind and stretch the threads
And weave and sharpen the scissors
And model song, so soul-crushing,
That, shaken by the shivers of death, the numb
Sleepers in the castle sob in their dreams;
For even if the ears slumber unsuspectingly,
Conscience watches in the listening heart:

Envy has woven the nets
of the curse,
The house is desecrated,
Hell rules over it.
The snake crept up on it,
As the seed of sin continued to proliferate,
The greed for gold.

The loving God of Light
Plucked from the tree
Full of fermenting poison
A purer bough;
And keen realization
Of the goal of the future
Preserved the miracle
On Hinderberg's heights.

In vain! The tempter
Also corrupted this
With hunger for gold,
With hot desire.
Then the will became
A cramp for the crown,
The man's word perjury,
The loyalty, deceit.

The pattern is marred,
And tomorrow the scissors
Of guilt will sever
The fabric of miracles.
Sons of the same sex kill each other,
And even the infant slurps
The murder in its milk.

Then from the blood
Sprout the vines of revenge
And bring down, destroying
The trunk to the dust.
Now you must kill each other
In restless rage;
The daughter exterminates
The serpent race.

The Norns' nets
Interwoven with curses
The hellhounds
This accursed house.
Its boastings and showings off
With shining fortunes
Now pay tenfold
The Nibelung's distress.

And as Siegfried draws ever closer to his death, it is that he too becomes interwoven with nature again – as I said, in ancient times this clairvoyance of nature could be felt quite differently in a tragically significant way – it is that Siegfried, through his clairvoyance, sees his destiny welling up in nature. But Siegfried also sees the workings of the destiny of his own soul intimately interwoven with the entire course of the evolution of the earth. And it is as if the destiny of the soul of the earth, in its weaving and surging, is condensed in his mind, which is becoming clairvoyant in that moment. As when, through the occurrence of a solar eclipse, which causes Siegfried to feel the disappearance of solar power, the disappearance of solar power for the earth as a whole simultaneously comes before his soul, in the coming times of the earth's winter, when the inner power of the sun is to die and what flows spiritually from the sun into people is also to disappear. Siegfried feels this rising in his own mind as he approaches his destiny. And from his contemplation of the solar eclipse, he gains an insight into the gradual dying away of the sun's blaze in the weaving and ruling of the cosmos and in the coexistence of this weaving and ruling of the cosmos with the earthly weaving and ruling. And so he sees, as it were, the embers of his own soul, of his own mind, dying away in the dying solar power. And an old song, learned in Iceland, across the sea, where Brunhilde is from, comes to his mind, who has suddenly become clairvoyantly knowledgeable. A foreboding weighs on his soul: it reflects his own destiny in the most intimate connection with his feeling for nature.

... The hero obeyed
And now hurried alone down towards the evening.

And evening fell within him as well.
A gloomy presentiment of a sad end
Went round his sunny fate with shadows.

But to brood over the dreadful words
Of the madwoman and to sift the meaning
Of the madness of the sick soul
forbidden to him: evening was falling
All around him, too. But high up in the sky
The sun was still shining brightly; not a single
He saw floating, as far as he could see. But this blue sky
Resembled that of steel. The birds fell silent,
They hid silently in the treetops,
And hid their heads in their colorful feathers.
Only the swallows still swarmed in anxious flocks,
And their twittering sounded like despair.
The mouse scurried out of its hiding place;
The marten stalked the sleepy birds
Like a secret murderer;
Ugly moths flew up and bats;
The cackling owl and the groaning owl
Rejoiced to hunt so early.

It dawns darker, yet
All things remain wondrously distinct,
Yes, shadows and light are even more sharply distinguished.
But just in the shadow of the sheltering lime tree
At his feet, he grasps the mystery:
Where the quivering light through the gaps in the foliage
Reaches the lawn, it forms on the ground
Not little discs as usual, no, sharp crescents.
He looks up to the sky, and there it flares like a crescent moon,
Still too dazzling to look at.
He peers around, and behold, there
A blackish swamp reflects
The sun clearly in a crescent shape.

Then the heart of the fearless hero was seized
A sorrowful presentiment of coming disaster,
But no longer for himself. As if to the soul of the earth,
His darkened spirit now expanded full of night thoughts.
The twilight of the gods,
The wrathful day of doom arose from the future,
And an ancient song, learned in Iceland,
was heard from the lips of the hero:

There, too, is distress
And destruction threatens.
In the sky, too, I hear
Lights have already gone out
And the proudest stars
Are awaiting destruction.
Night will come, too,
That no tomorrow follows;
For the sun grows weak
In coming summers.

Once there was a winter
That lasted endlessly,
That never thawed
The lurking winds
Never through the spring.
As if from eternal ice
the Alps now stare,
so the countries lay
burdened with glaciers;
Because the sun was sick
in past summers.

And again there will be
such a winter,
Where terrible frosts
follow in the spring.
A haze darkens
the source of life
until it is barely recognizable
glowing like coal;
Because the sun is failing
around the summer solstice.

Then a whale rolls
Through icy waters
And swings its tail
Swimming south.
In the freezing flood
The fins become entangled,
Its pulse freezes
On the palm-lined shore;
For the sun has grown weak,
And nowhere is summer.

With such a song, Sigfrid wandered
Lonely towards the evening, until at last he
From afar, the prince's camp was seen,
Where, strangely illuminated by the setting sun,
The Burgundians appeared like ghosts and shadows,
Still waiting for salvation in the dawning grove
At the pathless foot of the rocks of Idha.

We can only come close to this material, which Wilhelm Jordan tried to renew in his own way in the last third of the 19th century, if we know that the perspective of spiritual science is actually necessary in order to gain a relationship to what is contained in this material, which is also so deep in terms of content. From the spiritual-scientific point of view, subject-matter and language belong together, and so today we shall attempt to point out something of the subject-matter and language of these things.

What memories of significant events were brought to the Nibelungen verses in medieval times had been forgotten in the following period, which was quite different from the earlier one in terms of spiritual content. What elevates us today when we immerse ourselves in the Song of the Nibelungs was, to a certain extent, not there for the people of the 16th and 17th centuries; nor was it there for the people of the first half of the 18th century, really not there. Before that it was there, before that it formed, when it was brought before the people by the reciters, as was the custom, the content of elevation to the greatness and meaning of the human being. But when Central Europe was flooded by foreign domination, it was the fate of intellectual life in this Central Europe that everything that had once constituted its greatness had to be forgotten. It was only by chance that the material for the Song of the Nibelungs had to be recovered from individual manuscripts. And many great treasures of the past, in which so much that is significant lives, have this peculiar fate, as was the case with the treasure of the Song of the Nibelungs and the Nibelung saga.

What actually appears to us in the stories of this Nibelungenlied? People come before us, and we immediately know, as we get to know them through the Nibelungenlied, that there is actually more to them than can find immediate expression, immediate revelation, in this earthly shell in which they fight out their life struggles and life worries. More lives in all these souls than the body can bring to external reality; and this applies to a high degree to Brunhilde, to a high degree to Siegfried and also in a certain way to Hagen; while we already see in Kriemhilde and Gunther how they are people who, through what their souls are, are more in line with their time.

In Brunhilde and Siegfried, beings are embodied that actually no longer fit into the time in which they live. Siegfried is still a solar hero, Brunhilde a Valkyrie, a mother of the world. That is why they are both related, and that is why Brunhilde, the Valkyrie, can only be overcome by Siegfried, the solar hero. Kriemhilde and Gunther are beings who fit more into the time in which they live, in that they have already lost the old clairvoyance. Brunhilde and Siegfried still have it to some extent, and so does Hagen to a certain degree, but Siegfried must live in this time, Siegfried must live out the essence of his soul in his time. The way he lives it out, this soul shows us for the spiritual scientific view: it was once in the body of an ancient initiate, an ancient human being in previous embodiments, who was deeply familiar with the peculiarities of the spiritual worlds. And when we let the Brunhilde soul work on us from a spiritual-scientific point of view, this Valkyrie soul, it shows us: what it encompasses is something of the soul-spiritual that in ancient times could still appear to people with their dream-like clairvoyant vision, but which in more recent times can only be seen by heroes when, led by the courage of a fighter, they enter through the gate of death into the realm of spirits, where souls like the Brunhilde soul as Valkyrie souls await them.

Now these people are placed in the world of physical earthly events. Therefore, what can only prepare itself for this tragic fate lies over these souls. Even in the courage and turmoil of battle, the suffering, tragedy, lament that permeates the entire Nibelungenlied prepares itself spiritually, for these souls carry something within them that can no longer fully be placed in their immediate present. One would like to say that in the subconscious memory of these souls something lives from past earthly greatness, in these souls much still lives from old Atlantean times: so great and powerful were these souls. How earthly events take place in such souls, what can take place there in terms of loyalty between such souls and of doom, that is precisely what the Song of the Nibelungs seeks to depict, as the older sagas so beautifully portrayed such personalities, such as Siegfried.

Let us assume that Siegfried was a soul in a previous incarnation, familiar with the weaving of the spiritual worlds, that he was tremendously immersed in the spiritual worlds and their weaving with the powers of his soul, his soul-life. And now he is born as Siegfried. Something of those forces emerges in his soul, which draws him to that with which he was once interwoven, which is now no longer there as dreamlike clairvoyance, which is now hidden in the depths of physical existence. He is driven to that which he can no longer see properly, at most in particularly poignant moments. There he is driven to dragons and enchanted personalities, and there that which he can no longer see is interwoven with the courage, the bellicosity that lives in his heart. And a cornea develops from the dragon's blood because he carries within him as strength that which he once had within him as the meaning of vision. There is infinite depth in this material, infinite significance. Above all, all memory is in it: yes, there was once a clairvoyant, a dreamlike-clairvoyant humanity, for whose souls lay open a part of the supersensible worlds, their workings and weavings. But this power of solar vision, this power of sun-vision, has sunk down. Baldur has sunk, and Nanna, the human soul, senses the tragedy of the sinking of the ancient power of solar vision. Let us place ourselves in the mood from which the Nibelungen material is woven, in the mourning over the sinking of the ancient power of solar vision, in the knowledge: Now it is present at most only in the willpower, this power of solar vision, transformed into the weaving of the willpower!

The hollowness and professorialism of the 19th century has managed to transform this deeply tragic mood of the sinking of the ancient power of solar vision for the human soul of a later time into the abstract parable of the descent of spring into Baldur, and the like, like all all these abstract, learned, complicated, perverted symbols that have been invented by the learned, the perverted, who have maltreated the great, the mighty that lies in the knowledge of the decline of the ancient, dream-like power of sun-vision from the human soul. We must see in Nanna the human soul mourning Baldur, who was connected with her earlier as the power of solar vision, and who now dwells below in the dark realm of Hel, since in man only the gold of the sense mind has remained, which he can only seek with the mind power bound to the brain and the powers of the earth, that is, of sense matter. Only when we understand the whole atmosphere that permeates the Nibelungen saga in this way do we really understand the living forces at work in it. Then we also understand how something in the events can be seen as an extension of what lived in ancient times and what only survived in a faint echo in the people of that time.

Thus we see how in ancient times that which arose in the human soul through the power of vision united with that which lived in the other human soul through the power of vision; but we also see how, in times when this can no longer be, the power of soul vision connects with soul vision, people no longer find each other, even though they seem destined for each other, because they have re-embodied soul powers, which were once powerful soul powers, but in a body that does not fully express these old soul vision powers. Siegfried cannot find Brunhilde. Siegfried woos Kriemhilde, who was actually born into the present time. And Gunther, who was born into the present time, woos Brunhilde, who actually carries a soul within her, equipped with the powers of the ancient time, the soul's power of solar vision. And so, in the time that prepares materialism, souls get mixed up. This is how their tragic destiny develops.

What has been passed down from the old, inspired, seer-inspired time to the newer, merely rational, sensual time is playing out in the destiny of mankind. And when we are once in a position to have brought up more from the depths of soul-spiritual science, then we will find infinite depths precisely in such material as the Nibelungen material is. What is alive in these wonderful old legends will one day be brought to light; today, I might say, only a few strokes can be used to hint at the deep content of the Nibelungen material. But a mind such as Wilhelm Jordan's had no clear consciousness of all that I have just spoken of, for in his time spiritual science did not yet exist. But he had an inkling of it, coming from the time of which I also hinted to you yesterday, when Ludwig Feuerbach, in the forties, although an opponent of all spirituality, conceived an eminently spiritual thought in order to combat it. The gods give everything, it is only a matter of how people are able to grasp it. But Wilhelm Jordan had really immersed himself in the surging and seething and weaving and streaming of his time. He had a presentiment in his profound immersion in all this, and he now sought to renew in his own way that which lives in the Song of the Nibelungs.

It was no longer as bad as in the 17th and early 18th centuries, when, in the era of burgeoning materialism, the Nibelungenlied, along with everything else of a spiritual nature, had been completely forgotten, when nobody knew anything about it and it was bound to happen that a profound Swiss, who became a professor at the Joachimsthaler Gymnasium in Berlin, Christoph Heinrich Müller, would first draw attention to the full extent and significance of the Nibelungen material. It was Müller who first published the first treasures from the manuscript of Hohenems in [Vorarlberg] - he found two manuscripts there - under the title “Kriemhildens Rache”. Once again, what had served to uplift countless souls for centuries had to be pulled out of obscurity. And when the Swiss miller, who was a professor in Berlin, pointed out the great significance of the Song of the Nibelungs, it was Frederick II, the pupil of Voltaire, who wrote to this Swiss miller:

Dear learned and trusted sir, You are far too favorable in your judgment of the poems from the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries that you helped print and that you consider useful for enriching the German language. In my opinion, they are not worth a shot of powder and do not deserve to be pulled out of the dust of obscurity. In my collection of books, at least, I would not tolerate such miserable stuff; I would throw it out. The copy sent to me may await its fate in the large library there. But it does not promise much demand; otherwise, your gracious king.

Potsdam, February 22, 1784.

I don't know if it is still the case, but our friends in Zurich will know: for a long time this letter was kept under glass in the Zurich Central Library so that it could be seen when one came to this Zurich library. But, as I said, in the first half of the 19th century some people gradually began to realize the full greatness of the Nibelungen material. And Wilhelm Jordan now felt the need to awaken the time in which the Nibelungen saga could live; for this time was one in which people related to language in a completely different way than we do today. And anyone who felt that something unnatural lives in the peculiar alliteration of the language that Wilhelm Jordan was trying to recreate shows by that that he can no longer bring to life in himself that old intimate relationship to language where we still knew that something of the divine word lives in the working of language, where man still felt that what lived in his thoughts from the connection of things must also go out into language, into the weaving and living and working and being of language.

Of course, our time is one in which materialism has taken hold of everything, including our relationship to language. In ordinary speech, we no longer know what language was like, how it flowed out of the living life of the soul, where the soul was intimately interwoven with language. Wilhelm Jordan still had an inkling that the spiritual was connected with language. Today, language has become abstract; it consists only of signs for what is to be expressed. The spiritual no longer resonates. It is no longer a spilling forth of the inner life, of the breath of man, of the breathing of man. Just as the hand is a part of me, as I shape it into a gesture, so in the early days, in the weaving and living of the word, the speaker sensed something like a gesture, like a gesture of his air-man, of his elemental man within him. But for this to be the case, language had to be richer, richer than it can be today, when it has become a sign and the soul no longer feels the connection between sounds and thoughts.

Today we say quite thoughtlessly, quite naturally, “a brave hero”. If a medieval man were to resurrect in his body at that time, and he would hear us say “a brave hero,” he would not know how to contain himself with laughter, he would say: A brave hero? — What is that supposed to mean to me? — because he still has the feeling that “brave” should mean clumsy. He would say: A hippopotamus, you can call an elephant brave, but not a hero! And he would never have dared to call a hero great. Great and small were only sensual concepts for him. We call our heroes great because we no longer have any concept of what the word expresses, namely only the sensual. But these people did indeed have a richer treasure, a truly richer treasure for the way they wanted to describe a hero, for example. A hero was 'bold', that is, bold - roughly expressed in our language - and with 'bold', the medieval man still felt what was inside. Or a hero was 'strict', a strict hero. What would a modern man think of that? The medieval man would know that a strict hero had huge muscles. 'Strict' was the expression for the hero's form in relation to his muscles. A medieval person would also laugh if you said, “A hero is brave.” He would say, “Yes, but what do you actually mean by that?” A brave hero is one in whom courage takes over. A courageous hero is a person who is particularly passionate. You would never have said “a courageous hero.” But you see, language was much richer, infinitely richer, than it is today in terms of words. Language has lost many words because the inner relationship to language has been lost. Let us take just one example, a very obvious example – I would like to share this with you – let us assume that a person wanted to say: “The men were waiting for the horses” or “were waiting for the horses”. He could have said:

warun weros an wahtu wiggeo.

Now we have the alliteration. But if someone had wanted to say, for example, “The man was at home among the servants,” if he had wanted to say that, he would not have had any luck with the alliteration even if he had used this form for “men.” For this sentence: “The man was in his home among the servants,” one could say:

Segg was in his home undar gisindun.

So you could connect this “selda” as home with “segg”, which could also be used to express “the man”. Or you could say, for example: “Dietrich was the man's most expensive”:

Degano dechisto Diotrihhe.

So you had the option of finding several forms to express “man” and “men”. That has all been lost, and we have to translate all these sentences in a uniform manner with “man” and “men”. Our language has completely lost the inner relationship to thought, to expression.

Wilhelm Jordan has now tried to restore such a relationship; and he has done what he could. But of course he could no longer bring up what the old language had: an inner interweaving with the meaning of the living thought-being in the words. How satisfied someone is today if he can only say: “The man has a home” or “the man has a house”. Medieval man would not have said something that meant “house and home” in his language so simply. Or he would not have said lightly, this medieval man: “With my senses I perceive something,” but he wanted to divide what was perceived with the senses so that it appeared to him in a more concrete, more specific, more meaningful, more saturated way, as if he had said, for example, “hugi endi herta”. Both, you could say, mean “sense and meaning,” because the difference between hugi and herta is weakened. Time and again, you feel an infinite richness of content in this ancient language.

Now, Wilhelm Jordan at least wanted to salvage something of the inner life of the language. And so he experienced a struggle between his desire to do so and the fact that our modern language had become abstract. He wanted to save what was still there – and only in the German language – in terms of the possibility of saving these old intimacies in language. Today, people will naturally be tempted to read something like the lines I have read to you to themselves, so that what is written in the lines is only a linguistic sign for the meaning. The majority of people in Europe feel that language is nothing but a sign for meaning, and they will be satisfied when they hear:

Where now Rhenish vines the world-famous
Fiery Milk for Men mix
From juices of the earth and sunbeams,
In the vicinity of Worms,...

(read without emphasizing the alliteration).

Certainly, language is used as a sign. Even today there are languages in which many syllables are dropped because language has become nothing but a sign, because nothing is alive in what is spoken. Above all, we will never be able to penetrate to the true living principle of art if we think that language is only a sign, because that can only suffice for prose at best. Poetry demands that language be shaped inwardly, and not just mechanically through the end verse, but inwardly shaped, as a living organism is shaped, through alliteration or assonance. Just as mechanism relates to life, so does the end rhyme relate to alliteration.

Wilhelm Jordan still wanted to reflect this effect of language; he wanted to give language that which came from the old seer time. In the old seer times one could not have spoken as one does today in materialistic times, when one no longer has a feeling for the inner weaving of language. In the old seer times, one had the desire and yearning to really put the light that lives in the thought into the essence of the word. And Wilhelm Jordan had an inkling of this. In particular, I often heard his brother, with whom I was friends, read aloud in the style of Wilhelm Jordan, and there was a particular longing to emphasize the alliterative nature, to emphasize the artistic over the unartistic, merely in terms of meaning.

Where now Rhenish vines the world-famous
Fiery Milk for Men mix
From juices of the earth and sunbeams
In the vicinity of Worms...

I can imagine that today's materialistic rationalists consider this to be a gimmick. Since 1907, we have been working to find a form necessary for modern declamation to bring to the lecture that which should be resurrected from ancient times. The first attempt was not carried out, which we wanted to undertake at the time of the Munich Congress in 1907. But I think that the possible and the impossible in relation to the present language will have been brought before your souls in today's attempt. Because we can say nothing other than: No one can achieve the impossible; and our language has become so that it is impossible to bring up in its full sense all that was alive in the old Sun Seers' time, through alliteration, for example. And that he wanted to do it is certain – one can even say it was a mistake of Wilhelm Jordan's; it is a heroic attempt, but also in a sense a heroic mistake. But what follows from this? It follows that it is no longer possible to truly revive what in ancient times was alliteration, in ancient times that still had the direct resonance of dreamlike clairvoyance. Language has become material, has become abstract. But spiritual science will bring forth a new artistic creation, a creation with inner forms of meaning, in which, by directly grasping the spiritual, we also grasp the word. Such attempts have been made. Take the seventh picture, the picture of the spiritual realm in the 'Gate of Initiation' and many others, where the attempt has been made to enter into language by grasping the spiritual, where an attempt has been made to bring such art back into language, so that the spiritual expresses itself, resonates in the words. Only in the German language is it still halfway possible to express this.

Here too, we have an area today through which we see how it is predetermined in the course of human development to enliven the spiritual in such a way that it is strong, that this spiritual not only remains with the intellectual sense, but can again grasp the stronger power of the word. Then in speech there will be rhyming again and in rhyme again speech that has become the new rune. A rune is the direct interweaving of expression with the thing, so that the expression is not just a sign. Here again we have an area in which the necessity of the spiritual-scientific world view for our time expresses itself in a deep and also serious sense. Would that many could soon realize that in many fields we can observe how human life is withering if it is not fertilized by a new ray of spirituality. For that which lives among people as if in a physical aura, language itself, has become abstract, materialistic, intellectual; and by speaking, not just by thinking, we have become materialists. But what has already become straw in the word, so that we no longer feel the “tapsen” in “tapfer”, that must in turn gain soul, soul instead of mechanism. For language has become mechanism.

The spiritual-scientific current must also breathe soul into language. And this wrestling with language in order to breathe soul into it, we can feel it when we immerse ourselves in such artistic endeavour as was shown by an eminent man of world outlook, Wilhelm Jordan. But that falsification that is called the literary history of the 19th century will have to be rewritten altogether when people want to get a true idea of what actually happened. The names of poets that appear in literary histories will be completely different from those that have been appointed as great poets, while genuine, honest artistic endeavor, as shown by Wilhelm Jordan in the mid-19th century in the “Demiurgos” he published, has been trampled underfoot by literary court councilors like Karl Rudolf von Gottschall. Who knows today that Wilhelm Jordan endeavored to show in his Demiurgos how people live here on earth, and that this life on earth is actually a reflection of something that happens above ground, so that the person standing there is a sign of something that is happening in the supernatural at the same time! Who knows today that a personality such as Wilhelm Jordan, with such great and powerful problems, struggled in the dawn of modern times? But the sun of modern times, the sun of spiritual science, will awaken something quite different from the stream of artistic life than the forgeries are that are offered to us today in schools and outside of schools as literary history, in which the new materialistic soul only reflects itself and finds great things in which, as they say, it can lick its fingers because it finds it so similar to itself.

Let us feel the magnitude of the task of spiritual scientific thinking and spiritual scientific feeling. Let us feel it when we speak of straw instead of the living plant of the word, which has once sprouted and blossomed between souls that want to understand each other. Life, real life, will flow into the stream of existence when spirit from spiritual science in turn permeates people with the meaning of life.

My dear friends! We will begin this evening with the reading of some of the unpublished, and thus not yet printed, poems of our dear friend Christian Morgenstern, followed by some poems from the last volume to appear. Then there will be a musical presentation, after which we will have a slide show of pictures of our building. And for those friends who still want to stay, I will conclude with some reflections, in which I will include a brief note on the nature of our eurythmy, because some friends, particularly from Switzerland, have expressed a desire to hear something about the nature of eurythmy.

My dear friends! We feel that it is our sacred duty to seize every opportunity to bring before our souls the poems of Christian Morgenstern, especially those that were so close to his heart in the last period of his physical life, when he was so intimately connected with us. At the same time, we see this as something that is truly intimately connected with the whole nature and character of our spiritual scientific movement in the present day. It may be said without hesitation that Christian Morgenstern's way of immersing himself in what spiritual science wants to proclaim to the world has truly become beneficial for our movement in a spiritual sense, too, which is, after all, only at the beginning of its development.

Most of the friends gathered here know from various cycles and individual lectures that I have given here and there in the very last few months that one of my most significant occult experiences of late has been spending time with Christian Morgenstern after his death. And I have not held back the very experience that is so significant in connection with Christian Morgenstern for the blessing that flows to our movement from the spiritual worlds: that a poet could find his way to our movement and connect his soul so intimately with it that that, so to speak, the elements of his present nature in the spiritual worlds include that cosmic tableau, which – with the means of the spiritual world, and at the same time as an integral part of Christian Morgenstern – reveals the truth of that which we have to recognize and teach. Yes, my dear friends, this is something extraordinarily significant, something that can instill tremendous confidence in the inner truth, but also in the inner driving force of our movement. We know that something like the confluence of the spiritual cosmic universe is now connected with Christian Morgenstern's own being. Just as in a large tableau by a painter, a real painter on the physical plane, one sees many of the secrets of the physical world flowing together, so in the spiritual world, because there the human being has to give not only his abilities to what it offers, but his whole being, so the whole being of Christian Morgenstern is connected with this, I would say, cosmic painting in which he now lives. And it is one of the most moving experiences one can have to see how he is only now living in the spiritual world with his true and genuine nature. It is one of the most harrowing experiences to see how this human being lived in the physical world, locked into the most diverse inhibitions, and how it can now - conceivable, tangible for those who love this person - develop freely in the spiritual world. It is harrowing how we can only fully get to know such a being when we grasp its meaning after death.

Thus, after his death, Christian Morgenstern appears to me today as a spiritual leader of many people who, in the recent past, have ascended into the spiritual worlds during the spiritual development of humanity. These people have experienced tremendous advancement in that they were, in a sense, endowed with inner longings for the spiritual worlds in the physical world and yet could not find them. They brought this longing with them. We spoke of these longings on the day the foundation stone was laid, with reference to a particular personality: Herman Grimm. I showed how close he had come to grasping the spiritual world, and yet could not find it. For him and for many others it means an enormous advance that, expressed in human words, they can now be convinced of what they sought and could not find: they can be convinced that they have it in the soul of Christian Morgenstern. Not that they could not otherwise find it in the spiritual world; but it is something else to have it in this way. That is the tremendous blessing of Christian Morgenstern's having connected with the spirit of our movement and thus having had the opportunity to carry it up so that those beings in the spiritual world who longed to know anthroposophy could see it.

In my dealings with Christian Morgenstern, I often had to think of two facts after his death. One of them is connected with one of the greatest representatives of modern spiritual life, Goethe. Now, we all know Goethe as the poet of “Faust”, as one of the truest poets of all times, because he fought and suffered through in his own soul what he had portrayed in “Faust”. You all know that the second part of Faust ends with Faust's ascent into the spiritual worlds. Goethe had to depict this, but in Goethe's time there was no possibility of finding images that corresponded to the truth as it must be seen today. And in a certain respect it seems tragic when we read a conversation between Goethe and Eckermann, in which he speaks of the difficulties he had when he set out to complete the second part of “Faust” and to visualize Faust's ascent into the higher worlds. He says:

"You will admit, however, that the conclusion, where the saved soul ascends, was very difficult to express, and that with such supersensible, barely conceivable things, could very easily have lost myself in vagueness if I had not given my poetic intentions a beneficently restrictive form and firmness through the sharply outlined Christian-ecclesiastical figures and ideas.

We know that Goethe had to resort to these traditional Christian ecclesiastical forms, that he had to clothe the soul's passage into the supersensible world in these forms. But we also know that he had a yearning for what we are trying to express in new forms today, in forms that are appropriate for our time.

It is of infinite importance that our movement found a poet like Christian Morgenstern right at the beginning, who was able to directly translate everything that this movement could give him into personal feelings, which sound to us in particular so warm, so wonderfully loving from his posthumous poems. That he was able, right at the beginning of our movement, to absorb so directly and so fundamentally what our movement could give him is of tremendous significance, because Christian Morgenstern elevated everything personal to a transpersonal sphere that is connected to the starting points of our movement. That something like this is possible is truly connected to the trust that can be placed in our movement.

The other fact that I must always bear in mind during these days is the following: I once pointed out in a lecture in Berlin that I had a conversation with Herman Grimm, who was so close to all the longings that lead to an understanding of the supersensible worlds according to our way of thinking. In the conversation I tried to touch on these things. He only had a defensive reaction to this; he did not want to let it approach him. It was deeply distressing to see this peculiar behavior, especially in Herman Grimm, towards the form of intellectual life that is so very much our own in our time. I would like to mention that Herman Grimm was Goethe's accredited representative for the second half of the 19th century. All the efforts of our movement are directed towards pointing out to those spirits who are now in the spiritual world what Christian Morgenstern can tell them.

So you see how we try to elevate what we feel as our connection, as our relationship, our love for Christian Morgenstern, into transpersonal spheres. I have tried to hint at this in a few words.

If you follow what is to be presented to you now with your feelings, you will sense through the words of Christian Morgenstern in a different way what he is and will become for our entire movement. At one point in particular, one will feel deeply touched in one's heart in view of the events of these days. Even though Christian Morgenstern, when he wrote the little poem, of course meant a completely different war from the one we are experiencing today, in view of today's events, what this little poem contains goes deep to the heart.

So now, before I continue with these reflections, we will first listen to something from the posthumous poems of our dear friend Christian Morgenstern.

Recitation by Marie Steiner-von Sivers “From the posthumous poems of Christian Morgenstern”. It is not recorded which poems were recited, but they certainly included the following two:

ANTHROPOSOPHY

Oh world, - you poor human, you who do not know, what is happening here in the midst of you .

The true greatness of this confused time is vividly and humanly brought to life here, a piece of the most sublime history unrolls here before us - and we are part of it!

Oh great world, you poor mother (once again - oh dreamer!) you do not know, you do not suspect, what is being born within you.

(1911)

I

watch as the old world rises up within me and fights again and again, and how the new one gently glides over it, so alternately darkened and illuminated.

I watch. How will the war end? Will the murky smoke settle to the ground and dawn clarity gather over it?

I watch myself. Perhaps this will call for victory.

(1909)

Music. Presentation of pictures of the construction of the Goetheanum. Music.

My dear friends! Perhaps you have already gathered from much of what has been said here and in other places in the field of spiritual science – including the introductory words about our dear friend Christian Morgenstern – that it is important to me to take all our endeavors, including those that are linked to our endeavors, as a whole, as something unified, and that it is particularly important to me that this whole, which is to be incorporated into the evolution of humanity as an impulse for a new spiritual culture, really does connect with the longings, hopes and expectations of the spiritual culture of the immediate past. I tried to emphasize this in particular here at the celebration commemorating the laying of the foundation stone of our building. Our spiritual science and its aspirations, and also, among other things, what has just been shown before your eyes as pictures of our building, and finally what is to be introduced into our cultural context as eurythmy, should be seen as a unified whole, but also as something that is not just a whole in itself, but connects to something that has been awaited. And when I tried to draw a line from Goethe to Christian Morgenstern to Herman Grimm, this was only intended to give two examples of how, on the one hand, the development of humanity really gives us to believe in a deeper optimism in the progress of human development, but on the other hand also that spiritual factors and impulses continually intervene in human development. I have tried to lead you to your souls, as Goethe, at the end of his “Faust”, had to depict Faust's ascent into the spiritual worlds with old Christian-Catholic forms, and I have pointed out how in the poet Christian Morgenstern someone has found his way to us who has begun to shape the spiritual life, the supersensible worlds, into new forms, as is necessary for the human being of the present. From some of the poems left behind, from some of these words, you will have heard again how poetry can unite, most intimately unite, with what we mean by spiritual life: that a new relationship be found between the life of the human being on the physical plane and his or her connection to the spiritual worlds, and how spiritual factors intervene in the further development of humanity. I tried to make it clear by daring to express what may be expressed among true anthroposophists: that Herman Grimm, who may be called Goethe's accredited governor in the second half of the 19th century, may now find in the sight of what Christian Morgenstern was already able to carry up into the spiritual worlds what he could not find on earth in his physical body. There we see the interaction of the spiritual with the physical progress of humanity.

And are we not, my dear friends, seeking a new form for the old beauty with all that is expressed in our structure? Because beauty means much more than what is usually associated with this idea, with this concept. One has only to realize how diverse human progress is in order to understand what it means that in any age like ours, new forms of beauty, new forms of the whole human soul-attitude, should emerge. It must come about that out of the impulses of spiritual science, as we understand it, something develops that signifies progress compared to what came before, that goes even further than what Goethe himself could want in Faust. We must hope for something like that. When Goethe felt the longing to immerse himself in beauty, he could do nothing but go to Rome to relive Greek beauty in his soul. Basically, the whole of the 19th century could do nothing but go to Rome to relive Greek beauty. But the age has come when one must not only go to Rome, not only immerse oneself in classical Greek forms of beauty, but one must enter into spiritual worlds in order to find new forms of beauty from the spiritual worlds. And it must be emphasized that the past age, so to speak, thirsted for such an approach to an epoch of spiritual experience. More than the present time suspects, it expresses itself in just such a spirit as that of Herman Grimm, this representative of Goetheanism in the second half of the 19th century. Not to say something about Herman Grimm, but to show by his example what is expected of the spiritual life of our present time, I would like to insert this link, Herman Grimm, into the development of humanity as it has taken place from Goethe to us, who may consider ourselves as really living and striving in what, at bottom, was also the will of Goethe in the inmost part of his heart, in the inmost part of his soul. The way in which spiritual life progresses in the evolution of humanity is manifold and accessible only to deeper contemplation. |

You know that I only mention personal matters when there is an objective reason to do so. Now, when I turn my thoughts to the evolution of humanity, I must sometimes mention a weak attempt that I made as a very young man. This writing was the second thing of mine to be printed. At that time I tried, childishly of course, for I was only 23 or 24 years old, to realize that progress from what Shakespearean figures are to what Goethe's Faust is. Through Shakespeare something was created that had to be created in his age, in which human beings could only be portrayed as archetypes, in such a way that the way they are portrayed directly reveals an unfolding of their inner soul forces. The progress in Goethe's “Faust” lies in the fact that Goethe did not present the individual figures as individual types - like Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth and so on in Shakespeare - but presented Faust as the human being of our age. Faust can only be placed in a poem once; what Shakespeare had to give could be placed before people in many human types. One must consider the diversity of human spiritual life in evolution in such a way that in each age precisely what must happen as the characteristic of this age is expressed.

And if we seek today to find a true soul-feeling, a true and deep feeling of the affiliation of the human soul to the higher hierarchies, then this is really - as it presents itself to us in spiritual science - in a certain sense the fulfillment of expectations, of expectations that have been there in the development of mankind, that one can say: It is precisely such representative spirits as Herman Grimm who, in their own way, express the deepest longing for something that they are waiting for and which must be given in the way we describe today the higher hierarchies and their relationship to the human being. You see, a spirit like Herman Grimm was able to express this most deeply, most soulfully, one might say, most powerfully at the core of the soul. And yet, whenever we open his books, we see once more how his personality is connected with the expectation of spiritual science, which, when it fleetingly came to him, he was unable to understand. It was necessary that something similar should happen as it was after Christian Morgenstern's death.

I once met Herman Grimm during his visit to the Goethe-Schiller Archive in Weimar. He talked about how he imagined the evolution of humanity, that history was not a list of what is usually recorded as history; for him, history is an evolution of spiritual forces. But he could only bring himself to call it a history of the imaginative work of human beings. It was not possible for him to grasp that there are imaginations in the development of humanity that unconsciously flow into humanity and are transformed into human activity, that there are inspirations and intuitions in history. To him, it was 'the imaginative work of nations'. He could not come to replace the purely external, factual aspect of the Maja, which he called the “imagination work of the peoples”, with that which must present itself in the human spirit if it is to find its way out of the physical world and into the spiritual one. Only in the future will we understand what it meant for the nineteenth century when Herman Grimm said: What can interest us particularly in the way history has handed down the story of Julius Caesar? Julius Caesar – Herman Grimm says – interests me much more as he is portrayed by Shakespeare. That is truer, more historical than anything presented in historiography. – He repeatedly pointed out how much he likes to read Tacitus, for the reason that he was a person who knew how to bring to life and transform into the spiritual what he had to describe. From such conceptions there arose such a wonderful thought as that which Herman Grimm wrote down in the nineties and which is found in his book on Homer, a thought which really stands there as the expectation of what is to come as tidings from the Hierarchies: ” Recognizing themselves as a totality, human beings acknowledge that they are subject to an invisible court enthroned in the clouds, before which they consider it a misfortune not to be allowed to exist, and whose judicial proceedings they seek to adapt to their inner disputes.

What a wonderful image of the court enthroned in the clouds, under which the nations know themselves! Does not all yearning for the hierarchies, for knowledge of what the hierarchies are for humanity, live in this?

Thus, in the newer development of the spirit, spirits had emerged who, in their historical conception, had something like a kind of transformative ability, so that here too such spirits stand at the gateway of what spiritual science wants. Only through spiritual science will humanity gain a true conception of the fact that something has really been added to world evolution by Herman Grimm's speaking as he did about Michelangelo, Raphael, Tacitus, Shakespeare, Voltaire and Homer, and will learn to feel this thought of the essential evolution in the world in its heart. And if you remember what Herman Grimm said about the Christ, you will have something like an expectation of what spiritual science says about the Christ. So you have another example of what is really very important to me when we consider the entry of spiritual science into today's life: to show how spiritual science comes as the fulfillment of much that has been expected. In 1895 the book was published in which there is mention of the “throne of judgment enthroned in the clouds”. One really feels in intimate connection with what was there, when one may then speak of a sequence of hierarchies; the image is translated into the spiritual, which reflects the inner truth of the matter.

And even the beginnings of this inner ability to transform were already apparent. For just as Herman Grimm spoke, for example, about Michelangelo, Raphael, Homer, Tacitus, Shakespeare, Voltaire, especially in the time of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, the way in which he the way he knew how to bring Emerson's writings to life in the 1850s shows us something of the transformability that the serious part of humanity strives for and which can now find its fulfillment in spiritual science. And spiritual science must give precisely that which can become the most personal for each person, so that human feeling becomes the broadest, the very broadest, but in return also the most intense.

One would really like to say: Especially in such a representative spirit as Herman Grimm - with whom I believe I can increasingly associate more and more of our friend Christian Morgenstern's work for the spiritual world - the striving for the spiritual is evident, and it is important not to pass over these facts. When Goethe died, Herman Grimm was four years old. He died in Berlin on June 16, 1901 at the age of seventy-three. He lived through the second half of the nineteenth century in such a way that his personality had to show a unity with all the impulses of beauty that had flowed from Goethe into humanity.

In a wonderful way, one sees this tendency of humanity towards the spiritual in Herman Grimm in particular, this development of an organ for understanding the spiritual. And time and again, especially when I consider the cultural value of our eurythmy – yes, perhaps I may say so – I have to think of the external gestures in the life of Herman Grimm. Time and again I have to see how, in Herman Grimm's external gestures, everything was one, and there was no disharmony, which of course occurs particularly within materialistic life, where one does not see at all where the spiritual passes into the physical. It is enough to make you want to tear your hair out when you see all the modern sports, such as football and so on, and the way they mechanize people and add nothing of what is spiritual in them, however much they imagine they do. Everything that is striven for there is a mockery of the spiritual, however well it is meant. In contrast to this, a figure like Herman Grimm, in whom everything external is in harmony with the soul, appears as something unified: the way he walked, the fact that he always wore a top hat, all belong to the whole of his personality, the way he moved his hands, the way he spoke, the way he spent his time in Bolzano when he was working on his Homer book, the way he could only write the Homer book when he was awaiting spring in Bolzano. It all fits together so beautifully; how he writes at the Homer book, how he goes out as the days grow shorter and looks at the wonderful statue of Walther von der Vogelweide in the park in Bolzano, how he knows how to depict it down to the very gesture, , how he knows how to depict the wonderful marble that comes from the quarries near Bolzano, and how he knows how to incorporate everything he creates, everything he does, into the intellectual life in which he is immersed.

I dare to judge some things myself, since I myself was close to a center of German intellectual life for a while. From 1889 to 1897 I was in Weimar at Goethe's workplace, with which Herman Grimm was also connected. There one could feel how Goethe was the king of intellectual life and Herman Grimm his governor, accredited by the intellectual powers. One could feel with Herman Grimm how he tried to grasp everything that was connected to Goethe in a spiritual harmony of gestures. It was his endeavor to take Goethe spiritually. It was, so to speak, his endeavor to recognize the deceased Goethe, but one who lived on in his impulses, as weaving and living in the spiritual life in which one felt oneself to be included. It was the beginning of how we feel today, that the deceased are intimately connected with us, and that they live with us, as it were, only in a different form than before they passed through the gate of death. There was an effort to combine all the individual phases, all the individual moments of life into one gesture, with a spiritual gesture.

I am quite sure, my dear friends, that some things might have led me even then to what can be achieved in spiritual science, but not to what our eurythmy presents, if I had not been so close to this spiritual life at the time had I not seen for myself that there was an endeavour, in the way it could be at that time, to evoke something that is spiritual and at the same time really comes to life in the outer world, is really there in the outer world. Of course, all of this is part of a great karmic context, it is no coincidence. There is something like an inner eurhythmy in the way Herman Grimm wanted to live: the way he had the wonderful ability to transform himself as a very young man to take Emerson into German culture in a way that no other country has been taken into, the way he drew attention to the fact that that Emerson should be read more widely because he represented the best side of Americanism, how he resurrected Voltaire, how he resurrected Michelangelo, how he resurrected Raphael, and also Goethe, about whom he gave his wonderful lectures at the beginning of the 1870s at the University of Berlin. There were many things about these lectures that were not quite right for scholars. But in every thought, in every word, in every sentence of these lectures, Goethe lives; he is in them again, is in them with his own spirit. And Herman Grimm really wanted to give something to the life around him with his book “Goethe”. It was a unique event that Goethe, who had been physically dead since 1832 and who had almost been forgotten, was revived in the 1870s by Herman Grimm.

But now, because I spoke of the unified gesture, I would like to point out how Herman Grimm always strove to see all things in a larger context, how he is truly able to become a teacher in this regard for all those who seek the transition from the spiritual life of the 19th century to the spiritual life of anthroposophy. Goethe is something universal for humanity; in his 'Contributions to Cultural History', Herman Grimm draws attention to the way in which Goethe became earthly universal after passing through the portal of death into the spiritual world. Herman Grimm quotes a beautiful passage from one of Carlyle's lectures in 1838: “When a man like Goethe appears in an epoch, whatever that epoch may be, his appearance is the greatest thing that can happen in its course. He is the center. All intellectual influence radiates from him. Of him it must be said, as of Shakespeare: None was there like him before he came. He was not like Shakespeare, but the same clarity, the same spirit of tolerance, the same depth of human nature prevailed in both of them.

At the same time, such a word points to the universal, to that which cuts into all human relationships, which does not make us see the poet, the spiritual hero, as merely enthroned in the clouds, but as truly intervening in spiritual conditions. Thus, in the whole consciousness of Herman Grimm, there was something about Goethe that was truly capable of taking Goethe's spirit so universally that Goethe could appear to him as the spiritual emperor, the emperor of spiritual life. And in a different way, my dear friends, than one is otherwise accustomed to in the world, the free personality, the complete free reign of the personality, the self-assurance, is expressed in someone like Herman Grimm. One can truly say: In Herman Grimm lives something that allowed him to take external circumstances as they are, but on the other hand always let him base himself on what he had within as his spiritual life; and he judged all worldly circumstances according to the security of this spiritual life.

Thus the moment arises when, one might say, in his quietly distinguished manner, Herman Grimm could see a supreme moment when a monarch of the outer world pays homage to the spiritual emperor. This is also a gesture of this world, of unspeakable significance. I know that many have taken offense at it, but one must take things in their deeper context. Many have been offended by the fact that Herman Grimm mentions an event that happened to him on Christmas Eve 1876. But this fact is significant because it leads to a point where, in more recent times, there stands a man who feels it to be natural for a monarch of the external world to pay homage to the spiritual emperor. Thus it seems to me to be most significant for the newer spiritual life when Herman Grimm, in his “Contributions to German Cultural History”, relates how on Christmas Eve 1876 the following letter from the German Emperor Wilhelm I was delivered to him:

"My perusal of your book ‘Goethe’, a copy of which you presented to me on the 20th of last month, has given me very pleasant impressions. You have succeeded in sensitively adding many a lifelike trait to the luminous image of the great poet and in gaining new insights into the relationships between the external events of his life and his works. I am convinced that this thoughtful gift, given to the poet's admirers just before Christmas, will be recognized as a valuable addition to Goethe literature, and I thank you most sincerely for the pleasure I have personally gained from the book.

Berlin, December 24, 1876. Wilhelm.

Herman Grimm had kind words to say after receiving this letter; for a mind like Herman Grimm's enjoyed the relationship between the intellectual and the secular life. And in this light he also saw Goethe and his time, seeking to climb up to what escapes many people. And so it came about that Herman Grimm, following this letter, gave a beautiful and remarkable description of the confluence of spiritual life with the life of the outer world in the 19th century. He says: “From Weimar” – for Weimar was for Herman Grimm the first capital of German intellectual life; I know this and have often rejoiced in it – “From Weimar the basic lines of Germany's intellectual development had been so firmly drawn that Goethe's views remained the natural standard. And when, in the rush of national political needs, Shakespeare rose beside him, he was like a mere appendage to the Goethean empire. For Schlegel had translated Shakespeare into Goethe's German on Goethe's behalf, as it were, and Goethe and Shakespeare united as if to form a single effective power.” Etc., etc.

And now follow the beautiful words: “And so the Emperor understood Goethe. Goethe was not only the great poet, the great thinker of his epoch, but the splendor of historical princely heights was associated with his person. I recall the end of the above writing, where the Emperor mentions the personal enjoyment he has drawn from the book. What was this enjoyment? Hardly in anything that would benefit its literary value. I do not know of the Emperor ever mentioning Goethe in conversation, but he had, I am told, had passages read to him from the book. I see in this the expression of an emotion in him that could not be described merely as an interest in Goethe. Goethe was a bygone power that had a claim on the participation of the German Emperor. Something like the holders of the highest Italian order, “Cousins du Roi”

How Herman Grimm manages to show how the intellectual life takes hold of everything, and he himself is such a representative mind. He continues: ”It was not his victories, his political successes, that were first remembered, but what was peaceful in the emperor. His mildness. His even-handed justice. It is wonderful how, in the judgment of the nations, even with warlike princes and rulers, what they did for peaceful development ultimately receives the most light. How, in the case of Frederick the Great and Napoleon, admiring consideration of their organizational activity already outweighs that of their military deeds."

Thus we see that in modern times the life of the spirit has come to stand in a unified gesture with that which is the other, the outer life. Herman Grimm knew that he lived in times of expectation. He expresses this beautifully in the following words:

"Goethe's age is dying with the century that bears his name. We no longer enthuse over the past merely because it is gone. No matter how much digging and searching is done today, no matter how emphatically the reports of archaeologists speak of the importance of the latest discoveries: the Goethean gaze no longer rests on them, under which the excavated marble was once transformed into spirit. And the audience that used to believe in the mysterious value of the thoughts slumbering in these finds is also missing.” “The Goethean era is over! But Goethe himself? Did the century named after him know all of Goethe's thoughts? Here we are confronted with a new historical experience.” - ”The rays of the still living Goethe had illuminated the German countryside when the war against Napoleon I was over and the liberated people began to settle into their own home, in the good faith that the victorious spirit would suffice for that too. As long as those who had taken part in the war still lived, an inviolable trust in the power of higher intellectual work reigned. The years of humiliation that followed the Wars of Liberation could not shake it. This spirit was still alive in the influential circles when I gave my lectures on Goethe twenty years ago. But even then, the prevailing opinion, which no longer expected anything from science in the traditional sense, was already forming. Science, as we old people understand the term, was based on unlimited recognition of what had been handed down in Greek and Latin.” And so on.

Now it is becoming more and more apparent that the age of expectation is approaching, which finds a last representative spirit in Herman Grimm.

"The twentieth century will perhaps discover that Goethe knew in advance what it would one day achieve for itself, and even what it is still striving for. The places in his works where this is expressed will be pointed out. The periods of time separating the generations that follow one another will expand more and more. But what does a century more or less do for the relationship of humanity as it continues to develop to Homer or Shakespeare? Their power to penetrate souls increases more and more. With them, Goethe will one day accompany humanity as a star in its own right."

One would like to say that everything in this man strives for spirit, for spiritualization. This is how he brings us the confidence, the genuine confidence, the true confidence, that we are not giving something that has arisen from external arbitrariness, but rather what humanity needs, what it has been waiting for. This is something tremendously important. And it is the universality of spiritual science that already lives in this expectation. Therefore, I may refer once more to what Herman Grimm says in his book on Homer:

"Men as a whole recognize that they are subject to an invisible court enthroned in the clouds, before which they dare not stand, and whose judicial procedure they seek to adapt to their disputes. With anxious eagerness they seek their right here. How the French of today endeavor to present the war against Germany that they are planning as a moral imperative, demanding that other nations, even the Germans themselves, recognize it. I have the feeling that Homer's aim was to depict the struggle of the nations before Troy as if this movement, which took place in the distant past, had once encompassed a multitude of nations whose moral consciousness was shared and within which the struggle for the leading position was waged. They resemble our own epoch in this. Not external, accidental force or accidental protection of divine powers, but the justification that character grants, gives the decision in the Iliad."

—A beautiful passage, a wonderful passage!—

"The solidarity of the moral convictions of all people is today the church that unites us all. We are seeking more passionately than ever for a visible expression of this community. All truly serious endeavors of the masses have only this one goal. The separation of nations no longer exists here. We feel that no national distinction applies to the ethical worldview. We would all sacrifice ourselves for our fatherland; but we are far from longing for or bringing about the moment when this could happen through war. The assurance that peace is our most sacred wish is no lie. “Peace on earth and goodwill towards men” permeates us.” So says Herman Grimm in the heart of Europe in 1895.

My dear friends! Humanity has long aspired to harmonize life with the spiritual worlds, to find a community like ours. And there were endeavors that knew how to present themselves in the right way to all the peoples of the earth and to the peace of humanity, that knew how to express the attitude that also wanted to express itself. Homer, according to Herman Grimm's view for the Greek peoples: that peace is more dear to them than war. And so mankind should one day get to know how many people held the views I have described in Herman Grimm, how they were intimately connected with the soul, how there was an effort to maintain life from one source, and how surprising the outbreak of this war, which was really not wanted by such views, was.

And it should also fulfill our expectations if the - I would say - offshoots of our spiritual movement are to be drawn from the whole of our spiritual life. This is the case with our eurythmy, which must not be confused with any of the physical, sporting, gymnastic or dance endeavors that have emerged from the materialistic age, but which is rather singled out from our spiritual endeavors, so that people can experience in the most direct and intimate way how the spirit works, especially in this sphere. I have already shown from various sides how this eurythmy came about. The aim was to give humanity something that, I would say, already shows the spirit of evolution in an outward sense. This could only be done if it was clear that we also live in a world of forms in our immediate life and that progress is a penetration into the world of movement. The world of forms dominates our physical body, the world of movement dominates our etheric body. We must now find the movements that are innate to the etheric body. The human being must be guided to express in gestures, in movements of the physical body, that which is natural to the etheric body.

In the last lectures on “Occult Reading and Hearing”, you will have seen that there is something of regular movement in the universe, in cosmic becoming. This is transferred to the human etheric body. Our present-day materialistic culture, from which spirits like Herman Grimm longed to escape, has led to a situation in which people have no understanding at all for the fact that we can only move properly in external forms if we do not have movements as “dalkerte” - forgive the trivial expression - as in sports, in modern gymnastics or playing football, but when he follows the movements that are naturally inherent in his etheric body, when one begins to carry the movements of the etheric body into the movements of the physical body, when the etheric body lives on in the movements of the physical body. This is attempted in eurythmy. It will become clear that the human being, in his movements, is truly an intermediate link between the cosmic letters and sounds and what we ourselves use in the human letters and sounds in our poetry.

A new art will certainly arise out of this eurythmy. This art is for every human being. And one would like humanity to be seized by an understanding of this art, so that it would really be practised with children, starting with the smallest, where the most intimate joy in it has already been demonstrated, and continuing with the largest children, and even with those of seventy, eighty and ninety years of age. It is always good when a person learns to translate what is natural and innate in the etheric body into physical movements. It is self-evident in the spiritual life that what can be said poetically can be interpreted in the movements that our eurythmy brings.

Eurythmy expresses a pedagogical, artistic and hygienic principle at the same time. A pedagogical principle in that when a person grows up with eurythmy, when they have been making movements in the sense of eurythmy from the first years of childhood, then they have carried out movements with their bodies that have such an effect that, I would like to say, the gods feel very close to the earth. Therefore, it is a very good way to establish the connection between the divine spiritual hierarchies and the growing child.

For the occultist, it is immediately clear that a materialistic culture creates a terrible discrepancy between what is innate in the human being and what the head and heart often have to learn. I am not criticizing, but merely pointing out a fact. There is actually nothing more unnatural in the world today than that children growing up have to learn what they have to learn from about the sixth or seventh year. I am not saying that they should not learn it, because of course they have to learn; this is brought about by external social necessity. But for the souls it is often as if one wanted to bring about a natural development of the human body by breaking the hands and legs of children in their sixth or seventh year. That is roughly what happens when children are forced to learn letters, because for human beings, learning to read and write are the most unnatural activities there are. They have to be forced to do it, even though the art of reading and writing is in the greatest disharmony with what the soul wants. It is a sad sight to behold, but it is a necessity; it is no use closing one's mind to it. But teaching children to read and write at this age would be pretty much the most sensible thing to do. Even if they were instructed to make figures out of simple street dirt, that would be much more sensible. There is only one thing we can do: we can try to let the atrophied etheric body - for it atrophies under today's necessities - move in the eurythmic movements of the physical body, which the gods want. This is what eurythmy should offer in a pedagogical sense.

It is not surprising that many people today complain that this or that hurts them, without anything really being wrong with them; for today, unlike the Greeks, people no longer try to establish harmony between the external movements of the physical body and those of the etheric body. And if they do, they do something very strange. If he says to himself: “What the Greeks did in the Olympic Games was very clever, so we'll do the same,” then it's really very funny; because it means nothing other than if, for example, a twenty-five-year-old did not like studying at a university and would rather do what a five- or ten-year-old boy does. Simply to transpose Greek into our own time is the most ridiculous thing one could do; it is a betrayal of trust in the development of humanity. If we are to seek today for that which the Greeks sought in their own way in the Olympic Games, then eurythmy must become part of humanity. People must try to achieve bodily health from the soul by not allowing the etheric body to wither away, but by letting the physical body make the movements required by the etheric body. That is the hygienic side of eurythmy.

People will begin to grasp the artistic significance of eurythmy when they realize how they must immerse their whole being in the artistic, how they are not only the creators of this and that, but how they themselves must become artistic means; they become so by exercising the artistic with their own body. And they do that through eurythmy.

Eurythmy is not something arbitrary, arising from the same spirit as other contemporary endeavors. It asks: What movements are best for the ether body of the modern human being in pedagogical and hygienic terms, what movements best lead to an understanding of true artistry and best immerse the human being in full, true life? I therefore believe that eurythmy will become popular in our circles and be accepted as something that can help a great deal. You cannot teach your children Anthroposophy directly, but they can do eurythmy and will be able to cope with the life they are heading for in a completely different way than if they do not do eurythmy.

My dear friends! I have already spoken in many respects of the relationship between the large rotunda outside and the small one, of the relationship between what is in the large space of the building and what is in the small space inside. Now someone might ask: how do the forms of the small space emerge from those of the large space? The answer is: let someone try to let the forms of the large space of the building emerge through eurythmy, and the forms of the small space of the building will arise from them. If you try to imagine a person combining in their eurythmic movements everything that is expressed in the large rotunda and dancing it in the small room and radiating from there what they are dancing, then the twelve columns and the dome of the small room would arise from it by themselves.

And then I hope that something else will dance eurythmically in the building: the word! It will have good acoustics. In short, eurythmy can be defined as the fulfillment of what the human etheric body demands of the human being according to its natural laws. Therefore, something is really given in this eurythmy that belongs to our spiritual life and that is thought out of its wholeness.

Perhaps you will accept what I have tried to say and consider it an answer to a question that has just been put to us by many Swiss friends. What I have defined here is something you can actually get to know through the courses you have requested.

9. What is Immortal about the Human Being?

Dear attendees! If it must always be obvious to the human soul and the human mind, and must belong to its most intimate concerns, to raise the question that is to be the subject of today's reflection in our time, when so many, many people in the prime of have to go through the gate of death at a young age, it must be even more important for the soul to direct one's feelings and thoughts to that which is immortal in the human being.

Of course, in our time, a consideration such as the following is met with prejudice after prejudice, especially those prejudices that come from those who, from their firm ground, as they say, of the scientific world view, to be able to consider this question from the standpoint of the scientific world view, either as something that transcends the limits of human knowledge or as something that is so incomprehensible that everything that can be said about it must be in clear contradiction to the achievements of the scientific way of thinking. If a sentence were to be spoken this evening, dear attendees, which could not stand up to the strictest criticism of a scientific world view, I would rather leave this consideration unsaid.

For what natural science has to say about this question from its point of view must not only be anticipated by the person speaking from the standpoint of the humanities, but it must also be recognized as fully justified if it proves to be so from the standpoint of contemporary science. But those who raise objections to the following kind of presentation from an apparently scientific point of view are always assuming that even in our time, one can still get by with the thoughts and ideas, with the insights, or better said, with the thought patterns of a worldview that is coming to an end, in the face of advanced spiritual science. And it is still extraordinarily difficult for people today to understand that anyone who wants to talk about such questions of spiritual world view must appeal to insights of the human heart, the human soul, the human spirit, that go beyond what natural science is able to produce, that, so to speak, enter the terrain of a completely different field of knowledge, but that can exist alongside and above natural science as fully as natural science. The aim of spiritual science is to allow its insights to flow into the spiritual development of humanity, just as insights that we today call the scientific worldview flowed into this development three to four centuries ago. And just as this scientific world view at that time contradicted the thinking and prejudices of a wide circle and yet found its way to the human sense of truth, so spiritual science will take this path to the human sense of truth even if today it must still meet with objections, and if something like what has to be said today must, quite understandably, be seen by many as a flight of fancy, as a fantasy.

Because that which can give us an answer to the question, “What is it about the human being that is immortal?” can give us an answer, must first be drawn from the hidden depths of the human soul. A research method is needed that is based on intimate inner soul work, that rests deep within the human soul, that reaches for nothing but what is present in every human soul, but what eludes observation and the attention of this human soul in the everyday life of this human soul. That which a person carries through the gateway of death, that which he carries up into a spiritual world in which he finds himself when he has laid aside his body, cannot be grasped with everyday powers, cannot be grasped with the powers of knowledge that one has for everyday life as a way of observing the world. A more intimate inner work of the soul is necessary for this. Already on repeated occasions have I been allowed to speak here in this city about this intimate inner path, the purely spiritual-soul path, which the human being has to go through if he wants to enter the field of spiritual beings and spiritual realities. From a particular point of view, this path of the soul to the spiritual will be illuminated again this evening.

We cannot recognize from the everyday life of the person before us what belongs to the spiritual world. Nor can we recognize this as we can see from the water that the hydrogen, which is quite different from water, is contained in this water. First chemistry must come and separate hydrogen from water by its laboratory method; then one obtains something that can come out of water and which shows quite different properties from those of water. While water is liquid, hydrogen is gaseous; while water extinguishes fire, hydrogen burns. But no one can know what the properties, the characteristics, the essence of hydrogen are just by looking at water. Chemistry must first come and separate hydrogen from water. Likewise, one cannot recognize from the person who stands before us in everyday life what lives in him for eternity, for immortality. The spiritual scientific method must, one might say, come like a spiritual chemistry and separate from the body that which cannot appear in connection with the body. And as fantastic and dreamy, and perhaps even foolish it may still appear to some today, there will be a science of the future that is clear about the fact that there are spiritual-soul methods that bring the spiritual-soul of man, the immortal part of man, out of the connection with the body, so that man can really know: “I now live with my soul outside of my body, I experience myself in the soul outside of the body!”

And only through this research, which leads to an insight whereby the soul experiences itself cognitively outside the body, can one enter the realm in which the soul has its immortal members. But not external methods, not tangible methods, as used by external natural science, can serve to, as it were, chemically separate the soul from the mortal body, if the crude expression may be used. Rather, it is intimate, soulful methods, inner soul experiences. Of these soul methods, these inner soul experiences, we want to present two in particular to our soul today.

The first, it is called, I would like to say with a technical term of spiritual science: the concentration of the life of thought, of feeling, of the life of will impulses. When it is described in this way, this concentration of the life of thought, of feeling, of the life of will impulses seems easy; but one would like to say with Goethe's “Faust”: “But the easy is difficult.” And what I have to describe concerns the soul's experiences that are shattering and have a tremendous inner effect. These experiences of the soul we stand before in recognition with a much greater inner tragedy, I would say, than one can ever stand before external physical death. That is why those who have been close to spiritual science at all times have always emphasized that the path to the spiritual worlds, the path to spiritual knowledge, leads to the gate of death. Simply - but this simplicity must be approached with all intensity, with all energy - simply what one has to do to free the soul from the experience with the body together. A thought, a feeling or a series of thoughts, a series of feelings, one must first fully embrace them with the soul, make them fully present in the soul, then place them at the center of consciousness, so that nothing but these thoughts and feelings arbitrarily placed by our soul at the center of consciousness, so that, as it were, the whole world is forgotten and absorbed around us, with all sensory impressions, with all other feelings and thoughts. And only that which we place at the center of our consciousness through our free will must merge completely, I would say completely, with the soul and its powers; the soul must know itself to be completely one with that which it thus places at the center of consciousness.

This is a task for a long, long time. Depending on the person's aptitude for it, it may take weeks, months, years. Again and again, even if it only takes minutes during the day, it takes a long time to evoke in the soul that inner ability to reject all other thoughts and feelings, all other feelings and desires, and to place only a certain kind of thought at the center of consciousness. It does not matter so much what the content of the thoughts is, but rather that they place a clearly comprehensible sensation or thought at the center of our consciousness in such a way that we actually live only in what we think or feel, that we forget ourselves in doing so, that we know ourselves to be completely one with it. In this way, we concentrate all the powers of our soul on this single sensation, this single thought. At first, however, we must be clear in our own minds that, as I said, this seems easy; “but the easy is difficult.” Many things are involved when we are practising concentration of thought. Above all, it is essential that the thought we place at the center of our consciousness is one that we can fully comprehend. With most of the thoughts we have, all kinds of inner sympathies and antipathies, all kinds of feelings and memories play a role. They color our thoughts so that we usually do not even know what is going on in our soul when we have a thought in everyday life and concentrate on it.

Of course, anyone working in the field of psychiatry or psychology or modern science today has a cheap objection to all this. He will say: So if the spiritual researcher concentrates on a thought, he cannot possibly know everything that comes up in this thought from the subconscious depths of his soul and how he then becomes absorbed in self-suggestion and fantasies. Of course, it is quite understandable that such objections are raised from a scientific point of view; and they appear to be fully justified in a certain way, these objections, and the spiritual researcher can well see that they must be raised. But usually what must be observed in all these things is not observed. You will find a careful compilation of the details in the two books: “How to Know Higher Worlds?” and in my “Occult Science”. One passes by what is required there, that one should pay full attention to it. What matters is to place at the center of one's entire soul life a thought, a feeling that can be easily surveyed, that cannot remind us of anything, that cannot evoke anything from the subconscious depths of the soul. Therefore, it is even better not to place in the center of one's consciousness an idea taken from some external reality, an idea that depicts something, but rather an idea that is purely allegorical, purely symbolic, where it is only important that we concentrate the soul forces, that we focus all the work of the soul forces on detaching ourselves from everything else in order to concentrate purely on this one point.

I will give a very simple example: when someone becomes absorbed in the thought:

“In the bright light, the clear truth of the world takes effect,” or: “In the bright light, the clear truth of the world lives.” When someone forms such a sentence, anyone who is grounded in external, sensual materialism can of course say: Yes, such a sentence is pure daydreaming, it means nothing, it does not reflect reality. But that is not the point. The important thing is what one does when thinking and feeling such a sentence, what the soul does. And then, when one either meditates for a long time on such a sentence or when one alternates with such a sentence with others, then one has a very significant inner experience, an experience of which the one who has gone through it fully knows that it represents something so real in relation to the human soul as only any chemical or physical method represents something real in relation to external, sensual things. One comes to experience, by concentrating on a particular content of consciousness, one comes to feel more and more strongly those soul forces that one can call the imaginative, the thinking soul forces. In a sense, by identifying with it, one feels more and more inwardly stronger and stronger, and while outwardly one is at rest with regard to the whole world with one's senses, with the outward mind, inwardly one feels strengthened. In deep subsoil, one feels something welling up that lies hidden in the soul, that one has not observed, but of which one is now becoming aware in direct experience.

And by feeling this experience more and more strongly and more and more brightly, one comes to a certain point. We will see in a moment that this point should not actually be fully reached by a regular spiritual development, as I will describe in a moment, but has to be modified by something else. But if you would concentrate more and more, would execute more and more and more everything that is in the soul, on the one chosen, then you would finally, by feeling your inner activity swelling more and more, you would come to feel that power as if it were paralyzing itself, as if it were fading away. It is a momentous experience to which one comes, an experience that represents an infinitely unforgettable inner experience for the one who undergoes it. Because he has a very specific inner experience in the process, the experience that he feels: Now is the moment when, after concentrating all the powers of the soul, after gathering together everything that is otherwise hidden in the soul, where you have allowed it to flow into your power of thought, into your power of imagination, and where it flows out of you – but what you have brought up from the depths of your soul flows out into the world. It withdraws from you, it leaves your body, it flees you!

And one would not come along now, one would feel like the soul has been taken out of one's body, and this soul united with the general spirit that blows and works through the world. One would feel estranged from oneself. Therefore, the exercise that is implied by this must be modified by another, which must proceed simultaneously with it. And anyone who follows the path of spiritual research as I have described it in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” receives the individual rules in such a way that what I have just described is actually modified, so that we do not feel as if the best part of ourselves has been taken from us. So something else has to happen. The first thing that separates the soul from the body was the concentration of thought, the intensification of the life of thought. Through this intensification of the life of thought, we are, as it were, snatched from ourselves. The second thing is a contradiction to that; it is something opposite, the other pole, but life proceeds polarly, it proceeds in such a way that it passes through opposites. Therefore, if one has knowledge, knowledge that should not be knowledge in abstract terms, but knowledge of the laws of nature, of life, then one must move through contradictions.

The second is what could be called a complete surrender of the will to the ruling, present, and active world powers. So that, as it were, just as we bring our sensory perception to a standstill in the first, we must bring every inner stubborn will to a standstill in the second. Now there is a certain means by which one can develop the strength within oneself to make one's own will truly radically subject to the general weaving of the world. This is when one acquires a completely new attitude towards what we call our destiny. How do we experience our destiny in our ordinary existence? Well, we experience our destiny in such a way that we regard what happens to us as fate in good and evil as something that happens to us, that we encounter it with sympathy or antipathy, so that we really see what is, so to speak, what befalls us, what we incur, we see as something that comes to us; we stand outside of it, we see ourselves as the I-, the self-being, on which fate has an effect, to which it comes.

Even in ordinary life, one can see through truly rational reflection that we basically cannot relate to fate at all. If you consider what you are at a particular point in time in your later experience, you will say to yourself: what you are there, what you experience in your inner being, what you can do and are capable of, is inconceivable without the ordinary fate of life between birth and death. Just think about it carefully. Everything we are able to do in the present moment, if we trace it back to our ordinary life between birth and death, we have to admit: what we are able to do now is connected to something we have gone through earlier. The fact that I am able to do something now may be connected to the fact that the person who was responsible for my education once brought me into this or that sphere. What happened to me back then united with me, became strength in me; now it is my ability. Whenever you really think deeply, “What am I actually, what is there in me?” you will see that what is in me or in other people at the present moment is in every person, woven together out of destiny. And if you follow this thought properly, one might say in a soulful way, you come to understand how you must, as it were, grow ever more together with your destiny, how you must recognize what you call your self as a web of destiny. What one otherwise speaks of as a coincidence is now found within oneself, interwoven within oneself; one finds oneself as a result of fate. One grows together with fate, and in this way one grows together to the extent that one identifies with it.

As one must say with the earlier path, the earlier means of spiritual research: you identify with a thought, with a feeling, so now you must recognize yourself as identical with your destiny through the thing itself, through the circumstances themselves. What I am saying now must not remain only theoretical, it must not be only an abstract consideration, but it must be lived through inwardly, feelingly; it must permeate all the fibers of our soul. Then we feel how we gradually see our will streaming out into our destiny, and we see how we say to ourselves: 'You have so far regarded something as a twist of fate, but it was you yourself. That which is in you has brought this twist of fate upon you, otherwise you would not be this being, this I.

In essence, when you meditate on your destiny for weeks, months or years, depending on your disposition, you will experience an emotional surrender to your destiny. You learn to recognize that you have to go out of yourself from the little room in which you have felt locked up. One learns to flow with the stream of one's destiny. When one thus recognizes how the self, the I, actually lives outside, how in what we call 'happens' to us, in truth our will rests, how the I flows along in destiny, then this will is torn out of us again as we surrender ourselves to our destiny. And that is the second thing. But it must be achieved, it must be achieved in an inner emotional and mental experience. It must fill the whole person, that is, it must be emotionally surrendered to fate. Then one feels how one grows together with fate and at the same time with spiritually effective world forces that permeate and interweave the external world. What seems to flee from us in the concentration of thought, what seems to take away our selfhood, is then followed by - that is, the thought is followed by - an element of will, an emotional element of will. While we feel the thought flowing out of our head in the way indicated earlier, we then feel something following from our whole being. We sacrifice the will to the thought. And then, the soul, the thinking, the feeling, the sensing, the willing steps forth out of the thought, and we go with it.

What I have described is a real process, a real emergence of the soul from the physical shell. This is something that can be experienced experimentally just as truly and intensely and really, one might say, as the emergence of hydrogen from water, the detachment of hydrogen from water. It is like the detachment of the soul from the physical, which then remains behind, so that the physical with all its outer experiences becomes an external object; the soul has stepped out of the body. It then looks at its body, which it has left, as one otherwise looks at the table or the chair in the sensory world.

And what is important is that it does not merely experience itself in the abstract, but as truly as it develops an inner experience within the body, so truly it develops an inner experience outside the body, which it knows is a spiritual-soul experience. The soul experiences itself fully in the inner experience. And truly, just as people did not know for a long time that oxygen could be separated from hydrogen, but had to learn how to do it, so the spiritual culture of humanity will learn that the spiritual-soul can be separated from the physical, however baroque, foolish, and foolish it may still seem to present-day humanity.

A true spiritual science is that which the future will have - and through which the future of the human soul will bring that knowledge which the human soul needs when the powers that have been there from time immemorial have matured in it for such things. We await such a time. Only he can deny it who misjudges the signs of the time, who does not know the deepest longings that are already living consciously in numerous souls today, unconsciously in others, and that will take hold of all mankind: the longing to know about the spiritual. But then, when the soul grasps itself in real bodiless experience, then it becomes acquainted with powers within itself, which one does not have in everyday life, which one cannot unfold in the body. One power will be described in the following way.

When we live our everyday lives, we come, as the soul develops the power of imagination, feeling and will - we come in everyday experience to what is ultimately called memory. And anyone who reflects a little on memory knows what this memory means for the whole cohesive being of the human being. We could not develop self-awareness if we did not remember the experiences we have gone through since a certain point in time after birth. It is only because the stream of memories does not break off, because we know that it was we who have lived through this stream, that we are a self, a self. Even worldviews can only work with memories that the soul stores, and can then bring these memories into a harmonious or logical context, so that we can understand what the soul has before it in everyday life as its final experience, as a memory. So what is memory based on? Well, from an external point of view, we can say that when we go through experiences, we form ideas, we feel this or that about the experiences. Then an image remains with us, which is stored in the soul, and when we have long since moved beyond the experience, we know that we can look back on the image in our inner experience; the experience is not there, only the inner image is there, something is there that our soul is just weaving. In order to approach this image, to approach the essence of memory in general, we can now consider the following, which I can only outline in rough strokes, as if with charcoal, and which you can then follow in detail in spiritual science literature.

If we want to approach this memory, we find that in the first period of life after birth, after entering the world, this memory is not yet alive. This memory only occurs in the earliest childhood; up to a certain point of the earliest childhood, we remember later. What is before that must be reported to us by our surroundings, but we do not remember back. What is the basis for remembering back? It is based on certain powers that the soul can use to retain images, powers that enable the soul to store these images within itself. These powers were already there before memory was there; they were already present immediately after birth, but they had a different task then. They had the task of still working on the delicate organs of the human being, on the nervous system and the brain of the human being; on the nervous system and brain they have to work plastically. They were still formative forces of the human organism, of that which is still soft, so to speak - roughly speaking, but it means a reality - which must first be formed so that the human being is this particular human being. As formative forces, these still run into the bodily organization in early childhood.

And when this organization has hardened – again, this is figuratively speaking – so much so that these formative forces can no longer flow into the physical, then the physical works in such a way that these formative forces do not flow into it, but are reflected back from the physical into the soul. The body acts like a mirror. And what we then experience in our soul, especially what is stored in our memories, are mirror images reflected back from our bodily life. In truth, we remember because our body is a mirroring apparatus. Science will fully understand this when it continues on the paths on which all this is hinted at. Then it will also see through the contradictions it raises when such things are presented. Just as if there were one mirror hanging on the wall after the other and we walked past, we would only see ourselves when we stood in front of the mirrors. The mirror reflects our own image. This is how it is with our inner soul experience. The body is a mirroring apparatus; it reflects what the soul experiences. Through this, the soul itself experiences what were previously formative forces in the most tender childhood, what was used, so to speak, to build the mirror in the first place.

A further step is this: Imagine the following – I present it to you as a comparison, but it means something very real. Imagine that you are standing in front of a mirror that allows you to see yourself, to see what you yourself send to the mirror as a ray of light. You see yourself because the mirror reflects your physical image. In the same way, your body reflects that which is in the soul. But now imagine that you acquire the power – and this takes place in the soul – to not need a mirror. You would develop such great strength that you would, as it were, look into space at that which the mirror otherwise reflects as your own image. But this happens through the soul exercises that I mentioned: concentration of thought, immersion in the will, surrender to the order of the world, you could also say.

In this way the soul's powers are so strengthened that what would otherwise be reflected back from the body, which is only a mirror image, emerges as one's own inner, soul experience, that it becomes inwardly alive through the soul's own power. Therefore, what the spiritual researcher experiences inwardly when he has separated his soul from his body is a more highly developed, active act of remembering. While in ordinary life we only go as far as memory, through which we are dependent on the reflection of the body, the exercises indicated now give us the ability to develop inner soul forces in order to make our soul's inner life actively engaged, so that it radiates an inner reality.

When the soul reaches the point where it creates its inner powers, as it were, but in truth draws them from the deepest part of its being, then it will notice that not only does it unfold these powers, but that with the unfolding of these powers, with the procurement of the inner mirror image, so to speak, something else takes place: what we can call perception, direct grasping of a spiritual world. However, this perception is quite different from the perception of the external, sensual reality. When we perceive the external-sensual reality, we look at the objects with our eyes, we listen to the sounds with our ears, and touch the external objects with our hands. There is the object that we approach, which has an effect on us from the outside. But when we develop what I have described as the inner powers of the soul, then something really comes to life, so that the soul knows itself outside the body in a system of inner forces. Then what is spiritual essence, spiritual reality, flows into these forces.

I will use another comparison: when I grasp this corner here with my hand, through sensory perception, the corner is outside of me; the corner touches my hand from the outside. It is not like that in spiritual perception. Rather, if this were a soul force, as the hand is now, when I do not let it work, the spiritual flows into the hand from behind, as it were. While the physical touches things from the outside, the spiritual does not touch from the outside; the spiritual flows into the soul forces, so that we have to acquire completely new concepts if we want to speak of this spiritual recognition and perception. We perceive external things; in order to enter into a relationship with the spiritual, it is necessary that we develop forces into which this spiritual world flows. That is to say, we must say: We experience the great and powerful through soul development, that the spiritual world perceives us, that we become something like a thought, like a will impulse of higher spiritual beings that invisibly and supersensibly stand above us. The spiritual researcher must speak of these spiritual beings, which are invisible and supersensible to the just-discussed powers of knowledge of the soul, in the same way that the natural scientist speaks of the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms, and the physical human kingdom as the four natural kingdoms that are outside of us. And just as we say when we are confronted with these beings of the four kingdoms: we perceive, we reflect on these entities, they are outside, and we form sensory images of them, so we must say: by going out of our body with our soul we ourselves become - but in a much higher, in an inner liveliness and essentiality - we ourselves become thoughts, feelings, and volitional impulses of the higher spiritual beings; we are perceived, we experience ourselves being perceived by the higher spiritual beings.

From this you can see, dear reader, that anyone approaching the question, “What is immortal about the human being?” cannot approach the question as people still so often do today. They approach such a question and say: Well, I have acquired this or that concept. How can one prove to me the immortality of the soul?

Yes, with these concepts, which one has acquired in the outer life and in science, which one calls today, one cannot prove it; because these concepts relate to what the soul experiences in everyday life and what is only an inner reflection. Just as the reflection does not remain when the mirror is no longer there, so what the soul thinks, feels and wills in everyday life does not remain, because it is only a reflection of the body; even the memory in which it is stored up is a reflection of the soul. Anyone who wants to prove the immortality of the soul through thinking, feeling and willing is on the same path as someone who wants to prove the permanence of the mirror image from the picture in the mirror. Everything that the mirror image is must be admitted to the natural scientist, and nothing else is presented to him. All that is called “soul” in ordinary life does not pass through the portal of death, but it contains something, the soul contains something - for what spiritual science brings up is the soul – that passes through the gate of death in such a way that it can only be grasped in terms of ideas that one does not have if one does not develop them first.

While for ordinary experience one must say that the human soul perceives, for spiritual experience one must say: the soul is perceived by higher beings. While in sensory experience one perceives oneself, for spiritual experience one must say: after death, the human being is received by the higher spiritual beings. When a person incorporates thoughts of external natural things into his soul, then the entity that rules over him supersensibly incorporates itself into him; he is remembered, he is carried away into the spiritual world. That is why it is so difficult to answer the question, “What is immortal about the human being?” if you want to answer it with the ordinary concepts of the day, which do not apply to it at all.

And all philosophers who have tried to approach the immortality of the human soul, to answer the question of the immortality of the soul, have always come back to saying: there must be something fine and substantial that goes beyond death. We have seen, dear attendees, that nothing of the substantial remains, but that the soul's powers are themselves a highly developed memory life, that it is a being perceived, a feeling of security in the spiritual world. They all know that such processes in the life of the senses even have their symbols, their analogies. When you push a billiard ball against another, the physicist says: the state of motion of the first ball goes over into the second. What has gone from one ball to the other? It is not the substance of the first that has gone over into the second, but only the force goes over.

Those who have thought about the immortality of the soul have always thought of it as something that is in the ordinary life and passes through the gate of death; while what passes through the gate of death must first be sought, because it lies so deeply hidden in the soul that it is not noticed at all, that attention is not focused on it in ordinary life; but it is there after all. And when someone who has so truly, chemically, as it were, separated the soul and spirit from the body, then experiences this soul and spirit as it is sheltered in a supersensible world of spiritual beings that stands above it, then he also knows that in this of the soul - just as hydrogen is hidden in water - that in this he has something that works in secret, so to speak between the lines of life; which absorbs the finest powers of the soul, of experience, of the moral abilities of the human being, just as the small plant germ absorbs the forces from the whole plant in order to concentrate them. And after withering, after the leaves wither and the blossom dies, the plant as a small germ carries over what lived in the previous plant, carries over into the following plant what the plant has saved as a germ - so it is in the human soul. If you distill it out in this way, you realize that in every moment of life, waking and sleeping, this human soul works in the depths of everyday life, working out everything we acquire in the way of abilities , is permeated, deeply permeated, by what it has done in the way of right and wrong, beauty and ugliness. It carries this within itself, just as the germ of a plant carries within itself the germ of the whole new plant.

And then we know that what lives so hidden in the soul goes through a life between death and a new birth, and then returns to earthly life. In this life between death and a new birth, the human being gathers spiritual forces from a spiritual world, but these become formative forces so that, through a new birth, he can unite with what he has been given by his father and mother and his line of ancestors, in order to give himself a new inner soul life when it has solidified to the point that it can reflect. Thus the human soul does not live through one earth life, but successive earth lives.

Thus the complete life on earth consists of a succession of lives that take place between birth and death, and of lives between death and a new birth that are longer than the lives on earth in which the soul dwells in purely spiritual spheres, where it is active and engaged, where it is just as much at one with the spiritual world as it is with the physical world here. That the human soul experiences repeated lives on earth in its universal existence, and that each subsequent life on earth is the effect of previous lives on earth, is what spiritual science will gradually incorporate into the spiritual culture of humanity, just as the Copernican world view has been incorporated into external culture. Of course, it is still the case today that people often say: Yes, what you are telling me, contradicts what the five senses consider to be true! Yes, now, man has even had to experience quite different things that contradict his five senses. For thousands of years, man has believed according to his five senses that the sun and the starry sky move around the earth. That it is the other way around, that the earth moves around the sun, he had to believe despite the contradiction of his five senses. So what must now contradict the five senses, that man goes through repeated earth lives, will also enter into people's thinking habits. But then man will speak out of a real science about what is immortal in the human being. He will seek this immortal, so to speak, between the lines of ordinary experiences, will know within himself an inner working being, which is sheltered in a spiritual world, just as the thinking mind shelters the sensual outer world in our ideas and thoughts and feelings. Then the human being will know himself connected with his eternal, his immortal, connected with the spiritual world. Such is the destiny of human development. And we may truly remember this in our time, in this time of difficult but also glorious trials; we may remember how German intellectual life in particular – you will not find it incongruous if I mention this in the last part of my discussion – how German intellectual life in particular has been working for a long time to gain such a science.

We need only remember Lessing, the great standard-bearer of modern German intellectual life, and the store of enlightening ideas for him and for humanity that he has gathered in his soul. He summarized them, as if in a testament, in his beautiful essay “The Education of the Human Race.” Of course, many people, especially the very clever ones, say today: Well, Lessing! He wrote and said a lot throughout his life, then he grew old, his mental powers weakened, and then he also wrote such complicated stuff, where he also fought for something like the doctrine of repeated lives on earth, of intermediate lives between death and a new birth in the spiritual world! People consider it a crazy idea, and they forgive the great minds if they also come to such complicated ideas, which one does not see as such in ordinary life, which one can grasp with the five senses. But Lessing said something very significant at the end of his work: 'There have always been people in the most ancient times who, through ancient clairvoyance, through ancient abilities of the human soul that are still closer to certain powers of the spiritual world, have known something about repeated earthly lives in primeval times. And Lessing says: “Should that which the human soul has arrived at through original powers, what it has achieved before it was corrupted by the sophistries of school, should that, precisely that, be untrue?”

Lessing was right. Spiritual science will show humanity that what was, so to speak, at a primitive stage of development will, at the highest stage, come to a truly developed scientific knowledge, if, that is, science will be so far advanced that it not only but also to methods of spiritual-soul experimentation, as has just been described as a kind of spiritual chemistry. And it is precisely German spiritual life that has always pointed to this intimacy of the soul life, through which the soul comes beyond itself into a higher life of feeling, which is not a mere life of memory but an immersion into spiritual reality. A higher life of thought, a higher life of feeling, a higher life of will. To achieve this, to strengthen the soul's powers so that it can emerge from its body, has always been the goal of German spiritual life; and this is one of the seeds of German spiritual life that I referred to yesterday, which still have to blossom and bear fruit in this German spiritual life.

We see, for example, how very remarkably inward-looking German minds, such as the quite wonderful Novalis, how these German minds, through their inner, living contemplation, their contemplative experience of their soul, grasp this soul and receive it in direct contemplation in such a way that they know: This can pass through the gate of death as the immortality of the soul; and then they arrive at concepts that are foolish for ordinary experience, but which, because they do not fit ordinary experience, are precisely suited for an experience that goes beyond ordinary experience. Those who want to find only the usual concepts in spiritual science cannot achieve this. This spiritual science requires an inner mobility, an elasticity of mind, so that one can arrive at new concepts. Most people want to spare themselves this out of inner laziness. They believe that the spiritual world must be something like a finer copy of the sensual world; they imagine the spiritual world to be material again, substantial. But if you experience the world spiritually, nothing of what you are accustomed to remains in it; instead, something completely new awakens that you have not yet known, but with which you must enrich your soul in order to experience within yourself what is immortal in the human soul.

When speaking of the spiritual world, to which the soul belongs in the immortal, such people must first form the words, the concepts. That is why I have to apologize to you, so to speak, for today's lecture. In a lecture like this, where one speaks of the spiritual world in terms that are shaped for ordinary life, one has to struggle with words. One has to claim that when formulating words that go beyond ordinary words, one resorts to words that are uncomfortable for those who want to cling to the ordinary. Time and again, critics come along and say: What you said, that doesn't even exist. I know that. I know, well, of course, these gentlemen know a lot, an infinite amount, but when they apply their old concepts to something that must have completely new concepts, then their criticism is not appropriate for what they want to characterize. But in German intellectual life we have minds – Novalis is one of them – that know how to speak in a language that is indeed the German language, but is nevertheless like something, like a wonderfully lively essence that is distilled from the German language to show something that is as real as the sensory world, which is the reality into which the soul passes when it passes through the gate of death. What such people say can have an effect on those who are receptive to it.

And now I will give you a remarkable example; it is too beautiful for me to withhold from you how Novalis worked. I am deliberately seeking to cite his influence on a Belgian-French poet-philosopher, a Belgian-French poet-philosopher who studied Novalis, who, as he claims, immersed himself completely in this Novalis, who gained an impression that he describes in the following way.

I must say, before I present this, that yes, another, as you will soon hear, perhaps another Belgian-French poet-philosopher, Maurice Maeterlinck, immediately after the outbreak of the war and again and again, found particular abusive words about the German “barbarians” and went on a rampage against this “barbaric culture”. That is Maurice Maeterlinck, for whose fame in the world German intellectual life has done more than French intellectual life. Well, but gratitude is not something that needs to be demanded in this day and age. He really did insult and revile these German “barbarians” very much, following the example of the others I mentioned yesterday.

In contrast to this, there is another Belgian-French poet-philosopher, Novalis, who allowed himself to be influenced by one of the most German of German poet-philosophers, with all that he had to say about what is immortal in the human being, and he then talks about this influence. He cannot but say: When one reads Sophocles or Shakespeare in this way, when one sees what Sophocles' figures, what Shakespeare's characters, what Hamlet even experience, then what these people do and suffer is entirely earthly; it only interests the earthly human being. But, says the Belgian-French poet-philosopher, if a spirit from another planet or an English being – forgive the expression, I mean a being that is an angel, says the Belgian-French poet; you cannot refer to Goethe's words in “Faust”, which are somewhat ambiguous : “They lisp English when they lie,” that is inserted in parentheses. This Belgian-French poet-philosopher says: If a spirit descended from other worlds, it would not be able to relate to the experiences of the characters of Sophocles and Shakespeare; these are only earthly matters.

But in Novalis, this Belgian-French poet-philosopher finds a soul that has something to experience, something to say, that would interest even spirits who would one day descend from the universe to visit the earth because Novalis speaks of the eternal in the human soul, which must interest not only the human souls, insofar as they live in the body, but must also interest that which also belongs to the whole extra-terrestrial world. And in beautiful words, this Belgian-French poet-philosopher speaks of what he experienced in Novalis, the German poet-philosopher:

But if he needed other proof, it would lead him among those whose works almost stir to silence.

He means that the ordinary language of the day is for what is transitory, but what is immortal, one could say, one should actually remain silent about it or find another language.

She would open the gate of the realm where some loved her for her own sake, without worrying about the small gestures of her body. They would climb together to the lonely plateaus where consciousness rises [one step] and where all those who are restless about themselves [feel] attentively survey the immense ring that connects the world of appearances to our higher worlds. She would go with him to the borders of humanity; for at the point where man seems to end, he probably only begins, and his most essential and inexhaustible parts are only in the invisible, where he must be constantly on his guard. On these heights alone are thoughts that the soul can approve of, and images that resemble her and are as commanding as she is. There, humanity has ruled for a moment, and these dimly lit peaks are perhaps the only lights that announce the earth in the spirit realm. Their reflection truly has the color of our soul. We feel that the passions of the mind and body would resemble the tolling of bells in the eyes of a foreign reason; but the people I am talking about have come out of the little village of passions in their works and said things that are also of value to those who do not belong to the earthly community.

Such are the words of the Franco-Belgian poet-philosopher. If he had not heard Maurice Maeterlinck railing against the “barbarians” [what emerged from “barbarism”], as the Franco-Belgian poet-philosopher spoke of, as I read to you, he would not say to Maurice Maeterlinck:

In truth, it is difficult to question one's soul and to discern its weak, childish voice amidst the useless clamor that surrounds it.

No doubt the Franco-Belgian poet-philosopher I have been reading to you would call such a useless barker a “barbarian babbler” with his “Barbaric Chat”. Yes, but there is a catch, because what I said earlier was perhaps very justified, because the words are from Maurice Maeterlinck himself - albeit written before the outbreak of the war!

These are the things that we experience today; that is why I said yesterday: What we are experiencing in the world today is a characteristic chapter of psychiatry. For what follows from the incredibly paradoxical fact that the same Maurice Maeterlinck utters these words about the German Novalis – and later reviles and curses the entire German people as a “barbarian people”? What follows from the fact that what he said years ago and what I have read to you is deeply false and dishonest? That is the peculiar thing about our present culture, dear honored attendees, that because this culture is so full, so to speak, of what has already been stored up through language and through appearances, the untrue soul can also produce very beautiful words, beautiful-sounding words, but words that can be inwardly false. But it is precisely one of the paths of the soul that leads to the spirit in the way I have described, that everything the soul brings forth, goes through, is true in the deepest inner being, shattering true.

If only something is a mere phrase, only something is false in the soul on the way into the spiritual world, then one cannot find this way into the spiritual world. Following the one who said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” that is, the connection of the three, such a way of imitating the one who said this, is this way of truth. And if he is only a phrase, however beautiful a phrase may sound, he will not find the truth; he will only find the great deception, which can also penetrate into the soul, where the soul wants to find that with which it is connected as with its immortal part. Inner truth alone brings the soul into connection with that which, as the Divine, permeates and permeates the world.

And when, again, out of German spiritual life, Master Eckhart the philosopher speaks beautifully and profoundly of the fact that there is a spark in the mind, which ignites that which can live from the divine in the individual can live, so one must say that the human soul can only truly experience what, like a spark in the mind, is to be ignited if it is deeply true to itself.

However, this requires self-knowledge. But this self-knowledge is difficult to achieve in life. What we achieve – what I have explained – is that the human being with his soul and spirit emerges from the physical, and then he has his ordinary earthly self before him, as he otherwise has external things before him. But he must be able to see his earthly self and, before he begins this spiritual path, must be able to acquire self-knowledge as an inner habit.

But just how difficult it is can be seen from the following comparative example: Dr. Ernst Mach, a very famous contemporary Viennese professor, formerly of Prague, who wrote various books that are highly esteemed today, gave a sample on the third page of his book 'Analysis of Sensations' of how difficult it is to arrive at self-knowledge, even in terms of physical form. He recounts: “As a young man, I once saw a face in profile in a shop window while I was crossing the street. There were two mirrors facing each other. I thought: What kind of person am I encountering with a repulsive, even revolting face; and I was not a little surprised when I discovered that it was my own image in front of me, revealed to me by the way the mirrors were arranged.” And as a second example, the same professor tells the same story on page three of his book: ”Once, when I was quite tired from a journey, I got on a bus. I saw a man getting on from the other side, and I thought,” he says, he admits it, he is completely honest, ‘what a run-down, unpleasant schoolmaster is getting on there. And again I saw: it was me.’ And he adds: ‘So I knew the habitus of the species better than my own.’

A lady who had heard this after I had said it in other lectures, related an example of such a lack of self-awareness in relation to her appearance, which she had experienced with a relative. She went into a restaurant in a strange city. She didn't really know her way around. As she walked towards the wall, she saw a lady coming towards her from the other side. “Well, what kind of ugly country girl is that?” she thought. She was a very elegant city woman. It was only when she spoke to the lady and received no answer that she recognized herself.

These are examples that I would say are taken from the coarsest external sensuality. But even if a person has so little insight into his external physical sensuality, he has even less insight into the soul in ordinary life. But this possibility of looking at oneself, of knowing oneself as an external object, is part of the real grasp of what is immortal in the human being.

And the one who really immerses himself in the spiritual world and can then also follow what is real in this spiritual world, can follow - I say this without prejudice - the human being not only in his life between birth and death, but beyond death, who knows that when he communes with his soul, the soul looks back at death, and precisely by looking back, it looks back at itself in self-recognition, at what one has experienced between birth and death. Self-recognition is, as it were, the eye of the immortal spirit. Through self-knowledge, we must see the whole spiritual world in the time we live through spiritually between death and a new birth. All this is really so that we can say: the seeds that must come to further development and unfolding in the course of time are contained in German spiritual life, which must be grasped in a living way. Then real knowledge, real spiritual understanding, will emerge from this German spiritual life in the future.

If you look at the spiritual cultural history of modern times a little, you might think that it is leading you to the conclusion that the German spirit, with its sustaining power, is called upon to develop its idealism, which it has developed in its great philosophers, into spiritualism, into spiritual knowledge, into spiritual experience, into scientific knowledge. One is tempted to say that the German spirit was pressed, suppressed and suppressed by the foreign spirit. We see how Goethe, who is rooted entirely in the German spirit, sighs under what is coming over from France, especially in his time.

While the German mind is actually designed to recognize more and more intimately the spirit that pervades and permeates the world, the French mind is more designed to grasp everything that can be grasped by the intellect, to rationalize. This can even be seen in the peculiarity of French poetry. Reason, however, which is tied to the brain, is basically only capable of developing materialism. Therefore, materialism is basically a genuine French product, and only through the influence of French intellectual life on German intellectual life was what must emerge from the living forces that lie precisely in the German character, in the German spirit, overshadowed. Materialism is not in the German character when it is captured in its deepest intimate interior. This inner Frenchness, this inner materialism, must also be defeated by the German spirit in the course of time.

And if we follow a characteristic phenomenon of the development of world view in the British Isles, especially in terms of the leading philosophy there, we can summarize it by saying that the British philosopher – and this can can prove this in detail everywhere - goes back to what Locke, Hobbes and so on went back to: only to accept what the senses see and what is combined from that, and to make the intellect only a servant of sensory perception. This leads to external empiricism or to skepticism, to doubtfulness. But this has also deeply influenced the German mind, and that is also something from which it must free itself. We are, after all, experiencing some things in our time just below the surface of our soul's consciousness.

While England, with its world view, was called upon to swear by mere sensory appearances, and France was called upon to cultivate man from rationalism, from the intellect, to the point of the sentence “Man as a machine”, the German spirit - after emancipating itself from France - cultivated idealism, which is the predecessor of spiritualism, of the actual science of the spirit. Idealism does not seek to remain bound to materialism, which is tied only to the intellect; it does not seek to remain bound to the empiricism of Englishness, which wants to hold only to the senses, nor to the rationalism of Frenchness, but seeks to grasp what lives in the soul. Yesterday I showed this in the figure of Fichte. But by liberating it from foreign influences, by the German placing himself spiritually on his own, German idealism will incorporate the living spirit-knowledge of the culture of the future.

If one still endeavors to do something for this living spirit-knowledge today, one still encounters a great deal of resistance for the time being. If I may mention this here in a personal capacity: since the 1980s, I have been striving to establish Goethe's theory of colours, to establish the depth of this theory of colours, in the face of materialistic English Newtonian physics, in which the spiritual grasp of the physical is also real. It is easy to understand why physics objects to Goethe's theory of colors. All the objections can be listed. But Goethe's theory of colors is itself a scientific product that vividly penetrates into the physical reality of colors. And as spiritual knowledge takes hold of human culture, it will be recognized how infinitely superior this theory of colors is to the English one. Today, however, we are still talking to deaf ears; the relevant writings are not yet being read – or only by a small circle. But it has always been that way.

Goethe has established a natural – from what lay in German idealism as the ancestor of real spiritual science – a world view of development, how living beings develop. I have been writing about this since the 1880s in order to show how this Goethean theory of development is a spiritual view. This is the basis for Goethe being able to make real what he was able to emphasize to Schiller, namely that he already sees the idea in reality. But even here, one is preaching to deaf ears; because the other is more convenient. This doctrine of Goethe's was inconvenient for humanity to accept. And when Darwin came along and presented all of this in a more convenient way, in an external-sensory view, in a way that suits the English mind so well, it was accepted, it flooded the world; and the difficult, inconvenient, but spiritual doctrine of Goethe, people passed by. When Darwin presented it in a convenient way, the theory of evolution, it was accepted.

And another example was shown by the great philosopher Hegel, who also has a lot to do with this city. He showed how the German astronomical philosopher, philosophical astronomer, to whom science owes so much, Johannes Kepler, has achieved great things in terms of understanding the world's context. Yes, indeed, Kepler was the subject of the famous epigram by Kästner; because he saw through the course of the stars, because he saw through all of this and formulated it in wonderful formulas, he had to live a life of which the epigrammist [Kästner] says:

So high
had no mortal yet ascended
As Kepler ascended – and died of starvation.
He knew only how to amuse the minds,
Therefore the bodies left him without bread.

But Hegel goes further and shows that the famous Newtonian gravitation theory, on which every physicist says modern physics is based, is nothing more than what the Swabian Kepler achieved, expressed in mathematical formulas. The real thing is Kepler's. Speaking of the legitimacy of Newtonianism is to stand before a historical lie.

The German spirit will have to stand on its own. This will stand out from the many sad but also glorious events of our time as a marker of the historical development of humanity. However, what has worked so thoroughly from the west and northwest on human souls in such a way as to make the path I have described, the path into the spiritual world, more difficult for them, has done so.

Now I will say something, forgive me, that many will consider very stupid; but I know that it is the truth. Perhaps the time will come when this truth can be shown in detail. All that is needed is time. I can only put it this way: the way has been thoroughly blocked for souls from childhood on – now it has already improved, but it still has to improve more and more – the way has been thoroughly blocked for souls, the possibility to freely unfold in the powers that were indicated in order to do the way into the spiritual world. As a result, the path has been laid – I say this truthfully, not out of mere national chauvinism, but out of psychological, cultural-historical knowledge – the path has been laid because the poison of Robinson Crusoe by Defoe 's poison still poisons and contaminates the lives of many boys and girls; and in this lies that which takes root in the soul in order to imbue it with the empiricism of Englishness.

Many, many inner victories, victories that are in the interest of German culture, will still have to be fought. But what is happening now is the great, bloody, but also glorious harbinger. And those who now go through the gate of death as heroic souls – the spiritual scientist in particular must point this out, because he knows how souls pass through death as realities, and because he knows how those who are dead continue to live in life only in a different form – they will be among us in a high sense with their unspent powers. For in their soul-spiritual there is something that can still do so for decades. These are young, flourishing human lives that leave the earth in our time. There is still much in them that could have provided the body with formative forces for a whole long life, for decades to come. But that will still live and weave apart from their immortal soul part; that will be there in the spiritual sphere; that will be there, that will help when humanity meets it with understanding in the creation of a truly spiritual worldview, in such a worldview, which is spiritual through and through, which is scientific in the fullest sense, in the strictest sense of the word. Spiritual science will thus be able to be something very much alive and real. For the spiritual scientist knows that when what he has to give as the result of his research comes to life in the souls, these souls will become so much a part of life on earth that the great gulf that today gapes as a materialistic world view between the physical and the supersensible will be bridged.

In a much more real sense than one suspects today, people will live into a world view that will show them not only the earthly citizens who are immediately present but also the people who have passed through the gate of death in their effectiveness. But this is a world view that at the same time admonishes us to see the great number of deaths that our fateful time has brought upon us. Much blood, much death, much adversity, much suffering and pain, much courage, much willingness to make sacrifices, tremendous greatness rushes and weaves through that which surrounds us in our fateful, destiny-laden, world-historically significant present. But it is particularly appropriate in this present time to point to that which points beyond all death, beyond all mere temporal life, to that which is hidden, to that which is immortal in the human being.

Not everyone will be able to become a spiritual researcher, just as not everyone can become a chemist. But times will come when what a few chemists give to humanity will be made fruitful for all, so that what the individual spiritual researchers have to give will benefit all of humanity and their coexistence. One need not be a spiritual researcher oneself to find the truth in the results discovered by spiritual researchers; one need only be free of the prejudices that today's habits of thought put in one's way, and the things that have been hinted at today, spiritual science, can be understood. In order to discover the facts for oneself, yes, to say just one sentence of what formed the main part of today's consideration, one must go the path of spiritual research oneself. In order to penetrate into the spiritual world, where divine spirit beings dwell, who are just as real as the things and beings of the physical world, in order to really bring messages from this world and these beings, one must go the path of spiritual research oneself.

In order to understand what is brought from the spiritual worlds, one really only needs to have an unbiased sense of truth for the matter. People who cannot believe that this sense can be united with what spiritual research says today only do not realize that it is not the sense of truth, but the habits of thinking brought about by prejudice. But when these habits of thinking have been done away with, just as the old habits of thinking were done away with in the face of the Copernican world view, then spiritual science will bring something infinitely more fruitful in relation to the spiritual and soul life of human experience than natural science has brought for external life. For what natural science brings relates to what surrounds us, to what we build for ourselves, to many things that help make our lives comfortable and pleasant, to what is useful to us. But what spiritual science has to give is something that every soul desires, if only it becomes aware of the powers of this desire in the spiritual and soul; that which gives people the opportunity to develop in such a way that their souls cannot be drawn into desolation, loneliness, disharmony of life, but what strengthens the soul so that the soul can face life strongly, which will demand more and more complexity of the future from this soul.

Spiritual science will incorporate something into spiritual development that will evoke a living awareness in the soul of what is immortal in the human being. And in this coexistence with the immortal part of the soul, the person will truly know, will know that the world is more comprehensive than what the senses see, than what one experiences in time. The knowledge, which will not remain abstract or theoretical, will be concentrated in certain feelings that make the soul inwardly happy and bear it, but will also make it industrious, powerful and capable.

In conclusion, I would like to summarize in a few words what can be awakened in the soul through spiritual science. I would like to end with what, as I said, I have only been able to say in brief strokes, like a charcoal drawing, about the question today: “What is immortal about the human being?” May this fade away into the words that are, so to speak, the residue of feeling of spiritual-scientific knowledge and of the spiritual-scientific confession in relation to the question of today's reflection:

The human senses speak
The things in the vastness of space;
They change with the passage of time.
Awakening itself
The human soul awakens
From the vastness of space
And unperturbed by the passage of time
In the stream of becoming of eternity!

It is of course no longer possible to talk about this topic, which would require an exhaustive treatment if one wanted to go into it at all, in any other way than with a few hints at most, because the study of psychiatry, especially in our time, certainly requires the most far-reaching reforms. If we consider how it is actually impossible today to formulate the right questions that need to be asked in psychiatry, we will realize how necessary such a reform of psychiatric studies is. However, such a reform will not be able to take place – for me, this seemed to emerge from Dr. Husemann's lecture itself – unless spiritual science first truly enriches the individual specialist sciences. For the development that Dr. Husemann has so beautifully described today, which began around the time of Galileo and culminated in the 19th century, has actually driven the whole of human thought life apart into two sharply opposing currents of thought. On the one hand, there are the ideas we have about material things and their processes; on the other hand, there is the life of thought itself, which, I would say, has increasingly taken on a purely abstract character. So that, since abstractions cannot be forces in the world, and therefore cannot be forces in man either, which bring about something, there is also no possibility for man to understand the material, the physical, from the soul, to build some kind of bridge from the psychic to the material.

Today, at best, when we speak of the soul, we have an idea of a sum of abstractions or of abstract feelings themselves and the like. This sum of abstractions, of course, cannot set an organism in motion, cannot somehow build a bridge to the organism. Therefore, one cannot speak of being able to influence the external physical, real organism in some way by acting on the soul life, which is only a sum of abstractions. On the other hand, there is what has been gained through science about the physical organism; for it has been invented that soul phenomena are only parallel phenomena or even effects of the physical organism. The concrete ideas that are formed about the physical organism are not such as to allow anything to be pressed out of them about the psychic.

And so today we actually have two parallel views of the soul life – regardless of whether one is more or less of a materialist – one that only looks at abstractions and one that cannot be used to extract anything spiritual.

It is therefore fairly obvious that it is difficult to find a method that could be used in psychiatry. That is why in recent times people have begun to refrain from talking about the connection between the physical organic in man and the psychological, which takes place as a process in consciousness.

And since in reality, between these two stools, between the physical-material and the abstract-psychological, one is actually constantly in danger of sitting down on the ground, it is necessary to invent a completely unconscious world, a strange and unconscious world. And that has now been amply done in psychoanalysis, in analytical psychology, a scientific object that is actually extraordinarily interesting. This scientific object, once it has led to a reform of psychiatry, so that we will once again have a proper psychiatry, will have to be properly examined, above all, from this new psychiatric point of view, because it is actually an object for psychiatry.

So they have tried to imagine an unconscious world so as not to be completely grounded between these two chairs. I am not saying anything against the unconscious world, of course, but it must be researched, it must be really recognized through that which spiritual science introduces as vision, it cannot be fantasized in the way that the Freudians or similar people fantasize it.

Spiritual science will bring about a reform of psychiatry by leading from mere abstract concepts, which have no inner life, to concepts that are in line with reality, to concepts that already live in the world as concepts, that have been gained by immersing oneself in reality with one's methods. Then, by ascending to such spiritual methods, which in turn provide realistic concepts, one will find the transition from such concepts, which are not mere abstractions, to what is real. That is to say, one will be able to build a bridge between the psychic and the physical in man. The psychic and the physical must appear differently in our minds than they do today, if we seriously want a psychiatry.

The sum of abstractions today, including those that comprise the abstract laws of nature – they are becoming more and more filtered and filtered these laws of nature – this sum of abstractions is not capable of being immersed in a real process.

Just imagine how, with the abstractions that figure in science today, one could find something like the two important facts – for I can say they are facts – that I mentioned in the first lecture of this series of lectures: the spiritual-scientific heart teaching and the spiritual-scientific teaching of the reverse biogenetic law for the historical course of earthly events.

From such examples you can see that spiritual scientific methods are capable of finding the way out of the inner life of the soul and into the world of facts, of building a bridge between the so-called spiritual and the so-called physical.

Above all, this is necessary for psychiatry, because only when we are able to observe the corresponding facts correctly will we get on the right track. And the facts of psychiatry are actually even more difficult to observe because they require greater impartiality than the facts of physical laws. For in human life, as soon as one moves from the so-called healthy, relatively healthy, to the relatively sick, there is actually almost no possibility of completely isolating the person. The human being certainly develops into a complete individuality, into an isolated life. He does this precisely through his psyche, but through that which deviates in the psyche from the straight line of development. What deviates in the physical from the so-called normal development is not so. I can only hint at this, of course; one would otherwise have to make hours of explanations if one wanted to prove it in detail. It is not the case that one can look at it in isolation; the human being is much more of a social being, even in the deeper sense, than one usually thinks. And in particular, mental illnesses can actually only rarely be assessed on the basis of, say, the biography of the individual, the isolated individual. That is almost completely impossible.

I would rather use a hypothetical example than theories to suggest what I actually mean. You see, it is possible, for example, that in any community, be it a family or any other community, two people live side by side. One of them has the misfortune after some time to have an attack, and so he is transferred to a psychiatric institution. Now, of course, one can treat this person in isolation. But if one does so, especially if one forms one's view from the isolated observation of this person, then in many cases one will actually only fall prey to a thought-mask. For the case may well be, and in numerous cases is, that another person, who lives with the person who has become ill, or who has become mentally ill, let us say in a family or in some other community, actually has within himself, let us say, a complex of forces that has led to mental illness in his fellow human being. So, we start with these two people: one person, A, has the attack, from a psychiatric point of view; person B has a complex of forces within them, of a psychically organic nature, which perhaps, if you were to look at it in isolation, shows what is called the cause of the illness in individual A to a much greater extent. That is to say, B, who is not mentally ill at all, actually has this cause of mental illness within him to a much greater extent than A, who had to be taken to a sanatorium.

This is something that is absolutely within the realm of reality, not just possibility. For it rests on the fact that man A, apart from the complex of weakness which is designated as the cause of his mental illness, has a weak constitution and cannot bear this complex of weakness. The other, B, who also has the complex of weakness within him, perhaps even more strongly, has, apart from this complex of weakness, a considerably stronger constitution than the other; it does not harm him. B can bear it, A cannot. A would not have contracted the disease at all if he had not been constantly psychically influenced by the influence of man B, who lives next to him and who, in this case, can be extraordinarily considerable because B is more robust than A.

There you have an example that is a reality in numerous cases, from which you can see how important the psychiatric approach is if it is to seriously address realities, if it is not to play games, as is often the case in this field today. The point is really not to look at the person in isolation, but to look at them in their entire social environment.

However, what I mean here will have to be put on a fairly broad basis. After all, it is also the case for the rest of the disease that there is a big difference between a weak individual being affected by some complex or a strong, robust individual. Let us assume that two people live next to each other from a certain age onwards and interact. However, one of them still has a robust, rural nature from his youth and background, while the other descends from three generations of city dwellers. The one who has the healthy farmer's nature and can tolerate some internal damage may, under certain circumstances, have a much more severe complex within himself, but he can tolerate it and does not become ill. The other one, who actually only has it through a psychic infection, through an imitation, through whatever is present from person to person, cannot tolerate the effect.

Here you can see what needs to be taken into account if you want to talk about psychiatry not from a theoretical and programmatic point of view but from a realistic one, as is indeed the case today, when we are already turning to the seriousness that arises from insight, when we realize how, basically, our scientists have become so one-sided, especially since the time of Galileo, and how it is necessary to take in new ideas in a fruitful way in all fields. Otherwise, human knowledge, especially in those fields that are supposed to lead into practice, into the practice of life, will come to complete decadence.

So I could say: Basically, the same applies in psychiatry as we say about the art of education when we talk about Waldorf schools: one should not just come up with some new formulations of a theoretical nature, but one should bring the living spiritual science itself into this field. What one has to say from the pedagogical field, one also has to say from the psychiatric field. It will never be possible to approach the matter one-sidedly and say: this or that can be improved in the field of psychiatry. Rather, one must familiarize oneself with the idea that Either one assumes the spiritual-scientific basis in the field of knowledge in general, then this spiritual-scientific basis will already transform psychiatry, then it will make something out of psychiatry in particular, which is actually longed for by many people today, but which cannot be achieved at all by the latest scientific methods, which have of course been sufficiently discussed with you yesterday and today.

You see, the main thing that must come out of a — let me use the trivial word — popularization of spiritual science is a much, much better knowledge of human nature than you can find today. People face each other today in such a way that there can be no question of any knowledge of human nature. People pass each other by, each living only in himself. Spiritual science will open people up to each other. And then, above all, much of what is perhaps still believed today to lie in the field of psychic pathology will be carried over into the field of psychic hygiene. For the facts are just such that, I might say, straight lines can be drawn from the symptom complexes of disturbed psychic life to the ideas that are so common in public life today that they are not even considered pathological, but are generally accepted. And if one were to follow up some of the very generally accepted concepts, one would find that, although more slowly, the same path is taken after all that can be seen in the pursuit of a psychologically abnormal symptom complex, which, however, progresses rapidly in the case of someone who is found to be mentally abnormal today.

All these things show that ultimately all the talk about details in the reforms of the individual sciences does not lead to much, but that if one decides – although today souls, many souls, are too sleepy – to in the sense of spiritual science, then the most diverse fields of science, but especially that field of science that deals with the various deviations from normal psychic life, psychiatric medicine, will undergo a necessary, I would say self-evident, reform as a result. Even if these cases go as far as extreme rebellion, raving madness, feeble-mindedness, and so on: only then will it be found what these psychic aberrations actually mean in terms of normal life in the context of normal development. And in many respects we shall find that the more and more healthy our world view becomes, the more that will be cured which shines out from public error into the pathological aberrations of the mentally ill.

For it is indeed quite remarkable how difficult it is to draw the right line between so-called normal life and mentally abnormal life. For example, it is difficult to say whether a person is mentally normal in the case of an event that occurred not too long ago in Basel, not far from here, in which a man left a large sum of money in his will for someone to lock themselves away in complete solitude until they had succeeded in truly proving the immortality of the soul. This was the will of a man in Basel, and I don't know what happened to it. I believe the heirs objected to it and tried to decide – not psychiatrically, but legally – to what extent it was related to psychiatry. But if you now really, each and every one of you, set out to examine whether it should be assessed psychiatrically or whether it is a mental illness or whether it is really an exaggerated religiosity or whatever, you will hardly be able to manage in full accuracy.

The point is that our concepts have gradually become weak in the face of reality; they must become strong again. But they will only become strong through spiritual science. And among many other things, psychiatry in particular will feel the effects of this.

This lecture will deal with a topic that will be significant from the point of view of spiritual life. We will be able to present some ideas about how those who profess spiritual science can take their stand in relation to other spiritual currents, how they can relate to the development of humanity today, and to contemporary issues in general. I would like to give you a broad outline of the development of religious ideas in the post-Atlantic culture up to the present.

In doing so, we will recall what we have already mentioned here and there: that the concept of religion is actually something that only makes sense in the post-Atlantic era. Before the great Atlantic flood, there could be no such thing as what we call religion, because religion presupposes that the human being does not have direct perception or insight into the supersensible worlds, at least that the great mass of people do not have such perceptions. Religion is man's connection with the supersensible when, for the great mass of men, the supersensible is not perceptible, but can only be conveyed in various ways, through prophets, seers, sages, mysteries and so on, as has been the case in the last millennia. Before the great Atlantic flood, when our ancestors lived for the most part in the area of ancient Atlantis, people still had more or less direct experiences and perceptions of the supernatural. In a time when people lived in the spiritual world itself, when they had experiences at all times as today's humanity has them in the sensual world, no religion was needed. Toward the end of the Atlantean era, supersensible experience was extinguished for the vast majority. It was replaced by the pronounced sensory experience that humanity has today. What remains from the old Atlantean era?

If we go back to the dim and distant past and sift through the legends and myths, and let the Germanic teachings about the gods take effect on us, we find messages from the supersensible worlds in pictorial form. These messages are not images, personifications, invented by the folk imagination, as some would have us believe, but they are real memories from those ancient times when people themselves still knew what they had experienced. The legends of Wotan, Thor and so on are such memories. And what has remained with man, especially into the post-Atlantic period, is, in the highest sense of the word, a kind of religion of memory. It is most advanced among the peoples living in southern Asia, among the Indian peoples; in a different form it asserted itself in Europe. In India, the memory of the time when every human being still had direct perception in the spiritual world made itself felt as a longing for that world. What is real was felt to be illusion, maya, and there was a yearning back to those ancient times. This was called yoga, and in some individuals it brought forth the ability to penetrate into the supersensible worlds. Not all peoples proceeded in such a way that they had sages who could rise to the level of yoga. Other peoples had to be content with memories, especially the peoples of the north. Their initiates also penetrated into the spiritual worlds, and had direct experiences in the divine world, but the Nordic nature made it difficult for them to penetrate in larger numbers. This is how Nordic mythology developed.

But there is one thing we will find that people still had in common in that post-Atlantic period: it is an echo of the much more highly developed power of memory that existed in the Atlantic period. In those days, memory was developed quite differently than it is today. People remembered further back, up to the lives of distant ancestors. They knew what such an ancestor had gone through centuries ago, just as an old man knows what he had experienced in his youth. Such memories of the ancestors shaped what can be called the religion of the ancestors, the cult of the ancestors. Ancestor worship, veneration of the ancestors, is in reality the first religion. Memory had in a sense been kept alive. This activity of memory was so great that, although individual people could not rise to the level of yoga, they could still enter into a spiritual state in which the common ancestor of a people appeared to them in dreams or in psychic states.

This was not just a legend, a myth, something that an ancient tribe had as a living common ancestor, but it was something that appeared to people from time to time, that appeared in psychic consciousness, that accompanied the people. The individual tribes that streamed through Europe had the most diverse experiences. But one experience always remained vivid and alive for many, and they told it to those who trusted them, who believed in them: that was the appearance of the ancestor, who was their adviser from the spiritual realm, who was in contact with them. He came at particularly important moments, was there in doubtful cases. The cult of ancestors was something that was very much alive through the physical qualities of the ancestors.

More and more, this cult of ancestors developed into a kind of religious system, which, although it had been worked out by certain initiates, was also acceptable to many non-initiates. Such a religious system emerged in various areas, for example in ancient Indian Brahmanism. The last echoes of this can be found in Vedanta philosophy; but we also find the last echoes of this ancient pantheism in the oldest philosophical systems. It was a kind of esoteric pantheism, as we can see in ancient Brahmanism. It also comes to light in the actual system of the Egyptians, and also among the Hebrews. In reality, we can imagine that this religious system originated from the fact that a more comprehensive idea of the divine essence, which permeated and flowed through everything, gradually emerged. The ancestor had grown together with the spiritual foundations of existence; he had become a kind of spiritual primal power.

Then, in what we can call anthropomorphism, we have a special form of esoteric pantheism. It imagines the various gods in human-like images. The Greek system of religion belongs here, for example. But it is a complete misconception to think that for the educated Greek, the unified spiritual world did not prevail behind the individual gods. When we speak of angels, archangels and so on, in fact of the various spiritual beings who stand above man, as we have done in the cosmic evolution doctrine, we speak in a very similar way to how it was done in those days, when one spoke of Zeus, Athena and so on in comparison to the sole world spirit. A unified world idea underlies this system. Pantheism is the spiritual substratum of things; then the gods are conceived as human.

And if we ask ourselves how it came about that the much more abstract esoteric pantheism developed into the many-sided Greek world of gods, we must recognize in it a deep fundamental need of humanity in general, a deep principle in the evolution of humanity. When we look at the transition from Egyptian to Greek, we have the most beautiful example of this principle in action. In the whole pre-Greek period there is something particularly powerful and symbolic. The Egyptian pyramids and sphinxes are magnificent, powerful creations of the human spirit, which point in a somewhat abstract form to a spiritual source that one does not yet dare to develop. How the Greek spirit has demonstrated the ability to impress the spiritual into the pictorial form! There is tremendous progress in this, which can be seen everywhere. You can see this transition most clearly when you follow the transition from Oriental to Greek architecture in your mind, when we grasp the architectural idea in its purity. Throughout the development of mankind, the architectural idea is best expressed in Greek architecture. Nowhere else do we find such a complete transformation of thought into external form as in Greek architecture. We see how everything is placed in space, how it corresponds to the great cosmic laws.

Perhaps there has only been one other time in the development of humanity when architectural thoughts have been created: that is the thought of Gothic architecture. And if we contrast the Gothic idea with the Greek architectural idea, we have to say that in the Gothic we are no longer dealing with pure architecture, but with an expression of the mystical element that pushes into the feeling, only hinted at in the forms. The Gothic is not the complete expression of this idea. The Greek temple, on the other hand, is the dwelling place of the god and is to be understood entirely as such. If we imagine the god in the act of creation in space, his powers flooding the space, as it were, forming a body for himself, weaving a garment for himself, we have the Greek temple. And we know when we see it standing before us: this is the dwelling place of the god. The Gothic cathedral is not that; it is a house of prayer. It cannot be conceived without the visitor who is in it, for whom it was built to create the right mood. Imagine the Greek temple standing all by itself, inhabited only by the god, and you have the complete picture. This is not to be understood or interpreted symbolically. The devout believer belongs to the Gothic temple. And whoever does not understand space as emptiness, but as permeated by forces, whoever knows that forces crystallize in space and who feels these forces, feels that something has crystallized in the Greek temple from the dynamic forces of the world. Those who have a feeling for it, so strong that they can perceive these entities, know that forces shoot through space. The Greeks knew about the vitality of space. One can best see how thinking, feeling and willing have become concrete by comparing Greek and Romanesque architecture, in which we see in many cases how the column, for example, is elevated from its spatial task as a carrier. Romanesque architecture is also grand, but it has many decorative elements, including these columns, for which there is no deeper motivation. But the sense for it is missing, the sense of space is missing. The column is there, but it does not fulfill its purpose. All this is connected with the stages of development of the human spirit. Only through this anthropomorphism could humanity be prepared to conceive of the God-man, to conceive of God dwelling within man himself. This is why Christianity is also called theomorphism by occultism.

In Christianity, all the different divine figures flow together in the one living figure of Christ Jesus. For this, it was necessary for humanity to undergo a great and powerful deepening, a deepening that enabled humanity not only to think of the living form in space, as expressed in Greek sculpture, but to rise to the idea of seeing inwardness outwardly, to the belief that the eternal in a historical form has really lived on earth in the spatial-temporal. That is the essence of Christianity. This idea represented the greatest advance that humanity could make on earth.

We need only compare the Greek temple, which is a dwelling place of the god, with what later becomes the Christian church, as it is most purely expressed in the Gothic style. We will see that in the external forms there must even be a regression if one wants to represent the eternal in the temporal and spatial. And what later art achieves by expressing the inner in the outer is entirely under the influence of the Christian spiritual current. Basically, it must be said that it is understandable that architecture could become most beautiful where one could still cling with all one's soul to the outer powers that flood through space.

Thus we see how religious thought becomes ever more profound in the post-Atlantean era, how people seek their clues for the supersensible. It will not be difficult to see in all that has been said here indications of man's longing to penetrate the outer form, to somehow conjure up the supersensible within it. This is the aim of the most original sources of art. With Christianity we have, so to speak, arrived at our own time. From this and various other things said about the development of the post-Atlantean time, you will recognize that the course of humanity is striving more and more towards internalization. There is also an ever-increasing awareness of internalization in the external in the different races.

We would like to say that in the Greek images of the gods we see how that which lives within man pours out into the outer world. In Christianity, the most important impulse in this direction has been given. With Christianity, we see the emergence of what has been called science up to the present time. For what is today called science, the investigation of the intellectual foundations of existence, only begins in the Chaldean period. Now, in our time, we are really living in a great turning point in the development of humanity.

If we now survey what we have briefly considered and ask ourselves: Why did all this happen, why did man develop to impress the inner on the outer? the answer is that man was impelled to do so by the evolution of his organization. The ancient Atlanteans were able to perceive the supersensible world because their etheric body had not yet been completely drawn into the physical body. A point of the 'ether head' did not yet coincide with the corresponding point in the physical head. The complete penetration of the etheric body with the physical body is the reason why man is now being pushed out more into the outer world.

When the gates to the supersensible world closed, man needed a bond, a connection between the sensual and supersensible worlds, in his artistic development. In the past, in Atlantean times, he did not need this because at that time he was still able to get to know the supersensible world through direct experience. The gods and spirits had to be related to people only after they had lost their perceptibility, just as one has only to relate plants to people who have never seen them. This is the basis of the religious development of the post-Atlantean period. Why then did a being of a supersensible nature like Christ have to appear and live on earth in a finite personality, in Jesus? Why did Christ have to become a historical personality? Why did the eyes of men have to be fixed on this figure? We have said that men could no longer see into the supersensible world. What had to happen so that the God could become an experience for them? He had to become sensual, to embody Himself in a sensual, physical body. That is the answer to the question. As long as human beings were able to perceive in the spiritual, as long as they were able to perceive the gods there in supersensible experience, no god would have needed to become man. But now the god had to be there within the sensual world. The disciples' words flowed out of these feelings to affirm this fact: “We have laid our hands in his wounds,” and similar ones. Thus we see how the appearance of Christ Jesus Himself becomes clear to us from the nature of post-Atlantean men, how we recognize why Christ actually had to reveal Himself for sensory perception. The strongest historical fact had to be there for people. The spiritual self had to be there in a sensory way so that people had a point of reference that could connect them to the supersensible world.

Mere science degenerated more and more into a worship of the external world. Today we have reached a climax in this. Christianity was a strong support against this absorption in the sensual. Today, Christianity must be grasped in theosophical depth in order to be able to present itself to people in a new understanding. In the Middle Ages there was still a connection between science and Christianity. Today we need a supersensible deepening of knowledge, of wisdom itself, in order to understand Christianity in its full depth. So we are faced with a spiritual conception of Christianity. This is the next stage, the theosophical or spiritual-scientific Christianity. On the other hand, material science will increasingly lose its connection with the supersensible worlds.

What, then, is the task of spiritual science? Can the person seeking the spirit look to today's conventional science? What today's conventional science is, is precisely that which will increasingly take the course of post-Atlantic development and will increasingly focus only on the external, the physical, the material, and increasingly lose touch with the spiritual world. will lose its connection with the spiritual world. Follow any science back into earlier times: how many spiritual elements were there in it in the past!

You will see everywhere, in medicine and in other fields, how the spiritual connection has increasingly disappeared. You can follow this everywhere. And this process must be so, because the process of the post-Atlantic period is such that the original connection with the supersensible world must increasingly be lost. Today we can predict the course of science. Outward science will not, however much experiments are made, be capable of spiritual deepening. It will increasingly merge with that which is a higher instruction in technical skills, a means of mastering the outer world. For the Pythagoreans, mathematics was still a means of looking into the context of the higher worlds, into the harmony of the world; for today's man, it is a means of further developing technology and thus of mastering the outer world. The course of outer science will be secularized and unphilosophized. All people will have to draw their impulses from spiritual development. And this spiritual development will take the path to spiritual Christianity. Spiritual science will be that which is capable of giving the impulses for every spiritual life.

Science is increasingly becoming a technical guide. And university life is increasingly sliding over into that of a technical college, and that is the right thing. All spiritual knowledge will develop into a free human possession that must come out of science. Science will then appear again in a completely different context and in a completely different form. It is therefore necessary for present-day humanity that the re-establishment of the great experiences of the supersensible worlds take place. You can see that it is necessary if you realize what will happen if it does not. The etheric head is now drawn into the human being; the connection of the etheric body with the physical body is at the peak of development today. Therefore, the percentage of people who could have supersensible experiences has never been lower. But the course of human evolution moves forward in such a way that a re-emergence of the etheric body occurs all by itself again. And that has already begun. Again the etheric body emerges, it becomes more independent, freer, and in the future it will again be outside the physical body as it was in early times. The loosening of the etheric body must happen again, and that has already begun. But now man must take with him in his emerging etheric body what he has experienced in the physical body, especially the physical event of Golgotha, which he must experience physically, that is, in an earthly existence. Otherwise, something will be irretrievably lost to him: the etheric body would withdraw without him taking anything essential with it, and such people would remain empty in the etheric body. But those who have fully experienced spiritual Christianity will have in abundance in the etheric body what they have gone through in the physical body.

The greatest danger is for those who have turned away from spiritual truths through scientific deception. But the beginning of the emergence of the etheric body has already been made. The nervousness of our time is a sign of this. This will increase more and more if man does not take with him what is the greatest event in the physical body. There is still a lot of time for this, because for the masses it will take a long time, but some are already arriving at it. But if there were a person who had never gone through what is the greatest event in the physical world, who had never experienced the depth of Christianity and incorporated it into his etheric body, he would face what is called spiritual death. For the emptiness of the etheric body will result in spiritual death.

The clairvoyant Atlantean did not need a religion because the experience of the supersensible was a fact for him. All human development originated in such a time. Then the vision of the spiritual world faded. Religere means to connect, and so religion is a connection of the sensual with the supersensible. The time of the rising materialism needed religion. But the time will come when people will be able to have experiences in the supersensible world again. Then they will no longer need religion. The new vision requires the bringing along of spiritual Christianity, it will be the consequence of Christianity. This is the basis for the sentence that I ask you to remember as particularly important: Christianity began as a religion, but it is greater than all religions.

What Christianity has given will be taken along into all times of the future and will still be one of the most important impulses for humanity when religion as such no longer exists. Even when people have overcome religious life, Christianity will remain. That it was first a religion is connected with the development of humanity; but Christianity as a world view is greater than all religions.