| 232. Mystery Knowledge & Mystery Centres: On Man’s Life Of Soul
23 Nov 1923, Dornach Translated by E. H. Goddard, Dorothy S. Osmond Rudolf Steiner |
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| If you read that book as it is meant to be read you will understand what it means to live in thoughts. The Philosophy of Freedom is based upon experience of reality; but at the same time it was entirely the product of thinking. |
| You feel that everything comes inwards, not from below, as it were from the centre of the Earth upwards but from the cosmic expanse, the Universe. And you feel that to understand Man, this sense that something is streaming in from the cosmic expanse must be present. This applies even to a true understanding of the human form. |
| Our temperament in old age is often a result of what we have undergone in life and has become memory in the inner life of soul. What enters into a man inwardly in this way, may again—though this is more difficult—become reality. |
| 232. Mystery Knowledge & Mystery Centres: On Man’s Life Of Soul
23 Nov 1923, Dornach Translated by E. H. Goddard, Dorothy S. Osmond Rudolf Steiner |
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We will use the time that is available for lectures at the Goetheanum between now and Christmas in such a way that those who are here in anticipation of the Christmas Meeting may absorb as much as possible of what the Anthroposophical Movement can convey to the hearts of men. Those who will be here until Christmas will therefore be able to bring their thoughts to bear upon what can still be given. I shall not deal with matters concerning the international Anthroposophical Society—that will be done at the meeting to be held shortly—but I shall try to formulate our studies in a way that will help to prepare the right mood of soul for the forthcoming Christmas Gathering. I shall therefore speak from a different point of view of a subject with which I have been dealing in recent weeks and I will begin by saying something about man’s life of soul, leading on from there to a survey of cosmic secrets. Let us start from something quite straightforward and consider what happens in man’s life of soul if he practises self-mindfulness beyond the point I actually had in mind when I was writing the articles in the Goetheanum Weekly. These four articles can serve as an introduction to what we are now to study. If we practise self-mindfulness thoroughly and comprehensively we shall realise how the life of soul can be enhanced and intensified. What happens in the first place is that we let the external world work upon us—as we have done from childhood onwards—and then we have thoughts which are the product of our inner world. Indeed, what makes us human beings in the real sense is that we allow the effects produced in us by the external world to live on further in our thoughts and are able to experience ourselves inwardly in these thoughts. We create a world of mental pictures which in a certain way reflects the impressions made upon us from outside. It is probably not very helpful to our inner life to ponder a great deal upon how the external world is reflected in our soul. By doing that we simply acquire a shadowy picture of the world of ideas within us. A better form of self-mindfulness is to concentrate on the activity itself, endeavouring to experience ourselves in tire actual element of thought without regard to the external world, pursuing in thought what came to us as impressions of the external world. It will depend on a man’s particular nature whether he is then led more in the direction of abstract thoughts; he may or may not devise philosophical world-systems or make schedules of everything in existence. Another man who has reflected about things that have made an impression upon him and then goes on spinning thoughts, may be following certain fantasies. We will not go further into how this inner thinking without any external impressions takes its course according to a man’s temperament, character or other traits. We will rather make ourselves conscious of the fact that it is important, as far as our senses are concerned, to withdraw from the external world and live in our thoughts and mental pictures, developing them to further stages, often perhaps merely as possibilities. Some people, of course, consider this unnecessary. Even in difficult times like the present you will often find people who are occupied with their business the whole day in order to provide all kinds of things required by the world, afterwards getting together in little groups to play cards, dominoes or similar games, in order—as is frequently said—to ‘pass the time away’. But it will not often happen that people come together in groups in order to exchange thoughts, for example, about what might have happened in connection with the day’s business if things had gone differently in one way or another. They would not find that as entertaining as playing cards, but they would at least have been carrying their thoughts to further stages. And if on such an occasion they also retained a healthy feeling for reality there is no reason why such thinking should end in fantasy. This living in thoughts leads finally to what you will experience if you read The Philosophy of Freedom properly. If you read that book as it is meant to be read you will understand what it means to live in thoughts. The Philosophy of Freedom is based upon experience of reality; but at the same time it was entirely the product of thinking. Hence you will find a fundamental tone in the book. I conceived it in the 1880’s and wrote it in the early 1890’s; but from men who at that time ought at least to have taken notice of the book, I was faced with misunderstanding everywhere. There is a particular reason for this: even those who are called thinkers today are unable to experience their thinking otherwise than as a picture of the outer physical world. And then they say: perhaps something belonging to a superphysical world might arise in a man’s thinking but then this thinking which is acknowledged to be within him would have to be able to experience something supersensible outside him, in the sense that a table or chair are outside him. This was approximately Eduard von Hartmann’s conception of the function of thinking. Then he comes across The Philosophy of Freedom. In that book the argument is that to experience thinking in the real sense means that a man can come to no other realisation than this: If you live in thinking in the real sense, you are living in the Cosmos even if, to begin with, somewhat diffusely. This connection in the most intimate experience of thinking with the secrets of the world-process is the root-nerve of The Philosophy of Freedom. Hence the statement is made in the book that in thinking we grasp one corner of the whole world-mystery.1 This may be putting it simply, but what is meant is that when a man experiences thinking in the real sense he no longer feels outside the mystery of world-existence but within it; he no longer feels outside the Divine but within the Divine. If he comprehends the reality of thinking within himself, he comprehends the Divine within himself. This was the point that people could not grasp. For if a man really comprehends it, if he has made efforts to achieve this kind of thinking, he finds himself no longer within the world that was previously his, but he is now within the etheric world. It is a world of which he knows that it is not conditioned by any part of the physical Earth but by the whole cosmic sphere. He is within the etheric Cosmos, and he can no longer have any doubts about the law and order of this cosmic sphere if he has grasped thinking as it is understood in The Philosophy of Freedom. Etheric experience, as it may be called, has now been achieved and a notable step forward in life has been taken. Let me characterise this step as follows.—Our thinking in ordinary consciousness is concerned with tables, chairs, human beings, of course, and so forth; we may think of other things too in the outside world. With our thinking we comprehend these things from the centre of our being. Everyone is aware that with his thinking he wants to comprehend the things of the world. But once you achieve the experience of thinking I described just now, you are not grasping the world; nor are you riveted in your ego. Something quite different happens. You get the feeling—and quite rightly—that with your thinking which is not localised in any particular place, you grasp everything inwardly. You feel you are making contact with the inner man. Just as in ordinary thinking you stretch your spiritual ‘feelers’ outwards, so with this thinking which experiences itself in itself, you are continually stretching inwards, into your own being. You become object, object to yourself.  It is a very significant experience to realise that whereas hitherto it was always the world that you grasped, now, having this experience of thinking it is your own self you have to grasp. In the course of this firm grasp of your own self you come to realise that you have broken through your skin. You grasp yourself inwardly and in the same way you begin to grasp the whole world-ether from within, not of course in all its details but you know with certainty that this ether spreads over the whole cosmic sphere with which you are living together with stars, sun, moon, and so forth. There is a second way in which a man can develop his life of soul. Instead of being wholly occupied with thoughts that are prompted from outside, he gives himself up to his memories. If he does this and makes the process an inner reality he will again have a quite definite experience. The experience of thinking I have just described to you does actually lead a man to his own self; he grasps his own self and this process gives him a certain satisfaction. But when he passes on to the experiencing of memories he will find, if he is inwardly active in the real sense, that the most striking feeling is not that of approaching his own self. That is what happens in the experience of thinking; and for that reason man will find freedom in the course of this thinking, a freedom which depends entirely upon the personal element in him. That is why a ‘philosophy of freedom’ must take its start from the experience of thinking, for it is through this experience that a man finds his own self, finds his bearings as a free personality. This does not happen in the case of the memory experience. If a man proceeds with real earnestness, and is able to immerse himself entirely in the experience, he will have the feeling of being liberated from himself, of getting away from himself. That is why memories which enable the present to be forgotten are the most satisfying—I do not say they are always the best, but in many cases they are the most satisfying. You can certainly get an idea of the value of memory if your memories can carry you out into the world, no matter how utterly dissatisfied you may be with the present and wish you could get right away from it. If you can waken memories which, as you give yourselves up to them, give you an enhanced feeling of life, this will be a preparation for what memory can ultimately become. Memory can become more real if you recall with the greatest possible intensity something you actually experienced years or even decades ago. Suppose, for instance, you turn to a collection of old papers and take out letters you wrote on some particular occasion. You put these letters in front of you and let them carry you back into the past. Or it would be preferable not to take letters which you wrote yourself or which others wrote to you, because the subjective element would be too strong there. Try, rather, to get hold of your old schoolbooks, and peep into them as you did when you first went to school. In this way you can actually call back the past into your life. The effect is remarkable. If you do what I suggest you will entirely transform your present state of mind. You must exercise a little ingenuity here although almost anything will serve. For instance, a lady might come across a dress she has not worn for twenty years; she puts it on and is transported back into the conditions prevailing at that time. You must choose something that will bring the past with the greatest possible reality into the present. In this way you can separate yourself radically from your present experience. With ordinary-level consciousness we are too close to ourselves in our actual experience to be able to make it into anything valuable. We must be able to stand at a distance from ourselves. Now a man is farther away from himself when he is asleep than when he is awake, for during sleep his astral body and ego are outside his physical and etheric bodies. You will be able to approach this astral body, which as I have said, is outside the physical body during sleep, if you summon up some past experience as vividly as possible into the present. You will probably not believe what I am telling you because you will be reluctant to attribute such significance to something as comparatively trivial as the awakening of past experiences by looking at an old dress. But just put it to the test, and if you succeed in conjuring up some past experience into the present so vividly that you are wholly engrossed in it and can be entirely oblivious of the present, you will find that you are drawing near to your astral body as it is in sleep. But you will be mistaken if you think that all you have to do is to look right or left, and that you will see a shadowy form that is your astral body; that is not how things work. You must pay attention to what actually happens, which may for instance be that after such experiences you see the dawn and the sunrise very differently from hitherto. On this path you will gradually begin to feel the warmth of the dawn as something prophetic, having a kind of natural prophetic power. You will begin to feel the dawn as something spiritually forceful and that there is some connection between that power and an inner sense within yourself; and although at first you may regard it as an illusion, you will eventually feel that there is some relationship between the dawn and your own being. Through the experience I have described you will gradually come to feel, as you look at the dawn: this dawn does not leave me alone. There is an inner connection between my own being and the dawn. The dawn is a quality of my own soul. At this moment I am myself the dawn—If you have been able to unite yourself with the dawn in such a way that you experience its coloured radiance out of which the sun rises, in your very heart as a living feeling—then you will also feel that you are actually travelling across the heavens with the sun, that as I put it just now, the sun will not leave you alone, that it is not a case of you being here and the sun there, but that in a sense your existence stretches right up to that of the sun—in fact that you journey through the day in company with the fight. If you develop this feeling, not out of thinking but out of memory in the way I described, if you can develop these experiences out of the power of memory, then you will find that things which you have perceived with your physical senses begin to look different, enabling spirit-and-soul to become manifest; when you have acquired the feeling of travelling with the sun, all the flowers in the field will look different to you. The flowers do not merely display the red or yellow colours on their surface; they begin to speak spiritually to your soul. The flower becomes transparent; a spiritual element in the flower begins to stir and the blossoming becomes a sort of speaking. In this way you are actually uniting your soul with external Nature. In this way you get the impression that there is something behind this Nature, that the light with which you are connected is borne by spiritual Beings. And in those spiritual Beings you gradually recognise the characteristics described by Anthroposophy.  Let us look at the two stages of feelings which I have just been describing. The first feeling which can be brought by thinking inwardly experienced, is one of expansion. The feeling of being in a confined space ceases altogether. Your experience widens and you have a definite feeling that within your inner being there is a kernel which extends into the Cosmos and is of the same substance as the Cosmos. You feel at one with the etheric substance of the Cosmos. But when you are standing on the Earth you feel that your feet and legs are drawn down by the Earth’s force of gravity; you feel that your whole being is bound firmly to the Earth. At the moment when you have the experience of thinking you no longer feel bound to the Earth; you feel dependent upon the wide expanse of the cosmic sphere. You feel that everything comes inwards, not from below, as it were from the centre of the Earth upwards but from the cosmic expanse, the Universe. And you feel that to understand Man, this sense that something is streaming in from the cosmic expanse must be present. This applies even to a true understanding of the human form. If I want to give expression to the human form in sculpture or in painting, I must picture to myself that only the lower part of the head proceeds from the inner bodily and spatial nature of man. I shall not be able to get the right spirit into the work unless I am able to convey the impression that the upper part of the head has been brought from outside. The lower part of the head must seem to have come from within outwards, but the upper from outside inwards. If you looked with artistic understanding at the paintings in the small cupola of the now destroyed Goetheanum, you will have seen that this principle was everywhere observed: the lower part of the face was always represented as having grown from within the human being and the upper part of the head as something given him from the Cosmos. This was particularly evident in times when these things were known. You will never understand the form of the head in a genuine Greek sculpture unless you associate this feeling with it, for it was out of similar feelings that the Greeks created their works of art. And so in the Thinking experience you will feel yourself united with the surrounding Universe. Now it might be imagined that this process would simply continue further outwards as you pass from the Thinking experience to the Memory experience. But it is not so. If you succeed in developing within yourself the Thinking experience you will finally have the impression of the Third Hierarchy: Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai. Just as you can picture man’s bodily experience here on Earth in the working of gravity or in the process of the digestion of foodstuffs, you can picture the conditions under which the Beings of the Third Hierarchy live if, through this Thinking experience, instead of trudging around the confines of Earth you feel yourself borne by forces coming to you from the ultimate boundary of the Cosmos. Thinking Experience: Third Hierarchy Now if you pass from the Thinking experience to the Memory experience it is not a matter of being able to reach this ultimate boundary of the cosmic spheres. You can, it is true, reach this boundary if you know the reality of the Thinking experience. But the Memory experience leads to a different result. Suppose, for example, you have here some object—a crystal or a flower or an animal. What happens when you pass from the Thinking experience to all that the Memory experience can offer, is that you can see right into the object. The gaze which had extended to the ultimate boundary of the cosmic expanse, supplemented by the Memory experience, penetrates into the essence of things. You do not in that case press on into indefinite abstractions but this extended gaze perceives the spiritual quality in all things. For instance, it perceives the spiritual Beings who are active in the light, or the spiritual Beings who are active in the darkness. So we can say: the Memory experience leads us to the Second Hierarchy. Memory Experience: Second Hierarchy Now there is something in man’s life of soul which is not subject to the limitations of memory. Let us be clear about what it is. Memory gives our soul its special colouring. Suppose we come across a man who criticises everything adversely, who diffuses his own bitterness over everything we talk about, who whenever we tell him about something really beautiful, at once speaks of something unpleasant. In such a case we may know with certainty that this characteristic is connected with his memory. Memory gives the soul its colouring. But there is still something else. We may meet a man who faces us with an ironic sneer particularly when we say something to him, or he wrinkles his forehead or puts on a tragic expression. Or he may give us a friendly look so that we are cheered not only by what he says but by his look. When something important is said during a lecture it is interesting to give a momentary glance at the faces of the audience and see the ironic expressions on some lips, the foreheads with or without wrinkles, the blank or lively expressions on the faces. What is being expressed there is not merely memory that has persisted in the soul and gives the soul its colouring but something that has gone over from memory into a man’s physiognomy, into his different gestures, into his whole bearing. If a man takes in nothing, if his countenance betrays the fact that all the sufferings, sorrow and joy in his life have left him unimpressed, that too is characteristic. A face that has remained smooth and unlined, or one that is deeply furrowed by the tragedy or seriousness of life is as characteristic as one that expresses much happiness. In such cases, what otherwise remains part of the life of soul-and-spirit as the outcome of the power of memory has passed over into actual physical form. The effect is so strong that it is expressed outwardly in later life in a man’s gestures and physiognomy independently of his temperament which remains inward. For in old age we have not always the same temperament as we had in childhood. Our temperament in old age is often a result of what we have undergone in life and has become memory in the inner life of soul. What enters into a man inwardly in this way, may again—though this is more difficult—become reality. It is comparatively easy to bring before the eyes of our soul something we experienced in childhood or perhaps many years ago, and so make the memory of it a fact. It is more difficult to transpose oneself into the temperament we had in childhood or in our earlier years. But the practice of such an exercise can bring results of immense significance. And even more is achieved if we can deepen this experience inwardly than if it is merely an external act. Something can certainly be achieved in a man if, say at the age of forty or fifty—naturally within the obvious limits in such circumstances—he plays the games he played in childhood, if he jumps as he did then, or even if he tries to make the same kind of face he made when, as an eight-year-old, his aunt gave him a sweet! If he can transpose himself back into the actual gesture or posture of that moment, again he will find that something is brought into his life whereby he is led to the conviction that the outer world is the inner world and the inner world is the outer world. We can then penetrate with our whole being into a flower, for instance, and then, in addition to the Thinking experience and the Memory experience we have what I will call, in the truest sense, a Gesture experience. In this way we acquire an idea of how the spiritual is directly at work within the physical. You cannot, with full consciousness, inwardly apprehend the gesture you made, perhaps twenty years ago in response to some outer provocation, without realising the union of the physical and the spiritual in all things. But then you will have arrived at the experience of the First Hierarchy. Gesture Experience: First Hierarchy The Memory experience enables us to identify ourselves with the dawn when we confront it, and to feel and inwardly experience its glowing warmth. But with the Gesture experience, what confronts us in the dawn will unite with everything that can be experienced as colour or tone in the objective world. When we simply look at the objects around us that are illumined by the sun, we see them as they can reveal themselves to the light. But the dawn changes when we pass gradually from the Memory experience to the Gesture experience. The colour experience detaches itself entirely from materiality in any form; it becomes a living reality of soul-and-spirit, abandons the space in which the outer, physical dawn appears to us and the dawn begins to speak to us of the mystery of the connection of the Sun with the Earth. We experience how the Beings of the First Hierarchy work. If we still direct our gaze to the dawn and it still appears almost as it did during the Memory experience, we learn to recognise the Thrones. Then the dawn dissolves away; the colour becomes living being, becomes soul, becomes spirit, speaks to us of the relation of the Sun to the Earth as it was in the ancient Sun period, speaks to us in such a way that we experience the Cherubim. Finally, if with the enthusiasm and reverence aroused in us by this twofold revelation of the dawn, by the revelation of Thrones and Cherubim, we live onwards, there penetrates into us from the dawn, transformed now into living being, experience of the nature of the Seraphim.
In all that I have been describing to you today, my aim has been to indicate how, by simply passing in the life of soul from Thinking to Gesture man can develop feelings in himself—to begin with no more than feelings—of the spiritual foundations of the Cosmos right up to the sphere of the Seraphim.
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| 232. Mystery Knowledge & Mystery Centres: Penetration Into The Inner Core Of Nature Through Thinking And Will
25 Nov 1923, Dornach Translated by E. H. Goddard, Dorothy S. Osmond Rudolf Steiner |
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| You may be deeply impressed if you turn again to the Mystery Plays and now, perhaps with greater understanding than before, read the passages about the appearance of the Spirit of Johannes’ Youth.1 It is an indubitable fact that a man’s own inner being can become vividly perceptible to him if with an active effort of will he relives his younger days. |
| In my own case it was vitally important for me a year or two ago, when I needed to strengthen my powers of spiritual understanding, to re-live a situation of my youth. I was eleven years old at the time and had just been given a new school-book. |
| In spring it gets longer, in autumn, shorter; it is longest in summer, shortest in winter. During the course of the year the day undergoes metamorphosis. This is caused by a stream running from West to East, countering the East-West stream (diagram). |
| 232. Mystery Knowledge & Mystery Centres: Penetration Into The Inner Core Of Nature Through Thinking And Will
25 Nov 1923, Dornach Translated by E. H. Goddard, Dorothy S. Osmond Rudolf Steiner |
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Yesterday I was speaking to you of how man is subject to what natural science generally calls heredity, and also of how he is subject to the influences of the external world and adaptation to it. I also said that everything relating to heredity is connected with the Ahrimanic forces, and adaptation, in the widest sense, with the Luciferic forces. But I also told you how in the realm of the spiritual Beings belonging to the Cosmos, provision has been made to enable the Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces to play a lawful part in human life. Something shall now be added to what has been said, recalling the content of the lecture given the day before yesterday. We turned our minds then to how memory and everything akin to it give man his configuration as a being of soul. To a far greater extent than we imagine our configuration as beings of soul originates from our memories. Our soul has been shaped by the process whereby our experiences have become memories; we are the product of our life of memories to a greater extent than we think. Anyone who is capable of exercising even enough self-observation to enable him to penetrate into the store of memories, will realise how particularly important a part is played throughout earthly life by the impressions of childhood. The kind of life we spent in childhood—which really does not loom large in our consciousness—the period during which we learned to speak or walk, or got our first, inherited, teeth, the impressions made on us during these periods of development—all these play an important part in the fife of soul throughout our existence on Earth. All freely arising thoughts in which impressions from outside have played no part are connected with memories and are usually accompanied by faint nuances of joy or sadness—all this constitutes our memory and is carried with it by the astral body when we pass into the state of sleep. If with Imaginative vision we are able to observe man as a being of soul-and-spirit during sleep, the following picture presents itself. During sleep the etheric body and the physical body are still enclosed within the skin and the astral body is outside—I will speak of the Ego later on. This astral body is seen virtually to consist of the man’s memories. But these memories in the astral body now outside the physical body are seen to be swirling in and through one another in a kind of eddy. Experiences that were widely separated in time and space are now in juxtaposition; parts of the content of certain experiences are eliminated, so that the whole life of memory during sleep is transformed. Hence when a person dreams it is this transformed life of memory that is presented to his consciousness. And in the character and make-up of the dream he can be inwardly aware of the swirling eddy of memories which Imaginative clairvoyance can perceive from outside. But there is another aspect as well. These memories, which from the time of going to sleep until waking form the main content of man’s astral life, unite during sleep with the forces behind the phenomena of Nature. It may therefore be said that the astral element in the memories enters into a connection with the forces which lie behind, or rather lie within, the minerals, within the plants, behind the clouds, and so on. Those who can recognise this to be truth will be horrified to hear it said that material atoms are behind the phenomena of Nature. The fact is that our memories during sleep do not unite with material atoms but with the spiritual forces behind the phenomena of Nature. This is where our memories reside during sleep. We can therefore say with truth that during sleep our soul dips down with its memories into the inner being of Nature, and we say nothing untrue or unreal when we assert; When I go to sleep I give over my memories to the Powers that are spiritually active in the crystal, in the plants, in all the phenomena of Nature. During a walk you may see by the wayside blue or yellow flowers, green grass, gleaming ears of corn, and say to them: When I pass by you during the day I see you only from outside. But while I sleep, I shall sink my memories into your own spiritual core of being. While I sleep you receive and harbour the memories into which I have transformed the experiences I had in life.—There is perhaps no more beautiful feeling for Nature than to have to a rose-tree not merely an external relation but to realise that you love it because a rose-tree harbours the first memories of childhood. Space plays no part at all. However far away the rose-tree may be, during sleep we find the way to it. The reason why people love roses—only they do not know it—is that roses receive and harbour the very first memories of childhood. When we were children, the love shown us by other human beings made us happy. We may have forgotten all about it, but it remains within our soul, and during our sleep at night the rose-tree receives into and harbours within itself the memory we have ourselves forgotten. We are more closely united than we realise with the world of outer Nature, that is to say with the spirit reigning there. Memory of our earliest childhood is particularly remarkable in connection with sleep because up to the time of the change of teeth, up to about the seventh year, it is only the element of soul that is received and harboured during sleep. It is a fact in our life as human beings that the inner, spiritual core of Nature harbours the element of soul belonging to our childhood. There is, of course, another aspect: the element of soul we developed in childhood when, for example, we may have been cruel, that too remains in us; the thistles harbour it! All this is said by way of analogy but it points to a significant reality. The following will make it clear what it is that is not taken from childhood into the innermost core of Nature. In the first seven years of life the child’s whole bodily make-up is inherited, including, therefore, the first teeth; all the material substance we have within us during this period is, in essence, inherited. But after approximately seven years all the material substance has been thrust out, has fallen away and is renewed. The human being himself remains as a spirit-form. His material components are thrown out and after seven or eight years everything that was previously there, has gone. And so when we have reached the age of nine our whole bodily make-up has been renewed. We then shape it in accordance with external impressions. It is very important indeed that in the early epochs of life the child should be in a position to build his new body—not the inherited body, but the one developed from within himself—in accordance with good impressions from the environment and by a healthy process of adaptation. Whereas the body the child has when he comes into the world depends upon whether the forces of heredity are good or not so good, the later body he bears is very dependent indeed upon the impressions he receives from his environment. Invariably, however, after seven years the body is renewed. Now it is the ‘I’, the Ego, that is responsible for this. Although it is true the Ego is not yet born in the seven-yearold child as far as the external world is concerned—for it is born at a later age—nevertheless it is at work, since it is naturally connected with the body and is responsible for its formation. It is the Ego that is responsible for the development of what then appears as physiognomy and gesture, as the outer, material manifestation of man’s soul-and-spirit. It is a fact that someone who takes an active share in affairs of the world, who has wide interests and assimilates their substance and content will reveal this in his gestures and his very facial expression. In the later life of such a man, every wrinkle on his face will be indicative of his inner activity and it will be possible to read a great deal here, because the Ego comes to expression in a man’s gestures and physiognomy. The countenance of someone whose attitude to the world is one of boredom and lack of interest will retain the same facial expression all through life. There have been no intimate experiences which might have imprinted themselves in his physiognomy and gestures. In many a countenance you can read a whole biography; in another there is not much more to read than that the individual was once a child—and that is of little account. It is extremely significant that through the change of bodily substance after every seven or eight years, a man shapes his own outer appearance. And the result of this work on his outward appearance as revealed in physiognomy and gesture, is again something that is carried, while he sleeps, into the innermost being of Nature. If, then, you look at a man with Imaginative clairvoyance, and observe the Ego as it appears while he is asleep, you will find that the Ego is fully expressed by physiognomy and gesture. Hence those human beings who are able to convey a great deal of their inner nature to their facial expression or to their gestures, have gleaming, radiant Egos. This activity in the shaping of gestures and physiognomy again unites with certain forces in Nature. If we had many opportunities in life of showing friendliness and kindness, Nature is inclined, as soon as this kindliness has been expressed in the countenance, to receive it into her own essential being. Nature takes our memories into her forces, our gestures into her very being. Man is so intimately connected with external Nature that there is immense significance for the latter in the memories he experiences in his soul and also in the way in which he expresses his inner life of soul in physiognomy and gesture. As you know, I have often quoted words of Goethe which were really a criticism of a saying by Haller: ‘Into the inner being of Nature no created Spirit can enter. Happy he to whom she reveals only her outer shell.’ Goethe retorted: ‘O you Philistine! We are everywhere within her being: nothing is within, nothing without; what is within is without, what is without is within. Ask yourself first of all whether you are kernel or husk.’ Goethe said he had heard the remark in the sixties and had secretly cursed it. He felt—naturally he could not then know anything of Spiritual Science—that if a man whom he could only regard as a philistine, says: ‘Into the inner being of Nature no created Spirit can enter,’ he knows nothing of the fact that man, simply because he is a being of memories, a being of physiognomy and gestures, continually penetrates into the inmost essence of Nature. We are not creatures who stand at the door of Nature and knock in vain. Through our own core of being we are connected by intimate ties with the inmost essence of Nature. But because the child until his seventh year has a body that is wholly inherited, nothing of his Ego, nothing of his physiognomy and gestures, pass over into Nature. It is only at the time of the change of teeth that we begin to approach these realities. Hence it is only then—after the change of teeth— that we are mature enough gradually to begin to reflect about any phenomenon of Nature. Until that time it is only arbitrary thoughts that arise in a child, thoughts which really have not very much to do with Nature, and for that very reason are so full of charm. The best way to make contact with a child is to be poetical when we are talking to him, calling the stars the eyes of heaven and so on, when the things of which we speak are as remote as possible from the outer physical reality. It is only after the change of teeth that the child gradually ‘grows into’ Nature in such a way that his thoughts can gradually comprehend thoughts of Nature. Fundamentally speaking, the child’s life from the seventh to the fourteenth year is a period during which he ‘grows into Nature’. During this period, in addition to his memories he also carries into the realm of Nature his gestures and physiognomy. And this then continues through the whole of life. It is not until the change of teeth that we have any relationship with the inner core of Nature as single human individuals. For this reason the beings I have called Elementals— Gnomes and Undines—listen so eagerly when a man narrates something about childhood as it was before the age of seven. It is only at the time of the change of teeth that a man is really born as far as these elemental beings are concerned. This is an extremely interesting fact. Before that time man is to the Gnomes and Undines a being ‘on the other side’; it is for them something of an enigma that man should appear at this age almost as a completed being. It would be immensely stimulating for pedagogical imagination if, through imbibing spiritual knowledge, an individual could really participate in a dialogue with the Nature Spirits, if he could transport himself into the soul of the Nature Spirits in order to ascertain their views about what he can tell them about children. In this way the most beautiful fairy-tale imagination takes shape. And if in olden times fairy-tales were so wonderfully vivid and rich in content it was because the narrators could actually converse with Gnomes and Undines and not merely hear something from them. These Nature Spirits are sometimes very egoistic. They become silent if they are not told things about which they are curious. Their favourite stories are those which tell about the doings of babies. Then one learns from them many things that can create the atmosphere of a fairy story. What seems utterly fantastic to people today can be very important for the practical application of spiritual life. It is an actual fact that because of the circumstances of which I have told you, these dialogues with the Nature Spirits may be extremely instructive for both sides. On the other hand, what I have said may give rise to a certain anxiety, for during sleep man is continually creating pictures of his inmost being. Behind the phenomena of Nature, behind the flowers of the field, and extending into the etheric world, there are reproductions of our memories, good and futile alike. The Earth teems with what is contained in human souls. Human life is intimately connected with these things. First of all, then, we encounter Nature Spirits as beings into whom we can penetrate through our gestures. But we also find the world of the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai. We penetrate into those Beings too. Our memories carry us into the activities of the world of the Angeloi; our physiognomy and gestures—for which we ourselves are responsible—carry us into the Beings themselves of that world. This following sketch will give some indication of what happens when, during sleep, we penetrate into Nature. Let this (lowest) curve represent our skin; as we move outwards in the radial direction, we pass from the regions of the Angeloi into those of the Archangeloi and Archai. We are now in the sphere of the Third Hierarchy. And when, during sleep, we sink down with our memories and gestures into the flowing sea of Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai, weaving and intertwining, then from one side there comes another stream of spiritual Beings. This is the Second Hierarchy: Exousiai, Kyriotetes and Dynamis. If we want to find something in the physical world to which this can be related, we can say that the daily course of the Sun from East to West expresses how the Second Hierarchy crosses the realm of the Third Hierarchy. The Third Hierarchy, the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai, glide upwards and downwards, handing to each other the ‘golden vessels’. According to this picture we think of the Second Hierarchy following the path taken by the Sun from East to West—not the apparent but the actual daily path of the Sun, for the Copernican theory does not hold good here. Provided a man has the necessary vision, he sees how during sleep he passes into the world of the Third Hierarchy. But this world of the Third Hierarchy is permeated ceaselessly by the Second Hierarchy. The Second Hierarchy also makes its influence felt in our life of soul.  In the lecture the day before yesterday I pointed out to you the significance of vividly re-living experiences of youth. You may be deeply impressed if you turn again to the Mystery Plays and now, perhaps with greater understanding than before, read the passages about the appearance of the Spirit of Johannes’ Youth.1 It is an indubitable fact that a man’s own inner being can become vividly perceptible to him if with an active effort of will he relives his younger days. I told you that you may, for instance, pick up old school textbooks and steep yourself in what you either learnt or failed to learn from them. It does not matter whether you learnt anything or not; what matters is that you should re-live what happened at the time. In my own case it was vitally important for me a year or two ago, when I needed to strengthen my powers of spiritual understanding, to re-live a situation of my youth. I was eleven years old at the time and had just been given a new school-book. The first thing that happened was that through carelessness, the ink pot upset and blotted two pages of the book so badly that they were illegible. A few years ago I relived the event many times—the textbook with the ruined pages and what I had to suffer in consequence. For the book had to be replaced by a family with very little money. One suffered dreadfully on account of this book with its enormous inkblot! As I said, it is not a matter of having behaved well in circumstances recalled in later years but of experiencing them with real intensity. If you recall such happenings as vividly as you possibly can, you will experience something else as well. More clearly than in a dream, in actual perception, you will experience a situation while you rest in bed, shut off from the day’s impressions. If during the day you have vividly recalled a scene once inwardly experienced, when everything around you is dark and you are all by yourself at night you will see, as though displayed in space, a scene in which you once participated. Suppose you have recalled a scene at which you were once present, let us say at eleven o’clock. Afterwards you went somewhere else and found yourself sitting among a number of people. You have now summoned up something you experienced inwardly. What was around you outwardly at that time was entirely a spatial spectacle. If attention is paid to circumstances such as this, very significant discoveries can be made. Let us suppose that as a youngster of seventeen, you were accustomed to have your midday meal at a Pension where the guests were continually changing. Now you recall some such scene which you had inwardly experienced; you recall it vividly. Then, in the night, you have this experience: you are sitting at a table with other people whom you saw only seldom because the guests in a Pension were perpetually changing. The face of one of these people makes you realise: that is something I actually lived through all those years ago. The external spatial element is added to the inner soul-experience when you activate memories in this way. This means that you are actually living in the stream which flows from East to West (see diagram). More and more the feeling grows in you that you are not wholly absorbed by the spiritual world into which you pass in sleep, but that in this spiritual world something is happening that is reflected outwardly in the moment when again you see the people sitting around the table in the Pension. You had forgotten about the episode long ago but it is still there. You see it as things can often be seen inscribed in the Akasha Chronicle. The moment you have this before you, you have made contact with the stream that flows from East to West: the stream of the Second Hierarchy. In this stream of the Second Hierarchy there is contained something that is reflected outwardly as the day. Now the day varies in length throughout the year. In spring it gets longer, in autumn, shorter; it is longest in summer, shortest in winter. During the course of the year the day undergoes metamorphosis. This is caused by a stream running from West to East, countering the East-West stream (diagram). It is the stream of the First Hierarchy, of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. Hence if you follow how the day changes in the course of the year, if you pass from the day to the year, you come into contact with the stream which flows in the opposite direction and meets you in sleep. It is really the case that in sleep we grow into the spiritual world, radially from West to East and from East to West. And when we recall some experience vividly the picture before our souls must be of Winter in the world of space. And it is the same when we become conscious of our will. It is the effect of this that passes into the gestures and physiognomy. What I am now going to say will have a certain significance for Eurythmists, although naturally it is not the purpose of Eurythmy to vindicate what I am saying. It is a fact that when a man becomes increasingly able to shape his external form too from within himself, so that his Ego is expressed with greater and greater definition in his physiognomy and gestures, he does not receive an impression only of the day. An impression of the day results from passing over from a vivid, inner experience of memory to a perception of things in the external world of space. To take the example already given. Suppose you re-experience what happened to you at the age of seventeen, and see the human beings who sat at table with you in the Pension, in pictures, as in the Akasha Chronicle—that is the Day-experience. But the Year can also be experienced. This is possible if we pay attention to the working of the will, if we notice that it is comparatively easy to assert the will when one is warm, whereas it is difficult to let the will stream through the body when one is very cold. Those who can inwardly experience a connection between the will and being warm or cold, will gradually be able, when this faculty develops, to speak of a Winter Will and a Summer Will in themselves. We find that the best way to define this will is to relate it to the seasons. Let us observe, for example, the kind of will which seems to carry our thoughts out into the Cosmos and makes it easy to manipulate the body so that in its whole bearing and in its gestures the thoughts seem to be borne out into the Universe; they seem to glide away through the finger-tips. We feel that it is easy to activate the will. We may be standing in front of a tree and something at the top of it gladdens our eye. If our will is warm within us, our thoughts are carried to the treetop—indeed sometimes to the very stars of heaven when in summer nights we feel endowed with this warmth of will. On the other hand, if the will is inwardly cold, it is as if all thoughts were being carried only in our head and could not make their way into our arms or legs. Everything goes to the head. The head endures the coldness of the will, and if the cold is not so overwhelming as to give rise to a feeling of iciness, the head will become warm as a result of its own inner reaction, and then it unfolds thoughts. Hence we can say that Summer Will leads us out into the wide expanse of the Cosmos. Summer Will, Warm Will, carries our thoughts here, there and everywhere. Winter Will carries thoughts into our head. The will can indeed be differentiated in this way. And then we shall feel that the will which carried us out into the Cosmos is related to the course of the Summer and the Will which carries thoughts into the head, to the Winter. Through the will we experience the Year. It is possible to experience as a reality what I am now going to write on the blackboard for you. Your experience of Winter through the medium of the will can be expressed in these words:
These words have no merely abstract meaning. If you can feel your own will united with Nature you will also feel, when Winter comes, as though your own experiences, handed over to Nature, were being brought to you from the expanse of Space. You can be aware of your own experiences which had already been taken into Nature. This is the feeling of Winter Will. But you can also feel the Summer Will which bears your thoughts out into the Cosmos:
which means that the thoughts which are at first experienced in the head, pass over into and fill the whole body, but then stream forth from it:
These words express the nature of the Summer Will, the will in us which is related to Summer. And when we feel that we have called up from within the active memory of something experienced long ago, then the day with its following night bears it back to us again, supplemented by the spatial picture. This is connected with the stream flowing from East to West. Thus we may say: Winter Will changes in us into Summer Will, Summer Will into Winter Will. We find ourselves no longer related to the Day with its alternating light and darkness, but through our will we are related to the Year, and therewith to the stream flowing from West to East, the stream of the First Hierarchy: the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. As we proceed we shall see how man may be hindered or helped through heredity or adaptation to the external world through this association with the inmost life of Nature. What I have just been telling you refers to the fact that man, when hindered as little as possible by Ahrimanic and Luciferic forces, grows by means of ideation (Vorstellung) and will into the inmost life of Nature and is received by the Time-forces, the Day-forces and the Year-forces; Third Hierarchy, Second Hierarchy, First Hierarchy. But the Ahrimanic forces as they manifest themselves in heredity, and the Luciferic forces as they manifest themselves in adaptation, exert very deep influences. These great problems will occupy our minds in the next lecture.
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| 232. Mystery Knowledge & Mystery Centres: Mineral, Plant And Animal Creation
01 Dec 1923, Dornach Translated by E. H. Goddard, Dorothy S. Osmond Rudolf Steiner |
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| But the Earth has not always been as it is today; it has undergone tremendous changes, and if we go back to the epochs I have just mentioned—perhaps only to the Lemurian epoch or a little earlier—we shall find an Earth very different from that of today. |
| But I await my redemption, for in time to come my essential being will again pervade the Universe.—When we learn to understand the speech of the metals in this way, gold tells us of the Sun, lead of Saturn, copper of Venus. |
| This release has been in process of preparation for a long time already. It is only a matter of understanding it and of understanding how the Earth, together with man, will evolve on into the future. 1. pp. 115-37 in the 1962/63 edition. |
| 232. Mystery Knowledge & Mystery Centres: Mineral, Plant And Animal Creation
01 Dec 1923, Dornach Translated by E. H. Goddard, Dorothy S. Osmond Rudolf Steiner |
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On the basis of what I said yesterday it is possible to speak in greater detail of certain events in the course of the Earth’s evolution which have brought about its present form. As you will remember, I said that with clairvoyant consciousness a relationship can be established with the metallic substances in the Earth, with the essentially living quality inherent in the Earth by virtue of the veins of the different metals running through it. This relationship which can be established with the ‘metallity’ in the Earth enables one to look back over the Earth’s history. It is particularly interesting to look back at what happened in the process of evolution in the times preceding the Atlantean epoch, during the period I have rather loosely called the Lemurian age and also in the epoch immediately before that, when the Earth was recapitulating the Sun-stage. It is interesting to look back at these happenings for they give one an impression of the great mutability of everything connected with the Earth’s existence. We are accustomed today to regard the Earth as having always existed in the form in which it appears to us today. We inhabit a continent, we are surrounded by plants, by animals, by birds of the air. We are aware that we ourselves are living in a kind of atmospheric ocean surrounding the Earth, that we take oxygen out of this atmosphere into ourselves but that our relation to nitrogen has also a certain part to play. In general we simply think of the air around us as consisting of oxygen and nitrogen. Then we turn to look at the seas and oceans—further details need not be mentioned—and finally we have a picture of the planet we inhabit in the Universe. But the Earth has not always been as it is today; it has undergone tremendous changes, and if we go back to the epochs I have just mentioned—perhaps only to the Lemurian epoch or a little earlier—we shall find an Earth very different from that of today. Let us begin by thinking of our present atmosphere which we regard as being devoid of life. Even this atmosphere proves to be quite different from anything to be found in early periods of the Earth’s evolution. Still further in the past something resembling the solid core of the Earth as we know it today is in evidence, surrounded by an atmosphere. But in those days there was nothing at all like the air we breathe today. In this air oxygen and nitrogen play the most prominent part, carbon and hydrogen a subsidiary role, sulphur and phosphorus a role of less importance still. But it is really not possible to speak of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, sulphur and the rest in those early times, simply because what the chemists call by these names today did not exist. If a spirit-being of those times were to have met a modern chemist who spoke to him about carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and the rest, he would have retorted that nothing of the kind exists. We can justifiably speak of carbon, oxygen or nitrogen today but this could not have been done in those early times. Oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, as we speak of them today, became possible only when the Earth had reached a certain density and had developed forces such as it contains today. Neither oxygen, nitrogen, potassium, sodium nor any of the so-called fighter metals existed in those olden times. On the other hand, in the Earth’s environment that is filled today by our atmosphere there was something a little like albumen in consistency, a very fine fluid halfway between our present water and air. The Earth at that time was entirely surrounded by an albuminous atmosphere. The albumen we know in eggs today is very much coarser, but a comparison is possible. When at a later time the Earth became denser, what we today call carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and so forth, were differentiated out of this atmosphere around the Earth. But it would be erroneous to say that the then albuminous atmosphere was composed of these elements which were not specific ingredients of it. Nowadays we think that everything is composite; but that is nonsense. Certain substances of a higher kind are not always composed of what comes to light when they are analysed. Carbon does not appear as carbon nor oxygen as oxygen in the higher kind of substance of which I am now speaking. As I said, it can be described as extremely fluid albumen. All this substance which surrounded the Earth in that age was permeated with the inpouring cosmic ether which imbued it with life; in addition, it was differentiated in a curious way. For instance, in one fairly wide area a man would have suffocated had he been present there, in another he could have been greatly invigorated. Chemical elements in the modern sense did not then exist but certain formations remind one of the effects of the chemical elements we know. The whole sphere teemed with gleaming reflections of light, with sparkling, luminous rays. And it was warmed through and through by the cosmic ether. Such were the properties of the Earth-atmosphere—if I may use the modern expression—in that early epoch. The primeval mountains of which I spoke yesterday were the first formations to emerge from out of the Cosmos. The quartz to be found in those mountains, with its beautiful structure and relative transparency, was as it were poured into the Earth from the Cosmos. When a seer endowed with Imaginative vision observes those primeval rocks which, are the hardest substances on the Earth, they become the eyes through which he gazes out into the Universe—the same Universe which implanted these eyes into the Earth. It must be remembered that the quartz and silicious substances which permeated the whole atmosphere and were gradually deposited as primeval mountains were not as hard as they are today. They hardened into the state we know owing to the conditions that prevailed in later times. In the form in which they emerged from the Universe their consistency was scarcely more solid than wax. A quartz crystal to be seen on mountains today is so hard that, as I said yesterday, if you were to hit your head against it, your skull—not the quartz—would crack. But in the far distant past, because of the all-pervading life, this primeval stone was as pliable as wax when it emerged from tire Cosmos. These drops of wax were transparent and their consistency can be pictured only by thinking of them in connection with the sense of touch. If one could have touched them, they would have felt like wax. Silica came from the Cosmos into the Earth with a consistency similar to that of wax, and then it hardened. I described yesterday how pictures of the Cosmos arise in clairvoyant contemplation of this hard, rock-like substance. These pictures represent a more spiritual aspect of the phenomenon that was once concretely perceptible as a kind of plant-form in portions of this transparent, wax-like silica emerging from the Cosmos. Any observer of Nature will know that in the mineral kingdom today records of an earlier age are still to be found. When you look closely at certain stones you will see something like a plant-form within them. But in that distant past a quite usual phenomenon was that pictures were projected from the Cosmos into the albuminous atmosphere within the wax-like substance, where the pictures were not only seen but were reproduced, photographed, as it were, within this substance. And then there was a noteworthy development: the fluid albumen filled these pictures and they became still denser and harder; and finally they were no longer merely pictures. The silicious element fell away from them, dispersed into the atmosphere, and in the earliest Lemurian age there appeared gigantic, floating plant-formations which remind one of the algae of today. They were not rooted in the soil—indeed there was as yet no soil in which they could have taken root; they floated in the fluid albumen, drawing their own substance from it, permeating themselves with it. And not only so—they lit up, glimmered and then faded out; reappeared and again vanished. Their mutability was so great that this was possible. Try to picture this vividly. It is a panorama very different from anything to be seen in our environment today. If a modern man could project himself into that far-off time, set up a little observation-hut and look out on that ancient world, the spectacle before him would be something like this: he would see a gigantic plant-formation somewhat like present-day algae or palms. It would not appear to grow out of the Earth in springtime and die away in the autumn, but it would shoot up—in springtime, it is true, but the spring was then much shorter—and reach an enormous size; then it would vanish again in the fluid albuminous element. A clairvoyant observer would see the verdure appearing and then fading away. He would not speak of plants which cover the Earth but of plants appearing out of the Cosmos like airy clouds, condensing and then dissolving—it was a process of ‘greening’, taking place in the albuminous atmosphere. Of the period which would correspond more or less to our summer, an observer would say that it was the time when the environment of the Earth became ‘green’. But he would look upwards to the greening rather than downwards. In this way we can picture how the silicious element in the Earth’s atmosphere penetrates into the Earth and draws to itself the plant-force from the Cosmos, in other words, how the plant kingdom comes down to the Earth from the Cosmos. In the period of which I am speaking, however, we must say of the plant world: it is something that comes into being and passes away again in the atmosphere. And there is still something else to be said. If a human being of today, having established relationship with the metallic substance of the Earth, were to project himself into those past times, he would feel as if all this belonged to him, as if he himself had something to do with the process of greening and fading then taking place in the atmosphere. Now if you think back to your own childhood, this is simply a memory of a short span of time; on the other hand, if you recall a pain suffered in your childhood, this is something that really belongs to you. Similarly, in the cosmic memory of the past kindled through the metallity of the Earth, this process of greening and fading in the far past seems to be something that belongs to you. At that time man was already connected with the Earth which was surrounded by this watery-albuminous atmosphere; but he was then still wholly spiritual. It is correct to say, and it must also be realised, that these plant formations to be seen in the atmosphere at that time were something thrown off, ‘excreted’ by man. Man cast them out of his being which was still one with the whole Earth. Now this same conception applies in the case of something quite different. Everything that I have so far described is the result of the fact that the silica had already, at an even earlier time, been precipitated in the atmosphere as the wax-like substance of which I have spoken. But apart from this there was the albuminous atmosphere upon which the infinitely diverse forces of the Cosmos were working, those forces which modern science sees fit to ignore. Hence our modern knowledge is no real knowledge at all, because a great many happenings on Earth simply would not take place if they were not brought about by cosmic forces and influences. Since the modern scientists do not speak of or do not recognise these cosmic forces, there is no reality in what they say. They take no account of what is essentially quick with life. Even in the tiniest particle looked at through a microscope, cosmic forces, not only earthly forces, are working. And if these cosmic forces are not taken into account, there can be no reality. Thus cosmic forces were working in that remote time upon this fluid albumen in the Earth’s environment in such a way that it curdled or congealed. Albumen, congealed as a result of the working of cosmic forces, was everywhere to be seen in the sphere surrounding the Earth. But the forms assumed by this congealed albumen were not merely cloud-masses but living entities. These entities were in reality animals consisting of the congealed albumen which had solidified into a gelatinous state, into substance similar to gristle as it is today. Animal creatures of this kind were present in the fluid albuminous atmosphere. The forms of our present reptiles, lizards and the like, resemble, on a small scale, the forms of those earlier animals, but the latter were not so solid; they existed as gelatinous masses and were inherently mobile. At one moment their limbs were extended, at another withdrawn—comparable with what a snail does with its feelers today. Now while all this was taking place, something else was being deposited into the Earth from the Cosmos. Another substance was being added to the silica; it is what you find today as the chalky constituents of the Earth. If you go—not necessarily into the oldest mountains but only into the Jura mountains, you will find limestone rock. It came to the Earth at a later stage than the silica but it too came from the Cosmos. Thus chalk is to be found as a second substance in the Earth. This chalk deposit oozes constantly inwards and the actual effect is that in its core the Earth becomes denser and denser. Then in certain regions the silica combines with the chalk. But this chalk retains the cosmic forces and is altogether different from the crude substance which chemists consider it to be. Everywhere the chalk contains relatively latent formative forces. Now in an epoch rather later than the period I described to you, when the greening became manifest and then faded away, we find that within this albuminous atmosphere there is a constant rising and falling of the chalk; chalk mist is followed by chalk rain. There was a period in the history of the Earth when what we know today as water-vapour and falling rain was a chalky substance, rising and falling. Then comes a strange development: the chalk is particularly attracted to the gelatinous, gristly masses; it permeates them, impregnates them with itself. And thanks to the Earth-forces which, as I told you, it contains, it dissolves the whole gelatinous mass which has formed as congealed albumen. The chalk takes from the heavens what the heavens have formed in the albuminous substance and carries it nearer to the Earth. And out of this the animals with calcareous bones came into being. This is what develops in the later Lemurian epoch. We must therefore think of plants in their earliest form as pure gifts from heaven and the animals, and all animal-like formations, we must regard as something which after the heavens had presented the Earth with chalk, the Earth has taken—literally filched—from the heavens and made into an earthly product. Such things naturally seem paradoxical because they touch upon a reality of which modern man usually has no conception; nevertheless they are absolutely true. Now it corresponds with reality today if memory enables someone to say: ‘When I was nine years old I gave a friend many a sound thrashing.’ One may or may not feel gratified by such a memory, or it may pain one; but it does arise within one. Similarly, in human consciousness expanded through relationship with the metals into an Earth consciousness, this realisation arises: In the process of forming your whole being on Earth out of the heavens, during the descent you separated, cast off the plants from yourself. You also cast off the animal nature; your desire, to begin with, was that in the form of gelatinous coagulation or gristle it should be a product secreted by you. But then you were obliged to realise that pre-existent Earth-forces took this task over from you and reshaped the animal form into different structures which are products of the Earth. In this way, as it were in a cosmic memory, these happenings seem to be actual experiences of our own, just as the other incident I mentioned is an experience belonging to a brief earthly life. As man, we feel ourselves bound up with these happenings. But all this is connected with many other processes—I am speaking briefly of only the most important ones. Many other things were happening. For example, during the period when what I have been describing was taking place, the whole atmosphere was also filled with sulphur in a highly rarefied state. This rarefied sulphur united with other substances and from this union there arose the ‘parents’ as it were of what is present in the ores today as pyrites, as galena, as native sulphide of zinc and so forth. All these substances developed at that time in an earlier form, in a soft, still wax-like consistency, and the body of the Earth was permeated with them. Then, when these metallic ores emerged from the universal albuminous substance and formed the solid crust of the Earth, there was really nothing much else for the metals to do, unless man made some use of them, than to reflect about the past. And indeed we find that they do conjure up for the inner vision, everything that has happened in the Earth’s history. A man in whom these things are cosmic, or at least terrestrial experience, will say to himself: Through having cast away from yourself the primeval plant-form—which has since developed into the later plant-formations—through having cast away from yourself the complicated processes of animal evolution, you have also rid yourself of everything that previously stood in the way of your having a will in your own being as man. It was necessary for man to get rid of all this, just as today he must secrete sweat. In no other way could he cease to be a being in whom only gods willed, but become an individual with his own will, perhaps not yet free will, but nevertheless a will of his own. All this was necessary for the preparation of man’s earthly nature. In the course of further development, during which there were many other happenings, everything changed. Naturally, when the metallic ores had separated and were now in the Earth, the whole atmosphere also changed. It became far less sulphurous. Oxygen gradually gained predominance over the sulphur whereas in ancient times sulphur was a very significant factor in the Earth’s atmosphere. In this changed environment man was able to cast away other elements from himself and these are the successors of the earlier plants and animals. The later plant-forms now gradually developing were rooted in substance that was still very soft. Out of the earlier reptilian and lizard-like creatures, animals with a more complicated structure developed, the impressions of which modern geology can still discover. Nothing at all of the earliest animal creatures of which I have spoken can be found. It was not until the later epoch, when—for a second time as it were—man cast out more complicated structures, that the conditions I have been describing were present: cloud-masses continually forming and dissolving, viridescence (greening) appearing and then fading away, soft animal-like structures which, however, were real animals; at times they contracted and had a life of their own, and soon again lost identity in the general life of the Earth. All these developments resulted in greater solidification. Among animals of this kind was one which at that time looked more or less like this (diagram): it had a very large eye-like organ surrounded by a sort of aura; adjoining this organ a kind of snout protruded further forwards; the body was lizard-like, with powerful fins. Such structures were already more solid in themselves. It would be equally correct to speak either of wings or fins in the case of these animals for they were not marine creatures—there was as yet no sea. There was only the soft Earth and the still soft elements in the surrounding atmosphere from which only the sulphur had been partially separated. In this atmosphere such animals flew or swam—it was something between flying and swimming.  If, starting from the present day, someone were to go back through time into the period between the Lemurian and Atlantean epochs, he would confront a strange spectacle: huge flying lizards with a kind of lantern-like formation on the head, radiating light and warmth; and down below, a soft, marshy Earth but with something very familiar about it because it would seem to a visitor of today to be emitting an odour, an odour between that of decaying substance and of green plants. The mud of this soft Earth would emit an odour partly seductive and partly extremely pleasant. And in it, moving about like creatures of the swamp, there would be these other animals, already with more limbs, rather like the lower species of mammals today but with powerful formations below—more powerful, naturally, than the webbed feet of ducks—by means of which they propelled themselves through the swamps. Man was obliged to undergo this whole process in order that autonomous feeling might be prepared in him for his earthly existence. Thus we have a primary plant-animal creation consisting of the products secreted by man and which made it possible for him to become a being on Earth possessed of will. If all these products had remained in him, they would have taken possession of his will which would have become a wholly physical manifestation. As a result of what he had cast off, the physical element had been eliminated and his will became a quality of the soul. Similarly, as a result of the second creation man’s feeling acquired the character of soul. Plants and mammals somewhat similar to those we know did not appear until the middle or later period of Atlantis. It was then that the Earth acquired a structure definitely resembling that of today. The substances known to modern chemists as carbon, oxygen, the heavy metals, and so on, had gradually developed, and it was possible for the third casting-off process to take place. Man separated from himself the plants and animals to be found in his environment today. And the fact that this environment came into existence around him has enabled him to live on Earth as a thinking being. In those early times humanity was not split up as men are today, into single individuals; there was one universal humanity, still of the nature of spirit-and-soul, descending into the ether. For this universal humanity came out of the Cosmos together with the ether streaming thence to the Earth. The happenings I have described in the book Occult Science, then took place. Humanity came to the Earth, then departed to other planets and subsequently returned during the Atlantean epoch. This went on concurrently with other events; for whenever it was a matter of anything being cast off, humanity could not remain with the Earth but was obliged to depart from it in order that certain inner forces, now more of the nature of soul, might be strengthened. Humanity then came down again to the Earth. These happenings add details to what you can read in Occult Science. Man in truth belongs to the Cosmos, and it is he who prepares his earthly environment by casting off from himself the kingdoms of Nature and despatching them into the domain of the Earth where they form part of his environment. By sending these products of separation down to the Earth man was gradually able to equip himself with the faculties of thinking, feeling and willing. It was only in the course of time that he evolved into what he is today, an organic-physical being and able during his existence on Earth between birth and death to think and feel and will. He is connected with entities who, in order to further the evolution of humanity, have in the course of time separated from the human realm and in this separation have been metamorphosed into their present forms. It is clear from what has been said that we do not speak in an abstract way about tire relationship that can be established with the metallic substances of the Earth. When relationship has been established with the metals with their memory of the Earth’s history, one can speak of what is remembered and discover for oneself what I have been describing to you today. If we now go back to still earlier times, we shall find that everything is even more transient, even more evanescent. Think of the grandeur and majesty of the vista I described to you: those mobile, wax-like silica formations in which pictures of the plant-world appear, fill themselves with the soft albuminous substance and produce in the Earth’s environment the phenomena of ‘greening’ and fading. Think of all this and you will say to yourselves: In contrast to the plants growing out of the Earth today with their firmly formed roots and leaves or to our present trees with their strong trunks, this is as ephemeral as a cloud. How fleeting these earlier forms are if compared with an oak of today— the oak itself does not pride itself on its natural characteristic, it is usually the people living around such trees who are guilty of pride, for they mistake their frequent weakness for the hardiness of the oak! Compare this quality of our present oaks with those ancient, ethereal plant-formations, appearing and passing away like shadowy mists in the atmosphere, condensing and then vanishing away. Or to take cruder examples, compare a thick-skinned hippopotamus or elephant or a similar animal with those earlier creatures which emerged from the universal albumen, were laid hold of by the chalk and becoming rather more solid as a result developed the rudiments of bones and were drawn down into the animality of the Earth—I use this expression more as an adjective. Compare the Earth’s present density, shall I say the ‘elephantine’ density of the Earth today with the conditions that once existed, and you will no longer be able to doubt that the further back you go into the past the more fleeting and evanescent are the phenomena. In even more remote times we come to conditions where there are only surging and weaving colour-formations, appearing and disappearing. And if you turn to the descriptions of Old Sun, or of Old Saturn given in the book Occult Science 1 you will find that this is understandable when it is realised that these conditions belong to a far, far distant past. At that stage the evanescent plant-formations fill themselves with the albuminous substance and begin to look like clouds. At still earlier stages we can speak only of colour-formations such as I described in connection with Old Sun or Old Saturn. If therefore we go back from physical conditions with the ‘elephantine’ quality they have today, through finer physical conditions, we finally reach the spiritual. In this way, by paying attention to actual realities we come to realise that everything belonging to the Earth has its origin in the spiritual. This is a matter of actual vision. And I think it is also a beautiful idea to be able to say to oneself: If you penetrate into the interior of the Earth and let the hard metals tell you their memories, they will say to you: Once upon a time we were so widely diffused over the cosmic expanse that we were not physical substances at all, but were simply colour, weaving, hovering, undulating in the spiritual Cosmos. The memories of the metals of the Earth go back to a condition when each metal was a cosmic colour permeating the others, when the Cosmos was a kind of spectrum, a rainbow which differentiated and only then became physical. And it is at this point that the merely theoretical impression communicated to us by the metals of the Earth becomes a moral impression. For every metal says to us: I come from the cosmic expanse far away from the Earth, I come from the spheres of Heaven and have been compressed, enchanted into the interior of the Earth. But I await my redemption, for in time to come my essential being will again pervade the Universe.—When we learn to understand the speech of the metals in this way, gold tells us of the Sun, lead of Saturn, copper of Venus. And then these metals say to us: There was a time when we stretched far out into the Universe—copper to Venus, lead to Saturn—but now we have been enchanted into the Earth. We shall stretch far out again when the Earth’s mission is fulfilled through man having achieved on the Earth what can be achieved there and only there. We accepted this enchantment in order that man might become a free being on the Earth. When freedom has been won for man, release from our enchantment can also begin. This release has been in process of preparation for a long time already. It is only a matter of understanding it and of understanding how the Earth, together with man, will evolve on into the future.
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