The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Thirteenth Lecture

[ 1 ] It has already been said here in recent hours that, in the course of this winter, we want to gather together, as it were, the material, the building blocks, in the individual branch lessons, which will ultimately come together to form a deeper understanding of the nature of the human being and various other things that are connected with life and the whole development of the human being and which will lead us ever deeper into the secrets of the world. Today I would like to remind you of the penultimate of our branch lectures and start from there. You will remember that we spoke of a certain rhythm that exists in relation to the four members of the human being. Let us start from there today and answer the question: How can we, with such knowledge from deeper sources, understand the necessity and goal of the anthroposophical spiritual movement?

[ 2 ] Today we will have to connect two things that seem very far apart. You will remember that certain relationships exist between the ego, the astral body, the etheric body, and the physical body of the human being. What can be said about the fourth member, the I, becomes most tangible to us when we remember the two alternating states of consciousness that the I undergoes in the course of a twenty-four-hour period, that is, a day. We relate this one day with its twenty-four hours, during which the ego experiences day and night, sleeping and waking, as a unity in a certain sense. So when we say that what the ego goes through in one day is subject to the number one, we must say that the number which corresponds in a similar way to the rhythm of our astral body is the number seven. While the ego, as it is today, returns to its starting point in twenty-four hours, in one day, so to speak, arriving again where it was, our astral body does the same in seven days. Let us understand this a little more precisely.

[ 3 ] Think of your awakening in the morning, which consists in your rising, as one says in ordinary life (though incorrectly), out of the darkness of unconsciousness, and the objects of the physical-sensory world reappearing around you. You experience this in the morning, and you experience it again after twenty-four hours, except in exceptional cases, of course. This is the regular course of events, and we can say that after a day of twenty-four hours, our ego returns to its starting point. If we look for the corresponding conditions for the astral body in the same way, we must say that if the regularity that belongs to the human astral body really occurs in it, then it returns to the same point after seven days. So while the ego goes through a cycle in one day, the astral body moves much more slowly, completing its cycle in seven days. The etheric body completes its cycle in four times seven days; it returns to the same point after four times seven days. And now I ask you to note what was said last time: this does not happen as regularly for the physical body as it does for the astral body and the etheric body. However, we can also determine an approximate number: it completes its cycle in approximately ten times twenty-eight days, so that it returns to its starting point. You know that there is a great difference between human beings, that the female etheric body has a masculine character and, conversely, the male etheric body has a feminine character. From this it will be understandable that, in a certain sense, there must be an irregularity in the rhythm of the etheric body and the physical body. But in general, the numbers 1 : 7 : (4 x 7) : (10 x 7 x 4) are the ratios that indicate, so to speak, the “speeds of rotation” for the four members of human nature. This is, of course, only figurative speech, for we are not dealing with rotations, but with repetitions of the same states; we are dealing with rhythmic numbers. Two weeks ago, I already had to point out how phenomena of our everyday life can only be understood when we know such things that lie behind the sensory-physical world. And in a public lecture, I also pointed out a remarkable fact that even the most materialistic natural scientist and physician cannot deny, cannot classify as a “ghost of superstition,” because it simply exists as a fact. This is the fact that should actually cause people to think: that with pneumonia, a special phenomenon occurs on the seventh day, that a crisis occurs and that the patient must be helped through this seventh day. The fever suddenly subsides, and if the patient cannot be brought through this crisis, healing may not occur under certain circumstances. This is a generally known fact, but as a rule the starting point of the illness is not always correctly recognized, and if one does not know the first day, one does not usually know the seventh day either. But the fact remains. The question must arise: Why does the fever subside on the seventh day of pneumonia? Why does a special phenomenon occur on the seventh day at all?

[ 4 ] Only those who see behind the scenes of existence, who see beyond the physical and sensory phenomena into the spiritual world, know about these rhythms and at the same time know what causes such phenomena, such as fever. What is fever, actually? Why does fever occur? Fever is not the disease. On the contrary, fever is something that the organism produces to fight the actual disease process. Fever is the organism's defense against disease. There is some damage in the organism, let's say damage to the lungs. When a person is healthy and all their internal activities are working together properly, it goes without saying that these internal activities will be disrupted if any organ or limb of the human body malfunctions. The entire organism then tries to pull itself together and develop the forces within itself that can compensate for this isolated disruption. So what is happening is a revolution in the entire organism. Otherwise, the organism does not need to gather its forces because there is no enemy to fight. The expression of this gathering of forces in the organism is fever.

[ 5 ] Now, those who look behind the scenes of existence know that the various organs of the human body were formed and then developed at very different stages of human development. What we call the “study of the human body” from a spiritual scientific point of view is the most complicated thing imaginable, because this human organism is something very diverse and its individual organs were predisposed at very different times. Later, this predisposition was taken up again and further developed. Everything in the physical organism is an expression, a result of the higher members of the human being, so that the physical members always express the higher orders in the higher members. What we today call the lungs are, according to their predisposition, connected with the human astral body and have something to do with it. What the lungs have to do with the astral body, how the very first, original lung structure came into human beings on the predecessor of our Earth, on the old Moon, how the astral body was, so to speak, “inoculated” into human beings by higher spiritual beings—we will have to talk about all of that later. Today we will simply consider that the lungs are also an expression of the astral body. The actual expression of the astral body is, of course, the nervous system. But human beings are complex, and developments always occur in parallel. With the development of the astral body and the integration of the present nervous system, the lungs were also formed. As a result, the lungs enter, in a certain sense, into the rhythm of the astral body, into the rhythm that is governed by the number seven. What we know as fever is connected with certain functions of the etheric body. Something must be happening in the etheric body when a certain feverish process occurs. Fever is therefore in some way connected with the rhythm of the etheric body. Every fever is connected with this rhythm, but how? We must now make the following clear to ourselves.

[ 6 ] Since the etheric body completes its cycle in four times seven days, it moves much more slowly than the astral body, which completes its rhythm in seven days. So when we compare the rhythmic movement of the etheric body with that of the astral body, we can draw a comparison with the hands of a clock. Take the hour hand of a clock: it goes around once, while the hand that shows you the minutes goes around twelve times in the same time. There you have the ratio of 1:12. Now imagine you are paying attention when, at twelve o'clock noon, the hour hand is above the minute hand. The two hands overlap. Now the minute hand goes around once. When it is back at twelve, it can no longer coincide with the hour hand, because the latter has now moved to one. The two hands can therefore only coincide after about five minutes, so that after one hour the minute hand is not back above the hour hand, but only after one hour and a little more than five minutes. Now you have a similar relationship between the orbit of the astral body and the orbit of the etheric body. Suppose your astral body, which is always connected to the etheric body, is in a certain state in relation to the etheric body. Now the astral body begins to rotate. When it returns to its original state after seven days, it does not coincide with the etheric body again, because the etheric body has advanced by a quarter of its orbit after seven days. After seven days, therefore, the state of the astral body does not coincide again with the same state of the etheric body, but coincides with a state that has lagged behind the original by a quarter of the circumference. Now suppose that the illness in question occurs. A very specific state of the astral body is connected with a very specific state of the etheric body. At that moment, under the influence of these two states working together, fever arises as a call to arms against the enemy. After seven days, the astral body reaches a completely different point of the etheric body. Now, it is not only the power to produce fever that must be present in the etheric body, because then, once it has started to produce fever, the fever would never subside. But after seven days, this point of the etheric body, which now coincides with the point of the astral body that caused the fever seven days ago, has the tendency to remedy the fever, to weaken it again. So if, after seven days, the patient has progressed to the point where the disturbance has been overcome, then all is well. If the disturbance has not been overcome, the astral body does not now have the tendency to remove the illness, so it enters into an unfavorable state where the etheric body has the tendency to weaken the fever. It is important to pay close attention to these two superimposed points, these two points of coincidence. We could find such points for all possible human life phenomena. And it is precisely through these rhythms, through these inner mysterious mechanisms, that the whole human being would become clear to us. The etheric body really has a tendency that is expressed in four times seven. In other disease phenomena, you can again observe how the fourteenth day is of particular importance, that is, two times seven. We can even state that in certain phenomena the paroxysm must be particularly strong after four times seven. And this is the point: if the condition then subsides, there is hope for healing under all circumstances. All these things are connected with rhythms, namely with those rhythms that we touched upon three weeks ago and which we have brought more clearly before our souls today. With such things, which seem difficult but can nevertheless be understood, we penetrate a little beneath the surface of the physical-sensory world. This must go deeper and deeper. Now let us ask ourselves about the origins of such rhythms.

[ 7 ] The origins of such rhythms lie in the great cosmic relationships. We have pointed out again and again how precisely what we call the four human members—the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the I—have undergone an evolution through Saturn, Sun, Moon, and Earth. When we look back at our old Moon, we find that this old Moon had also detached itself from the Sun for a certain period of time. At that time, however, a large part of what is now the moon was connected to the earth. But there was a sun outside, and when such heavenly bodies belong together, their forces, which are only the expression of their beings, always influence the regularity of the life of their beings. The period of revolution of a planet around its sun, or of a secondary planet around its planet, is by no means accidental or unrelated to life, but is regulated by those entities we have come to know in the hierarchies of spirits. We have seen that it is not at all the case that the heavenly bodies revolve as if by themselves through mere inanimate forces. We have already pointed out how grotesque today's physicists are in their explanation of the Kant-Laplace theory using the experiment with the drop of fat: A cardboard disc is placed in the equatorial direction of the floating drop of fat, a needle is inserted through it from above, and then the whole thing is rotated; small drops then split off from the large drop and rotate with it. The experimenter thus shows how a planetary system arises on a small scale, and physicists generally conclude from this that the planetary system must also have arisen on a large scale. What is otherwise good to forget—namely, oneself—is not good here. For the good man usually forgets that the small planetary system could not come into being if he did not turn the crank. One may certainly perform such experiments; they are very useful, but one must not forget the most important thing. How many people suffer from such suggestions! They do not think about the fact that the “Professor” did this. Outside, there is no huge “Professor,” but there are hierarchies of spiritual beings who regulate the movements of the heavenly bodies, who actually bring about all the arrangements of matter in the cosmos, so that the individual heavenly bodies revolve around each other. And if we could respond to this — the time will come — we would recognize in the movements of the heavenly bodies, which form a coherent system, the rhythm of our human limbs. For now, we need only point out one thing.

[ 8 ] People today, with their materialistic way of thinking, laugh at the idea that certain conditions of human life in earlier times were connected with the phases of the moon. Now, it is precisely in the moon that the relationship between the astral body and the etheric body is reflected in a wonderful way. The moon completes its cycle in four times seven days. These are the states of the etheric body, and the four times seven states of the etheric body are reflected exactly in the four quarters of the moon. It is by no means nonsense to seek the connection in what we have just characterized as feverish symptoms in the phases of the moon. Consider that after seven days there is indeed a different phase of the moon, just as there is a different phase of the etheric body, and that the astral body falls over a different phase of the etheric body. In fact, this relationship between the human astral body and the etheric body was originally regulated by those spiritual beings who brought the moon into a corresponding orbit around the earth. And you can see how things are connected in a certain way from the fact that even modern medicine still reckons with an old remnant that has remained from rhythmic knowledge. Because the rhythm of the physical body is 10x28 and the physical body is, so to speak, back at the same point after 10x28 days where it was before, 10x28 days elapse approximately between the conception of a human being and their birth, ten sidereal months. All these things are connected with the regulation of the great world conditions. As a microcosm, the human being is a faithful mirror of the great world conditions; he is built out of these great world conditions.

[ 9 ] Today we want to focus on the middle of the Atlantic epoch in the evolution. This was a very important point in the development of the Earth. We distinguish three previous races in human development: the first, the Polar race; the second, the Hyperborean race; and the third, the Lemurian race. Then comes the Atlantean race. We are now in the fifth race, and two more races will follow us, so that the Atlantean epoch lies right in the middle. The middle of the Atlantean epoch is the most important point in the development of the earth. If we were to go back to that time, we would find there, in the conditions of outer human life, an exact mirror image of the cosmic conditions. At that time, it would have been very bad for human beings to do what they do today. Today, human beings no longer orient themselves very much to the cosmic conditions. In our cities, life often has to be organized in such a way that people are awake when they should be sleeping and sleep when they should be awake. If something similar to being awake at night and sleeping during the day had already occurred in the Lemurian era, if people had paid so little attention to the external phenomena associated with certain internal processes, then they would not have been able to live at all. Of course, something like that was not possible at that time, because it was quite natural for people to adjust their inner rhythm to the outer rhythm. At that time, people lived, so to speak, with the course of the sun and moon; they adjusted the rhythm of their astral body and etheric body precisely to the course of the sun and moon.

[ 10 ] Let us take the clock again. It is also, in a certain sense, aligned with the great course of the world. When the hour hand coincides with the minute hand at twelve o'clock, this is because a certain constellation of the sun and stars is present. This is what we use to set the clock, and a clock is not working properly if it does not bring these two hands back into alignment the next day when the same constellation of stars reappears. The clocks in Berlin are regulated daily by electric connection from the observatory on Enckeplatz. We can therefore say that the movements and rhythms of the clock hands correspond to and are even made daily according to the rhythm of the cosmos. Our clock is correct when it agrees with the standard clock, which in turn agrees with the cosmos. In ancient times, humans did not really need clocks because they themselves were clocks. The course of their lives, which they could feel quite clearly, was entirely governed by cosmic conditions. Man was truly a clock. And if he had not conformed to cosmic conditions, then exactly the same thing would have happened to him as happens today to a clock when its movement does not correspond to external conditions: it would simply run badly, and man would also have fared badly. The inner rhythm had to correspond to the outer. This is precisely the essence of human progress on Earth, that since the middle of the Atlantean epoch, this absolute correspondence between outer and inner conditions is no longer the case. Something else has happened. Imagine that someone had the quirk of not liking it when the hands of his clock were aligned at twelve noon. Let us assume that he would set it so that it is then three o'clock. When other people have one o'clock, he will have four, at two o'clock he will have five, and so on. But this will not change the inner workings of his clock; it will only be shifted in relation to external circumstances. After twenty-four hours, it will be three o'clock again for him; his clock will not collapse in its movement with the cosmic conditions, but in its rhythm it will still correspond internally with them, because things have only been shifted. In the same way, the rhythm of human beings has been shifted. Man would never have become an independent being if all his activity had been controlled by cosmic conditions. It is precisely because he has broken free from the external rhythm while maintaining his inner rhythm that he has gained his freedom. He has become like a clock that no longer coincides with cosmic events at the nodes, but still corresponds to them internally. Thus, in ancient times, humans could only be conceived under a very specific constellation and born ten lunar months later. This coincidence of conception with a cosmic relationship disappeared, but the rhythm remained, just as the rhythm of a clock remains when it is set to three o'clock at noon. However, it is not only the relationships within humans that have shifted, but the times themselves have also shifted. If we disregard the latter cosmic shift, something very special has also happened internally for humans in that they have, so to speak, removed themselves from cosmic relationships and are no longer a “clock” in the true sense of the word. It is similar to what would happen to a person who sets their clock three hours ahead but then cannot remember how much they have moved it forward and can no longer function properly. The same thing happened to humans in their development on Earth when they once left the relationship in which they stood as a clock to the cosmos. This caused his astral body to become disordered in certain respects. The more human living conditions were oriented toward the physical, the more the old rhythm was maintained; but the more conditions turned toward the spiritual, the more disorder was brought into them. I would like to clarify this from another angle.

[ 11 ] We know not only human beings, but also beings that are superior to human beings on Earth today. We know the sons of life or the angels, and we know that they went through their humanity on the old moon. We know the fire spirits or archangels who went through their human stages on the old Sun, and we also know the primordial forces that went through their human stage on the old Saturn. These beings have preceded human beings in cosmic evolution. If we were to study them today, we would find that they are much more spiritual beings than human beings. They therefore also live in higher worlds. But they are in a completely different position from human beings, especially in relation to what we have mentioned today. In spiritual matters, they are entirely guided by the rhythm of the cosmos. An angel would not think in such a disorderly way as a human being, for the simple reason that its thought processes are regulated by the cosmic powers and it conforms to them. It is completely impossible for a being such as an angel not to think in harmony with the great spiritual, cosmic processes. In the harmony of the worlds, the laws of logic are written for the angels. They do not need textbooks. Human beings need textbooks because they have brought their inner thought processes into disorder. They no longer recognize how they should conform to the great script of the stars. These angels know the course of events in the cosmos, and their thought processes correspond to the regulated rhythm. When humans entered the earth in their present form, they left this rhythm behind, hence the disorder of their thinking, their sensations, and their emotional life. While regularity prevails in the things over which human beings have even less influence, in the astral body and etheric body, disorder and lack of rhythm have crept into the parts that human beings have come to control, namely their sentient soul, intellectual soul, and conscious soul. It is the least of it that people in our big cities turn night into day. It means much more that people have torn themselves away from the great world rhythm in their inner thought processes. The way people think every hour, every moment, contradicts in a certain sense the great world process.

[ 12 ] But do not think that all this is said in order to advocate a worldview that is intended to bring people back into such a rhythm. Man had to break out of the old rhythm; that is the basis of progress. When certain prophets go around today preaching a “return to nature,” they want to turn life back and not move it forward. All this amateurish talk about returning to nature shows a lack of understanding of real evolution. When a movement today instructs people to eat certain foods only at certain times of the year because nature itself indicates this by allowing the foods to grow only at certain times, this is nothing but abstract, amateurish talk. Development consists precisely in man becoming increasingly independent of external rhythms. However, we must not lose our footing. True progress and salvation for humans do not lie in returning to the old rhythm, in saying to oneself: How can I live in harmony with the four quarters of the moon? For in ancient times it was necessary for humans to be like a seal imprint of the cosmos. But it is also essential that humans do not believe that they can live without rhythm. Just as he has internalized himself from the outside, so must he build himself up again rhythmically from within. That is what matters. Rhythm must permeate the inner being. Just as rhythm built up the cosmos, so must man, if he wants to participate in the building of a new cosmos, permeate himself again with a new rhythm. Our age is characterized precisely by the fact that it has lost the old rhythm—the external one—and has not yet gained a new inner rhythm. Man has outgrown nature—if we call the external expression of the spirit nature—and has not yet grown into the spirit itself. Today he still flounders back and forth between nature and spirit. This is precisely what characterizes our time. This very floundering between nature and spirit reached a peak in the second third of the 19th century. That is why, at that time, the beings who know and interpret the signs of the times had to ask themselves: What must be done so that human beings do not lose all rhythm, so that an inner rhythm can enter into them?

[ 13 ] Everything you can observe today as characteristic of spiritual life is disorder. Wherever you see a product of the spirit today, the first thing you notice is disorder, inner irregularity. This is the case in almost all areas. Only those areas that still have good old traditions retain something of the old regularity. In the new areas, human beings must first create the new regularity. That is why human beings today see the fact, as when the fever subsides on the seventh day of pneumonia. The explanation for this, however, is pure chaos of thoughts. When human beings think about it, they accumulate a hodgepodge of thoughts around the fact in an arbitrary manner, because they do not think regularly. All our sciences take an external fact from the world and stir up a sum of thoughts around it, all without any inner regularity, because man wanders around as if in an abyss of the world of thoughts. Today he has no inner lines of thought, no inner rhythm of thought, and humanity would fall completely into decadence if it did not take up an inner rhythm. Consider spiritual science from this point of view.

[ 14 ] You will see what waters you are entering when you begin to study spiritual science. First you hear—and gradually realize—that human beings consist of four members: the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the I. And then you hear how the ego works, how the astral body is transformed into manas or the spirit self, how the etheric body is transformed into buddhi or the life spirit, and how the physical human being is transformed in its principle into the spiritual human being or atma. Now think about how much we have considered with this basic formula of our spiritual science. Think of the many topics that were actually fundamental topics, how we had to build up our entire structure of thought again and again, starting from this basic scheme: physical body, etheric body, astral body, I. You know that in certain public lectures, some people can even become tired when these basic facts have to be repeated over and over again. But this is and remains a secure thread on which we string our thoughts: these four members of human nature, their interaction, and then, in a higher sense, the transformation of the lower three members, the third member into the fifth, the second into the sixth, and the first member into the seventh member of our being. Now take all the elements of human nature as we know them: the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, the ego, the spirit self, the life spirit, and the spirit man. That gives you seven. And take what underlies them, namely the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the ego, and you have four. And in your thoughts, repeat the great rhythm of 7:4, of 4:7, by contemplating these trains of thought. You bring forth the outer great rhythm from within yourselves. You repeat the rhythm that once was in the world cosmos in the great, you give birth to it again. You thus lay down the plan, the foundation for your system of thought, as the gods once laid down the plan for the wisdom of the world. From the chaos of thought life, a thought cosmos develops from within the soul when we allow what we have just mentioned, the inner rhythm of numbers, to come alive within us again. Human beings have freed themselves from the external rhythm. Through what is spiritual science in the true sense, we return to rhythm; from within, we build a world structure that carries rhythm within itself. And when we turn to the cosmos and look at the past of the Earth, at Saturn, the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth, we see a fourfold structure, then the Moon in spiritualized form in the fifth stage as Jupiter, the Sun in the sixth stage as Venus, and the old Saturn in the seventh, the volcanic stage. Thus, in Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan, we have the number seven representing our evolutionary phases. Our physical body, as it is today, has developed through the number four, through Saturn, Sun, Moon, and Earth. It will gradually be completely transformed and spiritualized in the future. So that here too, when we look back to the past, we have the number four, and when we look toward the future, we have the number three: here too, 4:3, or, if we bring the past together with the whole development, 4:7.

[ 15 ] We are only at the beginning of our spiritual scientific activity, even though we have been engaged in it for many years. Today, it has only been possible to draw attention to what people wanted when they pointed to the “inner number” that underlies all phenomena. Thus, we see how human beings had to break out of their original rhythm in order to gain their freedom. But he must find within himself the laws to regulate the “clock,” his astral body. And the great regulator is spiritual science, because it is in harmony with the great laws of the cosmos that the seer perceives. In relation to the great numerical ratios, the future, as created by human beings, will show the same thing as the cosmos in the past, only on a higher level. That is why human beings must give birth to the future from within themselves, from numbers, just as the gods formed the cosmos from numbers.

[ 16 ] In this way we recognize how spiritual science is connected with the great course of the world. When we understand what lies behind human beings in the spiritual world, the numbers four and seven, then we understand why we must also find in this spiritual world the impulse to continue what we know as the entire course of human development up to this point. And we understand why, especially in an age when human beings have become most entangled in inner chaos with their inner life of thoughts, feelings, and will, why it is precisely then that those individuals who have to interpret the signs of the times had to point to a wisdom that enables human beings to build up their soul life in a regulated manner from within. We learn to think rhythmically within ourselves, as will be necessary in the future if we think in accordance with these fundamental conditions. And human beings will increasingly accept that from which they have been born. For the time being, they are taking what can be regarded as the basic blueprint of the cosmos. They will go further and feel themselves permeated by certain fundamental forces and ultimately by fundamental beings.

[ 17 ] All of this is at its starting point today. And we feel the importance and global significance of the anthroposophical mission when we do not regard it as an arbitrary act of this or that individual, but when we set out to understand it from the whole inner workings of our existence. Then we can come to say to ourselves: it is not up to us to accept or reject this anthroposophical mission, but if we want to understand our time, we must recognize and permeate ourselves with what lies at the foundation of anthroposophy as the thoughts of the divine-spiritual world. And then we must let it flow out from us into the world again, so that our actions and our being do not become chaos, but a cosmos, just as it was a cosmos from which we were born.