The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today we are going to talk about karma and details of karmic laws. You know that by karma we mean the great law of cause and effect in the life of the spirit. In the science of the spirit this law of karma applies primarily to repeated lives on earth. We speak of reincarnation and karma as two things that go together. As I think you know, this law of karma is often taken rather superficially, as if it were just a matter of reward or punishment extending from one incarnation to the next, so that when something bad or terrible happens to people in this life they’d have to say to themselves: ‘I deserve it because of something I did wrong in my previous life.’ The matter is not as simple as that. To understand the law of karma we have to go more deeply into the whole essential nature of man.

The law of karma and reincarnation, of repeated lives on earth, is under severe attack from our opponents, starting with the common phrase: ‘One life on earth is enough—would not like to live this life several times over’, and even calling it a dogma that leads to inactivity, resignation in the face of blind fate. We are going to give this opposition careful attention and we shall discover how we can counter every such objection if we consider the whole evolution of karma. To do so we have to remember—and we have heard this many times—what the human being really is in the deeper sense.

As we know, the human being first of all has a physical body that we can see with our eyes and touch with our hands, a body studied and investigated in the physical sciences, dismembered in anatomy, and known to people in everyday life. Many people who think in materialistic terms believe this physical body to be all there is really of the human being. The second part of this human being must be seen in the ether or life body. This is completely different in substance from the physical body. It does not meet the case to say that the material which makes up the ether body is thinner than the matter in the physical body. It is a completely different ‘substance nature’ we have here. It is active matter, energy. This ether matter, which has nothing to do with the ‘ether’ that physicists speak of, is creative by nature, it is constructive activity.

The best way of thinking of the ether body is that it has approximately the same form as the physical body but is completely translucent though not completely transparent, not even to clairvoyant people. It is permeable; if it were on its own, one would be able to walk through it. But it is also creative, and our physical organs are built by its activities. Heart, lung, liver and so on have been created out of the capacities of the ether body. From a materialistic point of view people might say: ‘In that case the ether body of a child would have to be quite small.’ That is certainly the case. You must not let this upset you, for we have to see it more in terms of energy which in some situations may take up less space than the creation it then produces. We are thus dealing with active, creative life, with an active body that is the basis of the physical body which we can touch in space. The ether body sustains people’s habits. It is above all the vehicle for our memory and temperament, and in fact anything we have by way of lasting qualities of soul. When we speak of the soul element in us, we certainly also mean our temperament and original character. This comes to expression in the form of the ether body.

The third part of human nature is the astral body. It fills us and surrounds the living human body like an aura of light in which drives, appetites and passions show themselves. This has been described many times.

A fourth part of human nature shows itself in our self-awareness, in the I. Further parts of human nature are still at the seed stage and are held within the I.

With regard to karmic evolution, we are mainly interested in the parts of human nature I have been speaking of. There is one thing, a fact of life, we must consider, for it is important. If you look back on your life and go back to your childhood days, you'll be able to say to yourself that you have learned a very great deal. There was a time when you were not yet able to write and read, and knew nothing of world events, history, literature and many other things. Now you know all this; it has become part of your inner life. But there is something else you know as well. You know that one can learn a great deal and yet this will not make much of a change in one's original character and temperament. Some people have learned a tremendous amount in the course of life, having filled their minds with all kinds of knowledge, and yet they have to say to themselves: ‘I used to have a violent temper then and I still have it today.’ Or: ‘I've always been phlegmatic and still am to this day.’ ‘I used to have this particular habit, and also this one, and I still have them today.’ Other people, however, will have changed greatly in themselves and in their character traits.

Perhaps there isn't anyone who has not changed at all. Looking back to your childhood you will ultimately have to say that you have made some changes since then. You will also find that observation and learning relate to change as the minute hand of a clock does to the hour hand. The change in character and temperament goes slowly like the hour hand and the absorption of observations made in life goes faster, more or less like the minute hand. This has to do with the fact that everything we learn is taken up quickly into the mind, having the astral body behind it and coming to expression in the astral body. When you hear something that is completely new, you will have a feeling that will come to you at the time and be completely forgotten the next day, or if you feel pain this will be gone from your mind after a time. These are the things that light up in the astral body, but then vanish again. All this is supported by the astral body. Things that light up in us for a time and vanish again are thus connected with the astral body.

Things that are the permanent stock of our inner life, on the other hand, everything that becomes habit, so that we remember it for long periods, perhaps for the whole of life, everything connected with temperament, is in the ether body, which is denser than the astral body. When someone manages to change a habit, a quality belonging to his temperament, getting rid of habitual carelessness, for instance, and becoming more attentive, this shows itself in the ether body and not only in the astral body. When someone learns a great deal and really makes it his own, so that it becomes part of his soul, his inner life, and he does not merely know it but has made it his own, in a deeper sense, this changes the configuration of his ether body. If someone takes up a moral principle and has to tell himself again and again: ‘The principle exists, and I therefore follow it’, it will only be in the astral body. However if the principle becomes so much part of him that he cannot do any other, then it is in the ether body. The transition from astral body to ether body happens slowly and gradually in life.

Let us now move on from considering the parts of human nature to the nature of karma and its context. Something that happens only slowly in one life on earth, this transition from something being only in the astral body to it also being in the ether body, happens in the following way from one incarnation to another. If someone has tried hard to make the right moral judgments, with others perhaps also helping him with this, the fruits of those efforts will be an original disposition of the ether body in the next life, a kind of habit, therefore, a character trait. Something which now lives in the astral body will be part of the ether body in the next life. When you meet someone with a habit worthy of praise, and this habit shows itself in his life again and again, this indicates that he took in relevant ideas or brought them to his mind himself in his earlier life. Inclinations and habits come from ideas, thoughts and concepts one has developed in earlier lives. If you take heed of this, you can make provision for your next life, laying the foundations for a particular organization of your ether body in that life. You can say to yourself: ‘I am going to try in this life to tell myself again and again that this or that is a good and proper thing.’ The ether body will then show you that it is of course a good and proper thing to follow those particular principles.

Here we come to a particularly important concept that may be illuminated by karma. It is the idea of conscience. Anything that comes to mind from one’s conscience is also something we have acquired. Human beings have a treasury of conscience, an instinct for the good, the right and the true, but only because they have fashioned its principles for themselves in their past lives, through life’s experiences. You can make provisions to fortify and enhance your conscience if you decide to deepen your moral views a little bit every day. Moral views become our conscience in our next and next-but-one lives. You see, therefore, that what the minute hand of life shows now will be shown by the hour hand in our next life. Principles and views just need to be reiterated to some degree in one life and they'll be consolidated for the next life.

What shows itself in the ether body in one life, will yield fruit for the physical body in the next life. Good habits, good inclinations, good character traits lay the foundation for health, physical ability, physical energy, that is, a healthy physical body for the next life. A healthy physical body in one life indicates that the individual concerned prepared this physical body for himself in an earlier life by acquiring particular habits and character traits. Above all a marked connection exists between a well-developed memory in one life and the physical body for the next life.

Let us take someone who immediately forgets things again, for instance, and someone else who has a faithful memory. All one has to do is consciously bring experiences to mind again and practise this consistently. You will then find that not only have you developed a good memory for the things for which you have been specially training, but that this memory also becomes a completely different power. And this plays a role in spiritual development. The ability to gain an overview of the past develops in a quite specific way. If you conscientiously train your memory, you will be reborn with a firm physical body, with limbs that will truly serve well, so that you will be able to do the things you want to do in your inmost soul in that next life. A body unable to do what the soul wants comes from an earlier life where care was not taken to develop a good, sound memory and one has instead been content to let things go, without recall, and forget about them.

We are just considering individual phenomena today, but you can imagine the vastness of the field we are discussing. A true occultist will never give himself up to speculation. The things 1 am telling you are not theories but things that have been tried and tested in specific cases. They are thus based on specific research findings. When I said that a firm physical organism that obeys the soul is due to a good memory in the previous life, this means that a number of cases have been investigated and that the information given is based on those investigations. The aim is to speak of facts only.

The qualities developed in the ether body thus enter into the physical body in the next life, which means that not only good inclinations and character traits and sound habits of life develop in a sound physical body in the next life, but bad qualities, bad habits, corrupt inclinations also show themselves in the next life in a sick organism. This does not mean that a quite specific illness comes from a particular quality, but that certain dispositions, inclinations towards illness, always go back to quite specific character and temperamental qualities in the previous life. Someone who has a life with corrupt inclinations behind him will have an organism in this life that is more easily subject to physical illnesses than someone else's organism. Someone who has had sound character traits, a good temperament, will be reborn in a body that can be exposed to all kinds of epidemics without catching anything, and vice versa.

You can see that things in this world are connected in complex ways through the law of cause and effect. To give an example, let me tell you of something arising from particular spiritual investigations. It may shock you at first, but in a theosophical group one can speak of it. Someone had developed a highly egoistical sense of acquisition in one life, a real appetite for outer riches. This was not the healthy endeavour to be rich from altruistic motives, wanting to help others in the world and work selflessly—that would be something else. No, this was an egoistical desire to possess that would condition a particular constitution of the ether body and take acquisitive desires beyond the necessary level. Such a person is very often born with a physical body in his next life that shows a disposition towards infectious diseases. Occult investigation has shown that people who easily get infected during certain epidemics in this life have in many cases had a pathologically developed acquisitive streak.

It is also possible to go into detail about other things. Thus there are two qualities that have a clearly apparent effect on the karmic configuration of the next life. On the one hand we may speak of the powerful influence of a loving, well-meaning approach to other people when this is a persistent character trait. There are people who look kindly on everything they see in others, showing great love and empathy for those around them. In some, this love goes far beyond the ordinary love of humanity. They love nature and the whole world. The more this sense of embracing the world has developed and become a habit of soul, so that it is attached to the ether body, the more will the person have a tendency to be young in a next life; he will stay young for a long time. Someone who does not age until late in life, therefore, remaining young and flexible for a long time, will have spent one or more earlier lives in love for the world around them. A person will be all the more inclined to stay physically young in a later life the more he comes to love those around him. Someone who tends to feel antipathy towards others will age early. A body showing early signs of ageing physically, points back to the life of a petty critic, of disaffection and ill will. You see, therefore, that it is possible to influence one’s life by consciously intervening in karma. Someone able to develop love in this present life can be assured of having a body with youthful traits in the next life. All the people who write as critics for the supplements at an early age, will in their next life be people who are practically born with wrinkles. These are radical words, but there is a powerful truth behind them.

The karmic laws thus show us the connection between health and our life in mind and spirit. It is beyond dispute, of course, that this connection cannot be reached in a couple of steps and one must certainly consider the details. Nor can there be any doubt but that a moral, honest, conscientious inner attitude will in future create a sound body. But we can’t expect someone with faulty attitudes to be cured from one day to the next. And we have to realize that we have to progress from egoism to a selfless way of life that does not want to gather the immediate fruits of its actions. When something becomes a habit, however, it can have an effect on the physical body even in this life. Proof comes with occult development, where one is consciously able to influence not only the astral but also the ether body and the physical body. Someone who goes through the process of higher development learns to influence not only his astral body but also the ether body and the physical body. By changing their habitual attitude, people with a violent temper may grow gentle, people falling into affects may develop equanimity and a harmonious inner life. An occultist has to change his habits in a relatively short time. True development means that anything one learns does not remain theory but enters into the ether body. The occultist then also manages to let it enter into the physical body. He learns to control his heartbeat, pulse beat and breathing. Occult development shortens a process that otherwise takes many incarnations. Karma is shortened, therefore.

Some of the things we are going to talk about this winter will be easier to understand and more transparent if we know some of the more subtle karmic connections, such as the difference between a handsome or beautiful and an ugly person. What is the karmic situation when someone is beautiful? This has to do with something which may seem incredible at first but is definitely so. Physical beauty is often, though not always, a consequence of suffering borne in the previous life. Suffering in the previous life—in body or also in soul—becomes beauty in a next life, beauty of the outer physical body. A comparison I have made on other occasions is highly appropriate here. How does a beautiful pearl develop in an oyster shell? Actually due to a disease; it is the product of a disease. And in more or less the same way there is also a process in karmic connections that connects sickness, suffering, with beauty. This beauty has often been paid for with suffering and sickness.

Wisdom, too, has often been paid for with pain. It is not without interest that modern scientists are in many ways confirming what occultists have been saying for millennia: wisdom has to do with pain and suffering, a sombre earlier life full of renunciation, it really is sometimes worth while taking note of modern scientific research. A book has recently appeared on the way in which our thinking shows itself in our expression.⁴⁹ It is intended to show that the mood of a person’s thinking is reflected in his physiognomy. The author, and it is clearly apparent that he does not know much about occult things, has nevertheless discovered by means of sheer observation that the physiognomy of a thinker reflects pain that has been suffered before. Modern science is in the process of gradually substantiating ancient occult wisdom. This will be even more so in the next few years, more than any academic would ever have dreamt of.

You will also find it easier to see now that we cannot take certain phenomena of cultural life in blind faith or simply on authority. If we know karmic law and consider a phenomenon such as Schopenhauer,⁵⁰ for example, who drenched the whole of his philosophy in pessimism, someone able to see deeper should not think that this pessimism is the basic mood of humanity. It is a basic mood in his own soul that has been prepared for karmically and brought about by his ether body having a particular constitution. This pessimism can only be understood if one follows the karma of the philosopher. Someone like him will not have had the opportunity to do many good things in an earlier life—this is something quite real and definite. On the other hand his position in life and profession had condemned him to do some evil and wrong things. This evil, these wrongs he was condemned to commit in that earlier life, not by karma, but by his profession, came back to him as a feeling of antipathy to the world which was now coming to meet him. It was a recapitulation of his own actions. If you want to understand karma you should not simply take a fatalistic view, saying that all is predestined. It need not be the case that someone is condemned by his earlier lives to do the things he is doing now. Very often his actions will only be balanced out in a future life. These are the kind of actions I mean in speaking of Schopenhauer’s basic pessimism.

Everything people do by way of personal, individual actions arising wholly and completely from their own person—not the actions they have to perform because of the national community they belong to, or their family, community or profession—needs to be seen in a clear light. Two court counselors may do the same things because they hold that position. This we leave aside. But they may also do completely different things because they are two different people. And this we'll now consider. Something done because of the person one is will meet one in one’s next life as outer destiny. If someone has a good life, with destiny kind to him, this goes back to the right, well-considered and good things he did in an earlier life. If some people have a difficult life, with many things going wrong for them, and conditions are unfavourable for them—meaning the outside situation, not the constitution of their physical body—this, too, goes back to personal actions taken in their previous life. The things people have done because of their profession and their family become part of their temperament and character. Human destiny is thus determined by personal actions in the previous life. On the other hand, it is possible to create a favourable or unfavourable destiny for one’s next life by good, well-considered and right actions.

If life brings you together with particular people, you yourself have created the conditions for this in a previous life. You have had something to do with them and have now arranged things so as to have them around you. Here’s an example from the time of the Vehmgericht. This also involved execution. The individual concerned would face hooded and cloaked judges who would also execute their sentences on the spot. Someone was once condemned and killed. This destiny has been the subject of occult investigation going far back into earlier incarnations. It was found that the individual, killed by five judges, had once been a tribal head and had had those five people killed. His former action had brought those five people back into his life as if drawn there by magnetism and they had their revenge. You cannot have someone intervene in your life whom you have not brought into your life yourself because of earlier relationships. It may happen, however, that general conditions—work or family—bring someone together with individuals he has never been in contact with before. People's behaviour to one another will then be the basis for their meeting in the next life, now at the level of their outer destiny and life. You can see that such karmic ideas are highly complex and not so easy to explain. It is important to study these things in detail, for this alone will make it possible for us to gain real understanding of life.

It also needs to be pointed out, again and again, that the idea of karma, if rightly understood, must not in any way contradict the idea of redemption in Christian teaching. Many of you have heard me speak of the fact that the Christian concept of redemption and the idea of karma can be reconciled, but others in the audience are new to this. Misunderstandings are common, often because many of the people who talk about theosophy do not know much about it. They will say, therefore, that karma simply means that one has to accept all the consequences of one’s actions, and if someone has committed a sin, only he can redeem himself. Many theosophists taking this point of view declare that the idea of redemption through Christ Jesus means nothing. They say that in theosophy one cannot accept the notion of redemption by another spirit, for man has to redeem himself. Christian theologians dispute this, saying that they believe in redemption through Christ Jesus, whilst theosophists believe in redeeming oneself. The two ideas are not compatible.

Karma is, however, a kind of life account that can reasonably be compared with a balance sheet. You have a debit and a credit side. They are added together and a balance is drawn. It would be very odd for a business person to say: ‘I'll cease trading so that my balance won’t change.’ Just as a new business deal can be made at any time in commercial life, so new karma can be created at any time. It is foolish to say of someone: ‘He’s brought his suffering on himself, he deserves it, and so I must not help him.’ That is just like saying to a trader who’s gone bankrupt: ‘A few thousand pounds would help you, but it would upset your bookkeeping if I were to give them to you.’ That would certainly not be the case. The money that had been lent would merely be entered in the balance sheet. Balance has to be created, but not always by the individual concerned. Karma does not mean balancing things out yourself but only balancing things out by an action that is taken. Now imagine you're a rich man able to help not just one person but two. You would thus be able to intervene in the karma of two people. It is exactly because karma exists that you would be able to intervene in the life accounts of those two people. So there are people who are able to help three, four, five or even hundreds of others. They'll not say: I must not help them because this means intervening in their karma.’ No, they'll simply help them.

Now there is a spirit endowed with the most tremendous powers who has appeared in the world once. He is able to give this kind of help to those who see themselves as his people. This is Christ Jesus. Because the redemption has been brought about by a kind of evil it does not go against the law of karma. Redemption through Christ Jesus is completely reconcilable with the law of karma, just like the help a rich person gives to a bankrupt trader. Misunderstandings arise because some theosophists have not thoroughly understood karma and theologians have not taken note of this. It is exactly the essence and importance of the deed done by a single sublime spirit that guarantees the existence of karmic law. When these things are rightly understood at some future time, it will be apparent how far removed theosophy is from being in opposition to any professed belief that is based on the truth, and that it will actually help people to see the truth of such a belief. Once you have seen the way karma works in some instances, you will feel that insight is gained into a profound necessity for the life of the spirit. Karmic law will, however, only be rightly understood by someone who does not just take it as theoretical knowledge but makes it part of the whole inner world of feeling that is his being. Inner certainty and harmony will then fill the whole of his life. And people who keep insisting that karmic law leads to inactivity and lethargy, making people accept their destiny, and that it does not give joy in life, and the like, have simply not tried to live with the law of karma. To live with the law of karma is to let courage for life and hope flow into your soul.

Karmic law must above all throw light on our future. We should not think so much of the past, but more of the future. We have said that human beings can have an effect on the distant future by preparing the configuration of the ether body according to karmic law in their astral body, and looking further ahead also the configuration of a future physical body. If you are able to see this, realizing the tremendous importance of it, you'll have an idea of the way the idea of education, above all national education, will be deepened in the light of karmic law. If people work towards it today, that they may live in accord with karmic law, preparing for their next life, they will also be preparing for the future of their nations. The people of the future will, of course, be present-day people in reincarnation. Healthy races for the future and above all sound leaders of future races, will come if people live sensibly for the future in the light of karmic law. For when an individual makes himself more perfect, this will also have an effect on the organisms of nation and race in the future.

Now we need first of all to consider the actual mechanism of this karma. The question is, what powers take effect when the astral qualities of one’s present life are transferred to the ether body in the next life, and what powers bring it about that the qualities the ether body has in the present life—habits and inclinations—are transferred to the physical disposition in one’s next life. An even more difficult question concerns the powers that are active where, because of actions taken in this life, one will have a particular environment in the next; this will mean not only the people one will be dealing and have dealt with, but also the natural environment, the plant and animal worlds, the national and social context one has prepared for oneself. What is the nature of the powers that make all these things come to a person again? How does it come about that two people who had something to do with one another in a previous life, with one of them reborn in America, the other in Europe, are nevertheless brought together? These are big questions and we'll endeavour to answer them the next time we meet. In short, how do conditions in one life create the conditions for the next? We'll have many visitors and the subject would also be suitable for consideration at the annual general meeting. The people who have been attending these lectures will of course be at an advantage on that next occasion. The subject of the next lecture will be ‘karma technique’.⁵¹

With today and the next time we shall thus have considered an important issue in life. Please take note that I have been referring to a selection of cases that are based on genuine, positive occult facts. All the karmic connections shown today thus come from investigations made on the karma of particular individuals. Karma and the study of karma also show us the basic approach we must use in judging the relationship between sickness and individual soul qualities and above all the awakening of certain inner powers. Some of the things that will be presented more in general outline in the Architects' House concerning the connection between sickness and death, suffering and evil, will be more clearly apparent to those who have been taking these lectures on karma into their hearts and minds. This winter, special attention will be paid to the way the spiritual scientific view of the world relates to life. This will help us to gain more of an impulse and the insight that the science of the spirit is not something to be thought of as impracticable but that it plays a direct role in everyday life.

• 49. de Sanctis, S. Die Mimik des Denkens, published in 1906/1907
• 50. Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788–1860). German philosopher.
• 51. See lecture given in the evening on 22 Oct. 1905 (in this volume).

As we have gathered here⁵² on the eve of our annual general meeting, and look forward to a stimulating time, it may seem appropriate to open the sequence of meetings with a lecture for visitors from outside Berlin and as well as for our Berlin members. A lecture like this,⁵³ not part of the programme but offered as a free gift, may thus be on a subject that would fit in less well with the normal run of theosophical lectures—something for advanced theosophists and at the same time also for people who are at the very beginning. The latter will however need to find their way into things first. They will need to pay serious and careful attention if they are to be able to follow completely. On the other hand we also offer something for those who want to hear something about the parts of the higher worlds that are accessible to us.

Our theme will be the relationship of the human senses to the outside world, to the physical and the non-physical world around us.⁵⁴ We shall touch on a subject to which we are not yet paying sufficient attention among ourselves—the question as to how we should really see the relationship between the four bodies that make up essential human nature.

One of the first things people learn in the science of the spirit is that the human being consists of a physical body, an ether body, an astral body and a body which we have always been calling the I-body in our discussions. The I-body holds the seeds for our higher development. All this is given in elementary books on theosophy and in the things theosophists gradually come to hear in their first lectures. But people often say that the I-body is the highest of the four bodies, the astral body is less high, the ether body even less high, and the physical body the lowest of them all.

atman
buddhi
manas

kama manas
astral body
ether body
physical body

Anyone can read up about this in my Theosophy. We are interested in the four lower bodies also known as the Pythagorean quadrangle. The one called the ‘I’ or ‘kama manas’ is widely considered to be the highest, followed by the astral body, the ether body and the physical body as lower bodies. That is a fairly biased view, however, and I have often said that it is not correct. In its own way the physical body is the most perfect and also the oldest part of the human being. Consider this physical body in all its parts, study it, using the means given in modern science! You only have to give it some real thought and you’ll have to say to yourself: ‘This physical body is most marvellously constructed in all its parts, filled with the greatest wisdom the world has ever known.’ Nothing in this world—in so far as we are able to investigate it by physical means—is more perfect than the human physical body. You may look at a whole cosmos of stars, or study the most artful mechanism human beings can devise, and you’ll not find anything more perfect than the physical body. If you study the human heart and the functions it has to perform, looking at it as a purely physical apparatus, or just consider a piece of bone with all the marvellous struts inside, you’ll find this to be true. Just take a bit of the thigh bone. It has struts that run like this (Fig. 2):

The cleverest engineer would be unable to produce a structure as perfect as this, a system created by the cosmos to support the upper part of the human body. And it is the same with the human brain and all the organs that are part of the human physical body. You may study the whole of nature—there is nothing to equal this physical body in perfection.

Why is this physical body so perfect? Human beings have not always been the way they are today. They have gone through a long process of development. The human beings you see before you today, consisting of these four elements, have more than just long evolution on this physical planet earth behind them. Another planet, the predecessor of our earth, went before. That was the ancient Moon. This was preceded by the ancient Sun, and the Sun by ancient Saturn. Think of it in terms of a human being going through incarnations. The earth, too, has gone through similar states. We are able to trace four of them. In doing so, we are looking back on immeasurably long periods of time, stretches of time beyond the comprehension of an earthly human being. But something of this human physical body was present even then.

The first beginnings of the physical body existed on ancient Saturn. Nothing was there as yet of our present-time ether body, nor anything of the astral body, let alone the human I. We can see from this that the physical body has gone through four stages. On the ancient Saturn planet it emerged as a simple physical body, a kind of basic supportive structure. It then went through a transformation and entered into a twilight state, a pralaya. The physical body later emerged again on the ancient Sun—which was something very different from today’s sun—but now at a higher level. There the ether body joined it. The ether body is thus very much younger than the physical body. The young ether body developed under the influence of the physical body that already existed, now at its second level of perfection. During that time on the ancient Sun, when the physical and the ether bodies both existed, nothing existed as yet of the astral body. This only joined them during the third earth incarnation, on the ancient Moon. There the human physical body went through its third level of perfection, and the ether body through its second stage. On the Moon, the physical body may have been said to be in class 3, the ether body in class 2, and the astral body in class 1. The I only joined them on earth and had not yet been through anything until then. When the physical body appeared on earth, this was its fourth appearance. The human I-body will have reached the stage at which the physical body is today only after another three planetary stages, the astral body after another two planetary' stages. And the ether body will have reached the level of perfection of today’s physical body when one more planetary stage has been gone through.

Some quite commonplace reflections can convince us that the astral body is much less perfect than the physical body. The physical body in its wisdom would never fall into the kind of crude error the astral body does. Just think of the appetites created by the drives, desires and passions that live in the astral body. The heart has to stay fit for decades in spite of appetites in the astral body that are harmful to it. That is the case, for instance, if we drink coffee or tea, and so on. The heart does not want such stimulants, but the astral body does. The astral body does something that goes against the grain for the physical body at its present level of development. On the planet we call Venus, the astral body will have reached a level where it will be as wise in its behaviour as the physical body is now, unless it is disturbed.

We thus have to see the physical body as the most carefully developed and most perfectly made part of essential human nature. It has learned something every time it has completed another planetary stage, and has become increasingly more perfect. Looking at the physical human body you see that it consists of a number of organs. People do not give much thought to the way these organs have come into existence. In anatomy, in science, the human being is said to consist of such and such organs, having a liver, a heart, a nose for smelling, ears for hearing, eyes for seeing. And these organs are described in detail in modern science. But when people do this they are doing something that can only be compared with the following.

Imagine one were to put an old table and a new table side by side and describe them in a very basic way. One table has four feet, a top, it has such and such a colour, and the other table also has four feet, a top, such and such a colour, and so on. Those descriptions may be perfectly accurate and yet they do not really tell us what matters in this case—that one table is old and the other new. You can describe the eyes and ears in the same way. You can tell people what they look like today. You can describe the auricle, the auditory canal and everything, the acoustic nerves, and so on. You can describe the human eye in the same way. Both descriptions will look good, and it might appear that they are equal in value. But in the highest occult sense they are not. The two are not equal in value because these two organs—eyes and ears—have evolved at very different times.

If you were to go back to ancient Saturn and examine the first beginnings of the human physical body, when there was no question as yet of an ether body, astral body and I, if you were to examine the peculiar physical body that existed in those very early times, you would look in vain for even the first beginnings of eyes. But you would not be able to find them, for even the potential for eyes would not yet exist. You would find the potential for the human ear. This, then, is the age difference, and you can understand it if you realize that the physical body has gone through as many stages of evolution as our planet. At the first stage it went so far as to develop the full potential for the ears. These were already preformed when the human being came to Saturn from other, very different worlds. Human beings already had the potential for hearing when they entered into this particular chain of evolution.

They added the potential for a sense of temperature on that first planet, a feeling for warmth. This is generally called a skin sense. But careful distinction has to be made between two things. In the first place it is the sense of touch, perceiving hard and soft; then it is also the sense of temperature, perceiving hot and cold. This is the sense of temperature we are speaking of. So you have a sequence. First we have hearing and then the feeling, the sense of temperature. This sense of temperature evolved on the earth's planetary incarnation which we call Saturn. Such a sense does of course go through transformations at different stages of evolution. When it first appeared it was very different from the way it will be in its later form.

The ancient sense of hearing which human beings brought with them into planetary evolution was a quite peculiar sense of hearing. The best way of characterizing it is perhaps to say: ‘Basically that the human physical body was just one big ear.’ The human being was all ear at the time of entering into this planetary evolution. As a physical body the human being hardly differed at all from the environment. Man sounded, and everything else sounded as well. In the whole of their bodies, human beings perceived what lived out there as the sounds of the world. Just as a string vibrates when another is plucked or struck, so there was a vibration in the human physical body for every sound that arose in the world. Everything resounded.

The further development of the senses was a matter of specialization. Human beings had been all ear to begin with, and then the sense of temperature arose. Something that had been one before became differentiated into two structures. This also became apparent at the physical level. Organs appeared that would mediate only hearing, others that would mediate only temperature perceptions. The whole human being thus changed each time the physical body reappeared. The senses became specialized, and a simple form gradually grew highly complex.

Human beings thus entered into Saturn evolution with the potential for hearing. On Saturn they acquired a sense of temperature. During the Sun evolution that followed they gained the sense of sight. The potential for a sense of sight which developed during Sun evolution was thus the third stage, with the other senses becoming transformed so that on the Sun the human being was able to hear, feel and, in a way, to see.

Continuing along the line of evolution we come to the Moon. The Sun had first gone into pralaya again. It then rose again as Moon. On the Moon, the sense of taste developed in addition to the other senses. Four of our present-day senses had thus evolved. The others again specialized, distributing themselves among individual organs. You can literally follow the way this physical body opened up to be an organ for the outside world. The sympathetic nervous system had already evolved on the Sun. During life on the ancient Moon, the other organs also evolved in stages, but we’ll just consider the senses here. On the Moon, then, the sense of taste was added and on earth the youngest of the senses, the sense of smell. If you study the senses today, you can tell yourself that the sense of smell is the youngest, having developed last in the human being. The sense of taste was already there during Moon evolution and has been refashioned once. Every refashioning makes the senses more perfect. The sense of smell is the least perfect. The sense of taste has corrected its errors once, the sense of sight twice, the sense of temperature three times. Our sense of hearing is the most perfect, however, for it had already gone through four transformations and is going through the fifth on earth.

You thus have to see the human body as a highly complex entity and realize that much had to happen so that the physical body was gradually able to develop. One has to know their relative ages if one is to form an opinion about different parts of this body. So the senses again have different relationships to other spirits, also as regards their level of perfection. A sense organ which is more perfect, having gone through quite a number of transformations, relates to completely different worlds from those to which a sense organ relates that has only gone through a few transformations.

Let us stay with the sense of hearing for now. It has gone through a whole sequence of stages, for potentially it existed already when the human being entered into this evolution. So what happened? Physical Saturn evolution took the sense of hearing a stage further, and then added the first beginnings of a sense of temperature. Then, during Sun evolution, the ether body was added to the physical body. From Moon onwards the astral body played a role, and from earth evolution onwards the I-body. But this whole scheme of things also meant something else. The I does not yet have an influence on the sense of smell because the sense of smell only joined the other senses on earth and is still wholly caught up in physical evolution. The human ether body has an influence on the sense of taste, the astral body on the sense of sight, and the I-body on the sense of temperature, of warmth, of feeling.

The first beginnings of manas developing in the human being, as the potential for a higher spiritual self, have an influence on the sense of hearing. This principle, which belongs to man’s higher nature, thus only has an influence on the sense of hearing today. None of the things the four lower senses make their own becomes part of our eternal soul. Only the things that can be expressed in words, things we are able to put into words—a word only has to be thought and it will be heard inwardly—are part of the eternal, immortal part of the human being. All thoughts that can be put in words, feelings that are so clear in our minds that we can put them in words, all the impulses to which human beings can put a name and which do not live in them as dim drives but are so clear that they can be put into words—all this belongs to the eternal part of the human being. The word is therefore something that is part of the eternal basis of the human being. And if we start to speak of things eternal at all, we must quite literally speak of the word. At the time when the earth entered into its evolution, when earth evolution began on Saturn, this first potential for the word was there. Now, on earth, this potential has evolved. The statement: ‘In the beginning was the word’⁵⁵ must be taken quite literally. Those gospel words should not be taken as symbolic, but their meaning has to be developed until they can be understood in their literal sense. The word is also the beginning of the eternal part of the human being. Because of this, the word, the audible word, is the first part of the human being that proves useful for developing the future world. Everything the other senses produce is of no use at all for the evolution which the earth must still go through.

Legends and myths often contain profound truths, or do you think legend does not know that anything produced by the sense of smell is of no immediate use in earth evolution? That further planetar evolutions have to be gone through before the principle that lies in the sense of smell will be of use? The father of all obstacles thus is one who leaves a horrible stench behind—the devil is recognized after he’s gone because of the stench he leaves behind. The world of legend holds the deepest truths; one only has to know how to take them literally in the highest sense.

Our study of the senses and the way they relate to the world can take us yet further. Let us take one of the senses, say the sense of sight. It is the middle one of the senses. I’d now like you to follow me into something rather subtle. You know that the astral body, in which man’s inner drives, appetites and passions live, shows itself to the clairvoyant as a light body. In this light body you see all kinds of configurations and colours. Every passion, every drive has a specific colour. All this, and even a person’s basic mood, comes to expression in this light body. Looking at the light body of someone who is rather nervous, you see it pregnant with glittering dots that flash and shine out. It all shines out and vanishes again in a rich play of colour.

If there is a terrible affect, you see rays like this:

Someone with hidden resentment shows figures like snakes:

This is difficult to draw, because it is in constant motion, rather like lightning. The person is feeling anger or resentment or anxiety when the soul is twitching like this inside. That is where a human being inwardly experiences his state of soul. Outwardly this state of soul shows itself in light phenomena to the clairvoyant.

The physical eye sees lights and colours around it. Just as a clairvoyant sees red, blue, yellow and green in the astral body, so does the physical eye see red, blue, yellow and green around it. In both cases the cause is exactly the same. Just as an appetite lives behind the red in the astral body, so there is an appetite behind the red of a flower as the ‘thing in itself’. What the sense of sight does when it goes beyond this point is no different from turning a coat inside out. Whilst man's astral nature comes to expression in his aura, external astral nature lives behind the whole world of colours and light, the world that exists for the sense of sight. There would be never be any colours in the world if all things were not completely imbued with astral spirits. The colours that show themselves in the world come from the astral spirits that show themselves in colours. In turning inside out, the spirit moves from the higher to the lower plane.

You can achieve the following by means of meditation. If you have a green area before you, perhaps the leaf of a plant, and now go outside yourself to look at the matter from the other side, you would see the astral spirit that is behind the green colour and shows itself to be present by means of the colour green.

So you have to see it like this. Looking out in the world and seeing it decked out in colours, you can assume that astral spirits are behind those colours. Just as you let the colours of your aura become apparent to the clairvoyant, so does the tapestry of colour in the world reflect the cosmic aura. All colour in this world is aura turned inside out. If you were able to turn your aura the way you do a coat, the other side your aura would also become physically visible to you. This applies to the sense of sight, and you can see from this that the sense of sight is closely bound up with the astral world.

Taking the sense of feeling, the sense of temperature, this in turn has a universal relationship to the lower parts of the astral world. While the sense of sight relates more to the upper parts of the astral world, the sense of feeling or temperature has the same kind of relationship to the lower parts of the astral world, more to the region where the astral world begins its transition to the ether world. The sense of hearing is directly related to the physical world, and the things you perceive as sense of hearing are oscillations in the physical air.

This is something I would ask you to consider in a most subtle way, in the right way. If you want to see something, an astral spirit must be behind the colour you see. There must also be an astral spirit behind the heat or cold you feel. If you want to hear something, you have fully arrived in the physical world, since the sense of hearing is the most perfect of the senses and you can hear a physical entity. It is thus only in the word that the world of the spirit has rightly descended as far as the physical world.

Starting from the top therefore [on the board], we are able to say that the phenomena of the sense of heating are entirely on the physical plane, those of heat are already somewhat higher up, those of the sense of sight are on the astral plane, and the phenomena we perceive through the least perfect of the senses belong to the higher parts of the spiritual world. Whatever extends down into the physical world is simply the least perfect. Anything the sense of smell is able to perceive, anything it brings down into the physical world, is most incomplete. Where this goes its own way, it separates out from the great scheme of things, from evolution. The phenomena revealed in the sense of smell should only arise in intimate connection with the most sublime worlds today.

Let us then take the spirits which at one time, just when the sense of smell had started to evolve on earth, separated out from evolution and became independent. These are spirits that make themselves known mainly through the sense of smell. And so it is rather nice that legend speaks of fallen angels making themselves known in a most unpleasant way through the sense of smell. Having left the stream of evolution, they have become perceptible to the sense of smell.

If we therefore ask ourselves what really lies outside the skin which encloses the human sense organs, we have to say to ourselves that there we do indeed have the different higher planes and their spirits.

Research at the physical level is in most beautiful agreement here. Just think of how an eye develops. Initially it starts from the outside. A small depression develops in the skin of the creature developing an eye. This gradually deepens,

and after a time it looks like this. This then fills up with a kind of fluid and finally closes up.

And so the eye is indeed pushing in from the outside. The human organs do not develop from the inside but push in from the outside. It is the same for all human and animal organs. The technical term for it is ‘invagination’ or ‘inversion’. In vertebrate animals, a channel first developed, and the spinal marrow integrated itself into this from the outside. That is also how the senses integrate themselves from the outside.

What makes the eye push in like that? This is the work of the spirits that are active in the light. It is the spirits active in the ray of light which create the eye from the organism, spirits that are behind the outer appearance of things, astrally, of which we have said that we would be able to see them if we could turn our conscious mind inside out. They have pushed the eye into the physical organism. The eye is thus created by spirits of light. The other organs are created in the same way by other spirits from the different worlds. When you feel yourself to be inside your skin, you can feel yourself to be in the condition where spirits have worked on your body from different sides. When man arrived on Saturn in his very first evolution, only the most sublime spirits were able to work on his organ of hearing. He was taught to hear by higher and then also by lower spirits until on earth, too, the spirits embodied in the outside air began to share in the work on his organ of hearing. Man hears air in motion with his organ of hearing; that is where sound lies.

If we really take this into our hearts and minds, we shall begin to understand in a very deep sense why air played such a special role in the Genesis story, why it had to be breathed into man, so that it might play this role also with regard to his organ of hearing. ‘The creator breathed the living breath in man, and he became a living soul.’⁵⁶ Man himself is at his highest level created by the word, by sound. This also shows the relationship human beings have to their whole environment through the senses.

Looking at the sense of sight you can say that the spirits which live on the astral plane have worked on the sense of sight. They live in the ray of light. The ray of light has a physical and an astral part. Now imagine it falling on something. It contains the external physical light and also the astral spirits which live in the ray of light. Now make yourself stand in such a way that you stop the ray of light, letting the sun shine on your back. You will stop the physical light but not the astral spirits. An astral spirit will then be in front of you, in your shadow. An astral spirit lives in he shadow which you cast before you. This astral spirit living in your shadow is no more and no less than an image. An image of what? Of the body. And what lives in it takes its form from the soul. This is one of the methods by which one can gradually see one’s own soul. Primitive peoples were not entirely wrong when they said that the soul lived in a person’s shadow. You will find this in countless legends—the soul goes with the shadow. The soul first shows itself to astral vision in the shadow, in its form.

You’ll now also understand the deep significance of Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl, the man who lost his shadow.⁵⁷ Read Chamisso’s short story with this thought about the shadow in mind and you will realize that much, much deeper meanings lie behind many such stories.⁵⁸

You will in fact realize more and more that someone who does not know of these things is going about more or less like a blind Person. Someone who knows nothing of the worlds of spirit does not have the slightest notion of what he is taking along with him in his shadow. All the subtle things that surround us will be opened up again to people through the science of the spirit. The world is very puzzling for someone who wants to respond to it inwardly. When people become aware of the riddles that face them, they will no longer consider the spiritual scientific view to be something superfluous, something dreamt up by people with vivid imaginations, but realize that the reality which exists all around us only opens up for us through the science of the spirit. We should never tire of studying everything around us. Many spirits have had a hand in the complex structure we call the human being. This is also why the structure has so many different levels of perfection. The physical ear only gained the right to hear at the physical level once it had gone through many stages. A chela⁵⁹ who under the guidance of his master goes early to the Venus stage, will also be able to perceive other people on the physical plane in light activity; for then light activity will also extend down to the physical plane.

The process of evolution is quite regular. Just as the sense of hearing has descended to the physical plane, so will the sense of sight descend to the physical plane permitting genuine clairvoyance. The logic of this is quite apparent. Someone who is prepared to think can already see the sense of it, and no one can refute it by mere thinking. That is how it is with all things in the science of the spirit. Only people who do not want to think will fight the science of the spirit, or people wanting to apply their thinking activity only to the things they are used to thinking. Of course someone may come and say: I don’t want to go on a train, but this does not mean we can deny the existence of the railways. So there may also be people who say: There’s nothing in this business of higher worlds. But that does not mean we can deny the existence of the higher worlds. They do exist.

We have spoken of the human sense organs and tried to throw some light on the surrounding world. We have found that the sense organs exist only because other spirits create them. In the same way we could have spoken of the inner spirit that bases itself on the surrounding world. It is not possible to understand these things with a science of the physical world. There it may well be possible to show the structural differences between eye and ear, but not the difference in age between eye and ear. This needs occult science, where it is possible to see behind the surface. We could also have shown that the liver is much younger than the spleen. In that case we would have found that the spleen existed when the ether body joined forces with the physical body, whilst the liver only came with the astral body, with human passions. This is most beautifully shown in the story of Prometheus. The eagle that pecked at the liver of Prometheus who had been chained to a mountain peak is deeply significant.

You might thus consider the great truths to be found in legends in a new way. Ancient legends and myths hold profound wisdom. The myths did not arise from the poetic fantasy of the people, that is an academic superstition. Academics are the most superstitious people in the world. People who believe in ghosts are not as superstitious as are our academics. It is superstition to say that there is a popular fantasy that creates blindly. In reality the great myths come from initiates who knew the things which are now being made accessible again to humanity in the great theosophical truths.

In earlier times, societies where theosophy was taught existed in the part of the world where we are now. Some would go out and tell the things they had heard in their circles to the people, presenting them in myths. Myths thus hold spiritual truths, and anyone who tries can discover these again in the myths. Only lesser myths do not go back to the great initiates. Genuine myths come from them, they are their creation. If you remember this, you’ll see that the myths of different peoples are miraculous writing. Learn to read the myths and look deeply into the souls of peoples that have gone before, peoples that created from inside, as it were. Turn the myths inside out, as we turned the astral plane inside out earlier, and you have modern science, in concept.

In modern science you find the same truths, the evolutional truths to be found in the myths. Hence the strange agreement between the idea of evolution, understood at a deeper level, and the very earliest teaching given to humanity. The elements of mythology are seen from inside, modern science sees them from the outside; but they are the same elements. This brings to mind the remarkable fact that truths found in the earliest religious beliefs come up again in scientific facts that are rightly understood. It need not surprise us to hear that modern science is mythology transformed. It therefore has to be the same in structure as something that existed before.

We have been considering the way the senses relate to the world around us.

Tomorrow at 2 p.m. we'll talk about theosophical matters that do not come from so far away but nevertheless play a role in everyday life.

• 52. The Architektenhaus in Berlin had lecture rooms which could be rented. Rudolf Steiner lectured there from 1903 to 1918, giving a comprehensive introduction to anthroposophy in his longest continuous series of lectures.
• 53. A further set of notes became available for this lecture (19 Oct. 1906). Changes in the text compared to the 1st German edition of 1974 are due to this.
• 54. On this subject, see Steiner R. Theosophy of the Rosicrucian (GA 99), lectures of 1 & 2 June 1907. Tr. M. Cotterell, D. Osmond. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1981. Welt, Erde and Mensch (GA 105), lecture of 3 August 1908 (in German). It seems significant that Rudolf Steiner was considering the subject as preparations were in progress for the Annual General Meeting of the Theosophical Society's German Section. For the same occasion in 1909 he developed a theory of the senses based on the science of the spirit in the lectures he gave on 23-25 Oct. that year, publ. in The Wisdom of Man, the Soul and the Spirit (GA 115). In his own words, this gave the European spiritual scientific movement he was leading a firmer foundation. He intended to publish this theory of the senses in book form, but the work remained fragmentary. Published posthumously as Anthroposophy (A Fragment) (GA 45).
• 55. John 1: 1
• 56. Genesis 2
• 57. Chamisso, Adalbert von (1781–1831). German poet, writer and biologist. Peter Schlemihl published in 1813.
• 58. Changes in the German text compared to the 1974 edition are the result of making comparison with another set of notes.
• 59. Chela (Sanskrit), adept or disciple in the spirit.

A picture will be given of this way, and we shall also consider its fruits. You know some of the main aspects already, but even those of you who have heard lectures on the subject or read Lucifer,⁶⁰ especially No. 32, will hear something that is new to you, for we are going to consider the subject in a way that is only possible when we are among ourselves like this, as students in the science of the spirit. It will essentially be a matter of considering the way in so far as it exists in the Western Rosicrucian tradition which has been spiritually guiding and directing European cultural life by means of hidden threads.

The Rosicrucian movement was working in completely hidden ways up to the last third of the 19th century. No book would tell people about true Rosicrucianism, and the matter was not for public discussion. In about the last thirty years, some of the Rosicrucian principles have been made known to the world in general through the theosophical movement; before that they were taught only in closely restricted groups. The most elementary principles are in many respects part of theosophy, as it is called today, but only the most elementary. It will only gradually be possible to let people gain deeper insight into the wisdom taught in European Rosicrucian schools from the end of the 14th century.

In the first place we have to understand that there is not just one way, but there are three to be considered. This should not be taken to mean that there are three different truths. The truth is one and one only, just as everyone has the same view from the top of a mountain. But there are different ways of getting to that mountain top. During the ascent, the view changes at every step. Only at the top and one can climb the mountain from different sides—does one have the full, open view as one sees it with one’s own eyes. It is the same with the three ways of gaining higher knowledge. One is the Oriental yoga way, the second the Gnostic Christian way, and the third the Rosicrucian Christian way. These three ways lead to the one and only truth.

There are three ways because people differ in nature here on this earth. We may distinguish three types of people in this respect. Just as it would not be right for people wanting to climb the mountain to choose a path that is not the nearest to them but a long way away, so it would not be right for people to chose a spiritual training that is not the right one for them. People still have rather confused ideas about this, even within the theosophical movement, which is still only in its early stages. Many people think that there is only one way, meaning the yoga path. But neither is the Oriental yoga way the one and only one, nor is it in fact the right one for people living within European civilization. Taking a superficial view, one might find it difficult to see what this is about, for basically speaking human nature does not seem to differ that much between the races. However someone with occult powers who considers the big differences between types of human beings, will find that something which may be right for Oriental people, and perhaps also for individual people in our own culture, is certainly not right for everyone. There are people, but only a few of them in the European context, who can follow the Oriental yoga way, but it is impossible for most Europeans. It creates illusions and destroys the soul. Eastern and Western nature may not seem that different at first sight, even to a modern scientist, but they are completely different. An Oriental brain, Oriental powers of imagination and an Oriental heart function very differently from the organs of Western people. You should never ask the things of Western people that you can ask of someone who has grown up in Oriental conditions. You'd have to believe that climate, religion and social life have no influence on the human mind and spirit to think that the external conditions under which someone goes through occult training do not matter. If you know the profound spiritual influence all these outer circumstances have on human nature, however, you will understand that the yoga way is suitable for only few Europeans, really only individuals who completely and radically tear themselves away from European conditions of life, and that it is not possible for people who remain within the European culture.

People who are still inwardly straight and honest Christians, to whom some of the main theses of Christianity still mean much, may chose the Gnostic Christian training. This does not differ much from the cabalistic way. Generally speaking, however, the Rosicrucian training is the only right one for Europeans. This will be considered today, with the different things people are asked to do and the fruits that beckon for those who choose it. No one should think that it is only for people with scientific training, or indeed academics. Any ordinary person can take it up. When one does take it up, one will soon be able to meet every objection based on European science that is raised against occultism. One of the main tasks of Rosicrucian masters was to arm those who followed the road to higher insight so that they would be able to defend occult knowledge and follow that road also in the world in general. An ordinary person who has just a few of the popular notions gained from modern sciences, or even none of them, but an honest desire to know the truth, will be able to take up the Rosicrucian way just as well as the most highly educated and academic people.

There are major differences in the three ways. The first concerns the relationship between pupil and occult teacher; the latter gradually becomes the guru or mediates the relationship to the guru. The nature of the Oriental yoga way is such that this relationship is the strictest imaginable. The guru is absolute authority to the pupil. If this were not so, the training would not give the right result. Oriental yoga training is quite impossible unless one makes oneself strictly subservient to the guru’s authority. With the Gnostic Christian and the cabalistic way, the relationship to the guru on the physical plane is less strict. The guru guides the pupils towards Christ Jesus, he acts as a mediator. With the Rosicrucian way the guru becomes more and more a friend whose authority is based on inner assent. The only possible relationship in this case is one of complete personal trust. The least bit of distrust between teacher and pupil would break the bond that has to exist between them, and then the powers that come into play between teacher and pupil would not longer be effective.

The pupil will sometimes have the wrong idea about his teacher’s role. It may easily seem to him that he simply must speak to the teacher at some point or another and often needs to be physically with him. Now it may sometimes be that a teacher must physically approach a pupil as a matter of urgent necessity, but this is not as often as the pupil may think. In the early stages a pupil cannot properly judge the influence the teacher has on him. A teacher has means that only gradually reveal themselves to the pupil. Many a word which the pupil thinks has been spoken at random is of tremendous significance. It continues to influence the pupil's soul at an unconscious level, like a guiding principle that gives him his direction. When a teacher makes rightful use of occult influences, the bond between him and his pupil will be a very real one. Then there are also influences sent from a distance, influences based on loving sympathy, which the teacher always has at hand and which the pupil will only come to recognize gradually as time goes on and he finds his way into the higher worlds. The one thing that is absolutely essential is the most complete trust; without this it would be better to undo the bond between teacher and pupil.

Brief mention will now be made of the rules that play a certain role in Rosicrucian training. They need not be exactly the way they are presented here. Depending on the person, their occupation and age, the teacher will have to select various elements from different areas and arrange them in one way or another. Only an overview will be given.

One thing that is extremely important in Rosicrucian training is not normally given much consideration in all occult training. This is clear, logical thinking, or at least the effort to do so. The first step is to give up all confused or biased thinking. One has to get used to seeing things as they are in the world, from a great, selfless points of view. The best way of doing this for an ordinary person wanting to follow the Rosicrucian way is to study the elementary things taught in the science of the spirit. There is no justification in saying: ‘What good will it do for me to study the things taught about higher worlds, human races and cultures, karma and reincarnation when I am unable to see and perceive these things for myself.’ It is not an acceptable objection, for working with these truths cleanses one’s thinking and disciplines it, so that one will then be ready for the steps that follow in occult training. In ordinary life people are generally very chaotic in their thinking. The guiding principles and stages of human development and planetary evolution made known by those able to perceive them bring order to one's thinking. All this is part of Rosicrucian training. The teacher will therefore ask the student to think himself into the elementary teaching of reincarnation and karma, the three worlds, the akashic record, the evolution of the earth and the human races. The whole elementary subject matter now taught in the science of the spirit is the best possible preparation for the ordinary person.

Those able to give greater acuity to their thinking and enter with greater intensity into the actual basic supporting structure of the human soul, may study the books that have been specially written to discipline people’s thinking. The books written for this purpose—and they may not actually include the word ‘theosophy’—are my Truth and Science and Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. One does of course write such books so that they may serve a purpose. People wishing to take their thinking through energetic training to enable them to take their studies further, will do well to subject their minds to the ‘mental and spiritual gymnastics’ these books demand. This will give them the foundation on which to build their Rosicrucian studies.

Observing the physical plane, you gain sensory impressions in colour and light, heat and cold, smell and taste, sensations of pressure and touch, and auditory perceptions. Thought and the rational mind are brought to bear on these. The rational mind and thought, are still part of the physical plane. You can perceive all these things on the physical plane. Perceptions gained on the astral plane look very different. And those made on the devachan plane are very different again, let alone those in even higher regions of the spirit. Someone who has not yet gained insight into the higher worlds can, however, picture them to himself. The way I habitually seek to describe things is also intended to provide images of those worlds. Anyone who then rises to the higher regions will see for himself how they influence him. We learn new things on each plane. One thing, however, remains the same through all worlds up to the devachan. It is trained logical thinking. Only on the buddhi plane will thinking no longer have the same value as on the physical plane, then a different way of thinking has to develop. But thinking is the same for the three worlds below the buddhi plane—the physical, astral and devachanic planes. If therefore you train your thinking well by means of study in the physical world, this thinking will prove a good guide in the higher world, so that you do not stumble as easily as someone who wants to ascend into regions of the spirit with confused thinking habits. Rosicrucian training therefore teaches people to move freely in the higher worlds by encouraging them to discipline their thinking. Reaching those worlds you will get to know ways of perceiving things that do not exist on the physical plane, but you will be able to control them with the thinking you have developed.

The second thing a student following the Rosicrucian way learns is vision in images. You prepare for this by gradually learning to enter into the kind of ideas expressed in images that represent the higher worlds in the sense of Goethe’s words ‘All things that are transient are but a likeness.’⁶¹ The way we usually move through the physical world, we take in the things as they present themselves to the senses and not the things that are behind them. We shall only be free of this physical world when we learn to take the things that surround us as allegories or symbols. We therefore have to try and develop a moral relationship to them. Teachers will give directions on how external phenomena may be seen as symbols of spiritual elements, but pupils can also do a great deal themselves. You may look at an autumn crocus, for instance, and a violet. Seeing the autumn crocus as a symbol for a melancholy state of mind, I have taken it not just the way it presents itself on the outside, but as an allegory for a quality. The violet, on the other hand, may be seen as an allegory for a quiet, godly mind. You thus move on from one thing to another, from plant to plant, animal to animal, and see spiritual qualities reflected in them. This will make your ability to form ideas flexible, freeing it from the hard outlines of sensory perception. You may begin to see a quality reflected in every animal species, taking one animal to be the symbol of strength, another of cleverness. We have to pursue this seriously, wherever we are, and not be superficial about it.

Essentially the whole of human language is in symbols. Language is nothing but speaking in symbols. It has to be used even in science, where people feel the need to be objective in referring to things, and the words act as symbols. If you speak of the ala or wings of the nose, you know they are not wings, but they are given that name. For those who wish to remain on the physical plane it will be better not lose themselves too much in such symbolism, but advanced students will not lose themselves. Going into the matter one comes to realize the depths of our language in its original form.

Deep thinkers like Paracelsus⁶² and Jakob Böhme⁶³ partly owed their development to the fact that they did not hesitate to enter into conversation with country people and tramps and study the imaginative quality of language. At their time, words like ‘nature’, ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ still had much more of an influence. A country woman plucking a feather from a goose would call the inner part of the feather its ‘soul’. The student must find such symbols in the language for himself. He then comes free of the physical world and learns to rise to seeing in images. When the world thus becomes parable, likeness, to the student, this has a powerful effect. If he practises this for long enough he'll notice the effects. Looking at a flower, for instance, something will gradually come away from the flower. The colour which at first was merely there on the flower's surface rises like a small flame and floats freely in space. The ability to see in images thus develops. It will be like this with all objects, as if their surface comes free. The whole of space fills with the colour which floats away in space like a flame. And so the whole world of light seems to withdraw and come apart from the physical reality. When such a colour image comes free to float in space, it soon begins to attach itself to something. It does not stop somewhere at random; it embraces an entity which then shows itself in the colour as a spiritual entity. The colour which the student has drawn away from the objects of the physical world clothes the spiritual entities in astral space.

This is the point where the occult teacher's counsel is needed; otherwise the pupils might easily lose the ground from under their feet, which may be for one of two reasons. One is that every pupil has to go through one particular experience. The ideas we gain of physical things, not only through colour, but also smell and sound, show themselves in peculiar, ugly and sometimes also beautiful forms—animal faces, shapes of plants and also ugly human faces. This first experience is a mirror reflection of one’s own soul. One's own passions and drives, the evil that still lies in the soul, appear in astral space before the pupil as though in a mirror. Pupils then need their occult teacher’s counsel; their teacher will tell them that this is not something objective but a mirroring of their own inner nature.

You’ll realize that the pupils depend on their teacher's counsel if we also consider the way in which such images appear. It has often been stressed that everything is the other way round in astral space, everything is in mirror images. The pupil may easily be misled by delusive visions, especially if they mirror his own nature. The mirror image of a passion not only presents itself as an animal coming towards you—that would be the least of your problems—but you also have to take something else into account. Let us assume someone has a really evil passion lying hidden within. Such a drive or an appetite will very often show itself in enticing forms in the reflection, whilst good qualities sometimes do not look at all attractive. This is something legend speaks of in a most beautiful way. You find an image of it in the myth of Hercules. As he set out on his way, his bad and good qualities presented themselves to him, with vice clad in the enticing form of beauty and virtue wearing the garment of unpretentiousness.

There is also something else. Even if a pupil is already able to see things objectively, there is always still the other possibility, which is that inner arbitrariness acts as a power that guides and directs the phenomena. Pupils have to learn to see through this and understand it, for wishes have tremendous power on the astral plane. Everything that gives direction here in the physical world will not be there when you enter into the world of images. If you’ve deceived yourself into thinking you have done something here on the physical plane when in fact you have not done it, you'll soon discover the truth of it, for the facts will show it to you on the physical plane. It is not like that in astral space. There your own wishes present illusory images to you, and you need the guidance of someone who knows how these imaginative images must be put together to show their true significance.

The third element in Rosicrucian training is to learn the occult script. What is this? There are certain images, symbols, shown in the form of simple lines or combinations of colours. Such symbols are a specific occult sign language. The following may serve as an example. There is a process in the higher world that also has an effect in the physical world—a rotating vortex. You can see this in a stellar nebula, the Orion nebula for instance. There you see a spiral. This, however, is on the physical plane. But you can also see it on all other planes. This (Fig. 8a) is a figure found in all kinds of configurations on the astral plane. If you understand this figure, you will also understand, with its aid, how one human race changes into another. When the first sub-race of our present root race came into being, the sun was in the sign of the Crab. At that time, therefore, one race swung into another; because of this the occult sign for the Crab is this (Fig. 8b). The signs of the zodiac are thus all occult signs. We only have to get to know and understand their significance.

The pentagram is another such sign (Fig. 8c). The pupils learn to connect particular inner responses and feelings with this sign. They are the counter image of things that happen in the astral world. This sign language, the occult script which pupils learn, is no more and no less than reflecting the laws of higher worlds. The pentagram thus is a sign for several things. Just as the letter B is used in many different words, so the signs of the occult script may have different meanings. The pentagram, the hexagram, the angle and other figures may be used together in occult writing which in itself is a signpost in the higher worlds. The pentagram is the sign for the five-fold human being, the sign for reticence, keeping silent, and also the sign behind the species soul of the rose. If you connect the petals of a rose in your picture, you have pentagram. Just as the letter B means something different in ‘band’ and in ‘bibber’, so do the signs signify different things in occult writing. You learn to arrange them in the right way. These are the signposts on the astral plane. Just as someone who is illiterate may be seen relative to someone who is able to read, so someone only seeing the images as images relates to someone who has learned the occult script. The letters used on the physical plane are often arbitrary, but originally they reflected the astral sign language. Take an ancient astral symbol, the staff of Hermes with the serpent. In our script it has become the sign E (Fig. 9).

Or take the W, which indicates the wave motion of water. It is the sign for the human soul and also for ‘word’. The M is nothing but the upper lip of man:

All this has grown more arbitrary in the course of evolution. On the occult planes, however, necessity rules. There you can live these things.

The fourth thing is the life rhythm, as it is called. People know very little of this in ordinary life. They go through life egoistically. Only children at school have a certain life rhythm still in their timetable, for the lessons of each day are repeated week after week. But who does such a thing in ordinary life? Yet we only progress to higher development by bringing rhythm, repetition, into our lives. Rhythm prevails everywhere in the natural world. Everything is arranged in rhythms—the movement of the planets around the sun, the annual appearance and fading away of plants, and even the animal world, the sexual life of the animals. Man alone is permitted to live without rhythm, so that he may act out of freedom. But he must bring rhythm into the chaos again by choice. A good rhythm is to do occult things at particular times each day. Pupils must therefore do their meditation and concentration exercises at the same time each day, just as the sun sends its energies down to the earth at the same time in spring. This is one way of bringing rhythm into life. Another way is to make one's breathing rhythmical, as instructed by the occult teacher. Breathing in, holding one’s breath and breathing out must be made rhythmical for a short time each day, and this is done under the occult teacher's experienced guidance. A new rhythm thus replaces the old one. Bringing such rhythm into life is one of the preconditions for ascent to the higher worlds. No one can do this without the guidance of a teacher. Here the aim is merely to tell you the principle of it.

The fifth thing is to learn the correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm, as it is called. It involves the teacher giving the pupils directions to concentrate their thoughts on certain parts of the body. Those of you who have heard the lecture on the way the senses relate to the higher worlds will remember that the whole world has a part in creating the physical body. The eye is created by the light, by the spirits active in the light. Every point in the physical body has a connection with a specific power in the cosmos. Consider the point at the root of the nose. There was a time when the etheric head extended well beyond the physical body. The Atlanteans still had a point on the forehead where the etheric head extended above the physical, as is still the case in horses and other animals today. The ether head of a horse still projects a long way today. In human beings, the ether body and the physical body have been made to coincide in the point I spoke of, and this allows them to develop the parts of the physical brain that enable them to say I to themselves. The organ which enables man to say I to himself is connected with a specific event during the Atlantean period of earth evolution. The occult teacher will instruct his pupil: ‘Direct your thoughts and concentrate them on this point.’ He’ll then give him a mantra⁶⁴ This awakens a power in this part of the head which corresponds to a particular process in the macrocosm. Correspondence is thus established between microcosm and macrocosm. In the same way concentrating on the eye will give understanding of the sun. The whole organization of the macrocosm is thus found in the spirit in our own organs.

When pupils have practised this for a sufficiently long time, they will be permitted to enter more deeply into the things they have discovered in this way. They can go to the akashic record for instance and choose the point in time during Atlantean evolution when the point at the root of the nose on which they have been concentrating came into existence, or they find the sun by concentrating on the eye. This sixth stage, entering deeply into the macrocosm, is called ‘contemplation’. It gives the pupils insight into the world, enabling them to take insight into their own nature beyond the personal level. This is different from le popular chit chat about self knowledge. You do not find your self by looking inside yourself, but only if you look beyond yourself. This is the same self which created the eye and brought forth the sun. To look for the part of your self that corresponds to the eye you have to look to the sun. You must perceive the world outside you to be your self Looking inside only leads to hardening in oneself, to a higher form of egoism. When people say: ‘I only have to let my self speak’, they have no idea of the danger this holds. Self knowledge must not be practised unless the pupils following the white path also practise self renunciation. If they learn to say ‘That is me’ to every thing around themselves, they are ripe to have self knowledge, as Goethe let Faust say:

Before my eyes
Opened by you, all living creatures move
In sequence: in the quiet woods, the air.
The water, ...⁶⁵

The parts of our self are everywhere out there. This is also shown in the myth of Dionysus, for example, and it is why Rosicrucian training puts such value on objective, calm contemplation of the outside world. ‘To see yourself in your reality, look in the mirror of the outside world and essence. You will perceive much more clearly what lives in your soul if you look in the eyes of your fellow human beings than if you concentrate on yourself and enter into your own soul. This is an important, essential truth, and no one who takes the white path dare ignore it. Today many people have transformed their ordinary egoism into a sophisticated egoism. They call it theosophical development when they take their ordinary, everyday self to the highest possible level. They really want to bring out the personal aspect. True occult insight will show, on the other hand, that the inner life opens up when we come to know our higher self in the world.

When the pupil has developed this attitude of mind in contemplation, with the self flowing out over all things, when he feels the flower that grows towards him just as he does the finger he moves towards himself, when he knows that the whole earth and the whole world is his body, he comes to know his higher self. He will then speak to the flower as to a part of his own body: ‘You are part of me, part of my self.’ He will gradually come to feel inwardly what is known as the seventh level of Rosicrucian training—being in harmony with God. This evolves as the element of feeling that guides the human being into the higher worlds, where he must not just think about the higher worlds but, learn to feel in these worlds. The fruits will then be apparent to him, if he endeavours to learn under the continued guidance of his teacher and he need not be afraid that this occult way might lead to an abyss. All the things referred to as dangers of occult development do not arise if development is guided along the right lines. When this happens, the occult seeker of the way becomes a true helper for humanity.

During the Imagination the possibility arises that the individual spends a particular part of the night in conscious awareness. The physical body will be asleep, as usual, but part of this sleep state will be filled with a life of dreams that have meaning and content. This is the first sign of entering into the higher worlds. Pupils will gradually bring their experiences across into ordinary consciousness. They then see the astral spirits everywhere in the world around them—also here, in this hall, among the chairs, or out in the woods and fields.

People reach three levels in the process of imaginative insight. At the first level they’ll perceive the spirits that are behind the sensory impressions gained in the physical world. There is a spirit behind the colour red or blue, behind every rose; every animal has its species or group soul behind it The individuals gain daytime clairvoyance. If the pupil waits a while longer, calmly practising the Imagination, and also entering deeply into occult writing, he will be day-clairaudient. The third level is where he gets to know all the things that are to be found in the astral world and draw human beings down, leading them astray into evil, and they are now really there to guide him upwards. You come to know kama loka.

With the fourth, fifth and sixth parts of Rosicrucian training—life rhythm, relationship between microcosm and macrocosm, contemplation of the macrocosm—pupils reach three more levels. At the first of these they gain insight into conditions of life between death and a new birth. This comes to them in devachan. The next level is the possibility of seeing how forms change into one another—transmutation, the metamorphosis of forms. Human beings have not always had the lungs they have today, for instance; lungs only go back to Lemurian times. During the preceding Hyperborean time human beings had a different form, and before that a different one again, which is because they were in the astral state, and before that because they were in devachan. One also says that at this level pupils get to know the relationship between the different globes,⁶⁶ that is, they have direct perception of how one globe, or state of form, changes into another. Finally, before they move on to even higher worlds, they have direct perception of the metamorphosis of states of life. They perceive how the different spirits move through the different realms, or rounds and how one realm becomes another. After that they must move to yet higher levels, but these cannot be discussed today.

The things that have been said today will give you enough material to work with for the time being. You really have to work on these things. That is the first step towards reaching the heights. It is good to have the Rosicrucian way presented in an orderly fashion for once. It may be possible to travel on the physical plane even if one does not have a map, but on the astral plane it is necessary to have such a map. Consider the things I have said as a kind of map; this will be useful not only in this life but also when you go through the gate to the higher worlds. Those who gain these things from the science of the spirit will find that the map serves them well after death. The occultist knows that human beings often have a miserable time as they arrive on the other side and have no idea where they actually are in life and what it is that they are experiencing. People who have gone through the teachings of spiritual science know their way about and know how to characterize the things themselves. It would be of great benefit to humanity if people were not to shrink from setting out on the road to higher understanding.

• 60. From 1904 onwards the complete title of the journal was Lucifer-Gnosis; see Rudolf Steiner, an Autobiography, tr. R. Stebbing 1977, chapter 32. The passages from issue No. 32, to which Rudolf Steiner was referring, make up the chapter on 'Imagination' in his Stages of Higher Knowledge, tr. 1930.
• 61. Goethe, J. W. von. Faust 2, last scene, Chorus mysticus.
• 62. Paracelsus (Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, 1493–1541). German alchemist and physician.
• 63. Mime, Jakob (1575–1624), theosophical mystic. His first biography was written by Abraham von Franckenberg (died 1652). Later biographies in German: Fechner H.A., Jakob Böhme, sein Leben und seine Schriften, Gorlitz 1857; Claasen J. Jakob Barnes Leben und seine theosophischen Werke, 3 Bde, Stuttgart 1885; Martensen H. Jakob Böhme, London 1949; in English: Hobhouse S. Jakob Böhme, His Life and Teaching 1950.
• 64. In another set of notes it says: He then spoke a particular word for them.
• 65. Goethe, J. W. von. Faust 1, in A Forest Cavern.
• 66. Concerning 'globes', see Steiner R. At the Gates of Spiritual Science (GA 95). Tr. E. Goddard, C. Davy. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1986; The Apocalypse of St John [= The Book of Revelation] (GA 104). Tr. J. Collis. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1977.

The second subject on which we have said occult teachers instruct their pupils is Imagination. With this, the individual does not go through life in the ordinary everyday way but in accord with Goethe s words ‘All things corruptible are but a parable’. Pupils will see something else in every animal and every plant. Thus the autumn crocus will be the image of a melancholy mind, the violet an image of being quietly in harmony with God, the sunflower an image of life bursting with energy, independence, ambition. Living in this way, pupils rise to imaginative perception. They’ll see something like a cold flame rise from a plant, a colour image that takes them to the astral plane. The pupils are thus guided to see things that are shown to them by spiritual entities from other worlds. It had to be said, however, that the pupils must strictly follow their occult teacher, who alone can tell them what is subjective and what is objective. The occult teachers are able to give their pupils the necessary security. The world of the senses gives this of its own accord by continually correcting our errors. The situation is different in the astral world. There one is easily deluded; there someone with greater experience has to be at one s side.

The teachers give their pupils who want to follow the Rosicrucian way a number of instructions. In the first place they give them a particular instruction once they have begun to reach the level of imaginative development. A teacher will then say: ‘Endeavour first of all to love not just individual animals, to develop a particular relationship to individual animals, to learn one thing or another from one animal or another, but try to develop a living inner feeling for whole groups of animals; you will then gain an idea of the nature of the group soul. The individual soul of man is on the physical plane, the individual souls of animals are on the astral plane. An animal cannot say 'I' to itself here on the physical plane.’

A question that is often asked is if animals do not have the kind of soul that human beings have. They do have such a soul, but the animal soul is up above on the astral plane. The individual animal relates to the animal soul the way individual organs relate to the soul in human beings. If your finger hurts, it is the soul which feels it. All the sensations of individual organs go to the soul. The same is the case for a group of animals. Everything an individual animal feels inwardly is felt inside it by the group soul. Let us take all the different lions, for example. The sensations felt by the lions all go to a soul they have in common. All lions have a common group soul on the astral plane. If you cause an individual lion pain, or if it feels inner gratification at something, this goes all the way to the astral plane, just as the pain in a human finger goes all the way to the human soul. Man is able to gain insight into the group soul if he is able to create a form for himself that contains all individual lions, just as a general concept contains all the individual forms belonging to it.

Plants have their soul in the rupa part of the devachan plane.⁶⁷ By gaining an overview of group of plants and developing a particular relationship to the plant’s group soul, human beings learn to penetrate to the group souls of plants on the rupa plane. When it is no longer the individual lily, the individual tulip that is special to them, but when the individual plants merge for them in living, concentrated Imaginations that become images, human beings experience something completely new. It is important to have a very real image, individually created in one’s powers of imagination. One will then find that the earth’s plant cover, a flower-bedecked meadow, for instance, becomes something completely new and that the flowers become a genuine revelation of the earth’s spirit. That is the revelation of these different plant group souls. Just as human tears become a reflection of sadness felt in the soul, and the physiognomy comes to reflect the soul of a person, so does the occultist come to see the green of the plant cover as a reflection of inner processes, of the earth’s true life in the spirit. Some plants will then be like the earth’s tears for him, with the earth’s inner sadness welling forth. As in the case of someone who shares in the tremors and sorrow of others, so does a new, imaginative content enter into the pupil’s soul.

These are the moods a person must go through. If you go through the mood relating to the animal world, you find your way up to the astral plane. If you enter into the mood I have described for the plant world, you find your way up to the lower part of the devachan plane. You will observe the flame forms rising from the plants. The earth's plant cover will then be covered with a sum of configurations, the incarnations of light rays, that come down upon the plants.

We can also approach a dead stone in the the same way. There is a basic inner feeling relating to the mineral world. Let us take a rock crystal with the light shining through it. Looking at it we can say to ourselves that in a way this is an ideal picture of the human being himself. Just as the human physical body is physical matter, so a stone, too, is physical matter. But there is a future prospect, and the occult teacher guides his pupils towards this. Today human beings are still full of drives, passions and appetites. This fills our physical nature. But the occultist has an ideal before him. He will say to himself: ‘Our animal nature is gradually cleansed and purified until a level is reached where this human body can stand before us as chaste and free from desire as the mineral which desires nothing, with no wishes stirring in it when something comes near it. The inner material nature of the mineral is chaste and pure.’ This chastity and purity is the inner feeling pupils should have on looking at the world of rocks and minerals. These inner feelings are differentiated according to the different shapes and colours in which that world shows itself, but the basic inner feeling present in the mineral world is one of chastity.

Our earth has a quite specific configuration, a quite specific form today. Let us go back to earlier stages of its evolution. It once had a completely different form. Let us go back to Atlantis and earlier. There we come to increasingly higher temperatures, with the metals running about the way water runs on earth today. All metals have turned into those veins in the earth today because they were originally running streams. Just as lead is solid today and mercury liquid, so lead was liquid once, and mercury will one day be a solid metal. The earth is thus changing, and humanity has always been part of the different evolutional stages. The physical human being did not yet exist at the times of which we have been talking. But the ether body and the astral body were there, being able to live at even higher temperatures. As the earth cooled down, the outer bodies gradually developed around the human being.

New things were developing all the time in the human being in the course of evolution, and correspondingly new things also developed in the natural world around him. The beginnings of the human eye developed at the Sun stage of the planet. The ether body developed first, and then in turn created the physical human eye. Our physical organs developed from the more subtle ether body the way a piece of ice develops in water as it freezes. Physical organs developed inside the human being, and out there the earth grew solid. The development of an organ in the human being and the development of specific configurations in the natural world outside always ran parallel. When the potential for the eye developed in man, the chrysolite evolved in the mineral world. We can thus think of the same creative powers putting together chrysolite nature in the world of nature and creating the human eye.

We cannot be satisfied with general phrases in a given case, saying that man is microcosm and the world macrocosm, for occult studies have shown the true relationship between human being and world. When the physical organ for the ability to connect thoughts developed in Atlantean times, lead solidified in the outside world; it changed from the liquid to the solid state. Thus the same powers are active in the solidification of lead and the organism of rational thinking. We will only understand the human being if we are able to see the connections between the human being and the powers of nature. There is a particular group within the socialist movement which thinks differently from the other social democrats, being extremely moderate. This group within the socialist movement are the printers. And the reason is that printers work with lead. The tariff community between workers and employers developed first among the printers.⁶⁸ Lead taken in small quantities creates such an inner mood.

Another example taken from experience also shows how the nature of a metal influences a person. A gentleman had noticed that he found it easy to see analogies between all kinds of things. It was possible to conclude from this that he had frequent contact with copper. And that was indeed the case. He played the French horn in an orchestra, an instrument that contains a great deal of copper.

Once you study the relationship between the inanimate world outside and the human organism you find that the relationship between human beings and the world that surrounds them takes many different forms. An example is the relationship between the senses and precious stones. We have already seen the relationship between the eye and the chrysolite. In the same way a relationship exists between the organ of hearing and the onyx. This stone has a peculiar relationship to the movements of the I-life in man. Occultists have always made this connection. The stone represents life arising from death, for instance. Thus in Goethe’s Tale, the dead dog is changed into an onyx by the old man’s lamp. Goethe had an intuition here that came from occult knowledge. The relationship between the onyx and the organ of hearing is connected with this. Occult relationships also exist between the organ of taste and topaz, the sense of smell and jasper, the skin sense as man’s sense of temperature, and carnelian, the power of productive thought and carbuncle. The latter was used as a symbol of the productive powers of thought which arose in man at the time when the carbuncle developed in the natural world.

The occult symbols come from the depths of profound and real wisdom. Wherever you consider occult symbolism, you find genuine insight. Knowing the significance of a mineral you gain access to the upper parts of the devachan plane. Seeing a precious stone and gaining a real feeling of what this precious stone can tell us, we gain access to the arupa parts of the devachan plane. The occult student's horizons thus widen, with more and more worlds opening up to him.

He must not make do with general suggestions, but must gain access to the world-whole—bit by bit.

Looking at German literature we can also see that writers who know about mining have an instinctive intuition concerning the powers of minerals. Thus Novalis had studied mining science.⁶⁹ Körner⁷⁰often made miners the people with occult knowledge in his works. As to Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann,⁷¹ that strange individual who sometimes went deep into the secrets of nature in his art, especially in his short story The Mines at Falun, you can often sense echoes of occult relationships between the mineral world and the human being. This also shows the strange way in which great occult powers influence the artist’s imagination.

The true birth place of art were the mysteries. They were real and alive in astral space, where you had a synthesis of truth, beauty and godliness. This was very much the case in the mysteries of ancient Egypt and those of Asia, and also the mysteries of ancient Greece, especially in Eleusis. There the pupils would truly see spiritual powers coming down into the different forms that exist on earth. There was no other knowledge at that time than knowledge which was seen in this way. There was no other godliness than the harmony with God felt in the visions gained in the mysteries. Nor was there any other beauty than the beauty seen when the gods descended.

We live in a barbaric age, a chaotic age, an age lacking in style. In all the great periods in the arts creativeness came from most profound depths of the spirit. Looking at the images of Greek gods, you see exactly three types. Firstly there is the Zeus type, with Pallas Athene and Apollo also belonging to it. The Greeks were characterizing their own race in this. It was a specific shape given to the oval of the eye, to the nose, the mouth. Secondly you see the group that may be called the Mercury type. The ears are positioned quite differently, the nose differently, and the hair is woolly and crinkly. Thirdly there is the Satyr type, where we see quite a different shape to the angles of the mouth, a different nose, eyes and so on. These three types are clearly evident in Greek sculpture. The Satyr type is meant to represent a very ancient race, the Mercury type the race that followed it, and the Zeus type the fifth race.

Spiritual views of the world were part of everything in earlier times. During the Middle Ages this still showed itself in the work of craftsmen, with every door lock something of a work of art. Outer culture still showed us something that had been created by the soul. Our modern times are very different. The present time has only produced one style, and that is the style of the mercantile store. The large store will be just as characteristic of our age as Gothic edifices such as Cologne Cathedral are of 13th and 14th century medieval times. The new life comes to expression in these forms. As the knowledge given through the science of the spirit spreads, the world will have spiritual content again. And when this life of the spirit later comes to expression in outer forms we shall have a style that reflects this life of the spirit. The things that live in the science of the spirit must later come to expression in outer forms. We thus have to see the mission of spiritual science to be a cultural mission.

• 67. Rupa lokas (worlds) on the devachan = lower spheres in the world of the spirit, where forms still exist.
• 68. Tariff community, general labour contract.
• 69. In Novalis' novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen.
• 70. Körner, Karl Theodor (1791–1813), German lyric poet. In his poems Bergmannsleben (miner's life) and Berglied (mountain song) and his play Der Kampf der Geister mit den Bergknappen (struggle between the spirits and the pitmen). Notes taken of the lecture give the name as 'Kernig', clearly misheard. See Picht C. S. 'Theodor Körner and seine Beziehungen zum Reich der Steine', Das Goetheanum 1940; 19: Nr. 21.
• 71. Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Wilhelm (or Amadeus) (1776–1822), German writer, music critic and caricaturist. Reference here to 'Die Bergwerke von Falun' in his anthology Die Serapionsbrüder, 1. Teil, 1819.

Today we are going to consider something from the point of view of spiritual science that may be said to be of eminent value if it is taken the right way. We are going to talk about some aspects of nutrition and healing. More than with any other kind of subject you’ll have to remember, however, that all we can do is aphoristically take individual details from an infinitely vast field and that it is extremely difficult to speak about these things at this time in a language that everyone can understand. We can therefore only consider these things in an approximate way, for in this kind of wider group I am speaking not only to the initiate who would be in a position to sense the true value of every word that is spoken.

In occult schools whose members are already at a higher level one can agree to use a specific way of saying things, so that a particular word will express a specific feeling impulse. All such things—and today we can only touch on them lightly—often have different meanings in ordinary life. But an attempt will nevertheless be made to speak about these matters, seeing that they are also of practical value. People who do not believe that effects arising from causes that lie in the world of spirit are much more powerful than the effects you get in the outer physical world will not gain much from it, however. Many will admit, in theory, that something we must call spirit, something that has a powerful influence in the world, has powers similar to those of electricity, magnetism, and so on. The science of the spirit finds itself in all kinds of positions in modern cultural life. Above all it is misunderstood by people who conservatively want to have life continue along old-established lines and also by the many people who want to bring about reforms in all kinds of areas. All these different groups of people come to the science of the spirit and consider it only natural that the science of the spirit should come to them and not they to the science of the spirit. It will of course be easy to see that someone who is a radical protector of animals will not make his energies and experience available to the spiritual scientific movement but will get really angry if all theosophists do not immediately join the animal protection movement. This is something you’ll see in all kinds of specific areas. And it is, of course, perfectly natural. But the theosophical movement is something that is universal. It relates to the different individual movements the way an architect’s plans relate to the work of the carpenters, masons, skilled craftsmen of all kinds who are working on the house. The latter are individual workers. But the person who is in charge of the building project must ask the workers to come to him to be given their particular instructions. This is also why it is not acceptable for other movements—homoeopaths, teetotallers and others—to ask that the science of the spirit should come to them. Instead, all the specialist areas must be part of the spiritual scientific movement which must aim for basic reform in a
spheres of life, but from within.

The position of theosophy in relation to science in particular is readily misunderstood. Not only do scientists believe theosophists to be against them, not wanting to have anything to do with them. Even friends of theosophy have this opinion. Above all physicians who have had a scientific training and are working to meet official requirements will easily develop the prejudice that theosophy does not involve scientific methods and therefore does not go with science. That is not the case, however.

Today you keep hearing slogans, nothing but slogans, from people. There is some justification for having specialists. But it is not the representatives of specialist fields but mainly their followers who use such slogans. One of them is one I'd particularly like to mention. You often hear that the public practically freeze with horror if you use the term ‘poison’. It seems perfectly sensible to say that no poison should ever get into the body. And people like to talk about ‘natural medicine’ in that case. But what do we really mean by ‘natural’? and by ‘poison’? The effect which the belladonna poison has on the human organism is natural, a purely natural effect. Nature does, of course, include all actions that come under the laws of nature. And what is a poison? Water is a powerful poison if someone consumes it by the bucketful, for it will then prove most destructive. And arsenic is a very good thing if you use it in particular combinations. What we need, therefore, is a truly thorough study of the human organism and the things to be found in the natural world outside.

Paracelsus⁷² was very specific about the way particular processes in the human body relate to those in the natural world outside, for instance cholera to arsenic. He called someone with cholera an ‘arsenicus’, for he knew that the same factors played a role in arsenic and cholera and he also perceived how things harmonize. We thus have a natural process which must first be understood.

Something else that proves an obstacle in the matter of entering into dialogue with scientists is the materialistic way of thinking. This has distorted people’s views on all the matters we are concerned with here. Remember what has been said about the effects of some metals on the human organism.⁷³ Someone may say the science of the spirit is pure materialism when it is said that the powers inherent in minerals and metals have material effects on the human organism. But in the science of the spirit we also know that material things have a particular relationship to the spirit. Someone who truly speaks for a spiritual view of the world will have realized that substances like these are not just matter and that spirit and soul dwell in them just like in a creature that lives in a skin. That is the sense in which a theosophist will speak of the spirit embodied in gold, in quartz or in belladonna poison. To the occultist, the world is full of spiritual entities. The spirit embodied in lead has the relationship to the human organism you heard me speak of yesterday. For theosophists it is not a matter of looking for some kinds of peculiar spiritual entities that have nothing at all to do with our world, but rather for entities that are present in every piece of metal and indeed in everything there is in the world around us. That is how one sees the spirit in matter from the point of view taken in the science of the spirit. Spiritual analogies are something based on genuine spiritual research.

We are not therefore in opposition to expert knowledge. There have to be specialist fields, and we must not ignore the outer facts. But it is impossible to gain a comprehensive point of view concerning the world on the basis of specialist knowledge. A medical practitioner is also a person and as such needs to know something of the higher worlds. He will then arrange his work in a very different way from someone who knows nothing of the great scheme of things, for he will then also rate symptoms differently. A single observation or experience may well be taken to be something quite minor if one has an overview of the whole. Just as everyone working in the sphere of culture has to meet certain preconditions, so the future will demand physicians who know the science of the spirit. An example would be Hahnemann, the founder of homoeopathy. The difference between Paracelsus and Hahnemann is enormous. The 16th-century physician was still clairvoyant to some extent. Hahnemann was no longer clairvoyant. He was only able to assess the actions of medicines by what his senses told him.⁷⁴

An analogy may be found for the relationship we are speaking of between the human being and the creatures and objects of the natural world. It is the relationship between the sexes, which is largely governed by sympathy. It is a mysterious attraction that brings the sexes together, a power at work in the sphere of life. It should not be taken to be something mystical in the bad sense of the word that one particular man feels drawn to one particular woman. Someone who trains himself to be an occult observer of the world has a similar relationship to all living things around him, one that may be called universal. Just as there is a specific relationship between the one man and the one woman, so there is a specific relationship between one person of the kind I am speaking of and the phenomena in the world around him. People who have developed these powers gain knowledge that lets them perceive the connection that exists between a particular thing and the human being. And this then also leads to insight into the actions of medicinal powers.

Paracelsus did not have to try things out first, no more than a magnet which attracts iron needs to try it out. He was able to say that a particular healing power lay in the red foxglove. Such knowledge will only be regained when a physician realizes that it is a matter not only of intellectual understanding but of one’s inner attitude to life; when he knows that he himself must become a completely different person. When he has transformed his temperament, his character, the whole tenor of his soul, then and only then can he develop the power of vision and understanding for the powers in the world that harmonize the human being. This will be possible in a future that it not too far off. The view of the world held in the science of the spirit must above all offer particular principles, some of which will be mentioned now, after this more general view. Anyone who is willing can gain much from this.

Four elements are involved in this. The first is that there is a connection between the process we call digestion and the process we call thinking activity, in other words, what digestion is at a lower level, thinking activity is in a higher sphere. In the human organism, as it lives on the physical plane, the two are intimately connected. Let me give you a piece of real evidence of this. It is part of thinking activity that one must be able to draw logical conclusions, seeing how one concept evolves from another. This is a quite specific part of thinking activity. You can do exercises to make this thinking activity follow a particular course. The process such exercises bring about at soul level, in your thinking activity, is brought about by a particular substance in the digestive process, and that is coffee. This is no wild assumption, it is a fact that can be proved. What you do to your stomach with coffee is the same as you do to your thinking with practical exercises in logic. If you take coffee, you encourage logical consistency in your thinking. And if it is said that taking coffee enhances the activity which is needed to strengthen one’s thinking, this may well be true. But coffee only encourages consistency in one’s thinking in a way that shows dependence; it is acting as if under compulsion. You feel a certain lack of independence in you, something like an influence coming from outside. Someone who wants to be consistent in his thinking but also to remain dependent, may drink a lot of coffee. But if he wants to be independent in his thinking, he must free himself from the very things that act on his lower nature; he must develop powers in himself that come from the soul. He will then also find that his stomach functions properly again, or continues to function properly, after the exercises in question.

Something else. The opposite of well-ordered thinking activity is the kind of thinking that cannot stay with a thought, a thinking that lacks a sound basis. This, too, has its correlate in the action which a particular substance has on the digestion, a substance contained in tea. Tea does indeed act on our lower functions as something which causes all flightiness in one’s thinking in the upper human being. You may conclude from this that some of the harmful effects of tea can be quite disastrous on occasion. But do not think that someone who takes tea all his life will finally have to be quite scatty inwardly. If tea does not have that kind of harmful effect on him this merely proves that his organism has sufficient powers of resistance.

Just as digestive functions correspond to active thinking, so do the functions of the heart and blood relate to the life of the will and of appetites; every influence brought to bear on the blood by certain substances such as certain foods will have its correspondence in an active will. This can be observed especially by considering the reverse. You often hear today that the notion of it being possible to heal someone with thoughts is something that has long since been overcome; that it is not possible, for instance, to cure someone suffering from religious mania or also persecution mania by means of correspondingly opposite thoughts. What one sees on the outside is only a symptom, and if one were able to remove this symptom the disease would shift to another organ and take a different form. Occultists have known this fact established in materialistic medicine for a long time. An occultist would never dream of trying to cure a delusion by an idea that is its opposite. But it is a different story if one intervenes much more deeply, using occult means to influence the original cause. Let us assume someone has become sick in the sphere of the will and appetites; this would be due to disorders affecting particular organs. Not only the heart comes into this, but some other things that are also connected. A materialistic physician will say: ‘I cannot cure the situation which shows itself here by teaching the patient the right ideas.’ But you have to consider that there are not just two things to be considered in the organism, not only the material basis and the life based on it; there is a third element, and the occultist knows this. Yes, an organic function lies behind immediate soul activity on the physical plane, that is, behind the things that come to expression in will impulses. But behind this organic activity lies the third element, which is that the organ has been created by the spirit, it has developed out of something that is spiritual. And it is this spiritual principle behind the organ, having created it, which we must consider. To try and give someone suffering from religious mania the right ideas will serve no purpose. But if your influence on this person is such that you address the creator of the organ function—which is the ether body—you can achieve something, not with ideas but by doing something which on the surface seems to have no connection at all with the life of ideas.

To understand this, let us consider the concept of a religious truth. You can approach the idea of the religious truth in such a way that you grasp it. This is all that is needed for the rational mind. But you can understand as many ideas as you like, this will have no effect at all in your organic life—life in the ether body as well as the physical body. It is also of no avail to try and teach a patient right ideas from conviction, for this will have no effect at all on his will activity. But if you don’t think of this truth as something that works only in terms of the rational mind, but say to the person: ‘You need to grasp this not just once, but you must let these ideas influence you again every day; they have to be repeated rhythmically day after day, and this needs to go hand in hand with quite specific feelings and images.’ To do something once has no effect. But if it happens regularly for quite some time, then it will have an effect that also reaches the organic constitution. This is what we call concentration and meditation. So you don’t influence people with just teaching them something. But if you give instructions and they follow them daily for many weeks you will influence them a little bit, for you will reach the principle that is behind the organ, its creator. Occultism does not have a different basis from the scientific approach to medicine, but there is greater knowledge. It is of course not yet possible to make these ideas publicly known.

Our breathing function is connected with the life of feeling and of the senses in the widest possible sense. You can discover many things if you get a clear picture of everything connected with the breathing function and how this can influence the life of feeling and of the senses. Breathing depends on sufficient oxygen getting into the blood and organic matter being maintained by this. People who take pleasure in things of the mind, who have a life of the spirit that puts them in a cheerful frame of mind and influences them all the time—such people influence their organs out of the spirit in a way that brings health.

Going back again to digestion and thinking activity, we shall find that this is a field where much needs to be done. It has to be understood that humanity must change more and more to a deliberate way of feeding itself. People seeking to gain knowledge in this field do, however, often fall into a particular error. They want to learn too much of what they call ‘nature’; they want to follow ‘nature’ and ‘nature’ only. Paracelsus said: 'We should not be subservient to nature. A physician has to pass nature’s examination, it is true, but he must be an artist, he must take nature further',⁷⁵ And he did not think the right medicines were things taken straight from nature but new products created in the spirit of nature. He believed a time would come in medicine when such new products would be the truly effective medicines. It is solely and entirely a matter of taking nature further in this field.

People wanting to give reasons today why a mixed diet is best in their view tend to say that herbivores are ruminants and have a special stomach and digestive tools for this. Carnivores, they’ll say, are predators with digestive tools and teeth made for meat-eating. In their view, human teeth and digestive tools are half-way between those of ruminants and predators, so that nature herself destined humanity to have a mixed diet. But everything in the world is in a state of flux, changing and growing. What matters is not the way human beings look today but how they may change. If people change to a vegetable diet, the organs more designed for meat eating will gradually disappear and the organs needed for a vegetable diet will develop. You have to consider how things were in the past and how they can be in future. We are therefore not giving human beings the right diet if we consider their present state but only if we take account of their inner development and change. Statistics and external facts will only give you the existing condition, they do not show the direction in which humanity must go. One must look at the world on a larger scale to some extent.

Take the national character of Russian country people, as they are today, and that of English people. Russian country people will put as little emphasis as possible on the I. The opposite is the case with English people. You can even see this from the way they write the word. English people use a capital I. Further investigation will show that sugar consumption is five times as high in England as it is in Russia. Once again we have mutual correspondence between digestive activity and thinking activity. The process brought about in the digestion by taking in relatively large amounts of sugar has its correlate in greater independence of thinking in the upper human being.

Now as you can imagine, it is also possible to take corrective measures in this sphere. Some people may make their diet such that they need only a short time to digest it, while others may well spend a long time on the process. This again allows us to see deeply into the human organism. For if someone eats rice and has soon finished digesting it, energies are left over that will then be available for thinking activity. Someone else who may be eating wild duck, for example, and needs a correspondingly longer time to digest it may well be intelligent; but when he produces thoughts it is in reality his stomach which is thinking. One person may not be a great thinker but may think independently, another a great thinker but dependent in his thinking. You can also learn something from this.

To mention something else. Great care must be taken to give the body neither too much nor too little protein. It is most important to find the right measure, for proteins in our digestion correspond to the generation of ideas in our thinking. The same activity which makes our thinking fruitful is evoked by proteins in the lower organism. If the body does not receive a balanced amount of protein, the proteins will cause an excess of energies in the lower bodily functions that correspond to the functions which in the upper organization create ideas. Human beings should, however, be more and more in control of their ideas. Protein intake should therefore be kept within limits; otherwise people are overcome by idea-creating activities from which they should really be free. Pythagoras was thinking of this when he told his students not to eat beans.

Now people will of course come and say: ‘Look at the rice eater. He’s a poor thinker.’ Well that person eating his rice has not yet developed. The point is not one of knowing the rules, thinking that everyone merely has to follow them. If the lower and the upper do not agree, this, too, may create havoc. Think of someone who has recently taken up vegetarianism. Activity in the lower man then is of a quite specific kind. Certain energies change from material powers into those of mind and spirit, but they can grow harmful if left unused and may even limit brain activity. If you then do not occupy yourself in any other way than a banker, for example, or with ordinary book learning, you can cause yourself a lot of damage unless you take up spiritual ideas with the powers saved by a vegetarian lifestyle. A vegetarian must therefore also take up life in mind and spirit, otherwise he’d do better to remain a meat eater, for his memory might suffer, certain parts of the brain may be damaged, and so on. It is not enough to feed on fruits to have the most sublime realms of life in the spirit open up to you.

Another correspondence in the organism is the following. The function in the upper organism which corresponds to reproductive capacities is the visionary element, as it is called, and thus in a way also inner imaginative activity. This is why some religious orders used to demand a degree of asceticism, which, however, was also a source of great dangers. These can only be avoided by purity in the inner life, trust in one’s own individual nature, and the ability to maintain composure in all life situations. If one does not give oneself up to affects and external influences, one is secure in this area and will be able to avert harmful influences.

White magic demands not only a pure life, but also one that is strong and certain, with the inner life firmly in control and the ability to maintain composure in all situations. If on the one hand you have so much self-control that nothing can take you aback, then you will also be secure inwardly, and be able to cope more easily with falls from grace.

A new era can come if people resolve to make theosophical wisdom their guide in all these things. In future it will be necessary, for instance, to see how one can transform certain powers that become available in the organism into powers that can be used to gain spiritual insight. One day a substance will be produced in laboratories that will be of greater value than milk. Even now it would be perfectly possible to establish a food laboratory and thus gain influence on the feeding of the nations. But a time will come when those who study the science of the spirit will be doing chemical work that is in harmony with evolving nature and not with nature as it has come to be. Goethe thus said:

Gaze on them as they grow, see how the plant
Burgeons by stages into flower and fruition.⁷⁶

Please accept these few aspects taken from a vast field and consider that they need to be developed. You will then see that you can gain nourishment for mind and spirit from these things and discover the practical significance they may have for you.

• 72. Paracelsus (see note 62). 'From the external put together the whole human being: thus you find in the same the evident corpora of all materia, and find in these all species of the parts, of health and sickness, and also all their essences ... It arises from this that you should not say: that is cholera, that is melancholia, but: that is an arsenicus, that is an aluminosum. And also: he is of Saturn, he of Mars: not: he is of melancholy, he is of cholera. For one part belongs to heaven, one part to earth, and are mingled as fire and wood are, where each may lose its name, then they are two things in one.' From Das Buch Paragranum, edited and introduced by Dr Franz Strunz, Leipzig 1903, S 29 f. On Paracelsus, see the lecture given in Berlin on 26 April 1906 (in GA 54): Paracelsus, Anthroposophical News Sheet 1941; 9:37-40.
• 73. See preceding lecture in this volume (21 October 1906).
• 74. 'The appropriateness of a medicine... depends not only on being the right homoeopathic choice, but also on the dose being of the right degree of magnitude, or rather smallness... Here the question arises as to what this appropriate degree of smallness may be ... Pure experiment, careful observation and experience alone will determine it.' Hahnemann, Samuel, Organon der rationalen Heilkunde, Dresden 1810, paragraphs 300 ff.
• 75. 'How can the medicine be reconciled with such things, that the physician might reasonably call himself a physician? He is therefore subordinate to nature, and God is the lord of nature.'
  'Now the physician comes from the medicine, and not from himself, and he must therefore pass nature's examination, nature being the world and all it encompasses. And what nature teaches him he must entrust to his wisdom; yet he should not seek anything in his wisdom, but solely in the light of nature, and then keep safe what he has learned in the cell of that same vessel.'
  Theophrastus Paracelsus, Volumen Paramirum und Opus Paramirum, published by Dr Franz Strunz, Jena 1904, S. 74, 85.
  'Then nature is so subtle and accurate in its things, that it cannot be used without great skill. For it will not reveal anything that is in a perfect state; man has to perfect it. This perfection is called Alchimia.'
  'Thus the physician must furthermore be skilful. One who wishes to be skilful must have experience in everything, for the foundation of your skills goes beyond the realm of the arts; it is not the foundation of teaching but of your understanding in the skills needed for medicines.'
  Das Buch Paragranum (see note 72), S. 70, 105.
• 76. Metamorphosis of Plants, 17/18 June 1798.

The ways of karma are easier to understand if we consider what happens to the human soul between death and a new birth. Today we’ll therefore discuss different prospects that open up along the road which the soul has to follow between death and a new birth. A picture should unfold of what happens to the soul after death. And as we can only gradually enter into these regions in our thoughts and get accustomed to them, it would indeed be useful to let such thoughts pass through the mind on more than one occasion.

To look at what happens to the soul after death we have to understand above all that the relationship the human being has to the worlds around him is then completely different. It is always good to draw the parallel between death and sleep. Human beings as we now have them before us are made up of different parts. First of all we have the physical body. The ether body is like an archetype behind it. In a way, this ether body is the creator of the physical body. There is relative justification in saying that the ether body resembles the physical body. It is mainly in its head region, the upper region, that the ether body is a kind of double of the physical body. The ether body is the basis of our temperament, and also of the ideas that become established in the mind. If an idea becomes a permanent part of a person, so that it is always to hand, this means it has imprinted itself in the ether body. The ether body provides the basis for memory, and the densest part of the ether body is the basis for our conscience.

The third part of the human being is the astral body, the basis for appetites and passions and wishes that arise from human needs. There is no sharp dividing line between the ether body and astral body.

The fourth part of essential human nature is the I. It holds the germ of the immortal human being, the spirit human being or atman, the life spirit or buddhi, and the spirit self or manas.

When a human being lies asleep in bed, the ether body and the physical body remain connected. The astral body is lifted out. During the night, pain and pleasure and all other sensations vanish because the astral body has separated from the physical body and so there can be no perception of them. It is different when a person goes through the gate of death. We then have a physical body that has just been left by the ether body. In sleep, the ether body does not leave the physical body, but it does do so in death.

After death the physical body dissolves either by decay or by being burned, and its parts are given back to the physical world. The astral body and the ether body remain connected for a time. This is an important moment in life after death. At the moment when the ether body separates from the physical body but remains connected with the astral body, the whole of life presents itself to the human soul as in a tableau of memories. This happens because the ether body sustains memory. For as long as the ether body remains connected with the physical body, our memory is tied to the powers of the physical body. When the ether body has been lifted out of the physical body after death, all of it comes up at once in the soul, like a tableau of memories.

To our ordinary way of thinking it is difficult to imagine how such a long span of time can be apparent to the soul in one and the same moment. But another element also plays an important role here. In the physical world, every event in life brings pain and pleasure, eagerness or reluctance. And when we look back on our lifetime, eagerness and reluctance come back to mind again. After death, however, pain and suffering have gone. The images are objective and do not cause pain; they do not evoke personal feelings. A tableau of memories of this kind can also come up in life on exceptional occasions, for instance in individuals who are about to die of drowning or are in danger of their life in some other way. The best people to cite as witnesses for this are those who don’t want to know about spiritual investigation in any real sense, for instance the Viennese criminal anthropologist Moriz Benedikt.⁷⁷ He has told in his memoirs how on one occasion he was close to death on a mountaineering trip and how the whole of his life went through his mind at that moment. The phenomenon arises because something happens to the ether body when someone gets a major shock in life.

You know what it feels like when your hand goes to sleep. This is because the ether body has loosened. A clairvoyant is then able to see the fingers which have gone to sleep hang down limply from the hand, like a glove. Something like this also happens when you hypnotize someone. The clairvoyant then sees the ether head hang out of the physical head to the left and the right. When someone suffers a shock that touches the vitals, as in the case of drowning, his whole ether body is lifted out of the physical body. This then causes such a tableau of memories to appear.

A second death comes when the soul has lived in this memory picture for some time after death. The astral body with the I separates from the ether body. The ether body becomes part of the cosmic ether or the world of cosmic life in general, just as the physical body merges with the elements of the physical world. When the ether body first separates, it retains the form of the physical body for a time. You can see the ether body like a kind of spectre near the grave or somewhere else where the person has been. It has a tendency to stay close to the physical body.

We now need to see what happens to the astral body with the human being’s self-awareness. A particular kind of conscious awareness develops soon after the ether body has separated from the astral body. This is more powerful than ordinary dreaming. It enters into the reality of the astral world in a condition called kama loka, literally ‘desire world’. This does not refer to a place beyond the physical world, however. The worlds only differ in that one world is perceived with a different kind of organ from another. In the astral world, the human beings then lives surrounded by his astral body. It is a strange life he lives at this time. We can best understand it if we consider how the individual has lived until then.

Let us assume an average citizen of today has his favorite dish, something he really enjoys. This pleasure in his favourite dish is not in his physical body, for that merely takes in the food, in physical processes. Such physical processes may be chemical changes. But that is not the enjoyment of the food. The enjoyment is in the gourmet’s soul. It is the same with all pleasure and pain known to the soul. When the soul delights in beautiful colours or other things, a physical eye is needed if pleasure in the colour is to enter into the soul. The element in the soul that demands to be satisfied through the senses is kama. In the kama loka, the soul still thirsts for the pleasure but it no longer has the organs for this after death. The soul then develops an inner feeling of a particular kind. It may be compared to what happens in the soul if one walks through a desert where there is no well and suffers raging thirst. The condition after death is therefore due to the fact that one does not have the organs to satisfy one’s desires. The individual then experiences a raging thirst which will continue until all desire has gone. The more he has managed to free himself from the need to have his senses satisfied during life on earth, and the more he has made the beauty and the good of the world his own, things that are pure and independent of the body, the sooner will the time in kama loka be over. If he has already found his way into the world of the spirit, if the ideas and thoughts that are behind the world perceived by the senses have entered into his soul, the time in kama loka will be short.

Everything goes back to front on the astral plane, and things are the other way round, mirror images. Thus the figure 641 has to be read as 146 there. A passion which you produce comes towards you as an image, a wild animal, for example. In reality, however, this image comes from you yourself.

Human beings thus live once more through the physical life they have left behind, and do so in reverse. They live through the things that happened before death in reverse. This will take them back to childhood and they finally come free of all the things that tied them to physical life. The words ‘Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as does a child, there is no doubt that he shall not enter it,⁷⁸ are fulfilled. The individual has reached the point where he was before he incarnated. He will be as a child again. With this, he is ready to return to the devachan.

There are two ideas we must make our own. We have to consider an inner sensation that becomes very intense at the moment of death. At the same time as they have the memory picture, the individuals feel themselves growing larger and larger. The images that surround them, images of their past life, also enlarge. Still being in their ether body, they grow into their environment, as it were. When the human being is in his ether body and has relived an event that happened fifty miles away, it will be as if he expanded as far as the scene of that event. If he’s been in America, he’ll feel himself expand as far as America. Human beings feel themselves growing larger and larger in their ether body.

In their astral body, on the other hand, they feel themselves to be divided up into many different parts. They do not experience the astral body as something that is connected in space. There are gall wasps, for instance, where the front part of the body and the abdomen are only connected by a very thin stalk.⁷⁹ That is an example of how even in the physical world two parts that belong together may be connected by a very tenuous link. In the astral world it can happen that there is no link at all between two parts and yet the one belongs to the other and there is a definite feeling of their belonging together. In the astral body, human beings can be in all kinds of different places at once. If an individual going through kama loka has caused another person physical or mental pain at some time during life on earth, he will feel himself to be inside the other individual when he reaches that time in his journey back through life’s experiences and he will feel the pain of the other individual in his own astral body. All events and actions of the past life come up a second time in this mirror of inner sensations. This, too, is part of life in kama loka.

Let us sum up what has been said so far about life after death. The first thing is that everything we have experienced in life on earth passes before us without the individual feeling pleasure or pain. The second thing is that he goes through the suffering he has caused in reverse order. Two things remain for him. The substance of the ether body leaves him. but the powers of the ether body remain; an extract of all life’s experiences remains like a kind of residue. This extract absorbs the things he has done. He takes the experiences from the kama loka with him up into the devachan. The substance of which the human being must rid himself before entering into the higher life now separates off. The astral plane all around is full of astral corpses. This is the element the human being cannot take with him into the devachan. The astral corpse dissolves in the astral world.

To understand what a human being does in the devachan one must first of all consider the way life goes here on earth. The way we deal with life’s experiences here on earth is such that only an extremely small part is extracted; one could gain a great deal more from every event. This can be most clearly seen if we look at the matter the other way round. Remember, for instance, how you learned to write. This involved all kinds of experiences. They all condense into one thing—the ability to write. Something which initially occurred in an outward way in the world is transformed into an ability. All of life’s experiences hold that potential, that opportunity; they can later become abilities. Such is the transformation which takes place after death. When the individual is born again, much will show itself as ability or potential. The basic inner feeling on the devachan plane is that all life’s experiences are transformed into abilities. This gives a feeling of blessedness. A stream of blessedness then passes through the human being. The feeling may be compared to the one that goes through a hen’s soul when she hatches an egg. A soul always experiences a feeling of blessedness when it brings something forth. The higher the production, the higher the state of blessedness felt. This devachan feeling is no illusion. The relationships developed in this world are much more intense in the devachan than they are here. The barriers of space and time have gone. In this world one can truly enter wholly into another human being. The feeling a mother has for her child evolves from an animal level of feeling to become a moral relationship. Everything that is animal by nature drops away like scales during kama loka, and everything spiritual fills both entities in the devachan. All relationships that have developed here will be transformed with greater intensity in the devachan. When the human being has developed all that is necessary in the devachan, he is ready for a new birth.

All kinds of different forms and configurations exist in the astral world. One gets to know many different inhabitants on the astral plane. Thus there are forms that hasten through astral space at tremendous speed; they whirr through the astral world like bell—shapes. These are human beings on their way back to being born. When a human being has transformed all life's experiences into abilities in the devachan, he goes down to the astral world again. Just as a magnet attracts iron shavings, so do human beings gather the ether body for their next life as they return to the astral space. This happens with the help of other spirits. At the same time human beings are guided towards the parents who will be more or less right for the new incarnation. They can only be given the best possible body. Entering into the physical body happens not only from this one point of view, for the place and environment in which people develop is also determined. All this is determined by the things which they have done in the previous life on earth. The astral substance coming to them consists in the abilities they have gained. The ideas which have become an established part of the soul influence the configuration of the ether body. The ether body in its turn determined the nature of the physical body.

Now how do human beings come to be taken exactly into the situation into which they are taken when they incarnate again? Here we have to speak of mysterious influences around human beings. When someone has a thought, a wish, a sensation, these are initially experiences in the astral body. Inner feelings and thoughts that come to expression in the aura, are also forms on the astral plane. Anything human beings experience in the soul during physical life has a corresponding form in astral space. Physical experiences not only exist on the physical plane but also continue on the astral plane. Everything human beings experience deep down in the soul has its mirror image on the astral plane. Anything that is a quality of the ether body continues on the devachan plane. Just as every thought creates a form on the astral plane, so does every quality of the ether body evoke its counter image on the devachan plane. Our actions also have their counter images in higher worlds, and that means on the buddhi plane. Thus thoughts have their counter image on the astral plane, habits on the devachan plane, actions on the buddhi plane.

thoughts—astral plane
inclinations—devachan plane
actions—buddhi plane

Human beings are all the time populating the astral plane with thought forms, the devachan plane with forms that are their inclinations, the buddhi plane with reflections of their actions. All this is then around us all the time on the higher planes. That is one side of it. There is also another side. Imagine you have done something to someone, an action that has done him harm. During kama loka you experience this in yourself. The pain you then take with you as the pain you have experienced in the other individual becomes a power that is recorded on the buddhi plane. The unfolding of this power is prepared by being inscribed on the buddhi plane. Human beings are guided towards everything inscribed on the buddhi plane. Through the experiences that have come to them in kama loka they connect again with the consequences of their actions on the buddhi plane. Human beings are not yet able to live on the buddhi plane and therefore cannot do this themselves. They need guides. These are the Lipikas, the destiny gods.⁸⁰ They guide human beings to their destiny because they are not yet able to take hold of it themselves.

• 77. Benedikt, who by the way was a passionate mountaineer, had this experience not on a climbing trip but when he was about to drown. His description goes like this: 'From my childhood I had been very fond of water, and many of the things I experienced in connection with it stayed in my mind. I wanted to be a natural swimmer, and in the open-air Danube baths it happened that I went down. Fortunately I bumped into a post put there as a marker for bathers. It was no doubt scarcely 30 seconds that I had the feeling: I am drowning now. And I made the peculiar observation on myself that all life's memories passed before me at a tremendous speed within this short period. This observation is known in psychiatry, but few have had firsthand experience of it. I was 12 years old at the time.' Moriz Benedikt, Aus meinem Leben, Wien 1906, S. 35.
• 78. Matth. 18:3; Mark 10: 15; Luke 18: 17.
• 79. Cynipidae, usually small or indeed tiny, dark hymenopters that lay their eggs in plant parts, causing them to produce galls.
• 80. See Steiner R. At the Gates of Spiritual Science (GA 95), lecture of 26 August 1906. Tr. E. Goddard, C. Davy. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1986.

The Christmas festival which we are about to celebrate is given deep significance again and a new life in the spirit with the anthroposophical view of the world. Spiritually, the Christmas festival is a sun festival, and it is as a sun festival that we shall meet it today. To begin with, let us hear the most wonderful apostrophe⁸¹ addressed to the sun, words Goethe wrote for his Faust:

The throb of life returns, with pulses beating Soft to ethereal dawn. O steadfast earth,
True through the night, you waited for my greeting,
Breathing beneath my feet in glad new birth,
And, clothing me afresh in joy of living,
In high resolve that banishes misgiving,
You stir my soul to prove life’s utmost worth.—

In gold of dawn the quickened world lies gleaming,
The forest is alive with myriad voices,
Through dell and vale the misty shapes are teeming,
But nature’s deepest heart in light rejoices;
Now burgeon, freshly quivering, frond and bough,
Sprung from the fragrant depth where they lay dreaming;
On flower and blade hang trembling pearls, and now Each colour stands out clear, in glad device,
And all the region is my Paradise.

Look up on high!—The giant peaks that stand In joy of light above the mountain-brow,
Are heralds of the solemn hour at hand,
That brings the blessing down upon our land.
Already, down the soft eternal stair,
The shine has reached the lower Alpine sward,
Where clarity and brilliance are restored,
As downward, step by step, the light is poured—
The dazzling sun strides forth, and fills the air.
I turn, from greater power than eyes can bear.

And thus it is, when hope with earnest striving Has toiled in aims as high as man may dare,
Fulfilment’s open gates give promise fair,
But from those everlasting depths comes driving,
A fiery blast that takes us unaware:
We thought to light life’s torch, but now, depriving Our highest hope, a sea of fire surrounds us.
Such fire! Of love? Or the fierce glow of hate?
The blend of joy and sorrow that confounds us Sends us to earth: to veil our troubled state,
For benefice of Spring we supplicate.

And so I turn, the sun upon my shoulders,
To watch the waterfall, with heart elate,
The cataract pouring, crashing from the boulders,
Split and rejoined a thousand times in spate;
The thunderous water seethes in fleecy spume,
Lifted on high in many a flying plume,
Above the spray-drenched air. And then how splendid To see the rainbow rising from this rage,
Now clear, now dimmed, in cool sweet vapour blended.
So strive the figures on our mortal stage.
This ponder well, the mystery closer seeing;
In mirrored hues we have our life and being.⁸²

These are the tremendous words Goethe lets his representative of humanity utter as the sun rises in the morning. It is not this sun, however, awakening anew every morning, which we are considering in connection with the festival of which we want to speak today. We want to let the true nature of the sun influence us in a much deeper sense. And the reality of that sun shall be our lodestar today.

We shall now hear the words that reflect the most profound meaning of the Christmas mystery. These words sounded as the pupils listened in deep devotion in the mysteries of all ages, hearing them before they were permitted to enter into the mysteries themselves.

Behold the sun
At the midnight hour!
In the lifeless ground
Build thy rocky tower!

So, when in depths thou mourn,
Find thou in death’s dark night
Creation’s pulse new-born With living morning light.

The powers on high make known
The eternal word divine;
The deeps must guard their own—
Peace, in their sacred shrine.

In gloom thou livest—
Create anew a sun!
In matter weaves—
Know spirit-bliss begun!⁸³

Many people who today know only the Christmas tree with its candles believe it to be an institution that has a long tradition. This is not the case, however. The Christmas tree is in fact a fairly recent European institution. Even the earliest Christmas tree was only just over a hundred years ago. But young as the tree may be, the Christmas festival is old indeed.

The Christmas festival was known and celebrated in all the mysteries of earliest times everywhere. It is not a mere sun feast but one that takes humanity to true perception or at least an idea of the wellsprings of existence. It was celebrated annually by the highest initiates in the mysteries at the time when the sun sent the least energy to the earth, gave the least warmth. It was also celebrated by those who could not yet take part in the whole of it, but knew only an outer reflection of the most sublime mysteries, a reflection in the form of images. And these secrets from the mysteries have survived through the ages and assumed a different garb among different peoples, depending on their beliefs. Christmas is the name given to the solemn night, this holy night celebrated in the great mysteries. These were occasions when the initiator would let the higher human being be resurrected in those who had been adequately prepared, or, to put it in present-day terms, when the living Christ was born in the inner human being.

People who do not know that spiritual principles are at work as well as chemical and physical principles, and that like chemical and physical principles these have their particular seasons in the cosmos, people like this are the only ones able to believe that it does not matter when the higher self is awakened. The essence of the great mysteries was that human beings lived through an event in which they were allowed to see the creative powers in the glory of colour, in bright light; were permitted to see the world around them filled with spiritual qualities, with many spirits; were permitted to see the world of spirits around them, and had the greatest experience a human being can have. One day this moment will come for all and everyone. All will know it, though perhaps only after many incarnations—but the time will come for all and everyone when the Christ will rise within them and new seeing, new hearing will awaken in them.

Mystery pupils who were being prepared for the awakening would first be taught what this awakening meant in the great universe. After this the final acts would come to bring awakening, and these acts were performed at the time when the darkness was greatest, when the sun was at its lowest in the outside world—at Christmas, for those who knew the true facts in the spirit knew that powers moved through cosmic space at this time that were helpful for such an awakening. During the preparation the pupils would be told that those who truly wished to know must know not only what had been happening on this globe through millennia but must also learn to have an overview of the whole of human evolution. They also had to know that the great festivals had been made part of the year and its seasons by leading spirits and that they must devote themselves to looking up to the great eternal truths.

The eye was guided to roam over millions of years. Look to the time, the pupils would be told, when our earth was not yet the way it is now, when there was no sun as yet, no moon, but the two were still one with the earth; when the earth was still one body with the sun and the moon. Human beings were there at that time, but they did not yet have a body. They were spiritual entities, and no light of the sun fell on those human souls and spirits from outside. The light of the sun was in the earth itself. It was not like the sunlight of today, which falls on creatures and objects from the outside. It was a light that had power of spirit in it, and shone forth at the same time in the inner life of every human being. Then came the time when the sun moved away from the earth. It separated from the earth and its light then fell on the earth from outside. The sun had withdrawn from the earth. Darkness had come to the inner human being.

This was where the human race began to evolve towards the future point in time when they would find the inner light shining again within them. Humanity had to gain knowledge of the things of this earth, using the outer senses. Human evolution tended towards the time when the higher human being, the spirit human being, would once again be aglow and alight within. From the light through the darkness to the light—that is the course of human evolution.

When the pupils had been prepared they would be guided towards awakening at the moment in time when as a chosen group they were to have an inner experience of something which the rest of humanity is only to experience in the distant future. Then they would see the light of the spirit with eyes that had been opened in the spirit. This solemn moment was to come when outer light was weakest, on the day when the sun shone least in the outside world. Then, on that day, the pupils of the mysteries would be brought together, and the inner light would open up for them.

Others who were not yet able to take part in this celebration were to have at least an outer image that would tell them: ‘You, too, shall one day know this great moment. Today you see an image. Later you shall experience the event you now see in the image.’

Those were the lesser mysteries. They would show a reflection of what the initiate would experience at a later time. Today we’ll share in the experience of what happened in the lesser mysteries around the midnight hour. It was the same everywhere—in the Egyptian mysteries, the Eleusinian mysteries, the mysteries of Asia Minor, in the Babylonian and Chaldean mysteries and also in those of Persian Mithra worship and the Indian Brahma mysteries. Everywhere the pupils of those mystery centres would have the same experience around the midnight hour of that solemn night.

They would gather in good time on the eve of the event. In quiet thought they had to gain insight into the significance of this, the most important event. They would sit in absolute silence, having gathered in the dark. When midnight approached they would have been sitting in the dark room for hours. Thoughts of eternity went through their inmost minds. Then, towards midnight, mysterious sounds would arise, flooding the room, growing louder and then softer again. Hearing these sounds the pupils would know it to be the music of the spheres. Profound, solemn devotion filled their hearts. Then a faint light would come from a dimly lit disk. Those who saw it would know that this disk represented the earth. The luminous disk would then grow darker and darker until finally it would be quite black. At the same time the room around them would grow progressively lighter. Those who saw it knew that the black disk was the earth. The sun, which otherwise shone through the earth had been obscured. The earth could no longer see the sun. Then halo upon halo would develop around the earth’s disk, in rainbow colours, going outwards. Those who saw this would know that it was the iris.⁸⁴ And around midnight, a luminous reddish violet halo would arise in place of the black earth disk; a word was written on this. The word would be a different one, depending on the nations whose members were allowed to experience the mystery. In our present-day language it would be Christos.⁸⁵ Those who saw it would know it to be the sun. It appeared to them in that midnight hour when the world all around was lying in profound darkness. The pupils would be told that they had now experienced something in images which in the mysteries was called ‘to see the sun around midnight’.

A true initiate truly learned to see the sun around the midnight hour, for the material principle in him had been extinguished. The sun of the spirit alone lived in him, its light shining out over all the darkness of matter.

This was the most blessed moment in human evolution when the human being found himself released from darkness and living in the light of eternity. It was shown as an image in the mysteries, year after year, around the midnight hour of that solemn night. The image showed that there is a sun of the spirit as well as the physical sun, and like the physical sun this must be born from deep darkness. To make it even clearer to them, the pupils were taken to a cave after their experience of the rising sun, the Christos. The cave appeared to contain nothing but rock—dead, lifeless matter. They would then see ears of corn arise from the stones, a sign of life, a symbolic picture of life arising from apparent death, life being born in dead mineral. They would then be told that just as the power of the sun will wax again from this day onward, the day when it appeared to have died, so new life was forever rising from life that was dying.

The same event is referred to in the words ‘He must wax but I must wane’ in the New Testament.⁸⁶ John, herald of the coming Christ, of the light of the spirit when it is at its greatest height in the course of the year at midsummer, this John must wane, and as he wanes the power of the light that is coming waxes, growing more and more powerful as John wanes. Thus the new, the coming life is preparing in the seed which must perish and die so that the new plant may arise.

The inner feeling pupils were meant to develop was that life lies dormant in death, that new, magnificent flowers and fruit arose from death and putrefaction, that the earth was filled with the power to give birth. They had to come to believe that something happens in the inner earth at this time—the overcoming of death through life. When they were shown the conquering light they were shown the life that was present in death. They experienced this inwardly, they lived through this when they saw light arise and shine out in the darkness. They now saw sprouting life in the rock cave, life arising in glorious abundance from something that was seemingly dead.

That is how the pupils were trained to develop this belief in life, and belief in what may be called the greatest human ideal was made to grow in their hearts and minds. They learned to look up to this, the greatest human ideal, to the time when earth will have completed its evolution, when light will be radiant in the whole of humanity. The earth itself will then fall to dust, but its spiritual essence will remain, with all the human beings who have grown inwardly luminous through the light of the spirit. And earth and humanity shall awaken to a higher form of existence, a new stage of existence.

When Christianity arose in the course of evolution, this was its ideal in the highest possible sense. It was inwardly felt that the Christos, being the immortal spirit of the earth, was to appear as the foundation not only of all material, sprouting life, but also of spiritual rebirth, the great ideal of all humanity; that he was born around Christmas time, the time of greatest darkness, as a sign that a higher human being can be born out of the darkness of matter in the human soul. Before people came to speak of a Christos, they would speak of a sun hero in the earlier mysteries; he was seen to be connected with the same ideal as the Christos of Christianity. The individual connected with the ideal was called the sun hero. Just as the sun completes its cycle in the course of the year, as its light increases and decreases, just as its heat seems to be withdrawn from the earth and then radiates again, just as its death holds life, letting it stream forth once again, so the sun hero has become lord over death and night and darkness because of the power of his life in the spirit.

Seven degrees of initiation were known in the Persian Mithras mysteries. The first was the ‘raven’, someone able only to go as far as the portal of the temple of initiation. The ravens became mediators between the material life of the outside world and the spiritual life of the inner world; no longer belonging to the material world they were not yet part of the spiritual world. We find these ravens come up again and again, always playing the same role as messengers going to and fro between the two worlds and conveying knowledge between them. We also have them in our Norse and German myths and legends—Odin’s ravens and the ravens flying around the Kyffhäuser mountain. The second degree, that of the ‘occult person’, took the disciple from the portal into the inner initiation temple. There he matured until he reached the third degree, the ‘protagonist’ who would go out and make known to the world the occult truths he had experienced in the temple. The fourth degree, that of the ‘lion’, was gained when his consciousness was no longer limited to the individual but to a whole tribe. Hence the Christ was known as the ‘lion of Judah’. Someone whose consciousness extended even further, embracing a whole nation, would have reached the fifth degree. He would no longer have a name of his own but would bear the name of the nation. Thus people spoke of a ‘Persian’, or an ‘Israelite’. We can see why Nathanael⁸⁷ was called a ‘true Israelite’; it was because he had reached the fifth degree of initiation. The sixth degree was the ‘sun hero’, and we need to understand what this means. We shall then come to see that pupils in the mysteries would feel a shudder of veneration if they knew something about a sun hero and were able to share in the festival to celebrate the birth of a sun hero at Christmas.

Everything in the cosmos takes its rhythmic course. All the stars follow a great rhythm, as does the sun. If the sun were to abandon this rhythm for even a movement, if it were to leave its orbit for just a moment, this would cause a revolution of unheard-of importance in the whole of the universe. Rhythm governs the whole of nature, from lifeless nature all the way to the human being. We see it in the plant world—a violet, a lily flowering at the same season. Animals are on heat at given times in the year. This changes only in humans. Rhythm, active in powers of growth, reproduction and so on all the way up to the animal world, comes to a halt in human beings.

Humanity is meant to be embedded in freedom, and the more civilized people are the more is this rhythm on the decrease. Just as the light vanishes at Christmas time, so has rhythm apparently completely disappeared from human lives, and chaos prevails. But human beings are meant to bring this rhythm to birth from within and do so on their own initiative. They are meant to shape their lives of their own free will so that they run within rhythmic boundaries. Life’s events are meant to follow one another as firmly and securely as the sun’s orbit. And just as it is unthinkable that the sun’s orbit should ever change, so it should be unthinkable that the rhythm of such a life could be broken.

The sun hero was the embodiment of such a life rhythm. With the strength of the higher human being who had been born in him he gained the strength to govern the rhythm of his own biography. This sun hero was also the Christ Jesus for the first two centuries, and this is why the celebration of his birth was moved to the time when the birthday feast of the sun hero had been celebrated from time immemorial. Hence also everything connected with the life story of Christ Jesus, hence also the midnight mass, celebrated in caves by the early Christians in memory of the sun festival. At this mass, a sea of light shone out in the darkness of midnight in memory of the spirit sun that rose in the mysteries. Hence the story goes that Jesus was born in a stable, in memory of the rock cave out of which life was born in those ears of corn that were the symbol for life.

Just as life on earth was born out of dead rock, so was the highest—Christ Jesus—born out of the lowest. The legend of three priestly sages, the three kings from the east, was connected with his birth. They brought gold, the symbol of external power full of wisdom, myrrh, the symbol of life vanquishing death, and incense, symbol of the cosmic ether in which the spirit lives.

In the deeper meaning of the Christmas festival we can therefore sense echoes from man’s earliest times. And this has come down to us in the particular quality which Christianity has. Its symbols reflect the earliest symbols known to humanity. The tree with its candles is such a symbol. It is an image of the tree of paradise for us.⁸⁸ That tree represents the life-giving principle and the gaining of knowledge in paradise. Paradise itself is the whole, complete sphere of material nature. Spiritual nature is represented by the tree in the midst of it, the tree that encompasses knowledge and the tree of life. Knowledge can only be gained at the cost of life.

A story tells us the significance of the tree of knowledge and the tree of life. Seth stood before the gates of paradise and asked to come in. The cherub guarding the entrance let him enter. This is to indicate that Seth became an initiate. When Seth was in paradise he found that the tree of life and the tree of knowledge were firmly intertwined. The archangel Michael, he who stands before god, allowed him to take three seeds from the intertwined tree.

This tree prophesies the future of humanity. When the whole of humanity has gained insight and has been initiated, it will bear within it not only the tree of knowledge but also the other tree, that of life. Death will then be no more. For the time being, however, the initiate was only allowed to take three seeds, the three seeds that signify the higher principles of the human being.

When Adam died, Seth placed the three seeds in his mouth and a flaming tree grew on Adam’s grave. This had the property that new shoots and leaves would grow from any wood cut from it. In the bush’s circle of flame were written the words ehjeh asher ehjeh, meaning ‘I am the one who was, who is and who shall be’. This signifies the principle that goes through all incarnations, the power of man to renew himself, come into existence again and again, descending from the light into the darkness and ascending from the darkness into the light.

The rod Moses used to perform his miracles was cut from the wood of this bush. The gate of Solomon’s temple was made of it. Wood was taken from the bush and put into the pond at Bethesda and gave it the power of which the story tells. And the cross of Christ Jesus was made of this wood, the cross which shows life dying away, life perishing in death which nevertheless has the power in it to bring forth new life. Here we have before us the great symbol for the world—life that overcomes death. The wood of the cross had grown from the three seeds that came from paradise.

The same symbol—of the lower principle dying and the resurrection of the higher principle sprouting forth from it—is also shown in the Rose Cross, and the red roses. Goethe put it in these words:

For as long as you do not have
this word ‘die and become’,
you are but a troubled guest
in the darkness of this earth. ⁸⁹

This is a wonderful connection between the tree of paradise and the wood of the cross! The cross may be a symbol for Easter, but it also deepens the Christmas mood for us. We can feel the new life welling forth in the Christ idea as we contemplate it in the night when Christ Jesus was born. We see the idea reflected in the living roses decorating our tree here. They tell us that the tree of holy night has not yet become the wood of the cross but the power to be this wood is beginning to arise within it. The roses growing among the green are a symbol of the eternal conquering the temporal.

The square of Pythagoras (Fig. 12) is a symbol for the fourfold nature of man—physical body, ether body, astral body and I.

Above it is the tao (Fig. 16), the sign reminding us of the image our earliest ancestors had of God. Before Europe, Asia and Africa were cultivated land, those ancestors lived on Atlantis, which has gone down beneath the waves. Norse mythology still holds memories of Atlantis in the legends of Niflheim, home of mists. For Atlantis did not have clear air. Vast, mighty masses of mist rolled and boiled above the soil, similar to the experience we may have today walking in the clouds and mists at high altitudes. Sun and moon were not clearly visible in the sky. On Atlantis they appeared surrounded by rainbow haloes the sacred iris. People were then still much more able to understand the language of nature. The lapping waves, the sound of the wind in the trees, the whispering leaves, the rumble of thunder still speak to us today, but we no longer understand them. The ancient Atlanteans did. They felt that a divine element was speaking to them in all these things. In the midst of all those speaking clouds and water and leaves and winds a sound reached the ears of the Atlanteans: tao—it is I. The essence of the whole natural world lived in that sound. Atlantis heard it. The tao later became the letter T. The circle at the top is the sign for the all-encompassing nature of God the Father.

Finally the principle which is present in the whole of the universe and exists as the human being is shown in the symbol of the pentagram (Fig. 17) which we see at the top of the tree. It is not permissible to speak of the deepest sense of the pentagram here and now. It does show us the star of evolving humanity. It is the star, the symbol of the human being which is followed by all who have wisdom, as the priestly wise men did in the distant past. It is the meaning of the earth, the great sun hero who is born in holy night because the most sublime light shines out in the deepest darkness.

Humanity will live on into a future when the light will be born in them; when words pregnant with meaning will give way to others and it will no longer be said that the darkness cannot comprehend the light. Truth will sound out in cosmic space, and the darkness will comprehend the light that shines out for us in the star of humanity. Darkness shall yield and comprehend the light, that is, will be taken hold of by it. And this is meant to sound out for us from our inmost being in the Christmas festival. Only then will we be celebrating Christmas in the right way, for it will then tell us that one day the light of the spirit will shine out from the inmost human being into the whole world. And we’ll then be able to celebrate Christmas as the feast of the most sublime ideal for humanity. It will then have real meaning again, be alive again in our souls, and the Christmas tree, too, will once more have its true meaning as a symbol of the paradise tree, truer than the meanings it is given today, however thoughtful. In our hearts, celebration of holy night will lead to joyful hope and to understanding that yes, I too shall experience within me what we must call the birth of the higher human being; in me, too, the birth of the saviour, of the Christos, will come.

• 81. In rhetoric, a passage where the speaker specifically turns away from the main discourse and addresses a present or absent person or thing.
• 82. Goethe, J. W. Faust 2, Pleasing landscape. Faust speaking. Translated by Philip Wayne. London: Penguin Classics, Penguin Books Ltd 1959.
• 83. Version as found in a notebook entry Rudolf Steiner made in 1906. Different versions appeared in later years. English version given here taken from Steiner R. Verses and Meditations. Translated by F. Melland. London; Rudolf Steiner Press 1979.
• 84. In Greek mythology, Iris was the messenger of the gods. In another set of notes it says: 'an image of St Iris'.
• 85. The Greek ὁ Χριστός means ‘the anointed’, corresponding to the Hebrew ‘the Messias’. The ‘χρηστος’, Chrestos, used by Gnostics and Manicheans means 'the good one'; according to Marcion (early Christian Gnostic, c. 100–165 AD), the most sublime good god as distinct from the demiurgos, the creator god who was merely just. 'Chrestos' was introduced in the 3rd edition of the special German booklet Zeichen und Symbole des Weihnachtsfestes, for Rudolf Steiner used it in the lecture he gave on 14 December 1905 (in GA 54; English in Christmas). The context was a different one, however, and a further review of the original records shows that 'Chrestos' does not appear in any of the sets of notes available to us (Literary Estate Administration in Dornach).
• 86. John 3: 30.
• 87. John 1:47.
• 88. See 'Der Baum des Lebens und der Erkenntnis des Guten und des Bosen. Die Geheimnisse der Kunst' in GA 162.
• 89. In ‘Selige Sehnsucht’, Westöstlicher Diwan.
• 90. Lully (or Lull), Raymond (c. 1232–1315). See Steiner R. World History in the Light of Anthroposophy (GA 233), lectured dated 5 January 1924. Tr. G. & M. Adams. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1977.

Today I'd like to consider the question as to how far religious confessions can be seen, using specific examples, to have their foundation in the science of the spirit, or, as we may also put it, in occult science. I only want to consider a very small part of this subject concerning the spiritual scientific foundation of religions. You are going to see that this concerns a fact known to everyone in our civilization, even the most naive individuals, a spiritual fact that holds the most profound truths and fundamentals of the science of the spirit, and one only has to look for it to see how mysterious and full of wisdom are the connections that exist in cultural life.

Let us start with the question of Christian prayer. You all know 'Christian prayer’, as it is called today. We have spoken of it before and some people may well have asked themselves: ‘How does Christian prayer relate to the view of the world we have in the science of the spirit?’ Through this view of the world, members of the spiritual scientific movement have heard something about another way in which man, the human soul, can rise to the divine spiritual powers in the universe; about meditation, about that particular way of inwardly living with a spiritual thought; also something or other about what the great spirits that guide humanity have given us; or about the spiritual reality that lived and lives in the great civilizations. If we consider those civilizations we are given the means of entering for a short time in our souls into the divine and spiritual streams in this world.

Someone who meditates, even in the simplest way, using one of the meditations given by the spiritual guides of humanity; someone who meditates and thus lets one of the formulae, one of the significant thoughts, be present in his mind—you know it cannot be any kind of thought, but has to be something given by the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Inner Feelings—someone who meditates and lets these formulae come alive in his heart, finds he has entered into the stream of a higher spirituality; a higher power flows through him. He lives in it. First he creates the ability to strengthen his ordinary powers of mind, to elevate them and give them life, and with sufficient patience and perseverance, perhaps having let this power flow into him to strengthen him morally and intellectually, the moment will come when deeper powers are aroused that lie dormant in every human soul, powers awakened by such a meditative thought. From the simplest way of gaining moral strength up to the highest regions of clairvoyant potential, all kinds of stages can be reached by meditating like this. For most people it is just a matter of time, patience and energy to reach the higher levels. Meditating like this is usually considered a more Eastern way of going to higher levels to meet one’s god. In the West, and especially in the Christian world, we have prayer instead, the prayer in which the Christian goes to higher levels, to his god, prayer in which the Christian seeks to gain entrance to the higher worlds in his particular way.

Now above all else we must be clear that much of what is thought to be prayer today would not have counted as such at all in the early Christian sense, and least of all in the view of the founder of the Christian religion, Christ Jesus himself. In truly Christian terms it never is prayer if someone asks his god for something to satisfy his own personal and egoistical desires. When someone pleads or prays for his own personal wishes to be met, he will soon reach the point where he completely forgets the universal and comprehensive nature of anything which is granted in answer to prayer. He thinks the divine spirit will specifically meet his own desires. A farmer who is growing a particular crop may need rain, perhaps, whilst his neighbour needs the sun to shine. One of them prays for rain, the other for sun. What is divine providence to do? And this quite apart from anything divine providence is supposed to do when two armies face one another in the field and each is praying for victory, each considering its own victory to be the only just and fair one. You can see immediately how little universality and general humanity lies in such prayers, and that if a god were to grant them, only one party would be satisfied.

Praying in that way people forget the prayer in which Christ Jesus set the basic mood that should prevail in any prayer, the prayer that says: ‘Father, let this cup pass; but not my will but your will be done.’⁹¹ That is the basic mood of Christian prayer. Whatever people intercede or pray for, this basic mood must be a bright note sounding again and again in the soul as someone seeks to offer Christian prayer. The prayer formula then becomes a means of raising ourselves to higher regions so that we may feel the god within us. The formula will then also drive away any egoistical wish and will impulse, so that the words ‘not my will but your will be done’ will have real meaning. We then give ourselves up to and enter deeply into the divine world. When we achieve this basic mood as the true mood for prayer, Christian prayer is exactly the same—only with more of a feeling note to it as meditation. And this Christian prayer originally was exactly what meditation also is. It is only that meditation is more at the level of thought, seeking to be in harmony with the divine streams that go through the world and doing so by means of the thoughts of the great guides of humanity. The same thing is achieved, but more at the level of feelings, in prayer.

We see therefore that in both prayer and meditation people seek to achieve something which we may call oneness of the soul with the divine streams that go through the world, something which at its highest level is known as ‘mystic union’ with the godhead. Prayer and meditation, are the first step towards this. Human beings could never unite with their god, they could never make connection with the higher spiritual entities if they themselves were not an outflowing from this divine spirit.

As we all know, man is dual by nature. He has the four bodies that make up his essential human nature, bodies we have often mentioned before—physical body, ether or life body, astral body and I. Within the I lies the potential for the future—manas, buddhi, atman, or spirit self, life spirit and spirit human being.

To gain the right insight into the way these two essential realities of human nature are related, we have to go back for a moment to the time when man came into existence. You all know from earlier lectures that man as he is today is a symphony of the two essential realities—threefold potential for the future in manas, buddhi and atman, his three higher principles on the one hand, and physical body, ether body, astral body and I as the four lower principles on the other. We also know that he evolved to be like this in a far, far distant past which we call the Lemurian age of the earth.

Going back from our present age, through the Graeco-Latin, then the Egyptian, Assyrian and Chaldean, the Persian and also the Indian civilizations, we gradually come, as we go further and further back, to the great Atlantean flood that lives on in the mythologies of all peoples, and to our ancestors who lived in the land that lay between Europe and America, a land which we call Atlantis. Further back we come to ancestors who lived in primordial times in a land which then lay between Australia and India. The higher trinity of man—spirit self, life spirit and spirit human being—did not unite with the four lower bodies, as we call them—physical body, ether body, astral body and I—until the middle of that period.

We have the right idea if we see it like this. During Lemurian times on this earth, the highest life form was not the physical human being we know today. There was just a kind of highly developed animal form which today envelops our present-day human being. At that time it consisted of the four lower bodies. Higher human nature, the eternal in man, with the three potential elements that will develop further in the future through manas, buddhi and atman, had until then been in the keeping of the godhead. To imagine what happened at the time, in a way that may be rather commonplace but does help us to see it, think of all the people who today make up the whole of humanity having developed bodies by then that would enable them to absorb the human soul rather the way a sponge is able to absorb water.

Think of a vessel filled with water. You’ll be unable to tell where one drop of water ends and another begins. And then think of a number of tiny little sponges dipped into the water. What had been a uniform mass of water in the vessel, is now divided up among many tiny sponges. That is how it was with the human soul at that time, if we may use such a commonplace analogy. Before, they rested in the care of the divine prime spirit, and they were dependent, having no individuality; then they were absorbed into human bodies and thus made individual, like the water in the tiny sponges. The principle which was then absorbed by the individual bodies, which are the four lower principles, has continued on into our time, developing all the time, and it will continue to develop in the future. In the science of the spirit, or occult science, it was always called the upper trinity, and triangle and square were chosen, above all by the Pythagorean school, to represent this human being who came into being in the middle of the Lemurian age.

But as you can easily imagine, this upper, eternal principle which goes through all incarnations can be considered from two points cf view. On the one hand we may see it as part of humanity for ever and all eternity, and on the other hand as part of the divine spirit which that great spirit gave away at the time as a part or droplet of its own content, which is now down in the fourfold human vessel. A droplet of divinity became individual and independent as it came to rest in us human beings. You can see, therefore, that you may consider the three higher principles of human nature, the eternal in us, to be not only the three highest principles in human nature, but also as three principles in the godhead itself. If you wanted to enumerate the principles of the gods who gave humanity the soul droplet at that time, you would have to start with man and his physical body, continue with the ether body, astral body and I, go on up from manas to atman, beginning with manas, continuing with buddhi and atman, and go on to the principles that lie above atman and of which present-day human beings will only be able to have a idea when they become pupils of the initiates. So you see that we can also consider these three principles, which man has within him as his content, to be three divine principles.

Let us now look at them not as human but as divine principles, and describe them in their essential nature. The highest principle in the human being, atman, something we will develop at the end of this earthly, or, shall we say, present planetary evolution, can be characterized in terms of spiritual or occult science by comparing its essential nature with something of which present-day human beings have only a vague notion, and that is the will element in man. The basic character of this, the highest divine principle in us, is will-like by nature, a kind of will intent. The will, which is least developed in our inner nature today, will be our most outstanding principle at a future time, when we shall ascend higher and higher.

Today man is essentially a creature who seeks insight, with the will really still limited in all kinds of directions. We can grasp the universal nature of the world around us up to a point. But just consider how few of the things we are able to grasp are things we are able to will; how little power we have over the things we are able to grasp. The future will bring what we do not yet have. The will is going to grow mightier and mightier, until we reach our great goal, which in the science of the spirit is called 'the great offering' or 'sacrifice'. This consists in a power of the will where the spirit which wills is able to give itself up completely, not just giving the little a human being is able to give out of the weakness of his powers of feeling and will, but giving one’s whole existence, letting oneself flow out as an essential spirit right down to the level of material nature.

You’ll get an idea of what is meant by 'the great sacrifice', the highest form of the will in divine nature, if you look at it in the following way. Imagine you are standing in front of a mirror and your image is looking at you from this mirror. This image is an illusion but it is your perfect counterfeit. Now imagine you have died, giving up your own existence, your feeling, thinking and your very essence in order to give life to this image, making it into what you yourself are. To give up oneself and one's life to the image—this is something which in the science of the spirit has always been called the emanation, the flowing out. If you were able to do this you would find that you yourself are no longer there, for you have given away everything in order to resurrect life and conscious awareness in the image.

When the will has reached a level where it is capable of performing ‘the great sacrifice’, as it is called, then it makes, it creates a universe, large or small, and this universe is a mirror image that has been given its mission through the essential nature of its creator. We have thus characterized the creative will in the divine spirit.

The second principle we have to characterize in divine nature, in so far as it has entered into humanity, is already contained in the analogy we have made—it is the mirror image itself. Enter as actively as you can into a divine spirit that is the creator of a world and the centre of the universe. If you think of a point in this room and imagine that rather than by these walls, of which there are six, it is surrounded by a hollow sphere, the inner surface of which is a mirror, you will see yourself, the centre, reflected on all sides. You have the image of a divine spirit as a will centre that is reflected on all sides, and the mirror is the image of the godhead itself and also of the universe. For what is a universe? It is nothing but a mirror reflecting the essential nature of the divine spirit.

The universe is alive and active. And this is because the godhead emanates in making its great sacrifice, in reflecting its universe, which is like the enlivening of the mirror image we tried to imagine. The whole universe is given life out of the universal will that comes to expression in infinite variety. This process of infinite variety, infinite replication, this repetition of the godhead is known as the ‘realm’, as distinct from the ‘will’, in every occult or spiritual science. The will is thus the centre; its mirror is the realm, so that you may compare the will with atman or spirit man, and the realm, or mirror image of the will, with buddhi or life spirit.

Now this realm is such that it reflects the essential nature of the divine in infinite variety. Just look at this realm all around, in so far as it is our realm, our rich variety, our universe; look at its visible part in minerals, plants, animals and human beings. The realm manifests in every individual form, and something of this still lives on in the German term Reich [meaning 'rich' as well as 'realm'; tr.], with the major divisions of our universe called the mineral, plant and animal worlds or realms. But if we also go into detail, then every detail, too, is divine by nature. Nature is reflected in all of it, just as the centre would be mirrored in the hollow sphere. And someone who looks at the world in the terms of occult research sees the god, an image and expression of the divine, in every mineral, every plant, every animal and every human being.

The divine spirit shows itself in infinitely many different forms of life in all their variety. If one has reached the level of perception in the science of the spirit that enables one to see the individual entities as having originated in the godhead, they are told apart by giving them a ‘name’. It is the name which the human being thinks of as the individual entity; it serves to distinguish the individual entities in this vast variety from one another. It is the third of the greatest three human principles that flow from the godhead and may be said to correspond to the manas or spirit self. The occult teaching of different religions also used to teach, naively, what had flowed from the godhead and flowed into you, becoming your eternal image.

If you wish to rise to the realm to which you are ultimately destined to rise, you will find that it is will-like by nature.

If you wish to rise to the buddhi, the bearer of this will, of this atman, its realm is of the divine.

And if you wish to rise to that which you perceive to be names, concepts or ideas of things—this is what name is within the realm of the divine.

What we have been considering is the ancient wisdom which tells us that name, realm and will make up the part of the godhead that has flowed into essential human nature to be the eternal part of it. We thus see that the three higher principles in man are part of the divine.

To complete our study, let us now take a look at the four lower principles of mortal man. We know of the three higher principles that they can actually be considered from the other aspect, since we consider them to be parts of the divine principle. In a similar way, the four lower principles of essential human nature can be considered to be parts of the transitory world and parts of human nature.

Consider the physical body. It is made up of the same material and the same forces as the seemingly lifeless world all around it. This physical body could not exist unless matter and energy were continually flowing into it from the physical world that surrounds it, building it up over and over again. Everything we have in the physical body is really in transit within it. Materials flow into and out of it which make up the outer universe as well as being inside us for a time. Mention has been made here on several occasions that the whole material content of the human body is renewed in the course of seven years. None of you have any of the matter in you today that you had in you ten years ago. Human beings renew the substance of their physical bodies all the time. The matter which was in us before is now somewhere else, distributed in the natural world outside, and other matter has come into us. The life of the body requires matter to come in and go out all the time.

Just as we considered the three higher principles in the essential human being to be parts of the godhead, so we can consider the four parts of lower human nature to be parts of the divine natural world.

We may consider the physical body to be part of the material part of our planet; its substance has been taken from this material planet and goes back again to it. If we consider the ether body, we must also see it as part of the world that surrounds us here, and the same holds true for the astral body.

Let us consider the life body or ether body and the astral body in context. You know that the astral body sustains everything we have by way of drives, desires and passions, everything that moves the human soul—joy and suffering, pleasure and pain, whilst the life or ether body relates to qualities of soul that are more lasting, of longer duration and sustains them.

On some occasions when speaking to you I compared the development of the life or ether body and the astral body with the hour and minute hands of a clock. I made you aware that when you recall things which you knew and which happened when you were eight and the things you know and that happen now, you'll notice a great difference. You have learned infinitely many things, taking up many ideas; as to the things you did when you were eight, many feelings of joy and pain may have come to mind again; not only come to mind, but also passed through it. But if you now compare this with your temperament, your character, your lasting tendencies, you will realize that if you had a violent temper as a child you will probably still have a violent temper today. Most people keep these basic characteristics for the whole of their lives. As we have stressed a number of times, occult training is not a matter of theory but of directing evolution to the structures in the ether body, which otherwise tend to be unchanging. A disciple has done more if he has changed one of these temperamental characteristics, his basic inclination, and thus made the hour hand move a little faster than would otherwise have been the case. All the things that evolve so slowly—our lasting habits and basic temperament—are embodied in the ether or life body. Everything that changes relatively more quickly, like the minute hand on the clock, is embodied in the astral body.

If you now apply this to our human environment, to our life in the outside world, you will see that your habits, temperaments and lasting inclinations connect you with your era, your nation and your family. The lasting, unchanging qualities which people have will be found not only in them but in everyone with whom they are in some way connected—family, nation and so on. Individual members of a nation can be seen to have the same habits and temperaments. This basic set of habits and inclinations which need to be changed if we want to go through higher development make up our higher nature. Because of this such an individual is called a 'homeless' person, for he must change his ether body which normally connects him with his people.

If we consider the communities we live in, into which we are born, we find that the character qualities through which we belong to a family, a nation, and through which we feel we have a connection with the members of this nation, are also similar to the character qualities that live in our era. Just think how little you’d have in common with a member of the ancient Greek nation. His ether body would have been very different from the ether body of someone living today. People understand one another because of the common qualities in their ether bodies. The quality that makes people stand out from the common characteristics, making them unique within the family or the nation, so that they are individuals and not just a French or a German person, a quality that can also transcend the sum of gender characteristics, is anchored in the astral body; the astral body sustains it. The astral body thus holds more the individual, personal aspect.

If someone errs through his ether or life body, he is more liable to be a sinner among the people he lives or works with, failing to play his proper role in the social sphere that enables people to have a social life. Sins of a more individual nature, so that a person errs in a personal way, are due to the qualities of the astral body.

Sins against the community that come from a faulty ether body have always been called ‘faults’ in occult science. The way the term ‘fault’ is used for a physical defect is close to its use in a moral sense. The problem is due to a defect in the ether body. Defects in the astral body, on the other hand, are called ‘temptations’. Temptation causes people to commit individual sins. The I can also fall into its own kind of error, as shown in the story of paradise. When the human soul came down, out of the keeping of the godhead, and for the first time entered into an earthly body, it was taken up into that body the way a drop of water is absorbed into a sponge, and the higher soul then developed I-nature.

This higher soul, I-nature, can commit errors within the I. Man does not fall because of faults in his ether and astral bodies, but there is a basic way of falling into sin and this is due to the fact that man has gained his independence. Humanity had to go through selfishness and egoism so that they might gradually gain freedom and independence in full awareness. Man came down as a soul that was part of the godhead, and the godhead cannot fall into egoism. Nothing that is part of an organism would ever imagine itself to be independent of it. If a finger were to think so, for example, it would tear itself away from the body and shrivel up. Human beings could never have gained the independence which they need to develop if they had not first gone through selfishness; this independence will only gain its true meaning once selflessness has become its basic characteristic.

Selfishness entered into the human body and this made man a selfish, egoistical creature. We see, therefore, that the I follows all the drives and inclinations of the body. The human being devours his neighbour, he gives in to all kinds of drives and desires and is wholly caught up in the earthly vessel, just as a drop of water is absorbed by a small sponge.

The paradise story refers to the sins man was able to commit once he had become such an I-creature, a truly independent creature. Before that he drew on the common source, like a drop that is still in water and takes its energy from the common body of water; now he has all impulses within himself. This is indicated by biting into the apple in the paradise story, and not for nothing, for in occult science, all true meanings of words have a deep inner connection. So the Latin malum means both ‘evil’ and ‘apple’. In occult science, the word ‘evil’ is only used for errors arising out of the I.

Evil thus is to do wrong out of the I. A fault is the kind of error the ether body falls into in social life, in the life that human beings live together. Temptation is something that may affect the astral body in so far as it may be defective on the personal, individual level. And so the error which the ether or life body falls into is ‘fault’, that of the astral body is ‘temptation’, and the I is capable of ‘evil’.

When we consider the way the four lower bodies of man relate to the environment, to the surrounding planetary body, we see that the physical body is all the time taking up physical matter to feed and maintain itself. We see that the life of the life or ether body here on earth comes into existence in that the individual maintains community with the people of the community into which he has grown. We see that the astral body maintains itself by not falling into temptation. And finally we see that the I maintains itself and develops in the right way by not succumbing to what we call ‘evil’.

Now imagine you have before your mind’s eye the whole of this human nature with its lower four and higher three principles and are then able to say: ‘A drop of the divine lives in the individual human being, and man is developing towards the divine, to let his deepest, inmost nature come to fruition.’ Once he has done this, he will have gone through a gradual process to transform his own nature into what is called the ‘Father’ in Christian terminology. The great goal of humankind which lies hidden in the human soul is the ‘Father in heaven’. To develop in that direction, we must have the power to develop our higher three and lower four principles to the point where they maintain the physical body in the right way. The ether or life body must then live in such a way with other human beings that compensation is made for anything that lives in it by way of faults; the astral body must not perish in temptation and the I not in evil.

Through the three higher principles, man must seek to rise to the Father in heaven—through the name, the realm and the will. The name should be seen as something holy. Behold all things around you; they reflect the godhead in their manifoldness. Saying their name you must once again know them to be parts of the divine world order. Let everything there is around you be sacred; and see something in the name you give it that will make it part of the divine. Let it be sacred to you, grow into the realm that has come forth from the godhead, and progress to achieve the will that shall be atman, but at the same time also part of the godhead.

Now think of someone who enters deeply in meditation into this aim of evolution, and needs to express this aim in seven petitions in a prayer. How will he put it?

To say what the aim of the prayer is, he will say: ‘Our Father, who are in heaven,’ before he says the seven petitions. This refers to the deepest part of the human soul, the inmost nature of man which according to Christian esoterics belongs to the realm of the spirit. The first three petitions relate to the three higher principles in the human being: ‘Let your name be holy. Let your realm come to us. Let your will be done.’ We now move on from the realm of the spirit to the earthly realm: ‘Let your will be done in earth as it is in heaven.’

The last four petitions relate to the four lower principles in human nature.

What shall we say of the physical body, so that it may be maintained in life on the planet? ‘Give us today our daily bread.’

What shall we say of the ether or life body? ‘Forgive us our faults, just as we shall forgive those who commit faults against us.’

What shall we say with regard to the astral body? ‘Lead us not into temptation.’

And what shall we say with regard to the I? ‘Deliver us from evil.’ You see, therefore, that the seven petitions in the Lord’s Prayer speak of how the human soul, if it rises to this in the right way, asks the divine will to guide the development of the individual principles of the human being in such a way that he may develop all aspects of his essential nature in the right way. The Lord’s Prayer thus helps the human being to rise in moments of need to the true purpose of developing his sevenfold nature. And even for the most naive of individuals who is quite unable to understand them, the seven petitions reflect human nature as it is seen in the light of spiritual science.

Any meditation formulas that ever existed with the major religions have come from occult knowledge. You may take all real prayers and analyse them word by word—you’ll never find them to be words put together at random. It has not been a matter of following a vague impulse and putting together nice words; no, the great initiates took the prayer formulas from the wisdom of old, something we call the science of the spirit today. There is no true prayer formula that has not come to life out of profound wisdom. Christ Jesus, the great initiate and founder of Christianity, had the seven principles of essential human nature in mind when he taught this prayer, which reflects those seven principles.

All the prayers thus show a particular order. If they did not they would not have had the power which they have had for thousands of years. Prayers have to show this kind of order if they are to be a power also for simple people who may not even understand the meaning of the words.

This will be clearer if we compare what happens in the human soul with something that happens in the natural world. Consider a plant. It delights you and there is no need to know anything about the great universal laws that have made it grow. The plant is there and can lift up your hearts. It could not have been created if it had not been for those original and eternal laws. Naive minds need not understand those laws, but a plant can only come into existence on the basis of these laws. To be effective, a prayer cannot just be invented at will but must have arisen out of the eternal laws of wisdom just as a plant arises on the basis of the eternal laws of wisdom. A prayer can have no real significance for those who understand and those who do not understand unless it has come from that wisdom.

We now live in an age when people who have looked at the plant for so long, letting it lift up their hearts, can be guided towards discovering the wisdom-filled content of those laws. For two millennia, Christians have prayed the way naive people may look at a plant. In future they will perceive how the power of the prayer comes from that profound original wisdom that has given rise to it. All prayers, and especially the Lord’s Prayer as the central, focal prayer of Christian life, reflect that original wisdom. And just as light comes to expression in this world in seven colours, and the tonic in music in seven notes, so does human life, rising to its god in seven ways in the seven different feelings relating to the sevenfold nature of the human being, come to expression in the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer.

The Lord’s Prayer, as we contemplate it in our souls, thus reflects the sevenfold human being.

• 91. Matthew 26: 39.

The last time I spoke to you we were able to see how a familiar old prayer truly reflects the whole way the human being is seen in the science of the spirit. We realized that the religious streams, religious teachings and rites have come from something which we ourselves have come to know in the course of time through the science of the spirit. The way we should see this is like this. Originally humanity started with a universal, all-embracing basic view which in the religious confessions of different nations finds expression in accord with the differences in national character. You may of course ask how exactly can it be that the basic truths, the basic wisdom of humanity are connected with what people of different nations have been told by the people who founded the different religions.

It really is quite remarkable that we find the basic concepts of spiritual science in the seven petitions in the Lord’s Prayer. Many of the things we are now able to see through the science of the spirit must seem figments of the imagination to someone who has not given these things much consideration before, and he may easily say: All this has merely been put into knowledge you have obtained from the religious works.

If we are to go a bit more deeply into the question as to how the great wisdom of old originally came to be part of religious beliefs, we need to consider a basic question. We have to understand that anything we are able to know today, the things taught out of the science of the spirit today, were not presented in the same way in the earliest religious belief systems. We have to understand that the way in which such things were presented varied in the course of time. The old religious books you open speak to human beings in images and not ideas. These images, in many ways connected with ideas based on sensory perceptions, have been as far as possible preserved in those religious works. Thus insight is always referred to as a light, wisdom as a kind of fluid element, as water. If you look carefully, you’ll again and again find the same images in those very early times. There is a definite reason for this. Today we’ll bring together some of the things we know already so that we may enter really deeply into the way in which the very first teachers of humanity worked among the nations to which they brought the blessing of religious teachings. To understand how religious teachers worked who came before those whom we call the great initiates—Hermes, Zarathustra, Buddha, Moses and finally the greatest, Christ Jesus—we must once more contemplate the difference which exists between people’s ordinary conscious awareness and their astral or imaginative awareness.

People generally have an object-related awareness from morning till night. This shows things in such a way that they appear to be outside the human being and that their properties are those we perceive with the senses. This is not the only form of conscious awareness. The other forms are, however, hidden from most people today; they lie in the vague darkness which we call dreamless sleep, though for initiates this has a specific meaning. For initiates who know the world behind the physical objects there is a further state of conscious awareness which comes between going to sleep and waking up. In this, they do not perceive the objects that exist here the way they are here, but they perceive a world of its own. For ordinary mortals, dreamless sleep is an unconscious state, but for initiates it is a condition in which they consciously perceive the world of the spirit. To understand how this unconscious state comes to conscious awareness we have to consider the intermediate state which we also know—dream-filled sleep. This shows common, everyday sensory perceptions or the inner states of the soul in allegorical form. But the image quality you have in your dreams is something you’ll also find if you study the conscious mind of an initiate when he is in the world of the spirit. He sees the things of that world in images, though these are not as chaotic as our dream images. The only thing they have in common with dream images is that they are always changing. This table and this chair always look the same once they are where they are. Plants and people, in so far as they are objects outside us, show the form they have at the time. But the more we go towards the realm of conscious life, the more do we find transformation—the plant germinating from its seed and developing stem, leaves, flower and fruit; the animal making voluntary movements, the human being we see in motion as gestures and physiognomy change.

All this does however have permanence compared to the things a human being experiences in the world of devachan when he has reached a higher level of development. There we see continuous change. Anyone who gains access to the world of the spirit by doing the necessary exercises will see how there the colour of a plant rises above the plant like a flame. He comes to see colours as configurations that rise and fall in free space. He will only come to true vision, however, when he is able to see colours and sounds by themselves and make them move towards specific entities. Such entities are always present around us. If you were able to take the violet from the flower so that the colour moved independently in space, this would reflect the life in the plant’s inner spiritual world. The human aura and the astral bodies, as we call them, act in the same way. All human inclinations, feelings of vanity and egoism appear as quite specific streams of colour in their auras, and we are able to say that the inner life of the soul comes to expression in the human aura. The aura is never still, nothing is stationary the way things are stationary here in the world we perceive through the senses. And when an entity in the world of the spirit has a feeling or will impulse, you can always see it reflected in quite specific changes in colour and sound. Constant change is the essential characteristic of the higher worlds.

This is of course confusing for anyone who is entering the higher worlds for the first time. It also happens because everything in these higher worlds shows itself the way it is at the moment. People can hide their inner life from those who are only able to observe them with physical eyes, but not from someone who is able to see with eyes of the spirit. Then all is revealed, and you have to say to yourself: If we want to study someone with the eyes of the senses, we have to draw conclusions as to his soul life from outer signs—the way he smiles or weeps. It is different in the higher world. There no conclusions regarding inner life are drawn from outer appearances. The inner life is openly displayed. We live with the essence of things there. In our time, only an initiate can develop this awareness, for he needs to be able to live in the higher world in conscious awareness. To the level of consciousness we have from waking up to going to sleep he can add another, and this enables him to add the inner to the outer. All people were able to do this in a way in the far distant past. Before the human race reached today’s state of conscious awareness, they had one where they saw things from the inside.

Going back into the far distant past we come to human beings who have less and less of the abilities we have today. Today we are able to count and do sums. In the middle of the Atlantean period you would find people who could not yet count and do sums, and there was no such thing as logic for them. In this respect the least of our schoolchildren today can do more than any Atlantean was ever able to do. But the Atlantean could do something else instead. Studying some life form, a plant, for example, he would have quite a specific feeling rise in him. Every plant had a specific feeling quality for him. Today people walk past plants in a way that is quite indifferent, but an Atlantean would develop lively sensations and feelings. If we go far enough back, to the times of the earliest Atlanteans, we would find that they also did not see the lively colours people do today. If such an Atlantean had walked up to a violet, he would not have seen it the way we have it here before us, but as if a kind of misty form arose before him. Nor would he have seen the red colour of a rose, but a red aura around the rose, with the red colour floating freely in space. If you look at a crystal today, it would be red if it were a ruby. The earliest Atlanteans would not have seen the colour in the crystal. The crystal would have been surrounded by a radiant circle of colour for them, and the ruby would have been like something cut out from this radiant circle. Going back to those times you go to a far distant past where human beings would not have seen the outline of other human beings, nor of a plant or an animal. Approaching someone who was hostile to them they would perceive a browny red colour. If they saw a beautiful blueish colour they would have been able to say to themselves: This person comes to me in peace. The inner life of a human being would show itself to them in such colours. Going even further back we come to the far, far distant past of ancient Lemuria, which lay between Asia, Australia and Africa. Not only did human beings have a different state of consciousness when they perceived things then, but everything we may call will impulse was also different. The will still worked through magic; it had power over other objects; it was like a force of nature that influences other objects. When a Lemurian held his hand above a plant and let his will go down into it, he could make the plant grow rapidly by just using his will.

The forces active in the natural world are exactly those that also exist in the human being. Because man has become a closed-off life form enclosed in a skin, his powers have gradually come to be more removed from and unlike the forces of nature. Human thinking is most unlike the forces of nature. To make mental connections and do sums is quite alien to anything that exists in nature. However, if you were able to go back far enough you’d see that there were life forms once, the mental ancestors of humanity, who would have considered it to be great nonsense, comparatively speaking, to say: 'I am forming an idea of something that is outside me'. They could not have said this, but they would have seen the idea, as it were, seeing it as an activity and even seeing the essence of it as an entity. To get an idea of this today you have to realize that the object was originally produced out of that idea. You get a notion of this if you think of the way something or other is produced by a person. You may think of a finished clock, the mechanism of it, and the way the hands move. You would not be able to do this if there had not been a clock maker earlier on to think the thoughts you are thinking now. You follow the thoughts he has put into the clock.

All ideas human beings are able to have today, everything our thinking does today, existed as a reality in our past, a reality that has been put into the objects. Everything is grasped in its idea. And once upon a time each of them was shaped according to the idea. The situation in the world was no different from the situation we have in the arts today. The ideas people develop today were originally put into the objects. If you were to go even further back you would see that those people could never have said: ‘I develop an idea by looking at things,’ for they truly saw what was happening there, how the idea was put in. They were watching the master craftsmen, as it were.

This gives you the difference between the rational thinking of people today and the intellect of those early times, which we’ll have to call creative. But if you were to meet those who still knew the creative mind from personal experience—very different from modern minds which merely take things in—you would find them to be very different from us. They had not yet incarnated in a human body. The essential human being which today dwells in the enveloping bodies was still in the keeping of divine spirits at that time.

Without noticing it, we have gone past a time in earth evolution that would appear like this, if we were to make the comparison: Physical life already existed on earth; forms had developed down below that were quite different from but in a way similar to today’s minerals, plants and animals, and others that were not yet human beings but were between animals and humans and ripe to be given the human soul. Their organization had reached a point where they would be able to receive the human soul. We can only make an approximation, but we may visualize human beings walking about down on earth who were really still animal-humans. Now think of the human bodies as small individual sponges and the souls as drops of water which at the time were still all united in a common body of water. So you have the physical earth teeming with fife, and enveloping it a soul atmosphere—rather like our air atmosphere today. Within that soul atmosphere everything was still undivided, like the drops of water. And what happened then was just like it would be if you now let the sponges absorb the water, with every sponge receiving a single drop. Common soul substance was absorbed into individual human bodies; it was divided among them. And it was only through this that the human soul came into being. Without this process, the human substance would never have divided into numerous single individuals.

This also began the process in which human beings gradually separated from the environment, and this would give them a distinct awareness of objects around them. Before this they did not develop concepts, for the soul was still wholly within the world soul, receiving the whole of its wisdom from the communal world soul as though it came from within. They did not need to look outside. We might truly say that this communal world soul could still do everything; it created everything that exists on earth today according to common concepts. Human beings received those concepts when that droplet of wisdom was given out by the communal world soul. That is the difference between the ancient knowledge before it was embodied in the flesh, and today’s knowledge which arises when human beings turn to the outside.

The moment we no longer perceive with the senses, our inner life goes down into the indefinite sphere of darkness we call dreamless sleep today. The physical body and the ether body remain lying in the bed during sleep, the astral body goes outside. What is it in the human being which perceives the outside world? The astral body perceives colours and sounds. The astral body experiences pleasure when we enjoy something pleasurable and it feels pain as such. But this astral body cannot do anything in the human being today unless it is in a physical body, for it needs eyes, ears and all the physical tools to perceive the environment and also pleasure, pain, sorrow, joy, and so on. The physical body is just a tool, but it is necessary to today’s astral body. The moment the astral body is outside the physical body it no longer has perceptions.

This is the very astral body which in earlier times was in the common soul substance that surrounded the earth. If you were to separate out all astral bodies and put them together, you would have the astral or soul substance which at that time existed around humanity. If we were able to get all human beings on earth today to fall asleep at the same time, so that the whole human race would be asleep at once, and if we were to lift out all the astral bodies and mix them into the rest of the substance, we would see dreamless sleep come to an end altogether. The souls would no longer perceive colours and sounds with their external tools, but colours would begin to rise on all those astral bodies, and constantly changing colour images would be floating all around, and sound would begin to arise within. All this would then surround the earth again, the way it was in those times before any soul ever came to enter into a body. The dimming of that ancient state of conscious awareness, something you know from your dreamless sleep today, occurred because the common astral substance was divided into individual parts by the world soul and these were absorbed into human bodies. You can go even further. At the time of which we are speaking, night as we know it today, with the human soul going down into an indefinite sphere of darkness, was wholly filled with light; it was day. So you have now been taken to a condition where humanity had astral perceptions, though not in a physical body.

Now let us ask the question as to what humanity has actually gained since those days. What has been added to what human beings had already? What has humanity gained through incarnation? They have gained the ability to say ‘I’ to themselves. The whole level of consciousness, however clairvoyant, was merely a more or less enhanced dream level of consciousness. Human beings had no self awareness at that time, so this is what humanity has gained. It is the gift which God gave them. Religious records such as the Bible tell us that human beings were given self-awareness at the time when they incarnated. They did not know it until then, and this self-awareness will be progressively enhanced in present-day humanity. It is the principle which from the time when we were no longer in a dim or clairvoyant state of consciousness came to be revealed as the ‘I am’, and we can call it by no other name but ‘I am the I am’. This, then, is the word of Jahve: ‘I am he who was, who is, and who shall be.’⁹²

We have thus gone back to a time when this ‘I am’ word was still extinguished. It was not yet in the human being. Human beings had a conscious awareness that had been poured into them and which they did not gain by looking at outside objects. Where did the ‘I am’ awareness reside? Divine spirits had such awareness. Human beings gained it after incarnation in a physical body. There you have the difference between the Holy Spirit, as it is termed among Christians, and the spirit as such. The Holy Spirit is the one which had self awareness up above, before incarnation; the spirit as such had self awareness in the human being. If you were to throw all self awarenesses into one pot, separating them from egoism, you would once again have the Holy Spirit.

You now have the point we started from in its most radical form. We have found our way back to a very strange way of teaching. Today we teach face to face, with the student told: This is how things are. In those times only one thing was possible, a method of teaching that was at the same time also work, doing. Wisdom was poured out into individuals. The wisdom did not come from outside; it came to human beings from inside, a process known only to initiates today. If you were now to move on to our own time from the times I have been speaking of just now, when there was no teaching but only enlightenment from inside, you would pass through an intermediate period where people were half in the one state, we might say, and half in the other. This was the middle of the Atlantean age. People were then able to see definite outlines to things, and would gradually see colour covering the surfaces of objects, see how individual things gained characteristics. But the way they would see it was as if it was all enveloped in a mist of colours. They would still hear sounds that went through the whole world, wise sounds that would tell them something and bring them knowledge of other entities. But everything was still very confused at this intermediate stage. It was also the time when a way of teaching began that gradually changed to become the later way of presenting religious contents to humanity.

If we were able to go back to Atlantean times, we would find a major school for adepts. People are able to take in wisdom today due to the fact that the Turanian adepts of those times had pupils; those pupils then instructed others and so on, until our own time, so that we have a direct tradition going back to Turanian adept schools⁹³

People were put into a trance to teach them wisdom. Something which would be wrong today was perfectly normal then. The individual would be put into a kind of sleep state, and this sleep state was used to enlighten him in the following way. Before the human soul first incarnated in a body there was no night, all human beings were enlightened. Dreamless sleep was the state in vhich they then had sensory perceptions. They no longer had these by this time. The faculty had gone, and instead they had the ability to see objects in general outline. Inner perception was lost to the same degree as external sensory perception increased. But a special skill had been developed among the adepts; they had learned what we would call occult writing today, or we might also call it occult speech. You all know that there are mantras, ancient formulations of prayers, and that the sound of the words has a certain influence. This holds true for the first words in the Gospel of John. When it says: ‘In the original beginning was the word’, the ‘original’ carries a specific value which originally was inherent in those first words in the Gospel of John altogether. All this is but a shadow compared to the sound compositions used in the adept schools. This made up for the capacity for enlightenment which people had lost. They were able to receive this enlightenment in a trance from another individual who was an initiate. The pupils were thus given a kind of artificial enlightenment by their more advanced brethren, so that they would see the spirits at work again, like before, at work in a world that had always been there around them before the human soul had incarnated. Those were the experiences the pupils would have in Turanian times; those were the first religious instructions; this is how they were taught the laws of the cosmos.

Enlightenment of this kind would give the people formulas and line drawings, for drawings, too, would have an influence. A line following a specific law would have the effect of teaching people great secrets of the world. If you drew a vortex for someone, it was something he would not have seen with his eyes open. But if the vortex was shown to him when he was in a trance, or if it was tapped out, this would have evoked quite specific inner responses, for example the way a plant develops until it produces seed and then a new plant grows from the seed. Such formulas and such lines were later handed down from the adept schools and given to the nations by the founders of the different religions.

The further back we go, the more is the soul principle that was distributed among individual human beings a uniform soul. When the individual souls were distributed they were closed off from one another, and they then grew different. In sleep, all astral bodies are still similar to one another today. In the daytime they look fairly different from each other. And that is how it was in this trance state in which the astral bodies that were given instruction were really fairly similar. It was therefore possible to convey a certain original wisdom to them all. But when human beings were no longer able to receive wisdom in this way, the teaching in ancient India had to be the way the Indian body required it, in ancient Persia as the Persian body required it, and different again in Greece, in Egypt and among the ancient Germans. The outer physical bodies required this, according to the different influences that were brought to bear on them. The founders of the original religions had cast their teaching in the forms we now know from tradition as Egyptian Hermetic teaching, the teaching of Zarathustra, and so on.

But in all the basic forms of true religions there still lives the principle out of which they have arisen. The enlightenment given to human beings in earlier times was something very different from what can be done today. Things were conveyed not by teaching but in a living way. A pupil would relate to his teacher in a much more intimate way then. You can imagine perhaps that a vortex would elicit a direct inner response. Today, concepts are conveyed, and our inner responses have to catch fire from those concepts. But the religious formulas arose from exactly this way of influencing people through life itself. The sevenfold nature of man was one of the things that was made known in the Turanian adept school. And it still makes up the hidden thoughts in the Lord’s Prayer today. The Lord’s Prayer reflects the sevenfold nature of man.

This would be made clear to the disciple of the Turanian adepts by letting him hear a scale, the seven sounds of which represented the seven parts of the human being, with certain colours shown and a scale of aromas. The principle that lives in the sevenfold harmony of the scale would become an inner experience; the external things were just a means to this. The founders of the great religions then poured this into a number of formulas, the greatest of them the Lord’s Prayer, and everyone who says the Lord’s Prayer is influenced by it.

The Lord’s Prayer is a prayer and as such is not a mantra. It will still have meaning when thousands and thousands of years will have passed, for it is a thought mantra. The effect of the Lord’s Prayer was poured into the thoughts, and just as we are well able to digest food without having a physiologist tell us how the digestive process works, so will someone who says the Lord’s Prayer feel the effect of it even if he is not told all about it The effect of the Lord’s Prayer is there, for it lies in the power of the thoughts themselves. There is, however, higher knowledge that will give the Lord’s Prayer deeper meaning, and no one should reject this. This, then, is the road that has been taken by the religious truths. Your souls, living in your bodies today, once lived in the common divine spirit substance and were enlightened there in a sleepwalking state. Without self-awareness, they were able to perceive the divine spiritual powers at work. Then the souls were incarnated. The old way of perception became more and more obscured and they finally were also no longer able to produce this state artificially, the way in which it was still done at the Turanian adept school. The religious teachings and formulas which have come down from the original wisdom that once created the world are a mere echo of the inner responses that can be passed on from one individual to another. The wisdom of the Old Testament is like something spoken by the first and original ideas, the original wisdom that is at the bottom of all things, a wisdom which your soul once had. In future, human beings will have this again, this wisdom they originally had in a dim dreamlike consciousness; but they will have it in bright, clear conscious awareness, from the soul. Human beings will have their present bright, clear conscious minds and also enlightenment. Humanity had to give up the original clairvoyance in order to gain self-awareness, and as this clairvoyance grew less and less, inner self-awareness developed more and more. Once this has reached its peak, the human being will have come to his last incarnation, bearing the old clairvoyance within him as the fruit of life that is also an element which has been newly acquired.

A phrase one often hears is that people should gradually lose themselves in a common consciousness, that redemption lies in their losing their present-day conscious awareness and becoming part of a collective mind and spirit. But that is not how it is. Our self-awareness, which once did not exist at all, will continue to exist after our last incarnation. Everything that had separated out from the common spiritual substance will come together again.

You can visualize it like this: Initially you had clear water, and this was absorbed into the many small sponges. During this period of separation, everything in the environment that can be taken up will be taken up. Every droplet gains its own special colouring. When the small sponges are squeezed dry again, each brings its own colour with it. That is a vast variety of colours, shimmering, more beautiful than it could ever have been before. On returning to the collective spirit, every human being brings his own colour note with him. This is his individual conscious awareness, something that can never be lost. The collective consciousness will be a symphony of all individual conscious minds, a harmony. The spirits that have gone through the human stage will freely unite and be one. They will continue to be many individuals, but they will also be one because they want to be one though they are not forced to be so. All have retained the conscious mind, and through their will they all come together in a conscious awareness that is one. This is how we should think of the beginning and end of our present world process.

We must not use phrases but consider things the way they are. To talk of ‘losing oneself in a common consciousness’ is a pantheistic phrase. It is exactly when we speak from the point of view of eternity that we shall have to consider words that will show that humanity has not existed for nothing, that it had significance within the universe. In other words, someone who studies the real facts in this world will finally say to himself that man is destined to contribute, to give meaning to this life. Ultimately he will have to place the piece he has gained for himself on the altar of the godhead. And this creates a fabric, as it has been put so beautifully, which the whole spirit of the earth is weaving. This holds all the human ‘I’s, and Goethe spoke as a true initiate when he described it as a real process:

I ply on my wave
With weaving motion
Birth and the grave,
A boundless ocean,
Ceaselessly giving
Weft of living,
Forms unending,
Glowing and blending,
So work I on the whirring loom of time,
The life that clothes the deity sublime.⁹⁴

The deity will wear the immortal garb when earth will have reached its completion. Individual human beings will have woven the fabric as they moved up through their individual incarnations, always going through birth and death.

• 92. Genesis 3: 14; Rev. 1:8.
• 93. The Turanians were the fourth sub-race on Atlantis. See Steiner R. Cosmic Memory (GA 11), chapter on our Atlantic ancestors. Tr. K. E. Zimmer. New York: Harper and Row 1981
• 94. Goethe, Faust 1, Night scene.

Today I’d like to tell you some more and expand on the theme of human biography from my last lecture.⁹⁵ We can consider some more subtle aspects and also add something here and there that had to be left out in the public lecture. Above all I would like to present human biography to you as a whole, in all its greatness. I’d like to show you how human beings, the way we have them before us today, are indeed a kind of microcosm, a small world. Everything we have all around us, not only on earth but in a way also in the starry heavens, is in us, being part of the laws that govern our evolution.

You may remember that reference has been made on several earlier occasions to the fact that our earth has to go through an evolution which is similar to that of the human being, that our earth has not always been the planet on which we live today, but that it is a reincarnation, as it were, of earlier planets. Basing ourselves on the science of the spirit, we can say that our earth has evolved from a planet that preceded it, though this was a vast number of years ago, and, as we have said several times before, this planet is called ‘Moon’ by occultists. It should not, of course, in any way be confused with our present-day moon. Today’s moon, a satellite of our earth, is a kind of cinder that has been cast off as being of no further use. You could see the predecessor of our earth develop if you were able to stir together everything our present-day earth and moon are today and everything of soul and spiritual quality they contain. This would give you a planet that would more or less be the predecessor of our earth, the Moon. On that Moon, from which our earth has gradually evolved, the physical human beings did not yet have their present form. A kind of physical predecessor lived on the Moon, but this predecessor still had very much an animal nature. You should not think that today’s human being was present in the animal-human being on Moon. On ancient Moon, creatures walked about that had animal and human nature, higher than today’s mammals but lower than today’s human beings. The soul human beings have in them today was not yet present in the Moon human being. At that time it enveloped human beings, just as they have an invisible aura around them today.

I have said on several occasions that the human astral body leaves the physical body at night. In sleep, it is merely connected with the physical body by an astral strand in the region of the spleen that can be perceived by a clairvoyant. The spleen does not only have a physical function; it also serves to provide the connection between man’s physical part and his spirit and soul. The spleen is the point where the physical body connects with the astral body. It is because of this that you’ll read in any anatomy book that nothing much is really known about the spleen. It is one of the organs that are on the borderline of being physical organs. The astral body, which in sleep is thus only connected with the physical body through the spleen, works to rid the body of matter created by tiredness. To the clairvoyant, the sleeping human appears to be enveloped in a strange cloud that is continually working on the physical body.

In the earth’s Moon state, the part of the human being which today is outside the physical body during sleep was outside all the time. It was connected with the general divine spirit of the world. Part of the spirituality enveloping the Moon only separated off for human beings during earth existence. Occultists may indeed say that human beings had a predecessor who was animal-like in spirit. But if you were to take materialistic thinking to be the only kind that has validity, the present-day human being would never have evolved from this predecessor. The principle which had been working on human beings from outside had to enter into them and develop in order to achieve the later stages. The ensoulment spoken of in the paradise myth did therefore truly take place on earth. This paradise myth is something you may take literally in the widest sense. The air which surrounds us today was the true body of the human soul on the Moon. At that time the air was still wholly filled with spirit. Just as today’s earth is surrounded by physical air, so the Moon was enveloped in something that was full of soul substance. Now you’ll understand why the air has grown soulless and physical. The soul entered into the body: ‘And God breathed into their nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.’⁹⁶ This paradise myth contains the most profound wisdom.

On the Moon, a physical body in the cosmos, the human being was therefore still much less perfect as a physical entity, and everything else therefore had not reached the level it has today. This Moon body is something I have also described to you several times before. Let us recall what it may have looked like. Rocks, soil, the kind of solid ground on which we walk about today did not exist on the Moon. The ancient Moon as a cosmic body was a kind of half living creature. Imagine a peat bog, though with more life in it than today’s peat—a vegetable mush, if you like, like spinach perhaps. This mushy substance contained woody material. Instead of the rocks we have today, there was a kind of woody foundation on the Moon, and above this a mass that was half plant, half stone. Life-forms grew on this that were halfway between plants and animals—plant-animals we might say. Today’s parasitic plants are descendants of the plants that lived on the Moon, above all mistletoe. This can only grow on other plants because it is a relic, a plant that grew on a vegetable base on the Moon. This is why mistletoe plays such a role in popular tales.

Human beings were at a higher level of development than those life forms that were half plant, half animal. If the Moon had stayed the way it then was, if it had retained all those things, human souls could never have managed to develop Moon's animal-human being further, to become today’s human soul. The whole substance of the Moon was not of a kind that would allow human beings to be taken further in their development. For this to happen, it was first of all necessary to cast out the material that is in our present-day moon. This alone made it possible to develop the animal-human being to the human being of today, using the earth’s material. We thus have a predecessor of our earth which we call ‘planet Moon’. In it, our present-day earth was united with the present-day moon, which was merely discarded in order to obtain the purified substance that would make it possible to develop human beings in their present form.

Further back in time, our earth was a planet which is called ‘Sun’ in occult science, though again it was not the same as our sun today. If you were to stir together our present earth, our present sun and our present moon, with all the creatures and spirits that belong to them, you would have the earlier planet Sun. Cosmically speaking, the sun is a much more advanced entity than our earth. It is inhabited by spirits who live permanently in the condition in which human beings only find themselves when they are in the devachanic world between death and rebirth. They are devachanic spirits whom we might call our devachanic comrades. They had previously gone through the stages human beings are going through today. To enable them to reach the Sun stage, they on their part had first to remove the Moon of that time, just as today’s earth later had to remove the present-day moon. This had to be taken out of the Sun as it then was, and the planet then advanced to being a fixed star. A star is not fixed from the beginning. In reality a fixed star has evolved from a planet. Our earth, too, will one day be a fixed star. It will then also be a sun, and the inhabitants of our earth will then exist in the spirit, as the sun’s inhabitants do today. First, however, the moon had to be cast out.

That Sun had in turn evolved from a planet which goes so far back that present-day humanity cannot easily gain an idea of it. This would need a high level of initiation. That planet is called ‘Saturn’. It became Sun, Sun became Moon, and Moon became earth. Earth will change into ‘Jupiter’, Jupiter into ‘Venus’, and Venus into a planet called ‘Vulcan’.

Someone may come and ask: ‘There’s a Venus in the heavens today, and also a Jupiter. How do all these planets relate to one another?’ It would be quite the wrong idea to think that our present-day humanity has ever been on the Saturn which is out there in the cosmos today. It would be like having a child of six and a man aged fifty before us and thinking that the child’s powers could ever pass over to that man. The man has once been a child of six, he has gone through exactly the same stage. And that is how it is with today’s planet Saturn. It has nothing to do with earth evolution, but represents the stage at which earth has once been. Just as the fifty-year-old man has once been what the six-year-old boy is today, so our earth has once been in a condition similar to today’s Saturn, today’s sun and today’s moon. But if you look at today’s Venus, that is the condition in which earth will be in future. The earth will be in that condition one day. The planet Venus is not just any heavenly body which man will inhabit one day; no, the earth will be Venus one day. These are generic terms representing the specific stages reached by a planet.

The way they are today, human beings consist of a physical body which has the same substances in it as the whole mineral world. They also have an ether body, which plants also have, an astral body, which animals also have, and an I. If we go back to ancient Saturn, human beings—our physical ancestors—had nothing but the potential for a physical body. The potential for an ether body was added on the Sun, the potential for an astral body on Moon, and the I evolved on earth. This is the meaning of those consecutive stages of development.

On ancient Saturn, nothing existed that would be like a present-day physical human body. When Saturn was at its densest, it was as follows. When I talk, I set the air in wave motion. If you did not need to hear what I am saying, if I were able to set the air in motion without speaking, you would be able to see the wave motions of my words—quite specific movements in the air—you would see images of my words. If you had the context, you would be able to see from those waves what I had been saying. My words are the reason why the air is in motion here. Now just imagine you were able to freeze the air waves at one moment. My words would then fall to the ground, you would have something like oyster shells on the ground and be able to see the shapes of my words in air which had grown solid. This is more or less how you have to visualize the human body, the animal bodies, the plants and mineral crystals on Saturn—dissolved out of their stillness and in an air-like state. For on ancient Saturn all this lived only as a heaving, boiling mass of air. Today’s crystal is boiling Saturn matter that has become solid. It is the same with the plants and animals which existed on ancient Saturn as wave motions in the light, subtle Saturn matter. It was just as if higher spirits were speaking all the plants, creatures and minerals into the Saturn matter, just as I create waves in the air by speaking now. The creative spirits of Saturn set Saturn matter into inner motion, and those were the precursors of later plant, animal and human bodies.

That was the beginning of our evolution—‘In the beginning was the word.’ The word sounded through Saturn matter and all creation was wave motions in this Saturn matter. Think of Chladni’s figures for an analogy. If you take a brass plate sprinkled with fine sand or dust and make it sound, using a violin bow, you will get all kinds of figures on the plate. This is because you were holding the plate still and playing the bow against it. The movement of the bow creates a sound with specific waves and lines. The dust remains on parts of the plate that do not take up the wave motion and is shaken off elsewhere. You can evoke the figures from the tone colour, as it were, just as once—through the ‘word’ in the beginning—they were spoken into matter. Matter was given inner form and organization according to the laws of sound waves. And little by little solid bodies arose from the sound waves.

On the Sun, the ether body was added, filling part of the forms that had evolved on Saturn with spirit. The form thus filled with spirit progressed to a kind of plant existence. On the Moon, the astral body was added. Here the life forms advanced to a kind of animal existence. On earth, then, came ensoulment with the I. Humanity could only come into being on earth, however, if the predecessor of the earth cast off what has become physical moon matter today. Certain constituents will need to be removed from the earth as evolution continues, so that man may progress to Jupiter existence, to Venus and to Vulcan.

You need to be clear in your minds that in occultism careful distinction is made between the first and second halves of the earth stage, for in its first half, earth passed through Mars. The potential was gathered then to produce warm, red blood. The earth’s iron content comes from Mars, and the incorporation of iron in the blood comes from that passage through Mars. The initiates of ancient Greece and Rome who knew that humanity was given the element of courage, of aggressiveness, with the iron, would therefore refer to Mars as the god of war. The names which astronomers give to newly discovered stars today are chosen at will. In those days the name was still seen as something taken from the nature of the thing. The courageous nature of the soul is thus connected with powers which earth owes to Mars. Mars was therefore given the name of the war god because of the quality of courage. The second half of the earth stage on the other hand is more and more connected with powers which earth will one day owe to Mercury. The connection between earth and Mercury is of a more spiritual nature, however.

The following, then, are the different stages of our planet—Saturn, Sun, Moon, Mars (because that powerful influence came from there), then Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan. This comes to expression in the sequence of weekdays. The initiates referred to the sequence of earth incarnations in the names they gave to the weekdays. You have to start with Saturday, which was the Saturn day. It is still called Saturday in English, Zaterdag in Dutch. Then comes Sunday, Monday, and the Mars day, mardi in French; Ziu was the god of war in old German, hence ‘Ziu's day’, English Tuesday. Wednesday is a more exoteric name in German (Mittwoch = midweek, translator). The ancients called it Mercury day, mercredi in French, Wotanstag in German—because Wotan is a Mercury spirit—Woensdag in Dutch, Wednesday in English. Then we have Jupiter day, French jeudi. For the Germans, Jupiter was Donar, the thunderer, hence Donnerstag. Then came Venus day, French vendredi, German Freyatag. And then it starts again from the beginning, Vulcan being a new Saturn stage.

The human body has to some extent also gone through everything I have been describing to you. The traces of motion that existed on Saturn are now wave motions in the physical body. The development of the physical body in the first seven years is a kind of repetition of Saturn existence which is why occultists call the period from the 1st to the 7th year of life, that is, up to the changing of the teeth, the period of Saturn existence. The same powers are active there which were just beginning to be a possibility at the time when human beings had only developed in their physical body on Saturn. Then the ether body was born and with it the powers connected with Sun existence. The period from the 7th to the 14th or 16th year, when these powers are active, is therefore called our Sun existence. You have to understand that all the powers which were present in the human being at the Sun stage emerge as powers of life coming into flower, that is, as Sun powers, and develop during the period from the changing of the teeth to sexual maturity. This is not without importance, for you will only begin to understand something of the way these human powers relate to the present-day forms of those corresponding stars if you think back on the time when earth itself was a similar star.

The powers active in the child up to the 7th year also relate to today’s Saturn. Here you see the first inner seed of the widespread and tremendous wisdom that has come down to us as astrology from the times of the truly great initiates, a science that is no longer understood today. As there is this inner relationship between Saturn and childhood years, you can now understand how these things are inwardly connected. You can also see how the powers of the Sun itself have gone away. The development which will be important for the human being later on was brought to a conclusion with Moon and earth. The form principles are particularly important for human development from the 7th year to sexual maturity. This will in turn give you the right insight to realize how extraordinarily important it is that where their ether body is concerned, children have a deeper connection with the ‘spiritual sun’, as it is called, exactly at this time.

Here you have the more esoteric connection between the things I referred to in my public lecture. Remember above all that it is particularly important to give children a sense of beauty at this time. If they are not given a sense of beauty at this time, this cannot be made up for later on, because completely different powers will have come into play by then. This period has to do with a feeling for light and shade, and you can’t do better than teach your child to have a feeling for light and shadow. A quite renowned art historian I know⁹⁷ once complained bitterly: ‘I’m supposed to give lectures on art history. When I try and get people to understand, showing them pictures, they have no idea. Young people come from grammar school and have no feeling for light and shade; they can’t even grasp why a hand is foreshortened. One could build on light and shadow in the widest possible sense, but people are not much inclined to take this up.’

People can only develop a sense of beauty if they come to understand what the Sun does so beautifully on earth, the spiritual deeds of the Sun. This is very important. The Sun spirits live as divine spirits. Because of this, it is also necessary for religious development to begin at this time. This has to do with the development of the human ether body. Just as the Sun was able to take its inhabitants to the level of being spirits in the course of cosmic evolution, so teachers are able to arouse a receptivity, a feeling for the purely spiritual and religious element in children between the changing of the teeth and sexual maturity, for that is the time when the Sun body develops freely in all directions.

From the 14th to the 21st or 23rd year you then have human Moon existence, with above all the astral body coming into its own. This is the period when the drives that must be fought tend to emerge; everything that cannot be purified must be cast off. Things come out that really must sometimes be treated like the moon cinder; things truly have to be cast out, the way it happened with the moon.

We might indeed look more deeply into this time, and we would see how deeply man is connected with the whole world. We would see how because humanity is not able to cast out certain powers that are really moon powers, the terrible diseases develop which are called dementia precox, insanity of the young. This is a specific phenomenon, with symptoms of definite character that indicate how it attaches itself to the astral body which is just in the process of evolving out of the ether body. Try and observe someone who sails into dementia precox in puberty. You get specific symptoms that show a marked tendency to repeat things. The astral body if often very bright, but the way in which the astral body should relate to the ether body is in disorder. So if you were to ask such a person: ‘How much is 5 times 6?’ he’ll say: ‘30.’ ‘How much is 7 times 8?’ ‘30.’ How much is 6 times 9?’ ‘30.’ And so on, always 30. Memory goes haywire, as it were, and you can imagine that he cannot get out of the ether body stage, and cannot let the Moon stage develop in himself. Such aspects make it possible for us to look very deeply into the microcosm.

From the 21st to the 28th or 30th year of life human beings have their Mars existence. This is indeed the time when the courageous character of a person develops, through the blood sphere. It is not for nothing that people are made to serve Mars in exactly these years. To some extent these things happen from instinct. Much is also tradition based on things that people used to know in the spirit before.

Then come periods of preparation for future ages. As the soul is more and more left to itself, it initiates a process in the human being that will happen on the cosmic scale with the earth. Something will drop away from the earth, so that it may rise higher, up to Jupiter. And humanity is beginning with this process today. Here, too, the human being is a microcosm. Something separates off inwardly and develops to the inner freedom we call Mercury existence. This reaches its peak in the 35th year. We speak of mid-life, just as 70 has been called the patriarchal age, not without justification. Human beings thus gain their independence in their 35th year. They enter into the age where they do not merely learn things, but consolidate and strengthen them inwardly. With the will coming in firmly, the human body is left to itself and the inner life consolidates. Now people become counsellors for others around them. Their views now have value for others. Before, they had to follow the world; now the world can follow them. This is important, for many sins are committed in this respect. People above all cause harm to themselves if they start giving advice before they have reached the age of maturity, the middle of life. They will not create so many obstacles for themselves if they feel themselves to be merely students passing on what they have heard, but they will if they present all kinds of things as their own. This will indeed make their best powers ineffective. Knowledge can be acquired earlier, but wisdom is something that has to be developed inwardly. Knowledge is something one must first gather and which may then become wisdom.

The Jupiter age then begins with the 49th year. The soul grows even more free inwardly by leaving the body to itself even more and developing something in itself that contains the best powers for transition to the Venus age which begins in the 63rd or 64th year. The inner life has then consolidated to the point where individuals may have shed all egoism if development has gone well. They then have only love for everything there is in the world. They no longer want to have anything for themselves but are there for others. Today human beings are only developing the very beginnings of this, so that it is difficult to speak of it.

In the science of the spirit we speak of seven stages in the biography. This also shows how man is seen as a microcosm, looking back to a cosmic age that has passed and pointing to future development. Human beings are thus born out of the universe, and not only out of the past, for their whole development also has a prophetic note, something that points to the future. And what is to happen one day in the cosmos is already happening today in human life. It is therefore not entirely wrong to say that we truly get to know our self when we get to know world evolution. Letting the mind’s eye roam from Saturn to Venus, we see in the macrocosm what also happens in our own lives. This is how humanity is connected with the whole cosmos.

If you think of human beings, the way they are now, with their organs spread out in the cosmos, you have an idea that may also be found in an ancient Central European myth. This tells that the whole world was created out of the giant Ymir—the vault of heaven from their skull, the rivers from their blood, mountains from their bones, and so on. The myths of Osiris and Dionysus tell a similar story. Yet when we speak of the original human being as being thus divided up, this means nothing else but that the whole cosmos may be found in man, and when human beings enter into the cosmos they find there their own existence in greatly magnified form. We have to extend our own insight to make it cosmic, and not brood in introspection. Just as we see ourselves in the body in which our soul and our spirit are concentrated, so we may look at the large body which is the widespread image of our own body, seeing it as the divine body, image of the cosmic spirit. In self perception we thus have perception of the world and of God.

Thus man is born out of the godhead and in gaining insight can gradually return to the godhead again. Entering into the cosmos and opening up cosmic existence with all the powers of the human soul—that is the mood which may come to us also from the science of the spirit. Through it, human beings learn to see the world as the great body of the godhead, and they learn how the self has evolved out of this body. If we learn first of all to feel this in our hearts, having gained it through the science of the spirit, this inner feeling will finally be transformed into a feeling of being with God. Though still a long way off, this feeling, this inner experience, will be the completion of what human beings can learn by considering the world in the light of spiritual science.

• 95. Steiner R. Supersensible Knowledge (GA 55), Berlin, 28 February 1907. Tr. R Stebbing. Hudson: Anthroposophic Press 1987.
• 96. Genesis 2: 7
• 97. Grimm, Hermann (1828–1901). ‘Again and again I find myself surprised by young people's inability of recognizing what is shown to them in easily understood copper engravings based on he works of Raphael, for instance. When I ask them to tell me something about the whole, or individual figures, they usually having nothing at all to say; they see the things without having any ideas as to what they are. I would not insist that history of art be taught at grammar school; but I do ask how we can explain such marked deficiency in students who have previously been at grammar school.’ From ‘Die Deutsche Schulfrage und die Deutschen Klassiker’ in Fünfzehn Essays / vierte Folge: Aus den letzten fünf Jahren, Gütersloh 1890, S. 61.