The Rudolf Steiner Archive

First Lecture

[ 1 ] It gives me great pleasure to be able to address our friends here in Norway at some length for the third time now, and I would like to respond very briefly to the kind words of our dear friend Eriksen by saying that the warm words of welcome he has just spoken are reciprocated by me with equal warmth and from the depths of my soul, just as they were spoken.

[ 2 ] I hope that this series of lectures, which I am now about to begin before you, will also contribute in some way to an understanding of what we call the overall picture of our worldview. I would like to point out, particularly with regard to this lecture series, that in the course of its development it must necessarily contain many things that belong, so to speak, to the most fundamental truths of our worldview, and that it will have to include some elements that are actually still quite distant from contemporary human thinking. Therefore, I ask above all those of my esteemed friends who have dealt less with the more advanced questions of the spiritual-scientific worldview to bear in mind that we would not make progress in our field if we did not, from time to time, take a vigorous leap into those realms of spiritual knowledge that are actually quite distant from present-day human thinking, feeling, and perception.

[ 3 ] From this perspective, a certain degree of goodwill toward these remarks will sometimes be necessary; for it would take much longer to present all the evidence and proof required to support what will be said here in the coming days. We would not make any progress if, so to speak, an appeal were not made to goodwill and to the receptiveness of spiritual understanding regarding these very explanations. Indeed, the field we are now touching upon is one that, right up to our own times, has been largely avoided by occultists, mystics, and theosophists alike—and avoided for the very reason that a higher degree of open-mindedness is necessary to receive the things that must be said, so to speak, without the resistance that might sometimes arise.

[ 4 ] You may understand what this means most clearly if you recall that, at a certain stage of mystical or occult development, one is called a “homeless person.” This is quite literally a technical term, “homeless person,” and if we wish to characterize—without beating around the bush, since we are not speaking of the path of knowledge—what is meant by the term “homeless person,” we can briefly say that a person is called a “homeless person” if, in their knowledge and understanding of the great laws of humanity, they are truly unaffected by all that otherwise arises in a person from the place where they live in accordance with their national character. We can also say that a rootless human being is one who is capable of taking in the great mission of all humanity without being influenced by the nuances of particular feelings and sensibilities that arise from this or that homeland. You can see from this that a certain degree of maturity in mystical or occult development requires a free perspective precisely toward that which we otherwise rightly regard as something great—that which, on the other hand, we describe in relation to the individual human life as the mission of the individual national spirits, as that which, from the depths of a national soil, from the spirit of the peoples, provides the individual concrete contributions to the entire mission of humanity.

[ 5 ] We wish, so to speak, to describe the essence of that from which the rootless person must, in a certain sense, free themselves. Now, rootless people of all times, from prehistoric times right up to the present day, have always known that if they were to fully characterize, so to speak, what is referred to as the nature of rootlessness, they would find little, very little understanding. First of all, these rootless people would be met with a prejudice expressed in the accusation: You have lost all connection with the native soil of your people; you have no understanding of what is otherwise most precious to people. — But that is not the case. In a certain sense, rootlessness is—or at least can be—a detour, so that once this sacred place, this rootlessness, has been reached, one may find the way back to the substance of the people, to find harmony with the down-to-earth in human development. If this must be pointed out from the outset, it is nevertheless not unfounded that, especially in our time, we should speak in the most open-minded way about what we call the mission of the individual national souls of humanity. Just as it is justified that, up to now, so to speak, this mission has been kept entirely silent to a certain degree, so too is it justified to begin speaking of this mission in our present time. It is of a very special importance for the reason that the coming destinies of humanity will bring people together in a common human mission to a much greater degree than has been the case up to now. However, the individual members of a people will only be able to make their corresponding free, concrete contribution to this common mission if, above all, they have an understanding of their national character—an understanding of what might be called “self-knowledge of the national character.” Just as the phrase “Know thyself” played a major role in the Apollonian Mysteries of ancient Greece, so too will the saying “Know yourselves as national souls” be addressed to the national souls in the not-too-distant future. This saying will have a certain significance for the future work of humanity.

[ 6 ] Nowadays, it is particularly difficult for us to acknowledge beings that, so to speak, do not exist at all for external sensory perception or for external material cognition. Perhaps it will not be so difficult for us today to acknowledge that human beings, as they stand before us in the world, have certain aspects, certain parts of their being, that are supersensory and invisible. Perhaps the current materialistic mindset of humanity can be led even more easily to the view that beings whom one can at least physically see on the outside, such as human beings, also have a supersensible, invisible part. But it is a great imposition on our present age to speak to it of beings who, according to ordinary perception, do not actually exist at all. For what is it, really, that people today call here and there the national soul or national spirit? It is, at most, what is accepted as a quality—a collective quality—of so many hundreds or millions of people crowded together on a certain piece of land. That there is anything living there besides the many millions of people crowded together on that territory, that there is anything real that would correspond to the concept of a national spirit, that underlies this concept—this is difficult to make clear to the consciousness of our present age. If one were to ask—let us say, for the sake of having something entirely neutral—: What does the modern person understand by the Swiss national spirit? — they would describe, in abstract terms, certain characteristics possessed by the people who inhabit the Swiss regions of the Alps and the Jura, and would be aware that this does not correspond to anything that could be perceived through external faculties of cognition, through the eyes or other organs of perception. This must be the first step: to be able to form the idea, in an open and honest way, that there are beings who do not, strictly speaking, manifest themselves through the senses, who do not present themselves to ordinary material perception; that there are, so to speak, other beings—invisible yet active—between those beings that are perceptible to the senses, beings who work into visible beings, just as the human being acts upon the human hands or fingers; that one can thus speak of the Swiss national spirit just as one speaks of the spirit of a human being, and that one can distinguish this human spirit just as clearly from what one has before one in the ten fingers as one can distinguish the Swiss national spirit from the millions of people living in the mountains of Switzerland. It is something else entirely, namely an entity, just as the human being itself is an entity. The only difference is that human beings present a sensory exterior to the human faculty of perception. To the same extent that a human being presents itself to the sensory powers of perception—that is, an external appearance, something that can be seen or perceived with the organs of sensation or the external senses—a national spirit does not present itself; yet it is nonetheless a thoroughly real entity.

[ 7 ] Today we will focus on forming, so to speak, a conception of such a real entity. How do we actually go about this in spiritual science when we want to form a conception of a real entity? We gain a characteristic example of how we form a conception of a real entity when we first turn our attention to the nature of the human being. When we describe the human being from a spiritual scientific perspective, we distinguish in him the physical body, the etheric or life body, the astral body or sensory body, and what we regard as the highest member of the human being, the I. We know, then, that in what we call the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the I, we have, so to speak, the present human being before us. But you also know that we are looking toward a future development of humanity, and that the ego is working on the three lower members of the human being, so that it spiritualizes these members, transforming them from their present lower form into their future higher form. The ego will transform and reshape the astral so that it becomes something other than what it is today. The astral body will then represent what you know as the spiritual self or Manas. Likewise, an even higher work of the ego will be performed on the etheric body or life body by transforming and reshaping it into what we call the life spirit or Buddhi. And finally, the highest work of the human being that we can conceive of for the time being is that the human being will spiritualize, transform, and metamorphose the most resistant part of his being—the physical body—into the spiritual. It will be the highest aspect of the human being when the ego has transformed what is today the physical body—that which today confronts us as the coarsest and most material—into the spiritual human being or Atma. Thus we look upon three aspects of human nature that have developed in the past, upon one in which we now stand, and upon three others from which the ego will create something new in the future.

[ 8 ] We also know that there is something in between the work that has been done and the work that will be done in the future to form the three higher members. We know that we must conceive of the “I” itself as structured. It is working on a kind of intermediate existence. We therefore speak of the fact that between the astral body, as it has become part of the human being from the past, and the spiritual self or Manas, which will become part of the human being from this astral body in the distant future, there lie in the middle the three preparatory members; namely: the feeling soul, the lowest member in which the ego has worked, the intellectual or emotional soul, and the consciousness soul. So that we can say: Of what we are working out as the spiritual self or Manas, there is extremely little present in human beings today, at most the beginning. On the other hand, human beings have prepared themselves for this future work by learning to master their three lower members in a certain way and to a certain extent. They have prepared themselves by learning to master the sensory body or the astral body, by penetrating into it with their ego and developing the soul of feeling within the sensory body. Just as the soul of feeling stands in a certain relationship to the body of feeling, so the soul of understanding or emotion stands in a certain relationship to the etheric or life body, so that the soul of understanding or emotion is a faint foreshadowing of what the life spirit or Buddhi will be—a faint foreshadowing, but a foreshadowing nonetheless. And what is contained within the conscious soul is, in a certain sense, worked into the physical body by the ego. Therefore, it is a faint foreshadowing of what will one day be the spiritual human being or Atma. We can also say: At present, we recognize in the human being—if we disregard minor parts that he has already worked out of the astral body as the beginning of the spiritual self or Manas—four distinct members. We can distinguish today:

1. the physical body,
2. the etheric body,
3. the astral body,
4. the “I” that acts within it,

[ 9 ] and furthermore, as a prelude to the higher links:

the sensory soul,
the intellectual soul,
the conscious soul.

[ 10 ] Here we have before us the human being as he presents himself to us today, and here we grasp, so to speak, this human being at the very moment of his becoming. We can literally see the “I” emerging, having been prepared by the soul of feeling, the soul of understanding, and the soul of consciousness—the higher members. We see this ‘I’ working with the forces of the soul of feeling, the soul of understanding, and the soul of consciousness upon the astral body, upon the beginnings of the spiritual self. We see the human being present in this very moment of his work.

[ 11 ] Those of you—and this will include most of you—who have studied what we call the research into the Akashic Records, the evolution of humankind in the distant past, and the outlook into the distant future, will know that human beings, as I have been able to sketch them for you, have evolved; that we can look back into the distant past; that human beings required long epochs of development to form the first rudiments of their physical body, then the first rudiments of the etheric body, and finally the astral body, and to further develop these three members. Humanity has needed long periods of time for this, and you may also know that humanity did not undergo the earlier development of its being—for example, the development of its astral body—in the same state of the Earth in which the Earth is today, but rather that it developed its astral body in an earlier state of Earth existence, the lunar existence. Just as we recognize our present life as the consequence of earlier Earth lives, earlier incarnations, so too do we look back upon earlier incarnations of our Earth. What we call the feeling soul, the intellectual or emotional soul, was first formed in the present-day Earth existence. In the Lunar existence, the astral body was implanted, and in an even earlier existence of our Earth, the Solar state, the etheric body was implanted, and finally, during the Saturn state, the physical body. Thus we look back upon three incarnations of the Earth, and in each of these incarnations we see one of the members that human beings carry within themselves today, first laid down and then further developed.

[ 12 ] There is something else to emphasize when we speak of the Saturn, Sun, and Moon stages. Just as we, as human beings on Earth, are going through the stage that we might call the self-conscious human stage. So, during earlier stages of Earth’s development—during the ancient Lunar, Solar, and Saturn stages—other beings went through the stage that we are going through today on Earth. It makes little difference whether one names these beings using the terminology common in the East or that more commonly used in the West. Those beings who, during the Lunar stage of our Earth, stood at the level where humanity stands today, and who are the next higher beings standing above us, we call, in the terminology of Christian esotericism, Angeloi or angels. They stand one level higher than human beings because they completed their human stage one epoch earlier, so that these beings were, during the ancient lunar phase, what we are today. However, they were not walking around on the Moon at that time as human beings do today on Earth. They were beings at the human stage, but they did not live in the flesh as human beings do today. Thus, only their stage of development corresponded to the human existence that humans undergo today. Likewise, we find beings of an even higher order who underwent human development during the ancient solar state. These are the Archangeloi or Archangels. They are beings who stand two stages higher than humans, who went through their human stage two epochs earlier. If we go back even further to the first incarnation of our earthly existence, to the Saturn state, we find that the beings who went through their human stage there are those we designate as spirits of personality, Archai, Primordial Beings, so that when we begin with these beings—who were thus human beings in the distant past, during the ancient Saturn state—and then trace the incarnations on Earth down to our present time, we have before us the stages of development of beings all the way down to our own being. We can therefore say: Primordial Beings, the Archai, were human beings on ancient Saturn; archangels, Archangeloi, were human beings on the ancient Sun; angels, or Angeloi, were human beings on the ancient Moon; human beings are human beings on our Earth. Since we now know that in the future we will continue our development, further unfolding what are our lower members—that is, what today is our astral body, our etheric or life body, and our physical body—we must ask: Is it not just as natural that the beings who previously passed through the human stage are now already at the stage where they are transforming their astral body into the spiritual self or Manas? Just as we will complete the transformation of our astral body into the spiritual self or Manas during the next incarnation of our Earth—during the Jupiter epoch—so have those beings who were human during the Lunar epoch, the Angeloi, completed the transformation of their astral bodies into the spiritual self or Manas, or they will complete it during our Earthly existence. They are undergoing during our Earth incarnation what we will only have to undergo during the next incarnation of the Earth. If we look even further back at the beings who were human during the ancient Sun existence, we can say: They already had to undergo during the Lunar epoch what we will only have to undergo in the next Earth incarnation. They are engaged in the work that the human being will perform when, through the activity of the ego, he transforms his etheric or life body into life spirit or buddhi. Thus, in these Archangels, we have beings who stand two stages above us, who stand on the stage that we will one day reach when, through the activity of our ego, we transform the life body into life spirit or buddhi. When we look up to these beings, we do so in such a way that we say: We see in them beings who stand two levels above us, beings in whom we see, as it were, a foreshadowing of what we ourselves will experience in the future; we look up to them as beings who are working today on their etheric or life body and transforming it into life spirit or buddhi. In the same way, we look up to even higher beings, to the spirits of personality. They stand on a level even higher than the archangels, on a level that humanity will reach in the even more distant future, when it will be able to transform the physical body into Atma, or the spiritual human being.

[ 13 ] Just as human beings exist at their present stage of existence, so do these corresponding beings exist at the stages of existence just described; just as they stand above us, so are they realities. Now, their reality is not at all distant from earthly existence, but rather intervenes in it, influencing our human existence. We must now ask ourselves: How do these beings, who stand above humanity, influence our human existence? If we wish to understand this influence, we must take into account that such beings, so to speak, present a different spiritual aspect in their work than those beings we today call human beings. There is indeed a considerable difference between these beings that stand above humanity and those beings that are currently only at the human stage. As strange as this may sound now, it will become completely clear to you over the course of the next few days. This is, after all, spoken from genuine spiritual research: Humanity, as it is today, is, so to speak, in an intermediate state of its existence. Just as his ego works on his lower members today, it will not always remain so. The entire human being is, as it were, coherent within itself today, and it forms, as it were, an entity uninterrupted by anything. This may change in the future of human development, and it will change significantly. Once human beings have reached the point where they can work on their astral body with full consciousness and, together with their ego, transform this astral body into the spiritual self or manas, then a state similar to the one that now exists in the unconscious or subconscious of human beings during sleep will be present in full consciousness. Imagine the state of sleep in human beings. In the state of sleep, the human being withdraws from their physical body and etheric body in relation to their astral body and ego; they leave them lying in bed and then float, as it were, outside the physical and etheric bodies. Now imagine the human being in this state such that consciousness awakens: “I am an I”—that it awakens in this spiritual body just as it is in the waking state of consciousness. What a strange sight the human being would present to themselves at that moment! He would feel in one place: “There I am,” and perhaps down there, far away from that first place: “There is my physical body and my etheric body; they are in that place and they belong to me, but I, with my other limbs, am floating outside, up there.” When a person today becomes conscious in his astral body, outside his physical and etheric bodies, then he can indeed—even if he is, so to speak, highly developed on Earth today—do nothing other than move freely here or there in his astral body and can act independently of his physical body here or there in the world; but he cannot yet do this with his physical and etheric bodies. But in the distant future, it will also be possible to guide them from a place in northern Europe, for example, from the outside to another place, commanding them: “Go on!” and then directing their movement from the outside. That is not yet possible today. But human beings will be able to do this once they have evolved beyond the stage of Earth’s development to the Jupiter stage, the next stage of development for our Earth planet. That will also be the next stage of human development. We will then feel that we will, so to speak, be our own conductor from the outside. That is the essential point. And this leads to a division of what we have today called the human being. Materialistic consciousness, however, cannot make much of this. It cannot grasp that which is already, in a certain sense, actively present in the external world today in a manner similar to how it will one day be present in the human being. Such phenomena already exist today. People could perceive them if they paid attention. They would then see that there are certain beings who, for example, have developed in this way too early. Just as the human being, by waiting for the right moment, will reach the Jupiter state at the right time so that he can guide his physical and etheric bodies, so there are also beings who, in a certain sense, have developed prematurely without having waited for the right moment. We find such prematurely developed beings in our bird world, specifically in those beings of the bird world that undertake the great migrations across the Earth every year. Here it is the so-called group soul that is connected to the etheric body of each bird. Just as the group soul directs the regular migrations of the birds across the Earth, so will the human being, after having developed his spiritual self or Manas, command what we call the physical and etheric bodies, give them orders, and set them in motion. In an even higher sense, the human being will be able to direct these, to set them in motion from the outside, once he has developed to the point where he also acts transformatively with regard to the etheric or life body. Such beings who are already capable of this exist today. These are the Archangeloi or Archangels. These are beings who can already do what human beings will one day be able to do, beings who can accomplish what might be called “directing their etheric and physical bodies from the outside,” but who can also work on their own etheric bodies.

[ 14 ] Imagine, as a concept, beings that are active, so to speak, in the vicinity of our Earth, who are contained within the spiritual atmosphere of our Earth along with their I, and who, from this I of theirs, have already transformed their astral body, so that they possess a fully developed spiritual self or Manas, but who now continue to work on our Earth with this fully developed spiritual self or Manas and work into human beings by transforming our etheric or life body; beings who stand at the stage where they transform the etheric or life body into Buddhi or life spirit. If you imagine such beings, who thus stand at the level of the spiritual hierarchies that we call Archangels, you have a concept of what is called “national spirits,” what is called the guiding national spirits of the Earth. The national spirits belong to the level of the Archangeloi or Archangels. We shall see how they, in turn, direct the etheric or life body, and how they thereby influence humanity once more and involve it in their own activity. When we consider the various peoples of our Earth and single out individual ones, we will find in the unique fabric and life of these peoples—in what we call their special, characteristic qualities—a reflection of what we may regard as the mission of the national spirits.

[ 15 ] When we recognize the mission of these beings—who are the inspirers of peoples—then we can define what a people is. A people is a cohesive group of human beings led by one of the Archangels. The individual members of a people receive inspiration from this source for what they do as members of the people, for what they accomplish as members of the people. By imagining that these national spirits are individually distinct, just as human beings on our Earth are, we will find it understandable that the various groups of peoples are the individual missions of these Archangels. If we mentally visualize how, in world history, one people after another and also one people alongside another works, then we can now—at least in abstract form (the form will become more and more concrete in the coming lectures)—imagine that everything that is taking place there is inspired by these spiritual beings. But one thing will likely come to mind quite easily: that alongside this interplay of one people with another, something else is taking place in human evolution. If you survey the period of time we count from the great Atlantean catastrophe—which altered the face of the Earth so profoundly that the continent that once existed between present-day Africa, America, and Europe was submerged at that time—you can distinguish the periods in which the great peoples were active, from which the post-Atlantean cultures emerged: the ancient Indian, the Persian, the Egyptian-Chaldean, the Greek-Latin, and our present culture, which will eventually transition into the sixth cultural epoch. We also observe that various national inspirers have successively been active within them. We know that the Egyptian-Chaldean culture continued to exert its influence long after the Greek culture had already begun, and that the Greek culture continued to prevail even after the Roman culture had already begun. Thus we can view the peoples side by side and one after another. But in everything that develops within and alongside the peoples, something else is also developing. It is progress in human development. It does not matter whether we regard one as higher or lower. One might say, for example: I like Indian culture best. That may be a personal judgment. But anyone who does not swear by personal judgments will say: It is irrelevant how we evaluate things; the necessary course leads humanity forward, even if one later calls it decline. Necessity drives humanity forward. If we compare the different periods—5000 years before Christ, 3000 years before Christ, and 1000 years after Christ—then there is still something that transcends the national spirits, something in which the various national spirits participate. You need only consider this in our own time. How is it that so many people can sit together in this hall, coming from the most diverse national regions, and understand one another and strive to understand one another regarding the most important thing that has brought them together here? These different people come from the realm of the most diverse national spirits, and yet there is something in which they understand one another. In a similar way, the various peoples understood one another and were able to understand one another in those days, because in every age there is something that transcends the national soul, that can bring the various national souls together—something that is understood more or less everywhere. This is what is referred to by the rather poor but common German term “Zeitgeist” or “spirit of the age.” The spirit of the epoch, the Zeitgeist, is different in the Greek era than it is in our own. Those who grasp the spirit of our time are drawn toward theosophy. This is what transcends the individual national spirits from the spirit of the epoch. In the time when Christ Jesus appeared on Earth, his forerunner, John the Baptist, described the spirit that could be called the Zeitgeist with the words: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

[ 16 ] Thus, one can find the spirit of the age for every epoch, and this is something that is woven into the weaving of the national spirits, which we have simultaneously characterized as the weaving of the Archangels. For today’s materialistic human being, the Zeitgeist is something entirely abstract and devoid of reality, and one must certainly not suggest to them that the Zeitgeist is a true being. Nevertheless, behind the word “Zeitgeist” lies a real being, none other than one that stands three levels above the human level. Behind it lie those beings who already passed through their human stage on ancient Saturn, the most distant epoch of Earth’s development, and who today, from the spiritual sphere surrounding the Earth, are working on the transformation of the Earth, thereby undergoing, so to speak, the final phase of the transformation of their physical body into a spiritual human being or Atma. We are dealing here with high beings, with beings whose qualities might make a human feel dizzy. These are the beings we might again describe as the actual inspirers—or, to use technical terms of occultism in this context, the intuitors of the spirit of the age or the spirits of the age. They work in such a way that they take turns, passing the baton, as it were, from one to the other. From epoch to epoch, they pass their task on to one another. The spirit of the epoch that was active during the Greek period passes the mission on to the one who acts later, and so on. They thus take turns. As we have seen, there are a number of such time spirits, such spirits of personality, who act as the spirit of the age. These spirits of personality, these intuitors of the spirit of the age, occupy a higher rank than the national spirits. In every age, one acts preeminently and gives that age its overall character, assigning its tasks to the national spirits, so that what constitutes the collective spirit of the epoch becomes specialized and individualized through the national spirits. Then, in the coming epoch, it is succeeded by another spirit of the age, another spirit of personality, another archetype.

[ 17 ] Once a certain number of epochs have passed, a spirit of the age has undergone further development. We must imagine it this way: When we die in our own time and have completed our development here, our personality passes on the results of this earthly life to the next. The same is true of the spirits of the age. In every epoch we have such a spirit of the epoch; at the end of the epoch, it hands over its office to its successor, who in turn hands it over to his next successor, and so on. In the meantime, the previous ones undergo their own development; then it is the turn of the one who has been absent the longest, so that in a later epoch, while the others are undergoing their own development, he returns as the spirit of the epoch and, intuiting what he himself has acquired for his higher mission, instills it into humanity. We look up to these spirits of personality, to these beings who can be named with the otherwise so meaningless word “zeitgeist,” so that we can say: We humans go from incarnation to incarnation; but we know quite precisely that, as we ourselves move from epoch to epoch, as we look into the future, ever-changing zeitgeists govern the events of our Earth. But our present-day Zeitgeist will also return; we will encounter it again. Because of this characteristic of these spirits of personality—that they, as it were, describe circles and return to their starting points, that they describe cycles—because of this characteristic, they are also called “spirits of the cycles.” — We will have to justify this expression more precisely. — So these higher spiritual beings, who issue their commands to the national spirits, are also called spirits of the cycles. This refers to those cycles that human beings themselves must go through, in which, from epoch to epoch, they return in a certain sense to earlier states and repeat them in a higher form. Now you see, this repetition of the characteristics of earlier forms—you may notice this. If you examine the development of the stages of humanity on Earth in a spiritual-scientific sense, you will find these repeated events in the most varied ways. For instance, there is a repetition in the fact that, so to speak, seven epochs follow one another after the Atlantean catastrophe, which we call the post-Atlantean cultural stages. The Greco-Latin stage or cultural epoch forms, so to speak, the turning point in our cycle and therefore does not undergo a repetition. This is followed by the repetition of the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch, specifically in our own time. This will be followed by another epoch, which will be a repetition of the Persian period, albeit in a somewhat different form, and then the seventh epoch will come, which will be a repetition of ancient Indian culture, the epoch of the holy Rishis, so that in this epoch certain things that were laid the foundation for back then will emerge in a different form. The guidance of these events is the responsibility of the spirits of the age.

[ 18 ] That what progresses from epoch to epoch is now lived out across the Earth among various peoples; that the most diverse forms are shaped from this or that soil, grow out of this or that linguistic community, out of this or that formal language, out of architecture, art, and science, and that they can take on all these metamorphoses and are capable of absorbing everything that the spirit of the epoch can instill in humanity—for this we need the national spirits, who belong to the archangels in the hierarchy of higher beings. Now we still need a mediation between the higher mission of the national spirits and those beings who are to be inspired by them here on Earth. You will easily be able to recognize, initially in abstract form, that the mediators between these two kinds of spirits are the hierarchy of angels. They form the mediating link between the national spirit and the individual human being. So that the human being may take into himself what the national spirit is to instill in the entire people, so that the individual human being may become an instrument in the mission of the people—this requires this mediation between the individual human being and the archangel of the people.

[ 19 ] Thus we have looked up to the beings who became human three stages before the earthly human reached the human stage, and have seen how they position themselves within humanity through their consciousness and intervene in our earthly evolution. Tomorrow we shall have to show to what extent the work of the archangels from above, from their I, which has already developed the Manas or spiritual self and works on the etheric body or life body of the human being, manifests itself precisely in the productions, in the qualities, and in the character of a people. In this work of the higher beings, the human being stands within it; it immediately surrounds the human being in that, as a member of a people, he is placed within it. The human being is, of course, first and foremost a human individuality, a manifestation of an I-ness; but then he is not only an individuality but also a member of a people, and thus something for which he, as a human individuality, is initially not responsible. What can a human being, by belonging to a particular people, do about the fact that he speaks precisely the language of that people? This is not an individual achievement; nor does it belong to what we call individual progress; it is the riverbed into which he is received. What we call human progress is something entirely different. As we see the national soul being woven and lived, we will recall what human progress consists of and what a human being needs in order to move through it. We will see what belongs, so to speak, not only to his development but also to the development of entirely different entities.

[ 20 ] Thus we see how human beings are integrated into the hierarchy, and how, in their development from time to time, from epoch to epoch, beings whom we know from the other side play an active role. And we have seen how it is ensured that these beings can express themselves in the most diverse individual ways, and have seen that what they have to offer can be absorbed into human beings.

[ 21 ] The overarching principles of each epoch are shaped by the spirit of the times. The spread of the spirit of the times across the entire globe is made possible by the individual national characters. While the spirits of the age empower the national spirits, the angels ensure that these can flow into individual human beings, so that individual human beings can fulfill their mission. The fact that individual human beings become instruments in this mission of the national spirits is brought about by the beings who stand between human beings and the national spirits—the angels or Angeloi.

[ 22 ] How this marvelous network will reveal to us the workings of the manifold national individualities of the past and the present will be one of the subjects of these lectures. In the next lecture, we will begin to shed light on the concrete details of how this fabric—which we have only sketched out today—is woven, the spiritual fabric that is our next worldly existence.