The Rudolf Steiner Archive

What I found particularly important yesterday was to show, on the one hand, using Schiller's “Letters on Aesthetic Education” and, on the other, Goethe's “Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily”, how, before the middle of the 19th century, the way in which outstanding minds in particular imagined and felt about the world was different from the way they did after the middle of the 19th century. It is precisely in such examples that one can really see what a considerable, significant turning point occurred in the middle of the 19th century. We have spoken of this turning point in the development of humanity from various points of view, and have pointed out that in the middle of the 19th century there is, so to speak, a crisis of materialism, a crisis in that materialistic thinking gains the upper hand in all human perception and feeling, world view, outlook on life, and so on.

Now, anyone who wants to look at these things closely, who has the courage and the interest to look at these things closely, will notice the turnaround that has actually taken place in all sorts of ways.

Take the scene with the Kabirs out of today's performance, try to read in this “Faust” scene everything that refers to the Kabirs, try to follow every single line with real interest, and you will see how Goethe, through his spiritualized instincts, was still very much within the realm of intuitive knowledge. Through such performances and mystery plays, as the Greeks had in imitation of the Kabirs, for example, the highest is expressed for man in relation to the pursuit of knowledge and the like. Goethe rightly associated these Kabirs with the path that should lead from homunculus to homo. He rightly associated these Kabirs with the mystery of human becoming.

Three Kabiras are brought forward. We speak first of three human limbs. Before we go into the true inner being of man, we speak of three human limbs: the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body. Speaking of these human limbs immediately arouses the criticism of those people who today think they are particularly clever, who today think they are particularly scientific. Such people object, for example: Why divide, segment the unified human being? After all, man is a unity; it is schematic to separate man into such limbs. Yes, but it is not so simple. Of course, if it were only a schematic division of the human being, it would be unnecessary to attach any particular value to these limbs. But these individual limbs, which one seems to abstract so much from the whole human being, are all connected with completely different spheres of the universe. The fact that man has a physical body, as he has today, and the way in which this physical body has developed from its Saturnian disposition to the present day, means that man belongs to space, to the sphere of space. And through his etheric body, man belongs to the sphere of time. Thus, by belonging to the two totally different spheres, by, one could say, having crystallized out of the world of time and space, the human being consists of a physical body and an etheric body. This is not an arbitrary scheme, which is mentioned as a classification, as a structure of the human being. It is actually based on the whole connection of the human being with the universe. And through his astral body, the human being already belongs to the extra-spatial and extra-temporal.

This trinity, so to speak the human shell trinity, is presented in the three Kabirs. The fourth “did not want to come”. And it is he who thinks for them all! If we ascend from the three sheaths to the human ego, we have in this human ego, first of all, that which rises above space and time, even above the timeless, spaceless quality of the astral. But this human ego only came into consciousness in the period of time that followed the Samothracean worship of Kabir. The Greeks had, of course, derived their belief in the immortal from the ancient Samothracean teaching; but it was only within the Graeco-Latin period that the consciousness of the ego was to be born. Therefore the fourth did not want to come, representing as it does that which exists as a relationship between the ego and the cosmos. And how far removed that was from the Kabir mystery, which initially points to what was there in the becoming of man. The three highest, the fifth, sixth and seventh, are still to be “inquired of in Olympus”: spirit-self, spirit-life, spirit-man. These come, as we know, in the sixth and seventh periods. And the eighth has not yet been thought of at all!

We actually see the mystery of humanity in its ancient form, as it was veiled in the mysteries of Samothrace, from which the Greeks took the best for their knowledge of the soul, for their wisdom of the soul, and even the best for their poetry, insofar as it related to the human being. That is the important thing to recognize: as soon as one turns one's gaze back to these ancient times, which Goethe tried to revive, one looks into a knowledge of the connection between man and the universe. Man felt himself related to all the secrets of existence. Man knew that he is not merely enclosed within the limits of his skin, he belongs to the whole wide universe. And that which is enclosed in his skin is only the image of his particular being.

One could say that a reflection, a final echo of this view of the connection between man and the universe can still be found in such writings as Schiller's “Letters on Aesthetic Education”, and can be found as, I would say, the permeating spiritual air of life in such a work of poetry as Goethe's “Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily”. In his pictorial way of presenting things, Goethe has actually tried to show what it is that places a person in the community of human beings. There are twenty soul forces that Goethe lets appear in the form of the fairy tale figures. But by letting these twenty soul forces appear, Goethe shows how these soul forces lead from one person to another in social life. In this fairy tale, Goethe has created imaginations of the course of social development through humanity. These imaginations, as Goethe created them, as he juxtaposed the king of wisdom, the king of appearance, the king of violence, and as he allowed the king to disintegrate within himself, who chaotically combines all three - wisdom, appearance and violence - this way in which he presents it shows in his way what must be grasped very intensely and consciously from different points of view today.

But we cannot stop with Goethean fairy tales today. Those who want to stop at Goethean fairy tales and their presentation today are really just playing. You know that the same theme, the same impulses that Goethe presented in fairy tales, are presented in my first mystery, “The Portal of Initiation”. But they are presented with the awareness that something occurred in the mid-19th century that makes it necessary to present such things today from completely different, more urgent impulses. Yesterday I pointed out how the transition must be from looking at the earlier age to the age at whose end we are standing. But what we have to regain, what was present in ancient times like the last echo of atavistic clairvoyance about these things, is the consciousness of the connection between man and the whole universe, the consciousness of that secret which you will find expressed in my second mystery at the beginning, where it is shown through Capesius how all the activity of the gods ultimately amounts to representing man. Why is an awareness of this cosmic significance of the human being, of the fact that the human being is part of the whole cosmos, so very important for our time? Precisely because we are on the verge of having to grasp the most everyday, the immediate outer life spiritually. And this outer social life cannot be grasped if one cannot base it on a real insight into the nature of the human being. The moment one begins to place the human being himself in the social structure in his entirety, as some teachers of economics do today and as it even lives in the trivial consciousness of most people, one must fail with regard to the social question, because the human being with his essence stands out from what the social question actually represents.

I told you yesterday that there are three aspects to human nature. What they are called is another matter. Today we call them the nervous and sensory human being, the human being of rhythm, and the human being of metabolism. We have to distinguish three things in relation to a truly organically ordered social structure: the spiritual, the purely regulatory state, the economic-economic. The human being is in touch with this social life, the human being stands in it. But he stands, as it were, already in his threefoldness, as the threefoldness of the social organism. Please note: It is always necessary to point out that one is not constructing, not seeking analogies, not interpreting such things in abstract terms, but is actually doing spiritual research. Thus, anyone who compares the winter of the earth with night or with sleep, and the summer with waking, will come to nothing, whereas for the earth, summer represents sleeping and winter waking. Nothing is achieved by those who think of the development of humanity in analogy to the development of the Binzel man. While the individual human being progresses from childhood to old age, humanity progresses from old age back to childhood. Real research shows something quite different from what people fantasize. Don't spin any analogies, but look at things as they are! If we consider the threefold human being, we first have the human spirit in the sense-nervous sphere. Then we have the middle part in the rhythmic sphere, and the lower part in the metabolism. You can read more about this in my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (Mysteries of the Soul). But I have drawn attention to the fact that the metabolism actually bears the imprint of the highest, the spiritual. Metabolism therefore corresponds to intuition when we see the spiritual, the rhythmic corresponds to inspiration, and the nerve-sense life corresponds to imagination. The human being is a threefold being. But the right social organism, which present humanity is striving for in the fifth post-Atlantic period, is also threefold. Only, when we observe this threefoldness, we must not disregard what follows.

Where, in fact, in the human being, is that which the human organism is aiming at — not in the whole human being, but in the human organism? Yes, the world has a very complicated view of this, and the real view, the true view, seems complicated to people. Today's genuine physiologist thinks, as I said yesterday: People eat, stuff the food into themselves; then the organism selects from this food what it needs and expels the rest. It transforms this into itself, and so it goes, day after day. Now, I told you yesterday that this metabolism only refers to the daily metabolism, and that the other metabolism, which leads the human being from the first teeth to the permanent teeth, then again through puberty and so on, does not depend directly on this metabolism at all. This metabolism, which extends over the long periods between birth and death, is not connected with the simultaneous stuffing and transformation of food and so on, but is based on other laws and other substance processing. I already pointed this out yesterday. But what does this daily food that we take in mean at all? Here we come to a chapter where we must again come into the most violent conflict with ordinary science today.

Please, I do not want to cause you to not eat now, please do not draw any complicated, nonsensical conclusions from the things that are said for the sake of knowledge and insight, lest someone draws all kinds of follies from them as consequences! But why do we actually eat? Do we eat so that what is outside of us is inside of us? No, we eat so that the various substances that enter us carry out particular expressions of power, and our organism defends itself against these expressions of power. You can imagine figuratively: When you absorb food, these foods cause small explosions in you; you need these explosions because you have to destroy them again, paralyze them again, and destroy them, and it is in this destruction that your inner strength actually develops. Man needs impetus, stimulation, and essentially what food is to us is stimulation. For that which we are as human beings, we actually receive in a mysterious way from somewhere else.

You remember, I have said before: the head is actually hollow. This allows it to absorb from the universe that which is productive in the human being. And this production is, as it were, only coaxed out of the head. In this way, the head in turn comes into its own. In many respects, the head is actually the least important part; it is the last remnant from the previous incarnation. It is that which, for example, could not think without rhythmic activity. One always believes that the head thinks. It does not really think, but only reflects thoughts. But it is coming into its own again in that it is actually the productive element. And man depends on the fact that, in addition to the rhythm within him, metabolism also prevails, which is the constant stimulator, in order to develop this productivity. Metabolism is therefore the constant stimulator through which man comes into contact with the outside world.

And what about the social organism? There it is actually the other way around. What is inside the human being, what the human being carries inside him, what needs stimulation from the outside through the metabolism, is the basis for the social organism, just as food is for us. What we eat is to us what people bring forth from their nervous and sensory lives to the social organism. So the state, or rather the social organism, is an organic being that, if I may use the expression, eats what people think up, what people invent, what comes from human spirituality.

Take away the fundamental power, the fundamental property of human spirituality, namely freedom, individual freedom, and it is just as if you wanted to let people grow up without giving them food. Free, individual human beings who place themselves in a socially coercive structure and sterilize their free spirituality will cause the social structure to wither away just as a person will wither away if you do not give him food. What human minds bring into the world is the nourishment for the social organism.

So that one can say: what is productive in the sphere of the nerves and senses is the nourishment for the social organism. — What the rhythmic system is in the human being corresponds, in the social organism, to everything that should actually be entrusted to the state, as I said yesterday: everything that relates to regulation, to external legality, and thus to the legality of the state. And what is productive in the state? That which emerges from the natural foundation in the broader sense, the economic life. This is, in a sense, the head of the state. The economic life, the natural foundation, everything that is produced, that is, in a sense, the head. It is the opposite of the individual human being. So we can just as well say: just as the human being is productive through his nerves and senses, so the social organism is productive through its natural foundation. And just as the human being receives his metabolism from nature, so the social organism receives its nourishment from the human head.

You can only understand the social organism in relation to the human being if you turn the human being upside down. Here in the human head is actually the human being's land. The human being grows from top to bottom, the state organism grows from bottom to top. If it is necessary to compare it to a human being, then the state organism has its head at the bottom and stands on its head with its legs at the top. It draws its nourishment from the individual human beings. This is how we must inwardly understand the social organism. It does not matter if we use analogies; but the view of the true reality, of the genuine reality, that is what matters.

	Human being, from top to bottom 1	Social organism from bottom to top
Imagination	Sensory nervous sphere (productive)	Food for the social organism [= human minds]
Inspiration, intuition	Rhythmic sphere Metabolism (stimulator)	State legitimacy Natural foundation [economic life]

Isn't it true that in the course of the 19th century, precisely when this important turning point in the middle of the 19th century asserted itself, we recorded the actual tendency towards materialism, the turning away from the spiritual. It was the high tide of materialism. What actually happened with regard to the human conception of the world? Yes, with regard to the human conception of the world, what happened was that people lost the spirit of the supersensible. They lost what was to be achieved through the production of their empty heads; what was to enter into the empty head, that is what people have lost. They want to rely only on chance and experimentation with regard to all inventions and discoveries. However proud and arrogant we are of the achievements of the second half of the 19th century, study the history of ideas and you will see how even the greatest of these achievements are not based on the direct initiative of the mind, but on constellations that have arisen in the course of experimentation. Man has lost God, man has lost the spirit, by no longer striving towards the spirit with the mind.

What would be the counter-image in the social organism? There one would lose the natural foundations, there one would argue about everything without taking the natural foundations into consideration. This is indeed the character of social debate in the second half of the 19th century and to this day, today most fiercely. For today people talk about social institutions, about socialization of human economy and the like: in this way they omit in this debate the actual natural foundation, the way in which production should take place, in the same way as materialists omit what the mind should do in the human being. Just as materialistic thinking loses sight of the spiritual dimension of the world, so the corresponding social organism loses sight of the material dimension of the economy and of the social context. And in the social process there is a great danger that corresponds to the loss of spirit in the materialistic world view: in the loss of a production that is as satisfying as possible for humanity, of the most possible insight into the productive process.

Now, one cannot come to an understanding of the social structure if one does not train oneself in the threefold nature of the human being and thereby learn how to shape the relationship between the science of the human being and the social science. Otherwise everything will be judged wrongly. Our learned economists, through whom so much misery has come into the world, because the others also think in this way, because they only accept the experiments, our learned economists know in fact nothing about this relationship of the human being to the social structure. For this can only be gained through spiritual science. Our economic scholars and teachers of economics are seriously arguing about whether a piglet or a human being is of greater economic value. That is not true, though a great deal can be said for both from the point of view of the arguments that people have. Some claim that a piglet is more valuable in the economy than a human being, because a piglet represents something that can be eaten, something suitable for consumption, which has an economic value. You can't eat a human being; they even eat away at things themselves, and for some people they represent no economic value. But some think differently, they say: Well, but the person produces economic value, and that will be there! So indirectly he helps so-and-so many piglets to come into existence and so on. Well, as I said, there are arguments about such things! It is in fact a question that is discussed among teachers of economics, whether a piglet or a human being represents the greater economic value.

Now, that is just a grotesque example. But for those with deeper insight, what is alive in our catastrophic present actually depends on such grotesque things. For one can indeed say: the knowledge that is sufficient to make magnificent progress in science, the knowledge that provides great scientific results, that wonderfully enables us to compare the embryo of a piglet with the embryo of a dog, with the embryo of a human being, with the embryo of a bat and so and to form from this schematically the kind of thinking that is sufficient to produce all kinds of physiological, biological, mineralogical, geological knowledge in the sense of today, this thinking, this way of connecting thoughts, is not sufficient to distinguish economically what is more important, a pig or a human being. And until one realizes that one can be a great naturalist without being able to distinguish economically between a pig and a human being, there will be no salvation in relation to the knowledge of the social question. People must uncompromisingly admit that what constitutes the greatness of thought in the field of natural science today does not allow the economic value of a piglet to be distinguished from the so-called economic value of a human being. We will continue this discussion tomorrow.

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• 1. In square brackets: added by the editor for clarification.

My dear friends:

[ 1 ] It has not been possible for me to speak to you on the last two days. But today—the day when the Michael mood of dedication must pour its light into all our hearts, I did not want to let pass without speaking to you at least a few words. [ 2 ] That I am able to do so is due entirely to the loving and devoted care of our friend Dr. Ita Wegman. And so I hope that I will still be able to say today what I desire particularly to say to you on the occasion of this festival.

[ 3 ] In recent months we have frequently spoken, my dear friends, of the instreaming of the Michael-Power into the spiritual events of man's life on earth. And it will be one of the more beautiful results that can follow from our anthroposophical understanding of times and seasons, if we are really able to add to the other festivals of the year a rightly ordered Michael Festival. That however will only be possible when the might and power of the Michael Thoughts, of which today men have no more than a dim feeling, has taken hold in a number of human souls who will then be able to create the right human starting-point for such a festival.

[ 4 ] What we can do at present is to awaken, in this Michael time, the Michael mood in our souls by giving ourselves up to thoughts that will prepare the way for a future Michael Festival. And such thoughts are especially stirred to activity within us when we turn our gaze upon all that we have seen taking place—partly on earth, partly in super-sensible worlds—through long periods of time, in preparation for all that can now be accomplished for human evolution in the course of this present century by souls who in full sincerity feel themselves drawn to the Michael stream.

[ 5 ] That you yourselves, my dear friends, in so far as you truly and honestly incline to the Anthroposophical Movement, belong to these souls—this I have endeavoured to make clear to you in the lectures of the last weeks and especially also in the lectures where I spoke to you directly of the karma of the Anthroposophical Society. We can however carry these considerations a little further, and that is what I want to do today.

[ 6 ] Let us now bring before our souls beings who are intimately connected, and will always be intimately connected, with the Michael stream, in the sense in which we have described it here. Let us direct our gaze to beings who in at least two successive incarnations made a powerful impression on great numbers of their fellow-men, beings who, however, only show themselves in their true unity when we recognize them as successive incarnations of one and the same being.

[ 7 ] When we look back into olden times, we see rise up before us within the traditions of Judaism the prophetic figure of Elijah. We know what significance the prophet Elijah had for the people of the Old Testament, and therewith for all mankind; we know how he set before them the goal and destiny of their existence. And we have shown how in the course of time the being who was present in Elijah appeared again at the very most important moment of human evolution, appeared again so that Christ Jesus Himself could give him the Initiation he was to receive for the evolution of mankind. For the being of Elijah appeared again in Lazarus-John—who are in truth one and the same figure, as you will have understood from my book “Christianity as Mystical Fact.”

[ 8 ] And further we saw that this being appears once more in that world painter who let his artistic power unfold in marvellous depths of tenderness, as it moved hovering over the Mystery of Golgotha. And we saw how the deeply Christian impulse that lives in Raphael, as it were impelling into colour and form the very nature and being of Christianity itself—we saw how this impulse rose again in the poet Novalis. In the poet Novalis stands revealed in wondrously beautiful words what Raphael had placed before mankind in colours and forms of rarest loveliness. We see, thus following one another in time, beings who are brought together into a unity when incarnation is understood.

[ 9 ] We know [for I have often spoken with you of these things] how, when man has gone through the gate of death, he enters the world of the stars. What we are accustomed to call “stars” in the external, physical sense are no more than the outer sign and symbol of spiritual worlds which look down upon us and take their share and part in all the deeds of the evolution of mankind.

[ 10 ] We know that man passes through the Moon sphere and through the spheres of Mercury and Venus, through the spheres of the Sun and of Mars, and of Jupiter and Saturn. And we know that when, together with the beings of these spheres and together too with other human souls who have also departed from the life on Earth, he has elaborated his karma, he then turns back again to earthly existence.

[ 11 ] Bearing this in mind, let us look for a moment at Raphael and see how he passes through the gate of death, and how he enters the realm of the starry worlds, the realm of spiritual evolution, taking with him the power of his art, which already on earth shone with the bright light of the stars. We behold, my dear friends, how Raphael enters the Moon sphere, and we see how he comes into association here with the Spirits who live in the Moon sphere and who are the spiritual Individualities of the great original Leaders of mankind, with whose wisdom Raphael, as Elijah, had been deeply inspired. He meets these Moon Beings, and he meets too all the souls with whom he has lived in earlier stages of Earth-evolution. We see how he unites himself spiritually with the spiritual origin of the Earth, with that World of Being which first made it possible for man to be, and for the Earthly to be impregnated with the Divine. We behold Raphael as it were completely “at home”, united with those with whom he had most loved to be in the Elijah existence, inasmuch as it was They who at the beginning of Earth existence set the goal for the life on this Earth.

[ 12 ] Then we behold him wander through the Mercury sphere where, in association with the great Cosmic Healers, he transforms for his spirituality the power that had been his to create what is so infinitely whole and healthy in colour and line. All that he has painted, whether on canvas or as a fresco on the wall, for the help and comfort as well as for the unending inspiration of such as can understand—all his work that was so radiant with light, showed itself now to him in the great cosmic connection in which it is able to stand when it passes through the Beings of the Mercury sphere.

[ 13 ] And thus was he, who on Earth had unfolded so great a love for art, whose soul had been aflame with love for colour and for line, transplanted now into the sphere of Venus, which in turn lovingly bore him across to the Sun, to that Sun existence which lived in all his incarnations so far as they are yet known to us. For it was from the Sun that he, as the prophet Elijah, brought to mankind through the medium of his own people the truths that belong to the goals of existence.

[ 14 ] We see how in the Sun sphere he is able to live through over again in a deep and intimate sense—in another way now than when he was on Earth as a companion of Christ Jesus—he is able to live over again what he underwent when, through the Initiation of Christ Jesus, he, Lazarus, became John.

[ 15 ] And all that he has painted in shining light for the followers of Christ Jesus,—he now beholds all this pour its rays into the cosmic transformation of the human heart.

[ 16 ] And we see further how what he thus had at the foundation of his life penetrates, wisdom-filled, the sphere of Jupiter. In this sphere he is able in wisdom to enter into a relation of understanding with such spirits as Goethe—the spirit, that is, that afterwards became Goethe—as well as also with spirits who had gone astray on other paths, but who nevertheless led over World Being and World Thought into the realm of the magical. The foundation is laid for his magic idealism in the experience he had of the evolution of the later Eliphas Levi. And we behold too how he partakes in all that was living there in Swedenborg.

[ 17 ] And now I must draw your attention to something in the life of Raphael that is of very great significance. A personality who was most deeply devoted to Raphael—Hermann Grimm—set to work four times to write a life of Raphael. His “Life of Michaelangelo” he brought to a beautiful completeness, but he never succeeded in drawing any picture of Raphael's earthly life that gave him satisfaction. In his own view all he wrote was unfinished and incomplete. [ 18 ] The first book he undertook was intended to be a biography. What is it? Nothing but a reproduction of old anecdotes told by Vasari! No biography of Raphael at all, but something altogether different—a description of what Raphael became on Earth after his death, in the respect and recognition of his fellow men. Hermann Grimm relates what people have thought of Raphael—what the Italians, the French, the Germans have thought of Raphael in the course of history through the centuries. What he gives us is a biography of the Raphael Thought as it has lived here on Earth since his death. He finds the way to tell what remains of Raphael in the hearts and minds of men, what lives of him still in their reverence and understanding. But he does not find the possibility to give a picture of the earthly life of Raphael.

[ 19 ] After Hermann Grimm has made the attempt four times over, he says: all that one can really do for Raphael as a personality is to write of how one picture passes over into the next, as though it had been painted by a super-sensible being who had simply not touched the Earth at all with his earthly life. The pictures are there, but one can look right away from Raphael who painted the pictures and reproduce the sequence of what is expressed in their inner content.

[ 20 ] And so, shortly before his death, Hermann Grimm began to speak once again about Raphael; yet once more he made the attempt to put pen to paper and write about him. This time however he spoke only of his pictures and not about the earthly personality of Raphael at all.

[ 21 ] The truth is, my dear friends, this earthly personality of Raphael was completely yielded up and was only present through what Lazarus-John gave to this soul to be poured out into colour and line for all mankind.

[ 22 ] Such was the life of this being. And it was so, that this Raphael life could only be, as it were, absolved in another life of thirty years—in Novalis. And so we see Raphael die young, Novalis die young—one being, who came forth from Elijah-John, appearing before mankind in two different forms, preparing through art and through poetry the true Michael mood of soul, sent down by the Michael stream as messenger to men on Earth.

[ 23 ] And now we behold the wonderful artistic power of Raphael come to life again in Novalis in poetry that stirs and enraptures the hearts of men. All that through Raphael was given to human eyes to see,—of this could human hearts drink deep, when it came again in Novalis.

[ 24 ] When we consider the life of Novalis, what an echo we find there of the Raphael life for which Hermann Grimm had so fine an understanding! His beloved dies in her youth. He is himself still young. What is he going to do with his life now that she has died? He tells us himself. He says that his life on Earth will be henceforth to “die after her”, to follow her on the way of death. He wants to pass over already now into the super-sensible, to lead again the Raphael life, not touching the Earth, but living out in poetry his magic idealism. He would fain not let himself be touched by Earth life.

[ 25 ] When we read the “Fragments” of Novalis, and give ourselves up to the life that flows so abundantly in them, we can discover the secret of the deep impression they make on us. Whatever we have before us in immediate sense-reality, whatever the eye can see and recognise as beautiful—all this, through the magic idealism that lives in the soul of Novalis, appears in his poetry with a well-nigh heavenly splendour. The meanest and simplest material thing—with the magic idealism of his poetry he can make it live again in all its spiritual light and glory.

[ 26 ] And so we see in Novalis a radiant and splendid forerunner of that Michael stream which is now to lead you all, my dear friends, while you live; and then, after you have gone through the gate of death, you will find in the spiritual super-sensible worlds all those others—among them also the being of whom I have been speaking to you today—all those with whom you are to prepare the work that shall be accomplished at the end of the century, and that shall lead mankind past the great crisis in which it is involved.

[ 27 ] This work is: to let the Michael Power and the Michael Will penetrate the whole of life. The Michael Power and the Michael Will are none other than the Christ Will and the Christ Power, going before in order to implant in the right way into the Earth the Power of the Christ. If this Michael Power is able verily to overcome all that is of the demon and the dragon [and you will know what that is], if you all, who have in this way received in the light Michael Thought, have indeed received it with true and faithful heart and with tender love, and will endeavour to go forward from the Michael mood of this year, until not only is the Michael Thought revealed in your soul, but you are able also to make the Michael Thought live in your deeds in all its strength and all its power—if this is so, then will you be true servants of the Michael Thought, worthy helpers of what has now to enter Earth-evolution through Anthroposophy, and take its place there in the meaning of Michael.

[ 28 ] If, in the near future, in four times twelve human beings, the Michael Thought becomes fully alive—four times twelve human beings, that is, who are recognised not by themselves but by the Leadership of the Goetheanum in Dornach—if in four times twelve such human beings, leaders arise having the mood of soul that belongs to the Michael festival, then we can look up to the light that through the Michael stream and the Michael activity will be shed abroad in the future among mankind.

[ 29 ] Because this is so, my dear friends, I have made the effort today to rise up and speak to you, if only in these few short words. My strength is not sufficient for more today. May the words so speak to your soul that you receive the Michael Thought in the sense of what a faithful follower of Michael may feel when, clothed in the light rays of the Sun, Michael appears and points us to that which must now take place. For it must even be so that this Michael garment, this garment of Light, shall become the Words of the Worlds, which can transform the Logos of the Worlds into the Logos of Mankind.

Therefore let my words to you today be these:

Springing from Powers of the Sun,
Radiant Spirit-powers, blessing all Worlds!
For Michael's garment of rays
Ye are predestined by Thought Divine.

He, the Christ-messenger, revealeth in you—
Bearing mankind aloft—the sacred Will of Worlds.
Ye, the radiant Beings of Aether-Worlds,
Bear the Christ-Word to Man.

Thus shall the Heralds of Christ appear
To the thirstily waiting souls,
To whom your Word of Light shines forth
In cosmic age of Spirit-Man.

Ye, the disciples of Spirit-Knowledge,
Take Michael's Wisdom beckoning,
Take the Word of Love of the Will of Worlds
Into your soul's aspiring, ACTIVELY!

Additional Remarks

Translated by Steiner Online Library

It should be noted that Rudolf Steiner was unable to finish the presentation on September 28, 1924. Marie Steiner recalled this in her essay On the Eve of Michaelmas, published in the Anthroposophical Society's journal in September 1925:

“He did not get as far as he had originally intended with the lecture. He gave us the first part of the Mystery of Lazarus; at the time he not only told me, but later wrote on the cover of the first postscript: Do not pass on until I have given the second part. - It was then wrested from him anyway, like so many things. - Now he will no longer give us this second part. It will be left to our powers of understanding to distinguish the right thing between the secrets of incarnation and incorporation, the crossings of the lines of individuality. He ended with what had been a recurring theme in his revelations of wisdom: the mystery of Novalis, Raphael, John... We were led back to him again and again, from the most diverse aspects. The last, the most difficult, because it was crossed by another line of individuality, he gave to us on the eve of that Michaelmas day - and broke off...”

What Marie Steiner only hinted at as an explanation given orally by Rudolf Steiner was confirmed by Dr. Ludwig Noll, who, along with Dr. Ita Wegman, was one of Rudolf Steiner's doctors Steiner, handed down:

When Lazarus was raised from the dead, the spiritual essence of John the Baptist, who since his death had been the spirit overshadowing the disciples, penetrated from above into the former Lazarus up to the consciousness soul, and from below the essence of Lazarus, so that the two penetrated each other. After the resurrection of Lazarus, this is then John, “the disciple whom the Lord loved.” (See also Lecture 6 of “The Gospel of Mark”, where Elijah is described as the group soul of the apostles.)

According to Dr. M. Kirchner-Bockholt, Rudolf Steiner gave Dr. Ita Wegman a further explanation: “Lazarus could only develop fully from the earth's forces during this time up to the soul of mind and emotion; the Mystery of Golgotha takes place in the fourth post-Atlantic period, and during this time the soul of mind or emotion was developed. Therefore, from another cosmic being, the consciousness soul had to be developed upward to manas, buddhi and atma. Thus, before the Christ stood a human being who reached from the depths of the earth to the highest heights of heaven, who carried within him in perfection the physical body with all its members, up to the spiritual faculties of manas, buddhi, atma, which can only be developed by all people in the distant future.” (Journal 40, no. 48, December 1, 1963).

In October 1924, Ita Wegman wrote to Helene Finckh: “Dear Mrs. Finckh, Dr. Steiner says that he agrees that you give the Michael saying to those who ask for it. He also agrees that you read the lecture to the members, but then you should wait until Dr. writes something else to the Michael lecture to clarify the secret that exists about John the Baptist and John the Evangelist.”

See also Hella Wiesberger's “Zur Hiram-Johannes-Forschung Rudolf Steiners” in the appendix of the volume “Zur Geschichte und aus den Inhalten der erkenntniskultischen Abteilung der Esoterischen Schule 1904-1914”, page 423 ff.

1. Fichte's “Theory of Science”

Introduction.

I.

When a person's consciousness awakens, he finds himself transported into a world whose objects are given to him through perception. How and in what way we will see in a later investigation. But the human mind does not stop at the given; it goes further and wants to understand and grasp what is given. It strives for knowledge. So here we are dealing with two things: with a given, which is the first; but not satisfied with that, man still needs a second, knowledge. This is something sought after, something striven for. But one must not think that the sought-after thing is somehow known, because otherwise one would not seek it, but it is something completely unknown, something to be acquired, which one has never possessed. This striving of the human spirit characterizes its nature. The satisfaction that man seeks depends on the attainment of this striving. Open world and cultural history at any page, and you will find this striving for a certain goal on every page. Things are perceived and one strives to unravel their nature, one strives to recognize “what holds the world together at its core”. Look at the ancient Indians. The world was given to them, but they could not stop at that; they sought for another, one that was not given to them directly, but indirectly through the given. They came up with Brahma and all that is associated with him. We see, then, that the character of the striving of the human spirit consists in going beyond the given objects and fathoming their nature.

II.

Now knowledge is to be true knowledge, i.e., knowledge and cognition are to bear the character of validity, or in other words: knowledge is to convince. The question now is; how can knowledge convince, how can cognitions have validity? This question is not discussed in the individual sciences, because they deal with knowledge in so far as it is knowledge of objects, without examining the foundations of knowledge itself. Since none of the individual sciences can prove the latter by their means, there must be a separate science for this, a science in which the reasons for conviction are dealt with. We can call such a doctrine the science of knowledge itself or the theory of science. The first question is whether such a science is needed. Various facts indicate that it is. For one thing, ever since man began to think, this need has been felt. The fact that this need has always existed would be enough to make clear the necessity, first, that such a need is not feigned or contrived, and then, however, also that it requires satisfaction. A second fact is that there have indeed been people who have doubted the possibility of any knowledge. Now, first of all, we have to decide whether a science of science is possible, whether the above-mentioned need can be satisfied. But this possibility is a necessary postulate of human reason. If one denies the possibility of a theory of science, one can do nothing but fully embrace the skeptical point of view indicated above. Something must be certain because something is given, and it is only a matter of identifying what is actually certain. For if we assume the opposite and say that nothing is certain, then, if the proposition is to be universally valid, it must, by its very nature, be applicable to itself, i.e., it is not certain itself. It thus cancels itself out, but only insofar as it is valid itself; it is therefore a complete contradiction and we can do nothing with it. We must therefore admit both the possibility and the necessity of a philosophy of science as a postulate of reason. This establishes the task of knowledge in general and at the same time the task of the philosophy of science.

III.

Knowledge has the peculiarity of first having to arise and develop. This gives rise to various difficulties, especially when we consider that the knowledge of different people at different times is different, and when we further consider that world history gives us very different views of people in different eras, who at the time of their appearance always claim to be valid. What are we to do now? Are we to regard our present views as the only correct ones and all earlier ones as errors? Or are we to despair of the validity of our views altogether? It would be impossible to accept either of these; neither can ever stand the test of reason. The latter has already been dealt with above, the former leaves the question open: yes, if all previous views were wrong, why should ours be the right ones? There seems to be no other way out than to assume that all these views are valid. But then you have admitted at the same time that everything is right, there is no error. Now, the dubious nature of this assumption is strikingly obvious. Only one hypothesis remains, which can be formulated as follows: there is something true and valid about all these views, that is, the truth is capable of modification. So far, this is only presented as a hypothesis, and nothing is inferred from it.

IV.

Neither the views of the individual human being nor those of entire circles stand, when they occur one after the other, out of context; they develop from one another and are conditioned by one another. This can be observed always and everywhere. The individual ways of looking at things form levels, with each following one growing out of the one before. This close relationship between ways of looking at things allows us to surmise that they may all have something in common, which is only modified over time. It could well be that the core is unchanging, but that it takes on different forms, which are determined by the narrower or broader perspective of each individual or entire peoples, so that what changes is valid for an earlier perspective, but no longer for a later one. Indeed, experience shows that our assumption is a perfectly valid one. This is one side of the relationship between the views of different times, people and entire nations. We now move on to the presentation of a second.

V.

A view is only valid to the extent that it applies to a person, i.e., to the extent that it is formed by that person. Person is now something very specific, which cannot be any other, and whose specificity consists precisely in the fact that it forms its views in a certain way. It cannot form them this way today, that way tomorrow, not this way with this group of perceptions and that way with that, but it must form them in a way that is peculiar to it, and in this way they take on a very specific character; they are precisely views of the person and are subject to its laws of formation. What they become through these laws, that they are as views, and they cannot be anything else. These laws of formation thus imprint the stamp on them, they first make them what they are, and in this respect they are and must also be related. They are related because they have arisen in the same way. The business of the science of science is to explore this path, on which all views have arisen and are still arising. It is therefore clear from the outset that the science of science will have to take its starting point from the person. But we want to shed light on the matter from another side in order to gain insights into the source of the science of science.

VI.

Experience cannot be the source. After all, experience cannot determine for us what power of persuasion it has for us. All the means that the individual sciences apply are not sufficient to explain the least thing in the theory of science. It is supposed to prove the validity of the individual sciences, and yet one must not use that which one doubts to escape doubt. The theory of knowledge must therefore have a substantially different source than all other sciences. If we want to get to the bottom of this source, we have to ask ourselves what is actually needed to arrive at a realization.

This includes: 1. Apparently an object to be recognized; however, as we have already seen, we cannot start from this. 2. The act of recognition itself. But since the point is to examine what the foundations of the validity of truths are, we cannot start from the act of recognition, and so what remains is:

3. only the knower. In this, we must seek the foundations of knowledge, insofar as they are to be regarded as certain. The source of certainty and thus also of the science is the knowing person.

These words characterize the point of view adopted here. We do not consider it our task to deal with positive truths in the sense in which the individual sciences do so, but to show how such truths are possible, how they can arise and what significance they have.

Most philosophical systems have the fundamental flaw that they attempt to derive truths before they have even examined how truth itself arises, just as they attempt to determine what is good or beautiful before they have posed the question of how a good or a beautiful thing is. The theory of knowledge is not concerned with the “what” of knowledge; it deals only with the “how” of knowledge. All the individual sciences, except the theory of knowledge, have the peculiarity that they can only arise when the knower seemingly goes out of himself, when he seemingly disappears in the face of the objects; for the theory of knowledge, on the other hand, it is characteristic that the knower does not go out of himself. We see, then, that in the diversity of views, the own I of the cognizing personality forms a calm pole from which we must start.

I. Chapter.

VII. The Doctrine of the Person or the “I”—

Our striving must first go to the understanding of the essence of this I. Man says of himself: I think, I comprehend, I look at, I feel, I will, and so forth; in all this he refers to a certain point, which he calls his “I”. This ego is always one and the same, no matter how often it asserts itself: I think, I act, etc. We cannot even assume that a split occurs in the ego if the ego is to remain an ego. If we assume that the I that thinks is different from the one that wills, then we have to imagine the matter as follows: Let the first I that thinks be A, its action a, the second I that wills be 2, its action b. If b is to have any meaning at all for A, then it must also be something for A , i.e., it must be included in the laws of formation of A, e.g., in the manner £; and if a is to be something for B, then it must enter into its laws of formation, for example in the manner a. We can now visualize the whole process using the following scheme.

We see that for the one ego \(A\) that is to be distinct from B, the actions of \( \)B are significant only if they become its own actions. If we call the ego that is the subject of this discussion the pure ego, we arrive at the proposition: The pure ego is a unique entity. This ego is to be distinguished from the empirical ego, which we will discuss later. What is meant here is the qualitative and numerical identity of the I with itself, apart from all temporal conditions, which of course is out of the question here. It would be a duality of the I, for example, if I were to make the history of the ancient world according to completely different laws from those of the middle and modern times. This cannot be, but everything must be related to a common point, to a unified I. In all the diversity of views, cognitions, etc., the I is that focal point which it is impossible to grasp, since it always slips backwards when we want to focus on it.

VIII.

The I meant here is essentially different from the empirical or psychological I. The latter already presupposes the former. The psychological ego arises from the fact that I relate all my ideas to a common center, in which they intersect. This relatedness of the ideas to a common center is the psychological ego. But relatedness is preceded by the act of relating, and cannot take place without it. This psychological ego is therefore no longer the original pure ego, but an ego that has come into being through reflection, through the activity of the pure ego. The pure ego is neither this nor that in the strictest sense of the word. Its entire tangible essence is given by its activity; we cannot know what it is, only what it does. When Fichte said that the pure essence of the ego is the positing of itself, this is a very arbitrary statement, for the ego not only posits itself, but posits also something else, as Fichte himself would have to admit. But in all cases it is always active; its whole essence consists, therefore, in its activity, which can be expressed in the proposition: The ego is active. Everything that is not active like the ego would not be an ego. That one cannot know more about the ego than this can be seen from the following. What we indicated above, we can now express clearly. If the ego wants to know, it must include an object in its activity of knowing; in the above, it is now required that it include itself as this object. In order to recognize itself, it must rise to a higher level, but in order to recognize itself, it would have to descend a level, which is obviously impossible. However, nothing is more suitable for getting to the bottom of the most important thing than the above remark. It shows with complete clarity that the self is nothing other than what it makes of itself. Since we have seen that the ego is not something that can be experienced or recognized, it can only be that which it makes of itself. Without making itself into something, the ego is nothing at all; it is as good as non-existent. It is a mistake of some philosophical systems that they have not properly clarified this essence of the ego. Rather, they have presented the ego as something other than an ego, and they further assume that the ego is something other than what it makes of itself; whatever this other may be, it is not an ego. If the ego is to be a willing one, then it must make itself a willing one, and so with all its activity. Its “what” is its own product. One could figuratively say that the ego gives itself its character. Fichte came very close to what has been said, but he thought he could and had to specify a very specific what, a specific essence of the ego, which is neither necessary nor possible. Instead, as is done here, one can completely dispense with this what, only one must state that such a what of the ego must be produced by the ego itself.

To illustrate Fichte's train of thought, we can choose the following pictorial representation: Let \(A\) be the I, this is active and posits itself \( = A\), this is the What, and the action is represented by \(A = A\); the essence of \(A\) should consist precisely in the positing of \(A\). Our train of thought can be depicted as follows:

The ego is represented by \(A\), it is active in the modes \(\alpha\), \(\beta\), \(\gamma\),... and thereby always takes on a very specific character \(a\), \(b\), \(c\),...; which gives the overall character A. We now assert that if \(A\) and also \(a\), \(b\), \(c\), etc. are really to have a meaning for the ego, then the ego itself must make itself into \(a\), \(b\), \(c\), etc., respectively A, without deciding what \(a\), \(b\), \(c\), etc., \(A\) is.

IX.

It is very easy to get confused here if one does not strictly distinguish between philosophical reflection and common reflection. The philosopher seeks only to become aware of what both he and the non-philosopher do, just as the naturalist wants to explain only what he and the non-naturalist perceive. The philosopher does not do something different from the non-philosopher, but he is only aware of what both do, while the latter is not. But there is a very important difference between the natural scientist and the philosopher. While the former can only take possession of his objects indirectly, namely, as we shall later fully realize, by incorporating them into his activity, the philosopher is in a position to assert what he himself does, and since his cognitions are nothing other than those made by the ego, that makes them and is only now becoming aware that it makes them, he can claim that what he says must be so because he is the one who makes it so, whereas the naturalist can only say that what he asserts appears to him to be so, is so included in his activity. This is why the philosopher can be critical and dogmatic at the same time. A critical procedure is that which determines how something can be recognized. A dogmatic procedure is that which itself makes assertions. As soon as we have understood this, scientific theory as criticism immediately appears to us as an impossibility. For in order to say how knowledge is possible, one must oneself make dogmatic assertions. Now, these dogmatic assertions must not precede the investigation, but the investigation is impossible without them. Just as dogmatic philosophy fails because one asserts something that one must not assert, because it is perhaps impossible to assert such things, critical philosophy fails because it must itself be dogmatic. A purely critical philosophy is therefore just as impossible as a purely dogmatic one.

X.

If, then, philosophy can be neither critical nor dogmatic, only one thing is left possible if one does not want to fall back into skepticism, which has already been shown above to be completely absurd: a philosophy that is critical and dogmatic at the same time, and so it

with the philosophy of science; let us examine how this can be. In asserting that the self is nothing other than what it makes of itself, the philosophy of science is dogmatic, i.e., actually the self is dogmatic; in asserting that it is only that and cannot be anything other than what it makes of itself, it is critical. By seizing a principle and making it into what it can be, it is critical and dogmatic at the same time; it is the only middle way possible. True philosophy is thus the doctrine of science, i.e., critical dogmatic philosophy.

II. Chapter.

XI. The Doctrine of the “Not-I”. —

We have seen so far that everything we want to regard as belonging to the I must be designated as its activity. But activity as such is quite empty and without content; it must first take up a certain something within itself. The pure character of the ego would be that of activity, but this only comes to light in individual activities. However, an action that does nothing would be a “pure act,” a “mere ability,” a “dead force,” an action outside of action, an inaction. This reproach by no means applies to the activity of the ego that appears in empirical activities. But as soon as the activity of the ego comes to light, an alien element, one that is completely alien and opposed to the ego, seems to enter into it. The question now is: how can such an alien element enter into the ego? This seems completely incomprehensible and quite contrary to our above discussions. For when something alien enters, the ego is no longer what it is through itself, but through something else. Let us now consider this relationship in the case of imagining in the narrower sense. Every act of imagining involves two things: a cognizing subject and an object to be cognized. The first is the active one, the second the suffering one. By the one presenting, the other is presented. That an object is presented is the business of the subject, that an object is presented is the business of the object. If I am the presenter and I present a rose, then the presentation of the rose is my product, the presentation of the rose, on the other hand, is the product of the rose.

Let us choose another example. When I say, “I feel,” I am active, but I must feel something specific, I must have an object of my feeling. This object can never be given to me by the mere “I”. The question arises again and again: How can something completely alien enter into the activity of the ego.

Here only the ego itself can decide how to remedy the situation, and it is immediately clear that it is impossible for an alien element to enter the ego without the ego's intervention. It must therefore enter through the ego, it must be transformed by the ego into its own essence, so that the ego can remain what it makes itself. This happens in the determining. In the act of determining, these two completely opposed elements are united. Here, a precise distinction must be made: 1. the act of determining, 2. the determining elements. There are always two determining elements: an “I” and a “not-I”. The I is always the active element. We must distinguish here, above all, between two things. This is probably best made clear by means of a diagram.

Let us assume that the determining thing is the I, as the active determining thing. Let the external object be A; A is therefore a non-ego, it has come into being through determination, and through determination by the ego, in that it has come into being through the activity of the ego, and in its entirety as A, that is, it has come into being through determination by something other than the ego and apart from the ego, in that it has become A through the activity of the ego. Let us call the first kind of determination the active and the second the suffering, in order to have words for them. In fact, both kinds of determination are essentially different and must not be confused with each other.

Above, we spoke of another by which the ego is to determine itself, and this still requires discussion.

13. The Mysticism of Philo of Alexandria

[Dear friends!]

We saw last time how the basic doctrines of Platonism were expressed particularly in the "Phaedo" and the "Banquet" and how three main preconditions were necessary for the emergence of Christianity.

The first precondition was that which lived in the ancient mystery cults as an explanation of the world; the second was the initiation process to which everyone who wanted to become a Mystic had to submit; and the third was a transformation.

We have also tried to make clear to ourselves how this transformation took place and we have seen how an amalgamation with a historical fact then took place, from which Christianity could then form. We have seen how Christianity had to place particular value on the vouching of doctrines through appearance as an actual process, and pointed out how in Philo of Alexandria we have a personality who was able to deepen what was present in Platonic mysticism in a significant way.

This is a fact that we must understand from the course of European mysticism itself. This becomes most clear to us when we follow it through the philosopher who lived around the time of Christ's birth, Philon. But it is precisely Philon's mysticism that I must describe in broad strokes. I have to trace its lifeblood in order to be able to show how this teaching, which was expressed in Alexandria, lived through various metamorphoses on the one hand in North Africa, but then also in Palestine, especially in the sect of the Essaeans, from which Jesus of Nazareth emerged.

The best way for us Western thinkers to understand what Jesus taught is to take the detour via Philon's worldview, via Philon's mysticism. What Jesus [learned] within the Essaean community is something that emerged [also] from Philon's mysticism, which on the one hand drew from the Egyptian mystical view and on the other hand from the views of the Greeks, mixed with the view of Judaism. I will provide historical evidence for this later.

Within Judaism there were two strictly separate schools of thought. They can be compared with the two schools of thought in Christianity, scholasticism and mysticism. If we consider these two directions as they developed within the [thirteenth] century, we will notice that the same is also present in Judaism. An intellectual philosophy developed there in such a way that the written word, which lives in Orthodoxy, was interpreted, and then another direction, which was kept strictly secret, Jewish mysticism. This was kept so strictly secret that there are sayings that go something like this: Anyone who tells even two people about it is doing a great injustice. - It was considered downright dangerous to share this secret teaching with a large mass of people.

I would like to go back to Philonic mysticism and say that Philon, as a mystic and theosophist, made one of the greatest decisions, a decision that we will hardly find again in history in the same sense. In order to characterize this, I would like to mention a few things that I have already discussed on other occasions.

We know that philosophers have appeared before who said that every divine being is born out of man. We find this Feuerbachian view expressed by Greek philosophers as early as the fifth century BC. We find it expressed in order to polemicize against the divine idea. Then in the nineteenth century it was expressed by Feuerbach in the following sense: If man creates the divine idea in his own sense, it is a human creation. Thus its objective meaning is lost and it only has the value that it is to be overcome by man.

This view is only based on a misunderstanding of our cognitive process. There is no conception which has [not] arisen in the same way as the divine teachings. If we take a simple idea, this is a simple transfer from the inner to the outer world, it is the same way in which the highest idea that man can form, the idea of God, has arisen.

We can speak here, by way of illustration, of the collision of two spheres. One ball flies this way, the other flies that way. The force of the impact is said to have caused the two balls to fly further. What we add is that no experience comes from outside. When we say: The ball pushes - , this is something that we can only take from ourselves. We have taken a certain force effect from ourselves and transferred it to the outside world. So if we follow the recipe of those who say that the concept of God has no justification, then we would have to delete our entire inner life. We could know nothing at all about the outside world. Conversely, those who take the mystical viewpoint say the opposite: Yes, it is precisely what we experience inside that is the most real thing, and what the outside world has to tell us, it only reveals to us in a roundabout way through our inner life. Therefore, it is only a continuation of ordinary thinking that we also experience the highest ideas, the highest concepts, through which we explain the world to ourselves, only within ourselves. We can explain the world through these elements experienced spiritually within us.

Now Plato saw the world that he could experience within himself as the basis of the entire universe. Now comes the great further step that still had to be taken here, the bold step that leads beyond Plato. Plato made the world of ideas, the world that opens up to the human mind, the [primordial basis], the primordial being of the world.

But if we allow our world of ideas to pass us by, even in this eternal view in which it appears to us in Plato, then we have a necessary connection, one idea is connected to the other, one now builds on the other. There is a necessary harmony in this world of ideas.

Is this the highest that man can experience within himself? This is roughly the question that Philon posed to himself. Is it the highest thing to experience what is necessary? No, he can go beyond what is necessary, he can experience the will in himself as free creative will.

I cannot get involved here in the arguments about the freedom or lack of freedom of the will, I can only emphasize that in Philo we are dealing here with the free development of the will as part of his mysticism. He said: I can decide for myself, thereby intervene in the course of the world and bring about something that can only be brought about by me. This consciousness is only individual, but after deepening into the personality it goes beyond the world of ideas to the extent that it can only create ideas in man by way of freedom.

If man is to introduce the idea from the world of the eternal into the material world, then he must have the ability, the possibility, to carry the ideas out into the temporal, he must therefore be able to intervene creatively in the fabric of the world. To imagine this most personal, most individual, in itself at the same time as divine, to think of it not only as a world of ideas, not only as spirit as such, but the most immediate inner experience as divine, that is the step that Philon took beyond Plato.

Philon went even deeper into himself and still retained the belief that this innermost being was the primordial being, the primordial reality. Plato could only find the real in his ideas. Where man himself forms the living link between the eternal and the temporal, Philon, digging even deeper, sought the divine no longer in the ideal, but in life. This is one of the most significant philosophical conclusions that could have been made after Plato.

Almost everyone easily senses that in our world of ideas we are given something that reaches beyond the world of ideas. We could not realize that we are individualities if a ray did not penetrate us, if we could not realize through our spirit that we belong to the universe. It is this spirit that shines in. That which man feels to be most individual, that which he can say belongs only to him, is the decision of will.

It is easiest to say that this has nothing to do with the great All-Spirit. To recognize that the primordial essence of the world is still present there too, that it also enters into the most individual, that is Philon's greatest deed. Therefore Philon says: We must not only penetrate to the ideas, not only to the spirit, we must descend even deeper if we want to feel the divine within us. We must penetrate to the most immediate life. - It was there that Philon dives out of the purely spiritual, which was the last subject of Greek mysticism, from the Platonic world of ideas back into the immediate life. Not only the cognizing, the thinking, the person seeking the path in contemplation, but also the deeper seeker immerses himself in the universe.

This is a completely different, much more vivid version of what Plato only imagined and only preconceived. It was a deeper descent into the material world. If Plato had called on man to step out of the material world in order to nourish his gaze on eternity, Philon again tried to submerge [into the material], not just into the spiritual world, but into that which is full of life.

And that is also the meaning of mysticism: Not to recognize in the spiritual, but to live in the spiritual, to set oneself a task in the spiritual, to be aware that God has lost himself in infinite love in the material and must be reborn, but can only be reborn by man transforming the world process from a material into a spiritual process, so that man actually submerges himself into the material by simultaneously taking on the mission of sinking the primordial Logos into the material world and thereby developing it back up into the spiritual world.

This is how Philon conceives of Plato from the grasp of life. He can no longer say: Immerse yourselves in the world of ideas, then you will find life. - He says: Search below the world of ideas, search for what is deeper in human consciousness. If you are able to spiritualize that which is still deeper, if you are able to recognize that it is life, then you will reach the divine.

What was still possible for Plato, I would say, to express the divine in the ideas, becomes impossible for Philon. One can now only immerse oneself in the sea of life. The Platonic world of ideas becomes only a reflection, a shadow image of that which lives behind the world of ideas as the primordial eternal. So we have placed something behind the world of ideas that man cannot grasp, that he can only grasp by intuition, so that [Philon] creates a perspective of life that is behind the world of ideas.

For Philon, therefore, the divine cannot be expressed in words. When he says of any thing that it exists, the idea of existence is taken from sensory things and from things that he can perceive mentally. Man can perceive sensually and spiritually. He does not have a direct view of what lies deeper. Only the perspective opens up to one side of infinity. Man can never reach the end in this direction, he can never grasp it on the other side, on the material side.

What a person lives and what he weaves is for Philon, just as it was for Plato, an interpenetration of the spiritual and the material. In everything that is given to us, spirit and matter live everywhere at the same time. It is an interplay, a mutual interpenetration of spirit and matter. The atom is formed, lawfully arranged matter. The lawful arrangement is an influence of the spiritual into the world. What is arranged stems from matter. What we perceive as the soul is just as much an interpenetration of spirit and matter as the atom.

Everywhere we perceive, we are dealing with an intermediate part of the world that presents spirit and matter in all parts. We ourselves are such a link. On the one side we have a perspective that is always to be pursued towards the eternal, [on the other towards the temporal]; on the one side towards the unified, on the other towards the material, towards the manifold. This is the basic nerve of what drove Philon to his view.

We can approach what Philon wanted from another angle. If we imagine, to use another metaphor that I have often used, a being that can only touch, that has no eyes, no ears, only organs of touch, then the whole world would present itself to it in tactile qualities, in qualities that the sense of touch can convey to us. If hearing were then added to this, the world would be a world filled with sounds. And depending on which worldview a person belongs to, the world will look different to them. He will be able to say: I didn't hear the sounds because I didn't have ears. - Or: The equipment of my hearing organ adds the sounds to the world, the eyes also add everything colored.

And now think of this as a continuous opening up of new organs. This has a lot to do with it. Think of how the simple living being is only given organs of touch. If we were to speak in the sense of Schopenhauer and wanted to represent the world only as a being of tactile impression, as it presents itself to a simply developed being, then we would have to write: "The world as tactile sensation". A more developed being would then have a different view of the world. Every being thus has a higher or lower development. The human being, however, in whom the powers were already there that the human being still has to achieve, would see what the actual original being is. But as man is today, he must leave it completely undefined. He can only regard what he perceives as a reflection and strive to come closer and closer to the primordial being. Those who think subjectively and materialistically and believe that man does not find something real when he opens up his organs will not think like Philon. Philon says: "When I hear sounds, it is not I who create such sounds, but I am enabled to recognize this kind of world phenomenon. - It was all there. He will never say: Because my ear is there, therefore a sound is there. Everything that can be perceived by human organs is always there, is actually eternal. It was there before anything was there, even before time was there.

This must first be understood in order to understand why Philon left the end completely undefined. Man had to have developed all abilities from within himself, then his perception had to coincide with what the primordial being really is. Thus, he can only open up the perspective of the primordial real, which is impenetrable simply because man is a finite being.

Not that this primordial being does not have the same essence as man. It is, to paraphrase Goethe, a "revealed mystery. It is always and everywhere there, and it can be seen and recognized more and more by man. But it is only an assertion that Philon makes as a finite man and of which he is aware that it only has meaning for finite man, that - seen with the eye of God - it would be an untruth, that it would not be an exhaustive truth. This is Philon's assertion that the divine is not fully revealed in the world. Only for man does it not reveal itself. But man is on the way to making it accessible to him. Thus Philon has a primordial reason. - We must use the word, but we must also be clear that the word does not exhaust what it is about. -Thus he has the word for the primordial Logos, but at the same time he is clear that this is only an image, a shadowing of the primordial Logos, that man cannot help but enter that path through which the divine being is increasingly redeemed from the material.

The process that man undergoes is such that he immerses himself in the material in order to redeem God from matter with his help. He is aware that he who recognizes this will embark on the path of truth. He regards it as the task of the philosophy of life to lead man as a living being onto the path, so that as a philosopher, as a mystic, he arrives where Egyptian mysticism wanted to lead its disciples, where people take care of the divine business in the world. That is the basic idea, the basic feeling that led Philon to his views.

Now I would like to show how Philon, precisely because he stood within the Judaism of the time, could have been led to such a view, and I would also like to show how the symbolism among such great minds as Philon, which appeared as the infinite end point, was transformed at the end point of Philonian philosophy into the symbol on Golgotha. One must be clear about the fact that the [Christian] symbol that arose on the Mount of the Cross is a transformation of the symbol that reflects the source from which Philon drew, the symbol through which Jewish mysticism at that time, around the turn of the years into the Christian era, saw the source that appeared as God and man at the same time.

Jewish mysticism - like all mysticism - was imbued with the idea that when man looks within himself, he finds the primordial ground of the world within himself. But it was also convinced that what man finds within himself is also the true origin, the core of the world. And so, in the deepest humanity, man also finds the deepest divinity. Jewish mysticism expresses this deepest humanity in the symbol: Father on the right, mother on the left, child in the middle. This symbol of the immaculate father, the immaculate mother and the child, which was created in a purely spiritual way, this image, which at the same time expresses the two sides in nature, the eternal development, the continuous transformation of the various world forms, and in the child that which has emerged simultaneously from the spiritual and the material, this image was what appeared in the end as the symbol, as that which man could only have understood if he had seen completely behind the scenes. As it was, however, he could only imagine this primal mystery under the image of the father and mother with the child.

This primal symbol, which Jewish mysticism had, is nothing other than the beginning of the Bible itself. The Jewish mystic saw in human beings the original source of everything divine and at the same time of the deepest humanity. He saw this because this is where becoming and development really split or flowed apart most intensely, and whose parts were only united by a decision of will. Thus the symbolum, which as a symbolum of deepening leads through the free decision of will into the actual primordial being of the world, is represented by father and mother, by the "man - woman" and by the third, which has emerged from both and which contains both in its ongoing development.

We think of this symbol - which he who enters the path of knowledge would find more and more - translated as one of the ways for man to come to [higher] consciousness. One of the ways to reach [higher] consciousness is expressed by this symbol.

Let us imagine that man, as it were, turns his gaze away from the actual original meaning of this symbol, that he is content to find, incomprehensibly at first, the masculine and the feminine in this image, and directs his gaze to the child, thus directing his gaze to that middle link in development which we express as spiritual-material, spiritual-sensual, If we imagine that man tries to grasp the world from this intermediate link, from the child, because he has perhaps become aware that the other cannot be reached, that it lies at the end and he therefore directs his gaze to the center, so that what lies to the left and right appears shadowy, then you have set the human as the unattainable divine.

You have man living within the world development and within this man that which appears as male and female only as his powers within him, as it were only the consciousness, the realization that he can reach that goal on his path at the end of which are the two elements of the female and male.

Man has two kinds of consciousness. One is [his own], which leads him safely along the path, the second is that he has a guide who takes him further, that there is something definite and indefinite in him at the same time, that there is something in him that he can pursue himself, and something that lives in him through grace, which takes him further and leads him from step to step on the path of development.

The second divine power, the guide, comes to him and says: Leave the divine, turn your gaze away from the divine, so that you may recognize that which lives within you. And what lives within you? The path between good and evil lives within you. You will recognize the good and the evil. - So the child's path of life begins with the guide approaching the child and telling him: develop your own abilities, then your own abilities will lead you to the end that you can foresee in an infinite perspective. But you must realize that you have this divine only within you as [your own] power.

Now the child, I would like to say the divine-human, enters into the actual perspective, and the other enters as a secondary matter, as mere human power next to the human being as the good and evil, as that which he recognizes on his path through life. And there you have the transformation of the Jewish symbol of the world. The transformation is the actual Christian symbol on the Cross Mountain. The Redeemer in the middle, Father and Mother to the left and right. In the thieves we have the reflection of what we have in the original symbol as the mother and father principle, as the material and spiritual principle. Thus, in the mirror of the symbol, the mysticism of the time, the Jewish mysticism, is transformed into Christian mysticism. The gaze is directed to that side of the symbol - not to the end, because it is not reached after all, but to the Son - which provides the center of the new worldview.

This is, in a symbolic-mystical way, what took place at that time under the influence of philosophical ideas such as those presented by Philon. It is a new philosophical life on the one hand, a certain renunciation seen from another side, from the side of the old mysteries. And here is the explanation of why the mystery was kept so secret. It was kept so secret because it could not be understood. It first had to be transformed, humanized, if this symbolism, this mystery, which was only accessible to a few, was to attain a general world significance.

I ask you not to misunderstand me, I do not want to place the main emphasis on the transformation of the symbol, I only wanted to show in the mirror of this symbol what took place in the people at that time, for example in the Essaean community, under the influence of Buddhist teachings, a doctrine developed as with Philon, but with a different purpose and came about differently, because the most diverse mystical schools attained a kind of deepening through such personalities as Philon. Philon, just like other people of the time, imbued himself with all the mystical teachings that were available at the time.

An external expression of how people strove at that time to recognize, as it were, the primordial divine, which lies dormant behind all limited views of the divine, what is hidden behind them, can be found in the life description of another ["Christ"], as he was imagined, and in the life description of Apollonius of Tyana [by Philostratos]. This Apollonius is presented to us in such a way that we can see from it how [these views] lived everywhere and how this is to be understood in each case only as individual sides of an original religion.

For his part, he sought this primal religion, this primal revelation, in such a way that he sought only forms of expression in all forms of religion, so that in Apollonius of Tyana we have before us a personality who strove to find the primal religion. Basically, we also have such a personality in Philon. Too little has been handed down to us from Apollonius. With Philon, however, we can vouch for the fact that he deepened the views as they came to him in his own way, leading them to an even deeper level of consciousness, so that they can be regarded as the preparatory philosophy of the West, which then reappeared in the various Christian communities as Christian doctrine.

Philonic philosophy has made it possible for Christian doctrine to be deepened in a philosophical way; Philonic philosophy has made it possible, in fact, for the gaze to be turned away from an [inadequate] way of investigating the mysteries, so that through it man has been pointed to life itself.

And now we will see how the development continues under the influence of such feelings, as expressed in the transformation of the Jewish symbol of father, mother and child into the form of the image on Golgotha. We will see how Jesus and Philon express to us in parables what they have to express.

It is partly hidden, partly what they have acquired in the mystery schools.

Answer to the question:

Gospel of Matthew. The first son of David. "Behold, a son is born to you, and his name will be Emmanuel, which means "God with us."

Here we have the contrast between the inner truth and the outer truth. The gospel can only be understood when we realize that two views have merged in it. On the one hand, we see what actually presents itself. When we are in the middle ground, Christ appears to us as the one who appears on the deeper background. This is why Matthew depicts the Crucified One on the cross (the Christian symbol).

[Stenographer's note:] In the next sentence he looks back to the mystical symbol of the time.

Logos.

The second logos is the mutual interpenetration. The third Logos is that which lies on the other side of the perspective. The second Logos is the Son. The Gospel of John is just another interpretation of the Philonic worldview.

The picture I have given can be justified historically. Also that of Jewish mysticism. But this is not as obvious as the other teachings. Without Jewish mysticism, no correct understanding of Christianity is possible.

Jewish mysticism is probably attributed to Assyrian and Persian influences?

In its symbols, yes, but in its actual basis of feeling it cannot be traced back to this Persian symbolism. One has to imagine that the actual deeper content has the same origin as Buddhism. Philon himself denies the Indian origin, but everything is already there. He received everything from them. They were symbolic images. Their content was forgotten and then found again.

Goethe. The eternal feminine is like the basic Greek idea of seeking a deeper state of consciousness. The mother is male-female. The shadow image is the child. The serpent symbol is not to be misunderstood in Goethe. It is the leader who comes to sacrifice.

The will-o'-the-wisps signify mere cognition, empty philosophies.

The dogma of the immaculate conception.

It is not a miracle. It only makes sense if it is placed on an esoteric background. Being born of the Virgin Mary is the symbol of a higher natural process.

We have already gained an insight into the complexity of the human being. This is not always borne in mind, because, out of a certain complacency in our quest for knowledge, we strive for simplicity, for a simplification of knowledge, for a certain schematism. Only a more exact study of the things we have observed over the years can show us the complexity of the totality of human nature.

Take, for example, the fact that the human physical body arose in relation to its first predisposition in the distant past, during the ancient Saturn period. What arose at that time as the first predisposition of the human physical body, we still carry within us today, but in such a way that we have to recognize it from the transformed product that we have gradually become. After we have passed through the evolution of the sun, moon and earth as a physical human body, it is no longer possible for us to recognize with ordinary perception what came into being during the ancient Saturn time. For this human body has been transformed during the time of the sun, moon and earth. During the time of the sun it has undergone a transformation through the etheric body permeating it; during the time of the moon it has undergone a transformation through the astral body permeating it, and during the time of the earth it has undergone a transformation through the I permeating it.

If we now consider only the physical human body, not yet the etheric body as such, not the astral body and not the I, but only the physical body, we must say that this physical body has undergone four main transformations.

Once it was there as a physical body, and the higher limbs of human nature were not yet in it. Then it was transformed under the influence of the ether body, then under the influence of the astral body and finally under the influence of the ego. But all this is the physical body, it is a product of the transformation of the physical body.

Let us make a note of this: first we have the first formation of the physical body during the old Saturn time. Then, under the influence of the solar time, we have what the etheric body makes of the physical body, that is, the original formation, and what the evolution of the sun makes of it. Then, under the influence of the moon-time, we have what the astral body makes of it, and during the earth-time, what the I makes of it. These are four forms of transformation of the physical body (see diagram on page 13). We have now considered what is brought about by the etheric and astral bodies and by the I in this physical body. But we have not considered the higher aspects of human nature in themselves, nor what changes have taken place over time in the etheric body, the astral body and the I. During the sun time, the etheric body is added; it undergoes its own development during the sun time and then undergoes changes during the moon time through the influence of the astral body and during the earth time through the influence of the I, so that this etheric body also has a threefold nature. Finally, during the moon time, the astral body is added; it develops for itself in its astrality during the moon time and during the earth time through the I. But now only during the earth time the I itself is added as a single one.

We can now also look at the whole from a different point of view. When we consider the I, we actually have a fourfold I within us. We have within us that which the I makes out of the physical body. We then have that which the I makes out of the etheric body, then that which it makes out of the astral body and then the I itself in the I.

But now let us pose a different question. When we see a person as they are on the physical plane – we know, when we count the sections of the diagram, that the person is a ten-fold being – so when they stand before us on the physical plane, what of their entire ten-fold being do we actually see?

1. Physical body 2. Etheric body 3. Astral body 4. I
5. Etheric body 6. Astral body 7. I
8. Astral body 9. I
10. I

Now, basically, very little of all this is initially present in the physical plane; most of what I have written here about this tenfold nature remains hidden. What is present initially is this I here (diagram p. 19: I 1). What is this I? This I is what the physical body is, what the I has made out of the physical body. Please pay close attention to what I am going to say, because only then can you get a real idea of it.

When you look at someone, the shape of their head, the physiognomy of their nose and mouth, when you see what they are like – even if you dissect them as an anatomist or physiologist – that is what the I has made out of their physical body.

What existence in the moon, the sun or Saturn has made of the physical body escapes your gaze, and remains hidden from you. Only what the I makes of the physical body is there before your physical eyes. Only by paying attention can we form a clear concept of the matter.

I will try to help you further with another consideration to explain the matter. If you have an animal in front of you, for example a dog, a wolf, a cat, then you have a form that is made by an astral body. When you look at a human being, you have a form that extends into the blood circulation, which is made by the I. When you look at an animal, on the other hand, you have a form that is made by the astral body.

What remains hidden is the configuration of the physical body, which is made by the etheric, the astral and the physical body itself. What we experience externally is actually an embodiment of the ego. Let us bear this in mind. It is an embodiment of the ego, and when we speak precisely about the human being, we should say: the human being in his entire form, right down to the blood circulation, is an ego embodied on earth.

So we perceive what the I does with the physical body. But what do we not yet perceive? What we do not yet perceive is precisely this I. If you call this I 1 and this I 4 (see the diagram on page 19), then I 1 is perceptible from the outside, I 4 is what you do not perceive from the outside, but only as a self-experience. When you experience yourself in your self-awareness, when you experience what you perceive, what you feel, what you think, in short, when you experience yourself as I, then you perceive this I as such: that is the I that philosophers speak of. I 4, then, you perceive as an inner experience.

Now you would not be able to perceive it as an inner experience if only the ego were really there. I have already told you that we not only sleep at night but also during the day. We are not fully aware of all our inner experiences, and to the extent that we sleep during the day, the beings of the higher hierarchies also live in us during the day.

In this I live, stretching out their impulses from the spiritual world, the Angeloi, the Archangeloi and the Archai. In that which sleeps most of all, in the decisive will, the power of the Archai lives first. The angels and archangels also live in the will, but the deepest impulses of the will always come from the archai. Only, as I have already explained to you, man knows very little about his will. The power of the archangels lives in man's feelings and the power of the angels in his thinking. We may say that the Archai, who give the will, the Archangeloi, who give the feelings, and the Angeloi, who give the thinking, live in us as unconscious self-awareness. And all this strives and weaves into the I and finally becomes what man calls his inner soul life.

But actually only the I is known. 1 Just as behind what we see as the embodiment of the I lies what the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body itself have made out of the physical body, so behind what we experience inwardly lies what the angels, archangels and archai bring about. So that we can say: In essence, the human being knows very little about what he actually is.

When one person meets another, they perceive the other person's I 1; when they look into themselves, they perceive their own I 4. So eight of the ten limbs remain hidden at first. But even if these limbs remain hidden from us, we can still say that their effects come to light in certain individual phenomena of human experience. What the I does with the etheric body remains hidden. How the I here, which I would like to call I 2, behaves in the etheric body remains hidden at first, but only seemingly so. We will see in a moment that something comes out.

What the I 1 looks like is revealed to us when we meet a person, in their shape and form. Of course, the I 2, that is, what the I makes out of the etheric body, can only appear to a clairvoyant in the same way that the I 1 manifests itself in the physical form for external perception. The etheric body is not a body of form but of motion. You can sense, even without clairvoyance, how the I2 sets the etheric body in very specific rhythmic movements, just as the I1 gives the physical body its form. But these rhythmic movements, these inner movements of the etheric body, come to expression in the physical body by pressing through into it, or rather, they come to expression in the physical world.

We try to express through eurythmy movements what the I can produce in the etheric body in terms of movements, I would say, to the extent that this can already happen in the present. If you could imagine a poem or piece of music eurythmized in such a way that you could abstract, disregard the physical body and only look at what the etheric body is doing, then you would have the I in the etheric body moving within.

We try to defy Ahriman with this eurythmy; because Ahriman has come into the world, the human etheric body has become so hardened that it could not develop eurythmy as a natural gift. People would perform eurythmy if Ahriman had not hardened the human etheric body to such an extent that the eurythmic cannot be expressed; for this eurythmic must force its way through only one limb of the human physical body and is held captive by the other limbs of the physical body.

The etheric body, which is actually caused to live in eurythmic movements through music, singing and also speaking, is held back by the heaviness of the physical body, that is, Ahriman, from actually carrying them out and can only express them through a single limb: it can only be deposited in the lungs and larynx by forcing the air through them. This is how speech and song come about. We can therefore say that the I, by wanting to thoroughly organize and thoroughly eurythmize the etheric body, must be content with one part of the human being in song and speech, instead of taking hold of the whole human being.

When a person sings or speaks, a spectrum of the whole person always comes to light in the tone and in the vocalization. What one hears is the tone, the vowel. But for the clairvoyant consciousness, what comes to light is basically the whole person, the whole person in a certain form of movement.

A, E, I, O, U, that is always a whole person, namely a spectrum, an ethereal ghost of the whole person. Only the etheric body is moved in a one-sided way, so that when you hear a person speak: A, E, I, O, U – it happens that you see five people in succession, only always in different forms of movement and in such a way that the whole person is not always seen fully and evenly, but sometimes more of the head, sometimes more of the hands, sometimes more of the legs. The other parts then, I would say, recede into darkness, into gloom.

But now, in connection with that same I 2, of which I have just told you, there is an entity from the series of the angels that resounds in its effects in language and song. But this Angelos is precisely the one of whom I have spoken several times in these lectures. This is something that, of course, cannot come to consciousness at all, because not even what I have just told you about the activity of the I in the etheric body comes to consciousness when people sing or speak. A being from the hierarchy of the Angeloi pours into all of this. This is a servant of the folk spirit, and in this way the particular language coloring comes into the human being from the folk spirit. The fact that the folk spirit belongs to the hierarchy of the archangeloi is connected to the higher realms. It is a complicated path by which the folk-like, the national, enters the human being. But that is how it is integrated, in this way and at this point. Behind this Angelos stands the folk spirit, which is an entity from the series of archangeloi.

We will now call this next ego, which again remains hidden, ego 3. Man does not experience this ego 3 directly either. For that which one experiences directly is ego 4. What one sees from the outside is ego 1. And when we perceive the effect of ego 2 from the outside, it is when a person sings or speaks. I3 lives in very subconscious regions; it lives in everything that man is capable of in the scope of his imaginative creativity. Everything that man can produce within himself in the way of imaginative pictures, pictures that are not copies of the physical external world, comes from I3, so that we can say: it lives as creative imagination in the broadest sense.

What you find in my Philosophy of Freedom under the title Moral Imagination would also have to be described here. It appears as a moral imagination that creates moral principles. Everything creative, for good or ill, belongs to this part of the human being. I said, “for better or for worse,” because you might think that there are many people who show a striking lack of imagination. One can only say, “Oh, if only they had more real imagination!” Because a little cultivation of real imagination is a good remedy for certain harms of life.

I would like to draw your attention to just one thing. There are people who seem to have no imagination at all in the areas where one often seeks imagination. Yes, when they sometimes take the opportunity to express themselves about imagination, they even show a pronounced hatred for all imaginative creations. But if you get at their souls, they show that they basically have a great deal of imagination: no sooner do they hear a word about their neighbor that is detrimental to him, than they invent whole stories and tell the most outrageous things about their neighbor. All lies are the product of the imagination, a transformation of the imagination into evil. And if you take this extension of the imagination into evil, you will realize that imagination is quite widespread in the human world. If you consider all the creations of fantasy that people bring about by saying this or that about their fellow human beings, or by otherwise passing this or that off as their own, you will find a considerable amount of fantasy even in those people who, in the ordinary, more noble sense, have little imagination. Human abilities sometimes go astray, and mendacity and slander are devious forms of fantasy.

All in all, we can say that down there in the stream of human nature, there rests I3, because in everything that man can create out of himself, that wells up out of the depths of his soul life, in good and in evil, is that which comes from I3. But this I-3 is influenced by beings from the category of the angels and beings from the category of the archangels, for better or for worse, by nature, by Lucifer or by Ahriman.

You get an image of human nature when you define it here. (See diagram: I 4, I 3, I 2, I 1.) When you define it here, you have the revelation of the human ego on the outside; when you define it here, you have the revelation of the human ego on the inside. Between the two, you have what I would call half-outside, the expression of the inside to the outside; that is I 2. I 3 is what is only half inside, namely coming from unknown depths into the inside. On the other hand, what lies upwards from this oblique line here is something of the hidden human nature that lies towards physical nature. What lies below this oblique line are the nearest spiritual hierarchies that are connected with the human being. Basically, when we speak of the human being on earth, we have in mind hardly anything other than what lies within this line. Above it, however, is everything that is present in man as a residuum, as a remnant from the old Saturn, Sun and Moon times.

If you draw a line here ( )), you get everything that is hidden in the moon time in man. If you draw a line here (©), you get everything that is hidden in the sun time in man. If you draw a line here (h), you get everything that is hidden in the Saturn time in man.

If you draw a line here (9), you get what will become apparent during the Jupiter period, when man will live among the Angeloi. If you draw a line here (9), you get what will become apparent during the Venus period, and here at the end you get what will become apparent during the Vulcan period.

This scheme gives you a rough idea of the complexity of human nature. It is good not only to look at things as they present themselves in the course of our cycles, but also to relate the individual things to each other. Today I wanted to give you an example of how these things can be related to each other.

There are various ways to find such a scheme. First, I will tell you how a clairvoyant arrives at such a scheme. The clairvoyant will say to himself: I meet a person; from this person, I first perceive his outer form with physical perception, everything that belongs to the outside. But now, with clairvoyance, I can deepen this form; in a sense, I get to the bottom of the outer form. If I then disregard the outer form, I perceive an ethereal being, and into this ethereal being play, song, and in general all sound expressions, play a part. This deepens the outer form for me. In the same way I can deepen my inner life. I can develop my self-awareness in the way one develops it in ordinary physical life. But then you can also deepen it. You can pour your inner life into the world, which otherwise only manifests itself as a fantasy. But then something real arises. Then imagination really arises, then fantasy ceases to be mere fantasy. The human being enters into a feeling that tells him: fantasy is no longer merely fantasy, but is immersed in something real. Something comes to meet you and you know that this is the inner and this is the outer (see drawing), and they come to meet each other.

This is how the clairvoyant consciousness experiences it. Then it has to piece together what it can experience in the vision by placing itself in the time of the moon, the sun and Saturn. In this way, one can clairvoyantly and creatively experience the necessity of such a scheme within oneself. Those who have gone through the first stages of initiation can experience it that way.

But even if you have not yet reached this stage, you can help yourself to a certain extent, so that you gradually come to experience inwardly what is approaching you from the outside. If you take everything that has been presented so far about spiritual science, you can put this scheme together yourself, as it is written here. You just have to make an effort not just to read in succession, but to try to connect the things that have been presented. You can form this scheme from the available cycle material. And that is very useful, because by processing the material offered in the cycles in this way, one progresses from an external assimilation to an internal processing. This internal processing has a high value for real progress.

Today I have given you an example of how to build such a scheme from the cycles. I now hope that many of you will gradually build such schemes. Then, firstly, there will be less uninspired speculation about the content of the cycles, and that is very good; and secondly, through such compilations, real inner evolution will take place. Individuals will progress when such fruitful compilations are made. You cannot just make a few such combinations from the cycles. From what is now available as cycle material, if you make it fruitful, you can make not only hundreds, but many, many thousands, perhaps even more, of such combinations. So you see, you have enough to do if you apply what is given in the cycles in a correspondingly fruitful way.

If you go from such a scheme to an expansion of the scheme, then you will go even further. If you separate what is actually on the physical earth plane, this fourfold formation of the ego, then you can say: everything here lies under the diagonal strip, and everything there lies above it. For these points, we just have to reverse the order. What has been written down here, you have to put up there. Then we have the six points at the top; so we have to make six points up there and write what are here six links on these six points. What is up here, we would have to write down below. We could make six points again and we could write the six points where the upper points are.

But we do not need to do that, because the cosmos has already done that for us. That which is on the earth is there; and although that which lives in us from the Saturn, Sun and Moon periods is hidden for the time being, and that which will come as the Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan periods is also hidden, the traces of it are still 'present in the universe, in the Zodiac, in the zodiac.

So this scheme can be expanded. Everything that is not human on earth can also be found if we ascend or descend. This is just a hint of how you can connect our elementary teachings with what is contained in the cycles about the spiritual hierarchies and their connection with the worlds.

But you will also find much that can be applied to pedagogy, let us say. Even pedagogy will arise when we look at something like we have now discussed in the right way.

Consider that we have come to the conclusion that language and singing are present in I 2. So that we can say: language and singing have been driven out of the whole of human nature by Ahriman. Once this is properly understood, something extraordinarily important for real life will arise. First of all, the principle will arise for singing pedagogy that one must evoke an awareness in the person learning to sing of the part played by the etheric body in the process: so to speak, of the continuous transmission of sounds to the etheric body. Only when this involvement of the etheric body in singing is really taken into account will the impulse for change occur, which, with regard to vocal pedagogy, must necessarily come from our principles. In practical terms, this will be reflected in the fact that singing teachers will increasingly encourage their students to connect the feeling in the physical organs less consciously, but to develop more consciousness in what, so to speak, is adjacent to these physical organs. The singer must have a feeling, not so much of the movement of the organs, but of what the air in and around them does in its movement. An emancipation of the conscious experience of the sound in the air from the experience of the sound in the organ is what will follow from the correct recognition of the spiritual-scientific principles in singing pedagogy.

Likewise, with regard to speech technique, especially as regards recitation, it will become more and more apparent that here too it is a matter of becoming truly aware of the elementary interweaving while speaking artistically.

In this way it is possible for the tone to become a truly artistic tone, for the speaker to gain a sense of awareness that, in speaking artistically, one is not merely living locked up in one's own skin; rather, I would put it this way: the person speaking artistically will feel the sound in the air, feel the tone in the air as a living being, and through this feeling of the tone as a living being, there will be something like an undertone, like an undertone in speaking. Feeling the sound in living speech: this in turn will enrich the pedagogy of recitation.

It is precisely by responding to the intimacies of spiritual science that something meaningful for teaching and learning in life will arise. Much of what resonates when touching on such things as those touched on today is actually still quite unknown to humanity today. For example, it would be good to develop an awareness of how a certain new formulation of sounds has been attempted in individual areas of my Mystery Dramas. This can most easily be followed in the seventh picture of the first Mystery Drama. But there are also such passages in the other Mystery Dramas where this can be followed.

A certain inner shaping of the sound – in addition to everything else that is in it – is the expression of a new element in poetic creation, of which there is hardly a trace anywhere today, but which will take the place of what rhyme, end rhyme or initial rhyme was in earlier times. A certain inward, I would say ethereal-poetic experience of the sound as opposed to the more external-physical experience of the sound, as it is in end rhyme or in initial rhyme. There is a need, even in our increasingly prosaic recitation, to strip away the old forms. Not many people today are willing to use the initial rhyme, the alliteration, as Jordan tried to do; and not many reciters today are willing to emphasize the final rhyme as it was originally emphasized. It is better to emphasize the sense. But that is prose; it is not poetic speech if one merely recites in a manner that is analogous to the sense. Poetic recitation would be recitation with an excellent emphasis on that which is not the prosaic element in the artistic form. But that will only be possible again when one, instead of living in the externals of sound configuration in rhyme or external rhythm, lives in that inner rhythm. In this way one will have to live into the sound in the way I have discussed in another area: as I have discussed it in recent lectures, where I spoke of living into the individual tone in musical composition in the future.

All these examples show that it is not enough to learn the theories of spiritual science, but that it depends on an inner experience of what we take in and on a penetration of the whole soul with what spiritual science wants, as I have already said on another occasion.

And it is precisely with this that we should begin our work. Insofar as something that is capable of providing inspiration can be presented externally, it should be presented in this building, in order to feel an effect in the whole soul and not just in the eye through the contemplation of forms and colors. But what has been suggested will only be fully realized when we feel impelled to shape our whole life in the same way — wherever this is possible today — as was attempted in this building. But then we must also try to make spiritual science truly alive, to really pour it into what we undertake and want to do. It is necessary to become aware that with the spiritual-scientific world view, something is to be given that produces a kind of new human being in that old human being who has come to us like an heirloom from earlier earth evolution. At the same time, with spiritual science, we absorb the prerequisites that serve to help give birth to what is to be born for the future of the earth.

If one wants this, then one must indeed connect one's entire being deeply, deeply with spiritual science. We have already experienced beautiful examples of such penetration here and there. We have often spoken of an outstanding example. I would like to take this opportunity to mention a few words by our friend Christian Morgenstern, which represent such an example of how spiritual science can penetrate our hearts and souls as a soul experience. It is not by absorbing spiritual science in theory that it really penetrates us, but only when it is lived in every fiber of our being.

And this is one example, one example among many, of how spiritual science has been so beautifully expressed in a poem like Christian Morgenstern's. This poem could seemingly have been written from a different worldview, but in reality it breathes the spirit of our spiritual science in every line, and not only in every line, but also in the vocalization - but vocalization here taken in a spiritual sense.

I am born of God as all being is born of God.
I go to God to die with all that is mine.
I return home, O God, to live as Thine.

First I was given out of Thy I.
then it was a matter of acquiring what had been given,
of raising it breast to breast to Thee as a Thou.

But pride in the midst of it wanted to ruin it,
and it became You, and You were lost to it...
Until You, overpowering, summoned me!

Then I was born to You for the second time:
for I understood to die for the first time,
for I felt to live for the first time.

The individual who, through the feelings and longings of his soul, feels the urge to approach the theosophical movement will – perhaps without always being fully aware of it – seek the satisfaction of what his heart personally , which can bring him personal peace of mind about the great riddles of existence, about those questions which he feels he cannot live with in the era in which he is placed through his present incarnation without their being answered. If the individual then finds here or there within the spiritual life of his epoch that which he can accept in order to arrive at these satisfying answers to the anxious and necessary questions of his soul, then he should also endeavor to penetrate to an understanding of the fact that such spiritual life, which places itself in some epoch, can only really bring to the individual soul that which connects this individual soul with the spiritual in the right way, without this rightness always becoming conscious to the individual soul, if such spiritual life is in harmony with the overall evolution of mankind and is able to give an account of itself before the overall evolution of mankind. Here and there a spiritual movement may arise, individual souls may believe that they can find what they need in such movements. But what the soul receives, and in which it believes to be satisfied, may be worthless for the soul's true development, for the real powers that the soul must seek, if what it encounters as spiritual life can assume full responsibility for the spiritual guidance and direction of humanity in any given epoch, when this spiritual movement cannot approach those powers that are in charge of the spiritual life of humanity and answer to them by receiving, so to speak, their approval: “Yes, the spiritual movement is doing what the time demands, what the spiritual forces demand, which reach into the time.” The individual theosophist may now and then feel the need to see how what he receives relates to the spiritual life as a whole or how it manifests itself in the most diverse fields. However, this may express more a yearning than a need to expect from time the solution of the riddles that are to be gained through spiritual science. The theosophical soul, when it looks at what it receives with some satisfaction from spiritual science, may sometimes look with dissatisfaction or perhaps even dislike at what surrounds us everywhere as intellectual life in our time, because this intellectual life presumes to have something to do with the highest existential questions, the highest riddles of human existence. Some of the things that appear and struggle to solve the riddles of existence, to answer the questions of existence, may be perceived as materialistic, superficial, insufficient by many a soul that takes up spiritual science. But in this outer life there are many an unprejudiced observers who know nothing of spiritual science, many an one who cannot even suspect what lives in what we call spiritual science, and who sincerely and honestly struggles for the truth in our epoch, whose soul honestly and sincerely feels the deepest longing for the riddles of existence. We should not survey our world, what is outside of us, with a superficial, all-leveling gaze, but with a discriminating gaze, because only through this can we gain the opportunity to tie in the right way with what is there. Of course, in a lecture lasting an hour much of what the spiritual leaders of our movement have to take up today, what they have to take fully into account, cannot be mentioned. Therefore, only a few individual points can be emphasized, and by way of individual examples it will be shown how the riddles of the world are pulsating, and how spiritual science is preparing to answer them, to satisfy them.

If you observe the world, you will find in particular that searching souls - souls for whom the riddles of existence press so firmly into the heart - say to themselves: What do we need today, what do we have to ask, where can we get prospects about the goals of life? - Souls that feel this way are found in large numbers, especially among those who work their way out of practical technology, the practice of life, the practice of work. Not even among those inclined towards philosophy are there so many who think in an angst-ridden way as there are among those who practice life, who toil with their hands under the mechanization of life, but who look instead to what often fills the soul when it has to ask about the riddles of life. We must indeed listen to such souls, for we must imagine that spiritual science will one day have to answer, to give account to the guiding powers of the world. But such souls are among the best seeking souls of the present day, and there may come an epoch when they will approach the leaders of spiritual life, and when these will have to answer the riddles of life that have emerged under the pressure of the practical concerns of life. We just need not delude ourselves, we just need to have a sense of what is going on in life, and it will come to us wherever the true voices of the soul-seekers are.

Anyone who has recently either walked past bookstores or looked around at the bookstores at the train station, what was on display there, and not just went there with the intention of only choosing what they wanted to buy, will have found a book clearly displayed everywhere that they might , if he is a theosophist, read with much interest if he is only thinking of satisfying the needs of his own soul, but which he will read with interest if he says to himself: how must things be presented if we want to meet the seeking souls with answers to the questions about the riddles of life? Here is a book by a man who has distinguished himself in practical life, and if you read the first few pages, you can see that he has a good overview of our age, that our time is moving towards the mechanization of the outer life, that the forces of human labor are being pushed more and more into machine-like work. This is the book 'On the Criticism of the Times' by Walther Rathenau. It is a book by a man who knows our time, and who should be known by anyone who wants to have a say in spiritual science. It shows how everything is being mechanized in our time, and why it had to come to that. For the most part, it is presented inaccurately in terms of comprehensive concepts; indeed, it is perhaps impossible to agree with any of the expressions in it. But that is not the point. Rather, it is about what the seeking souls are saying in our time, and what the forces are with which they are seeking, especially when it is a person of practical life, as the author of this book is. I would like to begin our reflection by reading something from a passage in this book that seems to me to speak from the very center of the soul mood of the souls of Europe and America. In it one hears what countless souls cannot express, what can prompt questions in them when one understands such a personality, where they speak of time and the soul of the times and say: “She who seeks time - soul and will find it.” Yet in the whole book you will not find a single clue as to how time might find its soul, only longing, the urge toward something unknown, ”of course against the will of mechanization. This epoch was not concerned with developing the soul in man; it aimed to make the world usable and thus rational, to push back the boundary of wonder and to obscure the otherworldly. Yet we are surrounded by mystery as ever; it emerges from every smooth surface of thought, and from every everyday experience it takes a single step to the center of the world.” Nowhere in this book is it suggested how this step is to be taken from the mysteries surrounding us to the center of the world. “Mechanization could not rob the individual life of the three emanations of the soul: love of creature, of nature, and of divinity; for the life of the whole they were evaporated into insignificance. Human love... – says a contemporary practitioner who, with a sober eye, confronts his time as much as he can, who for decades has attacked the very threads of economic life in Europe and beyond, and who himself has worked on them – “Human love has been reduced to cold pity and the duty of care, and yet it signifies the ethical summit of the entire epoch; love of nature became a sentimental Sunday pleasure; love of God, covered by the management of mythological-dogmatic rituals, entered into the service of interests in this world and the next and thus became suspicious, not only to ignoble natures. Rathenau goes on to say words that anyone who wants to meet the spiritual needs of the time, with goodwill, must listen to, even if they are partially incorrect, because they express what justifiably wells up from the soul and will well up from the soul more and more in the future: Feelings against which no one who practices spiritual science may rebel without being struck by the karma of the time. “There is probably not a single path by which it would not be possible for a person to find his soul, even if it were through the joy of aeroplanes. But humanity will not take any detours.” That is the need of the time. We can hear how time will refuse to accept anything that speaks directly to the depths of the soul, that speaks supersensibly to the depths of the soul. This time will say: “There will be no prophets and no founders of religions, because this deafened time will no longer allow a single voice to be heard: otherwise it could still listen to Christ and Paul today. No esoteric communities will take the lead, because a secret teaching will be misunderstood by the first disciple, let alone the second. No unified art of the world will bring its soul, because art is a mirror and a play of the soul, not its creator.” One would like to say: That is what a man said a few months ago. And what have we done in the last ten years? We have tried to find answers to what is emerging from the times as its forces weave. And he continues: “The greatest and most wonderful thing is simplicity. Nothing will happen except that humanity, under the pressure and urge of mechanization, of bondage, of fruitless struggle, will cast aside the obstacles that weigh on the growth of its soul. This will come about, not through brooding and thinking, but through free comprehension and experience. What many people talk about today and a few people understand will later be grasped by many and finally by all: that no power on earth can withstand the soul.

That no power on earth can withstand the soul! That requires our trust that we grow into the future with what we have and know that we are in harmony with the best of the time, who know nothing about us or want to know nothing about us. But we do not want to be tempted to do anything against what our time thirsts for, because we know that the leadership of humanity is left to higher, spiritual powers, and that which expresses itself in humanity comes from these spiritual even if it appears to be different from what we ourselves want, if it is not produced by any arbitrariness, but appears to come from the center of souls with the impulse of time, as if with elemental force. This is how our time speaks to us. What do the phenomena that have brought about our time speak?

I would like to start with something that my thoughts have already turned to during this lecture cycle. Among the many personalities I encountered before I joined the Theosophical Society was the art historian Herman Grimm, who, with all his individual achievements, wanted nothing more than to consciously place himself in the needs of our time. One could experience very strange things with him. Herman Grimm set out to write a biography of Michelangelo in the 1860s. Anyone who picks it up today, if they are not prejudiced, will find it to be the best work ever written about Michelangelo. Herman Grimm spent many years endeavoring to create a well-rounded picture of Michelangelo's work and creativity. He also succeeded in creating a picture of the times. He then began to write a life of Raphael. It was one of the constant admissions that one could hear from Herman Grimm that he felt quite differently about Raphael. He was able to describe Michelangelo in such a way that he was able to present a complete picture of this personality, but Raphael only in such a way that it was never enough for him. Why? Herman Grimm was a person who, in everything he wanted to understand, always sought the original causes, and in the case of Raphael he simply could not find the original causes. When he had somehow finished with something about Raphael, he had to find that the matter had been resolved in a highly imperfect way. Nevertheless, he started again and again, even shortly before his death, to write a life of Raphael, but it was never finished. A short fragment about it appeared in his posthumous fragments. Herman Grimm himself said to himself: “Whether I will succeed differently this time, if I live long enough to accomplish something that coincides with what one wants to know about Raphael?” It was shortly before his death that he began again with it, for it was the fragment on which he laid down his pen and died. It is only a fragment, when he himself had come to write a “Life of Raphael”. When I read these words in his estate, I myself had to think of a moment when I was with him in a small circle and spoke, as I wanted to, of the spiritual matters of humanity. I loved Herman Grimm very much and will always love him equally. He was a personality, strictly enclosed in the spiritual realm that he had prepared for himself, and he had an answer to what I would have liked to have incorporated. It consisted of the following: it was a mere hand movement of rejection towards anything that might have moved into the island of his spiritual life from outside, anything that could not be absorbed by him with the powers that one could have in his time. Those who knew how to deal with him understood him and his hand as it was around the corner of the table in a rejecting movement. For me, this hand movement was the boundary between what a spirit can achieve that wants to revitalize the spiritual elements of its era, and what must flow into our time as new forces. That was in 1892.

Why – I would now like to suggest everything else only in your souls – could Herman Grimm not come to terms with the life of Raphael from the spiritual elements that lived in his soul? Give yourselves the answer with all that will be necessary for the spiritual life of an age that will want to understand something like the life of Raphael. I am not saying that the life of Raphael must be something higher than, for example, the life of Michelangelo, but I am merely presenting a fact for the human soul. Try to give yourself an answer. You can do so by letting your gaze wander over the first picture that opens our third mystery drama, 'The Guardian of the Threshold'. There you will find four pictures: Elijah, John the Baptist, Raphael and Novalis. With what has been able to come to light in the course of our many years of spiritual scientific work, so that it could appear plausible and conclusive, we have endeavored to show how an identical individuality of soul - reincarnating from Elijah to John the Baptist, is reborn in Raphael, then reappears in Novalis. However fantastic this may seem today, it will be found to be true in the not too distant future that we will fail to understand the world if we do not take the idea of reincarnation of the human soul and karma, which passes through the various earthly lives, which is called the spiritual context of the world. Only he will describe Raphael's life who starts from the life that is recognized through spiritual science. In our time, the connection of spiritual life in the whole world is urgently approaching the human soul, asking questions such as: How is it that thoughts suddenly arise in human life that seem to come from one's own soul, but which were present in times far removed from it and are now recurring? One can see how the spiritual life really works, how it makes thoughts appear again and again in successive epochs, if one knows the spiritual thought processes that spiritual science is able to reveal.

In the last few weeks, something highly significant has appeared in German intellectual life. It will seem strange to you that I consider it significant. But I must consider it significant because it is symptomatically significant. When I was working on Goethe in Weimar, I got to know many leading figures who set the tone for German scholarship. Among the many German scholars, one in particular stood out to me as someone from whom I could expect extraordinarily significant work in his field. It is Konrad Burdach, who was a professor in Halle at the time, but then left this post to live as a private scholar. Now, in the last few weeks, Konrad Burdach has presented a highly interesting paper at the meetings of the Berlin Academy of Sciences. It is initially listed only under academic writings, but it raises an important question – a question that cannot be answered with the means of Konrad Burdach, but only with the means of the humanities. You will see that it is very close to the needs of the individual soul when reflecting on the interrelations of life to ask: How does the Faust poem relate to the modern soul? Have we not portrayed in Faust the practical man of our time who, at the end of his long life, has above all a practical ideal before him? Let us look at Goethe in his practical work: we can follow it as he speaks to Eckermann, his faithful secretary. Goethe is obliged to describe the spiritual development of Faust. The spiritual content of Raphael's Sistine Madonna comes to his mind; he was only able to grasp this in his later life because he had not yet grasped it, for example, on his first visit to Dresden. He wanted to show how, in the end, Faust's immortal is accepted into the higher worlds. We see that he wrestled with his problem to such an extent that he once said to Eckermann: “It is remarkable how demonic forces go through the world and give rise to figures like Raphael from an unknown supersensible realm, how one cannot come to terms with figures like Raphael without explaining them in terms of their origin in the supersensible. One can have a feeling for how Goethe struggled with the gradual transition of the entelechy, of the gradual transition of the forms into the higher worlds, until he finally created a human being whom he also portrayed as a practitioner of life for the coming centuries.

Konrad Burdach has made a remarkable point for philology. Anyone who reads his essay has the feeling that it is indeed strange how pure philology has succeeded in providing a parallel image from earlier centuries to go alongside Faust. The old figures are only presented in a modern form, as if Goethe had created them. The whole story of Moses is presented in this way, as if Goethe had conceived it for his time. With this, Konrad Burdach wants to show how everything that has been structured around the figure of Moses flows into Goethe's way of thinking.

Thus a man stands at the gate beyond which lies the supersensible world, which provides answers to the question: To what extent are thoughts, spiritual powers real forces that work through time and emerge again in the most diverse times, appropriate to these epochs? Today, everywhere we look, the world is knocking at the gate of the supersensible world. It is our duty, it is part of our sense of responsibility, to hear the world, where it asks honestly and sincerely, not out of personal arbitrariness, as it is appropriate to the feelings and emotions of the souls. What we ourselves imagine the true development of humanity should be is out of the question. But we should read from the truly best and longing souls how they themselves want to enter the spiritual world, and hold back what we ourselves consider important for ourselves, in order to be able to give it to those who are seeking. In view of the culture we are working from and in which many foreign friends in Europe and America are working with us because they know that it has nothing to do with nationality, it is not appropriate to argue about what is oriental and what is occidental, in which a leading spirit said, “God's is the Orient, God's is the Occident!” These are words of Goethe that live in our souls and from which we work. But not only do our arbitrary thoughts live in our souls – not just ours, but also those of those we need to listen to – prescribing what we have to give to others, but feelings also live in our souls that the spirits of the centuries have created. Let us visit one of the groups we are approaching. Come with me to one of the performances which, like those of Goethe, are extraordinarily significant for the life of feeling in relation to the spiritual world and to the figures who work in the spiritual evolution of humanity. Come with me to a chapter of Goethe's “Wilhelm Meister”. Let us follow it together, as he consciously wanted to present Wilhelm Meister as a representative of humanity. We see how Wilhelm Meister arrives at a castle, how he is led by the castle's guide and shown the castle's beauties, including the picture gallery. This also contains what can represent the development of humanity through the various epochs, and one can see how humanity has developed from ancient times, ever further and further, until the destruction of Jerusalem. The idea is that the successive pictures help us understand how the forces at work in the evolution of humankind led to the destruction of Jerusalem. The man being shown around, Wilhelm Meister, whose spiritual education we are to be shown, asks his guide: Why is the course of human development depicted here up to the destruction of Jerusalem, and not, within this course, what occurred shortly before in this development: the life of Christ with all that he accomplished in Palestine? Then the Guide says to Wilhelm Meister: “To depict this in the same way as the rest of the course of human development is forbidden to us by what is most sacred to us. What you see depicted here is the working of forces in world history, and it works in such a way that it concerns the groups of people, the nations, in their interaction, but not the forces that have intervened in the lives of individual people. It would be wrong to include the Christ in this series of pictures, for the Christ addresses each individual soul intimately, and each individual soul has to deal with him. Then the leader leads the Wilhelm Meister into a second, more secret chamber, where is depicted what cannot be placed in the ordinary sense in the epochal course of human development. There are pictures again: what is presented there is what ties in with the Mystery of Golgotha. In pictures, everything that ties in with Christ is presented to Wilhelm Meister, up to – yes, to the Lord's Supper. What follows the Lord's Supper as the actual Mystery of Golgotha is not there. Why, asks Wilhelm Meister again of his guide, is it represented here in this more secret cabinet what leads up to the Lord's Supper, and not what follows it? He is informed that, for the time being, no human soul is able to represent what follows in such a way that it does not hurt the human mind. Even in his time, Goethe sensed from his spiritual self the powerlessness to depict the great mystery, because he knew that one would want to say, even from still unconscious activity, that the deepest feelings of the soul's life must be brought out if one is to strive for the most sacred for the soul and present it to the soul. Thus his Wilhelm Meister shows us how to cross a twofold esoteric threshold if we want to approach this sacred part of the soul.

What was it that found expression in Goethe's soul at that time? It found expression that when in modern culture the soul grasps itself aright within itself, this modern culture lays in the soul a most sacred, most exalted something that Goethe could not fail to sense. But what has not yet been given in his time to represent this most sacred part must come. It must work in souls with quite different means. He who feels the responsibility for what has produced such feelings in the time, now stands before the spiritual world with a full sense of responsibility and believes he can only serve this sense of responsibility by pointing out to the souls how in our time the epoch is ripening that the souls, when they grow up to spiritual life, will attain that which for the gaze of Wilhelm Meister is to open up only after twice crossing the portal to the higher mysteries. Thus would be the atmosphere that flows from the spiritual life of the time into our souls, if we wanted to speak of the Christ-secret, that should reveal itself to us, wanted to speak of the intimacy that will exist between the soul and this mighty power of world development, when every single soul matures, that the Christ, newly revealed from the spiritual world, will approach every single soul.

We knew that we could not act differently than to follow the guide of Wilhelm Meister. It first leads to what characterizes the epochs, then to what is locked in the more secret chamber, and then to the special preparations for the holy of holies, which, for each individual soul, when we have crossed the second gate, may not speak to the souls in any other way than in free resolution. If we disregard what otherwise speaks to the souls from the times, then, unless an external disaster or the like is at work, one cannot make a human soul aware of what it is to experience or expect, but rather of what will come to life in the soul through the grace of spiritual guidance in the development of humanity. We feel the combined effect of what spiritual life has prepared and then become the spiritual life of our time. There we stand and feel our responsibility to those who were the genuine seeking souls, and feel how we can answer for what we have done. But we also learn that we cannot say out of our own arbitrariness: this is how it should be done, or this is how it must be done! For why should not this or that also be justified in this or that way? No, we feel obliged to do what the creative powers of the time demand of us, not what we ourselves demand or can demand. We feel obliged to continue creating in the spirit of those who spoke before us, and say: We want to hold nothing sacred but what you held sacred and longed for. But we want to be true to what flowed for you through the spiritual powers. Then you will understand this and not say, with reference to the many questions which may have arisen in the minds of individual souls in these days, that something has been done here in disharmony. You will say to yourselves: these people could not have acted differently, but they also knew what they were doing.

Everything was pressing towards the most comprehensive spiritual life that spiritual science will give to the world, when we consider the past times. Do not look at what flows out of arbitrary endeavors of the time, but look at what the times themselves bring as necessities. Do not ask how this or that person, who believes himself to be standing on the firm ground of natural science, wants to think about the riddles of time and the human soul, because he cannot overlook what comes into consideration. Ask the great ones who have long since died, who speak to our soul with objectivity. Ask a person who did so much for 19th-century science, such as Alexander von Humboldt, who wanted to give such a comprehensive picture of the development of nature in his “Cosmos”, ask him where he wanted to go beyond what interested the naturalist, where for him the deepest riddles of all natural questions were touched upon. And his answer is: It is the one hundred and fourth Psalm of David! But this same Alexander von Humboldt was again a soul yearning, a soul that - completely in possession of the natural scientific culture of its time - from the nineteenth century directed its view to what flowed out of the fervent feeling of the spiritual world, as it comes to light in the one hundred and fourth Psalm of David. Ask now how much of what is spoken to the human soul in the hymn-like language of the 104th Psalm can be found in concrete form in spiritual science, as is necessary for our time! If we bear this in mind, we may say: What is the soul of Alexander von Humboldt's reply to what we are doing? It would answer us thus: We have longed for what you are attempting, and we sensed that it must come! And Wilhelm von Humboldt, Alexander's brother, the great linguist, the last of the time when the great poetry of which I spoke yesterday, the Bhagavad Gita, became known in Europe, this great spirit, spoke in a way that he said he had already lived enough after the acquaintance of the Bhagavad Gita had fallen into his life.

Thus, the 19th century prepared those souls who were most searching to receive objectively and without prejudice what spiritual treasures have been given to humanity throughout the world. Thus it prepared itself not to fall into one-sidedness.

I did not want to give you theoretical arguments. I always consider theoretical discussions to be very one-sided, even if they are the very best. I wanted to show you by way of examples what the facts are like and how souls feel under the force of real facts. I would like to come back to something that Herman Grimm had in mind, something he spoke to me about on a walk from Weimar to Tiefurt, something that lived in his soul like a building that he wanted to construct, and of which he himself he speaks of it in the introductory remarks to his posthumous fragments in such a way that it has always hovered before his soul, and that all his individual works have flowed out of what lived in his soul in this way. What was it that always hovered before him? It was nothing less than a history of the development of humanity, which he wanted to present as a history of the development of the national imagination of humanity of all peoples and times. That was his goal. He wanted to examine how, for example, the creative power of the imagination worked in Greece, how it produced a Homer, an Aeschylus, a Sophocles, how it progressed through the ages until the modern era and produced everywhere what was to be represented. A man was walking beside me who had faith in the truth of imagination, in the creativeness of imagination; but all around was a world that had no capacity to believe in the creativeness of imagination, in the descent of imagination from the Father of truth! The feeling that you now find in the third mystery play, 'The Guardian of the Threshold', where Mrs. Balde appears like a ghost in the heavenly realms - but like an inverted ghost, because ghosts usually ghosts come from the supersensible world, but Mrs. Balde looks up and appears there in the same way that supersensible beings descend to earth. This feeling pressed into my soul at the time and took shape as the destiny of fantasy. One must bear this fate of fantasy in mind if one wants to get into what Herman Grimm had in mind, without knowing anything about the descent of fantasy from the father of truth. What Herman Grimm had in mind never came about. He sensed vaguely that something would come about if he succeeded in doing what he wanted. But it did not work. Why not? It did not work because imagination, if you only want to look at it in a general human sense as a creative world power, continually slips away. One always senses how the power that one calls imagination, though it comes from the truth, cannot itself lead to the truth, but only to Maya, and how behind everything to which imagination leads stands the spiritual world, at the mention of which Herman Grimm made that dismissive hand movement.

In the last days, this feeling came to my mind again towards the man who wanted to describe the course of human development out of imagination, so that I said to myself: He had the ideal of finding something satisfying about the riddles of the world out of spiritual life, out of the spiritual means that his time gave him. But what he could attain in his time, what he could honestly and sincerely take up into his soul, did not give him the solution. And because he was honest, he refrained from it! From this we see how our time longs for what can reveal the riddles of the world, what can give enlightenment about the creative forces and creative powers that lie behind sensual phenomena and create the signature of sensual phenomena. Why did this come to my mind recently? I have never been afraid to mention the personal, even when the personal is objective, and everyone is free to think about it as they wish. I try to look at the personal quite objectively. It came to my mind because it compared itself to me, what a spirit wanted and could not, and what has now come about in a certainly beautiful way through the book by our revered Edouard Schure, “L'Evolution divine”. Read it and resolve to read it in such a way that you penetrate the spiritual power that stands behind all appearances, but which has also worked as creative imagination in the course of the epochs. And you will see how our time begins to respond to what were ardent, sometimes not even fully conscious, questions of our spiritual life. Then you will find the answer in your soul as to what spiritual science should be, but also the answer as to how spiritual science should be.

How we must think in order to achieve a harmonious interaction in the spiritual life of the present day was something I felt the need to tell you about during the course of this morning.

It seems appropriate to look back at this point in our meditation on the various things that have passed through our souls in the course of these discussions. We will not repeat them, but rather use them to orient ourselves, to shed light on things from a certain point of view. For the reflections we have been making during this time, and which in a certain way have followed on from what we have brought before our soul through previous years, they should, above all, in addition to the positive messages they contain, be suitable for filling our soul with thoughts that are needed by the human soul in this time, a time that must be recognized as one of the most serious in the development of world history. Despite the many things we have been through in recent years, we are truly facing serious issues. And no one should fail to recognize the seriousness of the times, for in doing so they would be distracting their souls from the many things that are eminently necessary, that are urgently needed by the human soul if it is to experience the present time in a reasonably dignified manner.

We have tried to characterize the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century with the means that arise when one considers the important, incisive events with which the development of human beings in this 19th and 20th century is connected. You will have recognized that, above all, if we want to understand what the most significant characteristic of this most recent time is, we have to look at the fact that our time is almost suffering from an overabundance of intellectuality. Not that this should be taken to mean that humanity in our present time, compared to earlier ages, is particularly clever. What is meant is that the various powers of the human soul in our time all tend towards intellectuality. And since we live in the materialistic age, intellectuality is used exclusively to interweave the material existence with the human soul, and conversely to interweave the human soul with the material existence.

Our intellectuality is not high in the present age because it is directed almost exclusively towards the compilation and summarization, if I may express myself pedantically, towards the systematization of material things and material phenomena. But in a certain sense, this intellectuality is dominant within the human soul.

What is the necessary strength of soul that must be added to intellectuality in the next age, at the beginning of which we stand? Today everything is imbued with intellectuality, even if it is intellectuality that relates exclusively to the physical plane. Science is imbued with intellectuality, art is imbued with intellectuality, human social thinking is imbued with intellectuality. What must be added is something that, when truly understood, cannot be intellectual at all. And what cannot be intellectual at all, when it is truly understood, when it is taken up into human consciousness, is the human will, the human will so permeated with love, as I have tried to characterize the human will in connection with the impulse of love in my “Philosophy of Freedom”. The human will expresses itself either in the subconscious realities of the drives, the desires, whether they be selfish individual desires, social desires, or political aspirations, all this remains unconscious or subconscious. But if the will is really elevated to the sphere of consciousness, then what is otherwise overslept by the will impulses, or at most dreamt, as the last considerations have shown, is elevated to the sphere of consciousness, then this view of the will can no longer be materialistic. We find in our time for every truly spiritually discerning person a proof that what will is, is not grasped in our time. And this symptom is that in such a way as it is the case, the question can be raised at all by those minds who consider themselves the most important in our time: whether there is any human freedom at all or not.

This question, whether there is any human freedom at all or not, proves, when it is raised, an unspiritual way of thinking. From the spiritual point of view, one must approach the question of freedom in a completely different way. One must approach it in such a way that one knows: the one who can doubt the fact of human freedom does not understand the human will. Wherever doubt arises about human freedom, this presence of doubt is proof that the person in question has no idea of the real reality of human will. For as soon as one recognizes the will, one also recognizes the self-evident correlate of the will, one recognizes the impulse of human freedom.

However, in our time, freedom and necessity are discussed in such a way that what I explained to you last time in the trivial comparison with the pumpkin and the bottle can be clearly recognized in the discussion. I said that if you make a bottle out of a pumpkin, one person can say: This is a pumpkin – and another can say: This is a bottle. This is how people today argue about the freedom and necessity of human action, and what they have to say is usually worth as much as if one person stubbornly claims that it is a pumpkin and the other stubbornly claims that it is a bottle. It is just a pumpkin that has become a bottle!

What is important and essential is that people should again take up the power of the will into their consciousness. Whenever one speaks of the will of the world, one also speaks of that which really rules in the will of the world: of world love. However, there is little need to speak of it, for it rules when the will really exists. And it is much more significant to speak of the individual concrete impulses of the will that are necessary in our time than to indulge in sentimental generalities about love and love and love.

But things must be looked at in such a way that in looking there is real courage for knowledge and also real energy for knowledge. For knowledge of the complete, whole human nature is necessary for our time. And our time must begin to raise the question as a question of human destiny: How must our view of the human being be shaped when we question the fact that the sphere of the so-called living and the sphere of the so-called dead is one, that basically, we only live with our sense perception and our intellect among the living, but that we, in so far as we are feeling and willing beings, live in the same world in which the dead also live. And this realization must be followed by the inner soul impulses that are involved in this question of knowledge, a real will to understand the life of man in a concrete way, including how it proceeds between death and a new birth. Because without an understanding of this disembodied life of man, a real understanding is also not possible for the existence of man within the physical body, namely an understanding of the task of man within the physical body is not possible.

To put it somewhat abstractly: it is necessary for present-day humanity to truly absorb the inner impulses of the zeitgeist, that zeitgeist that has ruled in the narrower sense since 1879, and in the broader sense since the mid-15th century, and to familiarize oneself with the impulses of this zeitgeist. Many people – at least as regards what is actually meant by the words just spoken – most people in the present day have hardly the slightest idea. I have often said in these reflections that what is taught to our youth - to our younger youth and to our older youth - as so-called history is mostly, on the one hand, fable convenante, and on the other hand, often worthless stuff. If real history is to come into being, then it is first necessary to see through what the impulses of the last centuries were and what must change in these impulses in our own age. Today, we have hardly any idea of the tremendous change that has taken place in human thinking and feeling with the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantic period, with the middle of the 15th century. The most nonsensical word in relation to development is considered by many people today to be a guiding principle. This nonsensical word is: nature does not make leaps. Just as nature makes its tremendous leap from the green leaf to the colored petal, so nature makes its leaps everywhere. And it was not a general transition from the fourth post-Atlantic period to the first half of the 15th century, to the fifth post-Atlantic period, starting from the second half of the 15th century, but there was a tremendous turnaround. One can only orient oneself if one can at least to some extent compare what the few centuries of the fifth post-Atlantic period have brought so far with what has gone before, for both things are fundamentally different from each other. From a certain point of view, I would like to draw your spiritual gaze to this matter today.

If one has familiarized oneself with what can be learned from the current content of science, the current content of human education – if one may use the foolish word “education” – and has prepared oneself from this today, then one does not understand writings from the 15th century, even if one is a particularly learned person of today.

Now you must not misunderstand me. Under no circumstances, given all the conditions of our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, can I be in favor of rehashing old things. All the talk that is going around the world today about the necessity of warming up all kinds of old books and all kinds of old ideas cannot be applied to the field of our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science because this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has to draw from the immediate spiritual life itself that which has to be revealed for the present time, and because in our time important things are being revealed for the recipient. But one can clarify many things by looking at the way in which a truly learned mind today can relate to the things that have been preserved as wisdom – we do not need to go back any further than the 14th or 15th century. If today a truly learned mind takes up the works of the so-called Basilius Valentinus, the famous adept from the 15th century, for example, he does not know what to make of them. What usually happens today when people like Basilius Valentinus do something – it could also be others, but I am citing him because he is the most famous adept of the 15th century – is that they either talk nonsense, amateurish stuff, stuff they cram themselves full of that cannot be understood, but they believe in it, or they talk nonsense as learned buffoons, talk impotent stuff about what flows to them from Basilius Valentinus.

If you read something like Basilius Valentinus with a connoisseur's eye, with a truly spiritual connoisseur's eye, you soon realize that this Basilius Valentinus contains a wisdom that is indeed useless for people of the present, who have the current interests of the present, but that in this Basilius Valentinus there is all the more wisdom of the kind that occurs when one can connect with the souls that exist between death and a new birth. One can say, whatever appears unnecessary to people at present, this wisdom as it stands in Basilius Valentinus, is all the more necessary for those people who live between death and a new birth. They too do not need to study Basilius Valentinus, because in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science we have something that speaks the language that is common to the so-called living and the so-called dead. What anthroposophically oriented spiritual science provides is enough to also speak to the dead in the way we know. But I mention it as a historical fact that the way in which the dead person absorbs the knowledge of the world has a certain affinity with what is found in writings such as those of Basilius Valentinus. For Basilius Valentinus talks about all kinds of chemical processes, seemingly about what is done with metal and other substances in retorts and crucibles. In reality, he is talking about the knowledge that the dead must acquire if they want to carry out their tasks in that lowest realm of which I have spoken, which is thus the lowest realm for them, in the animal realm. He speaks of what one has to know about those impulses that come from the spiritual world in order to understand the microcosm itself emerging from the macrocosm. This is indeed the cognitive activity of the soul between death and a new birth, but it can only be properly carried out today if it is prepared between birth and death. This was still present as an atavistic inheritance, as an ancient heritage of wisdom, until the 15th century. And Basilius Valentinus speaks of this ancient wisdom heritage, speaks of the secrets of how man is connected with the macrocosm, speaks of real, divine wisdom - in imaginations, as we would say today.

This way of relating to the cosmos in knowledge has disappeared over the last few centuries. It must be acquired again – in a more spiritual way than it existed before the 15th century, it must be acquired again. For it must be practiced both in science and in socio-political life. Salvation for mankind is only possible if such goals are pursued. And it must be recognized that salvation for mankind is only possible under the influence of such goals.

An ancient heritage, which could be called a primal revelation, was handed down through the centuries. In the materialistic fifth post-Atlantic age, it was lost. It must be acquired anew. It can only be acquired if man acquires it, as we have often discussed, by permeating himself, but actively, deliberately permeating himself with the Pauline “Not I, but Christ in me”, when he calls upon those forces that emanate from the Mystery of Golgotha, after having absorbed the mystery forces of Golgotha into his own soul. Christ in me», when he summons those powers that proceed from the Mystery of Golgotha, and, after absorbing the mystery powers of Golgotha into his own soul, uses these powers to explore the universe. And only in this way can we join with the dead who rule among us. Otherwise we will be separated from them for the simple reason that the plan of the world, which we can only grasp with our imagination and our senses, can never bring us into any kind of relationship with the dead.

But as I said, what does the learned mind of the present day make of this ancient wisdom? Perhaps in a similar way to the scholar who spoke the words: “The last and most important operation” by Basilius Valentinus “is the gradual heating of the philosophical mercury and gold in the

Thus Theodor Svedberg in Uppsala, who has written a book about these things from the scientific standpoint of the present and who in this respect is only representative of all the learned minds who unfortunately cannot comprehend. It is still the best thing for them to say: Unfortunately, one cannot comprehend. For all of them, Basilius Valentinus has already written the necessary dismissive words himself, in that he writes in his “Twelve Keys to the Universe and Its Understanding”: “If you now understand what I am saying, then you have opened the first lock with the key and pushed back the bolt of the approach. But if you cannot yet fathom the light within, then no glass vision will help you, nor natural eyes be able to help you to find the last thing you lacked at the beginning. Then I will no longer speak of this key, as Lucius Papirius taught me.

Thus speaks Basilius Valentinus to all those descendants who, when confronted with ancient wisdom, can only utter the words: Unfortunately, one cannot comprehend. But these people of the present have something else to do than to understand the spiritual! These people of the present must deal with all kinds of other things; and when there is any mention of the spirit, then they must, above all, deal with slandering this mention of the spirit. And an enormous amount of time is spent today on slandering this mention of the spirit.

To the Berlin nonsense of Max Dessoir can be added – I have not yet been able to read the writing myself, but I have been told a few things – the Dutch counterpart of the philosopher Bolland, who has indeed earned some merit for the development of philosophy by inspiring the philosophical youth of Holland with his repetition of Hartmannian and Hegelian phrases, but also, as it seems, could not avoid using his philosophical unproductivity in recent times to defame our spiritual science with all kinds of untrue stuff.

This must be emphasized again and again, because in order to truly take up spiritual science in our soul, we also need to pay attention to the way in which the present, in its spiritual-scientific impotence, relates to what is necessary for humanity.

This present-day science - I am not talking about the external science, which, as you know, I fully recognize, even if I don't follow every naturalist - but what is often called philosophy and the like is, in the present day, not much more than abstract talk, conducted in complete confusion about the concepts of pumpkin and bottle. Unfortunately, it still happens far too often in our society that we repeatedly fall for the nonsense talk of contemporary philosophers in particular and are even occasionally glad when here or there some philosophical button finds this or that, let us say, not to be criticized by what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants. As if it were not, if he does not find it to be criticized, at least his duty and obligation! We need not be pleased at all when, as many of us are, a word of praise falls from this or that side. Even these words of praise are usually not exactly borne by a great understanding. But we must be prepared for the fact that such slanderers of the Dessoirs or Bolland type will arise again and again, and that they will even multiply in the near future. For these people must occupy themselves with something! And since they are far too lazy to concern themselves with what must be brought from the spiritual world for the salvation of mankind in the present age, they must occupy themselves with slandering what is brought.

Basilius Valentinus, I said, still offered an ancient, atavistically inherited legacy, a science of the way in which man is created out of the cosmic All, which is above all the science of the soul freed from the body, but which must also be the science that wants to contribute to everything that is not merely external nature. This science can only be furthered if the realization of the will is added to the pure, and indeed materialistically oriented intellectual element of modern times. This will, which, when it is really recognized as will, can only be recognized in its spiritual nature, because it expresses itself only spiritually in the present stage of development of mankind. What the present time so urgently lacks is a courageous bringing forth of the impulses of life from the sphere of the will. Above all, the present time wants to talk, talk! That is good, but only on the basis of true knowledge. The present time does not want the latter – everyone wants to talk, everyone wants to talk, even on the basis of vain assumptions. And we have indeed seen that it is precisely in this disregard for the spiritual element in the world that the misfortune of our age lies. At the present time, one is only sincere about the evolution of humanity when one really wants to engage in the investigation of those impulses of the will that are necessary to push forward the waves of human evolution.

Of course, these things should not be taken personally. In this or that place in life, everyone can naturally say: Yes, what should I do? - Certainly, that can never be the demand, that we should understand today what we should do in order to somehow take the first steps tomorrow, to undertake something that will make a world epoch. What we have to undertake, karma will bring to us. But what we have to do is to open our eyes – I mean the eyes of the soul – to really recognize, to really see through the time. What we have to do is not to oversleep this time, but to look into what is happening! What the materialism of the fifth post-Atlantean period has taken away from people, what it necessarily had to take away because people first had to orient themselves purely personally, are comprehensive ideas, as they are the outpourings of the Zeitgeist, and these are comprehensive ideas that we can have in common with the so-called dead. The intellectualistic stuff that has become so great in our time has not only seized human souls, it has therefore also seized the social and historical development of the age itself. Faced with the necessities of history, man has, with a certain right – for these things are not to be criticized, but characterized – man has, with a certain right, handed over to the machine much of what he used to do out of his human initiative, and I also mean out of the organic human initiative. The materialistic age is, of course, at the same time the machine age. And this machine age not only forms with the machines what it needs for ordinary life, but war itself has become the maintenance of a great machine. It could not have happened otherwise, because in the course of the last few centuries, humanity has not only developed a certain class of humanity, but within this class of humanity it has also cultivated views that are above all concerned with only accepting as scientific that can be realized within the outer social order in the making of machines: either in the making of mechanical machines - if I may use this tautology, this pleonasm - or in the making of social machines. For example, until the war, the international financial management of the world was a large-scale machine. Everything was machine-like. Man has given up a great deal to the machine-like. A certain stratum of humanity retained only that which makes trivial necessities of life pleasurable. One could say: toiling in winter, bathing in summer and only as much thinking as is necessary, so that the world machinery toils for one, became the signature of the age.

Not as if it could have been avoided. This world machinery had to come about, that is quite natural. To criticize what has happened is a dilettantism in which spiritual science cannot participate. But the matter must be seen through and recognized in the nature that it has, because only then will it be possible to develop the right impulses of will in response to it.

Again and again, people have come along who have already expressed the appropriate ideas for this age. But these spokesmen for the appropriate ideas were actually regarded as impossible human personalities, especially in the second half of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century. Subsequent humanity has gone back to its daily routine without giving a thought to such clear-sighted minds as Bright's and Cobden's, who saw how the social structure of humanity must be on earth under the influence of the machine age. Subsequent humanity should have used some of its intellectual power to find out how appropriate Bright's and Cobden's ideas were for the machine age! But to force the will into the intellect in order to see through reality, that is an effort from which the people of the present shrink. They do not want to imbue their thoughts with will. They want their thoughts to be sentimentally directed towards that which, as they say, makes their hearts glow when they want to uplift themselves. And under the influence of such thought, divested of will, but which feels so warm and comfortable when prattling sentimentalities, one gets accustomed to seizing even the most important questions with a thought that is weak and lacking in will. Above all, one gets accustomed to learning nothing about the development of world history. Is humanity ready to learn at the present time? This, too, is not meant as a criticism but only as a characterization.

All that I say is not inspired from the point of view of criticism, but is inspired from the point of view of stimulating the will. It must be made clear how to introduce the impulse of the will into one's thoughts, which can serve for the good of humanity. Unfortunately, people today are not inclined to learn enough. They let things pass by and talk about them, believing that by talking they can also master the element of will. How much has been chattered, insubstantial chatter in the time when the ominous causes of this world catastrophe were preparing! How much has been chattered at the suggestion of the Tsar's peace manifesto frippery! This could happen because it can be said that people had to be taught that these were peace manifesto shenanigans, and that all the chatter that was attached to them was millions and millions of miles away from the possibility of stimulating impulses of will in humanity. But learning should be done. Is learning taking place? No, for the time being learning is not taking place – and it is not a matter of criticizing the lack of learning, but of seeing through this lack of learning so that one may learn. What has taken the place of the chatter about all kinds of world goals in connection with the peace manifesto frippery of the now dismissed tsar? The other nonsense of the peace manifesto frippery of the chatterbox Woodrow Wilson! Exactly the same thing instead of the same thing! That is to be learned, that humanity does not want to learn. And in the realization of this unwillingness to learn, the holy will for the right volition will be kindled in our soul, which must arise from the right insight into that which works and lives in our time.

In my public lectures, I have said that, fundamentally, what has developed over the course of the last four hundred years in the historical dream of humanity was enunciated as a world program in the course of the nineteenth century by people like Karl Marx and similar thinkers. The impulses had already passed when it was expressed, but what was basically the basis for the historical development of the last four centuries was expressed with it.

What is the situation today? The situation today is that the broader sections of the population have abandoned all thought about social interrelations. They leave it to the professors of political economy, who have indeed talked enough nonsense over the last few centuries, and especially decades. Real social thinking, which has to emerge from the knowledge of the impulses coming from the spiritual world, has been lost in the so-called leading classes. Only one class has recently brought forth world-historical ideas: that class which, in occult conception, are brothers of the shadows as opposed to the brothers of the bourgeois parties of the last centuries. World-historical ideas, even if they are shadowy ideas, have been brought by Social Democracy, gray shadowy ideas of a particularly dangerous kind, since they are completely impregnated with the spirit of the last centuries. But world-historical ideas are what the other strata of humanity have completely lacked. For the other strata of humanity, they would have had to borrow them from the spiritual world; they would have needed to develop their religious, social, and historical ideas not in a general, unctuous way, but to see through social development on a firm foundation of knowledge. No one will understand social evolution in reality who is not willing to place himself in a position to do so from the starting points on which these reflections have been based in recent weeks.

The best that the so-called living can receive from the spiritual world today, the best that the dead reveal to us from their life between death and a new birth, speaks for this. The new understanding of the mystery of Golgotha, which we must approach through the deepening of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, speaks for this. Everything that we should allow to pass through our souls as serious Christmas thoughts in these serious times speaks for this. For it was for the salvation of mankind that the Being whose birth is celebrated at Christmas entered into the evolution of the earth, not merely for the comfortable talking to of the soul, but so that this human soul might be imbued with – if I may use the paradoxical word – the will to will, the will to want. If this will to want permeates human souls, then this will mean the impulse for a longing for truly new ideas, because the old ones have been used up. Sometimes we can no longer even use the words.

We live in catastrophic times. To call what is happening war is almost anachronistic, arising only from the old habit of still calling a bottle a pumpkin. But just as little as what is happening should be called war, just as little should the comfortable hope speak of peace in the old way, in a careless manner! Mighty portents are announced in our time, and it is incumbent upon humanity to try to understand these portents. In the events themselves, events are changing. 1914 marked the beginning of a world event that could perhaps be called a war between the Entente and the European Central Powers. But something essentially different prevails under what is so-called, and completely different enemies face each other! And in our days a serious symptom of what smolders beneath what we still call, rather inappropriately, a war between the Entente and the Central Powers, is looming for us, a symptom which consists in the sad clash of the populations of northern and southern Russia, a significant symptom, even if it may fade away for the time being, a significant symptom of what is smoldering beneath the surface of events. People do not like the fact that things are being called by their right name today, because they do not want the volition, because they prefer to ignore the seriousness of the times as long as possible, as long as the stomach does not growl too loudly. What is at stake is whether we really develop the will to see the deeper foundations of events, whether we finally develop the will to cast off all superficiality and look things in the face with the eyes of the soul.

In the next lectures, we will have to supplement what we have now let pass through our soul in a kind of overview with a variety of additional points that are connected with the deeper impulses to which we have devoted ourselves in these reflections. But I believe that in this time, if we do not want to weave a veil before our eyes, we most honor the mysterious threefold necessity that passes through world-becoming and is the brother of human freedom and the freedom of the other creatures. Here on this earth we must grasp freedom. In this respect, too, the modern man's gaze learns a great deal when he turns to the dead; for the dead man knows that in the life between death and a new birth, freedom comes to him through what he brings with him from the life between birth and death. To be embedded in the intelligences of the higher hierarchies is something that becomes for us a natural necessity when we pass through the portal of death. When we live on the other side, we are embedded in the intelligences of the higher hierarchies and follow their impulses, just as a natural phenomenon here on earth necessarily follows natural impulses. Then we are still free after we have passed through the gate of death, if we carry over into the spiritual world with us in our soul that which we can acquire here as knowledge of spiritual becoming and spiritual essence.

This is something that is now also most intimately connected with the Mystery of Golgotha. And because this is so, I believe that even Christmas meditations at this time must not be sentimental, but must appeal to the will-wish.

For take the Gospels: how much there is in the Gospels of the appeal to the will to will! The Gospels are not sentimental writings; the Gospels are writings that speak to the very humblest of human nature, but they are also writings that seek to awaken in man the strength of will that he can muster. Christmas candles should not only burn so that we indulge in voluptuous contemplation in a certain way, but they should also burn so that they are symbols for kindling the light of will that serves the salvation of the world.

Humanity has a lot of catching up to do; and it must catch up! For by developing the strength that lies in this catching up, it will develop the right healing powers to emerge from the present catastrophic time. It was not man's task merely to enter these times; the task of getting out of them is much more important. This task stands as a sacred sign, I believe, written in letters of fire behind all the Christmas candles that have been burning before our souls for four years now in a different way than in many earlier years!

Tomorrow we will meet at four o'clock at the Basel branch for a Christmas party. On Monday at four-thirty we will gather here for the first performance of the “Paradeis-Spiel,” and I will then give a Christmas reflection for those of our friends who are not at home for some reason, but who are here right now, devoting themselves to work and the like, and who might prefer to spend their Christmas here on this day.

My dear friends, this evening I would like to tell you something about the journey, and then give another talk tomorrow — since the next week has to be spent in Stuttgart and I will be dealing with some things that are perhaps more closely related in content to the things that I will also have to deal with today, as part of the description of the journey.

The journey began with Ilkley, in the north of England, where an educational course was to be held, a course dealing with Waldorf school methodology and didactics in relation to contemporary civilization. Ilkley is a town in the north of England with a population of about 8,000. At present there is a tendency in England to hold so-called summer schools at such places during the summer months, and this course was initially also in the form of such a summer school.

The course was to be accompanied by what we have developed in the anthroposophical movement in the way of eurythmy, and it was also to be accompanied by what six of our Waldorf school teachers could offer based on what has just been said in the individual lectures.

Ilkley is a place that is probably considered a kind of summer resort, but it is located in the immediate vicinity of those cities that really put you so deeply into what industrial-commercial culture is in our time. Leeds and other places are very close by, for example Bradford, and Manchester is not far away either. These are cities that truly reflect the life that has arisen from the present. One really has a feeling there that says very clearly how much the present needs a spiritual impact; a spiritual impact that is not limited to giving individual people something for their immediate individual-personal soul needs. It is certainly as justified as possible to see the anthroposophical movement in this light, but I am now speaking of the impressions that are really imposed on one by today's outside world.

You see, my dear friends, it is indeed the case that one would consider it an extraordinary, I would even say cultural paradox, if someone were to recommend adding indigestible mineral products - let's say any minerals, stones and so on - to human food, in other words, to regard it as something possible to add sand or the like to human food. One is compelled, on the basis of one's ideas about the human organism, to regard this as impossible. But anyone who is able to look more deeply into the structure and interrelationships of the world — and this may be said out of genuine anthroposophical feeling and perception — will have a special sense of a collection of houses and factories in such a style, which, so to speak, gives nothing to the aesthetic needs of human beings — as for example, in Leeds, where incredible-looking black houses are lined up in an abstract manner, where everything actually looks as if it were a condensation of the blackest coal dust, which has formed into houses in which people now live. If we consider this in connection with the development of culture and civilization of all mankind, and really do so with the same attitude as I have just applied to the sand in the stomach, we feel that we must say: It is just as impossible for human civilization for such a thing to become established in the long run in the whole course of human development and for human civilization to somehow progress inwardly.

Now it is really not the case that one could ever be a reactionary on anthroposophical ground. Of course, one must not speak of these things in a negative sense. These things have simply arisen out of the life of the whole evolution of the earth. But they are only possible within the development of humanity if they are imbued, permeated with a real spiritual life, if the spiritual life actually penetrates into these things and is gradually able to elevate them to a kind of aesthetics, so that people do not completely stray from the inner human through these things being placed in the unfolding of culture.

And I would like to say: it is precisely from such an experience that the most absolute necessity of a penetration of spiritual impulses into contemporary civilization arises. These things cannot be grasped merely in the sense of general ideas that one forms, but they must be grasped in connection with what is in the world. But one must have a heart for what is in the world!

Ilkley itself is a place that, on the one hand, has the atmosphere of its proximity to these other, purely industrial cities, but on the other hand, there are traces everywhere in the surrounding remains of the dolmens, the old Druid altars, that are reminiscent of an ancient spirituality that has no direct successor there. It is, I would say touching, to perceive when on the one hand one has the impression that I have just described, and when on the other hand, in this region, which I would say is thoroughly permeated by the effluents of those impressions, one climbs a hill and then finds the remains of the old sacrificial altars with the corresponding signs in the extraordinarily characteristic places where they are always found - there is something extraordinarily touching about it. There is such a hill near Ilkley, with such a stone at the top. And on this stone, essentially – it is a little more complicated – but essentially what is known as a swastika, which was imprinted on the stones that were placed at certain sites at that time and what was imprinted on something very specific: it points to how at these sites the Druid priest was imbued with the same thoughts that, let's say, two to three millennia ago, were culturally creative in these areas. For when one enters such a place, stands before such a rock with the engraved signs, then one can still see from the whole situation today that one is standing in the same place where the Druid priest once stood and where he felt so strongly about the engraving of this sign that he expressed his consciousness, which he had from his dignity, in this sign.

For what does one read in this sign when standing before such a stone? One reads the words that were in the heart of the Druid priest: Lo, the eye of sensuality beholds the mountains, beholds the places of men; the eye of the spirit, the lotus flower, the turning lotus flower – for its sign is the swastika – beholds the hearts of men, beholds the interior of the soul. And it is through this seeing that I want to be connected with those who are entrusted to me as a community. Just as one would otherwise read a text from a book, one reads this, so to speak, by standing in front of such a stone.

This is roughly the setting in which the Ilkley Conference was held. It consisted of my always giving the lectures in the morning, which this time, above all, tried to extract the Waldorf school pedagogy and didactics from the whole historical development of the art of education. This time I started from the way in which the art of education in Greek culture grew out of general Greek life, from which one can see that actually no special methods or special practices should be invented for school, but that school should impart what is contained in general culture.

It is certainly not right, for example, to invent special practices in Froebelian kindergartens – and I am not criticizing Froebel at all! – for doing this or that with the children, practices that are not connected to and have not grown out of general cultural life. Rather, it is right for the person practising the art of education to be directly involved in general cultural life, to have a heart and mind for it, and then to incorporate into the educational methods from direct life that into which the person to be educated is to grow later.

And so I wanted to show how pedagogy and didactics must grow out of our life, but now permeated by the spirit. This gave us the opportunity to shed light on the Waldorf school method from a different point of view. What I just mentioned was only the starting point; the subject at hand was an examination of Waldorf school pedagogy, which you are familiar with.

After that, there was a eurythmy performance by the children of the Kings Langley School and eurythmy performances by those eurythmy artists who had come with us at the Ilkleyer Theatre there. It would probably have been better if the latter had taken place first, so that it could have been seen in the order itself how what is cultivated as eurythmy in the school also grows out of eurythmy as an art that is part of cultural life. Well, these things will settle down in the future, so that in terms of external arrangements, too, a picture will be given of what is actually intended.

The third aspect, so to speak, was the achievements of those who had been involved as teachers at the Waldorf School. And here it must truly be said that the greatest possible interest was shown in the matter. I must say, for example, that the way in which Dr. von Baravalle presented his ideas was extraordinarily moving for anyone who cares about the development of the Waldorf School. When one saw how Dr. von Baravalle simply explained his geometrical views in the way they apply to children, using the method that you should know well from his book on physical and mathematical methods, and how then, from an artistic-mathematical development of surface transformation and surface metamorphosis, one might say, suddenly with an inner drama, the Pythagorean theorem emerged. When they saw how, after the audience had been led step by step and did not really know where it was all going, a number of surfaces were shifted until, at the end, the Pythagorean theorem was visualized on the blackboard by shifting the surfaces. There was an inner amazement among the audience, which consisted of teachers, an inner dramatic unfolding of thoughts and feelings, and I would like to say such an honest, sincere enthusiasm for what is coming into the school as a method that it was really moving – just as what our teachers presented in general aroused the most extraordinary interest. We had brought examples of our students' work, which consists of sculptural pieces, making toys, paintings, and so on. The greatest interest was aroused when it was described how the children work on these projects and how they fit into the school's overall curriculum.

The way in which music lessons are taught, as interpreted by Miss Lämmert, attracted the greatest attention, as did the discussions by Dr. Schwebsch. The insistent, loving way of Dr. von Heydebrand, then the forceful way of our Dr. Karl Schubert; all these are things that really showed that it is possible to bring the essence of the Waldorf school system to the soul of a teaching staff in a vivid way. Miss Röhrle then gave a eurythmy lesson for different people, which was also a good addition, so that the whole thing was quite well summarized from an educational point of view. I can say that because I had no part in putting the program together. All of this was put together by our English friends in such a way that it really was a very nice summary of the educational subject.

During the whole conference, a committee was formed which set itself the task of founding an independent school in England based on the model of the Waldorf School. The prospects are actually very good for such a school to be established as a day school, alongside the Kings Langley School, which had already agreed last year, after my Oxford lectures, to adopt the Waldorf school methodology. As I said, it was the children of the Kings Langley School who had presented what they had learned in eurythmy at the theater in Ilkley. The interest and the way in which these things have been received, and also how sympathetically the eurythmy performances have been received, is something that can already be very satisfying. This was the first half of August, until August 18. Then we hiked over to Penmaenmawr.

Penmaenmawr is a place in North Wales, on the western English coast, where the island of Anglesey is located, and this Penmaenmawr is a place that could not have been better chosen for this anthroposophical undertaking this year. For this Penmaenmawr is filled with the directly tangible astral atmosphere, into which the young man shaped himself, who had emerged from the Druid service, traces of which can be found everywhere. It is right on the seashore, as I said, where the island of Anglesey is located; a bridge, which, by the way, is ingeniously built, leads over to it. On one side, hills and mountains rise everywhere near Penmaenmawr, and on these mountains you can find the remains of the old so-called sacrificial altars, cromlechs and so on scattered all over the place; there are traces of this ancient Druidic service everywhere.

These individual scattered cult devices, if I may call them that, are apparently arranged in the simplest way. If you look at them from the side, they are stones arranged in a square or rectangle, with a stone lying on top. If you look at them from above, these stones would stand like this [see drawing], and then a stone lies on top, enclosing the whole thing like a small chamber.

Of course, such things were also grave monuments. But I would like to say that in older times the function of a grave monument is always connected with the function of a much more extensive cult. And so I do not want to hold back here from expressing what such a cult site can teach us.

You see, these stones enclose a kind of chamber; a capstone lies on top of it. This chamber is dark in a certain way. So when the sun's rays fall on it, the outer physical light remains. But sunlight is filled with spiritual currents everywhere. This spiritual current continues into this dark space. And the Druid priest, as a result of his initiation, had the ability to see through the Druid stones and see the downward flow - not of physical sunlight, because that was blocked - but of what lives spiritually and soulfully in physical sunlight. And that inspired him with what then flowed into his wisdom about the spiritual cosmos, about the universe. They were therefore not only burial places, they were places of knowledge.

But even more. If at certain times of the day this was the case, what I have just described, then one can say: at other times of the day the opposite was the case, that currents went back from the earth [upwards], which could then be observed when the sun was not shining on them, and in which lived that which were the moral qualities of the community of the priest, so that the priest could see at certain times what the moral qualities of his community children were in the surrounding area. So the descending spiritual substance as well as the ascending spiritual substance showed him that which allowed him to stand in a truly spiritual way in his entire sphere of influence.

These things are, of course, not recorded in what today's science tells us about these places of worship. But it is indeed what can be seen here directly, because the power of the impulses – the impulses from the work of the Druid priests in the time when it was their good time – was so strong that even today these things are absolutely alive in the astral atmosphere there.

I was then able to visit another type of place of worship with Dr. Wachsmuth: from Penmaenmawr, you have to walk about an hour and a half up a mountain. At the top, there is something like a hollow. From this hollow, you have an unobstructed, wonderful view of the surrounding mountains and also of the hollow boundary of your own mountain. Up there in this hollow, one found what can be described as the actual sun cult site of the ancient Druids. It is arranged in such a way that the corresponding stones are arranged with their cover leaves; the traces are present everywhere.

Think of it this way: these places of worship have no inner space. Up here, in close proximity to each other, you have two such Druidic circles. When the sun makes its daily path, the shadows of these stones fall in a variety of ways, and you can now distinguish, let's say, when the sun passes through the constellation of Aries, the Aries shadow, then the Taurus shadow, the Gemini shadow and so on. Even today, when deciphering these things, one still gets a good impression of how the Druid priest was able to read the secrets of the universe from the various, qualitatively different sun shadows that this Druid circle revealed, from that which lives on in the sun shadow when the physical sunlight is held back, so that in fact it contains a world clock that speaks of the secrets of the world. But these were definitely signs that emerged from the shadows that were cast, signs that spoke of the secrets of the world and the cosmos.

The second circle was then a kind of control to check what the first circle had revealed. If you had gone up in an airplane and gone so far away that this distance in between might have disappeared, you would have had, looking down, the ground plan of what the ground plan of our Goetheanum was, directly from these two druid circles.

All this is located where the island of Anglesey is also close by, where much of what has been preserved in the accounts of King Arthur took place. The center of King Arthur was a little further south, but some of the events that took place there were also part of King Arthur's work. All this gives the astral atmosphere of Penmaenmawr something that makes this place in particular a special one, one of which one can say: when speaking about spiritual things, one is compelled to speak in imaginations. It is the case with imaginations that when they are formed in the course of the representations, these imaginations in the astral atmosphere within today's civilization very soon disappear. When one tries to depict the spiritual, one is constantly fighting against the disappearance of the imaginations. One has to create these imaginations, but they quickly fade away, so that one is constantly faced with the necessity of creating these imaginations in order to have them in front of oneself. The astral atmosphere that results from these things is such that it is a little more difficult to form the imaginations there in Penmaenmawr, but that this difficulty in turn leads to a great relief of the spiritual life on the other hand, that now these imaginations, after they are formed, simply look like they have been written into the astral atmosphere, so that they are inside. Every time one forms imaginations that express the spiritual world, one has the feeling that they remain in the astral atmosphere there. And it is precisely this circumstance that so vividly reminds us of how these Druid priests chose their special places, where they could, I would say, effectively engrave in the astral atmosphere what was incumbent upon them to shape in imaginations from the secrets of the world. Coming from Ilkley, which is very close to industrialism and shows only very slight traces of the ancient Druidic period, one feels a kind of real transcendence, almost like crossing a threshold, and now entering into something that is simply spiritual in the immediate present. Everything here is spiritual. You could say that this part of Wales is a very special place on Earth. Today, this Wales is the custodian of an incredibly strong spiritual life, which admittedly consists of memories, but real memories that stand there. So that it may actually be said: the opportunity to talk about Anthroposophy at this place – not in reference to the branches of Anthroposophy, but about Anthroposophy itself, about the inner core of Anthroposophy – I count that as one of the most significant stages in the development of our Anthroposophical life.

The credit for having made this institution, for having placed something like this in the development of anthroposophical life, goes to Mr. Dunlop, who is extraordinarily insightful and energetic in this direction. He explained the plan to me when I was in England last year and then stuck to it and has now brought it to fruition. From the outset, it was planned to bring something purely anthroposophical in connection with eurythmy to this place this August.

Mr. Dunlop then had a third impulse, but it was impossible to carry out, and it may be said that what has become possible has only become possible through the truly spiritually insightful way of choosing this place. I think it is of some importance to bear in mind that there are such outstanding places on the earth's surface where, in such a vivid memory, there is an immediate awareness of what was once a living sun cult in preparation for the later adoption of Christianity in Northern and Western Europe.

The lectures were in the morning; the afternoon was partly devoted to allowing the participants to see this astral atmosphere and its connection to the memories of decaying sacrificial sites, dolmens and so on, on the spot; the evening was filled with discussions on anthroposophical topics or with eurythmy performances. There were five of them in. Penmaenmawr, which were received with great sincerity on the one hand and with the greatest interest on the other. The audience consisted partly of anthroposophists, but also of a non-anthroposophical audience. It was certainly the case that — which is, of course, understandable for a mountainous area bordering the sea — from one hour to the next there was always a nice change from half-downpours to bright sunshine and so on. For example, one evening — the external furnishings were almost the same as in this carpentry workshop — we really did go from a downpour to a eurythmy performance; at the beginning, people were still sitting in the hall with their umbrellas, but they did not let themselves be deterred in their enthusiasm. So it was definitely something, as I said in Penmaenmawr itself, that can truly be recorded as a very significant chapter in the history of our anthroposophical movement.

One event was dedicated to discussing educational questions in Penmaenmawr as well. And on this occasion, I would also like to mention the following, which you have already been able to read in the brief presentation I gave of it in the “Goetheanum”. When I came to England, to Ilkley, I found a book called 'Education Through Imagination', which I was able to skim through at first and which immediately captivated me; a book that one of our friends in particular describes as one of the most important books in England. Its author is Miss MacMillan. The same person was then chairman on the first evening and the following evenings in Ilkley. Miss MacMillan gave the opening speech. It was uplifting to see the beautiful enthusiasm and the inner honest fire for the art of education in this woman. And at the same time, it was extraordinarily satisfying for us that this woman in particular is fully committed to what can be achieved in a truly serious art of education through the Waldorf school methodology.

During the following days, I read more of the book and summarized my impressions in the article in the last issue of the Goetheanum. Then, last Monday, Frau Doctor and I were also able to visit the place of work of this excellent woman in Deptford, near London and Greenwich. There we found the Miss MacMillan Care and Education Institute. She takes children from the lowest and poorest social classes into this care and education institute; she also aims to take children at an older age. Today she has 300 children at the school; she started with six children many years ago, today there are 300. These children are taken in at the age of two, coming from circles where they are very dirty, impoverished, sick, malnourished or very poorly nourished – if I may say so, rickety, typhoid, afflicted with worse. Today you can see a kind of school barracks in the immediate vicinity, like those of the Waldorf School – the barracks, not our current opulently built house, the provisional barracks – but there they are very beautiful, nicely furnished. The things are in a garden, but you only have to take a few steps from any of the Iore and then you can compare the population from which these children come, living on the streets in the most terrible squalor and filth, with what is being done with these children.

First of all, the bathing facilities are exemplary. That is the main thing. The children arrive at 8 o'clock, are released in the evening, and thus return to their home every evening. The care begins in the morning with a bath. Then a kind of teaching begins, all done with tremendous devotion, with a touching, poignant sense of sacrifice, all arranged in a touching, practical way. Miss MacMillan is also of the opinion that the education of the Waldorf School must penetrate everything, so one must say: one can see that from this point of view with complete satisfaction – while today one might want to do some things differently in terms of methodology; but that is not considered at all in the face of this sense of sacrifice. Things are always in a state of becoming. It is truly significant how well-mannered these children become, which is particularly evident during mealtimes, when they are led to the table and serve themselves, or when the food is passed by one of the children. What practical sense can achieve is shown, for example, by the fact that this, I would like to say extraordinarily homely, “feeding” of the children, during which one would like to eat along, costs 2 shillings 4 pence for the child during the week. Everything is extremely well organized. It was wonderful, for example, to see how the older children, who have been at the center for years, were called together and then presented us with a long scene from Shakespeare's “Midsummer Night's Dream,” the Midsummer Night's Dream, with real feeling and even a certain mastery of dramatic technique. There was something touchingly magnificent about the way these children performed it, expressively and impressively, with real inner control of the drama.

And this performance of Shakespeare's “Midsummer Night's Dream” was almost in the same place where Shakespeare himself once performed his plays for the court with his troupe. Because near Greenwich was the court of Queen Elizabeth. There, in the rooms where today's classrooms are located and other rooms, as I will explain in a moment, even the royal household of Queen Elizabeth lived, and Shakespeare, coming from London, had to perform his plays for the courtiers there. The children performed these Shakespeare plays for us at the same location.

And in the same area, connected to this educational mental hospital, is a children's clinic, again for the poorest of the poor. Every year, 6,000 children go through this clinic, not 6,000 at the same time, but every year. The head of this clinic is now also Miss MacMillan. So that in a very impoverished and polluted area, in a terrible area, a personality is working with full energy and actually great in the conception of what she is doing.

It was therefore a very deep satisfaction for me when Miss MacMillan expressed the intention, if at all possible, to visit our Waldorf School in Stuttgart with some of her colleagues at Christmas. This teaching staff is extraordinarily devoted. You can imagine that caring for such children, with the characteristics I have just described, is not exactly easy. It therefore filled me with great satisfaction that this particular person was the chairman for the Ilkley lectures, and then in Penmaenmawr – where she came again in the few days that she could bring herself to do so – she introduced a discussion on education in which Dr. von Baravalle and Dr. von Heydebrand spoke. So it was precisely what took place at Penmaenmawr and what was connected with it that was really quite satisfying.

The last part, so to speak, was the third part, which was the days in London. Dr. Wegman had come over for what was to be my first task in London. We were to present the method and essence of our anthroposophic medical efforts to a number of English doctors. Forty doctors were invited, and most of them appeared at Dr. Larkin's house. I was able to speak in two lectures, first about the special nature of our remedies in their connection with the symptoms and with the nature of the human being. And then in the second lecture I was able to give a physiological-pathological basis for the functions of the human being; then something about the mode of action of individual remedies, again in connection with this basis, the effects of the antimony remedy, the effects of mistletoe and so on – and I believe we can truly say that perhaps a fairly good understanding of the matter has been brought to bear, even in a wider circle, as evidenced by the fact that Dr. Wegman was consulted quite frequently. So this aspect of anthroposophical work has also come into its own.

The finale was a performance at the Royal Academy of Art, which was an extraordinary success. The room is not particularly large, but not only was it sold out, people also had to be turned away. The eurythmy was received with extraordinary enthusiasm. One could say of eurythmy that wherever it goes, it makes its way. If only it were not for the enormous obstacles that exist in the present time! On the one hand, when one sees all that is going on, for example, the tendency of the Ilkley enterprises to now have a kind of Waldorf School emerge in England, then one looks again with a great concern, which cannot leave one today, at what one, I would like to say, encounters as an indefinite, painful response when one asks oneself: What will become of the Waldorf school in the terribly endangered Germany, from which, for example, the school efforts have emerged? I say this not so much because of the pecuniary side of the matter, but because of the extremely endangered circumstances within Germany. There are some things that make you say: If things continue as they are now, it is hard to imagine where the efforts of the Waldorf School in particular will lead.

After all, if things continue as they are now, as they have arisen from what is currently happening, there will hardly be any possibility of bringing such things through the current turmoil without danger. Then one has a heavy heart when one sees how these things are happening after all, and how in fact today all things in the world happen out of shortsightedness and without any inkling that spiritual currents must play a part in the development of culture, and how in fact in the widest circles people have lost all direct interest, all hearty engagement with things. Basically, we are all asleep when it comes to things that go so terribly to the root of human and earthly becoming. Humanity is asleep. At most, one complains about the matter when it is of immediate concern. But things do not happen without the development of great ideas! And there is such a dullness in the world towards the impulses that are to strike: Either one does not want to hear about it, or one feels uncomfortable in the world when something like the endangered situation in Central Europe is pointed out. One feels uncomfortable, one does not like to talk about it, or one colors it in a certain way and speaks of insubstantial things, of guilt and the like. In this way one gets rid of these things. The way humanity relates to general world events today is something that can be terribly painful for the soul. This general cultural sleep, which is becoming more and more widespread, is basically something quite terribly lamentable. There is actually no awareness of how the earth today, in its civilization, forms a unity, even in the face of such elementary events – I do not want to talk about them here, but they have happened – such as the poignant Japanese tragedy brought about by nature. Yes, when one compares how people looked at these things relatively recently and how they look at them today, there is something that really does bring home to one again and again the necessity of pointing out how urgently humanity needs to wake up.

Of course, this is always in front of you, especially when you see what could become of it if people would take an interest, if people would come to take things as they are, if they would not take them in terms of national divisions, in terms of state divisions, but in a general human sense! When one sees on the one hand what could become of it, and when on the other hand one sees how it is almost impossible because of general lethargy, then this actually characterizes, I would say, our present age most of all. That is the way things are. One cannot speak of the one without the other also arising in the context.

I wanted to give you a kind of travelogue today, my dear friends. I will speak about questions of intellectual life, which are, of course, more distantly related and which are actually also anthroposophical in content, tomorrow, after this.

My lecture will take place tomorrow at 8 a.m.; on Tuesday at 8 a.m. there will be a eurythmy performance here.

We have let two Christmas plays pass before our soul. We may perhaps raise the thought: Are the first and second Christmas plays dedicated in the same sense to the great human cause that is so vividly before our soul these days? The two plays are fundamentally different, quite different from each other. One can hardly imagine two plays that are more different and yet are dedicated to the same subject. When we consider the first play, we see in all its parts the most wonderful simplicity, childlike simplicity. There is depth of soul, but it is breathed through and lived through everywhere with the most childlike simplicity. The second play moves on the heights of outer physical existence. It is immediately associated with the thought that the Christ Jesus enters the world as a king. He is confronted with the other king, Herod. Then it is shown that two worlds open up before us: the one that, in the good sense, develops humanity further, the world that Jesus Christ serves, and the other world that Ahriman and Lucifer serve, and which is represented by the devilish element. A cosmic, a cosmic-spiritual picture in the highest sense of the word! The connection between the development of humanity and the writing on the stars is immediately apparent. Not the simple, primitive clairvoyance of shepherds, which finds a “shine in the sky” that can be found in the simplest of circumstances, but the deciphering of the writing on the stars, for which all the wisdom of past centuries is necessary and from which one unravels what is to come. That which comes from other worlds shines into our world. In the states of dreaming and sleeping, that which is to happen is guided and directed; in short, occultism and magic permeate the entire play.

The two plays are fundamentally different. The first one comes to us, one may truly say, in childlike simplicity and innocence. Yet how infinitely admonishing it is, how infinitely sensitive. But let us first consider only the main idea. The human being who is to prepare the vessel for the Christ enters the world. Its entrance into the world is to be presented, to be demonstrated, that which Jesus is for the people into whose circle of existence he enters. Yes, my dear friends, this idea, this notion, has by no means conquered those circles so readily, within which such plays have been listened to with such fervor and devotion as this one. Karl Julius Schröer, of whom I have often spoken to you, was one of the first collectors of Christmas plays in the 19th century. He collected the Christmas plays in western Hungary, the Oberufer plays, from Bratislava eastwards, and he was able to study the way in which these plays lived and breathed among the people there. And it is very, very significant when you see how these plays were handed down from generation to generation in handwritten form, and how, not when Christmas was approaching, but when Christmas was approaching in the distant past, those who were found suitable for this in the village prepared to perform these plays. Then one sees how closely connected with the content of these plays was the whole annual cycle of life of the people in whose village circles such plays were performed. The time in the mid-19th century, for example, when Schröer collected these plays there, was already the time when they began to die out in the way they had been performed until then. Many weeks before Christmas, the boys and girls in the village who were suitable to represent such plays had to be found. And they had to prepare themselves. But the preparation did not consist merely of learning by heart and practicing what the play contained in order to represent it; rather, the preparation consisted in the fact that these boys and girls changed their whole way of life, their external way of life. From the time they began their preparations, they were no longer allowed to drink wine or consume alcohol. They were no longer allowed to fight on Sundays, as is usually the case in the village. They had to behave very modestly, they had to become gentle and mild, they were no longer allowed to beat each other up, and they were not allowed to do many other things that were otherwise quite common in villages, especially in those times. In this way, they also prepared themselves morally through the inner mood of their souls. And then it was really as if they were carrying something sacred around in the village when they performed their plays.

But this only came about slowly and gradually. Certainly, in many villages in Central Europe in the 19th century there was such a mood, the mood that at Christmas these plays were something sacred. But one can only go back to the 18th century and a little further, and this mood becomes more and more unholy. This mood was not there from the beginning, when these plays came to the village, not at all from the beginning, but it only emerged and established itself over time. There were times, one does not even have to go back that far, when one could still find something different. There you could find the village gathering here or there in Central Europe, and a cradle in which the child lay, in which a child lay, not a manger, a cradle in which the child lay, and with it, indeed, the most beautiful girl in the village – Mary must have been beautiful! – but an ugly Joseph, an ugly-looking Joseph! Then a scene similar to the one you saw today was performed. But above all: when it was announced that the Christ was coming, the whole community appeared, and each person stepped on the cradle. Above all, everyone wanted to have stepped on the cradle and rocked the Christ Child, that was what it was all about, and they made a tremendous racket, which was supposed to express that the Christ had come into the world. And in many such older plays, there is a terrible mockery of Joseph, who has always been depicted as an old man in these times, who was laughed at.

How did these plays, which were of this nature, actually come into the people? Well, we must of course remember that the first form of the greatest, most powerful earthly idea, the appearance of Christ Jesus on earth, was the idea of the savior who had passed through death, of the one who, through death, won for the earth what we call the meaning of the earth. It was the suffering of Christ that first came into the world in early Christianity. And to the suffering Christ, after all, sacrifices were offered in the various acts that took place in the cycle of the year. But only very slowly and gradually did the child conquer the world. The dying savior first conquered the world, only slowly and gradually did the child conquer it. We must not forget that the liturgy was in Latin and that the people understood nothing. Only gradually did people begin to see something more in the sacrifice of the Mass, which was fixed for Christmas, besides the sacrifice of the Mass that was celebrated three times at Christmas. Perhaps not without good reason – if not for him personally, then for his followers – the idea of showing the mystery of Jesus to the faithful on Christmas night is attributed to Francis of Assisi, who, out of a certain opposition to the old forms and spirit of the church, held his entire doctrine and his entire being. And so we gradually, slowly see how the believing community at Christmas should be offered something that was connected with the great mystery of humanity, with the coming down of Christ Jesus to earth. At first, a manger was set up and figures were merely made. It was not acted out by people, but figures were made: the infant Jesus and Joseph and Mary – but in three dimensions. Gradually, this was replaced by priests dressing up and acting it out in the simplest way. And it was only in the 13th or 14th century that the mood began to develop within the communities that could be described as people saying to themselves: We also want to understand something of what we see, we want to penetrate into the matter. And so people began to be allowed to play individual parts in what was initially only performed by the clergy. Now, of course, one must know life in the middle of the Middle Ages to understand how that which was connected with the most sacred was at the same time taken in such a way as I have indicated. At that time it was entirely possible out of a sense of accommodation, so that the village community, the whole community, could say: I too rocked a little with my foot at the cradle where Christ was born! — out of the accommodation of this mood. It could be expressed in this and in many other ways, in the singing that accompanied it, which at times intensified to the point of yodeling, in all that had taken place. But that which was alive in the matter had in itself the strength, one might almost say, to transform itself out of a profane, out of a profanation of the Christmas idea, into the most sacred itself. And the idea of the child appearing in the world conquered the holy of holies in the hearts of the simplest people.

That is the wonderful thing about these plays, of which the first was one that was not simply there as it now appears to us, but became so: piety first unfolding in the mood out of impiety, through the power of that which they represent! The Child had first to conquer hearts, had first to find entrance into hearts. Through that which was holy in Itself, It sanctified hearts that at first encountered It with rudeness and untamedness. That is the wonderful thing about the developmental history of these plays, how the mystery of Christ still has to conquer hearts and souls piece by piece. And tomorrow we will take a closer look at some of what has been conquered step by step. Today I would just like to say: it is not without reason that I noticed how admonishingly even the simplest thing is presented in the first play.

As I said, slowly and gradually that which came into the world with the mystery of Christ entered into the hearts and souls of human beings. And it is actually the case that the further one goes back in the tradition of the various mysteries of Christ, the more one sees that the form of expression is an elevated one, a spiritually elevated one. I would like to say that the further back one goes, the more one enters into a “cosmic utterance”. We have already incorporated some of this into our reflections, and in the previous Christmas lecture I showed how Gnostic ideas were used to understand the deep mystery of Christ. But even if we follow this or that even in the later periods of the Middle Ages, we find that, as late as the Middle Ages, something is present in the Christmas poems of that time that was later absent: an emphasis on the early Christian idea that Christ descends from the heights of the spirit. We find it in the 11th and 12th centuries when we bring such a Christmas carol before our soul:

The honor of the incarnate Son of God
Is proclaimed by the heavenly hosts, rejoicing and exulting;
And loudly resounds from the shepherd's mouth
The joyful tidings.

“Glory in the highest! And peace on earth!”
So it resounds in solemn song;
With wonder it is seen by men today,
What never happened before.

The heavens shine brightly with a new star;
Guided by it, from afar come
the wise men, and greet with delight
the sight of them.

With him, truth has now been born anew.
What was lost through sin has been replaced;
In the light of grace, the fruits of blessing
Bloom more gloriously.

The punishment of the past has now been revealed,
Since this fruit has sprung from the earth,
Which grants us life and refreshment,
And nourishes forever.

He has come, clothed in our flesh,
The good shepherd who tends all nations;
He has dwelt, like us, in pilgrim huts,
Suffered for us.

Hail then to the earth that saw his light!
Through him for time and eternity beglücker,
Consecrate everyone to him, the Savior, thanks and love
With pure impulses.

Help us, Christ, to fulfill Your law ourselves,
Through You, let us succeed in doing good deeds,
So that one day, the crown of eternal life
will also reward us!

Such was the tone that resonated from those who had still understood something of the cosmic significance of the mystery of Christ.

Or there was another Christmas poem from the middle of the Middle Ages, a little later than the Carolingian period:

The Son of God, begotten from eternity, who invisibly and without end,
Through whom the heavens and the earth were built, and all that dwells there was created,
Through whom the days and the hours pass and return;
Whom the angels in the heavenly castle always praise in fully harmonious singing,
Freed from all original sin, clothed in a weak body,
He, who took from Mary, the Virgin, destroyed the guilt of the first father Adam
As well as the lust of the mother Eve.
Today's glorious day of sublime splendor testifies that now the son,
The true sun, dispelled the ancient darkness of the world with the beam of his light.
Now the night is illuminated by the light of that new star,
Which once amazed the sky-wise gaze of the magicians,
And see, that shine for the shepherds, who were blinded
By the lofty splendor of the heavenly inhabitants.
Rejoice, Mary, Mother of God, for at your birth you were attended by a host of angels
singing your praises.
O Christ, only Son of the Father, who for our sake took on the nature of man,
of man, so you revive your own who plead here.
O Jesus, graciously hear the pleas of those whom you have deigned to take care of,
to make them, O God's Son, partakers of your divinity.

This is the tone that, I would say, sounds from the heights of more theologically colored scholarship down to the people.

Now we also hear a little of the sound that rang out at Christmas from the people themselves, when a soul was found that expressed the people's feelings:

He is powerful and strong,
who was born to win,
That is Saint Knist.
yes, praise be to thee in all that is, Niewan the deep
because of his great arrogance
so hell became his portion.

In hell is Michael out of place
who has his home there,
Your sun never shines so brightly,
the moon does not help him,
Only the bright stars,
yes, he has to see everything,
yes, he would love to be in heaven so much.

In heaven there is a house,
a golden gate opens therein,
the windows are the pearls of pity,
which adorn our little house
with precious stones:
no one enters there,
he is cleansed of all sins so pure.

He who gladly goes to church
and stands there without sinning,
may well live joyfully,
he will be given
the angels' common lot,
if he so desires:
in heaven, life is so pure.

I have long served
alas a man
Who walks around in the darkness
and has sworn an oath at my wrongdoing,
His reward is evil.
Help me, Holy Spirit,
to free myself from his delusion.

That is the prayer that the simple man said and understood. We have read the descent, now we have the ascent.

I will try to reproduce this 12th-century Christmas carol so that we can see how the simple man also grasped the full greatness of Christ and related it to the whole of cosmic life:

He is mighty and strong, who was born at Christmas. This is the Holy Christ. Everything that is there praises him, except for the devil, who, through his great arrogance, was sent to hell. There is much filth in hell – “much” is the old word for great, mighty – there is much filth in hell. He who has his home there, who is at home in hell, must realize: the sun never shines there, the moon does not help, nor do the bright stars. There everyone who sees something must say to himself how nice it would be if he could go to heaven. He would very much like to be in heaven. In the kingdom of heaven stands a house. A golden path leads to it. The columns are marble, that is, made of marble, adorned with precious stones. But no one enters there who is not completely pure from sin. Anyone who goes to church and stands there without envy may well have a higher life, for there are always young ones, that is, when he has finally ended his life. Remember, I once introduced the word “younger” from the ether body here. Here you have it in the vernacular! So when he is given “young” to the angelic community, he can certainly wait for it, because in heaven life is pure. — And now he who prays this Christmas carol says: I have unfortunately served a man who walks around in hell, who has developed my certain deed. Help me, holy Christ, to be released from his captivity, that is, to be released from the prison of the evil one. So that is in the language of the people:

He is mighty and strong
Who was born at Christmas...

on the occasion of the performance of old German Christmas plays for German prisoners of war interned in Switzerland.

On behalf of all friends of our anthroposophical movement and especially those who are united here at this building, I have the deepest satisfaction today to greet you most warmly. You will believe in the sincere warmth of this greeting. After all, the feelings we have for you are imbued with everything we are experiencing as a result of those painful events of the present, which are having such a profound impact not only on the general fate of the world, but also on the fate of each individual, especially those whose visit we are meant to be here today.

What we would like to offer you are Christmas plays. These performances should be taken without pretension; we ask you to bear this in mind. They are an attempt to revive old memories of European culture. And perhaps I can most easily explain what these plays are about if I take the liberty of drawing your attention to how I myself first became acquainted with them.

The content of these plays is not directly related to our anthroposophical movement, but this is only apparent. Only someone who misunderstands anthroposophically oriented spiritual science can believe that such tasks as those associated with these Christmas plays are not within its scope. After all, the interest in everything that concerns the spiritual life and the development of humanity must be within its scope.

I myself was introduced to these plays decades ago, and specifically to the plays that are to be rehearsed here today, through my old friend and teacher, Karl Julius Schröer. Karl Julius Schröer discovered precisely these plays, which are old, which have been performed somewhere, there or there, in earlier times and which are now being renewed. You can see many such plays everywhere. But the two plays we will be talking about today, and some others, differ from other Christmas plays in quite a significant way. Karl Julius Schröer found them on the island of Oberufer in the forties and fifties of the 19th century. This is an island off the island of Schütt, which is formed by the Danube below Pressburg, where Hungary borders Austria. Since the 16th or at least since the beginning of the 17th century, these Christmas plays have been preserved among the German farmers, the so-called Haidbauern, all in personal tradition. They have been passed down from generation to generation. The Haidbauer, from whom Karl Julius Schröer took them over, had actually only copied the individual roles. A complete manuscript of these things was hardly found. They were performed every year by the Oberufer farmers, whenever they could, when the people among the farmers of Upper Hungary had the time.

Let us first take a brief look at how it was done. I would like to describe it in the following way. When the autumn work, the harvest work, was done, one of the most respected farmers in the area, who had inherited these plays and the right to perform them from his ancestors, would gather a group of young men and rehearse with them from October, November to December, right through to Advent. The sentiment associated with the performance of these plays is actually what is most touching about the matter. It was truly, by going to the performance of these plays revealing the biblical mysteries, that the whole thing was associated with a deep moral consciousness. This is already evident from the conditions imposed on those who wanted to play in them. The farmer who was in charge of the plays in the 1850s communicated these conditions to Karl Julius Schröer in the following way. He said: “Those boys who were allowed to perform, who were to play a role in the plays, had to fulfill the following conditions for the entire period of preparation until the festival: first, they were not allowed to visit any of the girls during that time; second, they were not allowed to sing any rogue songs; and thirdly, they had to lead an honorable life throughout the weeks, which was obviously a very difficult fact for some; fourthly, they had to follow the master unreservedly in all things related to the preparations for the plays, who rehearsed them with them. That was just one of the most respected farmers.

These plays were performed in front of Catholics and Protestants mixed together, and the performers themselves were too. The plays had a religious character, but not the slightest confessional character. And hostility from any side towards what was to be presented in these plays was actually only on the part of the “intellectuals” in Oberufer. Even back then, the intelligentsia was opposed to such folksy Christmas plays, to such performances inspired by that ethos. Fortunately for us, the intelligentsia at that time consisted of a single schoolmaster who was also the mayor and notary. He was a single personality, but he was dead set against the plays. And the farmers had to perform them in defiance of the local authorities.

Only boys were allowed to participate in the performances as actors. For obvious reasons, we have to refrain from this practice; in fact, we cannot imitate some of the refinements associated with those performances, although we try to give an idea of what the farmers were able to offer back then through our own performances.

The boys also had to play the female roles. Eva, Maria and so on were performed by boys. After weeks of rehearsals, the whole procession of players set off. In front walked someone carrying a so-called Kranawittbaum, a juniper tree used as a symbol of paradise or a Christmas tree. Behind him came the star-bearer, who carried the star on a pole or on a so-called “scissors”. You will see it later: the scissors are designed so that the star can be made closer or further away by rolling up the star scissors. And so the procession moved towards the inn where the performance was to take place. The clothing of those people who performed a part, except for the devil and the angel, was only put on in the inn itself. While the people were dressing, the devil, whom you will also get to know, ran around the village, making mischief with a cow horn, drawing attention to himself, speaking to people. In short, he made sure that as many people as possible appeared in the inn where the performance was to take place. The performance itself was such that the audience sat in a kind of horseshoe shape, with the stage in the middle of this horseshoe, which of course we cannot imitate either.

You will see that it is essentially biblical memories that were performed. First of all – the performances were staged between three and five o'clock – the Shepherds' Christmas Play was usually performed, which we present here as the second play. It depicted the proclamation of Christ Jesus by the angel, the birth of Christ Jesus, that is, everything that our second play, the Shepherds' Play, will present. Then came the Fall of Man, which depicts the Fall of Man in Paradise – our first play to be performed today – followed, as a rule, by a carnival play. Just as in ancient Greek tragedy a satyr play always followed the drama, so here a carnival play, a comic epilogue, followed. It is noteworthy that the characters who represented sacred individuals – Mary, Joseph and so on, who appeared in the first plays – were not allowed to appear in the carnival play; a certain religious sentiment was associated with these plays.

Some of the details are very interesting to follow. If you watch the Shepherds' Play – the second to be performed – today, you will see three innkeepers, at whom the wandering Joseph, who is portrayed as an old man in all these plays, seeks shelter for himself and Mary. They are rejected by the first two innkeepers and led to the stable by the third. This was originally different, but it is still portrayed as such in Oberufer: originally there was an innkeeper, a landlady and her maid. And the idea was linked to that: the innkeeper rejects Joseph and Mary, as does the landlady, only the maid offers them shelter in the stable. Because it probably became difficult to find the necessary young people to play the innkeeper and her maid during the performances, the roles were then transferred to two other innkeepers, so that we now have three innkeepers. But as I said, with the old Oberufer play, this is definitely not to be taken in the same way as with the other Christmas plays. The Christmas plays, Easter plays, Passion plays and so on go back to ancient performances, which all actually originated from church celebrations. In the churches, the clergy originally performed all kinds of things related to the Holy History after the Christmas celebrations, Easter celebrations and so on. Then, in particular due to the fact that the audience grew larger and larger and that the stories were translated from Latin into the vernacular, the plays gradually moved from the ecclesiastical to the secular and were performed outside of the church by farmers.

And so we present these plays to you here. They have been preserved in their original form, which they probably took on in the 16th century. They have been preserved because they most likely originated in southern Germany during the early days of German development, namely in the Lake Constance area. When the various tribes that originally came from the Lake Constance area of southern Germany migrated to Austria and Hungary in earlier centuries, they took these plays with them. These plays were also present in the homeland, but in the homeland they were constantly changing. There were numerous people, clergy, scholars, who had influence over these things, and the things were corrupted. They were preserved unadulterated under the care of those who, in the midst of the Slavic and Magyar populations, had to rely on themselves and who, over the centuries, preserved things in their original form. That is why it was a real find for Schröer when he discovered these plays among the Germans of Upper Hungary in the forties and fifties of the 19th century. For those with a more refined sensibility, they are not at all what the Christmas plays that are so frequently performed today, which have changed over the centuries, are. Rather, they are truly something that takes us back to a part of Europe's past in centuries past. Karl Julius Schröer was particularly suited to preserve something like this. He was truly an exemplary man, a remarkable man, and his memory must be preserved with such things; he was deeply imbued with the idea of how such and similar things actually created the cement that culturally held together this state structure of Austria on the land that was created by those colonists who migrated from the Rhine, from southern Germany, from central Germany, migrated to Upper Hungary, migrated from west to east; also to Styria, to the more southern regions of Hungary, migrated as the Zipser Saxons to Transylvania, migrated as Swabians to the Banat, which, I would like to say, tragically gave up the land on which this culture developed. Now, Schröer was completely imbued with this cultural idea when he refreshed the old memories contained in the Christmas plays. He did many other things as well. And when you immersed yourself with him in his cultural studies, which were so devoid of all coloration of chauvinism but which were deeply imbued with the cultural mission associated with them, you first recognized the full value of the life's work of this man, who collected everything that had already been more or less eradicated from these areas by the mid-19th century due to the spreading cultural trends that dominate this area today. He left us his grammar and dictionaries of the German dialects in Hungary and the Spiš region, which he had carefully prepared, and the Heanzen and Gottscheer dialects, which he treated based on the grammar. His life's work, which he dedicated to literary history and Goethe, actually left a wonderful description of everything that brings together the entire German element, which underlies all cultural areas of this Central European state of Austria as the actual cultural cement. And that is what lives on as a special idea in the research of Karl Julius Schröer. So that we do not just have the product of philological or linguistic scholarship before us, but something that has been collected with heart and mind for that which lives as spirit in these things. And that is why it is so satisfying to be able to refresh these things a little.

Our friend Leopold van der Pals has tried to refresh the musical element of these things a little, and with his music you will see the performances here. So one can say that what we are offering you here is the product of the real mystery plays, the various Christmas plays, as they were spread throughout Europe in earlier centuries. But they should not be preserved in the form in which, for example, the world has caricatured the so-called Oberammergau Passion Plays. There is nothing left of what was actually intended in those ancient times.

However, some things cannot be revived. For example, a special way of reciting the play, which was still practised among the farmers in the old way, even in the 1950s, cannot be revived. With the exception of particularly solemn moments, when God the Father speaks and the like, everything that was presented was presented by the actors in such a way that they spoke in the spirit of their verse. The verse had four uplifts, he appeared, the tone moved by one tone on the fourth uplift. A certain person, let's say: Joseph, whom you will find later, the husband of Mary, for example, spoke the first heave in the pitch C, then E, then F, then went back again on the fourth heave. The other characters spoke in such a way that they began with a C, and then had the pitch E three times, then went back to C again. With great art, but with a simple, restrained art, these things were presented and one really felt the Christmas and Easter mood with transitions into the secular, without sentimentality, without any element of sentimentality. So in these things is contained what people felt and sensed as their spiritual life when they stepped out of the church into the world.

Some passages that may be more difficult to understand will also be explained. The whole thing was of course presented in the local dialect, and there are many things in it that may not be immediately understandable. For example, in the Paradise play, God the Father is referred to as “a Reeb.”

When it is said: Eve was made from a rib, you must not think that it is a wrong pronunciation here, when it is said that Eve is created by God the Father from a rib of Adam. The farmer really does not say rib, but rib. The devil then reports in the course of the Herod play once, he has a few rats. Ratten is a corruption of Ratten. Then perhaps it is not generally known the word “Kletzen”.

Hätten Adam und Eva Kletzen gfress'n,
's wär ihna tausendmal nützer gwes'n.

Now, Kletzen is something that was always eaten at Christmas in the area where the plays were performed: it is made from dried plums and pears. This is said so that people have something to latch onto that they already know. Then there is the word frozzeln, which the devil uses. It means to tease, to mock, to make fun of. There are a number of expressions in both plays that may not be immediately understandable.

So you will see that one saying in particular is used by the innkeepers:

I åls a wirt von meiner gstålt
Håb in mein haus and loplaynt gwålt.

One might think that the innkeeper thinks he is an innkeeper of a particular stature, shape and has power in his house. But this refers to rank. I, as an innkeeper of my rank, of my standing. He who is so well-positioned, has such prestige, has power in his house, namely the power to attract customers to his inn. So, an innkeeper who knows how to give his house such a reputation as I do, has the power to bring his house into such a reputation that it has many people as guests. That is what is meant by this expression. Clamor means rumor; the farmer uses the word for a rumor that spreads. The angel says: Elizabeth is in the rumor that she is barren. - So it means: the rumor is that she is barren. But the farmer says: rumor, he does not say: the rumor. Then you will hear the word from one of the shepherds: all around. That happens often, it is the custom.

I lent him my gloves, as I often do. Then you will often find the word bekern among the shepherd's speeches. This is common in the area where the plays were performed for something that has happened; a story that has been told. When they see each other, they say: they were cold, frozen; or the expression: the ground is as smooth as a mirror.

An especially pretty word is the way one shepherd is made aware that it is already late, that the birds are already chirping – in the farming language, that is piewen.

Stichl, get up, the forest creatures are squeaking already.

In the second line, Gallus says:

Stichl, get up, the carters are cracking their whips on the road.

Kleschen, that's cracking the whip. The carters are already cracking their whips on the road.

These are some of the remarks I wanted to make at the beginning of our performance. Overall, the plays speak for themselves. They are the most beautiful reflection of everything that took place in earlier centuries throughout Central Europe, in such festive plays. For example, there is the St. Gallen manuscript, which consists of 340 verses. There are plays that go back to the 11th century. But I believe that all that exists in this regard cannot quite match the intimacy that lies precisely in the Oberufer plays, which were preserved in the Pressburg area until the 1850s.

It is fair to say that these plays are among those things that have unfortunately been lost, that have disappeared and that one would so much like to revive. For they are truly such that through them one remembers what is so intimately connected with the development of our spiritual life.

That is what I wanted to say to you before the performance.