The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In our previous studies I have tried to show that a meaning, a wisdom-filled guidance, exists in the historical evolution of mankind that can only be discovered when ones digs deeper into spiritual foundations. I endeavored to bring this especially to your attention yesterday, and for some weeks I have sought to present it with various concrete examples. People in general live within their age in such a way as to let events come upon them, causing happiness or unhappiness, joy or sorrow; they derive their inner experiences from the impulses of the age. In a certain respect, they also reflect upon things. But their meditating upon what happens does not signify much because the spiritual development of our age is not fitted for a full penetration into the causes that hold sway spiritually behind the phenomena.

Now, as I have pointed out to you, he who goes deeply into the events of the time should continually bear in mind that with so-called civilized humanity's present-day thinking and feeling, the social order can only be maintained for a few more decades. A reshaping of sentiment and thinking is essential to mankind, a transformation of many ideas, perceptions, feelings and will impulses; spiritual science is ready to contribute its share toward the comprehension of such a renewal.

Official history today is really of little help in making a man understand why the things that go on around him are as they are. For the most part, official history does not desire to look into the inner growth of things, but instead registers what happens externally and, in what might be called the simplest and most convenient manner, always considers what has happened earlier to be the cause of what follows. But when one traces things back to their causes in the simple, easygoing way that modern history largely employs, one comes to positive absurdities. Ultimately, one would have to come to the opinion that the greatest part—yes, perhaps even the most widespread part of what happens—owes its existence not to sense, but to absurdity. If the full consequences of the views that people are so prone to entertain in our time were examined logically, one would have to admit that there is not sense, but nonsense in history. Let us take an example that everyone who studies ordinary history can see for himself.

Let us consider, for instance, the origin of the orthodox English denomination, the Anglican Church, to which many people belong; let us seek its external historical origin. Well, we shall find that Henry VIII reigned from 1509 to 1547, and that he had six wives. The first, Catherine of Aragon, was divorced from him and, considered quite externally, this divorce played a great historical role. The second, Anne Boleyn, he beheaded. The third, Jane Seymour, died. The fourth, he divorced. The fifth, Katherine Howard, he also beheaded. Only the sixth survived him and, if one investigates history further, it will be found that that was really only through a sort of mistake! A different fate was planned for her, too. I refer to his somewhat complicated matrimonial history of Henry VIII, who, as stated, reigned from 1509 to 1547, less for its historical content than in order to lead up to a consideration of his character. One can really gain some idea of a person's character if one knows that he has had two wives beheaded, been divorced from a certain number, and so on.

Now, taken purely historically, the divorce of the first, Catharine of Argon, played a definitely significant role; one need only look at two events to see this. The first was that Henry VIII, the Defender of the Faith, as he called himself, that is, of the Catholic faith emanating from Rome, became the opponent of the Pope because he refused to annul the marriage. Henry became the opponent of the Pope, of the Catholic Church issuing its orders from Rome, and simply on his own authority and power separated the English Church from the Roman Catholic Church. Thus, a kind of Reformation took place that was of a quite individualistic nature since the old customs, ceremonies and rituals were preserved. It was not the cause, as it was with the Protestants, that a renewal had been sought from a real spiritual basis and spiritual force. Everything of an ecclesiastical nature was preserved, but the Church in England was to be cut off from the Roman Catholic Church simply because the Pope had refused to sanction Henry VIII's divorce. Thus, in order to obtain a different wife, this man founded a new church for his people that has existed ever since.

So we have the outer historical fact that many millions of people have lived throughout a long period in a religious communion because a king's divorce could only be brought about through his creating this religious body! This a fact of external history. Is it not an absurdity? When one looks at the matter more closely, then another absurdity is added, a real inner absurdity, because it cannot be denied that many thousands of people, since the divorce of Henry VIII and the founding of the English Church, have found really deep, inner religious life within the communion that originated in such a questionable manner. This implies that something can arise in history through a most questionable procedure, and the ensuing fruits can bring—and have, in fact, brought—the greatest inner healing of soul to many thousands of people. One must only follow things to a certain conclusion. As a rule, one skims over things in their development but if one will observe their consequences, it will be clear that, when we look at facts from the point of view that is held today, we arrive at all sorts of absurdities.

I have spoken of one fact that emerged, but we must record yet another—the execution of Sir Thomas More, that most significant and gifted pupil of Pico della Mirandola. He it was who wrote Utopia, a wonderful work in which, out of a kind of visionary perception, he created the idea of a social relationship among men. I cannot enlarge on this today but another time it may be pursued further. One sees how this pupil of Pico della Mirandola, Thomas More, created in his book, from a certain atavistic clairvoyance, a picture of the social order. Let the people who are so clever think as they will of the practicality of this picture; ingenuity and impulses of genius live in it.

Although such a picture is not immediately practicable in the outer world, yet it is precisely for such pictures that Johann Gottlieb Fichte's words hold good regarding social and other ideals that have been set up for humanity. He observed how again and again people say, “Well, here come thinkers, preaching all sorts of ideals, but they are impractical men; one cannot make use of their ideals!” In response to such objections, Fichte said, “That these ideals are not directly applicable in real life is known to us, too, just as well as to those who make such objections—perhaps better. But we also know that, if life is truly to advance, it must be continually shaped according to such ideals. People who do not want to know anything of such ideals show nothing more than that in the evolution of humanity they are not to be counted upon. So may the good God grant them rain and sunshine at the right time and, if possible, food and drink and a good digestion also, and, if it can be done, good thoughts, too, from time to time!” So says Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and with justice. It is, after all, mankind's ideals that find realization in the world, although other forces and other impulses work together with them; the ideals do not always work directly, but indirectly.

Through the influence of Henry VIII, however, many charges were brought against Thomas More, and he was executed. It is precisely in such an execution and in the creation of the English Church, that we can see two events that must be observed more closely if we wish to know them in their deeper meaning. One can understand why this particular evolution took the course it did only when one considers outstanding individuals who appeared in the years following the time of Henry VIII and his activities.

Let us first consider the fact that a religious body was created in order to bring about a divorce. As already stated, that need not have any particular consequences for the individual if he be religiously inclined. He can find his salvation, and many have, even within a church so founded. But with regard to the religious question in historical evolution since that time, we see, in fact, that through this external creation of a religious communion something quite extraordinary has been brought about. In order to understand this, we must note what has proceeded by way of spiritual impulse from the civilization into which this religious body has been placed. Viewing matters objectively, we must be clear that after the spiritual influences coming from the southwest began to decline, cultural influences coming from England continually increased. The influence of English spiritual culture became ever stronger, first in the West and then on the entire European continent. If one wishes to speak of the strongest influences working in a spiritual sense in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe, one must naturally have in mind the impulses proceeding from England. Certain people appear within English civilization who are inspired by this cultural impulse; persons also appear in France in whom these cultural impulses live.

There arose in England, for example, the extraordinarily influential philosopher, Locke. Today, it is true that not many people know anything about him, but the influences of such men nevertheless go through thousands of cultural channels unknown to external life. Locke had an immense influence on Voltaire, who influenced European thinking greatly. This influence goes back to Locke. How much has directly come to pass under what we may call the Locke-Voltaire influence! How many thoughts would not have spread over Europe if this Locke-Voltaire influence had never existed. What a different part political and social life in Europe would have played if the European soul had not been fed such thoughts. In France, for instance, we see these same impulses live on in the immensely influential Montesquieu. If we then look to wider intellectual influences on the continent, we see how through Hume, and later on through Darwin, human thinking is revolutionized. Again we see, as through Locke and Voltaire, so also through Hume and Darwin, that an immense influence is exercised. And there is Karl Marx, the founder of modern socialism, whose influence cannot as yet be evaluated by the self-styled “cultivated” people because it exists so widely. When Marx began to study and to write his fundamental work, Capital, he went to England. To be sure, Hegelism lived in Marx, but a Hegelism colored by Darwinism. One who studies the constitutions of the different European countries in the nineteenth century and their constitutional conflicts, will realize how profound was the influence of the cultural impulses coming from England. All this can only be indicated here.

If, however, we now turn our minds to the outstanding personalities who give Europe a certain configuration, we find in all of them a specially developed, abstract rationalistic thinking that makes an excellent instrument for research in, and for learning to know and deal with, the physical world. In Locke and Voltaire, in Montesquieu and also in Hume and Darwin, in everything dependent on them, a faculty lives that is transmitted to European thinking and feeling, so that even those who know nothing of it are still deeply influenced by it. This faculty creates a kind of thinking that is peculiarly fitted to understand and deal with the materialistic relations of the world, and to create social orders that arise from materialistic connections.

Now we see a certain concomitant phenomenon that appears in all these thinkers and is emphatically not without significance. They are keen and at times brilliant thinkers, penetrating minds with respect to material matters, but they are all thinkers who take a peculiar stand toward man's religious evolution, definitely refusing to apply thinking to the sphere of religious life. Not one of them—neither Locke, nor Hume, nor Darwin, nor Montesquieu—is willing to apply thinking to what he considers to be concerns of the religious life. But neither do they dispute this religious life. They accept it in the form in which it has developed historically. To them, it was commonly accepted that one is Catholic or Protestant just as one is French or English. This means that one accepts it as something that is there; one does not criticize; one adapts oneself to it and lets it stand. But neither does one allow the subject to be broached in thought. Such energetic and keen thinkers as Hume and Montesquieu feel that the religious life should stand and be recognized in external life, but the discrimination that one employs to the full in material things should not be allowed to enter into matters concerning the spiritual sphere.

This is a direct historical consequence of the callous organization of the religion of England by Henry VIII. That is the inner meaning of the matter. This mood, which is poured out over countless European impulses, is dependent on the fact that a certain religious body was created through a man's desire for a divorce—a matter of indifference to everyone. A matter of indifference, a man's wish to be divorced, stands at the source and results in a mood in which one does not concern oneself with these affairs, but rather lets them stand for generations, centuries. This way of thinking about religious matters could only have come about through such an historical event standing at the beginning. Only when one views things from the inner aspect does one find the right connection.

Now for the other event, the execution of Thomas More that took place in 1535. Here, for various reasons, a man is executed who sees into the spiritual world, although in distorted, caricatured form. He is executed. I cannot go into the inner reasons today, but externally it is because he does not join those who take the Oath of Supremacy; that is, does not recognize the separation of the English Church from Rome. Such a man goes over into the spiritual world. The soul has thus left the physical body after having already had, while still in that physical body, deep insight into the spiritual world. This remains; it lives on further in the world as cause. What Thomas More had perceived of the spiritual world while in the physical body remains so closely united with him when he passes with his soul through the gate of death, that he can, through this circumstance, exercise a great influence upon the age that follows.

So these two streams work together. An external one, which I have described, that is apathetic toward the religious life, though full of an apparently orthodox recognition of it, and a soul that has grown powerful because, in the physical body, it has experienced the super-sensible and allows it to radiate out over succeeding evolution. It streamed into the other spiritual atmosphere I described about eight days ago (Lecture VI). The spiritual atmosphere from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries is, as we know, also permeated by the impulses that have arisen through the persecution and death of the Knights Templar.

Founded in 1119, the Knights Templar were first active in the Crusades. Then they spread out toward Europe, and through special circumstances many of them became victims of the avarice, the gold avarice, of Philip the Fair. I have described this to you, as I said, but let us see once more how these Knights were sacrificed. Let us turn our attention again to what we presented from the actual course of events, namely, that countless numbers of these Knights were tortured after having previously experienced a Christian initiation through the principles and impulses living in the Templar Order. Let calumnies assert what infamous things they please of the Knights Templar; that these were not true can be proved from history. Exceptions, of course, exist everywhere, but in essence the calumnies are not true. What was inculcated in the Templar Order was this, that each member of the Order should realize that his blood did not belong to himself but to the task of familiarizing Western mankind—and to some extent Eastern also—with the Mystery of Golgotha in the spiritual sense. What streamed to the Knights from this devotional mood toward the Mystery of Golgotha changed gradually into a kind of Christian initiation, so that a great number of them could actually see to some extent into the spiritual worlds. Through this power, however, they were exposed to quite special danger when their consciousness was dulled through the agonies of torture, as happened in hundreds of cases. Their consciousness was darkened through the torture; their day-consciousness was crippled and a subconscious was aroused. All the temptations to which one who strives toward such spiritual heights is exposed came to expression on the rack. So it came to pass as Philip the Fair had foreseen; in his own way he had a touch of genius, inspired by avarice and covetousness, as I have described. It came to pass that a great number of Knights admitted, in a subconscious state, not only the extraordinary charge of denying the Christian religion and the Mystery of Golgotha, an admission which, arising from their temptations, was understandable, but they also accused themselves of other crimes. A certain number afterward recanted when they were released from the rack and consciousness returned; others could not recant. In short, fifty-four of them met with a cruel death, including the Head of the Order, Jacques de Molay.

Souls thus passed through the gates of death who had not only looked into the progressive spiritual world in waking consciousness by having attained a Christian initiation and beheld the secrets of the Mystery of Golgotha, but who also knew something of evolution and could work into it by having learned to know those forces opposing human effort that spoke through their lips on the rack when they, in innocence, had accused themselves of crimes. These horrible and terrible experiences assumed an appropriate form when these souls were in the spiritual world. I have already related how, after these souls had gone through the gate of death, impulses streamed from them that would then work further in the super-sensible impulses from the fifteenth century on into our time. The inspiration living in different gifted personalities comes, if one observes its real cause, from the fact that souls were carried up into the spiritual world having first experienced what Philip the Fair had subjected them to before they died.

This has all been a preparation for the time in which we are now living. These causes, and many others, would first have to be described if one would fully understand among what thoughts a man born since then has been placed. What flowed out of the events I have recorded lived in everything; one can prove that by actual history. I will only refer to one instance, but I could point to many. In the age of which I speak, a most powerfully effective educational book, Robinson Crusoe, was produced. One need only think how the ideas living in this book become familiar to the tenderest, earliest age of childhood. This book has not only gone through hundreds of editions in its original form and has been translated into all languages, but it has been recreated in every possible tongue. There are not only Bohemian, Hungarian, Spanish, French, German, Polish and Russian, but also other translations. In all these languages there are new creations in the spirit of Defoe. What lives in it, how souls are moulded by it, is generally never considered at all. All of Robinson Crusoe would have been unthinkable if it had not been preceded by those events I have related.

All these things have their inner connections, and this is true down to the actual details. Today, a man walks from one street in the city to another on some business or other. At most, if he thinks of it at all, he only thinks of the immediate cause. The fact that he would not take this walk nor have this business if everything I have just mentioned had not come about before, is not considered at all. In general, inner connections are but little observed. I have often called attention to how seldom people are inclined to turn their minds to inner connections. For instance, a man who looks at things quite externally may perhaps sometimes wonder who built the St. Gotthard tunnel. Tunnels are not built nowadays unless certain calculations are made in differential calculus. The St. Gotthard was not only built by those who laid stone on stone, but without the calculus it would not have been built at all. The solitary thinker, Leibniz, devised the differential calculus; thus, he was a co-builder. All this is part of it. I am only saying this for the purposes of elucidation; the example in itself does not tell us much; it is only to make things clear.

Our age stands under all these influences—the thinking and the entire configuration of our age—that I have sought to characterize. Now one definite peculiarity is to be emphasized for this age. According to prevalent belief, it stands, not only with both feet, but also with hands and, in fact, the whole body, within reality. It is the pride, not to say the arrogance, of our age that people believe they are standing deep in reality. They are immensely proud of it. But as a later age will show, as regards thought, our age is by no means rooted in reality; it is far less so than was an earlier age. What will a later age teach? Well, it will naturally not deny that our age has produced great thoughts and achievements. The Copernican world conception makes its appearance; Galileo creates modern physics; Kepler modern astronomy; we have galvanic, voltaic electricity appearing, with all that grows out of it; we have the steam age, and so forth. Thus, the thoughts that have been formed in this age are striking; they are grand. Over and over again people emphasize, though they may not express it in the same words, how conscious they are that we have made such fine progress, in contrast to the silly superstitions of people in earlier ages. In short, men are entirely convinced that Copernicus, for example, finally established the fact that the sun stands still, or perhaps has a movement of its own. In any case, it does not move around the earth every twenty-four hours, but the earth itself revolves, and also moves around the sun in the course of the year, etc. These things are well known. They are understood today as if man had finally cast off the ancient superstition of the Ptolemaic world conception and had set truth in place of the former error. Earlier humanity believed all sorts of stupid things because it trusted its senses. The men of more recent times, however, have at last arrived at seeing that the sun is in the center and Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn move in ellipses around it—Uranus and Neptune being further out. At last, one knows this. At last, one knows that in the course of the year the earth revolves around the sun, and so on. In fact, one has made wonderfully fine progress!

We are no longer far distant from the time in which we will understand what all this means. The true reality was of no consequence at all to the spiritual powers upon whom Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo were dependent; it was rather to bring definite faculties into the human head. What matters is the education of mankind through the education of the earth.

Thus, mankind has to be obliged for a time to think in this way about the cosmos in order to be educated in a certain way through thoughts. It is with this that the wise guidance of the world is concerned. If one should begin to look at the matter spiritually—not merely externally, mathematically or physically as Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and especially their successors have done—one would come to yet other remarkable things. One will say, “Good, now we have a physical cosmic system; when we study it we must, as we know, calculate it and treat it geometrically as is taught today in practically every elementary school.” But spiritually, things are otherwise. You see, to an observer able to behold the spiritual, the following is presented, for example. He comes upon a certain movement of the sun; it takes this course.

Seen from a certain point of view, it is the sun's course; but when I draw this line here and bring the sun back again, the point does not fall exactly on the earlier point; it lies somewhat above it. This is a real movement of the sun that can be perceived spiritually.

But the earth, too, makes certain movements in the course of a year. Observed spiritually, it describes this orbit.

You must picture it in three dimensions. If you picture the orbit of the sun lying in a plane, then the orbit of the earth lies in this plane—seen, that is, from the side. If here is the orbit of the sun drawn as a line the earth orbit is so:

But, as you see from this, there is a point in the cosmos, where the sun and the earth are both together, but at not the same time. When the sun is there on its path, or rather has left this point by a quarter of its path, the earth begins its movement at the point that the sun has left. After a certain time we are, in fact, on the spot in cosmic space where the sun was; we follow the sun's path, cross it and are, at a certain time of the year, at the very place where the sun has been. Then the sun and earth go forward and after a time the earth is again practically at the spot where the sun was. Together with the earth, we actually pass in space through the spot where the sun has been. We sail through it. We not only sail through it, however, because the sun leaves behind results of its activity in the space it has traversed, so that the earth enters into the imprints left behind by the sun and crosses them—really crosses them. Space has living content, spiritual content, and the earth enters and crosses, sails through, what the sun has called forth.

You see, this is how the matter looks spiritually. Spiritually one must draw lines like these when one thinks of the orbits of earth and sun. There is a similar relationship with the other planets, too. At certain times we are approximately at the places where Mercury was, etc. The planets carry out quite complicated movements in universal space, and they enter into the imprints of each other. We have now the external picture, the purely geometrical picture. The other picture will be added, and only from a combination of the two will a later humanity attain the concept it must have.

You see, I am now telling you these things, but imagine for a moment that you relate what I have said to an astronomer. He would say, “Someone has lost his senses, has gone mad, to present such things. They are out of the question.” But it was not so long ago that the members of a famous Academy of Science also said, when meteoric stones that fall to the earth were spoken of, “That is a senseless statement!” This happened not at all long ago; many similar things could be recorded. Today, in orthodox physics, one recognizes the so-called law of the conservation of energy as something fundamental. The first to speak of it, Julius Robert Mayer, was confined in a madhouse. One could, of course, relate hundreds of such stories. But the point is this, that you see from what I have told you—I have given it only as an example—how the nature of thinking in astronomical fields, that wonderfully effective thinking from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, has had rather the faculty of bringing men away from reality. Men do not at all stand, as they believe, with both feet, both hands and the body in the real, but they give themselves up to the most fantastic ideas and imagine these to be reality. Men had to be educated like this in these centuries. They had to give themselves up to fantastic ideas about outer nature so that they might not be merged in the external events in the old way, but that, by virtue of these fantastic ideas, they might all the more obtain a feeling of the inner ego. This feeling has been greatly intensified in men during the last few centuries precisely through these fantastic materialistic ideas. That had to happen; the feeling of the ego had at some time to be engendered in the development of mankind's history. I have chosen an astronomical example, but it could be shown in every sphere how human evolution followed a course in the centuries just past that drew man away from true reality.

Now you will ask if men have known of such things as this, that together with the earth we enter the tracks of the sun, that twice in the year we are where the sun has been operative in space. Have men ever known anything of this? Yes, they have known it before, and it can even be easily proved historically that they knew it. Imagine that a man knows, really knows, that at a certain time in the course of the year the earth on its path so crosses the sun's path that the earth enters into the tracks of the sun and follows it. The reverse comes about when the earth turns back again toward the other side. The first time it is as if the sun descended below the earth's path, and the second, as if the sun ascended and the earth's path were underneath. The first time, the human being moves up with the earth above the sun's path, finding the traces of the sun by ascending; the other time, he moves down and passes under the traces of the sun. What can the man say who knows this and who also possesses the means to confirm it? He is able to know that now, at the point where the earth's path crosses the sun's path, he is passing through the place where the sun has stood. What could such a man say? He could say that this is a specially important time for us because we are at the place where the sun has been. This is expressed in the spiritual atmosphere and one meets the picture that the sun has left behind in the ether. Here, at this point in time, one establishes a festival! The ancient mysteries celebrated two such festivals of which but faint memories still remain in those of today, though the connection is no longer known. Please do not understand this as if I wished to give the actual point in time, but in the ancient mysteries it was known when we cross the sun's path and find in the ether the sun's content that has remained behind. In the time of such knowledge it was right for special festivals to be established at definite times of the year.

With the knowledge of today men are separated from these connections. Nor will they respect these things much since they say, “Well, what good is it to me if I do know that I am on the same spot that the sun was on? Of what use is that to me?” That is how modern man would speak. But the ancient Egyptians, for instance, did not speak in that way in their mysteries. On the fifteenth day of that month when they knew that the earth is passing through the point the sun has left, they interrogated the priestess of Isis, who had been prepared in the sanctity of the Temple. They knew that through the special spiritual preparation that this priestess could undertake, she could bring to light what can be experienced when one passes through the aura of the sun, and the priests might write down what they heard from the priestess, for example, “Rainy year, sow seeds at such and such a time...” In short, they were purely practical; that is, things that were important for guiding life in the succeeding year were noted. They lived according to these directions because they knew how the heavens work down into the earth.

This is what they investigated. It was already a time of decline when this science was betrayed by the opponents of the Osiris-Isis cult. The only way they could protect themselves—this external event has again a connection with the Osiris-Isis saga—was henceforth to impart at fourteen different temples what earlier, in ancient Egypt, had been the secret of only one temple. This was the art of living with the course of the year and investigating spiritually the influences on the earth.

The humanity of our age had to break away completely from such a relationship with the heavens because it had the task of finding the path away from the ambiguity of impulses and instincts, and of forming the pure ego. The ego did not act strongly at a time in which men made themselves mere instruments of heavenly activities, nor did it work strongly in the ages when the priest taught his immediate pupils, “There stands the Pleiades. When they are there, we must begin the days of Isis; then we must see that what we learn prophetically is the best way to proceed in the coming year.” They placed themselves as completely within the course of the universe as a cell is incorporated into our organism. Humanity could only become individual, personal, if in a definite epoch it were torn out of this connection, if all these human faculties of spirit that mediated such connections passed into a state of sleep. Thus a sleep regarding the spiritual was prepared, and mankind has slept most deeply in respect of spiritual matters ever since the fourteenth century. It has been a sleeping culture but now the time has come for an awakening.

Do not say, “I wish to criticize Creation and the Creator; why has he let me sleep?” This means putting oneself with one's intellect above cosmic wisdom. During the course of the earth stage, human evolution must go through its sleep periods just as much as the individual man must sleep in the course of twenty-four hours. Spiritual faculties, which is to say, a concept of the world in the sense of these faculties, slept deeply in the centuries indicated. On the other hand, man dreamt of geometrical lines in space; he dreamed the dream of the Copernican, the Galilean and the Darwinian world conception. Man needed this dream, this training, even the illusion of experiencing a special reality through the dream. Ultimately, it is the same with our sleep. In the evening we are tired and we go to sleep. Then we wake up refreshed with an inner feeling of reality. If humanity had developed the ancient spiritual faculties further, if these had not slept, men would have been tired out and would not have reached reality. They came to reality precisely by the fact that in their thinking and reflecting, and also in their social organizations, they had left reality. Because these capacities slept, past centuries have brought renewal and refreshment to mankind. In a certain respect, humanity has even become freer than it was in earlier centuries, and it will have to regain spiritual knowledge—and later spiritual power—in order to progress even further on the path of freedom.

Such things can be known! But again today's true materialist will say, “Well, and what if they are known!” I have, in fact, found materialists who say, “Good gracious, why must I think about the life of the soul after death. I shall see all that when death has arrived. Why need I bother now in the physical body about this life after death?” This seems to be quite plausible, this idea that it would be really unnecessary, here in the physical body, to bother about the super-sensible life. But this is not the case; it was so only in an earlier age when man was not yet ready for freedom. Today, the position is such that certain thoughts can only be grasped by the super-sensible hierarchies if men grasp them here in earthly existence. The gods only think certain thoughts if they live in human bodies. These thoughts must be carried into the spiritual world through the gate of death; only then can they be active. It is truly so; one who will not think about the super-sensible is like a farmer who says to his neighbor, “You are a silly fellow. Every year you put by a certain part of the grain for seed. I only became a farmer this year, but I am not as foolish as you. I shall grind it all, eat it and calmly wait. The grain will certainly grow again by itself.” Such a farmer resembles a person who is not willing to hear that, as well as consuming what we experience in the world, we must also lay aside certain seeds in the soul to guide it along its path in the spiritual worlds. Inasmuch as we pursue the science of the spirit, we are creating the right seeds for the present time. And the science of the spirit must be pursued.

You see from this that our time can become ever more clear to us through the spiritual understanding of its fundamental character and nature. This deepening of our inner faculties that must be striven for in order to come to a more real astronomy, for example, must also be striven for in social thinking. Regarding our thinking, we—or at any rate, most of us—have become as much asleep and dreaming in outer lives as we are in regards to astronomy, for instance, which I chose for an example. In the centuries gone by, and right up to today, very much has become veiled from humanity. Nor will what was present earlier appear again—investigations, for instance, through a priestess of Isis or through the Celtic druidical mysteries in which a priestess was similarly employed. To seek in that way to know about the action here of the spiritual will not recur; much more inward ways will be found, ways much more suited to future humanity. But they must be found.

Now, connect this with something I have already indicated yesterday. Remember that the servant of Osiris prepared the priestess of Isis before the fifteenth of a certain month of the year in order to obtain certain prophetic utterances from her when she traversed the sun-space with her soul. What happened through this Isis cult? What occurred was that actual time—not the abstract time of which we dream today, but actual time, was investigated. The time of year, the point of time, was, in fact, a specially important point, and the point on the return path was again important. How time works—concrete, real time—was expressed through the content of what the Isis priestess had to say. Then, might not the inscription on the Isis image read, “I am the Past, the Present and the Future?” this is the order of time. But only when such prophetic research was penetrated with a noble mood resembling the mood of virginity, when coming near to Isis was symbolized by the fact that Isis wore a veil, only then could one bring forth what was necessary. The whole must be steeped in holiness, in the atmosphere of a sacrifice.

Do not imagine that wisdom was not connected with the practical in those ancient times. What was called wisdom was fully united with practical things. Everything had a practical direction. One investigated the voice of the gods in the Egyptian temples, but the investigations were made in order to know in the right way which days or hours were most suited for sowing. Everything was connected with practical life. One investigated the action of the gods in practical life, and was conscious of how they penetrate it. Indeed, it was necessary that this temple service should be kept holy. What evils could have been committed if it had not been treated as sacred! It must never be asserted that these things that relate to past ages will arise again in the same way. They will arise quite differently. But a knowledge will again be won for humanity that will be directly fitted for entering practical life. A spiritual knowledge—but just because it is spiritual, a practical knowledge—will again appear in which the things around us will be fully mastered. Neither an Isis nor an Osiris cult will appear. Something else will arise that will bear the traces of our having passed through the centuries since the Isis and Osiris cult existed. It will show that the new science of the spirit must be sought with full consciousness and in freedom. But the things that have taken place must be tested a little in their reality. History must be different from what it so often is today, when people merely make researches in documents and records.

One comes, however, upon all sorts of peculiar explanations, like the one I have already given regarding Isis. When there stood as inscription on her image, “I am the Past, the Present and the Future,” one who was initiated knew that this referred to concrete reality and that the veil only expressed a certain attitude of mind. Today, people say of the veiled Isis image at Sais that the veil means that one cannot penetrate behind wisdom, that one will never know who Isis is. But when the inscription, “I am the Past, the Present, and the Future, no mortal hath yet lifted my veil,” stands there, one must explain it as meaning that the veil is not lifted because one only approaches its holiness when veiled as a nun, not because something lies behind it that one cannot know and that cannot be communicated to anyone. If the explanation that people usually give were correct, then one must really compare it with the trivial statement, “I am called Hans Muller, but you will never know my name.” She says indeed who she is—“I am the Past, the Present and the Future”—and this implies that it is for her to impart the Mysteries of Time, while what flows out of Time into Space is to be mediated by the Osiris priest. He is to carry the temporal into the spatial and is to receive in thought what comes from the soul, that is, the Isis revelation that is embedded in the universe and its course.

Today, the science of the spirit is still largely held to be foolish. But when it has really been understood, it will be seen to contain a science much more real than the scientific dream of the past centuries. Quite different practical operations, practical mastery of the outer world, will come to light when the time arrives. It is not yet time today; mankind must first have knowledge and know in the spirit of spiritual science before it can act in the spirit of the science of the spirit.

I wanted to go into this in order to point out precisely at this time how it is only through a true understanding of what has happened that an understanding can also be reached of what has to happen. In the future, humanity must be guided beyond many things with whose karma mankind is heavily burdened in our present grievous and painful times. Today mankind is burdened with the karma of the dream life of the past centuries. This mystery must first be grasped on its depths; then it will be easier to understand our sorrowful present and also to understand how humanity must gradually prepare a different karma for the future.

The cycle of lectures now being published for the first time in English has always presented some difficulties because of the two lectures on the Mexican Mysteries, which form an important part of it. In these lectures Rudolf Steiner provides some historical material that not only cannot be confirmed—like the prehistorical material given in Occult Science and elsewhere—but appears to be even contrary to what is available to conventional archaeologists and historians. In particular, there are two major areas where at first sight Steiner would seem to have been in error, and there appear also to be some errors in detail about the characteristics of some Mexican deities cited by name. It is certain therefore that critics of Rudolf Steiner will cite these anomalies and label them errors, in the process attempting to discredit the kind of spiritual investigation engaged in by him. To the best of my knowledge—which is admittedly not complete—in no other lectures given by Steiner at any time are there any comparable divergences from accepted historical fact. With regard to the other material taken from the Akasha Chronicle it must be said that much of it is startling and of very great interest. But this is impossible to check or confirm from the historical and archeological material available to us, but there is also nothing in the historical record that can be said to refute it.

In view of the fact that these lectures have long been available in German, and some use has been made of them in English language publications such as Carl Stegman's The Other America, it seems necessary now to come to grips with these apparent anomalies or errors. Rudolf Steiner gives the name of Vitzlipochtli to a great initiate of the white path who succeeds in having a powerful black magician crucified at the same period of time when Christ Jesus was crucified on the Hill of Golgotha. This name, as it was transcribed in 1916 in Dornach where the lectures were given, is so close to that of the evil god of the Aztecs some 1300 years later that the two names must be regarded as the same. This evil god (Uitzlipochtli or Huitzlipochtli) required human sacrifices, which were accompanied by the tearing out of the hearts of the victims. Steiner gives a different name to the evil god and says nothing here of the heart, but insists that it was torn out; and he even adds that this continued to be true in the time of the Spanish Conquest at the beginning of the 16th century A.D., for which also all evidence of any kinds is lacking.

It is by no means impossible that all Steiner's statements are perfectly correct, but that evidence is unavailable because of the maintenance of absolute secrecy in such dreadful mystery rites as these. It is also more than possible that a bellicose conquering people changed, over the period of some thirteen centuries, the image of their god man of the period of the Mystery of Golgotha into an evil god of war. In addition, over the same period the tearing out of the stomach (the seat of the will) could have become the tearing out of the heart (the seat of the feeling). It is not necessary for us to be able to prove or confirm what Steiner tells us from the Akasha Chronicle, but it does seem worthwhile trying to show that what he says is not inconsistent with, and not contrary to what is revealed by the very sparse surviving records, literary archeological—and it is entirely fair to stress the many centuries that elapsed between the events referred to by Steiner and the Spanish Conquest when most of the information was assembled by Spanish investigators, who obtained it by questioning the Aztecs of that period.

It was therefore decided to ask Frédéric C. Kozlik, docteur-ès-lettres, an anthroposophist who is familiar with the Mexican historical and archeological material, to write an introduction for these two lectures, mentioning such evidence as he has been able to assemble that may be considered to support Steiner's statements, particularly those that appear to be contrary to what is officially accepted as history, and presenting such arguments as seemed fitting to him to show why it is quite possible even for an erudite scholar to accept what Steiner says in preference to going along with the official history, so often called by Steiner a fable convenue. It may be noted that in an article written subsequent to this introduction Dr. Kozlik suggests that two different rites existed in Mexico, one involving the excision of the heart and the other of the stomach. His article was published in #11 of the Goetheanum News, March 11, 1984.

The introduction which follows was translated by me from his rather dense and packed French that I have in places, with his approval and collaboration, simplified and even paraphrased to make it, as we hope, more readily comprehensible by a non-specialist readership. Dr. Kozlik wishes to make it clear that he is not trying to prove anything that Dr. Steiner said, but only to offer hypotheses consistent both with the evidence and with Steiner's revelations. It will be for the readers themselves to determine how far they are willing to go along with him on the basis of what he has presented.

Colmar, March, 1984

Stewart C. Easton

The lectures of 18th and 24th September, 1916 on pre-Columbian America, to which this introduction is devoted, contain one obvious and central contradiction: on the one hand there is the universally accepted knowledge that on the occasion of human sacrifices it was the heart that was plucked out, while Steiner on the other states clearly that it was the stomach. So in all that follows we shall have two purposes in mind. It is not our intention to make use of all the documents that are available to us, but rather to deal in a precise manner with a few of them which seem to provide some confirmation of Steiner's statements. We shall then conclude by providing the reader with some thoughts of a methodological nature about the study of the oral and visual evidence for pre-Columbian Mexican spirituality.

Before embarking on the subject itself it seems to us to be most important to consider at some length a few of the characteristics of the existing documents. First of all, they are very scarce, and they contain many gaps. The architectural remains, the stonework and crafts in general have provided some substantial information on Middle American culture, whereas the written documents, what we may call in general the conceptual material, is very poor. Three, or possibly four Maya manuscripts survive, which may or may not be correctly deciphered, as against 27 others destroyed by Fray Diego de Landa in 1562, all the documents described for example by Alonso Ponce in 1588, some or all of which he may have seen, together with all those described by José de Acosta in 1590 and Pedro Sanchez de Aguilar in 1639. Most of the manuscripts assembled by later collectors such as the Frenchman Abbé Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg were lost, as well as those destroyed in 1847 during the civil war in Yucatan, the so-called “war of the castes.” Such a total of manuscripts is beyond computation, and to these must be added the numberless chronicles destroyed in Upper Yucatan in 1870.

The Mexican manuscripts in the strict sense of the word have experienced similar vicissitudes, though from a historical viewpoint they were even more spectacular. The fifteen “codices” in our possession, even if we include other texts such as the monumental collection of Sahagun and the Annals of Cuauhtitlan, are only a few remnants of what at one time was a vast corpus. Itzcoatl, the fourth Aztec king (1427-1440) commanded all the documents of the subject peoples to be destroyed, while Juan de Zumarraga, the first bishop of Mexico, was responsible for the auto-da-fe in 1528 of a “small mountain” of manuscripts heaped up by missionaries in the marketplace of Tezcoco.

Even though we examine with the greatest care the few crumbs that remain in the hope of extracting as much information from them as possible, it must be recognized that for purely statistical reasons they cannot provide any kind of a overall panorama of the cultural reality of Mexico in the historical sense of the term. And this remains true even when we take into account also such useful material as is to be gleaned from the iconography of the stonework or general ornamentation, which is necessarily fragmentary. However ingenious those investigators who rely on these documents may be, they will never be able to extract from them what is not there—and there can be no doubt that what is missing is the greatest part of Mexican culture. For this reason it is not logically possible to use this tiny fragment of pre-Columbian history for the purpose of trying to refute the work of a spiritual investigator.

We shall now proceed to a point by point comparison between the indications given by Steiner in his two lectures on the subject, and the various documents that are available. The most important is the Codex Florentin of Sahagun (here abbreviated to Sah.) in the remarkable Anglo-Nahuatl edition of Anderson and Dibble published from 1950 to 1961 by the University of New Mexico at Santa Fe (General History of the Things of New Spain).

Steiner places the original Meso-American mysteries long before the beginning of our era. For this epoch, which covers the pre-classical and probably also the classical periods, all documents are therefore lacking. Moreover, we many easily imagine that the iconography evidence, as for example for the second period of Teotihuacan, will scarcely offer us any indications because of the secret character of this high (if degraded) initiation. It seems hopeless to expect to find external traces of this initiation in view of the fact that most Mexican art was of a public nature, whether employed for the ornamentation of the temples or for such artisinal products as pottery. Since the veil of secrecy regarding initiation could have been lifted only as the result of a betrayal, it is in the highest degree unlikely that anything bearing on it could have survived. And it was precisely at the period we are discussing that the Mysteries reached their highest point, not when the cult of Taotl was in decline. It my well be that there was such a decline after the destruction of the great black magician mentioned by Steiner, and that this was accompanied by the growth of theocracy—for which the architectural and theological vigor of Teotihuacan II and III provides evidence. With regard to objects having an esoteric character and for this reason not public, the case might be different. We shall return to this point later, while always keeping in mind Juan de Zumarraga's boast that he destroyed 20,000 “idols.”

The only indications that it would be reasonable to look for are oral traditions from very much earlier transcribed into the Nahuatl language at a time when such knowledge was no longer forbidden. It is of course a well known fact that the failure to commit oral literature to writing has the effect of preserving it better than when it is, as we say, “fixed” in writing. Even if transmission by word of mouth involves numerous changes, especially in a period when an earlier original spirituality is in decline, nevertheless oral transmission does still contain an inner impulse necessarily lacking in a written document.

Steiner begins by speaking of Taotl:

“Before the discovery of America, there were mysteries of the most varied kind in the western hemisphere. ... Like a single central power whom all followed and obeyed, a kind of spectral spirit was revered. ... This spirit was called by a name that sounded something like Taotl.”

The Florentine manuscript contains in several places the word teutl (e is the vowel preferred by modern scholars) god, or teteuh, gods, in the categorical meaning of the term.

“First Chapter, which telleth of the highest of the gods (teteuh).

“Second Chapter, which telleth of the god (teutl) ...” (Sah. I).

The same word is used by the Aztecs in addressing Cortés: “May the god (in teutl) deign to hear ...” (Sah. XII).

In taking account of Steiner's indications we are faced with a process of abstraction that developed in the course of time, by which the “single central power” spoken of by Steiner and common to all the mysteries has become the collective “concept” of the gods. Such a process extending over thousands of years seems plausible to us.

The second point, which we shall examine, concerns Uitzilopochtli (or Vitzliputzli, as the name was transcribed in Steiner's account). In the lecture of September 18th the words appear: “At a certain time a being was born in Central America who set himself a definite task within this culture. The old ... inhabitants of Mexico ... said that he had entered the world as the son of a virgin, who had conceived him through super earthly powers, inasmuch as it was a feathered being (called in the lecture of 24th September a “bird”) from the heavens who impregnated her.” The later lecture also makes it clear that “Vitzliputzli was a human being, a being who appeared in a physical body.”

So it is a question here of the incarnation of a spiritual being who was not a human being in the usual sense of the term. It was only his incarnation in a physical body that made him similar to men. This corresponds very exactly with what is to be found in the Codex Florentin (Sah. I):

“First Chapter, which telleth of the highest of the gods whom they worshipped ... Uitzilopochtli ... was only a common man ...”

The legend to which Steiner refers forms an integral part of the Codex (Sah. III):

“And once ... feathers descended upon her—what was like a ball of feathers. ... Thereupon by means of them Coatl icue conceived [Uitzilopochtli].”

The following are the principal features of the mission of Uitzilopochtli, as Steiner gives them, in connection with the great initiate of the Toatl cults, whom he does not name:

“At this time in Central America a man was born who was destined by birth to become a high initiate of Taotl ... This was one of the greatest black magicians, if not the greatest ever to tread the earth ...”

“Then a conflict began between this super-magician and the being to whom a virgin birth was ascribed, and one finds from one's research that it lasted for three years. ... The three-year conflict ended when Vitzliputzli was able to have the great magician crucified, and not only through the crucifixion to annihilate his body but also to place his soul under a ban, by this means rendering its activities powerless as well as its knowledge. Thus the knowledge assimilated by the great magician of Taotl was killed.”

The continuation of the legend quoted by Steiner deals with the way Uitzilopochtli came into the world (Sah. III).

“At Coatepec ... there lived a woman named Coatl icue, mother of the Centzonuitznaua. And their elder sister was named Coyolxauhqui ... Coyolxauhqui said to them: ‘My elder brothers, she hath dishonored us. We [can] only kill our mother ...’ And upon this the Centzonuitznaua ... when they had expressed their determination that they would kill their mother, because she had brought about an affront, much exerted themselves ... But one who was named Quauitl icac ... informed Uitzilopochtli [who was not yet born]. And Uitzilopochtli said to Quauitl icac ‘... I already know what I shall do ...’

Then Quauitl icac said to him: ‘... At last they arrive here’ ... And Uitzilopochtli just then was born ... He pierced Coyolxauhqui, and then quickly struck off her head ... And Uitzilopochtli then arose; he pursued, gave full attention to the Centzonuitznaua; he pursued all of them around Coatepetl. Four times he chased them all around ... he indeed destroyed them; he indeed annihilated them; he indeed exterminated them ... And only very few fled his presence.”

It is startling to recognize how well these lines agree with what Steiner has given, and how fifteen centuries of oral tradition have only slightly altered the facts made available by occult investigation. According to Steiner's indications regarding the differences between white and black magic, the latter includes a strong dose of egoism, and permits the magician to investigate his own future for selfish aims (a practice, as Steiner often pointed out, forbidden to true occultists). The legend confirms this element of black magic when it speaks of the foreseeing of the birth of the man who is to fight against the forces of evil, and of the attempt made to prevent his incarnation. This is clearly shown in the dialogue between Quauitl icac and Uitzilopochtli who, though not yet born, is fully conscious of his own mission. The three-year struggle indicated by Steiner has a good correspondence with the four times that the Centzonuitznauas were chased around Coatepetl, before they were finally wiped out. Since the great Taotl initiate would naturally be supported by a powerful troop of helpers all equally devoted to evil, the legend confirms that this was indeed the case when it speaks of how the Centzonuitznaua—i.e., the multitude of the Uitznaua—were “exterminated,” and “very few fled his presence” (i.e., not all), thus confirming that the mysteries continued to exist, even though, as indicated by Steiner, they had lost the greater part of their power.

One further remark on this subject, to be taken into consideration only as a possibility, a hypothesis. Steiner does not indicate the name of the great initiated black magician. The legend, however, is most explicit on the matter. The feminine personage (this would be part of the alteration over the centuries) who was the first to wish to prevent Uitzilopochtli from coming into the world, and who was the first to be killed (pierced, as the legend says, in this suggesting the crucifixion) since she was the principal enemy, is Coyolxauhqui (Coyolli meaning fish-hook and xauhqui meaning adorned or decorated). Might this not be the name, or a corruption of the name of the great black magician? And indeed it may be easily imagined that a personage of this kind did not take part personally in the struggle against Uitzilopochtli and his forces, but was only the inspirer of the war waged by his (her?) troops to preserve his knowledge and power intact against the most deadly of his enemies.

The only real contradiction in our hypothesis results from the reversing of the time sequence. According to Steiner it was at the end of the Three Years' War that the black magician was put to death, whereas in our quotation the death of Coyolxauhqui occurred before the final disastrous conflict. This could be a question of one more alteration, or one could perhaps entertain the hypothesis that the magician's name was Uitznaua, or, more likely, a variant of this name-Uitznaua being a plural word designating a Mexican tribe.

The Aztec rites at the period of the Conquest were only a vestige of what was “flourishing” at the beginning of our era. In view of the particular character of these rites it is in keeping with them that a demonical character should have been attributed to Uitzilopochtli. As Sahagun says, “Uitzilopochtli was ... an omen of evil.” (Sah. I). But their transitory character by comparison with the original orientation of these rites in the past might well have resulted in an all-embracing syncretism, combined with fear and veneration toward Uitzilopochtli. And indeed the documents do give evidence of this mixture. The “diabolical” Uitzilopochtli is at the same time the god of a paradise that is fervently desired. As Cortés says in his Third Letter: “They all desired to die and go to ‘Ochilibus’ (Uitzilopochtli) in heaven, who was awaiting them ...” This attitude is also to be found in their desire to be impregnated by this divinity as demonstrated in numerous religious ceremonies. “And of those who ate it, it was said, “they keep the god.” (Sah. III).

Steiner's third statement gives us information about Tezcatlipoca.

“Many opposing sects were founded with the objective of countering this devilish cult (of Taotl). One such sect was that of Tezcatlipoca. He too was a being who did not appear in a physical body, but who was known to many of the Mexican initiates, in spite of the fact that he lived only in an etheric body.”

Compare this with the story as told by Sahagun:

“Third Chapter, which telleth of the god named Tezcatlipoca ... he was considered a true god ...” (Sah. I).

“... even as an only god they believed in him ... he was invisible, just like the night, the wind. When sometimes he called out to one, just like a shadow did he speak.”(Sah. III).

By contrast with Uitzilopochtli who was both god and man, Tezcatlipoca is a real, veritable god, a clear confirmation of what Steiner says. This is reinforced by a striking agreement: The initiate (that is, “one,” i.e., aca (somebody) perceives “just like a shadow” (can iuhquj ceoalli, literally, only like shadow), that is to say, the etheric, the etheric body being remarkably suggested by the nahuatl term. Ceoalli means “the shadow made by the body when it intercepts the light;” not a shadow in the abstract sense, but something that is similar to the physical without actually being physical.

Let us continue with Sahagun: “When he (Tezcatlipoca) walked on the earth, he quickened vice and sin. He introduced anguish and affliction. He brought discord among people. ... But sometimes he bestowed riches—wealth, heroism, valor. ...” (Sah. I).

Since the point of view here is the same as that attributed to Taotl, it is natural that Tezcatlipoca should be seen as spreading evil in all its forms. But as in the case of Uitzilopochtli it is clear that there has been a noticeable syncretism, as may be seen in the way “sometimes” Tezcatlipoca (in quenman) benefits human beings.

Quetzalcoatl is the fifth being mentioned by Steiner:

“Another sect venerated Quetzalcoatl. He too was a being who lived only in an etheric body.” (24/9).

“He had much in common with the spirit whom Goethe described as Mephistopheles.” (18/9).

Bearing in mind that the great temple of Teotihuacan, belonging to the period with which we are concerned, was dedicated in part to Quetzalcoatl, we read as follows in Sahagun:

“Fifth Chapter, which telleth of the god named Quetzalcoatl. ... Quetzalcoatl—he was the wind.” (Sah. I).

“Third Chapter, which telleth the tale of Quetzalcoatl, who was a great wizard. ... This Quetzalcoatl they considered as a god; he was thought a god. ... And the Toltecs, his vassals, were highly skilled. Nothing was difficult when they did it. ... Indeed these (crafts) ... proceeded from Quetzalcoatl. ... And these Toltecs were very rich; they were wealthy. Never were they poor. They lacked nothing in their homes.” (Sah. III).

While taking note of the use of the same word “wind” (ehecatl) to characterize the substance of both Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca, a substance that we have identified as “etheric” in the sense indicated by Steiner, we may think we are also in the presence of a resume of the gifts acquired by Faust by virtue of his position as “vassal” of Mephistopheles—the word maceualli meaning “vassal” just as well as its more usual meanings of “merit” or “reward.”

We find also in the legends the antagonism between Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl, as indicated by Steiner. For example in the Annals of Cuauhtitlan there is mention of “Quetzalcoatl vanquished by the sorcery of Tezcatlipoca,” again equating him with Taotl as well as referring to his defeat, as described by Steiner. This antagonism may also be seen in certain rites, as when, for example, a priest playing the part of Quetzalcoatl “kills” the statue representing Uitzilopochtli.

“And upon the next day the body of Uitzilopochtli died. And he who slew him was (the priest known as) Quetzalcoatl. (Sah. III).

The mention in the Codex Florentin of the vassals of Quetzalcoatl, that is to say of a kind of clan devoted to this divinity, implies the existence of a division of opinion among the Mexicans. It is possible to glimpse this dichotomy in the prayer addressed to the “good” Tezcatlipoca: “O lord of the war ... pity me; give me what I require as my sustenance, my strength, of thy sweetness, thy fragrance.” (Sah. III).

Then, a few lines later, we learn that “And also of Totlacuan (Tezcatlipoca) they said that he also gave men misery, affliction ... he stoned them with plagues, which were great and grave ...”

Having in mind the text of Steiner it would seem that we are here faced with an attribution of the evil deeds of Quetzalcoatl to Tezcatlipoca. But as the point of view adopted in the Codex is primarily that of Taotl, it is in keeping with this that, as was the case of Uitzilopochtli, the enemy should be clothed with the attributes of evil.

Another important agreement between Steiner and the traditions is provided by the cosmogony: the first era (Four Ocelot) of the great ages was presided over by Tezcatlipoca, then the second (Four Winds) was rules by Quetzalcoatl, in this in conformity with the “sending” of Quetzalcoatl, in order to combat the already existing influence of Tezcatlipoca.

We shall now broach the subject of the ritual of the excision—of the stomach, according to Steiner; of the heart, according to what is to be found in all the widely known documents on the subject. But before continuing, let us mention one detail that is in fact of crucial importance; we have found in Steiner's personal library a book in which the tearing out of the heart is related. As Steiner all through his life gave evidence of a capacity for reading that is quite extraordinary, it is entirely reasonable to conclude that he knew about this rite of the tearing out of the heart.

In 1904, in #22 of the ethnological review Globus, Fischer for the first time, as far as we know, brought to the attention of the world a figurine in nephritic stone, which we reproduce here.

This statuette of unknown origin, now in the Linden Museum of Stuttgart, shows two openings hollowed out one above the other. The upper orifice, which penetrates into the body to a distance of 80 mm, begins at the sternum and ascends at an angle of about 45° and constitutes a cavity that is almost spherical. Its opening has a diameter of 16 mm and when it is 5 mm into the body it is enlarged to 22 mm. Fischer, as well as Seler in his 1904 communication to the Congress of Americanists, confirms that this is a cavity that reminds us of the rite of the tearing out of the heart. We indeed share this opinion, especially in view of the fact that the usual method for plucking out the heart is via an incision under the sternum, the priest having to thrust his hand upwards to grasp the heart. That this was his method of taking hold of it is confirmed by the inclination upwards of about 45° of the cavity, and its roundness corresponds likewise to the global form of the heart.

The second cavity, less deep than the first—penetrating only 40 mm into the body—is oval, and its opening has the dimensions of 11.5 by 18 mm. It also becomes wider in the interior. From being 10 mm at the orifice its diameter is widened to 28 mm. By contrast with the upper cavity—that of the heart—it ascends only very slightly. Seler, not having any definite argument to put forward, supposes that the second cavity merely indicates the absence of the navel or umbilical cord. Now bearing in mind the way in which the first cavity corresponds to the heart and the manner in which it was torn out, from an anatomical point of view it is clearly the stomach that corresponds to this ovoid cavity—the stomach, unlike the heart, being directly accessible as soon as the excision is made. Hence the depth, as well as the very slight upward inclination by comparison with the heart. We may also make the observation that the two organs, slightly off center toward the left in the human body, correspond very well to the two openings made one above the other.

The detailed analysis made by Seler of this figurine, which is carefully and totally covered with symbols, arrives at the conclusion that the statuette—aside from its connection with Xolotl and Tlaloc—represents Tlauizcalpantecutli, the god of the planet Venus. But an unusual feature, and noted as such by Seler, is that this is here a divinity with the attributes of Quetzalcoatl. Unusual though this may be it is not, however, unique, for the Codex Borgia—as Seler points out in the same analysis—shows Quetzalcoatl emerging from the mouth of the god of the Wind as the planet Venus. And as the Wind god is Quetzalcoatl himself we have here a kind of double within the duality Quetzalcoatl-Venus. The nephritic figurine therefore presents us, in what is certainly very esoteric symbolism, an unexpected link, as far as our present documents are concerned, between Quetzalcoatl, god of the planet Venus, and the tearing out of the stomach—a conjecture that we go so far as to regard as almost certain. And since the planet Venus is among other things the seat of the Luciferic forces this idol is a noteworthy illustration of the Ahriman-Lucifer duality linked to the tearing out of the stomach as it is also to the tearing out of the heart. This is, from an occult point of view, an insignificant inference from the indications given by Steiner.

There remains one last problem which, for the moment, is still awaiting solution: the indication by Steiner that Europeans were put to death by having their stomachs torn out—and the remarks with which Steiner follows this statement constitute the real riddle here. “The fact is even known to history,” he tells us and “this is a matter of historical knowledge.” Though we cannot pretend to resolve this contradiction, we may propose two directions for research along the lines we have followed here. Either Steiner is quoting some historical work without naming it—perhaps a book available only in German—which tells of the association mentioned above. Or else Steiner, after examining some iconographic elements of the documents concluded that the stomach was the organ referred to when it was tacitly traditionally accepted as being the heart.

In the new (1984) German edition of the present cycle the editor tells us that Rudolf Steiner's library contained a book by Charles V. Heckethorn entitled Geheime Gesellschaften, Geheimbünde und Geheimlehren, in which both the excisions, the heart and the stomach, are referred to, and these were said to have been practiced on the Spaniards as well as on others. However, this book, which is not a historical but a popular work, contains descriptions that are very approximate and no doubt partly imagined; and it is clear that Heckethorn has not read Sahagun's work edited by Bustamente in Spanish in 1829 and in French by Siméon in 1888. In view of the fact that Steiner provides very precise descriptions that are not those given by Heckethorn, nor those that have come down to us in any historical documents known to us, we do not believe that Steiner, as the editor says in a footnote, relied on this book, especially when we keep in mind that it is absolutely not a “historical” reference book. So the problem remains still unsolved.

To conclude we should like to begin the second part of our discussion by outlining a number of reflections on the subject of the methodology of the study of what are commonly called “mythologies.” It is possible in a schematic but not altogether incorrect manner to separate two fundamentally different tendencies. The first adopts an anthroposophical viewpoint, held by only an almost negligible minority of officially recognized scholars. These hold that mythologies are the remnants of what were once clairvoyantly perceived facts, that is to say, a perceptible and comprehensible universe, formerly perceived in pictures. This approach was inaugurated by Steiner on the basis of his own personal investigations, which he only later compared with what had survived from ancient cultures. Today the anthroposophist, or someone who wishes to follow this path but lacks the capacities possessed by Steiner, aside from using his awakened sensibilities which can indeed be of real help to him, can only place the totality of what Steiner has taught about the spiritual world over against the mythological facts as they are revealed by the various traditions.

The second path is the one taken by almost all current studies. The spiritual world is invariably regarded as nothing but the subjective creation of the individual, and no effort is therefore made to look for anything truly suprasensible. Looked at from a strictly logical point of view, which ought to predominate in any scientific study, it is entirely legitimate to regard mythical facts as purely subjective, in the absence of clear, controlled and understandable suprasensible perceptions. But such premises must they always be looked upon solely as working hypotheses, and never as untouchable dogmas overruling all other considerations. Indeed the difference between hypothesis and dogma is fundamental. A hypothesis as such never loses sight of its contrary hypothesis, and results alone can eventually eliminate one of the premises. Another unscientific defect may be noted in the attribution of an exclusively subjective character to mythologies: from the point of view of logic the inability to perceive the suprasensible cannot lead one to affirm that such perception does not exist! A man blind from birth cannot do otherwise than recognize that for him colors do not exist. But the same blind man would commit an egregious error in elementary logic if he were to conclude that in the case of everyone else colors are also subjective and not perceived, and if he were to insist also that the names given to colors are therefore meaningless! Although this example may be a little crude it is nevertheless a fair picture of the abnormal situation in which every science that claims to be serious finds itself at the present time.

A second feature of this orientation is its conceptual framework which results in a poverty of concepts that most of the time drives one to despair. Thus Coyolxauhqui is abstractly associated with both “moon” and “goddess” to make her “goddess of the moon.” But what does this association mean in reality? The unlikely ceremony of flaying (practiced in the Mexican rites) is supposed to be a “commemoration” of the simple process of husking the ears of corn—and this, in spite of the varied and extraordinary social consequences, the frenzied emotions of the participants, and the outlandish reversal of the natural order of things involved in a rite of this kind!

A well-known reaction to this type of excessively naive speculation exists today in all those tendencies comprised under the general name of structuralism, especially in the works of Levi-Strauss, who looks upon mythology as nothing but imaginative pictures constructed out of the social and geographical realities of a given epoch. If we examine closely the “studies” of Levi-Strauss we find they are based on a kind of fundamental dogmatism. They give the illusion of being impeccably scientific, but in fact they lead to a bewildering series of vicious circles. Instead of regarding materialism as simply a working hypothesis yet to be proved, materialism is put forward as a dogma, and conclusions are then deduced from the original dogmatic content. The logical worth of this kind of procedure can be illustrated from the following picture. Let us imagine an ethnologist blind from birth who is investigating a tribe made up persons with more or less seriously defective eyesight, who are the distant descendants of ancestors whose sight was normal. His informant will tell him about the round shape of the sun and explain that it is the source of heat, the latter being the only aspect of the sun that is perceptible to the blind ethnologist. Since the ethnologist denies the existence of any other kind of perception than his own he will seek to “explain” the round shape of the sun by taking under consideration all the other facts he can find associated with the sun—what the structuralists call the infrastructures. It is easy to imagine that there may be “real” facts in the sense in which the ethnologist conceives of them, which will permit him to associate the source of heat with the round shape of the sun. His learned work of explanation will certainly be coherent and in a certain way irrefutable, but it will be at the same time absurd, the round shape being simply the result of ordinary perception, shared by everyone except the ethnologist! Broadly speaking, that is the “scientific” edifice which is all we possess to explain the entire realm of mythology!

The objection might be raised that we are doing no better than the men whose work we are criticizing. Instead of the dogma of subjectivism we are substituting an equally dogmatic objectivism. Yet in fact there is a crucial difference. We are dealing here with two different conceptual frameworks, one provided by materialism and the other by anthroposophy, neither of them being of course perfected and completed systems. Faced with the data of mythology the first approaches them in a negative way, dogmatically rejecting what they claim to be, namely descriptions of real and not subjective facts, such as life after death, spirits, divinities and the like. By contrast the second approaches them positively. It tries to approach the data of mythology by entering into this material from within, so to speak, making use of a series of concepts which correspond exactly to the mythological symbols, not in an arbitrary manner but as the necessary complement to the percepts of which the symbols themselves are the reflected images. One can then raise the objection that the Steinerian system is just as subjective as the mythologies, and therefore lacks all objective validity. Aside from the fact that once the Steinerian system is known this objection might well disappear, the difference between the two conceptual systems might also be demonstrated objectively. This could be done on a statistical basis, the general principle applicable to all research that makes use of models.

The most coherent model is regarded as that which takes in the largest number of phenomena, and is therefore superior to any other model that covers fewer facts. Take, for example, the Aztec rite of flaying. Is there at the present time any serious psychological system that is coherent and applicable over a wide range of phenomena that can offer any explanation of how it could be that the unlikely sequence of tortures, murders, and rites so repulsive as to be scarcely imaginable, should have been the commemoration of the husking of a plant??? This pretended similarity between the flaying of a human being and the husking of a plant is surely an idea so far-fetched as to be totally worthless. Anthroposophical concepts are of course not waiting passively to be made use of for mythological studies, including studies of the kind just mentioned. But when the first steps in this direction have been taken, only then will the time come when we can talk of a confrontation between the facts and the fundamental teachings of anthroposophy—not a confrontation between anthroposophy and the present materialistic edifice constructed from the beginning out of pure dogmatism, but an undogmatic examination of the material and non-material remains (for example mythology, popular stories and the like) just as they were at the time of their original discovery. This examination should not be based on the dogmatic notions prevalent at that time, which, as far as present day popular and scholarly opinion is concerned, have indeed endured to this day.

Materialism possesses no concept capable of being applied in a positive manner to Uitzilopochtli, who was both a god and at the same time only a man. It is obliged to flatten out the original texts, thus implicitly showing its contempt for their authors; and it can only condescendingly refrain from paying any attention to what appears to it as at most a piece of poetic imagery—for example, Tezcatlipoca appearing like a shadow. This bespeaks neither a true scientific spirit, nor does it show any sign of a true respect for others. When will all this change?

Frédéric Kozlik
France, 1984

My dear friends, in the lectures which have been held here for some weeks I have endeavoured to show you some of the things which have lived in human evolution—certain things connected with various inner impulses which have entered into the modern development of humanity. We have had to go very far back to find the origin of these impulses. We have sought to understand how, from out of the Atlantean civilisation, there flowed the relics of an ancient Atlantean Mystery magic. We have shewn how, in a state of decadence, this Atlantean civilisation still lived on amongst those peoples who were re-discovered in Europe through the re-discovery of America. We then sought to study the relics of another branch of Atlantean magic which sent its rays and streams from Asia throughout Europe. And so, we have seen coming from Atlantis a co-operation in a certain sense between the Eastern and Western pole. From out of these impulses which have remained over from Atlantis, we then sought to deepen ourselves concerning the nature of the Graeco-Roman epoch, which as we know, was a copy to a certain extent, of Atlantean civilisation, though of course on a higher stage. And then we tried to understand the two poles of the IVth Post Atlantean Period. That is, the pole of Greece and the pole of Rome. We then attempted to follow at least partially, the various impulses which were further active in our European life of civilisation. We have especially considered that impulse which came into the spiritual stream of Europe through the fact that the Templars had to undergo a certain fate, and that this fate of the Templars which works so powerfully, so deeply on our own souls, evokes spiritual forces into existence which have continued to work on in a spiritual way; inspiring, impelling, initiating all of those things which have contributed to the external path of the history of the peoples of Europe. And then we have continued to trace how these impulses pass over into a recent material. And in the last lecture, we saw at the end of the 18th century, it gives a peculiar colouring to those ideas which at that time confused the world, the ideas of Brotherhood, Freedom and Equality. Many such impulses as have been born in the course of centuries and flowed into European development could be characterised, but that must be left over to a later time.

I should now like to characterise, through certain significant impulses, the path of our own European life of civilisation, because it is essential that through a Spiritual Scientific observation one should learn to know more and more thoroughly the peculiarities of our own age, the age in which we are standing to-day. It is important for us to know how our own time is determined by that special spiritual structure of the 19th century. In this 19th century all those impulses of which I have spoken to you have been more or less veiled, covered up to a certain extent. I have often drawn your attention to the fact that, as regards the evolution of modern civilisation, the middle of the 19th century was a most important time;—it was that time in which in the 5th Post Atlantean civilisation something was to become especially active something which man knows and learns to produce through his intellect in so far as that is bound to the physical plane. We must rake this quite clear to ourselves. With the 5th Post Atlantean civilisation something of the nature of forces comes into the Post Atlantean development which was absolutely different from what occurred in the Graeco-Latin age in the 4th Post Atlantean epoch. Naturally the Greeks had intellect (verstand) but that was of quite a different nature from our own - our own intellect,—which has gone through the 5th Post Atlantean epoch and which, in the middle of the 19th century, really entered upon a quite definite crisis. That intellect which was developed in ancient Greece, and which, for instance, radiated in all that the Greeks created artistically, which radiated in all that the Greeks created in their State arrangements (which were not really State arrangements at all),—that intellect which worked through the Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, that intellect which then was drawn over into the political being of Rome was utterly different from the intellect which arose in our own 5th Post Atlantean epoch. One can even prove this philosophically, as I have attempted to do in the first volume of my “Riddles of Philosophy.” With the Greeks, their ideas were really so existing that they perceived them just as we to-day can see colours, hear sounds, and have sense perceptions: so they could experience ideas. Now with our modern humanity the intellect is separated from outer perception and it works in the inner being of man; but it works in such a way as it must do when it is to be activated through the brain or, in general, through the physical organism. This has gradually brought about a certain state of affairs:—and please bear in mind, that by reason of the whole meaning of our civilisation, it had to be so. The tendency was gradually brought about in the 15th century, through this intellectual development, of permeating human life more and more with purely materialistic cognition, and practical life with the principle of mere utility, Utilitarianism. We have gradually seen with what necessity these things developed, how in the civilisation of the West of Europe certain impulses arose, and in connection with these impulses questions were put in the sphere of cognition. We have seen how these questions differed from others which arose, for instance, in the East of Europe. We have seen, for instance, how the West, through a long preparation was driven in the sphere of knowledge and in the practical sphere of life, to urge the spirit into a configuration which gradually put certain questions above all else. We have seen how in the West there gradually rose the tendency to study what I must call the affinity of all beings; and, when it comes to man, of studying what relates to the Birth of man and to Heredity. One can best understand Western civilisation (when it is striving for cognition) if one knows that these questions concerning the affinity of beings, and of Birth and Heredity, were dominant in the life of the West. From this there arose in the Western world, in their science of chemistry and physics, the seeking of the affinity of different forces of Nature which were regarded as modifications of one particular force of Nature. This tendency then extended to other spheres; in the sphere of Biology it was the affinity of various animals and plants which was investigated; and out of all of this man himself was explained—man, as he was thought to have developed, from a purely animal existence. One must say: To understand the birth of man in its affinity with other creatures on the Earth, was the culmination of these questions in the West.

The Eastern sphere on the other hand, sought in the realm of knowledge other questions: “What is Evil? What is the meaning of suffering in the world?” Never so much as in the East of Europe was there so much thinking concerning Evil and Sin. Of course, in the other spheres this was also the case, but nowhere with the same intensity and with the same genius as in the East. All the literary production of the East stands under the influence of the question: “What is Evil?” And the pains which in the West we applied to the problems of Affinity, were in the East applied to the investigation of Sin. The same thought which was employed in the West to investigate the natural connections of physical man as he passes through birth into existence, was applied in the East to understand Death. That same effort is employed in the East to understand Death. “How does man maintain himself aright as a soul, as he passes through Death? What does Death signify in the whole connection of Life?” That announced itself as a question in the East, one just as important for the East as the question concerning the natural Affinity of Man and the Birth of Man is for the West. Just as in the Western World we can prove that these problems of Birth and Happiness lay at the basis of their thinking, so we can show that in the Eastern world, (for example, in Solovieff) we can say that all his thinking is directed to the question of Evil and of Death. The difference is only this—that in the West one has already travelled a long way in one's investigation, whereas in the East they are still more or less at the beginning. Then, as you know, all these things passed over into the sphere of practical life, into the arranging of social life,—those ideas which we seek to realise in everyday life,—and if to a certain extent we investigate the most intimate impulses in the life of the West, we see that we can refer these to the thoughts concerning the Happiness of Man.

Please just bear in mind how this thinking concerning the Happiness of Man begins with the “Utopia” of Lord Bacon and the “Utopia” of Sir Thomas More, and we see how this same trend of thought has developed into the most diverse social programmes which have found expression in the West. Of course, social programmes have also come to expression in the East, but one can easily prove that in the East they spring from quite different impulses than have the social programmes of the West. All these, as well as the idea of Freedom which came to us from the French Revolution, and all the social ideas of the 19th century, all have as their aim the Happiness of Man. In the East we find, (of course still in the beginning) how there, instead of Happiness it is Redemption which is sought for—the inner freeing of the soul of man. There the longing exists to know how the soul of man can develop towards the overcoming of life. One understands this extraordinary interplay of impulses if one keeps this in mind. And we have seen how even a consideration of a somewhat higher kind, of the Lives written of Christ Jesus, has received its colouring from what lies in these same impulses and tendencies. In the West, we have that most characteristic and clever observer of the Life of Jesus—Jesus considered only as Jesus—just as one can consider any other human being, born from a certain race, a certain climate, or a certain nation. I refer to the “Life of Jesus” by Ernest Renan. Now in the East Jesus is little spoken of, and when one speaks of Jesus it is simply as a path along which one can come to the Christ. You find this very strongly in Solovieff.

Between these two, as I have told you, (and if one only has an eye for these things, a sense for what Goethe calls the UR-phenomenon, one knows how these three names are chosen)—between these two, Renan and Solovieff, there stands—a far more original and far clever man than the other two—David Frederick Strauss. Ernest Renan considers only the Jesus, Solovieff considers only the Christ; Ernest Renan transformed Jesus into a simple man, a human, one can almost say an “all too human” man Now with Solovieff this human element is completely lost. Man's gaze is directed into the spiritual world by Solovieff, when he considers the Christ; and he only speaks of moral, spiritual impulses. Everything with Solovieff is forced into a super earthly sphere. The Christ has nothing earthly, although He pours His effects into an earthly sphere. Between these two stands David Frederick Strauss. He does not deny Jesus—he admits that such a personality lives; but, just as Ernest Renan simply and solely considers Jesus as man, so to David Frederick Strauss, Jesus is only of significance in so far as on this Jesus for the first time is suspended the idea of the whole of humanity. Everything which man can long for or ever has longed for, from out of the Mysteries of all ages as the Idea of All-humanity, is attached to the Jesus of David Frederick Strauss. D. F. Strauss does not very much consider the earthly Life of Jesus only as a means whereby to show how in the age when Jesus appears, humanity had the longing to bring together all the myths which refer to the sum total of humanity, and to concentrate them on that Figure. And so, that which in Ernest Renan's Life is so full of colour, with D. F. Strauss becomes a kingdom of shadow, which only seeks to show how the Myths of Centuries all flow together. With D. F. Strauss Christ is not a figure cut off as with Solovieff, but is the idea of that which lives on throughout the whole of humanity—that Christ Who for thousands of years has poured Himself into humanity and developed through humanity. With D. F. Strauss, therefore we find only an idea of Jesus, united with an idea of Christ. With Ernest Renan, we have a personal and historical Jesus. With Solovieff we have a Christ Who is super-personal yet individual, but at the same time super-historic. He is super-personal yet individual, because He is a Being shut off, included in Himself, although at the same time He is an individual but transcending personality. Between these two stands D. F. Strauss, who has not to do with a vision,—a perception of the personal element working in Christ Jesus,—for this personal element is only, as it were, a point of support for all those myths streaming through humanity.

If one only keeps in mind this scheme obtained from a spiritual observation of the history of Europe, one can almost read straight off the various spiritual connections. You see, with Ernest Renan, a man who pre-eminently arose out of the Western civilisation, it is a question the whole time, of understanding how a certain country, a certain race could give birth to Christ Jesus. It is a question of the birth of Jesus. With Solovieff the question is especially: “What does Christ signify for human evolution? And how can Christ save what is born in man as a soul, how can He lead that again through the Gate of Death?”

And so, in the middle of the 19th century, as I have told you, that which lives in this evolution and which belongs especially to our 19th century, reached a certain crisis. At that time, the most extreme point was reached which one can strive for through physical, intellectual performance. In the course of the 19th century, the striving after happiness was gradually transformed into the striving for mere utility,—Utilitarianism. That is something which appears especially in the middle of the 19th century, both in the sphere of knowledge as also in the sphere of life:—the striving after mere utility. And that is something which especially disturbed those who understand the real eternal needs of the human soul, it disturbed them especially that the 19th century should bring forth a striving especially concentrated on the principle of Utilitarianism. Thus, we meet Materialism in the sphere of Knowledge, and Utilitarianism in the sphere of Practical Life. And those two things belong absolutely together.

Now I am not bringing forward these things in order to criticise them, but because they are necessary points of transition for humanity. Man had to go through this materialistic principle in the sphere of Knowledge, as he had to pass through the principle of Utilitarianism in the sphere of Practical Life. It was a question of how humanity should be led in the 19th century in order to pass in the right way through those necessary points of its development. We will therefore begin the consideration of these things this evening from a certain point of view, and then, on a later occasion I shall hope to enter into them more thoroughly.

Knowledge, especially that which in the West is, ae we know, concentrated on the phenomena of Birth and the question of Heredity, and this was placed in the service of Materialism, of Utilitarianism. Now let us make clear to ourselves what really happened in thought. As you know, Darwinism arose, which studied the problem of the Birth of Man, that is, the Origin of Man from a sequence of organisms; and Darwinism attempted to make popular certain quite definite views. We know also that something far more spiritual than Darwinism already stands in Goethe's “Theory of Evolution,” but Goethe's theory had for the time to remain more esoteric. And so, in the first place, the more coarse, materialistic form had to be taken up by humanity. We know too that in the last decades the most intimate pupils of Darwinism have attempted to undermine Darwinism itself in its materialistic colouring. But Darwinism, as it really entered the world of the I9th century, did not enter the world because the investigations of Nature, because science itself made it necessary—not even the natural scientists would maintain that. Oscar Hertwig, the best pupil of Haeckel says, that because human beings only wanted to keep in man the social and mercantile principles of utility during the I9th century, therefore they carried these principles over even into the external world. They simply wanted a reflection of their own thinking, and it was no external facts of nature which forced a Darwinistic view on humanity. So, it is no wonder that, on a closer investigation, one no longer finds these views substantiated. But, as human beings, we have come now to the principle of Utility.

Now Darwin also lived in a certain stream which strove after the principle of Happiness, the Happiness of Human beings, but a stream which was absolutely materialistic. Darwin came very near to that stream which belongs to the doctrine of Malthus. The teaching of Malthus proceeded from a certain definite view, a view that on the Earth in a certain way the means of life increases. That means the fruitfulness of the Earth can increase. But, side by side with this increase in the fruitfulness of the Earth the Malthusians also regarded the increase in the population of the Earth, in such a way as one is only able to regard it, if one does not take into consideration the idea of reincarnation. And they came to see that the fruitfulness of the earth—that is, the means of nourishment,—did not increase at the same rate as the increase in population. They thought: the increase in the nourishment runs its course according to the number [sequence] 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on which we call arithmetical progression; whereas the increase in population happens according to the numbers 1, 2, 4, 8 and so on, which as you know, is geometrical progression. The disciples of Malthus, on the basis of this view, developed the ideas which they thought they had to develop, keeping in mind the Happiness of humanity on the earth. All the time they had in front of them their calculated increase in population, and on the other side an increasing lack in the means of nourishment. From this proceeded the so-called Malthusian ideal—that is, the ideal of the `two children' system. It was said: Since nature has the tendency to impel men forward geometrically and only to impel the means of nourishment forward arithmetically, therefore the population must be restricted, which can be done through the two children system. Now, concerning this special application of the principle of Happiness in the whole stream of Materialism which one gets simply by studying the sequences of Birth according to a materialistic principle (which of course has blinded humanity), we need not speak further now, but Darwin started from the certainty of the principle that for all beings who live on the Earth, the means of nourishment increase in arithmetical progression, whereas the population increases in geometrical progression, And so for him there resulted a certain consequence. He said: If things transpire so the means of nourishment increasing at the rate of 1, 2, 3, 4 and so on, whereas the population increases at the rate of 1, 2, 4, 8, then there will be amongst the beings of the Earth an inevitable struggle for existence, and the struggle for existence must be a really operative principle. So, upon Malthusianism,—that means something which was meant absolutely for practical life,—Darwin based his system. Please bear in mind that Darwin did not derive his system from an observation of Nature, but from a theory. It was not an observation of Nature based on Knowledge which gave Darwin his impulse, but simply this principle of utility which said that by regulating the births so that the rate of birth did not grow greater than the rate in the increase of nourishment—one could thereby maintain a balance. Of course, it was thought that one could find the struggle for existence everywhere in Nature, and so the Darwinians said: All beings live immersed in a struggle for existence whereby the unfit are removed and the fit remain over. That means the Darwinian `survival of the fittest.' And so, you see, no cosmic principle full of wisdom is required, because now everything runs on by itself through the survival of the fittest. How suitable for the humanity of the I9th century to strip off everything of a spiritual nature and to live as far as possible only in material existence! One has no need to think of ideals if one lives only under the principle of the survival of the fittest. Nature can then go on entirely without ideals. As a matter of fact, one might even work against the course of Nature if one attempts to realise any ideals, because through one's ideals one might even cause an unfit individual to survive;—an individual who would go under in the struggle for existence!

My dear friends, that principle lived in the humanity of the 19th century everywhere, and was uttered more or less clearly. One lived under the impulse of thinking along these lines, even if one did not always say it quite so clearly. In short, a View of the World arose which sought to satisfy the humanity of the I9th century in this special manner. I just wanted to show you in this where lies the true impulse of Darwinism, because in the beautiful scientific Unions or Scientific Societies in general, people have sought to spread a materialistically coloured Darwinism as a kind of Gospel throughout humanity, without knowing what real impulse lay at the back of them. You see, humanity has a far greater preference for ideas which deceive it than for those which explain the truth. We could go on to bring forward many, many things which would simply be an expression of the fact that in the middle of the 19th century our civilisation and culture had reached a certain crisis, and it was a question for those who knew that certain things must never he quite killed,—things that they knew were necessary for the progress of humanity,—it was a question for those who knew, how, m such an age of mere utility, one could still maintain a spiritual civilisation and culture. And so, it was no accident but something founded in the purpose of the whole of human development, that when that principle of utility brought European development to a crisis in the middle of the 19th century, a personality such as Time. Blavatsky appeared who, through her natural endowment, was capable of revealing to humanity an extraordinary amount from out of the spiritual world itself. if anyone who is an astrologer wanted to consider this matter, he could undertake the following pretty experiment. He could take the point of time of the strongest utilitarian crisis of the 19th century, and for that point of time set up a horoscope. He would get just the same horoscope if he calculates the horoscope of Time. Blavatsky! This is simply a symptom that the self-evolving Cosmic Spirit in the course of time wanted to place a personality in the world through whose soul the opposite of Utilitarianism should come to expression. That principle of utility is absolutely established in Western civilisation, and against all this the Eastern civilisation has always held itself erect. Therefore, we see this peculiar play that, whereas in the West right into the sphere of Knowledge this Western principle is striven for out of a materialistic Darwinism, where a struggle for existence inserts itself into scientific observation,—that brutal struggle for existence against which attacks have always been made by the Russian investigators, whose research work you find collected by Kropotkin in his book, wherein he says that it is not a struggle for existence which lies at the basis of all animal species, but what he calls Mutual Aid. And so, about the middle of the 19th century we have Darwin's “Origin of Species” appearing in the West through the struggle for existence, and in the East, we have brought together by Kropotkin, the labour of a whole series of Russian scientists in his book “Mutual Aid,” which characterises the evolution of species by showing that just those species develop best of all who help each other mutually. Thus, on the one side as it were, at the one pole of the newer spiritual civilisation men are taught that those species develop best who suppress each other most of all, and then from the East, from the other pole, we are taught that those species develop best, the members of which are so endowed that they support each other mutually. That is extraordinarily interesting. One might say, that just as Darwin from out of the milieu of the West works m the middle of the 19th century, so from out of the aura of the East there worked that which was laid down in the soul of Blavatsky, but which could not come fully to development because the time was not yet at hand

We have seen how the West has come forward in a certain way already, whereas the East still stands at the beginning of this development. And so, in Blavatsky there appears a kind of beginning, the announcement of a soul-development. This soul-development of Blavatsky appeared entirely out of a Russian aura, in spite of the fact that her origin was not in itself entirely Russian. This soul, in her mediumship, was developed in a Russian way, but, in the course of her life she was completely led into Western civilisation,—she was so utterly led into Western civilisation that, as you know, she wrote her books in the language of the West; even as far West as America, this figure of Blavatsky was interwoven with the civilisation of our recent age. One might say that in Blavatsky the attempt was made to see how these two things could be intermingled. From all that I have told you concerning the evolution of Blavatsky, you will know that certain things were attempted through her, but, as you also know all meaning, all sense was snatched away from these very exempts. The works of Blavatsky are even chaotic, giving out great significant truths, hut all hopelessly mixed up with the most extraordinary rubbish. Now what, in reality, has proceeded from that impulse which was attempted with Blavatsky? With Blavatsky, the attempt was made to take occultism, which is a merely traditional occultism, and to propagate that. And what has followed from this, after Blavatsky's death right on to our own age? That you have experienced for yourselves right up to the humbug with Alcyone, and what is now developing from Mrs. Besant herself.

Thus, you have this example before you—an attempt to unite occultism with utilitarianism. Now in the way in which it was attempted there, it could not go on any further. Through that peculiar intermingling of something which was born in the East with what existed in the West, Blavatsky, whose soul was of a mediumistic nature, was intended to incorporate the spirituality of the West with the principle of Utilitarianism An Ahrimanic attempt was begun; and that is a terrible, a horrible, but powerful example of how an Ahrimanic attempt inserts itself, which tries, not only to bring out a certain knowledge concerning the supersensible world, but to place it entirely in the service of utility, of Utilitarianism. Blavatsky was surrounded by personalities who strove to keep her entirely in their own hands, but that never quite succeeded because she always slipped away from them in a certain way. But a certain number of men in the Western world endeavoured to get Blavatsky entirely into their own hands, and if that had succeeded, if the ideal of uniting spirituality with the principle of utility had been Utterly realised, we should experience something quite different to-day from that Bureau of Julia (Stead's Bureau); for the Bureau of Julia is only a posthumous, an unsuccessful attempt to amalgamate the principle of utility with spiritualism. What was attempted with Blavatsky was simply only a caricature, but if that had succeeded, we should have everywhere to-day Bureaus where, through mediums, we could get all kinds of information concerning what numbers would win in a lottery, what lady one should marry, whether one should sell out or keep for a time certain stocks and shares. And all that would be arranged from the information to be got from the spiritual world, through mediumship. The spiritual life would be placed utterly at the service of utility. The tragedy of Blavatsky consists in this,—that she was driven to and fro, between both poles, and therefore her life is of such an extraordinary psychological character. In Blavatsky's life, certain doors had to be opened through which one could look into the spiritual world, and so we see this extraordinary phenomenon appearing, of the withdrawal of the Individuality who used Blavatsky as a means of bringing revelations into the world concerning the spirit, while in its place appears that individuality whom Olcott characterises as the reincarnated Sea-Pirate of the 16th century, John King. John King, who then occupied himself in materialising tea cups and things of that kind, when they were especially needed! Into these things there plays a conflict between the principle of Utility and that principle which must work with more Utilitarianism in the course of the further development of humanity,—not by removing utility out of the world, but by directing it spiritually into the right paths. Because, my dear friends, you must not think that any spiritual civilisation of the future will ever be at enmity with life. The task of any true spiritual Science should be to bring Utilitarianism into the right waters.

But of this we shall attempt to speak in the next lecture. We shall then attempt to show the relation between the principle of utility of the most practical life of our present age, and that which should be a spiritual life within this life of practise. And therewith we shall contact one of the most important questions of the life of our present age.

My dear Friends:—The separation which exists to-day between the Life-Ether and the earthly elements, did not as yet exist in the Graeco-Latin age, because at that time they were much more intimately united. As you know, the earthly element only exists in man's body up to 6 per cent. 90 percent of man's body is water; and so you see, man is, really a pillar of water. In the course of evolution, the Life-Ether has, as it were, withdrawn from, the earthly elements, and thereby it has become possible for free spiritual Imaginations to arise in the soul of man through the Life-Ether, and the firm solid earthly elements then exist in man's body as a basis for grasping these Imaginations.

Now with the help and application of certain inner methods we can show that these facts are correct. A Greek statue or drama, or even a poem of Homer is not comprehensible without something further, because at that time the relationship between the Etheric body and Earthly elements was quite different from that existing to-day. Anyone who works with occult methods knows that a person living in that age was quite different from a man of to-day. Whoever experiences, for instance, what Goethe experienced in Italy,—knows that the Greeks created from Nature in a way, a secret way, one absolutely strange to humanity to-day. Without something further, it is not even possible to understand the elements of Greek civilisation. If one really attempts to penetrate into the elements of Greek civilisation, even into their philosophy, one must bring about that fine inner union between the etheric body and the earthly elements; and then one finds that one's etheric body streams through the whole organism—one sees colours quite differently, feels warmth quite differently, one feels everything bound up with the life of the soul in an absolutely different way from what one feels to-day. Then at last one understands such figures as Aeschylus, Sophocles, Heraclitus, and even Aristotle. As I have told you, the Greeks saw colours quite differently; blue was then far more complicated,—it was a kind of dark veil which had utter darkness behind it. Peelings then were more complicated. A warm object, for instance, felt as if something were spreading over the whole of one's hand when one grasped it. You can understand that the Greeks experienced the whole world of nature in a different way from the way it is experienced to-day. If one understands this, one can understand how it is that the Greeks spoke differently concerning colours than we do now. Evolution has pressed forward since then, and expresses itself in the most different impulses.

Now unless one has Spiritual Science behind one, one is forced to live in the polarities. That is of great significance for the external civilisation, because these polarities work both in the unconscious as well as the conscious faculties of man. As you know, in the West there is a striving to draw the spiritual into the service of purely external physical existence, of which I have given you a shocking example in the Bureau of Julia of William Stead. (For instance, after Dr Steiner had given a lecture, questions used to be written on a piece of paper and passed up and laid on the desk, which Dr. Steiner then answered; but he found after certain lectures that one person or another was even advised through this Julia-Bureau in London to apply to him for material utilitarian aims.) Now practically this whole direction was followed by Spiritualism, which tries to grasp the spirit in a material way. Ordinary science is far more adapted for this,—even earnest science,—than it is for the understanding of Spiritual Science;—the real working and weaving of the spirit in the external world. When scientists have investigated these things, they have often shown this so simply, no less simply than ordinary lay people. One scientist relates what he has experienced with mediums, but we can see how he then let himself be deceived; there has been a pretty play of conjuring before him which he has not understood—and far less has he understood the medium himself. These mediums are often far cleverer than the average learned person to-day because it is a question with them of a sub-conscious cleverness. You see that the same principle of utility plays into all these spheres.

In the West people are seeking after secrets which relate to Birth, to Heredity and so on. That same principle of natural selection which meets us in Darwinism, is applied to man himself. This application I think is called Eugenics, and the question is discussed as to how the healthy man can find a healthy wife, in order to produce a most healthy line of descendants. Even Psycho-Analysis is under the influence of the same impelling forces;—Psycho-Analysis, which is seeking to drag certain complexes out of the human organism, reckons chiefly with sexual relationships, or with relations of power. But behind all these things there are spiritual elements. Through these one comes into contact with certain spiritual beings who are working behind existence. These beings have a one-sided power, i.e. thinking, reasoning; and they seek to form a union with the lower impelling forces of man. These beings attract forces for man's lower desires, sexual and otherwise; and through them the lowest powers of man are stimulated. Thus, we see that Psycho-Analysis comes under the stimulus of beings who excite the lower nature of man. They direct their attention to the impulses of the lower nature, and hence arose the experiments which seek to explain everything from the aspect of man's lower desires, right on from Freud to the greatest, most significant and most spiritual: Laurence Oliphant, born 1822. In his books “Sumpneumata” or “Evolutionary Forces now active in Man,” 1884 and “Scientific Religion,” although these forces are sympathetic and purified, nevertheless all World-History is there turned to a sexual aspect. One can learn a great deal from these extraordinary books, but only the one pole is expressed in them. It is not an attempt to rise from the normal powers of man to a spiritual world, but only an attempt to develop all impulses towards phenomena. Thereby can arise this mystic materialistic character of the will, which expresses itself in an attempt to climb up into the spiritual world, not in a normal way but by placing everything in the service of utility. One thereby seeks to satisfy the spirit in another way.

Now in occult Brotherhoods, Freemasonry, and so on, the attempt is made to insert the other pole, symbolism and ceremonialism,—that which has remained behind through decadent races from earlier times. Now in H. P. Blavatsky's soul there was poured an Indian element of this nature, after she had been rejected by the occultists in the West because she put too high a demand on them, and was therefore excluded. In the Brotherhoods this coupling together of what is taken over from other ages with what exists as a limitation to nationalistic principles, all this has the aim of acquiring power. In these Brotherhoods, it is a question of gaining power. This impulse is then placed also at the service of this lower world. It is used within the Brotherhoods for developing power, and not for a health-giving knowledge. Now if a person has remained behind in connection with former civilisations, he speaks quite differently from one who has taken up ancient knowledge through occult brotherhoods. Hence Ku Hung Ming is far more full of insight then these Europeans; he is an educated Chinaman, at the summit of Chinese culture. He himself has taken into his soul Tibetan substance. The Chinese are the descendants of the last phases of Atlantean evolution, and what stands in this book of Ku Hung Ming is really reminiscent of that, even as the book appears in translation. Ku Hung Ming, stands in quite a different position from the European to-day. He sees certain things far more exactly than we do, therefore many things in his book are worthy of regard, because he is far more unprejudiced than many Europeans, Ku Hung Ming draws a sharp limit between uneducated and educated people. You see, in China the half-educated does not come in between; a man is either educated or not educated. That sharp limit has disappeared in Europe; it began to disappear when Latin was no longer a language only for the educated—and Ku Hung Ming has a sharp eye for such things as this. He has an interesting chapter concerning language, in which he distinguished between the language one writes and the language one speaks; and he describes how this half-educated state belongs to Europe. As a matter of fact, it was not Militarism that was the cause of the war, but this great realm of half-educated people who are the danger for our civilisation m Europe to-day. For instance, a half-educated person will speak concerning such things as materialism, civilisation, and so on. without understanding them. If one reads this interesting book of Qo Ho Ming one can see that his intellect works quite differently from ours. How willingly he makes quotation from Carlyle: -

“The policeman is employed at 15/- a week and he is necessary for the ordering of society. Why does not the policeman turn himself into an Anarchist, for which he has the tendency? Because the concept of honour which is injected into him advocates other people: they require the policeman, but he does not require them. A millionaire is not secure without this `15/- worth.' He is necessary for the protection of the possessor, and that is also injected into him. And so we see how European civilisation rests on deception.”

Ku Ho Ming lets fall there a judgement which is well worth considering. It is necessary that European people should [pay attention] to this Chinaman, who is really considering human nature very well; the judgement of an atavistic man may be far more unprejudiced than the judgement of a man here in the West. The man of the second pole strives for the conquering of that which is the higher thing to the man of the first pole. At the first pole, it is utility which is valuable—Utility, the god of the real bourgeois; at the second pole, it is Sacramentalism which is valuable—Sacramentalism in its widest scope. One has to see the reality from the spiritual aspect. That second pole is more at the beginning, more symbolic, it will observe the world in such a way that it seeks for spiritual connections behind external appearance. That second pole leads into the neighbourhood of spiritual beings also, but it leads into the realm of spiritual beings whose lower powers and forces are related to the highest powers of man, and they seek to tear the higher powers of man away from his lower nature. One has to keep in mind that man is in connection both with super-sensible and sub-sensible forces, while he lives in the world of the senses. We know how beings send down their forces into a sub-sensible region. In Sacramentalism, for instance, in symbolical actions, there streams down forces from a super-sensible into a sub-sensible world. The other polaric impulse leading to one relating oneself to special beings allied to man's lowest powers lead to sexuality in Psycho-Analysis. It is distasteful to go into further details. A synthesis must arise in the union of these two one-sidednesses, these two poles, while one learns to overcome them. One must will to overcome the forces of nature sacramentally. These polaric impulses are playing into everything to-day without man knowing it, and second pole, the pole of Sacramentalism, so often shines into the first pole, that of Utilitarianism. If we return to H. P. Blavatsky, she started from that second impulse that impelled her towards a Sacramental side. The first impulse however led to the materialism of the Theosophical Society, and so we see a tornado of both impulses working round H. P. Blavatsky.

This is lecture 9 of 16 from the lecture series: The Inner Human Impulse for Improvement, Goethe and the Crisis in the Nineteenth Century

In the lectures given here for some time it has been my task to draw attention to certain impulses, certain forces which work in the souls of men and thence into all that these souls bring to expression in earthly life. I have pointed out how these impulses and forces developed at the dawn of modern spiritual life. Today, because I want to call your attention to a particular kind of modern spiritual striving, we will consider, once again, an important starting point for modern spiritual life, which we have already considered but which is one of the most, important and essential of all. When we inquire into the forces that are at work in modern souls, we are compelled to recognize the importance and significance of this event in history. I refer to the whole destiny and development of the Order of the Knights Templar.

I should like, then, to put before you once more, the picture of the Order of the Knights Templar in order to show how what proceeded from this Order worked on in broad streams which flow even into the feelings and perceptions of men of our own times.

We know that the Order of the Templars was founded in connection with the Crusades. It was, so to speak, an important accompanying phenomenon to that great event in history whereby the peoples of Europe sought in their own way to come nearer to the Mystery of Golgotha than they had previously been able to do. The Order of the Templars was founded almost at the very beginning of the Crusades. Leaving on one side all that is known externally about the founding of the Order and the further course of its activity—you can easily read it in history books—we find that this Order of the Knights Templar, inwardly considered, expresses a specially deep approach to the Mystery of Golgotha on the part of modern humanity. First of all, a small number of souls who were faithful and devoted followers of Christianity gathered together at a place that lay near to the ancient Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem and established there a kind of spiritual order. As we have already said, we will not consider now the more external side of the event, but will look at it from a spiritual point of view and turn our attention to what gradually began to live in the souls of the Templars.

In their blood, as the representative of that which distinguishes earthly Man, in their I, but also in all their feeling and thinking, in their very being and existence, these souls were, in a sense, to forget their connection with sensible physical existence; they were to live solely in what streams from the Mystery of Golgotha, and fight for the continuance of the strongest impulses that are connected with the Mystery of Golgotha.

The blood of the Templars belonged to Christ Jesus—each one of them knew this—their blood belonged to nothing else on earth than to Christ Jesus. Every moment of their life was to be filled with the perpetual consciousness of how in their own soul there dwelt, in the words of Paul, “Not I, but Christ in me!” And in bloody and severe combats, in devoted work such as the Crusades demanded, the Templars lived out in practice what they had spiritually resolved. Words are impotent to describe what lived in the souls of these men, who might never waver in their duty, who, even if a three times stronger power confronted them on the physical plane, might never flee, but must calmly await death, the death that they were ready to endure in order to establish more firmly in earth existence the impulse which went forth from the Mystery of Golgotha. It was an intense life of the whole human being in union with the Mystery of Golgotha.

And now, when such an intense life is lived in the right rhythms, so that it can take its place in the whole stream of cosmic and earthly forces, then something of real significance develops out of such a life. I say advisedly of real significance. For when such a consciousness as this is placed inwardly, mystically, and with a certain rhythm into all that goes on in the outside world, then Man can experience again and again how his own inner being is brought into connection with the divine and spiritual. But something else, something that has still greater effect is developed when this inner experience is brought together with the course of external history and placed into the service of the course of events. And it was intended that what lived consciously in the souls of the Knights Templar should be in harmony with what had to be done in the attempt to regain power over the sacred grave. A deeply mystical life developed in this way among those who belonged to this so-called Spiritual Order, an Order which on this very account could accomplish more for the world than other Spiritual Orders. For when in this way a life that is lived mystically is also in connection with the life going on in the surrounding world, then what is experienced mystically streams into the invisible and super-sensible forces of the surrounding world of that human being. It becomes objective—it is not merely within his own soul, but works on further in the course of history. Through a mysticism of this kind, it comes about that an experience of the soul is not simply there for the single human being, but turns into objective forces which were formerly not there in the spiritual stream that carried and upholds humanity. These forces come to birth and are there. When a person performs his daily task with his hands or with implements, he places some external material thing into the world. With a mysticism such as was unfolded by the Knights Templar, something spiritual is added to the spiritual “effects” of the world. And inasmuch as this took place, humanity was actually brought a stage further in its evolution. Through this experience of the Templars, the Mystery of Golgotha was understood, and also experienced, at a higher stage than before. Something was now present in the world, in regard to this Mystery of Golgotha, which was formerly not there.

The souls of the Templars had however at the same time achieved something else. Through this intense inward penetration into the Mystery of Golgotha, they had gained the power actually to attain Christian initiation by means of the historical event. Christian initiation may be attained in the manner described in our books, but in this case it was attained in the following way. Their external deeds and the enthusiasm that lived in these deeds drew forth the souls of the Templars, so that these souls, apart from the body, outside the body, lived with the spiritual progress of humanity and penetrated in soul and spirit the secrets of the Mystery of Golgotha. Many and deep experiences were then undergone, and not for the individual soul alone but for all humanity.

Then, as we know, the Order of the Knights Templar increased and spread, and in addition to the immensely powerful influence that it possessed spiritually—more in a super-sensible manner than through external channels—it acquired great wealth. And I have already described how the time came for these external treasuries, which the Knights Templar amassed to greater and greater extent, to be converted into temporal power. I have told you how, through a kind of initiation with the evil principle of gold, Philippe le Bel was chosen to be the instrument who should oppose the Templars. That is to say, he wanted in the first place to possess their treasures. But Philippe le Bel knew more than most men in the world. Through what he had experienced he knew many of the secrets of the human soul. And so it came about that Philippe le Bel could be a fitting instrument in the service of Mephistophelian-Ahrimanic powers whose aim and object it was to render ineffective the Templar Movement in the form it had first of all taken.

Philippe le Bel was, as we have said, the instrument of other, spiritual, Mephistophelian-Ahrimanic powers. Under the inspiration of these powers Philippe le Bel knew what it would have meant if, into the spiritual streams which flow through the world just as truly as do the outwardly visible events, if into these streams had been allowed to flow what the Templars had gained as knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha and as feelings and impulses of will connected with that Mystery. What had thus developed must therefore be torn away from the normally progressive divine-spiritual powers; it must be turned into other paths. To this end it had also to be brought about that something which could only live in the souls of the Templars should be torn out of the individuality of the Templars themselves. Just as that which the Templars had experienced in connection with the Mystery of Golgotha did not remain with them as individuals, but was placed out into the general evolution of humanity, so now something else was also to be removed, as it were, from the individuality and embodied in the objective spiritual stream. And this could only be accomplished by means of a particularly cruel deed, by means of a terrible act of cruelty.

The Templars were committed for trial. Not only were they accused of external crimes, of which they were most certainly innocent—as can be proved on historical grounds, if one is but ready to see the truth—but they were accused above all of blaspheming Christianity, of blaspheming the Mystery of Golgotha itself, of worshiping idols, of introducing paganism into the Mystery of Golgotha, of not using the right formula in the act of consecration at the Transubstantiation, nay, even of desecrating the Cross. Of all sorts of other crimes also, even unnatural crimes, were the Templars accused. And hundreds and hundreds of them were subject to the cruel torture of the rack.

Those who committed them for trial knew what this torture on the rack meant. The ordinary day consciousness of those who underwent this torture was suppressed, so that during the torture they forgot, in their surface consciousness, their connection with the Mystery of Golgotha. But they had become acquainted—and this is the case with everyone who truly sees into the spiritual world—they had become acquainted with all the trials and temptations which beset a person when he really approaches the good divine-spiritual powers. With all the enemies who work out of the lower spiritual kingdoms and want to bring Man down and lead him into evil, who are able to work in the impulses and desires and passions, and especially in hatred and mocking and irony against the Good, with all these the Templars had become familiar. In many an hour that was for them a sacred hour of their life, they had gained those inner victories that Man can gain when with open eyes he passes through the worlds that lie beyond the threshold of the world of the senses; for these worlds must first be overcome before Man can enter with strengthened powers into the spiritual worlds where he rightly belongs.

During their torture, the vision of the Templars that could look out over these spiritual worlds to which they belonged, became clouded and dim; their surface consciousness was dulled, and their inner gaze was directed entirely and only to what they had experienced as something to be overcome, was directed to the temptations over which they had gained victory after victory. And thus it came about that, during the moments while they were actually being tortured on the rack, they forgot their connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, forgot how with their soul they were living in the spiritual and eternal worlds. And the trials and temptations which they had resisted and overcome stood before them, like a vision, whilst they lay stretched on the rack, and they acknowledged the very thing that each one for himself had overcome; they confessed it to be a custom within the Order. They confessed themselves to be guilty of just that over which they had again and again won the victory. Every one of these Templars was obliged to seem to be the man in him over which he had inwardly gained the victory, over which he had to gain the victory before, with higher forces, he could attain to the highest and holiest of all. (I speak of all true Templars—abuses can of course be found everywhere).

All this the opponents knew. They knew that, just as on the one hand the Mystery of Golgotha had been placed out into the evolution of humanity as an influence for good, so now, in the same way, because the ordinary consciousness had been dulled, therefore what lived in this evil consciousness was by this means placed outside, objectified, and embodied in the evolution of humanity. It had become a factor in history.

Two streams were thus allowed to flow on into modern history: what the Templars experienced in their holiest moments, what they had worked out and developed within the progressing spiritual stream of humanity, but also what had been wrested from them by Ahriman-Mephistopheles, fetched up out of their consciousness in order to make it objective, in order to form it objectively and make it effective in the further progress of the centuries.

At this point a simple-minded person might easily put the question: Why do the divine-spiritual powers of providence allow such a thing to happen? Why do they not guide humanity through the course of history without Man's having to undergo such painful trials? Such a thought is “human, all-too-human.” It arises in the mind of one who can believe that the world would be better if it had been made, not by Gods, but by men. Many people may think this; they may think that, with their intellect, they can criticize the wisdom that works and weaves in the world. But such a way of thinking leads also to the very extreme of intellectual pride.

We human beings are called upon to penetrate into the secrets of existence, not to criticize the wisdom-filled guidance of the world. We must therefore also gain insight into the place and significance of the evil currents which are permitted by the wise guidance of the world. For if only the good were allowed, if good impulses alone worked in history, human beings would never be so guided in their historical evolution that they could develop freedom. Only through the fact that evil holds sway in the spiritual course of human history can humanity develop to freedom. And if the Gods were to turn away Man's gaze from evil, he would have to remain forever an automaton—he would never become free. Things are indeed so ordered in the progress of humanity that even that which causes the deepest sorrow is led at last to good. Pain is only a temporary thing—not that it is on that account any less great and deep. We must not deceive ourselves as to pain and fall a prey to some cheap mysticism that will not see the pain; we must be ready to partake in it, ready to sink ourselves in it, ready to pour it out over our own soul. But, at the same time, without criticizing the spiritual purpose and will of existence, we must also learn to understand how the most varied impulses of a positive and negative nature are introduced into the evolution of humanity in order that human beings may become not only good, but also free and possessors of their own impulses.

And so in the evolution and destiny of the Templars we see an impulse that is important for all the succeeding centuries of modern times. If it had been possible for the purpose of the Order to continue to be lived out with the intensity and strength with which it was at first lived out by the great Templars, succeeding humanity would not have been able to bear it. The speed of evolution had, as it were, to be checked; the stream had to be held back. But in this way it was made more inward. And so we see how, in the two streams we have indicated in modern history, deep inwardness of life developed alongside external materialism. For the Mephistophelian impulse, which Mephistopheles-Ahriman, through his instrument Philippe le Bel, dragged out by force, lived on. It lived on, together with many other things, in the materialistic thoughts and feelings of men and in all the materialistic impulses which appeared among mankind from the 15th to the 19th century. Hence it has come about that what we know as materialism has spread itself so widely over the soul and spirit of Man and over all his social life and has prepared the ground for the karma of our own time.

Had things not gone in this way, had the stream of materialism not been allowed to spread so far and wide, neither could, on the other hand, our connection with the spiritual world have become so deep and intimate. For indeed, what the Templars had accomplished by entering in a living spiritual sense into the Mystery of Golgotha was not lost. It lived on. And the souls of the Templars—after their terrible experiences on the rack, fifty-four of them were put to death—the souls of the Templars who had, under these circumstances, passed through the portal of death, were now able to send down from the spiritual world streams of spiritual life for those who lived in the succeeding centuries.

Fifty-four Templars were burned at the stake in 1314. Fifty-four souls went up into the spiritual worlds. And from that time on, supersensibly and invisibly, without its being outwardly perceptible to the facts of history, there began in European humanity a spiritual development that owed its origin to the fact that individual souls were continually being inspired from the spiritual world with what these fifty-four souls carried through the gate of death into the spiritual world.

Let me give you an example of this. It is one I have mentioned before, but I will now deal with it in more detail from another point of view.

Before the tragedy broke out in the Order of the Templars—a whole century before the year 1312—Wolfram von Eschenbach composed his poem Parzifal. Working alone, or in a very small circle, Wolfram von Eschenbach produced this song about a soul who strives by means of inward purification to attain the life which the Knights Templar also held before them continually as their ultimate goal. In a wealth of picture and in wonderful imaginations, Wolfram von Eschenbach unrolls before our view the inner life of Parzifal, who was for him the representative of the Templar ideal. Now let us inquire: Do we see any important external result of Parzifal—who was for him the representative of the Templar ideal—in the historical development of succeeding times? We do not. In the further history of European humanity it was, as we know, Richard Wagner who first presented Parzifal again, and then in quite another way. But the spiritual power, the spiritual impulse that was able to flow into the soul of Wolfram von Eschenbach—at that time still from the earth—became in succeeding centuries for many others an inspiration from the spiritual world. And one who is able to perceive the mysterious connections between the life on earth and the spiritual life, knows that the impulses which were carried into the spiritual world through the destiny of the Templars flowed also into the soul of Goethe. It was not to no purpose that Goethe began in the eighties a poem which he never finished. It is significant that he began it, and equally significant that even he was not strong enough to bring to actual expression the mighty thought of this poem. I refer to the poem The Mysteries, where the Brother Mark goes to the lonely castle of the Rosicrucians and enters the circle of the Twelve. Goethe grasped—in his own way, of course, the fundamental thought which is also contained in Parzifal, but he was not able to complete it; and we may see in that very fact an indication of how all of us are standing within the same spiritual development which Goethe experienced in its beginnings, and at which we must work and work and work that we may be able to give form to these beginnings and make further and further progress in the penetration of the spiritual world. Goethe devoted to the first beginnings of this spiritual development the best powers of his existence; he let them flow into his Faust where he set out to portray Man's connection with the forces of the spirit, which include for him the Ahrimanic-Mephistophelian forces.

One who observes history concretely in its spiritual development can see quite clearly that into the soul of Goethe on earth there followed from the spiritual world what the Templars—whose manner of death had been so cruel and so significant—had carried up into the spiritual worlds; and, just because they had gone through the gate of death in this way, could pour down as inspiration into the souls of men. It flowed down, and if with more significance into Goethe's soul, it was not into his soul alone but into many others; and it continues to live, although but little noticed by human beings. The spiritual element in Faust itself still almost escapes notice in the outside world! It lives on however, and is moving towards an ever richer life, and will have to become more and more fruitful if humanity is not to drift into decadence instead of evolving in an upward direction. But this lies in our own choice. In our age of time it is given into Man's own hands. The choice is set before him—and will be so more and more definitely—as to whether he will fall into decadence and continue to hold to materialism, or strive upwards into the spiritual worlds.

For we human beings, as we live on earth, it is only in our physical body that we live a life connected with the earth. The body that is woven of light and sound and life and is within this physical body—the so-called ether body—partakes not only in the life of earth, but in the life of the cosmos. And when a human soul descends from the spiritual worlds to enter existence through birth, then, already before the event, forces are directed in the cosmos in a right way for the building up of the ether organism of the human being, even as the physical body of Man is built up from the physical forces and physical substances of earth.

In the very simplest of Man's ideas lives pride and arrogance and this is especially true in our materialistic age. In this materialistic age, parents actually believe that they place their children into existence all by themselves. And as materialism spreads, it will be more and more believed that it is the parents alone who bring the children to existence. Seen spiritually, it is different. Human beings here on earth only provide the opportunity for something spiritual to come down to them. What a human being can do as a part consists solely in this, he can make ready the place by means of which an ether body that is being prepared from out of the far spaces of the cosmos may be able to sink down to earth. This ether organism of the human being is just as much an organized entity as is the physical organism. The physical organism—we see how it has head, arms, hands, trunk and all the parts that the anatomist and physiologist discover—for spiritual vision, this physical organism is shone through and glowed by the ether organism. The physical organism breathes in air, and breathes out air. The ether organism breathes out light, and this light it gives to us. And when it breathes out light and confers the light upon us, we live by means of its light. And it also breathes in light. As we breathe in and out air, so does our ether body breathe in and out. And when it breathes in light, it uses up the light, just as we use up air physically. (You may read of this in a passage in my Mystery Dramas where this secret of the ether world is unfolded dramatically.) The ether body breathes in light, uses up the light and changes it into darkness, and can then receive into this darkness the sound of the worlds that lives in the Harmony of the Spheres, can receive into it the impulses of life. As we receive physical nourishment so does the ether being that lives in us breathe light in and out. As we use up in us the oxygen of the air and make carbonic acid gas, so does the ether body use up the light, shooting it through with darkness, so that it appears in colors, so that the ether body shows itself to clairvoyant vision in waves of color. And while the ether body prepares the light for the darkness and thereby carries on an inner work of breathing, it lives, in that it receives this sound of the worlds and changes the sound of the worlds into the life of the worlds.

But now what we receive in this way as our ether body, comes down to us from the wide spaces of the cosmos, and it comes at certain times, from the far spaces of the cosmos. It is today not yet possible to show in all detail how the human ether body draws downwards on the paths of light when these paths are guided in a particular manner through the constellation of the stars at the time. For that to be possible, human beings will have to lift themselves to a higher stage of morality. For today, this mystery of the in-drawing of the human ether bodies on the paths of the light and on the paths of the sound of the Harmony of the Spheres, would be misused by human beings in the most terrible way. For what is contained in this mystery would, if people of lower impulses wanted to acquire it, give parents unlimited power over the whole of their descendants. You will accordingly understand that this mystery of how the ether bodies come to the human beings who are incarnating—of how they come on the paths of light and on the paths of sound from out of the Harmony of the Spheres—will have to remain a mystery for a long time to come. Only under certain quite definite conditions can one learn anything of this mystery. For the failure to comply with the conditions would mean, as I have said, that parents could acquire a hitherto unheard-of power over their offspring, who might be completely deprived of all independence, of all personality and of all individuality and have the will of their parents thrust upon them. Wisely is this mystery hidden away for mankind in the unconscious and takes its course there in a good and healthy way, working through the will of the wise world-guidance.

Our ether body travels quite a different path from our physical body. After we have passed through the gate of death, we still carry, as you know, our ether body for a few days; then we have to give it back to the cosmos. In the spiritual, in the cosmos, our ether body remains only as a picture for our own further life between death and new birth. It is incorporated into the cosmos in the most varied manner—in one way in the case of people who die early through some accident or otherwise, and in a different way in the case of those who attain maturity. But when one looks across into the world that lies beyond the threshold, one knows that both—the early death as well as the later death—have great significance in the whole cosmic connections. For our ether body that we give up continues to work on spiritually.

Fundamentally speaking, seen from a deeper aspect, we all grow old. Physically, one dies earlier and another later; seen from a spiritual aspect, we all become old alike. If we die early, our physical body comes to an end early; but our ether body continues to live on for the cosmos, and just because we have died early, our ether body has other functions in the cosmos than if we had died only later. When we count up the years that we live in physical and in ether body as human beings—we have the deeds on earth that we accomplish in the physical body, and we have what we accomplish in the ether body also after death, and the life that we live there not for ourselves but for others, for the world—when we add up all this in its years, then we find that everyone lives to about the same age.

But now, when an event takes place such as happened with the Templars, something different again comes about from when it is only a case of the individual lives. The life that we lead as an individual remains within our own person; but there is also the life that can be objectively separated from us—as in the case of the Templars. On the one hand, what they were able to do for the continuance and spread of the Mystery of Golgotha and, on the other hand, what happened through the working of Mephistophelian-Ahrimanic forces for the impulse of modern materialism, all this also continues to live on as fragments of the ether body. But it is incorporated into the whole process of history. So that some of the life Man lives in his ether body lives on further with the human individuality, while some of it is incorporated into the course of history—when it has been torn away from the human being in the manner described. And the ether body is the means or medium whereby what a person lives in his soul so objectively that it can go out of his soul—whereby this may have, as it were, something to hold on to for its further life—it is the ether body that provides for this.

What flowed into the etheric world from the spiritual impulses of the Templars lived on etherically, and through this continued etheric life many souls were prepared to receive the inspirations that I have described as coming out of the spiritual world from the souls of the Templars themselves. That is what has actually been taking place in modern times.

Into what flowed from the souls of the Templars, however, there began to enter more and more that which flows from the Mephistophelian-Ahrimanic impulses and is steeped in the Mephistophelian element, and which was inaugurated on the racks where the Templars were tortured, inasmuch as they were forced under torture to speak untruths about themselves. This fact—not alone, but as one of the spiritual grounds of modern materialism—has to be understood if one would acquire an inner understanding of modern materialistic evolution.

And so it came about that in modern times, while certain individuals were inspired with high spiritual truths, the general culture became more and more materialistic in character; and the eye of the soul grew dim for what now surrounds us spiritually and also for that whither we go when we pass through the gate of death and whence we come when we pass through the gate of birth. More and more was the gaze of Man turned away from beholding the spiritual, and this was true in all the different spheres of life—the spiritual sphere, the sphere of religion, the sphere of social life. More and more was the gaze directed to the material world as it showed itself to his senses. And the result has been that, since the rise of modern times, mankind has fallen into a great many errors.

Again let me say, I am not criticizing the fact, I am not passing judgment on it. Through the fact that errors found their way into human evolution, human beings have to experience these errors, and they will gradually come to see them; and, in overcoming them, get stronger forces than they could have had if the path to their goal had been implanted in them automatically. And now the time has come when this insight must be developed and human beings must see how, in all that is material, live impulses to error. Today Man is called upon again and again to make up his mind to see through the errors and overcome them.

It is not our intention to lay blame on anything that has happened in history, what we want to do is to look at history objectively. The events of modern times have brought it about that Man's thoughts and feelings run their course only in accordance with external physical reality, only in accordance with what Man experiences between birth and death. Even the religious life has gradually assumed a personal character, inasmuch as it aims merely at putting into Man's hand a means whereby he may find blessing in his own soul. The religious life of more modern times, that turns Man's gaze more and more away from the concrete spiritual world, is really permeated with the materialistic outlook. As has been said, we have no intention of casting aspersion on any event in history; the events of history, must however be described in such a way that they may be rightly understood—that is, if the coming generation is not to fail into decadence but to take a turn, and move upwards.

We see the stream of materialism flow on and, side by side with it, the parallel hidden stream; and then at the end of the 18th century we come to a tremendous event, an event the influence of which was felt throughout the whole of the 19th century and right on into the present time. At the end of the 18th century, we see the French Revolution spreading its currents far and wide over European civilization. Many things took their course in the French Revolution as the historians have described them. But in addition to the understanding one has already of the French Revolution, in addition to the impulse one has recognized as proceeding from it and working on in European history, we must also understand the spiritual effects of materialistic Mephistophelian-Ahrimanic impulses. The French Revolution strove for a very high ideal. (As I said before, we are not concerned with finding fault but with understanding the events of history.) The French Revolution strove for a very high ideal; and it strove for it in a time upon which still felt the shadow of the event I have described today, the event which left Mephistopheles-Ahriman mighty to send forth into European life the impulse of materialism. And we may say of the best of those who were responsible for the French Revolution that they believed in the physical plane alone. It may be that in their consciousness they thought they believed in something else. What people profess with words is however of little account; the important thing is to have a live consciousness in one's soul of what is really working in the world; and those who were responsible for the French Revolution were conscious only of the physical plane.

They strove, it is true, for a high ideal, but they knew nothing of the trinity in Man, the body that works by means of the etheric principle in the human being, the soul that works through the astral principle, and the spirit that works in Man to begin with through the I. At the end of the 18th century, Man was already regarded in the way that he is regarded—to his lasting harm and loss—by modern materialistic physiology and biology. That is to say, even if in a religious way men had some notion of a spiritual life and perhaps also talked about it, their gaze was really only actually directed upon what is lived out here in the physical world between birth and death—what is lived out here, that one can understand. (Even that of course is not yet entirely understood; nevertheless one can understand it when one directs one's attention solely to the external physical body.) What lives in the entire human being, that can only be understood when it is known that with the external physical body are united an etheric principle, an astral principle and an I-principle. For even while we stand here in the physical world, there is living in us something that is of soul and spirit and that belongs to the spiritual world. Body, soul and spirit are we here. And when we have gone through the gates of death, we shall again be threefold beings, only with another spiritual body. So that anyone who observes and studies Man living out his life as physical Man between birth and death, is not studying the whole human being, and is bound to fall into error in regard to the whole human being.

The events that happen in the world must not be looked upon as erroneous in themselves. What makes itself manifest in the world is indeed truth; but the way in which Man regards it and turns it into deed and action often causes confusion. And confusion arose in the minds of men at the end of the 18th century, because everything was applied to the body, and ideals which only have meaning when Man is seen as a trinity were aspired to as the ideals for a purely physical “monon.” And so it came about that lofty and beautiful ideals were on everyone's lips in a time when men were not capable of understanding them, but only confused and falsified them, because they tried to comprehend them all together, believing as they did in the physical body alone. As a matter of fact, of the threefold ideal, Brotherhood, Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood is the only one that holds good for the physical body of Man. Freedom only has meaning when it is referred to the human soul, and Equality when it is referred to the spirit as it lives in Man, in the I. Only when it is known that Man consists of body, soul and spirit, and when the three ideals of the end of the 18th century are referred Brotherhood, to the body; Freedom, to the soul; and Equality, to the I, only then is one speaking in a sense and meaning that is in accord with the inner meaning of the spiritual world.

Brotherhood we can develop, inasmuch as we are physical human beings bearing physical bodies of the earth; and when we accept Brotherhood into our social order, then for the social order on the physical plane, Brotherhood is a right and true thing. Freedom Man can acquire only in his soul, inasmuch as it is with the soul that he incarnates on earth. And Freedom only prevails on earth, is only possible on earth, when it has reference to the souls of men who live on the earth in their social orderings, to the end that they acquire the faculty of holding the balance between the lower and the higher forces. When we are able, as human beings, to hold the balance between the lower and the higher forces in the human soul, then we develop the forces that can live here between birth and death, and the forces too that we shall need when we pass through the gate of death. So that alongside of the social order, a soul order is necessary on earth, wherein the souls of men may take their places individually and be able to develop the forces of freedom, which they can carry with them through the gates of death, but which they will only carry with them if, already here in this life, they prepare themselves for the life after death. That a true intercourse between souls shall be established on earth, that souls shall be able to develop the forces of freedom, that all human events, great and small, and all attempts to give form to human activity and creation shall have as their aim, Man holding the balance in his soul in regard to what lives and works spiritually—this must come to be an ideal. Man becomes free when he is in a position to acquire these forces of the soul in the external physical world, as he can acquire them, for example, when he is able to follow the beautiful forms that live in an art that really has its sources and beginning in the spirit. Man becomes free, when there is an intercourse and communion between soul and soul of such a nature that the one soul is able to follow the other with an ever-growing understanding and with an ever-growing love. If it is a question of the bodies of men with which we are concerned, then Brotherhood comes into consideration; if it is a question of the soul, then we must look to forging those delicate and subtle links that arise between soul and soul, and that must find their way right into the structure of our life on earth and must always work in the direction of engendering interest—deep interest in one soul for the other. For in this way alone can souls become free, and it is only souls that can become free.

Equality applied to the external physical world is nonsense; for equality would be uniformity. Everything in the world is undergoing change; everything in the world is compelled to be in number; everything in the world is obliged to come to expression in multiplicity and variety. To this very end is the physical world there, that the spiritual may go through a multitude of forms. But in all the multiple and manifold life of Man, one thing remains alike, because it is still in its beginning. The rest of our human nature we have carried in us since the Saturn time, the Sun time and the Moon time; the I we have for the first time in this life of earth. The I is only in its beginning. During the whole of our life between birth and death we come no further in the spiritual than to say to ourselves “I,” and to take cognizance of this I. We can only behold the I, either when through initiation we are outside the body here between birth and death, or when we have passed through the gate of death and it is given us to look back in memory on our earth body and behold the I spiritually. But through this I all possible variety comes to expression here on earth. And our life on earth must be so constructed as to give possibility for all the variety that can enter earth life in human individuality to come to expression. One human being manifests one individuality, a second another, and a third a different one again. All these individualities in their several workings are focused in a point, the point of the I. There we are alike, and through this focus-point where we are alike can pass all that we communicate to one another as spirits. The fact that we all have this I—point where we are alike gives the possibility for the development of mankind of a community life. That which is different in all of us passes through what is alike. Consequently, it is not the establishment of what is contributed by the single human individual to the whole stream of cosmic spiritual evolution that is achieved in spiritual equality; rather it is so, that because what has placed us each into a different kind of life passes through our I, through the spiritual in us, it becomes something that can be shared by all, it flows on as a common good in the stream of cosmic evolution. Equality belongs properly to the spirit.

No human generation will understand how the three ideals of Brotherhood, Freedom and Equality can come to realization in the life of mankind, unless they understand that Man carries in him this threefoldness of body, soul and spirit. That people were unable in the 18th century and have continued to be unable throughout the 19th century to understand this, was a result of the strength of the Ahrimanic-Mephistophelian stream which entered modern evolution in the way I have described. The 18th century mixed up Equality, Freedom and Brotherhood, and applied all three to external physical life. In the way it has been understood in the 19th century, it can only mean social chaos. And mankind will have to drift further and further into this chaos, if they do not receive spiritual science and spiritual life, which will lead to an understanding of Man as a trinity and to a reconstruction of earth life for threefold Man.

Man had to go through materialism. His forces would have been too weak for the times to follow, if he had not gone through materialism. For strange and amazing is the evolution of mankind. Let us look back for a moment to an event of the Lemurian epoch. We find there a certain moment in evolution—it lies thousands and thousands of years back—when the mankind of the earth was quite different from what it is now. You will know from the descriptions I have given in Occult Science of human evolution on the earth that the various impulses entered into Man only gradually. There was a moment in evolution when what we today call magnetic and electric forces established themselves within Man. For magnetic and electric forces live in us in a mysterious manner. Before this time, Man lived on earth without the magnetic and electric forces that have developed ever since, spiritually, between the workings of the nerves and the blood. They were incorporated into Man at that time. The forces of magnetism we will leave out of consideration, and a portion of the forces of electricity. But the forces which I will distinguish as the electrical forces in galvanism, voltaism, etc.—forces that have taken deep hold in the culture and civilization of our time—these forces found entry in that far-off time into the human organism and united themselves with human life; and this very fact made it possible for them to remain for a long time unknown to human consciousness.

Man carried them within him, and for that very reason they remained unknown to him externally. The forces of magnetism and the other electrical forces we learned to know earlier. Galvanism, the electricity of contact, which has a much deeper determining influence on the karma of our age than is generally realized, was, as you know, only discovered at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, by Galvani and Volta. People give far too little thought to such facts as these. Just consider for a moment! This Galvani was dealing with the leg of a frog. “By chance,” as we say, he fastened it to the window, and it came in contact with iron, and twitched. That was the beginning of all the discoveries that rule the earth today by means of the electric current. And it happened such a little while ago! People do not generally stop to think how it is that mankind did not come to this knowledge earlier. Suddenly this thought emerges in a human being, in a perfectly miraculous way; he stumbles on it—as it were, perforce. In this materialistic age of ours, we naturally never stop to think about such a thing. And this is the reason why we can understand absolutely nothing at all of the real becoming of the earth. The truth of the matter is as follows:

After mankind had passed the moment in the Lemurian time when it implanted into it, or received implanted into it, the forces that go through the wire today in electricity and work in an invisible manner in Man himself, after this time had passed, electricity lived inside the human being. Now evolution does not proceed in the simple, straightforward way in which people are inclined to picture it. They imagine that time goes ever forward on and on into the infinite. That is an altogether abstract conception. The truth is that time moves and turns in such a way that evolution is constantly reversed and runs back. It is not only in space that we find movements in curves as in a lemniscate, but also in time.

During the Lemurian epoch, Man was at the crossing point of the lemniscate movement, and that was the time when he implanted into himself the principle of electrical force. He traversed the returning path in the Atlantean time and, in respect of certain forces, in the Post-Atlantean time, and arrived about the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century exactly at the point in the evolution of the worlds at which he was in the old Lemurian time when he implanted into himself from the cosmos the principle of electricity. There you have the explanation of how it came about that Galvani discovered electricity at that particular time. Man always goes back again in later times to what he experienced earlier. Life takes its course in cycles, in rhythms. At the middle of the materialistic age which had been developing ever since the 14th–15th century, mankind was standing at that point in the world. All through which he had passed long ago in the Lemurian epoch. And mankind as a whole in that moment remembered the entry of electricity into the human being, and thereupon as a result of this memory impregnated his whole civilization with electricity. The soul and spirit in Man found again what it had once experienced long ago.

Truths like this must be clearly envisaged again, for it is only with truths like this that we shall escape decadence in the future.

Under the influence of the inspirations of which I have been speaking to you today, certain minds came upon such truths. For the fact that people went on such paths was the result of the fact that many and different currents work in human evolution. If, for example, what the Templars wanted to attain had been the sole influence working in history, quite a different evolution would have resulted for Man. Through the fact that the other stream too—the Mephistophelian—has been intermixed with it (the Mephistophelian stream was of course also there from the beginning, but it was given new life by the destiny of the Templars), Man has been brought, in our time, into materialism just in the way that it has actually happened. These Mephistophelian-Ahrimanic forces are needed in the evolution of mankind. And, as I have said, certain great minds were led by the inspiration that comes from the Rosicrucian Temples and has its source in the spiritual world to recognize this principle of which I am here speaking.

Do not imagine that a great poet, a really great poet who creates out of the spiritual world, puts together his words in the superficial way that people often imagine they are at liberty to take them! No, a poet like Goethe, for instance, knows what is contained and implied in the Word; he knows that in the Word we have something that lets spirit resound through the person speaking. “Person,” did I say? Here we must remind ourselves that “persona” is a word that comes from the Latin for the mask that the actor carries and through which his voice sounds. “Personare” means to sound through. All this is closely connected with the evolution of the Word. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and Divine was the Word.” The Word was not in Man; nevertheless human personality is closely connected with it.

The whole evolution, as we have said, is carried forward inasmuch as not merely good forces are working, but others also. And a man like Goethe uttered in his Faust—even though in part unconsciously, nevertheless under inspiration—notable and great truths. When the Lord is conversing with Mephistopheles in the Prologue in Heaven, he says at last to Mephistopheles that He has no objection to his work and influence. He recognizes him and allows him his place in the evolution of the worlds. It is owing to him that there are such things as enticements and influences that must needs create what is evil. But then the Lord turns and directs his word to the true and genuine Sons of the Gods who bring forward normal evolution, and with whose working the working of the other stream is united. And what does He say to these true Sons of the Gods?

But ye, the genuine Sons of Heaven, rejoice!
In the full living beauty still rejoice!
May that which works and lives, the ever-growing,
In bonds of love enfold you, mercy-fraught,
And seeming's changeful forms, around you flowing,
Do ye arrest, in ever-during thought!

The Lord gives to His Sons the direct command to set in the world's places enduring thoughts! Such an enduring thought was placed into the world when the principle of electricity was implanted into Man, and Man was led back again to the enduring thought when he discovered the principle of electricity implanted it into his materialistic civilization. Of immeasurable depth is the thought expressed in these lines:

May that which works and lives, the ever-growing,
In bonds of love enfold you, mercy-fraught,
And seeming's changeful forms, around you flowing,
Do ye arrest, in ever-during thought!

And it means a deep experience for the soul, to feel that mystery of the “enduring thoughts.” For then we feel how in the world here and there the Eternal stands at rest in the form of an enduring thought, and we who belong to the world of movement are passing through what is being placed into seeming's changeful forms as enduring thoughts, as the beauty that weaves and works everlastingly, reveals itself in order that we may comprehend it when the right moment comes.

And may a right moment also come for mankind in the near future, even as it is predestined to come if mankind is not to fall into decadence. May Man understand that he has to pass through the next point, which reverses materialism into its opposite, the point where the great thought of the spiritual world can ray into mankind. Preparation is now being made for this in those whose karma has allowed them to come to Spiritual Science. And it will be the continually recurring task of Spiritual Science to turn its work in this direction. For to the materialistic age that has found the enduring thought which in its newest form Ahriman-Mephistopheles has placed into modern evolution, to this materialistic age must be added what can be experienced in passing through a spiritual enduring thought. Spiritual Science must see to it that mankind does not omit to grasp this spiritual thought. Therefore also must we not grow weary in warning Man again and again, lest the moment of time for the comprehension of Spiritual Science slip by and be lost.

Tomorrow I shall begin my discussion of the problems related to the connection of the spiritual scientific impulses with various unclarified tasks of the present time, and the influence that spiritual science must exert on individual, especially scientific, problems. Then I should like to refer to what I may call, in the sense of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch, the karma of human vocation.

Today I shall take as my point of departure something that seemingly has little to do with that theme, but it will afford an opportunity to connect various related matters. I shall endeavor to point out the element in Goethe's life that characterizes him especially as a personality of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, and much to which I have recently referred will, of course, be echoed in my remarks. I should like to bring before your souls the very facts pertaining to this personality that will enable anyone to distinguish important phenomena of the advancing post-Atlantean cultural epoch. In relation to the spiritual interests of humanity, the life and personality of Goethe are comprehensive and decisive to an extent that can hardly be ascribed to any other individual. Still, it may also be said that, in spite of much that has occurred, his life and personality have had the least possible effect on our lives. This, however, must be attributed to the very nature of our modern culture. It may be asked how it can possibly be said that the life of Goethe has remained without effect. Are not his works known? Has not an edition of his works, consisting of hundreds of volumes, been published recently? Did not his published letters number six or seven thousand by the turn of the century, and today number almost ten thousand? Is there not a wealth of literature concerning Goethe, one might almost say in every civilized language? Do not his works continue to be produced on stage? Is not his major work, Faust, brought again and again before the minds of men?

Now, I have often referred recently to the strange error of an illustrious contemporary scholar, which is really far more symptomatic of the character of our time than one might assume. A dominant scientist, this scholar speaks of the significance of the scientific world conception in such a way that he presents it as being the most brilliant, not only of our age, but of all ages in human history. He concludes that although it is hard to prove that we live in the best of all worlds, it is certain to the scientist, at least, that today we humans live in the best of all epochs, and we might exclaim in the words of Goethe:

‘Tis delightful to transport
Oneself into the spirit of the past,
To see in times before us how a wise man thought,
And what a glorious height we have achieved at last.’¹

This noted scientist² is gravely in error; he presents this as his own innermost sentiment and believes that he is thereby associating himself with Goethe, who is renowned for his knowledge of the world and of man. But he is really associating himself with Wagner, whom Goethe sets up as a foil to the Faust figure. Yet such a blunder contains at least a good bit of the honesty of our age because this person speaks more genuinely than the numerous people who, in quoting Goethe, have Faust on their tongues, but really have an undisguised Wagner attitude of mind. As a basis for subsequent reflections, let us, then, bring up before our mind's eye the life of Goethe as a spiritual phenomenon.

If we wish to study human life in connection with the important question of destiny, if we study the questions of karma, we should remember that Goethe was born in a city and under conditions clearly of much meaning for his life. The family of Goethe's father had come to Frankfurt in the seventeenth century, whereas his mother's family, the Textors, was old, established, and highly respected, so much so that from it the mayors of Frankfurt were chosen. This fact alone signifies the respect enjoyed by the family at that time. Goethe's father was a man with an extraordinarily strong sense of duty, but for a man of his time, he also possessed a broad range of interests. He had traveled in Italy and representations of important Roman creations, about which he liked to talk, hung on all the walls of his Patrician Frankfurt home. What was dominant in the French culture of his time completely permeated the life of Frankfurt and most intimately influenced Goethe's home. The important world events were part of the life in his home, and his father took a deep interest in them. Goethe's mother, moreover, was a woman of the most spontaneous human sentiment, sharing directly in everything that connects human nature with the legendary, the fabulous, everything that lifts man aloft above the commonplace as if on the wings of poetic fantasy.

In Goethe's boyhood days it was much more possible to grow up unconfused by those disturbing influences that affect children today because they are dragged into school at a relatively early age. This did not happen to young Goethe; he developed extraordinarily freely in his parents' home under the austere but never harsh influence of his father and his poetically endowed mother. In later years he could recall with inner happiness these years of his boyhood and childhood that led to a ripe humanness. Many things that we read today in Goethe's story of his life, Poetry and Truth, though decked out in a somewhat pedantic humor, have more meaning than may be supposed. In telling how he practiced the piano,³ there is a profoundly human significance; the fingers of his hands, as if playing mythological roles, become soul-endowed, independent figures. They become Thumbling, Pointerling—I say this without sentimentality—and acquire certain mystical relations to the tones. This indicates how Goethe was to be guided into life as a complete human being. Not only a piece of this man, the head, should be guided, as so often happens, one-sidedly into life to be followed by the support of the rest of the body, developed through all sorts of athletics and sports; but, on the contrary, the body permeated by spirit to its very fingertips should be related with the outer world.

We must take into account from the very first the marked individuality of the innate endowments and nature of Goethe. From his earliest youth, everything pointed to a definite orientation of his life. As he grows in childhood, he is just as strongly inclined to follow with complete absorption the charming and stirring fairy tales and other narratives of his mother, thus even as a boy bringing his fantasy into living activity, as he is also inclined to escape from her and especially from his austere father. Slipping away into the narrow alleys, he would observe all sorts of things and also become entangled in varied situations through which he experienced in vital sentiments and emotions much that is stored up in human karma. His stern father guides the boy in a certain matter-of-fact way to what people in those days thought could provide support and direction in life. The father is a jurist who has grown up among, and is permeated with, Roman points of view; the son's soul, too, absorbs these views. In this process, however, through viewing the works and treasures of Roman art that represented what is essentially Roman, there was kindled in the boyish soul a certain aspiration for what had been created in the culture of Rome.

Everything tended to situate Goethe in a quite definite way within the life of his time. In this way, he became, between the third and fourth centuries of the fifth post-Atlantean period, a personality bearing within him all the impulses of that period. Early on, he becomes a self-sustained personality, living out of his own nature, free of everything that binds a man in a fixed, pedantic way to those certain forms of one or another group of social ties. He learns to know social relationships in such a way that they affect him, but he is not united with them. He always keeps a certain isolated pedestal upon which he stands and from which he can establish connections with everything. From the very beginning, however, unlike so many others, he does not excessively identify himself with anything or with the environing circumstances. To be sure, all this results from a peculiarly favorable karma in which, when considered objectively, we shall find a solution for profound questions and problems regarding karma in general.

After Goethe had been introduced by his father to the field of jurisprudence, he was sent to the University of Leipzig, which he entered in 1765 at a relatively early age. We must not forget that when he joined this university life he was not tormented and exhausted by those strenuous exercises that must be suffered for an even longer period of time by young people in our day who are trying to pass the battery of final examinations at the conclusion of high school, the Abitur. After having passed their examinations, these young people are anxious to wipe the most recent learning experiences from their minds and enter a university in order to enjoy life. No, young Goethe had not entered the University of Leipzig simply to idle away his time but, nevertheless, he was not above skipping lectures and using the time saved for something else, as was done by many students. However, as he enlisted in the lofty and famous scientific life of the university, he came into circles that had never failed to awaken a longing in him whenever he had heard about them. Indeed, he knew above all that the famous Gottsched⁴ worked at the university, Gottsched whose head held all the learning of the time and who expressed it in writing and orally to those associated with the contemporary culture of Leipzig. To be sure, Lessing's⁵ great impulse was still to be felt in Leipzig, but it was natural for Goethe to think that the lofty Gottsched would introduce him to the entire scope of contemporary wisdom, enabling him to study conjointly jurisprudence and philosophy and whatever else a man of the world might derive from theology and learning regarding supernatural things.

Goethe, however, who possessed without doubt a certain sense for aesthetics, was slightly disillusioned when he first called on Gottsched. He appeared at Gottsched's door. I do not know whether or not the servant sensed something of Goethe's nature, but he admitted him directly into the presence of Gottsched without taking the time to announce him in the proper manner. So Goethe came upon the great man without his wig, standing there quite baldheaded. To a learned man in the year 1765 this was something quite dreadful. Goethe, who was sensitive to such things, had to witness how Gottsched seized his wig with a graceful turn and jammed it on his head, and how with his other hand he slapped his servant on the face. Goethe's enthusiasm was a little chilled. But he was still more chilled by the fact that Gottsched's entire demeanor corresponded little with that for which he longed.

Nor did Gellert's⁶ moralistic lectures speak to him of the comprehensive intellectual horizons he desired. Therefore, he soon turned his attention more to the medical and scientific lectures, which were in a way continued in the home of Professor Ludwig, where he took his lunch and where much of a similar nature was discussed. It cannot really be said that Goethe “studied thoroughly jurisprudence, medicine, philosophy and, unfortunately, also theology”⁷ in Leipzig, but he got a view of them and, most important, it was in Leipzig that he absorbed many a scientific concept of his time. After having busied himself with the sciences, having experienced various aspects of life, and having been involved in various affairs, he then became so ill that he stood face to face with death. Such things must be taken fully into account by one who considers the human being in a spiritual scientific way. We must realize how much passed through his soul as he actually faced death because of extremely severe and recurring hemorrhaging. He was weakened, had to return home, and could not resume his university studies for some time.

When Goethe did continue his studies in Strassburg, he joined the circle of an important personality who became of exceptional significance to him. In order to judge with what feelings he met this personality, we must recall that, when he returned to Frankfurt under the influence of those inner experiences through which he had passed in Leipzig when he was face to face with death, he had already begun to enter more deeply, through association with various persons, into a mystical experience and a mystical conception of the world. He had immersed himself in mystic, occult writings and sought in a youthful way to elaborate a systematic world conception that took its point of departure in mystical—one might say, mystic-cabalistic—points of view. Even then he endeavored to learn “what secret force/ dwells in the world and rules its course”⁸ and to open himself to the influence of “every working force and seed.”⁹ He was unwilling merely “to trade in words,” as he had seen this done in Leipzig.

Then he came to Strassburg where he could again attend lectures on science, and this is what he did at first. Jurisprudence, which was so dear to his father but less so to him, would be taken care of somehow, no doubt, but his most urgent impulse was to investigate how various laws of nature conform to one another. As he was once ascending a flight of stairs, he met a personality who immediately made a tremendous impression on him, not only through his external appearance, but also through an inner light that radiated through a highly intelligent countenance. Externally, a man approached him who had, indeed, somewhat the appearance of a priest, but who wore his long overcoat in such a curious way that the train was stuffed into his hind pockets. The man who made such a grand impression on¹⁰

Goethe now entered vitally into all that then stirred tempestuously in Herder, and that was indeed a good deal. One might say that Herder bore within him an entirely new world conception. Basically, what had never before been undertaken, Herder bore it brilliantly within himself; that is, the endeavor to trace the phenomena of the world from the simplest entity, the simplest lifeless thing, through the plant world to the animal kingdom, on to man, to history, and even to the divine governance of the world in history. At that time, Herder's mind already harbored a vast, comprehensive view of the world, and he spoke with enthusiasm about his new ideas; but he also on occasion spoke with indignation against all pedantic, traditional ideas. Many of these conversations with Herder animated Goethe. That everything in the world is in process of evolution and that a spiritual plan of the universe sustains all evolution was a connection Herder perceived as no one ever had before. But this was still growing in him, and he had not yet expressed it on paper. Goethe received it in this state of being born and shared in Herder's aspiration, contemplation, and struggle. We may say that Herder wished to trace the evolution of the world from a grain of dust through all the kingdoms of nature up to God. He then did this in a splendid comprehensive fashion, as far as was necessary at that time, in his incomparable work, Ideas for a Philosophy of Human History. Here we can really see that Herder's mind grasped everything that was then known of the facts of nature and of the human realm, but all this knowledge was condensed into a world conception permeated with spirit.

Beside this, Goethe received through Herder an idea of Spinoza's contribution to the evolution of a new concept of the world, and this worked on him. The leaning that Goethe showed throughout his life toward Spinoza¹¹ was planted in him at that time in Strassburg by Herder.¹²

Herder was an enthusiastic admirer of Shakespeare,¹³ which was something unheard of at that time. Just think how this peculiar polarity of souls must have worked between Herder and Goethe when Goethe, yearning to perceive these things that contemporary culture could not give him, found in Herder a revolutionary spirit of the first rank storming the culture of his day. Up to that time Goethe had learned to revere that art of form that is found in Corneille and Racine,¹⁴ and had taken all this in as one takes in things that are said to be the most important in the world. But he had absorbed all this with a certain inner indignation. When Herder introduced him to Shakespeare, it worked on his mind like a breath of fresh air. Here was a poet free from everything formal—who created characters directly from human individualities; who possessed nothing of all the unity of time, place, and action that Goethe had learned to value so highly, but who presented human beings in his plays. We may say that a revolutionary cultural mood came to life in Goethe, now baptized in the name of Shakespeare, which we may express thus: I want to comprehend what constitutes the human being himself, not how he is put into the interrelationships of the world by formal rules and laws, or by the network of unities of situation, time, place, and action.

In this regard, he was able to become acquainted with men then in Strassburg who sought to look into the deeper and more intimate aspects of the life of the soul. One of them was the remarkable Jung-Stilling,¹⁵ for example, who was studying the occult aspects of the life of the soul and knew how to describe them thoroughly. His life history, his description of what he calls the “gray man” who rules in the subterranean sphere of the earth, belongs among the finest descriptions of occult relationships. It may be said that Goethe was introduced by Herder to all that belongs to the life of nature and history, the aesthetic in life, and by Jung-Stilling to the occult aspects of human life, with which he had already familiarized himself in Frankfurt through an exhaustive study of Swedenborg.¹⁶

Such ideas fermented in Goethe's mind in connection with what had been passed on to him as the laws of nature while he was attending lectures on the sciences in Strassburg. Then he began to see the great problems and questions of human life. He looked deeply into what can be cognized and what can be willed by man, and into the relation between human nature and universal nature. Earlier in Frankfurt he had become acquainted with the work of Paracelsus¹⁷ in connection with all this. And thus, a profound longing to perceive “every working force and seed” took a hold of him, especially in Strassburg along with all that he otherwise experienced there.

It must not be imagined that, in Strassburg, Goethe simply trifled away his time during his frequent visits to the pastor's home in Sesenheim,¹⁸ although I certainly do not want to deprecate the importance of these visits. He was always capable of uniting life in the depths of man's will and cognition with life in association with the immediately human and ordinary, and with every human destiny.

After he had defended his dissertation, he became a sort of Doctor of Jurisprudence—Licentiate¹⁹ and Doctor of Jurisprudence. He thereby satisfied his father and could return home. The practice of law began, but there was a notable disharmony in the soul of this man who had to study legal documents at the Supreme Court in Wetzlar that were often literally hundreds of years old. There “law and rights like an endless illness” dragged along their weary way. Even in later times much of this sort of thing could still be experienced elsewhere. In a place where I grew up—permit me to interject this—I was able to experience the following. In the 1870s when I was a boy, we once heard that a man was to be imprisoned—in the seventies! He was a much respected man who had a rather large business for such a place. He was imprisoned for a year and a half, I think, because in 1848 he had thrown stones at an inn during the revolution! The lawsuit had actually continued from 1848 when, as a young boy, this person had thrown stones at an inn, until his present age. In 1873 he was imprisoned for a year and a half. It was, perhaps, not so bad then as when Goethe studied the documents at the Supreme Court, but it was still bad enough.

Goethe's work gave his father immense pleasure, and he shared with counsel and help the problems Goethe had to solve with the dusty documents. This is not to say, however, that Goethe was lacking in skill as a lawyer. That was by no means the case. He made his contribution as an attorney and his work at that time belies the recurring belief that a great spirit, living in the world of ideals, must be deficient in practical life. He was not at all lacking as an attorney. When lawyers these days point to their busy schedules and call attention to the fact that they have no time to read Goethe's works, one should point out to them that Goethe was unquestionably just as good a lawyer as they. That can be documented, as can many things related to his work. But in addition to being just as practical as only a practical man can be, Goethe at this time also carried within him the idea for his book, Götz von Berlichingen.²⁰ Indeed, he bore within him the idea for his Faust, too, which had already emerged in Frankfurt from his scientific studies and later from his acquaintance with Herder and Jung-Stilling.

Götz von Berlichingen—Gottfried von Berlichingen—evidences at once, as Goethe forms it into a work of art, what his own nature really was. Goethe's way of being introduces a new element into the intellectual activity of humanity. As artist or poet, he cannot be compared with Dante, Homer, or Shakespeare. He stands in a different relationship to poetic creation, and this is bound up, in turn, with the way his mode of being relates to the age in which he lives. This age, as it was expressed in his immediate, and also in his more comprehensive, environment, did not permit such a spirit as his to blend wholly with the period. The life of the state that we today take for granted did not exist around him. After all, he lived in a region where certain territories had, to a high degree, taken on individual forms. How this came about is not important, but he did not live in a large state. No great all-encompassing conformity spread over the area where he lived and grew up. The life about him was not narrowly organized and thus he could experience it everywhere in its individual manifestations and simultaneously expose himself to its universal meaning. And this is what distinguishes Goethe from other poets.

One day a book came into his hands that is, indeed, badly written but that interested him immensely. It was Autobiography of the Iron-handed Gottfried of Berlichingen, which dealt with that strange individual who participated in so many events of the sixteenth century, but whose part in them was of such a peculiar nature. When we read this autobiography, we see how, under the Emperor Maximilian and Charles the Fifth, he came into contact with every possible kind of person and took part in every possible kind of quarrel and battle during the first half of the century.

His activities, however, always come about in such a way that he takes part in one event, is wholly involved in it and expresses himself completely therein. Then he becomes involved in another event in an entirely different role; he is drawn into that, fights for the most varied issues, and is later captured. After he has bound himself by an oath not to take any further part in quarrels and is thereby left at peace in his castle in middle South Germany, he becomes involved in the peasant uprising. All this, however, occurs in such a way that we see he is never forced by the events; but what holds these disparate episodes together is really his personality, the character of Gottfried himself. When one reads the autobiography of this man, I will not say that the events in which he is involved bore one to death, but we are not really interested in his quarrels and battles. Yet, in spite of all the boredom of the single events, we are always interested in his personality, so strong in character and so rich in content.

These traits, however, are just what attracted Goethe to Gottfried of Berlichingen. Thus, he could see the substance, the life, and the struggle of the sixteenth century concentrated in one personality as he could never otherwise have seen it. This was what he needed. To him, this meant taking up history and becoming acquainted with it. The way in which one or another historian, after having searched through attics and wastebaskets, telescopes together in a few “pragmatic maxims”²¹ individual historical periods would certainly not have suited Goethe. But to see a man standing alive in the midst of it, to see reflected in a human soul what is otherwise not of special interest, this had some meaning for him. He took this tedious, badly written autobiography of Gottfried of Berlichingen, read it, and really changed its content remarkably little. For this reason, he called the first version of this drama, if we choose so to designate it, The History of Gottfried of Berlichingen with the Iron Hand, Dramatized. He did not use the term drama, but dramatized. He had really only dramatized the history of Gottfried of Berlichingen, but in such a way that the whole period became alive through this man. Bear in mind, it was the sixteenth century, the time of the dawn of the post-Atlantean epoch. Goethe perceived this time through the character of Gottfried of Berlichingen, the man who grew up in middle South Germany.

At that time a fragment of life had already passed through Goethe's mind that is historical but seen really within actual life, not in what is “historic.” It would not have been possible for him then, with all those problems of humanity in his mind to which I have alluded, to take just any individual and dramatize his life according to history. However, to dramatize the stammering autobiography of a being who worked upon him with complete humanness in such a way that it would reflect the dramatic art as revealed to him through the reading of Shakespeare, that was something he could do. So he became known in certain circles that were interested in this sort of thing since he had lifted a fragment of the past, which was a book sealed with seven seals, into his own present world. Of course, just as little was then known about what Goethe disclosed by means of the badly written history of Gottfried of the Sixteenth Century as is known today by many a pastor about the super-sensible life.

Goethe had taken hold of human life. He had to, since his life style was one that made him blend with life as it revealed itself directly to him. To be sure, he continued to stand on an isolated pedestal, but as life touched him, he became one with it.

Goethe was to be brought into union with life in still another way. There is little conception today of something that constituted a profound trait of the soul life in the so-called cultured world surrounding Goethe. People had become bound, as it were, to what had come about since the sixteenth century. In public life, the laws and statutes had been handed down like an inherited disease,²² but the souls of men were, nevertheless, touched in a certain way by what we recognize as the impulse of souls of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. The result was that, for the most deeply endowed natures, a profound disharmony ensued between what they sensed within the soul and what took place in the external world. This, to be sure, led to a marked sentimentality in experience.

To sense as strongly as possible how wide the gulf was between the actual world and what a true and warm human soul could feel, to express this contrast with all possible emphasis, was felt by many to be a profound necessity. The eye was directed toward the life of the world in which various ranks of society and the people with their various interests lived. But they often had little soul contact with each other in this public life. Yet, when these human beings were alone, they sought for a special life of the soul existing apart from external life, and for them to be able to say to themselves that this external life was wholly unlike all that the soul would strive after and hope for was felt to be a great relief. To get into such a sentimental mood was a characteristic of the age. Life, as it was publicly manifest, was felt to be bad and defective. People strove to search for life where it had not been besmirched by indifferent public existence, and where they could really enter in a vital way into the silent working and weaving of the world of nature, the peaceful life of animals and plants.

From this a mood gradually arose that affected many cultured spirits. To be able to weep over the disharmonies of the world afforded a tremendous satisfaction. Those writers were especially honored whose works tended to induce a flood of tears to fall upon the pages that were being read. To be unhappy constituted for many the very happiness for which they longed. Someone takes a walk in the forest; he then returns and, sitting quite still in his room, reflects: “How many, many little flowers and tiny worms that I did not notice and trod under foot have sacrificed their lives to this walk of mine!” Then he weeps hot tears into his handkerchief over the discord between nature and human life. Letters written to beloved friends who were as sentimental as the writer begin with such expressions as “Dearly beloved Friend,” and this, too, is moistened by a tear that falls on the paper and hastens away with the letter as a precious testimony to the friend.

This life still permeated a large part of the cultured world in the second half of the eighteenth century. It also surrounded Goethe, and he had much understanding of it, for there was much truth in this feeling of the disharmony between the frequently unconscious or vague feelings of the soul and what was afforded by the outer world, and Goethe could feel the truth in it. In those days, the silent plan of life between souls was not at all similar to what took place in the world as a whole. He had to go through this because he could be, and needed to be, touched by everything. But, in his contact with these things, he had to draw health-giving forces from his inner self repeatedly.

And thus in his youthful novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, he wrote himself free of this whole temper of the age, which we call Siegwart,²³ or Werther, fever, and which had taken possession of a large part of educated society. In the figure of Werther he concealed to such a degree as to come near to suicide what he had shared of this sentimental mood and the disharmonies of the world. It is for this reason that he has Werther end his life through suicide. It is well to consider that, on the one hand, it was possible for Goethe to be bound up with everything in the souls of those about him, even though he was so firmly rooted in his own individuality. On the other hand, what he was writing about cleansed his soul and at the same time became a work of art. After he had finished Werther, he was completely cured of him, whereas in many cases other persons were only then possessed because through the influence of the Werther, Werther fever raged in the most widespread circles. Goethe, however, was cured.

In estimating such things, we must not overlook the fact that Goethe possessed a broad inner horizon so that he could, in a sense, live within himself in polaric contrasts. He went through the Werther sickness and wrote himself free of it through The Sorrows of Young Werther. Yet, there is truth in what he wrote to a friend at that time. He sketched a picture of his loftily sentimental mood, but also said there was a Goethe other than the suicidal Goethe who harbored thoughts of hanging himself and who entertained thoughts for which he ought to be hanged. There was also a carnival Goethe,²⁴ who could put on all sorts of masks and disguises, and this Goethe also really lived artistically. We need only allow the more or less fragmentary dramatic creations of that time, Satyros and Pater Brey, to work upon us, and we shall be able to sense the scope of his inner life: on the one hand, the sentimentality of Werther, on the other, the humor of the Satyros and Pater Brey.

Satyros, the deified forest devil who develops a veritable pantheism and does not enjoy the fruits of culture, wants to return to nature in genuine Rousseau fashion. Raw chestnuts—what a royal repast! Such is the ideal of Satyros. But he is really a philosopher of nature who is quite familiar with its secrets, and—if you will excuse me—he wins his followers especially among women, is deified, but finally behaves quite badly. Here all false yearning after authoritarian belief is ridiculed with immense humor. Then in Pater Brey we see the cult of false prophets play a part and, under the mask of holiness, do all kinds of things. This, indeed, is not ridiculed but objectively presented with much humor. Here Goethe is a humorist in the most vital sense—a blunt humorist, expressing it all from the same constitution of soul that created Werther. He was able to do this not because he was superficial but because he was profound enough to grasp the polarities of human life.

Especially the Werther book gained Goethe a far-reaching reputation. It became well-known rather early,²⁵ and it was really this work that led the Archduke of Weimar to take an interest in him. The Gottfried of Berlichingen made a decided impression, but not among those who then considered themselves capable of understanding culture, art, and poetry. “An abominable imitation of bad English works; a disgusting platitude,” said an eminent man of the time about this book.²⁶

It was in 1775 that Goethe was able to transfer his activities to a different field of operation, to Weimar. The Duke of Weimar²⁷ became acquainted with Goethe and called him there, where he became the minister of state.

Nowadays, after the event, people have the feeling that Goethe had already written the Gottfried of Berlichingen, The Sorrows of Young Werther, and even carried with him to Weimar a large part of his Faust; they see in all this his most important accomplishment. He himself did not consider them to be of first importance at that time, but they were only the scrapings of his life. The Duke, likewise, did not appoint him court poet, but minister of state, which caused the pedants in Weimar to be beside themselves with anger. The Duke had to address a sort of epistolary decree to his people in which he justified himself by saying that Goethe was in his eyes simply a greater man than the pedants. The fact that he was made minister of state without having been previously—what shall I say?—under-councillor and upper-councillor, required at least some justification from the Duke, and that is what he produced.

Goethe was by no means a bad statesman and performed his ministerial duties not as part time work, but as matters of first importance. He was a far better statesman than many a minister who was not a Goethe in our sense. Anyone who personally convinces himself—as I may say with all modesty that I have done—of the way in which he performed his ministerial obligations will know that he was an excellent minister for the Duchy of Sachsen-Weimar and was completely devoted to his duties. Being a minister was his chief occupation, and he achieved a good deal during his ten years in this capacity.

He had brought with him a part of his Faust, which is listed in the collected works under the delectable title, The Primordial Faust (Ur-Faust). All that we might call the upward vision of Faust was already alive in this version. How directly had Faust been taken from the life that touches every human soul!

In Weimar it was evident again that Goethe could not be completely captured by his environment. We often become acquainted with persons who are, in greater or lesser degree, merely the exponents of their files. Goethe, however, was not merely the exponent of the numerous documents he drew up as a Weimar functionary. In addition, he acclimated himself to the conditions in Weimar and, even though he remained on his isolated pedestal, he was nevertheless touched by everything human. The immediately human took form with him as art. Thus we see how the character of a woman, Frau von Stein,²⁸ with whom he formed a friendship, became a life problem for him. It was fundamentally his immediate view of her character that was the cause of his dramatizing the figure of Iphigenia. He wished to put into artistic form what worked on him in the character of Frau von Stein, and the legend of Iphigenia was only the means for solving this life problem. The relationships at the Weimar court, his life with Duke Karl August, whose character was so strangely endowed, his view of the fate of the Duchess, and other connected circumstances, all became problems to him. Life became a question. He again needed a subject in order to master these relationships in an artistic way, and to do so he took that of Tasso. It was, however, really the Weimar situation that he artistically mastered.

It is, of course, impossible to enter here into the many details of Goethe's mental life, yet I wish to place these facts before you in order that we may form a spiritual scientific contact with them as examples. Even in the most early period of his stay in Weimar, through the various circumstances into which he was brought, the possibility arose of deepening his studies in natural science by independent work. He continued his plant studies and began anatomical studies at the University of Jena. He endeavored in everything to confirm in detail the ideas of the universal interrelationships he had received from Herder. He wished to study the connections within the plant kingdom and what was spiritually alive in plants. He wished to hold the kinship among the animals before his mind and to find the path upward from them to man. He wished to study the idea of evolution in direct connection with actual natural objects. You see, Goethe had taken up Herder's great idea to study the evolutionary phrases of all entities, a unitary spiritual process of becoming. In this thought he and Herder then stood practically alone because those who dominated the intellectual life of the time thought quite otherwise; everything was pigeonholed.

All intellectual activity can be found to work in two polaric directions: toward separation and toward union. It was important for Goethe and Herder to bring unity into diversity and multiplicity; others were simply content with neat classifications and clever division. For these people, the problem was to show, for example, how man is distinguished from the animal. Man, it was said, has no intermaxillary bone in the upper jaw in which the incisors are rooted, but only a unitary jawbone; only the animals have an intermaxillary bone. Goethe was certainly not materialistically inclined, and he had no desire to establish materialism. The thought, however, that the inner harmony of nature could not be confirmed because of such a detail offended his intelligence. He therefore undertook to prove, in opposition to all scientific authorities, that man also has an intermaxillary bone, and he succeeded. He thus arrived at his first important scientific treatise entitled, An Intermaxillary Bone Is to Be Ascribed to Man as Well as to the Animal.²⁹ He had thereby introduced a single detail into the evolution of thought with which he opposed the entire scientific world, and which is now an obvious, undisputed truth.

Goethe appears, not as the poet of Werther, of Gottfried, and of Faust, or as the poet in whose head Iphigenia and Tasso came into being, but as one possessing a profound insight into the interrelationships of nature, so that he now studies and labors as a genuine research scientist. We have here, not a one-sided scientist, poet, or minister; he is a complete human being aspiring in all directions.

Goethe lived in Weimar for about ten years and then could no longer suppress his yearning to go to Italy. So in the late eighties he undertook a journey to Italy as if it were an escape. We must not forget that he then, for the first time, entered into situations that he had longed for and cherished from his earliest youth. This was his first introduction to the world at large; you must remember that he had never before seen any other large city except Frankfurt. We must also not forget that Rome was the first city through which he viewed the theater of world history. This must be included in his life and also that he felt the whole stream of life pulsating in Rome as it had risen in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Goethe united what then worked upon him as world history with the comprehensive world conception germinating in his mind. He traced the idea throughout the multiplicity of forms of plants, stones, and animals he had compared, and now followed them over the Apennine peninsula. He endeavored to confirm the idea of the "archetypal plant" over the broadest area and was able to do so. Every stone and plant interested him. How the multifold comes into form as the unit, this he allowed to work upon him.

Goethe also exposed himself to the influence of the great works of art, which revealed to him ancient Hellenism in its last feeble outgrowth. As he directed his objective glance over the multiplicity of nature, so also could he feel in the depths of his soul all the intimacies of the great art of the Renaissance. One need only read the words he spoke upon viewing Raphael's Saint Cecilia in Bologna, how, as he looked at it, he experienced in a wonderfully profound and intense manner all those feelings that lead man out of the sensory world into the super-sensible. One need only read in his Journey to Italy how, as he gradually deepened his ideas of nature, he sensed in the presence of works of art that man really creates such works only when art works creatively from the depths of life. Greek art, he said, now became clear to him: “I have an intimation that they proceed according to the same laws by which nature proceeds and which I am tracing,”³⁰ and “These lofty works of art, being also the highest works of nature, have been created by man according to true and natural laws. Everything arbitrary, all mere fancy, falls away; there³¹ So he wrote to his Weimar friends.

Goethe took into himself something stupendous, and what he had previously felt and surmised now took form. Scenes of great importance in his Faust were composed at this time in Rome. Iphigenia and Tasso had already been sketched and partly completed in Weimar. Now he rewrote them in verse. As he exposed himself constantly to classic works of art, he was now able to find the classic style that he wished to pour into these works. This was a regeneration, an actual rebirth of the soul, that he experienced in Italy. Thus, something peculiar now took form in his soul. He sensed a profound contrast between the aspirations of his age in what he had observed in his environment and what he had learned to feel as the loftiest expression of the purely human.

Goethe returned to Weimar to the world where works had been produced that entranced everybody. Schiller's The Robbers,³² Heinse's Ardinghello, and other such literary reproductions seemed to him barbaric stuff; they contradicted everything that was now rooted and living in his soul. He felt within like an utterly lonely person and had, indeed, been almost completely forgotten when a path was opened for the friendship with Schiller.³³ The approach was difficult because nothing was more repugnant to him when he first returned than Schiller's youthful works. But the two men discovered one another, and in such a way as to establish a bond of friendship almost without counterpart in history. They stimulated one another, and Hermann Grimm rightly remarks that in their relationship we have, not only Goethe plus Schiller, but Schiller plus Goethe as well.³⁴ Each became something different through the other; each enriched the other.

Profound, all-embracing human problems arose in the soul of Goethe and Schiller. What had to be resolved by the world in a political way—the vast problem of human freedom—was present before their minds as a spiritually human problem. Others gave much thought to the question of how an external institution that would guarantee man freedom in his life could be established in the world, but to Schiller the problem was: how does man find freedom within his own soul? He devoted himself to this problem in developing his unique work, Letters Regarding the Aesthetic Education of Humanity. For Schiller the question was how man guides his soul above himself, from the ordinary status of life to a higher status. Man stands, on the one hand, within sensory nature, said Schiller; on the other, he stands face to face with the realm of logic. In neither is he free. He becomes free when he enjoys and creates aesthetically, when his thoughts develop in such a way that they are under compulsion, not of logic, but of taste and inclination, and at the same time, free of the sensible. Schiller demanded a middle position.

These Letters Regarding the Aesthetic Education of Humanity of Schiller belong among mankind's most cultivated writings. But it was a question, a human riddle, that he and Goethe had faced in thought. Goethe could not penetrate this problem philosophically in abstract thoughts as Schiller had done. He had to attack it in a living way, and he resolved it comprehensively in his own way in the fairy tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. When Schiller undertook to show philosophically how man ascends from ordinary life to a higher life, Goethe undertook to show in his fairy tale, through the interplay of spiritual forces in the human soul, how man evolves spiritually from an everyday soul life to a higher one. What Schiller brought to light in a philosophic, abstract way, Goethe presented it in a magnificent visible form in this fairy tale. This he attached to a description of external life in his novel-like piece Conversations of German Emigrants. There really came to life in the inspired friendship between Goethe and Schiller all that man proposes to himself in riddling questions about life, and that is related to Faust's explanation of why he turned to a magic interpretation of the world:

[That I might]
Her vital powers, her embryo seeds, survey,
And fling the trade in empty words away.³⁵

Whoever penetrates the intellectual exchanges between Goethe and Schiller and sees what at that time came to life in the spirit of these two men receives through it as yet unrecognized and unrealized spiritual treasure—a treasure which manifests the aspirations of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch in an extraordinary manner. The innermost concern of the two was manifested through the way in which Schiller undertook to solve the riddle of man philosophically in his Aesthetic Letters, the way Goethe addressed himself to the realm of color in order to oppose Newton, and the ways he depicts the evolution of the human soul in the fairy tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. All this comprises comprehensive questions that were destined, it would seem, to be of vital concern to but a few people.

Even though we have wished thus far to touch only upon such facts as bear upon the life of Goethe, it must also be remarked that, although many people nowadays believe they are capable of speaking about him, for many this Goethe period belongs to the past and is a book sealed with seven seals. In a certain sense, we may really feel pleased when someone is quite honest about this. It was, of course, narrow-minded of the famous scientist Dubois-Reymond³⁶ to deliver his discourse Goethe and No End. The same man, a rector of a university, who had previously described the limitations of a knowledge of nature and had made so many remarkable physiological discoveries, delivered his discourse on Goethe and No End! His remarks were narrow-minded because they arose from the opinion: “Yes, so many people talk about one who, after all, was only a dilettante; Goethe, the universal dilettante, is forever the subject of discussion. But how much have we since acquired about which he was, of course, totally ignorant—the cell theory, for example, the theory of electricity and advances in physiology!” All that was present in Dubois-Reymond's mind. “What was Goethe in comparison? People talk about his Faust as if he had given us an ideal of humanity.”

Dubois-Reymond cannot see that Goethe really did set before us an ideal for humanity. He asks: “Would it not have been better to make Faust greater than Goethe made him and more useful for humanity? Goethe places before us a wretched fellow”—Dubois-Reymond did not use this expression but what he says is approximately the same—“a wretched fellow who cannot even master his own inner problems. Then, if Faust had been a virtuous fellow, he would have married Gretchen instead of seducing her; he would have invented the electric generator and the air pump and have become a famous professor.” He says quite literally that if Faust had been a decent man, he would have married Gretchen and not seduced her. He would have invented the generator and air pump and would have performed other services for humanity and not have become such a debauched genius who got involved in all sorts of spiritistic nonsense.

Such a rectoral address, heard at the close of the nineteenth century, was certainly narrow-minded. Yet at least it is honest. We could wish that such honesty might appear more often; it is delightful because it corresponds with the truth. Thrice mendacious, however, is much of the laudation for Goethe and Faust that is brought forth by people who are happy “only when they find earthworms.” The quotations from Goethe that we often hear are really only spiritual earthworms even though they are Goethe's own words.

Precisely through the relationship of our time with such a spirit as Goethe's is it possible to study the deep untruth of the present age. Many people do nothing more than “trade in words,”³⁷ even trade in the very words of Goethe, whereas his world conception contains an element of everything that leads to and must come to birth in the future evolution of mankind. As we have already suggested, this element not only unites with spiritual science, but is by its very nature already tied to spiritual science.

• 1. These words are spoken by Faust's student Wagner in Faust, Part I, lines 570–573. The German text reads as follows:
  
  Verzeiht: Es ist ein gross Ergotzen
  Sich in den Geist der Zeiten zu versetzen
  zu schauen, wie vor uns ein weiser Mann gedacht,
  und wie wir's dann so herrlich weit gebracht.
  
  
  The German word "Ergötzen" connotes a passive and fleeting delight and is a contrast to the activating joy (“Erquickung“) Faust experienced in line 568. Wagner's conclusion in line 573 symbolizes the shallow optimism of the materialistic Enlightenment. Wagner himself is incapable of true spiritual perception.
  
  Except when noted otherwise, quotations of Goethe's works are from translations by Ann Swanwick.
• 2. Svante Arrhenius (1859–1927), Swedish physicist, chemist, and astronomer, was the author of Die Vorstellungen vom Weltgebdude im Wandel der Zeiten [Conceptions of the Structure of the World in the Changing Course of the Ages] (Leipzig, 1908). The foreword of this book contains the quote from Faust.
• 3. See Goethe's Poetry and Truth, IV.
• 4. Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–1766) was a writer and a Professor of Literature in Leipzig. He is best known for his efforts to reform the German theater and for having established rules for drama that conformed to French models.
• 5. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) was the foremost poet and critic of the German Enlightenment.
• 6. Christian Fiirchtegott Gellert (1715–1769) was a Prussian poet of the German Enlightenment.
• 7. Faust, Part I, lines 1-3. Faust reviews his past education and questions his knowledge.
• 8. The translation is from Walter Kaufmann, Goethe's Faust (Anchor Books: 1963), p. 95. This pronouncement in the third scene of Part I, lines 382–383, reveals Faust's search for a cohesive spiritual force that holds the universe together. Later in the poem he admits that he has been seeking this knowledge through alchemy.
• 9. Lines 384–385 in Faust, Part I; cf. footnotes 8 and 35. The German word “Samen“ [seed] refers to a term used in alchemy, but it is not certain that the word “Wirkungskraft“ [working force] does. Some scholars think Goethe invented the word.
• 10. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) was a famous German theologian and cultural philosopher.
• 11. Baruch Spinoza (1632–77) was a Dutch philosopher, a rationalist, and a monist. His Ethics, published posthumously in 1677, exerted a profound influence on Goethe.
• 12. In the introduction to Goethe's Scientific Writings I (1883), pp. LV-LVIII, Rudolf Steiner depicts Goethe's relationship to Spinoza. Fritz Jacobi helped to deepen Goethe's knowledge of Spinoza's philosophy in the summer of 1774. After Goethe and Herder had renewed their friendship in Weimar, the two men and Frau von Stein studied Spinoza together. Goethe the Scientist (New York, Anthroposophic Press, 1950).
• 13. William Shakespeare (1564–1616).
• 14. Pierre Corneille (1606–1684) established a theory of French tragedy. Jean Baptiste Racine (1639–1699) was a famous writer of French classical tragedy.
• 15. Heinrich Jung-Stilling (1740–1817) was a German physician and writer.
• 16. Emanuel von Swedenborg (1688–1772) was a Swedish natural scientist and theosopher.
• 17. Paracelsus, Theophrastus von Hohenheim (1493–1541) was a Swiss physician, natural scientist and alchemist.
• 18. The reference is to Goethe's relationship with the pastor's daughter, Friederike Brion (1752–1813).
• 19. Goethe received the degree of “Licentiate of Law,“ a title which in Germany was regarded as being equal to the doctorate. From then on, Goethe used the title, “Doctor juris.“
• 20. Götz von Berlichingen (1480–1562) came from an old Swabian family. He became the leader of the peasant uprising in 1525, fought against the Turks in 1542, and against France in 1544. His autobiography was published in 1731.
• 21. The reference is to Faust, Part I, line 584: “mit trefflichen Maximen.“ Faust, in lines 575–585, replies to Wagner's remarks (cf. footnote 1):
  
  My friend, the times that antecede
  Our own are books safely protected
  by seven seals. What spirit of the time you call
  Is but the scholar's spirit, after all,
  In which times past are now reflected.
  In truth, it is often pathetic,
  And when one sees it, one would run away:
  A garbage pail, perhaps a storage attic
  At best a pompous moralistic play
  With wonderfully edifying quips,
  Most suitable to come from puppets' lips.
  
  
  The translation of these lines is by Walter Kaufman (cf. footnote 8); he renders “pragmatic maxims“ with “edifying quips.“
• 22. Faust, Part I, lines 1972–1975, trans. by Walter Kaufmann. Mephisto says to the freshman student:
  
  The laws and statutes of a nation
  Are an inherited disease,
  From generation unto generation
  And place to place they drag on by degrees.
• 23. Siegwart, a sentimental novel by Johann Martin Miller, was published 1776, two years after Goethe's Werther, and immediately became a best seller.
• 24. The reference is to Goethe's letter from Frankfurt to Countess Auguste von Stollberg-Stollberg, dated February 13, 1775.
• 25. Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther was published in 1774. One year later, Goethe received Duke Kark August's invitation to Weimar and arrived there on November 7, 1775.
• 26. Frederick the Great in De la litterature alemande (1780).
• 27. Karl August, Duke of Weimar (1757–1828), son of Duchess Anna Amalia.
• 28. Charlotte Freifrau von Stein (1742–1827).
• 29. This treatise was written in 1784 and was published in Jena in 1786.
• 30. Goethe's letter from Rome, dated January 28, 1787.
• 31. Goethe's letter from Rome, dated September 6, 1787.
• 32. The Robbers had been published in 1781. In his Glückliches Ereignis [Happy Event] (1817), Goethe writes: “After my return from Italy, where I had endeavored to educate myself to a more definite and pure understanding of all branches of the arts and where I did not care what in those days was going on in Germany, I discovered that some recent, as well as some older, poetic works were in high repute and had widespread appeal. Unfortunately, they included some works that I found extremely disgusting such as Heinse's Ardinghello and Schiller's The Robbers.“
• 33. Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805) was a dramatist, poet and historian and is regarded as one of the greatest German literary figures.
• 34. Hermann Grimm in the 21st “Goethe“ lecture: “When two superbly gifted men combine in common endeavors, their strength is not doubled but multiplied fourfold. Each one has the other invisibly next to himself. The formula would not read G + S, but (G + S) + (S + G). The strength of one accrues to the strength of the other.“
• 35 Faust, Part I, lines 384–385. The German text reads as follows:
  
  
  Schau alle Wirkungskraft und Samen
  Und to nicht mehr in Worten kramen.
  
  
  The Kaufman translation (cf. footnote 9) of this passage, although preferable as a whole, leaves “Wirkungskraft und Samen“ [vital power and embryo seed] untranslated and renders the two lines as follows:
  
  
  Envisage the creative blazes
  Instead of rummaging in phrases.
  
  
  To do justice to Steiner's remarks, I have here used Ann Swanwick's translation of these two lines. (P.M.)
• 36. Emil Du Bois-Reymond (1818–96) was a physiologist in Berlin.
• 37. Cf. footnote 35.

Our real purpose in this lecture, as you already know from what has been said, is to lead the way to an understanding of the karma of the individual and, in a broader sense, the collective karma of our time. But even when we consider human life as it concerns single individuals, it is extraordinarily complicated, and we must follow many threads that link a man to the past and present worlds if we wish to answer questions regarding his destiny. This fact will, perhaps, explain to you the detour I am taking, although I really wish to discuss something that is close to every person. Goethe's life was important in world history, and I will associate reflections with it that are intended to light up each individual existence. His life, to be sure, is accessible to us in many details. Even though the destiny of each human life is far removed from the destined course of such an exemplary spirit in world history, it is possible for each of us to gain viewpoints from the contemplation of it. Therefore, let us not be annoyed if the connections with our special questions, which we shall gradually approach, are here somewhat expanded.

When people trace Goethe's life in the way many do who pretend to be his biographers, they fail altogether to observe how rash men are in their tendency to link cause and effect.

Scientists are constantly reminded nowadays that many blunders are due to the adoption of the principle, “After a thing, therefore because of that thing” (post hoc, ergo propter hoc); that is, because one thing follows another, it must, therefore, be an effect proceeding from its cause. This is refuted in the scientific sphere, but in the field of the observation of human life we have not yet come to reject this principle altogether. Certain uncivilized people belonging to the Kamchadales believe that the water wagtails or similar birds bring on springtime because spring follows their arrival. Such conclusions are frequently drawn when people say: A thing that follows another in time must derive from it as the effect from its cause. We learn from Goethe's own narrative, from the description of this life shining above ordinary humanity, that he had this father and that mother and that he experienced certain things in his youth. We then derive what he did later in life, which made him so important for humanity, from these youthful impressions according to the principle that, because one thing follows something else in time, it must proceed from it. That is no more intelligent than when the coming of spring is supposed to be brought on by the water wagtails.

In the scientific sphere, this superstition has been sharply reproved; in the sphere of spiritual science there is still need to do so. It is explained quite nicely, for instance, that at a rather youthful period while Goethe was still a boy and French officers were quartered in his father's house during the occupation of Frankfurt, he saw how the famous Lieutenant du roi Thoranc³⁸ directed theatrical productions and employed painters there. Goethe thus came into contact with painting and the art of the theater while scarcely more than a child. His later inclination to art is thus glibly traced to these youthful impressions. To be sure, in his case we see his foreordained karma clearly at work from his earliest youth. Is not an especially prominent trait in Goethe's life the way in which he unites his views of art, the world, and nature and has always behind his artistic fantasy the aspiration to know the truth in natural phenomena? Do we not see that a clearly prescribed karma leads the boy of six or seven to assemble minerals and geological material that he finds in his father's collections and place them on a music stand to make of them an altar to the great God of Nature? He then sets a candle on this altar made of natural objects and instead of producing a light in an ordinary, mechanical way, he lets the earliest rays of the morning sun pass through a magnifying glass to light the candle, kindling a flame to offer to the great God of Nature. How impressive and beautiful is this orientation of the mind to what lives and weaves as spirit in the phenomena of nature even in this boy of six or seven! Most certainly, this trait must have come from an original potentiality, if we choose to call it that, and not from the environment, and we see how what he brought into this incarnation worked with special force.

When we consider the time into which Goethe was born, we shall observe a remarkable harmony between his nature and contemporary events. In accordance with the present world conception, people are often inclined to say that what Goethe created—the Faust and other things that he did for the elevation and spiritual permeation of humanity—have come into existence simply because he produced them according to his talents. It is more difficult with the things he has given to humanity to prove that they cannot be bound up in this simple sense with his person. But, in reference to certain phenomena of existence, just consider how shortsighted many kinds of reflections are even though they are supposed to be fundamentally concerned with the truth. In my most recent book, The Riddle of Man,³⁹ you can find de la Mettrie's statement that Erasmus of Rotterdam and Fontenelle would have become entirely different human beings if only small particles in their brains had been different. According to this view, we must assume that nothing of all that they produced would exist if, as de la Mettrie⁴⁰ suggests, they had been fools instead of wise men because of a slightly different constitution of the brain.

Now, this does apply in a certain sense for the things Erasmus and Fontenelle produced, but consider this question in relation to another case. Can you imagine, for instance, the development of modern humanity without the discovery of America? Think of all that has entered into the life of modern humanity through the discovery of America. Could a materialistic person assert that if Columbus's brain had been a little different he would have been a different sort of man, a fool, who then would not have discovered America? Certainly, this could be asserted, just as it can be said that Goethe would not have been Goethe, nor Fontenelle have been Fontenelle, nor Erasmus have been Erasmus if, for example, their mothers had suffered accidents so that their children would have been stillborn. But we can by no means suppose that America would never have been discovered if it had not been discovered by Columbus. You will find it rather self-evident that America would have been discovered even if Columbus had suffered from a brain defect.

So you will certainly have no doubt that the course of world events is one thing and the participation of an individual in these events another. You will have no doubt that these events summon those individualities who are especially fitted through their karma for whatever is demanded of them. With reference to America we can easily think through to this conclusion. But, for those whose vision penetrates more deeply, the same truth applies to the genesis of Faust. We should have to assume utter nonsense in the evolution of the world if we had to suppose that there would have been no necessity for the creation of such a poetical composition as the Faust even if what the materialists like to emphasize so much had actually occurred and a tile had fallen on Goethe's head when he was five, making him an imbecile. Anyone who traces the course of spiritual life through the decades preceding the time of Goethe will see that the Faust was really a demand of the age. Lessing, indeed, is the typical spirit who wished to create a Faust—in fact, actually wrote a fine scene. It was not merely Goethe's subjective needs that demanded the Faust, it was demanded by the age. With respect to the course of events in world history, the truth is that a relationship similar to that between Columbus and the discovery of America exists also between Goethe's creations and Goethe himself.

I have said that, if we observe the age into which Goethe was born, we note at once a certain harmony between the individuality of Goethe and his age when taken in the broadest sense of the term. Bear in mind that, in spite of all the dissimilarities between Goethe and Schiller, there is, nevertheless, something quite similar in them—not to mention other less important contemporaries. Consider, for example, how much is resplendent in both Goethe and Herder. But we can go much further. When we look at Goethe, it does not, perhaps, appear at once—we shall come back to this later—but, when we look at Schiller, at Herder and Lessing, we shall say that their lives were different, of course, but that in their tendencies and impulses a portion of the soul's potentialities is present that, under other circumstances, might just as well have made a Mirabeau⁴¹ or Danton⁴² of them. They truly harmonize with their age. In the case of Schiller, this would by no means be so hard to prove; as the poet who composed The Robbers, Fiesko, Intrigue and Love, he will not seem to anyone to be far removed in disposition from a Mirabeau or Danton or even a Robespierre.⁴³ This same soul's blood flowed likewise in Goethe, even though we might at first consider him far from being a revolutionist. But by no means is he so remote from this. There comes about in Goethe's complex nature a special complication of karmic impulses, of destiny, that places him in the world in a most unusual way, even in earliest youth.

When we trace the life of Goethe with spiritual scientific vision and disregard all other things, we find that it falls into certain periods. The first proceeds in such a way that we can say that an impulse which we have already observed in his childhood continues to progress. Then something comes from without that changes the direction of his life; that is, his becoming acquainted with the Duke of Weimar in 1775. Then, again, we see how his soujourn in Rome⁴⁴ changes the course of his life, how he becomes an utterly different person through having been able to absorb this Roman life. If we should wish to view the matter more accurately, we might say that a third impulse, which comes as if from without—but this, as we shall see, would not be entirely accurate in a spiritual⁴⁵ after he had experienced his Roman transformation.

If we study the first part of Goethe's life up to the year 1775, observing the events more intently than we usually do, we shall discover that there lives in him a powerful revolutionary mood, a rebellion against what was in his environment. His nature, however, is spread over many things. For this reason, because the impulse toward rebellion does not appear so strongly as when concentrated in Schiller's The Robbers but is more diffuse, it does not appear so strikingly. Anyone, however, who is able to enter in a spiritual scientific way into Goethe's boyhood and youth finds in him a spiritual force of life, brought with him through birth, that could not have been present throughout his life if certain events had not occurred. What was living within him as the Goethe individuality was far greater than what could be taken up and expressed in life by his organism.

This is obvious in Schiller. His early death was due primarily to the fact that his organism was consumed by his mighty, spiritual vitality.⁴⁶ This is obvious. Indeed, it is known that after his death his heart was found to be dried up, as it were. He sustained himself as long as possible only by his powerful spiritual vitality, but this also devoured his bodily life.

With Goethe, this force of soul became even stronger, and yet he lived to an advanced age. What enabled him to live so long? You will recall that I reminded you yesterday of a fact that intervened significantly in Goethe's life. After he had spent some years in Leipzig as a student,⁴⁷ he became seriously ill and stood face to face with death. He virtually looked death in the face. This illness is, to be sure, a natural phenomenon in the organism. However, we never learn to understand a man who creates out of the elemental forces of the world—indeed, we never learn really to understand any man—unless we take into consideration such events in the course of his karma. What really happened to Goethe when he became ill in Leipzig? We may describe it as a complete loosening of the etheric body in which the life forces of the soul had been active until then. It was loosened to such an extent that, after this illness, he no longer had that closely knit connection between the etheric and the physical bodies that he had formerly possessed.

The etheric body, however, is the super-sensible member in us that really makes it possible to form concepts, to think. Abstract concepts such as we have in ordinary life, the only concepts that are approved by most persons who are materialistically disposed, come about through the fact that the etheric body is, as it were, closely united with the physical by a strong magnetic union. It is also through this fact that we possess a strong impulse to project our will into the physical world, that is, provided the astral body is strongly developed. In the case of Robespierre, Mirabeau and Danton, we have an etheric body strongly united with the physical but also a powerfully developed astral body. This works, in turn, upon the etheric body, which establishes these human individualities strongly in the physical world.

Goethe was also organized like this, but another force now worked in him and brought about a complication. The result was that the etheric body was loosened and remained so through the illness that had brought him to the point of death. When the etheric body is no longer so intimately united with the physical body, however, it no longer thrusts its forces into the physical but retains them. This explains the transformation Goethe passed through when he returned to Frankfurt. There, during his acquaintance with Fräulein von Klettenberg,⁴⁸ the mystic, and with various medical friends who were devoted to studies in alchemy, and through the writings of Swedenborg, he really developed a systematic spiritual world conception. It was still somewhat chaotic, but nevertheless a systematic spiritual world conception, and he was profoundly inclined to occupy himself with super-sensible things.

These things are, however, connected with Goethe's illness. The soul that had brought this predisposition for this illness into his earthly life also brought the impulse so to prepare his etheric body through his illness that it should not be expressed merely in the physical. It maintained the urge and the capacity to become permeated with super-sensible concepts. So long as we merely consider the external biographical facts of a person in a materialistic way, we never discover what subtle interrelationships exist in his stream of destiny. But, as soon as we obtain an insight into the harmony between the natural occurrences affecting his organism, such as the illness of Goethe, and what manifests itself ethically, morally, spiritually, it becomes possible for us to sense the profound effect of karma.

The revolutionary force would certainly have been manifest in Goethe in a way that would have consumed him at an early age. Since an external expression of the life of these revolutionary forces would certainly not have been possible in his environment, and since he could not have written dramas as Schiller did, this force would necessarily have consumed him. It was turned aside through the loosening of the connection of the magnetic union between his etheric and physical bodies.

Here we see how a natural event seems to enter with immense significance into the life of a human being. Undoubtedly, it points to a deeper interrelationship than the one the biographers generally wish to reveal. The significance of an illness to a man cannot be explained on the basis of hereditary tendencies but rather points to the connection between a man and the world in such a way that this relationship must be conceived spiritually. You will note also how Goethe's life was thus complicated; such experiences determine how we take things in and what we are ourselves.

Goethe now comes to Strassburg⁴⁹ with an etheric body that is in a sense filled with occult knowledge, and in this condition he meets Herder, whose vast conceptions had to become something quite different in Goethe because the same conditions did not exist in Herder's more subtle constitution. This event of near death appeared in Goethe at the end of the sixties in Leipzig, but its force had been prepared long before that. Anyone who undertakes to trace such an illness to external or merely physical events has not yet attained the same standpoint in the spiritual sphere as that occupied by the natural scientist who knows that what follows must not be viewed necessarily as the result of what it follows. This tendency to isolate himself from the world to some degree was a manifestation of the connection between physical and etheric bodies. It was always present in Goethe, and it really only became a crisis through his illness.

In anyone possessing a compact connection between the physical and etheric bodies, the external world exerts its influence and, as it makes impressions on the physical body, they pass over immediately into the etheric body; this is one and the same thing. Such a person simply lives in direct contact with the impressions of the external world. In Goethe's case, the impressions are, of course, made upon the physical body, but the etheric body does not immediately respond because it is loosened. As a result, such a person can be more isolated, in a sense, from his environment, and a more complicated process takes place when an impression is made on his physical body. If you establish a connection between this organic structure of Goethe and the fact that, as we learn from his biography, he lays himself open even to historic events without forcing them, you have then arrived at an understanding of the peculiar functioning of his nature. I told you that he took the autobiography of Gottfried of Berlichingen and, influenced only by the dramatic impulses received from Shakespeare, did not really alter much in it. So he did not call it a drama but The History of the Iron-handed Gottfried of Berlichingen, Dramatized. You see, this soft and almost timid handling of things, as I might call it, without taking hold of them forcefully is due to his quite unusual connection between the etheric and physical bodies.

This relationship between the etheric and physical bodies was not present in Schiller. For this reason, he creates characters that he has certainly not derived from external impressions but has formed forcefully out of his own nature; Karl Moor is an example. Goethe, however, needs the influence of life, but he does not force it; he only helps with a light touch to elevate the living into a work of art.

It was the same when he was confronted with the experiences that he later reduced to artistic form in Werther. His own life situations as well as those of his friend Jerusalem⁵⁰ are not twisted; he does not alter the form greatly but takes life and retouches it a little. Through the delicate manner in which he renders assistance by means of his etheric body, life is transformed into a work of art. But because of this organization he gains, I might say, only an indirect contact with life, and thereby he prepares his karma in this incarnation.

Goethe goes to Strassburg. In addition to the experience that advanced him on his way, he experienced also, as you know, the romantic involvement with Friederike, the daughter of the pastor in Sesenheim.⁵¹ His affections were deeply involved in this relationship, and many moral doubts may be raised against the course of it—doubts that may also be fully justified. We are not now concerned with that aspect of the matter, but rather with an understanding of it. Goethe really passed through everything that, in another, not only must, but obviously would, have led to a permanent life union. But he does not experience directly. Through what I have explained, a sort of chasm had been created between his unusual inner nature and the external world. Just as he does not alter by force what is living in the external world but only delicately modifies its form, he also does not carry his feelings and sensations, which he can experience only in his etheric body, through the physical body to such a firm contact with the external world—something that, in others, would have led to quite definite events in life. So he withdraws from Friederike Brion, but one must accept this from the viewpoint of the soul.

The last time he went to Sesenheim, he met himself; you can read of this in his autobiography.⁵² Goethe meets Goethe! Long afterward he related how he then encountered himself, Goethe meeting Goethe. He sees himself; he drives out to Sesenheim and Goethe comes to meet him, not in the same clothing he was wearing, however, but in another outfit. When he went there again many years later to visit his old acquaintances, he realized that he was unintentionally actually wearing the clothes in which he had seen himself many years before. We must believe this even took place in the same way we believe anything else he relates. Considering the love of truth with which he described his life to us, to find fault with it is not appropriate.

How does it happen, then, that Goethe, so remote that he could actually withdraw, and yet in such loose contact with the circumstances that for anyone else it would have led to something quite different—how does it come about that he meets himself? Now a man who has an experience in his etheric body finds that it easily takes objective form when the etheric body is loosened. He sees the experience as something external; it is projected outside him. This actually happened to Goethe. In a moment peculiarly appropriate, he saw the other Goethe, the etheric Goethe who lived in him, who remained united in karma with Friederike of Sesenheim, and he met himself as a ghost. But this is just the kind of event that so profoundly confirms what is to be perceived from the facts regarding his nature.

We see here how a man may stand within external events and how it is also necessary to grasp the special, individual way in which he stands among them. It is a complicated relationship that exists between the human being and the world; it is complicated also by the interrelationship between what he brings from the past into the present. Through the fact, however, that Goethe had wrenched his inner nature out of the corporeal connection, it was possible for him even in his early youth to cherish in his soul the profound truths that so astonish us in his Faust. I say astonish purposely for the simple reason that they really must astonish us. I scarcely know anything more simple-minded than when biographers of Goethe repeat over and over the statement, “Goethe is Faust and Faust is Goethe.” I have often read this in biographies of Goethe. It is, of course, an ordinary bit of nonsense. What we really have in Faust, when we permit it to work on us in the right way, so impresses us that we must sometimes say that we cannot imagine that Goethe had a direct experience of a similar kind or could even know of it. Yet there it is expressed in Faust.

Faust constantly grows beyond Goethe. This can be understood completely by one who knows the surprise experienced by a poet when he has this composition before him. That is, we do not have to suppose that the poet must always be as great as his work, anymore than a father must be as great in forces of soul and genius as his son; the truly poetic creative process is something living; just as one cannot say it is also impossible to assert that one who is spiritually creative never creates above his own level. But through the inner state of isolation that I have described in reference to Goethe, those profound insights in his soul appear that we find in reading his Faust. Such works are not poetic compositions like others. The Faust poem flows from the entire spirit of the fifth post-Atlantean culture period; it grows far beyond Goethe. Much that we experience in connection with the world and its process of becoming sounds forth to us from Faust in a strange manner. Call to mind the passage you have just heard:⁵³

To us, my friend, the ages that are passed
A book with seven seals, close fastened, are
And what the spirit of the times men call
Is merely their own spirit after all. ...⁵⁴

These words by Faust himself are passed over too lightly. One who experiences the statement in its fullest depths is reminded of much that confirms its truth. Consider the knowledge possessed by modern man of the Greeks and the spiritual life of Greece, through Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides! Suppose men steep themselves in this Greek spiritual life—let us say, in Sophocles. Is Sophocles a book with seven seals? That will not easily be admitted! More than eighty dramas were written by Sophocles,⁵⁵ who lived to be ninety-one; only seven of these dramas now survive. Do we really know a man if he has written eighty-one or more dramas and only seven of them survive? Is this not truly a book with seven seals? How can anyone assert that he knows the Greek world from what has been handed down to us, when he must simply recognize the fact that seventy-four of Sophocles' dramas, by which the Greeks were fascinated and inspired, are nonexistent? Many of the dramas of Aeschylus no longer exist. Poets lived in Greek times whose names are not even known any longer. Are not the times past truly a book with seven seals? We must admit this when we consider such external facts, and

... 'tis delightful to transport
Oneself into the spirit of the past,
To see in times before us how a wise man thought,
And what a glorious height we have achieved at last.

Wagner types believe they are able to transplant themselves quite easily into the spirit of a wise man; that is, when somebody before them has already done the exercise! It is a pity that we cannot put to the proof what the critics would have to write about Hamlet if it had been written today and were to be performed for them by some large municipal theater, or if a drama of Sophocles should be presented for them at this very moment. Perhaps no impression would be made on these gentlemen even by what Sophocles had to do to convince his relatives of his greatness in his advanced old age of ninety-one. His relatives had had to wait so long for their inheritance that they tried to prove he had become feeble-minded and could no longer manage his property. He had no other way to protect himself than by writing the Oedipus in Colonna, thus proving that he was not yet in his dotage. Whether this would work with present-day critics I do not know, but at that time it did help. Anyone who enters deeply into the tragedy of the ninety-one year old Sophocles, however, will be able to estimate how difficult it is to find the way to a human individuality and how such an individuality is bound up in the most complicated fashion with world events! Many things could be adduced to show under what deep layers we must penetrate in order to understand the world. But how much is alive, even in the earliest parts of Faust, of that wisdom that is necessary for an understanding of the world! This wisdom must be attributed to the peculiar course of Goethe's destiny which reveals to us in a real sense that nature and the work of the spirit are a unity in human development and that an illness not only has an external significance but may also possess spiritual meaning.

Thus we see a decided continuation of the karmic impulses that existed in Goethe. Then in 1775, however, his connection with the Duke of Weimar appeared as if from without. Goethe is called from Frankfurt to Weimar. What does this signify in his life? To further understand the life of a man, we must first understand what such an event means to his life. I know how little inclined the present world is really to arouse those forces of the soul that are necessary to fully sense and feel such a phenomenon—to completely feel what is already alive in the first scenes of Faust. In order to write the Monologue in the Study, Spirit of the Earth that has just been presented, a richness of soul is needed, and it will cause one who beholds it to linger long in an attitude of fervent reverence. One is often pained to the depths of one's soul to realize that the world is really still decidedly dull and cannot feel what is truly great. But, if we feel such a thing completely, we shall then also see where one who is deeply permeated with spiritual science arrives in his feeling. Such a person comes to the point of saying to himself that something lived in Goethe that consumed him; he couldn't go on in such a way.

Two things must be clear if we are to appreciate, in the proper sense and in the right light, these first scenes of Faust. We might imagine that Goethe had written them gradually between his twenty-fifth and fiftieth years, in which case they would not have strained his soul so intensely, nor been such a burden. Certainly! But this is impossible because, after his thirtieth or thirty-fifth year, the youthful force necessary to give such form to these scenes would have been lacking. In accordance with his individuality, he had to write them in those early years, but to continue to live thus was no longer possible. He needed something like a damper, a partial soul-sleep, to reduce the intensity of the fire that burned in his soul as he wrote these first scenes. Then, the Duke of Weimar called him to make him a minister in Weimar. As I have already said, Goethe was a good minister, and while he labored assiduously, he could refresh himself by partially sleeping off what burned in his soul.

There is really a tremendous difference between Goethe's mood up to 1775 and that after 1775, a difference that may be compared with a mighty wakefulness followed by a subdued life. The word “Dumpfheit,” an inner feeling of numbness, comes into his mind when he describes his life in Weimar, where he engages himself so much in events but responds to them more than at an earlier age, when he had rebelled against them. It is peculiar that after this dampening down for ten years there followed a period when events confronted him in a more gentle way. Just as the life of sleep is by no means a direct effect of the preceding daytime life, so also this sleep life of Goethe was not at all the result of what had gone before. The interrelationships are far greater than is generally supposed. I have already frequently pointed out that it is indicative of a superficial view when, to the question—Why does a man sleep?—the answer is given: Because he is tired. This is a lazy truth and one that is itself asleep since it is nonsense. Otherwise, it would not be true that individuals such as non-working persons living on their private incomes who are certainly not tired, fall comfortably asleep after a full meal when they are expected to listen to something that does not particularly interest them. Tired they certainly are not. The fact is not that we sleep because we are tired, but waking and sleeping are a rhythmic life process, and when it is time or necessary for us to sleep, we become weary. We are tired because we ought to sleep; we do not sleep because we are tired. But I will not discuss this further just now.

Just consider in what a tremendous interrelationship the rhythm of sleeping and waking stands. It is a reproduction within the nature of man of day and night in the cosmos. It is natural, of course, that a materialistic science should undertake to explain sleep as resulting from weariness caused by the day's activities, but the reverse is true. The explanation of the rhythm of sleeping and waking must be drawn from the cosmos, from vast interrelationships. They also explain that the period when Faust was fermenting in the soul of Goethe was followed by the ten-year period of dampening in Weimar. Here your attention is called directly to his karma, about which we cannot speak further at present.

The consciousness of the ordinary human generally lets him wake in the morning thinking he is unchanged from what he was when he fell asleep. In reality, such is never the case. We are never the same upon waking as we were when we fell asleep but, as a matter of fact, we are somewhat richer, though unconscious of it. However, just as the trough of a wave has followed after a crest, as it was in Goethe's Weimar years, the awakening that follows is at a higher stage; it must follow at a higher stage because the innermost forces strive toward this. In Goethe also the innermost forces strive to awaken again from the inner state of numbness in Weimar to a fullness of life in an environment that could now really bring him what he lacked. He awakened in Italy. With his special constitution he could not have awakened in Weimar. In this fact, however, we can see the profound relationship between the creative work of a real artist and his special experience.

You see, a writer who is not an artist can produce a drama gradually without difficulty, one page at a time; he can do this perfectly well. The great poet cannot; he needs to be deeply rooted in life. For this reason, Goethe could bring the most profound truths to expression in his Faust in relatively early youth, truths that ranged far above the capacities of his soul, but he had to set forth a rejuvenation of Faust. Just bear in mind that Faust had to come into an entirely different mood in spite of the fact that his nature was so deeply formed. In the end, in spite of all his depth, what he had taken into his soul up to that time had brought him near to suicide. He had to be rejuvenated. A lesser individual can describe perfectly well, and even in pretty verses, how a man is rejuvenated. Goethe could not do this so simply; he first had to experience his own rejuvenation in Rome. It is for this reason that the rejuvenation scene, The Witch's Kitchen, was written in Rome in the Villa Borghese.⁵⁷ Goethe would not have ventured to write this scene earlier.

Now, a certain condition of consciousness, even though dulled, is associated with such a rejuvenation as Goethe experienced. In his time there was not as yet a spiritual science, so this state of consciousness could not be heightened but only subdued. Furthermore, special forces are associated with such a rejuvenation as Goethe experienced. In his time there was not as yet a spiritual science, so this state of consciousness could not be heightened but only subdued. Furthermore, special forces are associated with such a rejuvenation that are projected over into the next incarnation. Here experiences are woven together that belong to the present incarnation and also much that projects its influence into the next. When we bear this in mind, we are led to consider an especially profound and significant tendency in Goethe.

You see, if I may be permitted to interject this personal comment, I have occupied myself for a number of decades with Goethe's view of nature—I may say since 1879-80, and intensively since 1885-86. During this time, I have arrived at the view that there is something in the impulse that Goethe gave to the conception of nature, which contemporary scientists and philosophers really do not understand, that can be developed, but it will take centuries to do so. It may well be, therefore, that when Goethe returns in another incarnation it will still be possible for him to work formatively on what he could not perfect in his views of nature in this incarnation. Many things that are implicit in his view of nature have not yet even been surmised. In regard to this, I have expressed myself in my book, Goethes World Conception, and in the introduction to Goethe's Natural Scientific Writings in Kürschner's Nationalliteratur. We may really say, therefore, that Goethe bears within him in his view of nature something that points toward remote horizons. It is, however, intimately related with his rebirth as this was connected with the period of life through which he was passing when he was in Rome.

You may read for yourselves how I have presented these matters, how the metamorphosis of plants and animals, the archetypal plant and animal, took form during his journey in Italy; how upon his return he tackled the problem of the theory of colors, something that is scarcely understood at all at present; how he took hold of still other things. You will then see that his living penetration into a comprehensive view of nature is intimately bound up with his rebirth. To be sure, he did relate to Faust what he had arrived at in the course of his own life, not, however, as a minor, but as a major poet would do this. Faust experiences the Gretchen tragedy. In the midst of it, we are suddenly faced with Faust's view of nature, which admittedly is closely related with Goethe's. It is expressed in the following words of Faust:

Exalted spirit, all you gave me, all
That I have asked. And it was not in vain
That amid flames you turned your face toward me.
You gave me royal nature as my own dominion,
Strength to experience her, enjoy her. Not
The cold amazement of a visit only
You granted me, but let me penetrate
Into her heart as into a close friend's.
You lead the hosts of all that is alive
Before my eyes, teach me to know my brothers
In quiet bushes and in air and water.
And when the storm roars in the wood and creaks,
The giant fir tree, falling, hits and smashes
The neighbor branches and the neighbor trunks,
And from its hollow thud the mountain thunders,
Then you lead me to this safe cave and show
Me to myself, and all the most profound
And secret wonders of my breast are opened.⁵⁸

A great world conception, ascribed by Goethe to Faust! Only during the journey to Italy had Goethe acquired it with such penetration of soul. The scene beginning, “Spirit sublime, thou gavest me, gavest me all,” was also written in Rome, not earlier. These two scenes—the rejuvenation scene in The Witch's Kitchen, and the scene, Forest and Cave, were the portions that were written in Rome.

Here you see a real rhythm in Goethe's life that reveals an inner impulse just as the rhythm of waking and sleeping reveals an inner impulse in the human being. In a life such as Goethe's we can study certain laws in an especially clear light, but we shall also learn that the laws we discover in great personalities may become important for the life of every individual human being. In the last analysis, the laws working in an eminent human being apply to all individuals. Tomorrow we will continue to speak of the relationships of life as they may be grasped from this point of view.

• 38. Francois de Théas, Comte de Thoranc (1719–94).
• 39. Vom Menschenrätsel, Bibl.-No. 20, CE (Dornach, 1957), p. 155.
• 40. Julien Offroy de la Mettrie (1709–51) was a French physician and materialist philosopher who wrote L'homme machine (1748) and who was a friend of Frederick the Great of Prussia.
• 41. Honore-Gabriel Comte de Mirabeau (1749–91) was a Jacobin revolutionary leader and a celebrated orator.
• 42. Georges Jaques Danton (1759–94) was one of the leading figures of the French Revolution.
• 43. Maximilien de Robespierre (1758–94) was the French revolutionary whose name is usually associated with the infamous Reign of Terror.
• 44. Goethe left Karlsbad on September 3, 1786, arrived in Rome on October 29, 1786, left Rome on April 23, 1788 and arrived back in Weimar on June 18, 1788.
• 45. The friendship between the two men lasted from the summer of 1794 to the death of Schiller on May 9, 1805.
• 46. Cf. Rudolf Steiner's remarks in “Der pädagogische Wert der Menschenerkenntnis und der Kulturwert der Pädogogik“ [The Pedagogical Value of the Knowledge of Human Beings and the Cultural Value of Pedagogy], Second Lecture of July 18, 1924, Bibl.- No. 310, CE (Dornach, 1965).
• 47. Goethe arrived in Leipzig on October 3, 1765 and left the city on August 28, 1768. His illness began the end of July, 1768.
• 48. Susanna von Klettenberg (1723–74), a well known Pietist, became Goethe's prototype of “die schöne Seele,“ [the beautiful soul] in his novel Wilhelm Meister.
• 49. Goethe left for Strassburg on April 1, 1770, and returned from that city to Frankfurt on August 14, 1771.
• 50. Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem (1747–72) was secretary of the Brunswick Legation in the city of Wetzlar. He committed suicide on October 30, 1772, with a pistol borrowed from J. C. Kestner, who was also a friend of Goethe. The tragedy is generally believed to have prompted Goethe to write his Werther, as if he wanted to vindicate his friend's action. Werther, too, borrowed a pistol from a friend to kill himself.
• 51. Cf. footnote 18.
• 52. Poetry and Truth, XI: “I perceived, not with the eyes of the body but of the mind, how I approached myself on horseback, yet wearing clothes -- pike-grey with a little gold -- that I had never worn before. As soon as I shook myself loose from this dream, the apparition had disappeared. The strange thing is that after eight years from this incident when I was travelling on the same road to pay a visit to Friederike, I was wearing the very same clothes I had dreamt about -- not by choice but by coincident.“ The later visit to Friederike Brion took place on September 25, 1779, during Goethe's second journey to Switzerland.
• 53. This lecture was preceded by a presentation of the scene in Faust's study (Earth Spirit, Faust, and Wagner).
• 54. Ann Swanwick's translation of Faust, Part I, lines 575–579, with Faust speaking to Wagner. Kaufmann's rendering of lines 575–585 is given in footnote 21.
• 55. Sophocles (496–406 B.C.) wrote 130 plays, seven of which are extant: Ajax, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonos, Antigone, Electra, The Trachiniae, Philoctetes. Recently, fragments of a satyr play, Ichneutae or The Trackers, were also found.
• 57. The scene was written in March, 1788.
• 58. Faust, Part I, “Wood and Cave,“ lines 3217–3234. The translation is by Walter Kaufmann.

Now, I wish to approach the problem we are dealing with in these reflections from another point of departure. In spiritual science we must proceed so that we encircle the problem, in a sense, and approach it from various points and directions. When we observe a life such as Goethe's, one thing must strike us that may become a profound riddle in the evolution of humanity. This is so even when we take into consideration repeated lives on earth and include them in our deliberation of the molding of a human life. The problem is this: What is the reason that individuals such as Goethe are capable of creating something so significant out of their inner nature, as he did especially through his Faust, and through this exert so important an influence on the rest of humanity? How does it happen that certain individuals are separated from the rest of humanity and are summoned by cosmic destiny to do something of such significance? We compare such an important life and work with that of each individual and ask ourselves: What conclusion can be drawn from the difference between these individual lives and the lives of these preeminent persons?

This question can be answered only when we observe life somewhat more thoroughly with the tools provided by spiritual science. To begin with, all that a person can know, especially in our time, is intended to conceal and disguise certain things and to keep unprejudiced reflections out of touch with them. This often makes it necessary in the sphere of spiritual science to adapt what we say to what can be understood by others.

Now, the description we generally give in spiritual science is that man consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego. In explaining the alternation between waking and sleeping, we say that in the waking state the ego and astral body are within the physical and etheric bodies but, during sleep, the ego and astral body are outside. This is adequate for a primary understanding, and it corresponds exactly with the spiritual scientific facts. But the truth is that we give only a part of the full reality in this description. We can never encompass the full reality in just one description, and thus we exhaust only part of anything we describe. We always need to seek light from other sources in order to properly illumine the part of reality already described. Here it must be stated that, speaking generally, sleeping and waking are really a sort of cyclic movement. Strictly speaking, the ego and astral body are outside the physical and etheric bodies in sleep only in being outside the head. Because the ego and astral body in sleep are outside the physical and etheric head, they bring about a more vivid activity in the rest of the human organization. It is, indeed, during sleep, when the ego and astral body are working from without upon the human being, that everything in him that does not belong to the head but to other parts of his organization is subjected to a far stronger influence of the ego and astral body than when he is awake. It may even be said that the action that the ego and astral body bring to bear upon the head in the waking state is exerted upon the rest of the organism during sleep. We can, therefore, rightly compare the ego with the sun, which illumines our environment during the day but during the night, it not only is outside of us but lights the other side of the earth. So, likewise, is it day in the rest of our organism when it is night for our sensory perception, which is primarily connected with the head; reciprocally, it is night for the rest of our organism when it is day for our head; that is, the rest of our organism is more or less withdrawn from the ego and astral body when we are awake. If we wish to understand the entire human being, this is something that must also be added to illumine the full reality.

Now, it is important to grasp correctly the connection of the psychic with the physical in man if we wish to understand properly what I have just told you. I have often stressed the fact that the nervous system of the physical organism is a unified organization, and it is really sheer nonsense, impossible to prove anatomically, to classify the nerves as sensory and motor. They are organized as a unity and all have one function. The so-called motor nerves are distinguished from the so-called sensory only to the extent that the sensory nerves are arranged to serve our perception of the outer world whereas the motor nerves serve for the perception of our organism. It is not the function of a motor nerve to cause my hand to move, for example; this is sheer nonsense. It exists for the purpose of perceiving my hand's movement from within. The sensory nerves, however, serve in the perception of the outer world. This is their sole distinction. As you know, our nervous system is divided into three branches: those nerves whose main center is the brain, centered in the head, the nerves that are centered in the spinal cord, and the nerves that belong to the ganglionic system [autonomic nervous system]. These are, in essence, the three kinds of nerves, and the important point is to know how they are related to the spiritual members of our organism.

Which is the finest and most advanced member of the nervous system and which the least? Quite obviously, those who adhere to the ordinary scientific world conception will answer that the nervous system of the brain is naturally the noblest because it distinguishes man from the animal. But such is not the case. This nervous system of the brain is really connected with the entire organization of the etheric body. Obviously, additional relationships exist everywhere so that our brain system is naturally related to the astral body or the ego. But these are secondary relationships. Those between our nervous system of the brain and our etheric body are the primary, original ones. This has nothing to do with the view I once presented in which I explained that the entire nervous system has been brought into existence with the help of the astral body. This is something quite different and must be kept quite distinct. In its original potentiality, the nervous system was brought into existence during the Moon period. It has evolved further, however, and other relationships have been introduced since its first formation, so that our brain system really has its most intimate and important relationship with our etheric body. The spinal cord system has its most intimate and primary relationships with our present astral body, and the ganglionic system is related with the actual ego. These are the primary relationships as they now exist.

Considering all this, we shall readily see that an especially active relationship exists during the state of sleep between our ego and ganglionic system, which extends throughout the trunk of the body, ensheathing the spinal cord, etc. But these relationships are lessened during the waking life of day. They are more intimate during sleep, as are the relationships between the astral body and spinal cord nerves. We may say, then, that during sleep especially intimate relationships obtain between our astral body and the nerves of the spinal cord, and between our ego and ganglionic system. To a greater or lesser degree, we live during sleep, as regards our ego, in a strong connection with our ganglionic system. Someday, through a thorough study of the puzzling world of dreams, people will come to know what I am here pointing out on the basis of spiritual scientific investigation.

Taking this into consideration, you will arrive at a transition to another essential, important thought. Something significant for our life must be due to the rhythmical alternation that occurs in the living union between the ego and the ganglionic system, and between the astral body and the spinal cord system. This rhythmical alternation is identical with the alternation of sleeping and waking. Thus, you will not be surprised when the statement is made that, just because the ego is really so truly in the ganglionic system and the astral body is so truly in the spinal cord system, man wakes in relation to the ganglionic and spinal cord systems during sleep, and sleeps in this relationship while awake. Here we can only ask how it comes about that so little is known of that vivid state of waking that must really be developed during sleep. Well, when you consider how man has come to be, that his ego has taken its place in him only during earthly existence and is, therefore, really the baby among his human members, it will not then seem amazing that this ego life cannot yet bring to consciousness what it experiences in the ganglionic system during sleep, whereas it can bring into full consciousness what it experiences when it is in the head, which is primarily the result of all those impulses that were at work during the Moon, Sun, etc., periods.

What the ego can bring to consciousness depends on the instrument it can use. That used during the night is still comparatively delicate. As I have pointed out in previous lectures, the rest of the organism really developed later than the head, has only been added later, and is an appendage of the fully developed head organism. When we say that relative to his physical body, man has passed through longer or shorter stages beginning with Saturn, we are referring only to his head. What is attached to his head is in many ways a later formation of the Moon period, and even of the earth. It is for this reason that the vivid life that is developed during sleep, and that has its organic seat to a large extent in the spinal cord and ganglionic systems, enters consciousness at first only in a small degree. But it is not because of this a less significantly vivid life. One can say with equal justification that during sleep the possibility is offered to man to descend into his ganglionic system and that in the waking state the possibility is given to ascend to his senses and brain system. You will surely say, “How this complicates and confuses everything that we have acquired!” Man, however, is a complicated being and we do not learn to understand him when we fail to permit these complex complications to work upon us.

Now just suppose that what I have described regarding Goethe actually happens to someone and his etheric body is loosened. Then an entirely different relationship comes about during the waking life between his soul-spiritual and his organic-physical nature. As I expressed it yesterday, he is put on a sort of isolated pedestal. But such an effect can never come about without being followed by another. It is important to bear in mind that such a relationship does not occur one-sidedly, but brings about another. If one expresses what I characterized yesterday somewhat more crudely, we may even say that the loosening of the etheric body influences the entire waking life in a certain way, but this cannot happen without also influencing the sleeping life. The result is simply that the person comes into looser relationships with his brain impressions. Because of this, he enters into more intimate relationships during the waking state with his spinal cord nerves and ganglionic system. At the time that Goethe fell ill, he developed, as it were, a looser relationship with his brain but at the same time he experienced a more intimate relationship with his ganglionic and spinal cord systems.

What is actually happening as a result of this experience? What does it mean to say that a more intimate relationship comes about with the ganglionic and spinal cord systems? It means that the individual enters into an entirely different relationship with the external world. We are, of course, always in the most intimate relationship with the outer world, but we merely fail to observe how intimate the relationship is. But I have often called your attention to the fact that the air that you hold within you at one moment is, in the next, outside, and then different air is taken in. Thus, what is outside takes on the form of the body and unites with it when you inhale. It is only seemingly true that the organism is distinct from the external world. It is a member of it and belongs to it. If, therefore, such a modification in an individual's relationship to the external world occurs as has been described, it makes itself felt strongly in his life. Indeed, it may be said that in such a personality as Goethe's, the lower nature, which we generally connect with the spinal cord and ganglionic systems, must come to the fore all the more strongly through this process. As the forces draw back from the head, the ganglionic and spinal cord systems take possession of them in larger measure.

An understanding for what really happens here is acquired only when we permeate ourselves with the knowledge that what we call the intellect and reason is not really so closely bound up with our individuality as is ordinarily assumed. It is clear that contemporary basic conceptions of these things are completely wrong; in part, it is in these matters that contemporary views are least frequently right. This has been especially evident in the muddle-headed behavior by some people in our age, including members of the most learned circles, when they tried to interpret their experiences with so-called dogs, apes, horses, etc. As you know, reports came out of the blue and were circulated about educated horses that can speak and do all sorts of things, about a highly educated dog that made a great stir in Mannheim, and an educated monkey in the Frankfurt zoo that had been taught to do arithmetic, as well as other things that one cannot mention in polite society. The Frankfurt chimpanzee, in other words, has been trained in certain natural necessities to behave like humans rather than monkeys. I will not pursue this further, but all this caused the greatest astonishment, not only among laymen, but also among professionals. They were actually enraptured, especially when the Mannheim dog, after one of its beloved offspring died, wrote a letter telling how this dear puppy would be together with the archetypal soul, what it would be like and so on. That dog wrote a most intelligent letter.

Well, we need not elaborate on these specially complicated expressions of intelligence, but what stands out is that all these various animals performed feats of arithmetic. A great deal of attention was then given to the investigation of what such animals can achieve. Something quite unusual came to light in the case of the Frankfurt ape. It was possible to witness that when he was given a problem in addition to which he had to find a definite answer he pointed to the correct number in a series placed side by side. It was then discovered that this educated ape had simply formed the habit of being guided by the direction of the glance of his trainer. Then some of those who had previously been astonished said, “He has no trace of a mind; his training is everything!” In other words, the animal was taking his direction from his trainer and followed nothing more than a somewhat complicated training procedure. Just as a dog fetches a stone when it is thrown, so did the ape produce from the series of numbers the one indicated by the glance of his trainer.

Upon more thorough investigation, similar findings will undoubtedly be obtained in experiments with the other animals. Whatever, we cannot suppress our astonishment that people are so amazed when animals perform something that is seemingly human. How much more objective understanding, how much intellect, is actually associated with the so-called instinctual behavior in animals. As a matter of fact, the enormously important achievements and profoundly significant connections in the animal realm cause us to admire the wisdom underlying all happenings. We do not have wisdom merely in our heads; wisdom surrounds us everywhere like light, working everywhere, even through the animal kingdom. In the presence of such unusual phenomena as we have mentioned, only those people are astonished who have not seriously dealt with scientific developments. To all those who today are writing such learned tracts on the Mannheim dog and other dogs, on horses and the Frankfurt ape, along with much else because these are not unique—to all these I should like to read a passage from Comparative Psychology by Carus⁵⁹ that was published as early as 1866. Since they are not here, I will read the passage to you. Carus writes:

... When, therefore, the dog, for example, has long been treated with kindness and affection by his master, the human traits imprint themselves upon the animal quite objectively, even though it has no conception of goodness as such; they blend with the sensory image of this person that the dog has often seen and cause the animal to recognize him, even apart from the sense of sight, merely through scent or hearing, as the one from whom something good once came to him. If, therefore, some suffering befalls this man, if he is even deprived, perhaps, of the possibility of continuing his kindness to the dog, the animal feels this as something evil inflicted upon him and is moved thereby to rage and revenge; all this occurs without any abstract thinking whatever, but only through the succession of one sensory image after another.

It is certainly true that for the dog sensory image follows sensory image; however, intelligence and wisdom are at the bottom of the phenomenon per se. Carus continues as follows:

Yet is it strange how closely actual thinking is approached and may be resembled in its results by such a peculiar weaving together, separating and again joining together of the images of the inner sense. Thus, I once saw a well-trained white poodle (this was not the Mannheim dog because this book was written in 1866) that correctly picked out and placed together letters for words spoken to him. He also seemed to solve simple problems in arithmetic by bringing together figures written, as were the letters, on separate sheets of paper, seemed to be able to count how many ladies were present in the company, and did other similar things. Of course, if all this had depended upon a real understanding of number as a mathematical concept, it would not have been possible without actual reflection. It turned out, however, that the dog had simply been trained to pick up, on a slight gesture or sound from his master, the paper bearing the required letter or number from the series of sheets laid before him. Upon another indication through an equally slight sound, like the clicking of the thumbnail against the nail of another finger, he would lay the sheet down in another row, thus performing what seemed to be a miracle.⁶⁰

You see, not only the phenomenon, but also its explanation has long been known. Only now has this explanation been furnished again by the scientists because people pay no attention to what has been accomplished in the past. It is only for this reason that such things occur, and they bear testimony, not to our advanced science, but to our advanced ignorance!

On the other hand, certain objections have rightly been raised. If we had only these explanations (as we have heard them today) they might be considered equally naive, because Hermann Bahr⁶¹ has quite correctly reminded us of the following. Herr Pfungst⁶² demonstrated that the horses reacted to extremely slight cues made unconsciously and unperceived by their trainers. But Herr Pfungst was able to perceive these exceedingly slight gestures only after he had worked for a long time in his physiological laboratory constructing an apparatus to detect them. Bahr justifiably raises the objection that it was certainly most peculiar that only the horse should be clever enough to observe the gestures, whereas a university instructor had to work for years constructing an apparatus to do so—I believe it took him ten or more years. In all such things there is obviously a bit of truth, but we must simply view them in the right way.

With the proper perception, one can obviously explain such phenomena only when one thinks of objective wisdom and understanding as qualities that, along with instinctive behavior, have been instilled in things, and when one thinks of an animal as part of a complete system of interrelated objective wisdom permeating the world. In other words, they can be explained only when we are no longer limited to the idea that wisdom has come into the world through man alone, but recognize that wisdom is to be found throughout the universe. Man, by reason of his special organization, is able to perceive more of this wisdom than other beings, and is thus distinguished from them. Because of his organization, he can perceive more than they, but through the wisdom implanted in them, they can perform wisdom-filled tasks as he can. It is, however, a different kind of wisdom. The phenomena of these unusual expressions of wisdoms are really far less important to serious observers of the world than the phenomena that are always spread out before their eyes. These are far more important and, if you take this into consideration, you will no longer find incomprehensible what I am about to say.

An animal, far more intensely than man, fits into the universal wisdom and is quite intimately united with it. Its orders, so to speak, are far more compulsory than those of man. Human beings are much freer, and so it is possible for them to reserve forces for the cognition of interrelationships. The essential point is that the physical body of an animal—especially the higher ones—is fitted into the same universal interrelationships as man's etheric body. Thus, man knows more of the cosmic relationships, but animals are far more intimately united with them; they are far closer to, and more interwoven with, them. Therefore, if you take this objectively dominant reason into consideration tell yourself this: “We are surrounded not only by air and light but also by governing reason; we do not move merely through illumined space but also through the space of wisdom and governing reason.” You will then fully understand what it means for a person to be fitted into the world in regard to the finer relationships of his or her organs, and not just in an ordinary way. In normal life, a man, for example, is joined to spiritual cosmic relationship in such a fashion that the connection between his ego and ganglionic system, and between his astral body and spinal cord system, are greatly impaired during the waking life of day. But because these connections are subdued, he is not too attentive in ordinary, normal life to what is going on around him. It would be possible for him to observe this only if he really should see with his ganglionic system as he otherwise perceives with his head.

If, however, as in the special case of Goethe, the astral body is brought into a more vivid relationship with the spinal cord system and the ego with the ganglionic, because the ether body has withdrawn from the head, then far more vivid intercourse occurs with what is going on in our surroundings. But it is concealed from us in normal life because it is only while we are asleep at night that we enter into relationship with our spiritual environment. Here you arrive at an understanding of how the things Goethe has written were for him genuine perceptions, and although these could naturally not have been so clear as our sensory perceptions of the external world, yet they are clearer than the perceptions that an ordinary man has of his spiritual environment. Now, what did Goethe perceive in this way with special vividness? Let us grasp this point clearly through a special instance.

Through the complications of his particular karma, Goethe was destined to enter a life of scholarship and knowledge differently from an ordinary scholar. What did he experience through this? You see, for many centuries it has been so that a man who grows into intimate union with a life of learning has experienced a significant discord. To be sure, today it is more concealed than in Goethe's time, but it nevertheless is experienced because there is an enormous field in science that has been preserved from the fourth post-Atlantean epoch in the terminologies and systems of words that we are compelled to acquire. We trade more than we realize in words. All this has been obscured somewhat through the experimentation that has gradually been introduced since the nineteenth century, and a person now grows into his knowledge so that he sees more than he did earlier. Such sciences as jurisprudence, for instance, have descended somewhat from the specially lofty positions they previously occupied. But when jurisprudence and theology still occupied their specially lofty stations, the areas of learning man was trying to penetrate were really comprehensive systems of words, and the same is true of other things that had to be taken in as an inheritance from the fourth post-Atlantean period.

Along with this, what arises from the needs of the fifth post-Atlantean period made itself felt in an ever increasing way; that is, the life that arises from the great achievements of the new period. This is not realized by anyone who is simply driven from one lecture to another, but Goethe experienced it most intensely. I say that a person who is simply driven from one lecture to another does not sense it, but he passes through it nonetheless. He really passes through it. Here we touch the edge of a certain mystery of modern life. We can judge students who are enrolled in courses according to what they experience and what they are conscious of. But what they experience is not the whole story. Their inner nature is something quite different. If these individuals who are experiencing these overlapping layers of the fourth and fifth post-Atlantean epochs really knew what a certain part of their being is going through unconsciously, they would then have an entirely different understanding of what Goethe, even in youth, concealed mysteriously in his Faust. Countless persons who are finding their way into contemporary education are unconsciously sharing in this experience.

We must, therefore, remind ourselves that, by reason of all that Goethe had acquired because of his special karma, those with whom he came into close relationship during his youth were quite different to him than they would have been if he had not had this special karma. He sensed and felt how the people with whom he became intimately associated had to stupefy the Faustian life within them so that they no longer possessed it. He was able to sense this because what lived mysteriously in his fellow men made an impression on him such as is made by one person on another only when an especially intimate relationship, indeed when love, develops between them. In such a case of ordinary life, the connection of the ego with the ganglionic system, and of the astral body with the spinal cord system is highly active, although this is not consciously perceived as such. Something very special is activated. But what is otherwise active only in a love relationship came about in Goethe vis à vis a far larger number of people, so that he experienced a tremendous, more or less subconscious, compassion for the poor fellows—excuse the expression—who did not know what their inner natures were going through as they were driven from class to class and from examination to examination. This was felt by him and it gave him a rich experience.

Experiences become conceptions. Ordinary experiences become the conceptions of everyday life, but these particular experiences become the conceptions, the mental images, that Goethe poured tumultously into Faust. They were nothing but actual experiences that he gained from the most extensive environment because his ganglionic and spinal cord life was stimulated to more than normal wakefulness. This was the opposite from the subdued head life, but it was a potentiality in him even in his boyhood. We can see this from his description of what became active in him: not only what ordinarily engages people, say in piano lessons,⁶³ became active in him but also the entire being. Goethe partook much more in the happenings of real life as a whole person than others, and we must say, therefore, that he was more wide-awake during the day than they. During the time in his youth when he was working on Faust, he was more awake during the day, and because of this he also needed what I described yesterday as the time of sleep—the ten years in Weimar. This dampening was necessary.

This, however, is just what happens to a greater or lesser degree in every human being during the course of life, only in Goethe it took place more intensely. He was simply drawn somewhat more consciously than other men into the surrounding wisdom-filled and purely spiritual influences. He became aware of what lives and weaves mysteriously within men. What, then, is this really? When we are put into the world in our ordinary and brutal waking life together with our ego, we are bound up with the world through our senses and our ordinary perceptions. But you will agree that we are now much more closely bound with this world. Our ego is, indeed, in an especially intimate relation with our ganglionic system, and the astral body with the spinal cord system. Through this relationship, we have really a far more comprehensive connection with our environing world than through the sensory system of our head.

Now you must bear in mind that man needs the rhythmic alternation of his ego and astral body in his head during the waking life of day, and outside his head during sleep; because they are outside his head during sleep, they develop an inner active life in connection with the other systems, as I have indicated. The ego and the astral body need this alternation of sinking downward into the head and rising out of it. When man's ego and astral body are outside his head, he not only develops that intimate relationship with the rest of his organism through the ganglionic and spinal cord systems, but he also develops spiritual relationships with the spiritual world. Thus, we may say that an especially active, vivid connection with the spinal cord and ganglionic systems corresponds to an active psychic-spiritual life with the spiritual world. Since we are obliged to assume that the soul-spiritual is outside the head at night, and since this causes the development of an especially active life in the rest of the organism, we must then say that during the life of day, when the ego and the astral body are more within the head, we are in turn experiencing a spiritual symbiosis with the surrounding spiritual world. In a certain sense, we submerge ourselves in an inner spiritual world in sleep, but in a surrounding spiritual world when we awake.

This state of being one with the surrounding spiritual world is more pronounced in Goethe. He is, as it were, dreaming during a state of wakefulness—just as the ordinary person does not always fall into a deep, dreamless sleep. It is seldom that anyone dreams consciously in this way during the life of the day, but people like Goethe pass into a state of dreaming even during the waking life. The forces that remain unconscious in other people become, in a certain sense, dream-forms of life for people like Goethe.

We now have an even more exact description which might tempt you to entertain the arrogant notion that all of you could easily write a Faust poem since you are experiencing the Faust dilemma by ranging out into and by living in union with the surrounding world during your daytime life. The latter is indeed true. We do experience Faust, but only as the opposite pole is experienced in the night through the ego and astral body when we do not dream. But since Goethe not only experienced this unconsciously, but also dreamed it, he could express it in Faust. He dreamed this experience and in people such as Goethe the following takes place: what they create stands in the same relationship to what the rest of us experience unconsciously as does the dream to deep sleep on the other side of our lives. This is an actual reality; the creation of the great spirits are related to the unconscious creations of other men as dream to dreamless sleep.

Even so, much remains obscure. But bear in mind that you are thereby gaining a glimpse into something that is intimately connected with human life; it may be described somewhat as follows. We could really say quite a bit about the connection between our being and the surrounding world if we could awake just to the stage of dreaming. If we were able to awaken only to the stage of dreaming, we would experience tremendous things and would also be able to describe them. But this would have a grave consequence. Just think, if all men, to express it trivially, were so conscious that they could describe everything in their environment, if they would really describe experiences, for example, like those of Goethe's as set forth in his Faust, what would we come to? What would the world then come to? Strange as it may seem but so it is, the world would come to a stop and would make no further progress! The moment everyone were to dream the way Goethe dreamt Faust, which is an utterly different kind of dreaming—the moment everyone were to dream his connection with the external world, then such people would devote all the forces developed in their inner being to such an activity. They would pour them into such things and human existence would, in some sense, consume itself. You can form a faint idea of what would happen if you just look at the many ruinous effects that are taking place because many people, although not really dreaming, imagine that they are and babble or scribble reminiscences they have picked up elsewhere. This is associated with the fact that there are entirely too many poets. Where is there anyone today who does not believe he is a poet or painter or something! The world could not continue if this were so because all good things have also their dark side, truly their dark side.

Schiller was also an important poet who dreamed much in the way I have described. Just imagine, however, that all those who in their youth were trained like Schiller to become doctors had given up the practice of medicine as he did and later, thanks to an extensive patronage, had been appointed “professor of history” without any real preparation or serious study of history! As a matter of fact, Schiller did deliver interesting lectures at the University of Jena, but his students did not get from them what they needed to learn. He also gradually stopped giving these university lectures and was happy when he did not have to give them anymore. Imagine that things would be the same with every professor of history or every young physician! Obviously, everything that is good also has its dark side. The world must be protected, so to speak, from standing still. It seems trivial to say this, but it is nevertheless a profound mystery-truth: not all people can dream in this way. The forces with which they dream must first be applied in the external world to something different so that through it a foundation may be created for a further evolution of the earth. It would come to a standstill were all men to dream as I have indicated.

Now we have reached a point where an especially paradoxical fact comes to light. To what in the world are the aforementioned forces really applied? If we observe their application in a spiritual way, they are ultimately applied to deep sleep even though you may like them to be applied to dreams. More concretely, they are applied to all that is spread out over human evolution in the most varied kinds of vocational work.

Vocational work is related to the work that was done in creating Faust, or in Schiller's Wallenstein, as deep sleep is related to dreaming. But to say that we sleep during our vocational work will seem extraordinary to you, and you will say that here, in this, you are wide awake. The truth is that there is a grand illusion in this idea that one is awake during this kind of work because what really comes into being through vocational work is not something we do in full waking consciousness. Of course, some of the effects a person's profession has upon his or her soul do enter one's consciousness, but such a person really knows nothing whatever of all that is actually present in the web of vocational labor that men are continually spinning around the world.

It is, indeed, surprising how these things are connected. Hans Sachs⁶⁴ was a shoemaker and also a poet. Jakob Boehme⁶⁵ was a shoemaker and a mystical philosopher. There you have sleeping and waking alternating through a special constellation that we may also discuss. It is possible to pass from one state into another.

What, then, is the significance of this interplay and alternation of life between vocational labor for such a man as Jakob Boehme—he really did make shoes for the good people of Görlitz—and his mystical-philosophical compositions? Many people have strange opinions of these things. Allow me to review the experience we once had when we were in Görlitz.

One evening before a lecture I was to give on Boehme,⁶⁶ I got into a conversation with a high school teacher, in which we spoke about Boehme's statue that we had just seen in the park. The people of Görlitz, as we were often told, called his monument, the “park cobbler.” We remarked that it was most beautiful, but the school teacher said he did not think so. He thought it really looked like Shakespeare and one would not know from it that Boehme had been a shoemaker. He said that to represent Boehme it would have to show that he was a shoemaker. Well, one can disregard such an attitude. As Jakob Boehme was writing his great mystical-philosophical views, he was working from the results that could have come about only through the human being having evolved through the Saturn, Sun, Moon, and Earth times; that is, through the fact that a broad stream flows through these ages and finally comes to expression in these effects. This stream manifests itself in such a personality only in a way that is the result of special karmic relationships. But just as all that has traversed the Sun and Moon periods is necessary to every individual on earth, so it is also necessary, but in a special way, in order to bring out what was in Boehme.

But then, Jakob Boehme also made shoes for the worthy Görlitzers. How does all this hang together? To be sure, the fact that a man has been able to develop the skill of a shoemaker is also connected with this stream. But when the shoes are finished, they are separated from him and their function has then nothing more to do with skill but with protecting and warming feet. They go their own way in performing their functions and are separated completely from the one who makes them; what they bring about has its effects only later. In other words, this is only a beginning.

If the initial influence leading to the mystical-philosophical activity of Jakob Boehme were represented graphically, I should have to indicate the first potential toward shoemaking here at this point. This then flows on further and in the future Vulcan evolution will have developed a degree of perfection that has been reached already by what had flowed into his mystical-philosophical activity from the Saturn evolution. This is, in a sense, an end; his shoemaking is a beginning. We say, of course, that the earth is earth at present, but if we could trace things from Saturn still further back, we might then say that, relative to certain things, the earth is already Vulcan. We should then assume Saturn at this point.

We can thus take everything in a relative way. We may say that the earth is Saturn, and that Vulcan is, in a sense, earth. What happens on the earth in the vocational labor of a man like Jakob Boehme—not in his free creative work, but what he does as vocational labor—is the beginning of something that will be as far advanced on Vulcan as the happenings on Saturn are already advanced on the earth. For Boehme to write his mystical-philosophical books on earth, it was necessary for something to have happened on Saturn that was similar to what he has done on earth in making shoes. Likewise, Boehme's shoemaking here on earth has the effect that something may be done on Vulcan that will be similar to his writing mystical philosophy here on earth.

There is something extraordinary in all this. Here is an indication of how what is often given little value on earth is so little esteemed because it is the beginning of something that will be prized in the future. In their being, human beings are, of course, much more intimately bound up with the past since they must first familiarize themselves with what is a beginning. Therefore, they often care much less for something that is a beginning than for something that has come over to them from the past. From the scope of what we are yet to be involved in during the earth period, and so that something special may then come about when the earth shall have developed further through Jupiter and Venus to Vulcan—from all this a full consciousness will develop such as the one that exists for the philosophy of Jakob Boehme on the earth. It is for this reason that the real meaning of human external labor is enveloped now in unconsciousness, just as man was shrouded in unconsciousness on Saturn; sleep consciousness was developed on the Sun, dream consciousness on the Moon, and the present condition of waking consciousness on the earth.

The human being is thus really living in a profound sleep consciousness in his involvement with everything of his vocation. Through his vocation he is really creating, not through what gives him pleasure in it, but through what is developing without his being able to enter into it; thus does he really create future values. When a person makes a nail over and over again, it certainly does not give him or her any special pleasure. But the nail becomes detached from its producer; it has quite definite tasks. As to what then happens by means of this nail is not of further concern to the worker; he does not follow up every nail he has made. But what is enveloped there in his unconscious, profoundest sleep is destined to come to life again in the future.

We have thus been able to juxtapose what the ordinary person accomplishes: first the most insignificant work in a profession and then that which appears as the highest achievement. Superior achievements are an end; the most insignificant work is always a beginning.

I wanted to place these two concepts side by side because we cannot reflect upon how the human being is bound through his karma with his vocation until we first know how his labor, which is often connected quite externally with him, is related to the entire evolution of which he is a part. We will soon develop the real question of karma as it relates to vocation. But I had first to introduce these matters so we might attain a universal concept of what flows from a human being into his or her vocation.

These things are also exceedingly useful in forming our moral sentiments in the right way. Our judgments are incorrect because we do not focus our attention on things in the right way. A seed often appears quite insignificant beside the beautiful flower of the future. Using human work as a case in point, I wanted to show you today how seed and flower are bound up in the evolution of mankind.

• 59. The philosopher and physician Gustav Carus (1789–1869) wrote the book Vergleichende Psychologie oder Geischichte der Seele in der Reihenfolge der Tierwelt [Comparative Psychology or History of the Soul in the Order of the Animal World] (Vienna, 1866).
• 60. Cams concludes the passage with a note: “Horses have been observed to accomplish similar feats; in fact, I have seen canaries do the same thing, although not quite as completely.“
• 61. Herman Bahr (1863–1934) was a Viennese writer.
• 62. Oskar Pfungst, Das Pferd des Herrn von Osten [Mr. von Osten's Horse] (Leipzig, 1907).
• 63. Poetry and Truth, IV, 107.
• 64. Hans Sachs (1494–1576) was a shoemaker who became known as the foremost “Meistersinger“ in Nürnberg.
• 65. Jakob Böhme (1575–1624), a shoemaker in Görlitz, Silesia, is regarded to have been one of the most profound mystics in Germany.
• 66. Steiner lectured in Görlitz on December 3, 1908.

Someone might say that the spiritual scientific reflections touching on the problem of vocation are among the least interesting. But such is not the case. This must be recognized, especially in our fifth post-Atlantean period, because in this period all human relationships will be essentially modified in comparison with those that prevailed in earlier periods of the earth. They will be so modified that man must, out of his own freedom, bring more with him than in earlier ages when his mission in the evolution of earth could be carried out almost instinctively; that is, when he received by inspiration the direction into which he had to go.

When we look back, for example, to the Egypto-Chaldean culture or to other cultures of earlier times, we shall find that the measure of freedom now given to man toward forging his external destiny—and this freedom will constantly increase—was not given him in earlier times. During the Egypto-Chaldean period, the fact that each person belonged to a certain class into which he or she was forced similar to the way an animal is forced into its species, though not so irrevocably, removed from the sphere of man's freedom much that at present belongs there. To be sure, there was a compensation for this limitation of freedom. Students of the external history of culture who are generally quite shortsighted in their thinking, usually assume that conditions in ancient times were such that those who were then guiding human affairs did so with the same impulses as the leading personalities today. But you must bear in mind that there were quite definite processes in the mysteries in ancient times whereby the guiding personalities acquainted themselves with what was willed by beings who guide life from regions outside the earth. I have told you that at certain times—we do not need now to review them—sacrificial priests carried out specified mystery rituals. As a result, certain personalities in the temples who were suited for such purposes were brought into contact with the universe, the cosmos, the extraterrestrial relationships. The consciousness of these specially qualified personalities was then inspired by beings who guided the earth from extraterrestrial regions, and what was learned from these beings determined the course of action.

I will show you through a hypothetical case how things took their course in earlier times. Suppose that today the Christmas festival was not more or less an external holiday for most people, but that in its form and time of occurrence men knew that our earth is especially fitted to receive ideas into its aura that cannot enter, for example, in summer. I have explained how the earth is awake during the winter and that Christmas time is one of the most brilliant points of this waking state. At that time the aura of the earth is permeated, interwoven, with thoughts. We may say that the earth is permeated, interwoven, with thoughts. We may say that the earth ponders the outer universe, just as we men, while in the waking state of day, reflect in our thought on what is around us. In summer the earth sleeps, so it is not possible then to find certain thoughts in it. In winter the earth is awake, and most wide awake at Christmas; then the earth's aura is interpenetrated with thoughts, and it is possible to read the will of the cosmos for our earthly events from them.

Now the sacrificial priests educated some individuals in such a way that they became sensitive and receptive to what was alive in the earth's aura. By putting these individuals into contact with the earthly thoughts that gave expression to the cosmic will, the sacrificial priests in the temples could learn it from them. What they learned was to them, in a sense, the will of heaven, and from this they were able to determine who should remain in a particularly worthy position and who should be taken into the mysteries in order that he might assume a leading position in ancient government or priestly life. Humanity has now outgrown such things and is exposed to chaos in this respect; we must simply recognize this fact. The transition from the ancient, quite definite conditions in which men learned from the will of the gods what was to happen here on earth has already occurred. During the fourth post-Atlantean period, in which the individual freed himself from the will of the cosmos, these ancient customs passed over into our present more chaotic conditions. Everything tends to be handed over more completely to man. Thus, it is all the more necessary that the will of the cosmos shall penetrate earthly conditions in another way.

It would require much time to make clear how in the third Egypto-Babylonian culture period something still lived and wove in earthly life from the various vocations of men—to use a term adapted to our present conditions—that was in large measure a reproduction of the will of the cosmos. This came about as described and was disappearing during the fourth post-Atlantean period. It has vanished completely in our fifth post-Atlantean period which began, as we know, approximately in the fifteenth century. If men would pay more attention today to what is happening and stop offering a fable convenue in place of history, they would be able to recognize, even from external conditions, how man's relation to his vocation has changed since the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. They would recognize from present conditions how everything will increasingly become different in the future. But a sort of anarchy would inevitably overtake mankind if no one were to grasp these deeper connections and impart to the intellectual community ideas that take into account the modifications produced by the natural course of evolution. What it has been possible to establish even from external history regarding the emergence of what we might call the modern vocational life since the fifteenth century would cause astonishment to those who are at all able to observe human life. If they would submit to the influence of all that it is possible to recognize, they would find fault with themselves, in a way, for living in such a somnolent state and for having no conception of what is connected with evolving human destiny.

Last time, I called your attention to the fact that what constitutes real vocational life is by no means so insignificant for the cosmic complex as it may at first appear. I pointed out that, as men, we have gone successively through the Saturn evolution, where the first potentialities of the physical body were prepared; the Sun period, in which the etheric man was prepared; the Moon period, in which the astral man was prepared, and that we are now passing through the earth period in which the ego develops. But other periods are to follow: The Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan times. We may say that the earth is, in a way, the fourth stage of Saturn; likewise, Vulcan is the fourth stage of the earth. The earth is, in a sense, the Saturn of Vulcan. Just as on ancient Saturn processes occurred so intimately bound up with evolution that we owe the first potentiality of our physical body to them, which still continues to work in us, so must something happen on earth that will continue to work on in our evolution. On Vulcan it will attain a fourth stage of development, just as certain processes on Saturn have reached a fourth stage of development of earth. I pointed out that those processes that would correspond to Vulcan correspond to what we have on earth from the Saturn evolution; they represent, therefore, what works and lives in the various vocations that men take up on earth. As humans pursue vocational lives, something develops on earth within their vocational activity that will be the first potentiality for Vulcan, just as the Saturn activity was the first potentiality for our physical body.

If you add to this reflection the fact that vocational life has undergone a tremendous transformation since the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean period, you will understand how increasingly important it will become to conceive of it as a component of the entire world evolution provided you do this by means of those points of view that may be developed through spiritual science. Only by learning first to recognize the objective aspects of vocational life can we form suitable concepts regarding the karma of vocation. Of even greater interest will be the question where vocational life is going and what it will develop into from our age onward because from this we shall derive more clear-cut concepts than from today's conditions.

As can easily be recognized when we take a common sense look out into the world today, the future evolution of vocational life will consist in the ever increasing differentiation and specialization of vocations. It is not too intelligent for people to criticize the fact that, in recent times, vocations have become more specialized and that not so many centuries ago a person could find in his vocation the connections between what he was producing and what this meant for the world. He thereby would take an interest in the forming and shaping of his product because he saw clearly what his product became in life. In our times, this is no longer the case for much of humanity.

To take a radical example, a man is placed by his destiny in a factory where he perhaps makes, not a whole nail, but only part of one; this piece is then joined with another part by another man. Thus, the man who makes only part of the nail can develop no interest in how what he produced from morning until night takes its place in the relationships of life. If we compare the earlier handicraft life with the factory life of today, we are immediately aware of a radical difference between what is contemporary and what existed not too long ago. What has already come to pass in the various branches of human activity will continue to develop, and more specialization and differentiation of vocational life will necessarily occur. It is by no means especially intelligent for people to criticize this because it is a necessity in evolution; it simply will happen, and will happen more and more.

What sort of outlook is opened to us by this fact? Fundamentally, it is that men must increasingly lose interest, as we can readily imagine, in the work that occupies the greater part of their lives; in a way, they must surrender like automatons to their work in the world. But the most essential point is something else. Man's inner nature must obviously acquire the color of his outer work. Anyone who observes the historic development of humanity will certainly discover to what a large extent the men of the recent fifth post-Atlantean period have become reproductions of their vocations and how their vocational lives influence their soul lives, specializing them. This does not apply to the majority of those who live today within our Anthroposophical Society, however. They are often in the fortunate position of having detached themselves from the interconnections of life. In the fortunate position? I might just as well say in the unfortunate position! This is good fortune often only for subjective egoistic feeling. For the world, it is often bad fortune because the world will demand increasingly of men that they excel in special fields and become specialists.

But what must happen in addition to this? Their specialization will be a necessary by-product of world evolution, and this question will soon become one of the weightiest of family problems; anyone who wishes to educate children will have to understand it. To place oneself rationally within the course of evolution then will depend altogether upon an understanding of the question: How shall I place my child into the evolution of humanity? What is still possible in many cases today, even though it is only a residue left over from ancient times that people routinely cling to, will soon prove to be empty phrases; that is, the fine manner of speaking so much admired today, according to which children must be allowed to become what corresponds to their observed talents. This will soon prove to be an empty phrase. In the first place, people will see that those who are born from now on will give indications of their previous incarnations in a more complex way than was the case with people in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. They will show complex potentialities that no one would have dreamed of before since these potentialities were far simpler in earlier times. Those who consider themselves especially clever in testing the potentialities of grown children to determine whether or not they are fitted for this or that vocation may learn that the insights derived from these tests are nothing but their own fantastic imaginations.

In the near future, however, life will be so complicated that the word profession will take on an entirely different meaning. Today we still often associate something quite inward with the word, calling it “vocation,” although for most people their vocations do not at all represent anything inward. We conceive vocation (calling) as something toward which a person is called by his inner qualities. However, if we would question people about their calling, especially in our cities, many would say, “I am in my profession because I am convinced this is the only one that corresponds to my talents and inclinations that I have had since childhood.” Yet, closer inspection of these cases would reveal that the answers given did not correspond with the facts, and I imagine they are not congruent with your own observation of life. Today, a vocation is increasingly that to which a person is called by the world's objective course of development. There outside of men is the organism, the interconnection; you may call it, if you please, the machine—this is not important—that gives orders, that calls him.

All this will constantly intensify and, as a result, what humanity accomplishes through vocational activity is also detached from man himself; it becomes more objective. Through this detachment, vocational activity grows increasingly into something that, in its further development through Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan, goes through a process of development similar to what has taken place for the earth through Saturn, Sun, and Moon. It is a peculiar fact that when one speaks as a spiritual scientist it is not possible to flatter human beings if the subject is related intimately to their lives. Spiritual science will be less and less exposed, you see, to the danger of expressing itself according to the model of wisdom to be found in the words:

At best a pompous moralistic play
With wonderfully edifying quips,
Most suitable to come from puppets' lips.⁶⁷

Spiritual science will certainly not be in a position to do this. It will often be compelled to set forth as something significantly great for the evolution of the world the very thing that people would prefer not to hear. It will therefore be inevitable that some people today who consider themselves exceedingly bright because their philistinism has crept into their brains will glibly declare, “Oh, professional life is a prosaic, mundane matter.” The way vocational life appears to true spiritual science compels us to declare that through the very fact that this life becomes detached from human interests, it contains the necessity to develop relationships possessing a cosmic significance. Many people might think that a depressing view of the future results from this: increasingly people are caught in the treadmill of life and spiritual science cannot even console them that this has happened.

It would, however, be a great deception should one draw such a conclusion from what has been said since the nature of the universe requires things to be unified through polar opposites. Just consider how these polarities thrust themselves upon you in the world! It is, for example, in their mutual relationship that positive and negative electricity produce their unified effects. Positive and negative electricity are necessary to each other. Male and female are necessary for the propagation of the human race. It is from polarities that unity evolves in the evolution of the world.

Now, the same principle is at the bottom of what has been said. When vocational labor is separated from the human being, we necessarily create the first cosmic potentiality for a far-reaching cosmic evolution. Everything that happens in the evolution of the world is related to the spiritual, and in what we create within the sphere of our vocations, whether by bodily or by mental labor, there lies the possibility for the incarnation of spiritual beings. At present, during this earth stage, these spiritual beings are, to be sure, still of an elemental kind; we might say an elemental kind of the fourth degree. But they will have become elemental beings of the third degree during the Jupiter evolution, and so on. The labor in the objective vocational process is detached from us and becomes the external sheath for elemental beings who thereby continue their development. But this occurs only under a certain condition.

If it be said that we must first begin to understand the meaning of what is often belittled as the prosaic part of life, we must also understand that this meaning is not clarified until we comprehend it completely in its comprehensive cosmic connection. What we produce in our vocational life can become meaningful for the Vulcan evolution, but something else is prerequisite to this. Just as positive electricity is necessary for negative, and the male necessary for the female, so also what will be released continuously from humanity as activity will require an opposite pole. A polarity of opposites was also present for humanity in its earlier evolutionary stages. Something absolutely new, of course, does not come into existence here because something similar was already present before. But when you look back at earlier cultural periods, if only two or three centuries ago, you will find that the human being was still far more immersed in his professional life with his feelings and passions, in fact with all his emotions, than today. When you compare the joy that a human being could still experience in his or her profession even a hundred years ago with the dissatisfaction of many people today who have nothing but their profession, you will be able to form an impression of what really needs to be said.

Such things are really considered rightly far too infrequently for the simple reason that those who discuss the character and choice of vocation are those who can least afford to talk about this subject matter. Schoolmasters, literary scholars, parsons—the very people who least experience the dark side of vocational activity in the modern world—write about these things. Thus you will find in ordinary literature and even in pedagogical books that people express themselves on this subject like the blind discussing colors. Of course, someone who has finished elementary and high school, and then looked around a little in a university because that's the thing to do, may easily consider himself unusually clever with the ideas he has absorbed; that is, if he now plays the role of a reformer of humanity who can tell us how everything should be done. There are, indeed, many such individuals. A person who has gained a proper perception of life knows that they are the ones who usually talk most stupidly about what must come about. This is ordinarily not observed simply because those who have acquired such educational credentials are at present highly respected. The time is yet to come when the feeling will develop that the so-called men of letters, the journalists and narrowly educated schoolmasters, understand the interrelationships of life least of all. This must gradually develop as a general opinion.

It is important that we come to see more clearly how in earlier times man's emotional life was intricately related with his professional life and how subsequently the latter has increasingly become disengaged from man's emotional life and must continue to do so. For this reason, the polar opposite of vocational life must become something different from what it was earlier. What was this element that was added earlier to vocational life? You have it before you today when you consider what constitutes the shell of culture. The buildings in which professions are practiced and in the midst of these, the church, have become the sheath and shell of culture; the days of the week reserved for work, and Sunday reserved for the needs of the soul. These were the two poles: the vocational life and the life dedicated to religious conceptions.

It would be one of the greatest mistakes that could be made to suppose that this other pole as it is still conceived today by the religious denominations could remain as it is, since it was made to fit a vocational life still bound up with the emotions of men. All of human life will deteriorate unless understanding increases in this sphere. So long as the elemental spirit that an individual creates in his vocation, as I have described, was not separated from him, the old religious conceptions still sufficed to some extent. Today they are no longer sufficient, and they will become less so the farther we advance into the future. The very idea that is most vociferously opposed by certain people must be revived; that is, the opposite pole, consisting of the fact that men shall be able to form concrete concepts regarding the spiritual worlds, should enter into evolution.

The representatives of the religious sects will often say, “Oh, there they are in spiritual science talking about many spirits and gods, but it is the one God that is important; with Him alone we have enough.” Thus, we can still make an impression on people today if we present them with the great advantage of coming into contact with one god, especially during after-dinner coffee and family music, when contemptuous remarks are made about other more recent endeavors, and ideas are expressed in an especially egotistic and philistine fashion. But what is really important is that human horizons should be broadened; that is, that we should learn to know that everything is permeated not just by a single divine spirit conceived in the vaguest way possible, but that spirit is also omnipresent in a concrete, special sense. People must learn to know that when a workman stands at his vice and the sparks fly about elemental spirits are being created which pass over into the world process and there have their significance. Those especially clever ones will claim that this is stupid. These elemental spirits, however, will certainly come into existence even though the one working at the vice is unconscious of them. Nevertheless, they will still be created, and it is important that they shall come into existence in the right way since elemental spirits both destructive and helpful to the world process can come into being.

You will most clearly understand what I mean if you consider it in a special context because in all these things we are standing today at the threshold of new evolutionary developments. Many people already have an inkling of this. Should it be transformed into reality and people fail to have spiritual scientific aspirations, it would be the worst thing that could happen to the earth. What has come about primarily during the course of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch is that the human being has been liberated from the external, inorganic world which he embodied in his tools. Eventually, he will be reunited with what he has embodied in them.

Today, machines are constructed. Of course, they are at present objective, containing little of the human element. But it will not always be so. The course of the world tends to bring about a connection between what the human being is and what he produces and brings into existence. This connection will become ever more intimate. It will appear first in those areas that furnish the foundation for closer relations between one person and another—for example, in the treatment of chemical substances that are used in medicines. People still believe that when sulphur, oxygen, and some other substance—hydrogen or something else—have been combined, the product of this combination possesses only those effects that are derived from the individual substances. Today this is still true to a large extent, but the course of world evolution is tending toward something different. The subtle pulsations lying in the human being's life of will and disposition will weave and incorporate themselves gradually into what he produces. Thus, it will not be a matter of indifference from whom a certain preparation is received.

Even the most external and cold technical development tends toward a quite definite goal. Anyone who can form a vague conception of the future of technical development knows that an entire factory will operate in a completely individual way that will be in keeping with the one who directs it. His or her attitude of mind will enter into the factory and will pass over into the way in which the machines work. Human beings will blend with this objectivity. Everything that they touch will gradually come to bear a human impression. No matter how stupid it may seem today to the clever people—in spite of St. Paul having said that what men consider to be clever is often foolishness in the eyes of God⁶⁸—people will realize that the time will come when an individual will be able to step up to a mechanism standing at rest and will know that to set it in motion he must move his hand this way, that way, and another way. Through the vibrations of the air caused by this signal, the motor,⁶⁹ adjusted beforehand to respond to it, will be set in motion.

Then, national economic development will become such that to patent machines will be quite impossible; such things will be replaced by what I have just explained. Thus, everything will be excluded that has no relation to human nature, and by this it will be possible to bring about something quite definite. Just imagine what a truly good person who has reached an especially high level of morality will in future be able to do. He will construct machines with signals that can be governed only by individuals like himself. Evil minded people will produce quite different vibrations when they make these signals, and the machine will not respond.

People already have a faint inkling of this. It is not without purpose that I have called your attention to certain individuals who study flames dancing under the influence of definite tones. Further research in this direction will reveal the way to what I have just indicated. We might, indeed, say that it is the path back to those times when an alchemist who only wished to stuff money into his pocket could accomplish nothing, whereas another, who wished only to set up a sacrament for the glory of the gods and the welfare of humanity, would be successful.

In a sense, so long as what arose from human work bore the aura of the emotions and joys that men transferred into it, it was not accessible to the kind of influence that I have just described. But to the extent that the products of vocational labor can no longer be produced with special and absolutely necessary enthusiasm, what thus flows away from men and streams forth from them can become a motor force. The truth is that through the fact that individuals can no longer unite their emotions with the world of machinery, they, in a way, restore to this world the purity that arises from or serves their labor. In the future it will no longer be possible for people to bestow the warmth gained from the enthusiasm and joy derived from their work on the things produced. But these things themselves will be purer as they are put into the world by workers. They will also become more susceptible to what will emanate from, and be predetermined by, man as a motor force, as I have described.

Such a direction to human evolution can only be given by concrete knowledge of the spiritual forces that can be discovered by spiritual science. In order that this development may occur, it is necessary for an ever greater number of individuals in the world to gradually find the opposite pole. This consists in uniting one human being with another in what rises far above all vocational labor, while at the same time illumining and permeating it. Life in the spiritual scientific movement furnishes the foundation for a united life that can bind all professions together. If there were only an external advance of vocational evolution, this would result in a dissolution of human ties; people would become less able to understand one another or to develop relationships according to the requirements of human nature. They would increasingly disregard one another, seek only their own advantage, and have only competitive relationships with one another. This must not be permitted to come to pass lest humanity thereby fall into complete decadence. To prevent this from happening, spiritual science must be propagated.

It is possible to describe truly what many people are today unconsciously striving for, even though they deny it. There are many today, you know, who say, “This talk about the spiritual is ancient twaddle! The true advance that will really bring about human progress is to be found in the development of the physical sciences. When men get beyond all this twaddle about spiritual things, we will then, in a way, have a paradise on earth.”

Should nothing prevail in humanity except competition and the compensatory acquisitive instinct, however, it would not be paradise on earth but hell. After all, there would have to be another pole if real progress were to take place. If a spiritual pole were not sought for, there would have to be an ahrimanic pole. Then the following argument would prevail: “Should vocations continue to be specialized, there would always be a certain unity in that one person would be this, another that, but all would have the common characteristic of acquiring as much as possible through their jobs.” True, all would be made alike, but this is simply an ahrimanic principle. It is incorrect to think that the world can reach its goal through such a one-sided evolution, proceeding purely in the external sphere as we have described it. To follow this line of thinking would be tantamount to a woman's arguing that men had gradually become worse, were really utterly unfit for the world, and should be completely exterminated, and that then we would get the right evolution of the physical world.

It would require a weird person, indeed, to hold such a view since nothing whatever could be achieved by getting rid of all the men. Because this applies to the sensory world, people understand it, but they do not understand such foolishness in reference to the spiritual world. Yet, it is the same for spiritual relationships as if someone were to suppose that mere external evolution could continue to progress; it cannot. Just as the earlier evolutionary periods required the abstract religions, so this new stage requires a more concrete spiritual knowledge as it is striven for in the spiritual scientific movement. The elemental beings that are created and released through the vocational labor of men must be fructified by the human soul with what it takes into itself from impulses striving upward to the spiritual regions. Not that this is the only mission of spiritual science, but it is the mission related to the advancing and changing vocational life. Therefore, world evolution demands that as professions become more specialized and mechanized, people feel the need for the opposite pole to become proportionately more intensely active in them. This means that each human being should fill his soul with what brings him close to every other human being, no matter what their specialized work may be.

All this leads to much more. As we will hear in due course, a new age will emerge from what we may describe as our own time's indifference to and withdrawal from life, which is frequently the experience of working people these days. In the new age, human beings will again perform their work from different impulses. These will really be no worse than those good old vocational impulses that cannot be renewed, but must be replaced by others of a different sort. In this connection we can already point today, not merely abstractly but quite concretely, to a human ideal that spiritual science will develop. This will show what even a vocation may become to human beings when they understand how to observe the signs of the times in the right manner.

We shall continue our reflections regarding the significance of these matters for the individual, and for karma.

• 67. Kaufmann's translation. See footnote 21.
• 68. I Corinthians, 1:20: “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?“
• 69. Rudolf Steiner says in the third lecture of “Weltwesen und Ichheit“ [The Essence of the World and Selfness], Bibl.-No. 169, CE (1963) that the American Keely invented such a motor in the 19th century.