The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I would like to contribute to a deeper understanding of what has already been said, more or less in connection with the development of our building, so that we can add more in the future, which will be better understood through such an episodic consideration, as today's is intended to be.

We know that the human soul appears to us as divided into the sentient soul, the mind or emotional soul, and the consciousness soul. We know that the human I works in these three soul members, as described in “Theosophy”. Now, there is really a lot going on in human nature that does not penetrate into consciousness as it happens. It is precisely spiritual-scientific knowledge that can gradually lead to much of what lies in the depths of the human soul being illuminated by the light of consciousness. But when the human soul lives in this way, it illuminates, as it were, only a small part of the entire horizon of the soul, and below this horizon lies much that has deep, deep significance for the soul, but is not conscious in ordinary life. Above all, let us now turn our gaze to something that does not usually come to consciousness. For modern man it is actually quite salutary that it does not come to consciousness. But we shall see later that this was not always the case for all human beings. If only the ordinary everyday consciousness of man were to deepen a little and were able to bring up what, I might say, is only one degree more unconscious than ordinary consciousness, then the human soul would very soon discover that it is the trinity of which has been spoken, that it is really not a unity without further ado, but a trinity. I have indicated in the writing 'How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds' that when a person begins to advance towards the spiritual worlds, he, as it were, falls apart into a trinity. And as soon as one, as I said, peers a little into this, as it were, covered part of consciousness, one very soon notices that this threefoldness of sentient soul, mind or emotional soul and consciousness soul is there. Below the threshold of consciousness – and not very deep at that for the present human being – there really is a kind of soul realm that is permeated not by a unity, but by a kind of three-ness, by the radiance of this three-ness, so that in the moment when the human being pushes back represses what he has basically only attained so completely since the second half of the fourth post-Atlantic period and so clearly only after the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantic period, as soon as he represses this, he can distinguish exactly between three worlds or realms in his soul. One area is one that is more inspired, into which dream-like, dreamy inspirations come. The second area is that through which the human being, as it were, ensouls himself, is built up in the physical parts. And the third area is where he receives consciousness of the world.

The first area is that into which inspirations penetrate, dream-like inspirations that fill the soul, which is connected to the sentient soul. A second area, where the soul, as it were, builds up its body through its own inner formations and creations, is connected to the mind or emotional soul. This is the inner workmaster, the master builder, we could also say the blacksmith of the physical body. And the third, the mediation of external knowledge, which comes into contact with the world, which is connected to the senses, is connected to the consciousness soul. We can therefore say: connected to physical forces.

A soul trinity, as it were, reigns at the bottom of the human soul, and this trinity is contrasted with the reign and work of that which strives towards unity. I will indicate this by contrasting one particular soul realm with another here (see the following drawing). This realm of the soul works in a certain relation entirely in itself. But it works naturally in a unified way, so to speak, in the sense that the soul is its temperament, its character, which rests deep down in the soul, but as a unified soul. I would like to describe this with this: unified soul, in contrast to the trinity.

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The way our soul is now, this unity soul cannot escape a certain dull life if it is not, as it were, illuminated and illuminated. And in our time, the illumination always emanates from some form of the Mystery of Golgotha, so that I can symbolize for you what radiates in some way into the unity soul: some form in which the Mystery of Golgotha radiates into the unity soul. Over the years, we have really done a great deal to gradually gain an idea of how infinitely vast everything connected with the Mystery of Golgotha is. You can therefore imagine that when the Mystery of Golgotha radiates into the human soul in any form, it is always only a certain level, a certain degree of the Mystery of Golgotha. But we imagine that because the soul of unity is something that broods over things, as it were, but contains something particularly valuable for our time, this unity must be permeated in some form by the Mystery of Golgotha.

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Now that which emanates from the various centers of inspiration and initiation in the world extends into every soul, and that also belongs to the subconscious influences in the human soul. You see, the effect of the Mystery of Golgotha is all-embracing, universal, but the human being, the human soul, can only absorb this Mystery of Golgotha in a certain way. I have often spoken in the past about the initiation center, which works particularly in the depths of the soul so that the depths of the soul are properly prepared to be permeated by the Mystery of Golgotha. I have often said that the initiate Scythianos always stands before this initiation center. Let us assume, then, that the soul has been prepared in the unified soul for what comes from the Mystery of Golgotha, ready to receive it through what works unconsciously in each soul from Scythianos.

In this way we have, as it were, split the human soul into two realms: one tripartite, and the other unitary; I would say, into a realm that is more soul-oriented and one that is more , I might say, a realm that takes up the forces of the Mystery of Golgotha into its natural foundation on the one hand and the influences of the Scythian on the other.

Now this unity cannot easily unite with the trinity, that would not work, and that is why this trinity remains below the threshold of consciousness in present-day people. This trinity is, as it were, drowned out; the consciousness of it must be extinguished. If the soul could really descend to the triad, it would immediately feel itself as a triad, not as one. It would say: There is something in me, inspiring me, something that builds me up, that forges me together, and something that connects me to the outside world. But this trinity must be, as it were, extinguished, overshadowed by something that brings the human being to say: I do not distinguish the three. — So something must radiate into the three that makes the soul not feel the three within itself, extinguishing this three, allowing it to be, as it were, like a foggy formation.

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You see, then there can be a connection between what should live in the soul as a unity and what is in the soul as a trinity, when there is a communication, a kind of exchange, a kind of soul trunk, as it were, that leads to the extinguished trinity and that emanates from what is unity but is irradiated from two sides, so to speak, is illuminated in such a way that it is not just a dull, even, character- and temperament-related unity of nature, but that it is uniformly illuminated by what the human being should be: by the consciousness of the human soul in its connection with the divine-spiritual being. Actually, I have recorded something that lies at the bottom of every human soul. Not a single human soul in our time can exist without all these things being present in it.

But now imagine the following. I have repeatedly emphasized here, in order to show what our building should be, that what lives in the human soul is also expressed outwardly, so to speak, in the outer evolution of the earth. If there is such an area in the human soul that really represents a kind of trinity, which in today's people is already, so to speak, covered by the ordinary consciousness, then we must once find a stage of evolution where we encounter it externally, that the soul really feels itself as a trinity, as it were, divided into three soul members. In other words, there must once have been a people who felt these three soul-members as separate and felt that basically the unity was felt much less in the soul than the trinity, since the trinity was still thought of in connection with the cosmos. These people were in Europe and left behind an important cultural monument, which I have spoken about before. These people, who once, in the place in Europe where they had to be, felt this trinity in the soul, are the Finnish people. And the expression of this cultural level is laid down in Kalewala. In what is presented in Kalewala, there is a clear awareness of the triad of the soul, so that the ancient seers, on whom Kalewala is based, felt: There is something inspiring in the world, a link of my soul is connected to it, my sentient soul. It tends towards it, its powers go towards it, it receives impulses from there. This people or these ancient seers sensed something human-divine or human-heroic in what inspires the sentient soul. And they called it Wäinämöinen. This is nothing other than what inspires the sentient soul in the cosmos. All the destinies described in Kalewala as the destinies of Wäinämöinen express that this consciousness was once present in a people who had a large spread in the northeast of the European area and who felt the three soul members separately and the sentient soul inspired by Wäinämöinen.

Likewise, these people, these ancient seers, felt that the mind or emotional soul is, as it were, an extra link in the soul that receives its impulses for forging, felt that what forges in the human soul, what builds it up, receives from another elementary, heroic being, from Ilmarinen. Just as Wäinämöinen corresponds to the sentient soul, so Ilmarinen corresponds to the mind or mind soul in Kalewala. If you read the lecture about Kalewala, you can find all this in it.

And it is equally important to note that these people felt that while the consciousness soul was felt in those days as that which makes man a conqueror on the physical plane in the first place, these ancient seers in Lemminkäinen felt a being that is connected to the forces of the physical plane, an elemental, heroic being in the inspirer of the consciousness soul. Thus these three heroic figures, one might say, come from the ancient Finnish people, speaking by analogy with other epics, inspiring the threefold nature of the soul.

The wonderful thing is the connection between Ilmarinen and what is forged there. I have already hinted at it. Man himself is forged out of the elements of nature. This being, forged out of all the atoms of nature, pulverized and forged together, is depicted in a magnificent tableau in the forging of the Sampo in Kalewala. And that this formation of the human being out of these three soul-members has once happened, then must go into a pralaya, as it were, and then comes forth again, is also depicted in Kalewala: how the Sampo is lost and found again, as it were, like that which is first covered by darkness of consciousness.

And now let us imagine that to the south, to the southeast, we can say, there is another people who first developed those soul qualities in ancient times of which I have spoken, the unity in the soul, that which expresses the unity in the character, the emotional qualities, in the temperament. This people is a Slavic people, while the people facing them are the Finnish people. This Slavic people receives its influences from Skythianos, who also lived for a time in ancient times, surrounded by the ancient Scythian people. It is not at all necessary that a highly developed people also live around an initiation center, but rather, in the course of development, what is necessary must happen. And the penetration of a certain form of the Mystery of Golgotha is the penetration of the Greek-Byzantine culture into Slavdom. What I have drawn for you here as a center of Greek-Byzantine culture, you can safely take as Constantinople on the map of Europe, because that is basically Constantinople.

So now we have souls that find themselves impregnated with a Slavic basic type. These are souls that, on the one hand, are connected with that which can lead to a unified being through the Mystery of Golgotha, which can prepare for Christianity in unified souls, and on the other hand, receive the Mystery of Golgotha in a very specific form, something like the inspiration, the influence of the Mystery of Golgotha, as it emanated from the Byzantine-Greek culture.

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But now something else must come, from a certain point, as it were. What was there in the Finnish people as the division, the separation into the three elements, the sediment of which is so magnificently contained in Kalevala, that must be wiped out. It can only be eradicated if an external influence comes, can only be eradicated by the advance of a people or a part of a people that is predisposed from the outset to feel not the trinity but the unity in the soul, not the unity that one receives from the mystery of Golgotha but the unity that one has by nature, as it were. If you look at the Finnish people, you find that they are particularly predisposed to develop an awareness of the trinity. And this trinity cannot be expressed more meaningfully in its relationship to the cosmos than it has been in Kalewala. But then in the north it had to be whitewashed, overcast by what, as it were, extinguishes the awareness of this trinity. A tribe was pressing down there that carried in a natural way in its soul what was there at that time as the striving for unity, which was expressed in a completely different way, at a completely different stage in Goethe's “Faust”, but also in Faust in general, something that is unaware of the threefold nature of the soul, that strives for the unity of the ego. Here, at a primitive stage, it has a destructive effect on the three soul members.

Now the Finnish people were one such people, who still felt naturally, otherwise they would not have felt the three soul members. That which flows along, extinguishing the trinity, this flowing in, pushing in, was felt as a r r r, and because it was felt as something that, one might say, is best expressed in occult language in the letters, in the sound u u o, so that one would like to say: It comes close, one must actually be afraid of it, so it breathes in the rruuo and settles, which is always felt by the Tau, t, when it penetrates into the human soul. Just as the penetration into the human soul of the ancient Jehovah is expressed by the s, by the Hebrew “Shin”, so this penetration into the soul is generally expressed by the s-sound. All this is connected with what penetrates into the soul and takes hold in the soul; all this pushes towards i, the meaning of which is well known. In the Finnish people, it is connected with rruu. That is why they felt this rutsi, ruotsi, and that is why they called the peoples who were pushing down there, the Rutsi, Ruotsi. And gradually the Slavs adopted this name, and because they associated themselves with what was pushing down from above, what the Finns called, they called themselves Rutsi, which later became the name Russians.

So you see, all that is told externally in history had to be that these peoples sitting down here called the Varangian tribes, which were actually Norman-Germanic tribes that had to join with the Slavic tribes. This is based on something that had to be, that was necessary due to the nature of the human soul. And so it came about that later in the east of Europe the element of the Russian entered into the European folk-tale. In the element of the Russian all that I have spoken of really lives. Above all, the Norman-Germanic element lives in it, even living in the name from which the name Russian has come, because it has come by the route I have indicated.

In a profound way, Kalewala expresses that the greatness of the Finnish people is based on the fact that they actually prepare unity in the trinity, prepare for the acceptance of that unity by extinguishing the trinity, and that unity is no longer only human, but is divine, and the divine hero of the Mystery of Golgotha lives in it.

In order for a group of people to be able to absorb what comes to them, they must first be prepared. In this way we get an impression of what must happen inwardly so that what happens outwardly can be fulfilled in evolution. I said that Kalevala expresses in a magnificent way that the Finnish people had to provide this preparation, in that the mystery of Golgotha is introduced into Kalevala in a peculiar way at the end. Christ appears at the end of Kalevala, but by throwing his impulse into Finnish life, Wäinämöinen goes out of the country, which expresses that the originally great, the meaningful, that has come into Europe through the Finnish element, is a preparatory stage for Christianity and receives Christianity like a message from outside.

Just as we see in the individual human being that he or she must be prepared in an extraordinarily complicated way, so to speak, so that his soul can then find what it needs from the most diverse sides in order to live in a particular incarnation, so it is with nations. A nation is not something quite so simple and homogeneous, but a nation is something in which many things converge. The people who live over there in the east, all of this has come together in them. And all that is inwardly spiritual in them, one could say, is outwardly hinted at, even if only in a slight way. I have said that there must be a soul strain in this nation that leads from below to above, or from above to below, if it is a connecting soul strain. This was present in a mighty road that went from the Black Sea to the Gulf of Finland, and on which an exchange took place between the Greek-Byzantine cultural element and the natural element of the Rutsi.

Man has to go through different things in the course of his various incarnations. One incarnation must always build upon the other. The human being can only do this by drawing upon the substance, the material, of which the individual peoples and their members are formed, and by truly drawing upon the forces that will later enable human evolution to take place. There comes a time when a human soul must find in its incarnations a physical body that has been formed from the forces I have described here. And what is so easily said, that a person is born a Russian, has a profound, a colossal significance. That a person is born a Russian means that, through the various incarnations, he has arrived at a point in his earthly career where he can only experience what he can by passing through a life between birth and death in a physical body that is composed in such a way. If one did not live through it in such a body, then one would lack something in what one acquires from incarnation to incarnation. Foolish people – I say this without any nuance of feeling, but as a technical term – have repeatedly spoken of the saying: 'The world is best understood in its truth when it appears in its simplicity'. That is not true, it is just convenient. Deep minds have always said, most recently and most forcefully Ralph Waldo Emerson, that one only penetrates to the truth of the facts when one recognizes them in all their complexity. It is not so simple to understand what is alive in the world and what is connected with the whole evolution of the world.

And just as it is on the eastern half of the European peninsula that souls are prepared to experience something special, so it is for all other cases on the earth's surface, so the individual national characters are prepared in a complicated way. Now, above all, remember one thing that we have become sufficiently familiar with in the course of our spiritual studies.

To a certain extent, when a person has passed through the gate of death, by looking back on his last life on earth, he is dependent on what he has experienced in his last life on earth. We know that the connections with earlier lives on earth play a role in the afterlife for many years. But that has to be the case. The human being must pass through a physical incarnation so that during the time between death and a new birth, certain memories of this previous incarnation are present and certain impulses from this previous incarnation reach into the present. Because he was a very specific human being with a specific organism, which was subject to certain influences due to the conditions on earth, the impressions after death, which go back in terms of memory, also continue to have an effect to a certain extent. These are influenced and affected by this, they take on a certain shade. This is the shade that a soul receives from having passed through a particular nationality, which it gets from a particular nationality. This is increasingly being shed as the national gives way to the international. But today this is still present to a great extent, otherwise today's events could not have occurred. To a certain extent, people still look back on what they experienced through their organism – insofar as it is nationally determined – in the previous life between birth and death. Now the souls that pass through bodies in the way described today, that have just been prepared in this particular way, are prepared in a very specific way for the life they enter after they have passed through the gate of death. Of course, individuality is not affected, only what is, as it were, like the clothes, the covers of the actual individuality. But these clothes or covers, with which nationality is connected, still give something that the soul also has after death, of which it knows that it has belonged to your passage through earthly life.

If the soul has now passed through a body that has been prepared in this way – exoterically one would say that it has passed through a Russian body in an incarnation – then it naturally has the nuance of the outer shell, which after death becomes an idea that one has of oneself, as one otherwise has ideas of oneself. Into this, it has incorporated everything that is expressed here (see drawing $. 49) in this way, and if one wants to express what the soul undergoes inwardly from having a body that is so composed, one can say the following. We know from our previous considerations that consciousness changes in a certain way after death; it attains a higher degree, becomes clearer, more intense after death than it is in a physical body. Having gone through what was meant before, the soul prepares to enter into a particularly intimate relationship after death with those beings who, like special guardian spirits, live above the actual human individualities and belong to the next higher hierarchy, the hierarchy of the Angeloi. In the life after death, which follows a Russian incarnation of a soul, it is predisposed, as it were, to identify with its angelos, to view the spiritual world, so to speak, with the eyes of the angelos, to use a rough expression.

The human being strives upwards to the higher self. This higher self expresses itself in the most diverse ways. Read the last Munich cycle on “The Secrets of the Threshold”. There you dealt with how consciousness becomes something else, how the soul, as it were, permeates the angelos. It must permeate itself with it and prepares itself for the permeation with the angelos by living itself through the gate of death into the spiritual world after life in a Russian body that has been prepared as we have described. So that we can say: The one who has gone through a Russian body actually feels everything more subtly after death because he is particularly imbued in his entire being with an angelos, with the protective genius of the next higher hierarchy.

But for people of Western culture, it is the case that one is less strongly impregnated, less strongly imbued after death with the essence of the angelos. If you go through a Western incarnation, you are more likely to experience the following after death: I still feel the way I used to feel, I still look at the world the way I used to look at it. - It feels like a special art to grow together with one's Angelos. For the Russian people, it is something natural to always be with one's Angelos. The soul passes through all possible nationalities on its way through the incarnations and must also pass through this incarnation, where it receives the impulse to merge more fully with its angelos, to grow together with its angelos, to see with its spiritual eye into the spiritual world.

Of course, more than in other periods between death and a new birth, this refers to the period immediately after death, the next few years or one and a half to two decades, because in the main period before and after the “midnight” of which I have already spoken, the soul discards such things. So this refers to the time when a person is still influenced by what they have experienced in their physical body, when that is still having an effect.

And now, after we have dealt with this, let us turn our gaze to the spiritual world, so to speak to the inner world in which we live, by adding to our consideration that it only corresponds to the limited human mind when it believes that it is only surrounded by physical people. He is always surrounded by the deceased, by those who live in the spiritual world. So we have deceased souls in our environment who have gone through physical, Russian bodies that have a great tendency to live more than Angelos, I would say, in their present state of mind than as humans.

After such an incarnation, the etheric body dissolves particularly quickly into the surrounding etheric world, while in the case of Western nations the etheric body is more compact, holds together more, and dissolves more slowly into the surrounding etheric world. Now, however, we are already living in a time, namely since the last third of the 19th century, as I have often indicated, when Michael has taken power in the spiritual world, after Gabriel ruled before. We are now living in a time when these conditions are emerging particularly strongly in the spiritual world, and what has been described is having a particularly strong effect in the spiritual world. For it is incumbent upon our time to prepare the great event that I already hinted at in the first mystery drama, 'The Portal of Initiation': the appearance of the Christ in a spiritual form before man. This event of the appearance of the Christ, as Theodora has indicated, can only be brought about if the rule of Michael spreads more and more. This is still a process in the spiritual world. Michael is fighting for the approach of the Christ on the plane that borders on our world. He needs his hosts, his fighters, to do this. Now important fighters are being delivered to him, important hosts from those souls that have gone through a Russian body in the present incarnation. So that we can almost see in the spiritual world a kind of conquest by Michael for the approach of the Christ. For this he recruits a host, a series of important fighters from the souls that have gone through Russian bodies, because they are predisposed to identify with their Angelos. This makes them particularly suitable for summoning the forces to create the image through which the Christ is to appear in purity. To prevent him from appearing in the wrong form, in subjective human imagination, so that he appears in the right image, Michael must fight the battle I have indicated. He can fight it particularly through those souls who naturally carry this consciousness of Angelos within them. This makes them particularly prepared. Also, because their etheric body dissolves very easily, they have nothing in their etheric body that could cause the Christ to appear in a false form, in false imaginations.

In order for everything that should happen in the world to happen correctly, various links in the world order must work together. In order for what I have described to happen, an idiosyncrasy must be combated that is more prevalent in the West, especially in souls that have gone through a French incarnation. These souls, because of their nationality, have the peculiar tendency to hold on to their etheric body, to hold on to a very specific imaginative form in the etheric body for a long time. This cannot be combated by the Western souls alone, but these Western souls must be helped, one might say, to disperse these etheric bodies in the general world ether, so that a false image of the Christ-appearance is not created. So the hosts who fight under Michael must work together to combat those souls who have passed through French bodies.

This is what clairvoyant consciousness was able to see as the basis of our present evolution, especially in the last third of the 19th century and into our time. More and more, a spiritual battle developed in the spiritual world, in the astral world, between Russia and France - naturally in that which is spiritually fundamental - and this battle grew ever stronger. A battle in the spiritual world actually means cooperation in the physical world, but it is already a picture of the battle, of the opposing forces, and those who look into the spiritual world have seen an intensification of the spiritual battle between West and East since the last third of the 19th century and into our time , through Central Europe, the battle in heaven, one could already call it that, which consists in the fact that more and more crowds in the East have been gathered under the rule of Michael, in order to prevent all that which could prevent the appearance of Christ in the West, in the West that is growing more and more into materialism.

Yes, my dear friends, where there is a high culture, a culture as distinct and mature as in France, the soul has adopted certain imaginations. These imaginations remain after death, but they prevent something completely new from coming, something that must come through the Christ. Therefore, especially in the spiritual world, what passes from a fully mature culture into the souls must be fought against. Michael cannot choose his hosts from a fully mature culture; they must first be cleansed of a particular imagination. Hence the grandiose picture behind the scene of the spiritual world: the struggle of the East against the West, the host of Michael against the souls of the West that have become independent.

And you see, the outer physical expression of a spiritual battle is a physical alliance. What allies itself on the physical plane expresses by doing so that it is in a battle on the spiritual plane. People become allies on the physical plane when they have to fight each other on the spiritual plane. From this you can see once again how seriously we must take the words of Maya and truth. The word of Maya and the truth is often spoken, but it remains theory, because anyone who looks into the spiritual world and sees what underlies the physical world is overcome by the feeling of the most tremendous shock when he seriously penetrates from Maya to truth and finds the truth behind what lives in Maya. Truth must often be expressed in quite different words than on the physical plane.

What is called an alliance on the physical plane is often called war on the spiritual plane. Of course, one must not make false constructions by seeking what one finds on the physical plane in its opposite in the spiritual, because it is not so for all things. One must seek things in their reality in the spiritual. In some cases it is absolutely true that what happens on the physical plane can be a direct reflection of what happens in the spiritual world. In other cases there is such a colossal contrast as here between the East and the West, where on the physical plane there is an alliance in Maja and in the spiritual world there is a struggle of infinitely greater significance. For through this struggle it must gradually be brought about that a true image emerges from the etheric world, an image of the Being that in our time, in the course of the twentieth century, is to approach humanity, in whom Christ is.

We will continue with such reflections at the next opportunity. But I ask you to take such things as today's in all seriousness, because I assure you that when they are first found, they are sufficiently shocking.

If there is a sphere in the human soul that really constitutes a kind of triad, which, in the case of modern man, is, as it were, covered by his ordinary consciousness, we should also be able to find in evolution a stage that reveals this outwardly; that is to say, a stage in which the soul really feels its threefold nature and in which the three members of the soul appear separately. In other words: A nation must once have existed that felt these soul-parts separately, in such a way that the “one-ness” was, after all, felt within the soul far less than the “threefold-ness”, and so that this threefold nature of the soul was still thought of in connection with the cosmos.

Such a nation really existed in Europe and it left behind an important monument of culture, concerning which I have already spoken to you. This nation once experienced within the soul the soul's threefold character—and just there, where it should exist—and this was the Finnish nation. This stage of culture is expressed in the epic poem “Kalevala”. What is set forth in “Kalevala”, contains a clear consciousness of the soul’s threefold nature. Thus, the ancient seers, upon whose visionary power the “Kalevala” is based, felt: “The world contains an inspiring element and one of the members of my soul is connected with it; my sentient soul receives its impulses from there.” This nation, or these ancient seers, experienced the inspiring element of the sentient soul almost as a human-divine, or a human-heroic essence, and they called it “Wainamoinen”. This is nothing but the inspiring element of the sentient soul, inspiring it from out [of] the cosmos, and all the destinies of Wainamoinen, described in “Kalevala”, express the fact that this form of consciousness once existed in a nation that was widely spread in the north-eastern territory of Europe, a nation that experienced the three parts of the soul separately and felt that the sentient soul was inspired by Wainamoinen.

In the same way, this nation, or these ancient seers, felt that the understanding soul was, as it were, a special member of the soul, that receives its forging impulses—or that which forges within the soul and builds it up—from another Being, called Ilmarinen. Just as in the Kalevala Wainamoinen corresponds to the sentient soul, so Ilmarinen corresponds to the understanding soul. If you read my lecture on “Kalevala”, you will find in it all these explanations.

In the same way, that nation, or those ancient seers (but we must bear in mind the fact that the consciousness-soul was, at that time, experienced as something that enabled the human being to be a conqueror upon the physical plane) experienced that Lemminkainen was a Being connected with the powers of the physical plane, an elemental, heroic Being, the inspirator of the consciousness-soul. Thus, if we speak in accordance with other epic poems, we may say that these three heroic characters come from the Finnish nation and inspire the threefold nature of the soul.

Wonderful is the relationship between Ilmarinen and what is being forged there. I have already pointed out that in “Kalevala” the human being is forged out of the various elements of Nature. In “Kalevala”, this Being, forged, as it were, out of all the atoms of Nature, the Being that is pulverised, and then forged together, is described in a marvellous picture as the forging of Sampo. The fact that once upon a time the human being was really formed out of these three soul-parts and then passed over, as it were, into a “pralaya”, in order to emerge again later on, all this is described in “Kalevala” in the part where Sampo is lost and found again: it is, as it were, the re-discovery of something over which the darkness of consciousness was first spread out.

Let us now imagine that in the south, or rather in the southeast, another nation faces the Finnish nation, one that developed in ancient times the soul-qualities mentioned to you: a uniform character of the soul, a soul-element expressing this uniform character in the qualities of its character, feeling and temperament. This nation is a Slav nation, influenced by Scythianos, who lived in the remote past for some time in the environment of the ancient Scythian nation. However, a nation living in the neighbourhood of a centre of initiation need not at all be a highly developed nation, but instead, the necessary things must take place in the course of evolution. With the penetration of the Graeco-Byzantine culture into Slavism, a particular form of the Mystery of Golgotha also penetrated into it. What I have indicated, here, as the centre of the Graeco-Byzantine culture, may be taken, if you like, as Constantinople on the map of Europe, for it is, after all, Constantinople.

Thus we have before us souls impregnated with a fundamentally Slav type, souls that are, on the one hand, connected with something that can lead, through the Mystery of Golgotha, to a uniform soul-essence and may thus prepare these souls having a uniform character for Christianity, and on the other hand, these souls take up the Mystery of Golgotha in a very definite form, resembling an inspiration or an influence coming from the Mystery of Golgotha, in the form in which it went out of the Graeco-Byzantine culture.

But something else must now take place. The following thing must, as it were, come from a certain point.—The separation that existed in the Finnish nation, the division of the three soul-parts, set forth so wonderfully in “Kalevala”, must now be obliterated. This can only be obliterated through an influence from outside; it can only be obliterated through the circumstance of an advancing nation, or part of nation, predisposed from the very outset to experience within the soul its “one-ness”, not its “threefold-ness”, but this “one-ness” is not the one obtained through the Mystery of Golgotha, but a kind that this nation possessed through its own nature. If we study the Finnish nation, we shall find that it is particularly disposed to develop the consciousness of the soul’s threefold character; this threefold character and its connection with the cosmos cannot be expressed more significantly than it has been expressed in “Kalevala”. But in the north, this had to be whitewashed, it had to be clouded over, as it were, by something that obliterates the consciousness of the soul’s threefold nature. And so a race descends, that bears within its soul, in a natural form, the strivings after unity, in the manner in which they existed at that time—expressed in an entirely different way and on an entirely different stage in “Faust”, in Goethe's “Faust”, and in the character of Faust, in general—it bears within its soul something that entirely ignores the soul’s threefold nature, striving after the unity of the Ego. At this still primitive stage, it has a destructive effect upon the three soul-members.

But the Finnish nation was of such a kind that it could still feel in a natural way the streaming forces that penetrated into the soul’s “threefoldness”, obliterating it. (Otherwise it would not have been able to experience these three members of the soul). This streaming-element, forcing its way into the soul, was experienced as a threefold R, as RRR. And just because it was experienced as something which in occult language is best of all expressed in the letters, or in the sound “UUO”, inducing one to say, it comes along, and one should really be afraid of it—it now streams along as a breath in the sound “RRRUUO” and becomes, rooted in what is always experienced through the “TAO” (T), when it penetrates into the human soul. In the case of the ancient divinity Jehova, the penetration into the human soul was expressed with the sound “S”, or the Hebrew “Shin”, and the penetrating element in general is expressed, with the “S” sound. This is connected with the element that penetrates into the soul. What takes root in the soul, tends towards the sound “I”, (pronounced EE), whose significance is well known. Consequently, the Finnish nation experienced this in the sound “RUOTSI”, and for this reason it called the descending nations the “RUTSI” (Ruotsi). The Slavs then gradually adopted this name, and because they connected themselves with that element, penetrating, as the Finns called it, downwards from above, they also called themselves “Rutsi”, which afterwards became the name of the “Russians”.

Thus you may see that the external events described in history had to take place. The fact that the nations that were settled down here, below, called in the Warager tribes—in reality, they were Norman-German tribes who had to connect themselves with the Slav tribes—is entirely connected with something that had to take place; it had to occur, in accordance with the constitution of the human soul. In the East of Europe thus arose later on that element which penetrated into the nations of Europe as the Russian element, the Russian nation. The Russian element therefore contains all those things which I mentioned: it contains, above all, a Norman-German element, and this lives in the name from which the name “Russians” descends, for it has arisen in the way described just now.

The “Kalevala” expresses in a deep way that the greatness of the Finnish nation is based on the fact that it really prepares the “one-ness”, or the unity within the triad; by obliterating the soul’s threefold character it prepares the acceptance of that unity which is no longer a purely human unity, but a divine one, in which dwells the godly hero of the Mystery of Golgotha.

In order that a group of men may take up what comes towards it, it must first be prepared for this. We may, thus, gain an impression of all that had to occur inwardly, in order that the things, which we then encounter inwardly, may arise in the course of development. I explained to you that “Kalevala” expresses in a wonderful way the truth that the Finnish nation had to supply this preparation, in view of the fact that the Mystery of Golgotha is introduced in a strange way at the end of the poem. Christ appears at the end of “Kalevala”, but because he throws his impulse into Finnish life, Wainamoinen abandons the country, and this expresses that the originally great and significant element that penetrated into Europe through the Finnish element, was a preparatory stage for Christianity and took up Christianity like a message from outside.

Just as an individual human being must be prepared in an extraordinarily complicated manner, as it were, so that his soul may find from various sides what it requires, in order to live within a definite incarnation, so it is also the case with nations. A nation is not an entirely uniform, homogeneous element, but something in which many elements flow together. All manner of things have flown together in the nation that lived yonder in the East. Indeed, we may say that everything of an inwardly spiritual character is, at the same time, indicated outwardly, even though it is only indicated slightly. I said that in this nation we must look out for a soul-tribe leading upwards from below; respectively, also downwards from above, in the case of a connecting soul-tribe. This was actually the case, for a powerful stream, a great road went from the Black Sea to the Finnish Bay and along this road an exchange took place between the Graeco-Byzantine element and that which constituted the natural element of the “Rutsi”.

Last time I told you that Europe’s Eastern culture was preceded, let us say, by a cultural stratum in which the human beings were constituted in such a way that they still possessed in their souls something that has more withdrawn into subconscious spheres in the case of modern man, and that they experienced in their ordinary life something like a division of the soul into sentient soul, understanding soul and consciousness-soul.

I explained to you that the men belonging to the once great Finnish nation (the present one is only a remnant of the formerly great and widely spread nation) had souls that possessed, in addition to a certain ancient form of clairvoyance, in their immediate daytime experience, something like a scission of the soul into sentient soul, understanding soul and consciousness-soul.

I told you that in the magnificent epic poem “Kalevala” the three characters Wainamoinen, Ilmarinen and Lemminkainen express how this threefold soul is structured and guided from out the cosmos.

How could such a thing take place? How was it possible that a great nation could develop at a certain place in Europe, a nation whose soul was of the kind described to you?

That the human being develops his true Ego, the gift of the earth, depends upon the fact that the spirits of the earth influence him from below, through the Maya of earthly substance. The spirits of the earth work from below, through the solid earth, as it were, and in our time these spirits of the earth are essentially used for the purpose of calling forth in the human being his Ego-nature.

When something that lies below the Ego-nature rays into a nation such as the old Finnish nation, something more spiritual than the Ego-nature and more strongly connected with the divine forces, (for, if the soul feels itself split into three, it is more strongly connected with the divine powers than if this is not the case) then not only the earthly element, with its elemental spirits, can, in a certain way, ray into man’s earthly part from below, but something else must ray into this earthly element, another elemental influence must ray into it.

Just as man’s physical existence is intimately connected with the spirit of the earth—in so far as this existence is an earthly one and in so far as he develops his Ego within it—that is to say, with the spirits working upwards from below, from the earth itself, so man’s soul-element, revealing itself as an existence connected with his nature, temperament, character and soul, is related with everything that lives upon the earth in the form of watery element, of liquid, element.

Consequently, these souls that are split into three parts must be influenced by spirits pertaining to the watery, to the liquid element. The essential element of our time is the earthly element, the Ego-forming element. When another element penetrates into us, for instance the watery element, then it penetrates more from out the spiritual world. It is not contained in the human being himself. It must, as it were, penetrate into man as a spiritual being, so that man’s earthly nature may obtain something that leads him into the spiritual world.

Suppose that the surface of this blackboard represents that out of which come the elemental forces of the earth; in that case, a spiritual element that seeks to penetrate in there, must come out of the organism of the earth itself out of something that is, in itself, spiritual: a Being must be there, a real Being, that is not the human being, but inspires the human being, as it were, to experience the threefold split of his soul. Consequently, a being must be there that influences the soul from out [of] the spirituality of Nature in such a way that the sentient soul, the understanding soul and the consciousness-soul separate and so that the souls are really able to say: My sentient soul is influenced from out Nature by a force resembling Wainamoinen; it streams towards me like a being of Nature and endows me with the force of the sentient soul. But that is still another influence, resembling Ilmarinen, that endows me with the forces of the understanding-soul, and there is moreover something that resembles Lemminkainen, endowing me with the forces of the consciousness-soul. If HERE, at this place, *) we have a being stretching out, as it were, its feelers into Nature, almost through a kind of neck, if a being that has, as it were, its chief group-body HERE, at this place, and that stretches out its feelers in such a way that we have one of them here, together with the sentient soul, a second feeler there, and a third one there, then this being of Nature would have a body and its soul-part would penetrate, as if with soul-feelers, into these places, in order to exercise an inspiring influence—and there, etheric bodies can arise, that enable the soul to feel itself split into three.

The ancient Finnish population used to say: We live here, yet we feel something resembling three powerful beings, that do not belong to the physical plane, but are beings of Nature. They reveal themselves, coming from the West; they are three parts, almost organs of one might being, whose body lives yonder, but that stretches out its feelers in this direction. (Wainamoinen, Ilmarinen, Lemminkainen.) A powerful OCEAN-BEING spreads from west to east; it stretches out its feelers and endows this nation with that which constitutes the threefold soul.

The nations who still experienced this, felt and spoke in this way, and also “Kalevala” speaks in this manner, as explained just now. Modern man, who merely lives upon the physical plane, says that the western sea stretches out as far as this place: Here is the Gulf of Bothnia, the Finnish Gulf and the Gulf of Riga. But in trying to gain an insight into the spiritual essence of the external physical aspect, we simply take together what appears to us like a transverse section of Nature: we take together the following things and say: There is still a great quantity of water, there below; beyond there is the air; man breathes in the air, and this ocean world is a great powerful being that is simply structured in a different way than the one to which we are accustomed. What is spread out over there is a powerful being, and the human beings belonging to that older race were connected with it in a very marked, and distinctly outlined way. And when we speak of Folk-Souls, these Folk-Souls have in the elemental spirits that exist in countless of these soul-expressions, the instruments through which they can work. They organise, as it were, an army in order to penetrate with their influence as far as the etheric body, and to mould man, through the etheric body, in such away that his physical body becomes an instrument for that which is to be his particular and special mission upon the earth.

We can understand culture, even in its relation to man, only if we can contemplate the forms that we encounter in Nature as an expression of the spirit, we can understand it, if we do not contemplate the sea and land boundaries in the usual thoughtless manner, but if we are able to understand what these forms express. Someone who sees the face of a person might say, for instance: The face has certain definite forms; flesh and air contact one another. But if he describes it in this way, it will be difficult to know what the face was really like. We can only understand it if we consider it as the expression, as the countenance of the human being. Similarly, in the above-mentioned case, we can only grasp things if we consider them as the physiognomy of a powerful being that stretches certain parts of its principal body out of the ocean that stretches out this part of its physiognomy.

Indeed, many things occur below the threshold of consciousness and the Spirits of Form have not in vain set definite forms into Nature. It is possible to grasp the meaning of these forms. They are the expression of an inner being. And if we become the pupils of the Spirits of Form, we ourselves can create forms expressing that which lives in the inner being of Nature and of the Spirit.

I explained to you that there is a certain relationship in which East and West work together, in which the liquid element leans towards the East, as if it were a powerful Being and, as an expression of the threefold nature of the soul, it leans over in the three great Bays, that were still experienced by the more spiritual nations of ancient Finland as Wainamoinen, Ilmarinen and Lemminkainen, and are to-day designated so prosaically as the Finnish, the Bothnian and the Riga Bays. What comes out of the liquid and out of the solid elements, worked together in the Finnish nation. Within it were united the element that moulds more the etheric part of man and refines his physical part, namely, the liquid element, and the element of the earth, or that which comes out of the earth and forms the physical part of man.

We might now ask: What significance has the fact that a nation that fulfilled so eminent a mission in the course of the earth’s evolution as that of the great Finnish nation, should still exist after having accomplished its task? The fact that such a nation remains, that it does not disappear after having fulfilled its mission, has its meaning within the whole progress of evolution. Just as a human being preserves in his living memory, for his subsequent life, the thoughts which he formed at some earlier time of life, so the nations of a past time must remain, almost like a conscience, like a living memory that continues to be active in the face of what happens later—LIKE A CONSCIENCE.

Now we might say: The conscience of Eastern Europe is the force that preserved the Finnish nation. But a time must come when the understanding for the tasks of evolution will take hold of human hearts, when the ideas of “Kalevala” will begin to blossom from out the midst of the Finnish nation itself, when this wonderful epic poem will be spiritualised and permeated with modern anthroposophical ideas, so that it will once more reach, in all its depth, the consciousness of the whole of Europe.

The European nations revered Homer’s epic poems. Yet the “Kalevala” streamed out of still deeper sources of the soul’s life. This cannot as yet be grasped. But it will be grasped, when the teachings of Anthroposophy will be used in a corresponding way, in order to explain the spiritual phenomena of the evolution of the earth. An epic poem such as “Kalevala”, cannot be preserved unless it is preserved in a living form of existence; it cannot be preserved without souls that dwell in human bodies, souls that are related with the creative forces of “Kalevala.” “Kalevala” remains as a living conscience. Its influence can continue, because, not the words, but that which lives in the poem itself, continues to live. Its influence can continue through the fact that a centre exists, from which it may ray out. The essential thing is that this centre should be there, in the same way in which the thoughts that we have had at some earlier time of our life, still exist later on in life.

If we consider only the human physical body, it is very difficult to arrive at insights such as those we discussed last time. This applies particularly to the peoples who are the peoples of the new world, of Europe and America.

In these areas, the physical body is formed from within to a much lesser extent than in Asia and Africa, for example. In the case of the peoples of Asia and Africa, the physical body is more formed from within, from the forces lying in the etheric body. In the case of the peoples of Europe and America, the greater influence in the formative forces of the physical body comes from external influences.

We can say something like this: as soon as we look for the forces that form and shape the physical body of a person, we must find etheric forces. These etheric forces lie more in the interior of the etheric body for the inhabitants of Africa and Asia. For the inhabitants of Europe and America, they lie more in the etheric world that surrounds people from the outside.

The people of Africa and Asia are therefore more connected with the inner etheric forces, and the people of Europe and America more with the outer etheric forces, and thus more with the nature spirits.

If I want to express myself in a primitive way, paying less attention to what has become clear to us through spiritual scientific observation, I would have to say: the physical body of African and Asian peoples is more shaped from the inside out, more through internal formative forces. The body of the peoples of Europe and America is more shaped by the way they relate to the conditions of the outside world. The external forces are more impressed in the plastic forms and therefore shape the forms of the physical body more.

In the book Threshold of the Spiritual World, I pointed out that when we consider a human being's etheric body, we find that they are connected to the Earth's whole organism to a greater extent than one might think if one focuses only on the physical body. The Earth itself is a kind of living being. But while the human being, as a living being, appears to us, as it were, as a closed unit, so that we must also perceive him as a unit, we must consider the earth as a living organism in such a way that we see in it a multitude of natural beings interacting with each other.

The Earth includes, first of all, the solid Earth itself, which forms the continents. But what we perceive as this material, solid Earth is nothing other than Maja. The reality is a great multitude of nature spirits, which in turn are led by spirits of higher hierarchies. That this mass of spirits coalesces and functions as solid Earth is Maja. The Earth is spirit through and through. This has often been emphasized.

Now the earth is not only the solid earth, but also what permeates the earth as water, and insofar as the matter of the earth lives out in the liquid, we are again dealing with the water as the maja. In reality, however, we are dealing with a large number of nature spirits. It is the same with the air and the warmth that permeates and washes around the earth. All this is a sum of nature spirits, and the material is only the outer Maja.

More than that in Asia and Africa is the case with the European human being - let us limit ourselves to this for the time being - there is, as it were, a constant exchange of impulses between the inner etheric forces and the elemental beings contained in fire, water, air and earth. These elemental beings act from the outside in on the human etheric body, and thereby they receive the formative and educational forces, which then appear in the appearance and the activities of the physical body, right down to speech. For speech is also an activity of the physical body. But of course the impulses for speech lie in the etheric body.

Now, you see, if we consider the human being as he lives on earth, as he is an earthly being via the etheric body, and as he belongs to the earth, we must take into account the different ways in which the individual essences of earth, water, air and so on affect the human etheric body. For the elemental and etheric entities of the earth are of a very different nature, the etheric and elemental entities of water are of a very different nature, so that we can say: simply by the fact that any person lives as a physical being in the mountains or on the seashore, other entities have a greater influence on his etheric body. In the case of the person living on the seashore, the elemental entities that have their Maya expression in water have a much greater influence than in the case of the person living in the mountains. In the case of a person living in the mountains, the beings that live in the earth have a greater influence than the entities that have their Maya expression in water.

Now that which is formed, made, out of man is influenced by this interaction – I am now speaking mainly of the European human being – I say influenced, and in the way these elementary spirits of nature work, there is something of what forms man out of the spiritual world, insofar as this man is an earthly being.

Last time I spoke to you about the fact that Eastern culture preceded European culture, let us say, a layer of culture whose people were so constituted that they still had something in their souls of what is more pushed back into the subconscious in today's people, that they had something in their ordinary lives of a division of the soul into the soul of feeling, mind or emotion and consciousness. I have pointed out to you that the Finnish people, the great Finnish people of old — the present-day people are only a remnant of the once widespread Finnish people — had such a soul that the souls of these people, in their direct experience of the day, had something of a division of the soul into a soul of feeling, a soul of mind or emotion, and a soul of consciousness, in a certain ancient clairvoyance that was developed in them.

I have told you that in the great epic Kalewala, the three figures of Wäinämöinen, Ilmarinen and Lemminkäinen express the way in which this threefold soul is determined, as it were, by the cosmos.

Now, how could something like this come about at all? How could a great nation develop at a certain point in Europe - so we ask ourselves - that had a soul like the one I have described?

Now, you see, how the human being develops his actual self, the gift of the earth, comes from the spirits of the earth working on him from below, through the maya of earthly matter. From below, as it were through the firm earth, the spirits of the earth work, and in our cycle it is so that these spirits of the earth are essentially used to evoke the I-nature in man.

Should something arise in the soul of a people, such as the ancient Finnish people, that lies beneath the nature of the I, that is more spiritual than the nature of the I, that is more closely connected to the divine forces (for when the soul feels that it is split three ways, it is more with the divine powers than when it does not. If something like this were to arise, then not only the earthly with its elementary spirits from below was allowed to radiate into the earthly of man, but something else had to radiate into this earthly, another elementary influence.

In the same way that a person's physical existence is intimately connected with the spirits of the earth — physical existence, insofar as it is an earthly existence and one develops one's self in it — with the spirits that work from the earth itself, from below upwards, then the soul life of the human being, which manifests itself as natural, temperamental, character-shaped soul life, is connected with everything that lives on the earth as a watery element, as a liquid element. So the spirits of the watery, liquid element must have an effect on these souls, which are thus split into three.

Now, for our time cycle, the earthly element is the ego-forming element, that is, the one that matters. If another element intrudes, such as the watery element, for example, it intrudes more from the spiritual world. It is not contained in the human being itself. It must, as it were, sink into the human being as a spiritual being, so that he can receive into his earthly nature something that leads him into the spiritual world.

Let us assume that the surface of the blackboard is where the elementary forces of the earth come out. If a spiritual element wants to sink into this, it must come from the organism of the earth itself, from something that is spiritual in itself. There must be a being, a real being, which is not the human being himself, which, as it were, inspires the human being to the threefold nature of the soul. There must therefore be a Being that acts on the soul in such a way, acting from natural spirituality, that the sentient soul, the soul of mind or feeling, and the consciousness soul separate, so that the souls can truly say: For my sentient soul, something like Wäinämöinen is at work from nature, something that flows towards me like a nature being, that gives me the powers of the sentient soul.

But there is also something like Ilmarinen, something that gives me the powers of the intellectual or mind soul, and there is also something like Lemminkäinen, something that gives me the powers of the consciousness soul. If there is a being that extends its feelers into nature as if through a kind of neck, if a being that has its main body here and extends its feelers here, so that we have one of the feelers with the sentient soul here, and the second feeler the second feeler horn and here the third feeler horn, so the nature being has a body and stretches its soul into it, as it were, like soul feelers, to inspire, and there the ether bodies can form, which give the soul the ability to feel divided into three.

The ancient Finns, the population of old Finland, said: We live here, but we feel something like three mighty beings that are not beings of the physical plane, that are nature beings. They reveal themselves from the west, they are three parts, as it were, organs of a great being that has its body over there, but it extends its feelers towards us here: Wäinämöinen, Ilmarinen, Lemminkäinen. A mighty sea creature is spreading out from west to east, stretching out its feel-horns and endowing this tribe with that which is the three-part soul.

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The nations that still felt this, felt it this way and also spoke it, also in Kalewala, as I have explained it. The modern man, who today lives only on the physical plane, says that the western sea extends into this; that is the Bothnian, that is the Finnish and that is the Rigaian Gulf. But we take all of this together, wanting to see through the spiritual of the outer physical, that which appears to us as a cross-section of nature, we take the following together. There is still a lot of water down there, over there is the air, human beings breathe air, and the world of the sea is a great, mighty being, which is only formed differently than we are accustomed to. It is a mighty being that extends over it, and with this being the human being of the earlier race was in a very distinct, definitely configured connection. And when we now speak of folk spirits, these folk spirits have in the elemental beings, who live in numerous such soul expressions, the tools to work. They organize themselves, as it were, into an army to work, to work their way into the etheric body and, from the etheric body, to make the human being in such a way that his physical body is a tool for what he is supposed to be for his specific mission on earth.

Only when we can see the forms that appear to us in nature as expressions of the spiritual can we understand nature itself in its connection with the human being. We can understand nature when we do not simply look thoughtlessly at the sea and land borders, but understand what is expressed in these forms. After all, someone might think when looking at a person's face: Yes, there are such forms. There the flesh and the air border each other. — If someone says this, however, little will have been understood of it. It is only understood when it is grasped as an expression of the human being, as a face. Here, too, it is only understood when it is seen as the physiognomy, as it were, of a mighty being that extends certain parts of its main body out of the ocean, that extends this part of its physiognomy.

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Much really does go on below the threshold of consciousness, and the Spirits of Form have not placed the forms in nature for nothing. These forms can be understood. They are the expression of inner essence. And when we become disciples of the Spirits of Form, we ourselves form shapes that express what lives in the inner essence of the natural and the spiritual.

Thus, for example, in our architraves, in what is above the columns, forms should be formed that are truly the expression of the spirituality that is to be associated with what is to take place within the building. Man is a being that emerges from a sea, as it were, from a sea of reality, of hidden reality, in which he is immersed.

You see, this is another example of how we actually have to penetrate behind the Maja if we really want to understand what is in the world, namely if we want to understand the human being with all his expressions. We often have to go down into what lives in the human being without him knowing it, or what he only gradually learns through the mediation of knowledge.

We cannot help but look at the outer Maya first, and then we must be clear about the fact that something extraordinarily complicated lies behind this outer Maya.

If we were inclined to enter into what lies behind the maya everywhere, then there could be infinite harmony, a consonance in the whole human being, because, to a certain extent, this human being is infinite underground impulses with a harmonious unity being, and everything that exists in the world can only be understood if it is examined in relation to what lies beneath the surface of existence.

It is always one-sided to look at anything only in relation to Maya. I want to interject something here. It is true that we can only fully understand the things we have discussed now, little by little. I want to show how difficult it is, even in ordinary life, to really go into everything that lies in the things that come to us. For example, perhaps very few of our dear friends have noticed that I once spoke at length about Switzerland in a recent lecture, about something that is closely related to Swiss nature. I don't know how many of you are actually aware of what I am talking about. But perhaps you remember that I followed the four lectures I gave on occult reading and hearing with a lecture in which I spoke a great deal about Herman Grimm from a purely external, historical point of view. That was a lecture in which an extraordinary amount was actually said about Switzerland, but one has to go back to the essence of the matter, to what lies beneath the surface. Why is that?

You see, the human being – I repeat something very elementary – consists, as we know, of his physical body, his etheric body, his astral body and his ego nature. We know that the I-nature and the astral body leave the physical and etheric body during sleep and, as it were, dwell in the spiritual world, in a world of which we can say: At night we are in this world, where the elemental, etheric beings are also. But there are also those spiritual elemental beings in it that are connected with the whole structure of our physical being. They are all there and at work. A number of elemental beings are connected with the whole structure of our physical being. In a lecture series I once gave in Kassel on the connection between the Gospel of John and the other gospels, I pointed out how man is connected to the entities of elementary nature through his ancestors. I pointed out – you can read about it in this lecture cycle – that if we arrange the four parts of the human being in this way, we have the physical body, the I, the etheric body and the astral body, and that what lives more in the physical body and the I is inherited from the paternal side.

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Those who have read the lecture cycle carefully will remember that what lives more in the etheric body and in the astral body is inherited from the maternal side. When we sleep, we have the physical and etheric bodies in bed, so we have something paternal and something maternal. But we have the I and the astral body outside. The astral body contains that which is imprinted on our feelings, on our entire temperament, that which gives us our soul character. And in this, which gives us our soul character, in turn, in the succession of time, elemental beings have an effect, beings that carry the forces from the ancestors to the descendants, so that these descendants become, in a certain way.

In the case of a personality such as Herman Grimm's, something very peculiar takes effect. One has an after-effect with Herman Grimm from what his immediate ancestors were. His immediate ancestors, his father and his uncle, were the collectors of the Children's and House Tales, and they heard these Children's and House Tales told. They simply listened when they were told and then wrote them down. But you don't do something like that unless you have a specially tuned astral body that is predisposed to it. Such things must be deeply rooted in the whole course of events.

Who was this mother? Dorothea Grimm, née Wild, was from an old Bernese family. She herself was still a citizen of that city. Her ancestors had fought in the Battle of Murten. All the feelings that she had gained there, with all the elemental spirits, were then carried up into Hessian, because the father, who had emigrated from Bern – Herman Grimm's grandfather – had learned the apothecary's trade, then moved to Kassel and founded the Sonnenapotheke (Sun Pharmacy). So if we look for what the elemental spirits were doing in Herman Grimm, what was making the particular configuration of this spirit, so to speak, because these spirits were working in him while he slept, then we have to think of Switzerland, and we are actually talking about the characteristic of Herman Grimm when we speak of the characteristically Bernese-Swiss.

And so, sometimes, outwardly completely overshadowed by Maja, we encounter the essential. If we consider the peculiar structure of his mind, we listen attentively to what the essence is in the mind of Herman Grimm's mother, so that I actually said something directly Swiss in the spiritual, in what I emphasized as lying below the threshold of consciousness, and spoke of the Swiss, especially the Bernese, when I spoke of Herman Grimm. Therefore, it was to be assumed that precisely this kind of thing, of which hints had been made, would evoke quite familiar, homely feelings among some of our friends.

So it does not just depend on what, so to speak, appears externally to us, but on what lives in what appears externally to us. The earth with all that is on it is actually intimately connected, the earth as a unified being is actually intimately connected with what the human being can be on it, with what is formed around the human being through the etheric body.

Now that I have made it clear through the present example how we have to go through the Maja if we want to understand what is there, let us go back to the sea dragon, which is, so to speak, the inspirer of European humanity, which pushed its way across from the Atlantic Ocean to be the inspirer of European humanity. If we consider the totality of its elemental-etheric beings, it contains everything that is spiritual in European humanity. If we could understand it completely, this dragon, if we could give ourselves completely to it, then we would all be clairvoyants. But it is not the task of European humanity to be merely clairvoyant; rather, it has the task of developing precisely that part of the soul that rises above clairvoyance like islands rise above the sea. That which now had to develop particularly as, I might say, the basic types of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural period, had to have the basic character to stand out as a nature of consciousness, to stand out from the merely soul-like. It had to be inspired by the nature spirits working through the earth. It had to have the possibility of being connected everywhere, of being connected with this inspiring being through countless flowing impulses, as it were. But it had to be set apart, it had to send the earthy into the watery. And this happened through the British Isles rising out of the inspiring sea with the sum total of all their nature spirits.

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When there is a real spiritual science, then it will be known that on such a continental area of the human soul-bearer, his physical and etheric bodies, must form in the same way as the relationship between sea and land requires. Just as the elevation above the sea, the elevation of the land above the sea, determines this, so it is that the human being, in his nature, must fill certain spaces by not letting them be muscles, but letting them become bones, so that the soft and the hard have a certain relationship to each other.

This is also how it is formed outside in the great Earth Mother, and in such a way that the solid element emerges from the liquid element. One can say: the Earth sends up from its depths the elemental spirits that form the Earth in a certain configuration, at a certain point of spiritual inspiration, so that such soil can arise on which such bodies can dwell, in which the consciousness soul develops.

The solid land in the sea is really like a skeletal structure in the elementary being. Just as our skeletal system sits within the soft muscle system, so the solid land of the earth sits within the sea, configured within it. And the countries do not arise so randomly as geology presents them, but arise in their forms just as regularly as our bone system arises regularly in us, although not through cells, as the bones form. We just have to learn to understand why the individual continents are formed in this or that form. I would like to use another comparison, which should just not lead you to misunderstand. I would like to say: In order for the view we have been talking about to arise here among this ancient Finnish people, it was necessary for such a land configuration to arise in the gulf.

Just as human lungs let in air, so in this land configuration are outlined – as if drawn in – the tentacles of that great being that is connected with the entire configuration of Europe.

We have now spoken for the last time about the bodies that are given to the Russian soul when this soul incarnates in a Russian body. We have shown, last time and also in the course of other considerations, that in a Russian body the Russian soul forms itself expectantly, that it forms in itself that which a future being can once receive. For this it is necessary that this soul should in a certain way remain in relation to the spiritual. Otherwise the spiritual self could never be formed. But on the other hand this soul must be prevented from developing too early into those regions which are actually pictured for it.

Let us assume that here - where the Baltic Sea is now - there would be land and that here - where Russia is - would be sea. Only peninsular formations like Italy and so on would stretch out. The Gulfs of Bothnia, Finland and Riga would extend as far as the Caspian Sea, instead of us having Russian land here. Then we would have a seafaring people here, sailing these seas. But then the bodies would not be able to form here as they should. The being that stretches its tentacles over here would breathe out what these seafarers would receive, and they would develop their abilities prematurely, that is, at too early a time. They would develop too early that which should have waited for a later time. The spirit self must wait a certain time and must not be developed too soon. Therefore, there must not be a sea here, but the land must emerge to such an extent that the spirit self is not developed too early, but that there is still the possibility of receiving the inspirations of this great being. There must not be high mountains like the Alps, nor flat lands, only such elevations that the spiritual self is not received too early. There must be just enough land to produce the spiritual self: extensive, more flat land areas. If there were a seafaring people here, they would have developed the spiritual self long ago. But that would be immature, and development would occur at the wrong time.

And now we come to the cosmic mind of the earth. The earth has cosmic mind, which conditions its form, conditions its form in such a way that it raises the land everywhere as far as is necessary for the right elemental spirits to come into contact with the beings on the earth, and on the other hand allows the water to exist as far as is necessary for the inspiring genii to work.

We get the impression that we are literally looking at our earth and that we can see something similar in such an elevation of land, as when we form this or that expression in the face, where the soul also appears in the expression in this or that configuration of expression. The soul of the earth meets us in the configuration of the earth. In fact, as soon as we touch on the human ether body, this essence of the human ether body expands, as it were, over the entire organization of the earth, and the human ether body is connected with the earth organism everywhere. Everywhere we find that what is actually earthly — the Maja for the earth spirits — is connected for the present human being with his I-nature, with the outer physical nature. Everything that is water and air – spiritually speaking – is connected with what he develops in contradiction to the nature of the I. For the whole earth exists to form the earthly human being. The other thing is to nuance this earthly human being. This nuancing is achieved through the mutual relationship of land and water and air through the earth.

If we look at southern Europe, and in particular at the Greek and Italian peninsulas, we find that the way in which land and water are distributed here prepares the earth for such bodies, which could carry the fourth post-Atlantic culture, in which the mind or soul soul is so particularly expressed.

If the countries in southern Europe had been larger and the sea inlets smaller, something should have arisen in Greece and Italy that was only to arise later. That is to say, something would have arisen for evolution in an unusable way. In order for the Greek character to find its counterpart in the Romanic character, as I have described it, there had to be a broader land mass stretching out towards the sea than is the case with Greece. But that is the case in France. And in the relationship that I have said exists between France and Greece, you can find it expressed precisely in the physiognomy of Greece, how it is cut into by the sea everywhere, and in the physiognomy of France, how it extends its projections towards the sea more on a large scale.

I wanted to give you a few pointers today for all kinds of things that need to be done during our time together. We will then build on these pointers tomorrow.

Yesterday we spoke at least in a few words about the extent to which the Earth itself is a source of inspiration for people living on it. Of course, only hints can be given in a field that is as all-encompassing as this.

It is important and significant, especially in our time, to become aware that such connections exist as those we have been talking about, because man within the evolution of the earth is at the point, especially in our present time, of emancipating himself, as it were, from this earthly influence, and, on the other hand, to allow himself to be permeated by those influences that do not come from the world of the earth but from the spiritual world surrounding the earth.

This endeavour to get into human abilities, into human thinking and feeling, that which is not merely earthly, underlies our spiritual-scientific endeavour. All tendencies of modern education are really moving towards this spiritual-scientific endeavour, and it may well be said that there are two things that must increasingly come to the consciousness of the modern human being.

The first is that man, in relation to his own soul essence, belongs to a world that does not reveal itself to the external senses, but that lies behind the external sense world. Man belongs to such a world with his innermost soul being, which can be reached neither through sense observation nor through inferences and logic based on sense observation. It will be the task of our time to gain clarity on this point, that all knowledge conveyed by the external senses and their philosophy, which is based only on external sensory knowledge, cannot approach what the human soul actually is.

The second truth is one that you are familiar with from your spiritual scientific life, but you also know that it is still very far from the general consciousness of the present day. It is the important truth of repeated earthly lives, of the fact that the human soul is not exhausted in the body in which it lives between birth and death, in all that is connected with this body, but that it goes from life to life.

Because these two truths, that the soul belongs to a world that lies behind the sensory world and that it goes from life to life, are among the most important for our time, which must be understood first, I have added a chapter to the second volume of my Rätsel of Philosophy», I have added a chapter in which these two truths in particular are pointed out in an intensive way from the course of human development, because it is an urgent requirement of our time that more and more people learn to understand precisely these two truths.

Since this book, “The Riddles of Philosophy”, is not specifically aimed at anthroposophists, but at all people who can read and understand what they read, an attempt had to be made to point out these two truths as briefly but as sharply as possible. It may be said that it lies in the deeper consciousness of people in modern times to direct their thoughts towards these truths. For the time being, I will just say to direct their thoughts. We can see such tendencies to direct thoughts towards these truths everywhere. I have sometimes tried to cite people from the new spiritual history who tend towards such truths. Today I would like to give another example.

Emerson is undoubtedly one of the greatest minds of the 19th century, who wrote so meaningfully and forcefully, if not in pedantic philosophical language, then in a forceful language. Whether he is talking about nature or the human race, Emerson points out that the outer structure of the world, which man surveys with his senses and comprehends with his mind, is only the shell, the phantasmagoria, and that one can only arrive at the truth by trying to penetrate behind the phantasmagoria.

But minds like Emerson's go even further. And I would like to give an example of this. Among his very significant books, Emerson also wrote one called “The Representatives of the Human Race”. In this book, he treated Plato as a representative of all philosophical human endeavor; Swedenborg as a representative of mystical human endeavor; Montaigne, a significant mind of the 16th century , as representative of skepticism; Shakespeare as representative of the poetic faculty; Goethe as representative of the literary faculty; and Napoleon as the man of action, as representative of the man of action.

This book has certainly achieved something significant. It highlights the types of humanity in relation to the soul. It would make for an interesting reflection if one were to shed light on how Plato's representative of philosophical endeavor and Montaigne's representative of skeptical endeavor are actually met. This book marks one of the greatest achievements of human spiritual endeavor. Now, Emerson curiously devotes, I would say, a particularly loving portrayal to Montaigne, although this loving portrayal is only encountered when one thoroughly engages with this chapter on Montaigne. This is also very significant for Emerson's commitment to the spiritual-scientific world view. Anyone who seriously engages with this world view becomes aware of how truly every thing has two sides, how when one tries to express a truth, one can only say something one-sided and the second side must lurk in the background, as it were.

The skeptic who has a vivid sense of the fact that one is, as it were, already doing an injustice when formulating a truth strictly, is touched in the deepest sense by the spiritual-soul fluid that is always present in the human soul and that prevents one, as soon as one is only touched by the spiritual world, from stating a sharply contoured truth with too much aplomb, without pointing out that in a certain sense the opposite of it also has a justification.

This sense of having been touched by a feeling that comes from spirituality is what makes Montaigne an important figure. But that is not what I wanted to point out. I wanted to point out how Emerson tells how he came to Montaigne. He says: Even as a boy, I found a volume of Montaigne in my father's library, but I did not understand him. — When he had then graduated from college, he looked at the book again, and then he got the strange urge to get to know, sentence by sentence, what Montaigne had written. And he did that, following this urge. Now we see in the chapter about Montaigne, which Emerson wrote, that he was looking for an expression for why he was suddenly obsessed by Montaigne and suddenly began to absorb him completely. He finds no better expression for it than to say: It was as if I had written these books by Montaigne in a past life. From this you can see how a man of the most eminently modern mind, who approaches what is demanded by the present, is forced, when he wants to express himself about the most intimate things in his soul, to form an expression that tends entirely towards the spiritual-scientific truth of reincarnation. He cannot find a better expression and must therefore resort to the idea of repeated lives on earth.

Something like this is extremely characteristic and tremendously significant, and this now leads us to tie in with the idea that was expounded yesterday. If we look at the most distinguished minds of our time – and one of the most distinguished is Emerson – then, on the one hand, if they are as great as Emerson, they have inherited the knowledge of the earth, in that they are part of the evolutionary process of the earth. They know what is absorbed by a person today. They know that when you are placed at a certain point on earth, you speak a certain language and so on, that it is customary in the place where you are sent to hand these things down to the child, to the young person, and thus to bring that which is called education to the people. This knowledge, which is handed down to a people in this way, is knowledge of a wide scope. It is fair to say that this is knowledge of a broad scope, and one can see how Emerson actually proceeds.

We know that when he had a lecture to give, it seemed as if what he said sprang forth from his mind as he was saying it. Everything seemed improvised. If he was visited on a day when he was supposed to give a lecture, the visitors could see that all kinds of notes were lying around the room, from which he had gathered what he had to say, so to speak, about the outward appearance of his material. But behind what he passed on to humanity lay intimacies, and this is precisely an intimacy, which I have expressed, that the idea of repeated earthly lives shimmers quite chastely in one place.

One can see how even the best of our time, by feeling and feeling through such truths in their souls and also expressing them, remain chaste within themselves, do not yet want to carry these truths into the realm from which external knowledge arises.

If we now approach the matter from a spiritual scientific point of view, we have to illuminate it differently, because our time is the time whose mission it is to bring to clarity and to real knowledge what has so far been held back in the soul and only occasionally hinted at, clarity, to bring it to real knowledge, to shape it into forms of knowledge, so that our time really has the task of making many things that have emerged from the souls of the best up to this time of ours into full clarity, into a truth that is self-evident for people. And here we can describe exactly how it was when Emerson, in his rich lectures, would soon say a sentence expressing a realization about the industrial life of his surroundings and then a few lines later bring something that deals with ancient India, and then again something that deals with Shakespeare. So he gathers together, so to speak, the knowledge of the earth and then often a remark slips out of him that comes from the intimacy of his soul.

Where does what lies in such a remark come from? This can only be answered by considering all sides of human nature. Man recognizes only the least, only a part of his life, which takes place from waking to falling asleep, during his time on earth. The other part of life is spent asleep, and this part of human life is very, very diverse.

It is true that for many, many people this life in sleep proceeds in such a way that they come into contact with elemental world entities that are connected with lower expressions of human nature than the daytime expressions. One would like to say that people engage in all sorts of nonsense from the moment they fall asleep until they wake up, in the realm of elementary life, of nightlife, things that they have outgrown when they are in the outer life. Who would not know that he often has to be ashamed of his dreams. This is a general experience that anyone can have. Man, then, during sleep, does all kinds of foolish things, in a company that is not a good one, but one that appeals to his passions, his instincts, and is much worse than the one in which he is educated during his waking life.

Only if we understand this can we better understand many historical events. To prevent people today from making too much of a mess of things in the physical world, they need to be endowed with the gift of not attaching too much importance to their dreams. He therefore forgets his dreams very easily, forgets the Allotriia from the dreams, and that is good for him, because he should be prepared to enter the spiritual world in waking consciousness, while the prehistoric times were there to let people enter this spiritual world during sleep until they woke up.

Strictly speaking, a stronger awareness of this world is not as far behind us as is usually believed. I will give you an example of this too. There is a picture by Albrecht Dürer that has posed many riddles for many people, especially scholars. The etching is about a satyr-like, faun-like figure that is holding a female being, as it were. From the background, another female figure appears, approaching the couple as if to punish them. And a Hercules-like male figure stands nearby, holding a club in his hand, which he uses to hold back the punishing female figure from the group of the woman with the satyr, preventing her from approaching. It is, one might say, quite remarkable, extremely remarkable, how the scholars have struggled to understand this picture. It is usually called 'Hercules'. But what it expresses is not found in the usual Hercules saga. So one wonders: how did Albrecht Dürer come up with this scene? And some very curious ideas have been put forward. One can see, for example, how helpless Herman Grimm is in the face of this picture. He does not know what to make of it. He comes up with the strangest ideas. And why is that? Why can't people make sense of it? Because he and the scholars do not know — as Albrecht Dürer still did — that people can still enter a spiritual world when they are asleep. Today, this awareness has been lost. But Dürer still knew, for example, that there are men who, during sleep, engage in all sorts of antics with the elemental world, men who are quite civilized during the ordinary time, but during sleep they fall back into the world of drives and do all sorts of useless things, all sorts of antics.

In the painting by Albrecht Dürer, we see the satyr and Hercules with the club. Good old Hercules, who is standing there, would like to be this satyr himself. But he lives in the physical world, in a moral world on the physical plane, and his wife does not allow him to do so. She comes along and wants to drive him away. But he likes it and holds her back.

We see here an inner process of the soul and know that Albrecht Dürer still knew something of these things. Thus much in the art of not so distant centuries can be explained, because at that time there was still an awareness of the connection of man with the spiritual-elemental world immediately adjacent to the physical.

But if we turn to such noble minds as Emerson's, we have to say that they do not engage in frivolities during their sleep, but in noble things. When they are in the spiritual world with their ego and astral body, they come into contact with the truths that are to be true anthroposophy in humanity. What future physical knowledge is to become comes to her consciousness. One could say that Emerson receives something like this in his sleep. That is why it fits so chastely and intimately into what he has to say about the physical life with his physical senses and mind, surveying the wide expanse of earthly life.

Now it would not be in keeping with the evolution of humanity if people were simply to grasp, as I said, in their life of sleep, what lies behind the appearance of sense and behind the phantasmagoria of the senses. For that is again the meaning of evolution, that the life of sleep loses more and more of its significance in knowledge. One must be a great spirit like Emerson if one wants to conquer something out of the life of sleep, like the idea of repeated lives on earth. But what is spiritual must come into humanity, must find its way into humanity. Just as these truths are related to the innermost human soul life, as they reveal themselves there, as it were, in a kind of dawn, especially in spirits like Emerson, so on the other hand there must be an earthly disposition to understand such truths in the light of waking consciousness. There must be an earthly predisposition to perceive oneself in such a way that one finds it natural to recognize these truths. You understand that this is not yet natural in the present, because we are still such a small group as spiritual scientists, and all those who stand outside of spiritual scientific striving see us as fools or something similar.

It is not part of modern education to recognize these truths directly. Man's natural temperament argues against it. As a rule, the logical arguments people put forward against spiritual science are extremely inferior, because people do not resist on logical grounds; they resist because, by their very nature, they are not predisposed to accept such truths today, through all that they are through the forces of the earth.

But there must come a time when man's nature will be so constituted that he can immediately grasp these truths, just as he can grasp mathematical truths today. Man must be organized naturally so that he can grasp these truths. For this it is necessary that he is physically so constituted for the time that elapses between birth and death that his brain is so developed that he can see these truths.

In the sense of yesterday's discussion, such a relationship must be established between the spirits that work in the earth and people, that people are constituted in such a way that they can absorb these truths, and this happens in such a way that an area of land, as I showed and sketched yesterday, leans from east to west towards the three gulfs I spoke of yesterday. This area of land is only a phantasmagoria on the outside. This area of land is in reality composed of the spirits of the earth. In reality, the spirits of this area of land work on people and physically shape them in such a way that they understand the truths of the spiritual and mental constitution of man and repeated lives on earth. What I would say is more for the Western spirits, which have to conquer from sleep, will have to become a more self-evident truth in waking life for those who lean towards the East in the evolution of humanity. The earth prepares its bodies, one would like to say, for what they need for evolution. This earth is absolutely that which I discussed yesterday: a far-reaching organism that is ensouled and that, from time to time, sends out the earth spirits from its soul life, which organize the bodies in such a way that they can intervene in evolution in an appropriate way.

You see, these things are extraordinarily deep and significant, and one must really get involved with such things if one wants to understand what it is all about. However, if you compare the earth as an ensouled and spiritualized organism with what man is as an ensouled and spiritualized organism, there is a great difference. Man is related to the actual spirits of the earth through the exterior of his physical body, in which he actually does not usually live in it, but in which he is stuck in it. Through the etheric body, he is related to the spirits of water; through the astral body, he is related to the spirits of air, and through his connection with the ego, he is related to the spirits of fire.

When a person leaves their physical and etheric bodies during sleep, they live with their ego and astral body only in relation to the warmth that pervades the earth and the air that flows and breathes through the earth. They are torn away from everything that configures earth and water in the physical body. Man is truly torn out of everything that, I would like to say, the physical and etheric bodies do as earthly beings when they sleep. Of course, air and warmth also belong to the earth, but only to the earth, not to the parts of the earth. Now, for man as a spiritualized being, warmth is, so to speak, that in which he dwells as in his own element. In the higher animals, there is already a preparation for this. They have their own warmth, not just the warmth of their surroundings. They live in their soul, in their own warmth. Man has particularly developed this, that he lives in his own warmth, that he has his own temperature. This is something that separates him from the great variety of the outside world. Heat is, as it were, something that every human being carries within himself and carries with him. There he is in his actual self, there he is at home in the warmth.

In the air, he lives in it to a lesser extent. I would like to say that the differentiation of the earth already exerts a certain influence on him. Whether he lives in mountain air, sea air or country air, that makes a certain difference. In this way, the human being comes into relation to what affects him from the outside. This is the case with the human being as a soul-inspired and spiritualized organism.

The opposite is the case with the earth as a souled and spiritualized organism. What warmth is for human beings, that is for the earth just the earth, the solid earthly, and warmth is for it the 'outmost' that has a relationship to the souled earth like to us the earth. The earth is earth through and through, as we are warmth through and through. The earth is outwardly differentiated in relation to warmth. Depending on whether it extends its limbs into the icy regions or into the sultry region of the tropics, it opens its soul outwardly to warmth, just as we, in relation to our physical body, incline toward the region in which we happen to live. In the case of the earth, it is exactly the opposite of the human being, and this is the basis for the interaction between the earth as a spiritual and animate organism and the human being as a spiritual and animate organism. Through this interaction, that which comes about in the physical human body arises so that this physical human body, in the succession of nations and peoples, enters into the evolution of the whole earthly existence in the right way. We have an intensive relationship between the earthly and the human precisely in those peoples who, as a mass of people, moved from east to west. And one could express this intensive relationship as if one were to see a mighty being in the earth itself, and this mighty being would decide to intervene in evolution in an appropriate way, let us say from the 20th century onwards. Then it must say to itself: I must direct certain spiritual entities up to my surface, I must let them be active in such a way that they prepare physical bodies so that the physical bodies can receive through the brain the truths that are beneficial to humanity in this time of evolution.

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What I have just expressed is like a thought that the earth has. This thought can only be grasped if it is grasped with the right devotion and reverence, if it is not taken like the thoughts of external science, but if it is regarded as something sacred, as something that cannot be uttered without reverence, because one is reminded of man's connection with the spiritual world, because one is directly immersed in the communication between the human and the divine, where such things are expressed. Therefore, attention should be paid everywhere to ensure that the necessary atmosphere of feeling and sentiment is present when such things are expressed. This is extremely important in such matters. One might say: in a certain sense, such things must not be expressed in any other way than that they are based on the feeling, the mood of prayer. A looking up to the spiritual worlds must pulsate through what we think through so thoroughly as we approach such thoughts. And that this can happen in a natural way, through the external environment alone, is why our body is constructed, and why everything that is to appear in it is made.

Thus we see in what I have just described a kind of example of how the earth, as earth, works spiritually through what is contained in its solid element, how it creates and forms that which lives on it in evolution.

If, on the other hand, we go more to the west, we have different conditions. Yesterday I explained to you a situation where the west interacts with the east, where the liquid element leans over like a mighty being towards the east and expresses the three-part soul nature, leaning over into the three great gulfs, which the spiritually inclined peoples of ancient Finland still felt as Wäinämöinen, Ilmarinen and Lemminkäinen, and which today are so prosaically referred to as the Gulfs of Finland, Bothnia and Riga. In the ancient Finnish people, that which comes from the liquid element and that which comes from the solid element worked together. In the Finnish people, the element that more constitutes the ethereal human being and refines the physical human being, the liquid element, and the element of the earth, that which comes from the earth, that which constitutes the physical human being, united.

The question may be raised as to the significance of a people like the great Finnish nation, which has fulfilled such an eminent mission in the course of the Earth's mission and yet still remains for later times. All this has its significance in the whole progress of evolution, that such a people remain, that they do not disappear from the Earth when they have fulfilled their mission. Just as a person retains in living memory the thoughts that he has conceived at a certain age for a later age, so must earlier peoples also remain as a conscience, as a living memory in relation to what happens in later times: as a conscience.

And now one could say: The conscience of the European East will be that which the Finnish people have preserved. There must come a time when an understanding of the tasks of evolution will take hold of the heart, when the ideas of Kalewala will flourish from the very heart of the Finnish people, when this wonderful Kalewala epic will be imbued with modern spiritual ideas and when the whole of Europe will be made aware of its depth.

The European peoples revered the Homeric epics. The Kalevala flowed from even deeper sources of the soul life. This cannot be recognized today. But this will be understood when the teachings of spiritual science are applied in the appropriate way to explain spiritual phenomena in the evolution of the earth. An epic like Kalevala cannot be preserved without being preserved in living existence, without the souls that dwell in the body, which are related to the creative powers of Kalevala. It remains as a living conscience. In this way it can continue to work, not through the words but through that which has lived in it itself, continues to live, that there is a center from which it can radiate. What matters is that this is there, like the thoughts we have had earlier are there in later life.

In the West, there is more of what forms and shapes the etheric body. These are difficult truths, and you will have to get used to them, because I do not have the opportunity, which one will hopefully have one day in the evolution of the earth, to deal with the things that I have to deal with in an hour over the course of a whole year. You will have to be open to supplementing many things with your thoughts, to meditatively reflect on what has been said. Then it will become fully familiar to you. In particular, do not try to approach things with these or those hasty nuances of feeling.

In the West, there is more of an effect on the etheric body, which had to be formed in the same way, but at an earlier time, than it has to be done on the physical body in the East.

You see, it is very easy to misunderstand such things, because the differences are fine, very subtle. If, for example, we see in the West that it depends on the peoples that the etheric body has been formed more by the spirits of water, it is self-evident – because the physical body is an imprint of this – that the physical body has also been formed as an imprint of the etheric body, out of the forces of water. But the important thing is that in the East the forces of the physical body have a more direct effect. So we have to focus on what is important. External physical science cannot make this subtle distinction. It sees that the Eastern physical body is configured in one way and the Western physical body in another. It does not see any more than that. Only spiritual science can go into such differences in more detail. Furthermore, language is so clumsy and very unsuitable for expressing such differences. When you say something completely different, you often have the impression that you are actually saying the same thing. Yesterday, for example, I had to say that for Asian peoples it is important that the forces that build up the physical body lie in their own etheric body. Today I have to say that it is important for the peoples of the West that the etheric body is formed from the forces of water. If you take all of this together, you will understand that in the old days it was the case that the etheric body had to be formed in the Eastern peoples of Europe, but today, now, is the time when the physical body has to be formed , while in the western peoples it is the case that their etheric body is formed after their physical body has already received its character more from the outside, that their etheric body is directly exposed to the genii of the sea, the genii of the water.

In the case of Western peoples, what they are comes about through the impulses entering their etheric body. Where the impulses enter the etheric body more, what matters less is the spatial and more the temporal. How the impulses work in the succession of time is what matters more.

If we look towards the east, we see how thoughts well up out of the earth, as it were, to prepare human beings for future evolution. If we look towards the west, we see thoughts welling up out of the fluid, the forces that form the etheric bodies in the succession of time.

And there we see how, in the ancient times in the West, the etheric body of man was formed far into Central Europe in such a way that this etheric body lives out its immediate life in the body, alive, outwardly.

What does that mean? It means, my dear friends, that in ancient times in western Europe there lived people who brought their way of life to light from the etheric body in the same way that people now bring it to light from the physical body — where the etheric body has already worked with these old impulses. There were people who still had a living relationship with the spiritual world, especially with the elemental world. That belongs to ancient times. Those times are, so to speak, already over, when the genii of the liquid element spoke to the etheric body of man in the West in the most lively way. But when this etheric body is spoken to, it is different from our time, when it is mainly spoken to the physical body of man. The physical body of the human being is spoken to in such a way that an impression is made on his senses, that he acquires knowledge and adopts certain habits of life that are connected with the impressions of the senses.

These ancient Westerners were still more connected with the elemental world in their habits, in what lived within them. Among the Celts, there were people who knew about the elemental world just as we know about the physical world today; people to whom the elemental world was not closed, who could speak of nature genii, of water genii, of earth genii, just as we speak of trees, plants, mountains, clouds, who had direct contact with these nature genii. And the peculiarity of life in Europe is based on the fact that this was precisely the case in ancient times, because in those days, just as one acts today through the senses on the physical body, one acted on the etheric body of the human being.

Then, of course, work was still being done on the etheric body of the human being, but this etheric body was formed and developed in such a way that the relationship of the genii of fluidity to it took place more in the subconscious, and the conscious relationship with the nature spirits receded more.

How did this come about? For France, for example, it came about through the wave of Romanic evolution sweeping over the wave of Celtic evolution, permeating the Celtic element with the Romanic element. In the confluence of the Celtic and the Romance, we have two impulses. An old impulse, which directly mediates the connection between the elementary world and the etheric body, and in the new impulse, in the influence of the Romance, we have that which also enters the etheric body, but that it is like an historical, a historic wave, so that what I said in earlier lectures could occur, that a revival of the ancient Greek element could take place in the French element.

If we want to understand this western type of human being correctly, we must assess these various impulses, which also flow into the etheric body, in the right way. And now, so to speak, we have spoken of characteristic phenomena with regard to the influences on the physical body and with regard to the influences on the etheric body. The situation is different when we consider the middle region. There things are somewhat different. There we are dealing with something, I might say, much more unexpressed, with something that can be less clearly characterized. There we are dealing with the fact that both spirits of the earth and spirits of the liquid element have a direct effect on the physical body.

You see, it is a transition. Here, in the West, the spirits of the liquid element act directly on the etheric body. The spirits of the liquid element subside in Central Europe, and they are joined by certain spirits of the earthly element. They act directly on the physical body; less strongly on the etheric body. The spirits of the earthly element refine the physical body as you go further east. Therefore, in some way connected with Central Europe, we have everything that, over a long period of time, has provided Europe with such physical bodies that are accessible to the liquid and solid elements. And so we see how what flows into human evolution must become more complicated. We see how, out of this store, this reservoir, the people of the Franks, as I have described them, through the agency of the fluid and the solid, are preparing to reintroduce themselves into the Celtic-Romanic folk element; and only then does that which has confronted us as the active element in human evolution arise.

The Franks who remained behind thus retain the peculiarity of preferring to receive in the physical body that which emanates from the liquid and earthly spirits – the Saxons are related to them in this respect. The Franks who moved to the West united their nature with that which comes from the direct influence of the genius of the sea, which becomes even more significant when we consider that it incorporates the historical element of the Romance language.

In this way the impulses interlock and so we can understand how, above all, if we want to characterize Western Europe, we cannot come to an understanding unless we take into account everything that intervenes in the etheric body.

If we want to characterize Central Europe, we have to say that it depends more on the physical body, it depends more on what is configured in the physical body. Now we see how such impulses, like the ones expressed, concentrate in certain centers, as it were, how they characteristically emerge in certain centers. Two such centers, which are truly characteristic of each other, are found in Central Europe on the one hand and in the British Isles on the other. In Central Europe, where it is most strongly expressed, we have what I have called the solid element, and where what comes from the spirits of the liquid and the spirits of the solid flows into the physical body, where it is mixed, and in the British Isles, where - in some ways more strongly than in France, for example - what comes from the spirits of the liquid element has a preferential effect on the etheric bodies. This has led to people living in these two areas who basically carry the same impulses within them; only some carry them in their physical body and are suited to everything connected with the work of these genii in the physical ; the others, in the British Isles, have them in their etheric bodies and are thus called upon to bring about everything that is connected with the impulses of the etheric body. If I may say it grotesquely, I could say that if you put a German and an Englishman together, you notice the difference when you look at their physical bodies. You only notice the similarity when you put the German's physical body together with the Englishman's etheric body. Only then does it become apparent that the same impulses are alive there.

You see what emerges, caricatured, in the external view, which remains with the external phantasmagoria, I would say. Do not misunderstand the word. It only appears in its true form when one considers what becomes the basis of life, what the truth is. But because in the world the entities must work together, because it cannot be otherwise, because the world is a whole, it must be so that on the one hand certain impulses work through the physical body, on the other hand through the etheric body. I would say that is the way it should be. This is how the corresponding real interaction arises.

And so you see, what appears in the spiritual world is that a very special relationship has come about between the German world and the British world. I have explained this very special relationship for the East and West in a previous lesson, in which I showed you how a certain struggle takes place in the spiritual world for the East and West, caused by the diversity of the souls that come from an eastern and the souls that come from a western body.

The effect of the conditions just described is something else. I ask you not to take what I have to say today as if it can be understood or speculated upon rationally. One must observe in the spiritual world, otherwise one will not be able to arrive at the right conclusion. A harmony is gradually emerging between what is happening in Central Europe and the British Isles, a harmony, a true spiritual alliance that has gradually grown so strong that it can be said that spiritually speaking, no earthly souls love each other more than the earthly souls of Central Europe and the earthly souls of the British Isles. There the strongest love, spiritually conceived, exists, and that expresses itself outwardly in what we now see before us. Such are the complications of the situation.

One would truly not express such things if they were based only on a lightly founded knowledge, if one had not gained them through the most painful experiences. Do not think that you can generalize by thinking that every alliance in the physical world is a war in the spiritual world, and a war in the physical world is an alliance in the spiritual world. Things are as I have described them to you. And that this is expressed as a struggle is the expression in today's materialistic culture for the difficulty of really living out the matter in the spiritual.

Our time is reluctant to recognize what is present in the spiritual world, not only in words but also in deeds. It tries to present the opposite of what is present in the spiritual world, because the materialistic age is also reluctant to recognize the spiritual in deeds. And so the tendency of the spiritual world – namely, after the harmony of the physically achieved in Central Europe and the ethereally achieved in the British Isles – is drowned out in Maja by what is happening today in the form of struggle and mutual hatred.

You see, it is worthwhile for those who are not spiritual scientists to consider us fools, because the insights that emerge from the spiritual world are very much at odds with what can be observed in the physical world. But we can be assured that the further development of humanity depends on the fact that spiritual truths will really penetrate, that people really learn to see beyond the world of the senses. For this to happen, events are necessary, of which I have spoken more or less clearly in these days.

We can be glad that Karma has brought us together here in a neutral area, where it is possible to speak so frankly about these things, for it is not easy to speak about them, especially today. But it is good for the humanities to find their way into these things, because they may regard what happens in the outer world precisely as an incentive to look behind the veil. Much would remain quite incomprehensible if one could not see behind this veil. Things only get their full meaning when one sees behind this veil.

The idea of other worlds lying beneath or behind the physical world is very familiar to us, and as an introduction to what I propose to put before you, I want to speak today of certain characteristics of these worlds. By widening and extending the knowledge we already possess, still other aspects of this subject will become clear to us.

As you know, the world bordering upon that known to our ordinary consciousness is the so-called world of Imagination. The world of Imagination is far more inwardly mobile and flexible than our physical world with its clear-cut lines of demarcation and its sharply defined objects. When the veil formed by the physical world is broken through, we enter an ethereal, fluidic world, and when we experience this first spiritual world, the feeling arises that we are outside the physical body. In this spiritual world we are at once conscious of a new and different relationship to the physical body; it is a relationship such as we otherwise feel to our eyes or ears. The physical body in its totality works as if it were a kind of organ of perception; but we very soon realize that, properly speaking, it is not the physical but the ether-body that is the real organ of perception, The physical body merely provides a kind of scaffolding around the ether-body. We begin, gradually, to live consciously in the ether-body, to feel it as a sense-organ which perceives a world of weaving, moving pictures and sounds. And then we are aware of being related to the ether-body within the physical body just as in ordinary life we are related to our ears or eyes.

This feeling of being outside the physical body is an experience similar in some respects to that of sleep. As beings of spirit-and-soul we are outside the physical and etheric bodies during sleep, but our consciousness is dimmed during the experience, and we know nothing of what is really happening to us and around us.

You will see from this that there can be a relationship to the physical body quite different from that to which we are accustomed in ordinary life. This is a fact to which attention must be called by Spiritual Science and it is an experience which will become more and more common in human beings as evolution leads on into the future.

I have said repeatedly that the cultivation of Spiritual Science today is not the outcome of any arbitrary desire, but is a necessity of evolution at the present time. This feeling of separation from the physical body is an experience that will arise in human beings more and more frequently in the future, without being understood. A time will come when a great many people will find themselves asking: “Why is it that I feel as if my being were divided, as if a second being were standing by my side?” This feeling will arise as naturally as hunger or thirst or other such experiences and it must be understood by men of the present and future. It will become intelligible when, through Spiritual Science, people begin to understand what this experience of division within them really signifies.

In the domain of Education, particularly, attention will have to be paid to it; indeed we shall all have to learn to pay more heed than hitherto to certain experiences which will become increasingly common in children as time goes on. It is true that in later life, when the whole impression made by the physical world is very strong, these feelings and experiences will not be particularly noticeable in the near future, but as time goes on they will become more and more intense. They will occur, to begin with, in children, and grown-up people will hear from children many things which in the ordinary way are pooh-poohed but which will have to be understood because they are connected with deep secrets of evolution.

We shall hear children saying: “I have seen a being who said this or that to me, who told me what to do.”—The materialist, of course, will tell such a child that this is all nonsense, that no such being exists. But students of Spiritual Science will have to understand the significance of the phenomenon. If a child says: “I saw someone who came to me, he went away again but he keeps on coming and I cannot get rid of him”—then anyone who understands Spiritual Science will realize that a phenomenon which will appear in greater and greater definition as time goes on, is here revealing itself in the life of the child. What does this really signify?

We shall understand it if we think of two fundamental and typical experiences, the first of which was particularly significant in the Greco-Latin age, while the other is significant in our own time, when it is beginning, gradually, to take shape. Whereas the first experience reached a kind of culmination in the Greco-Latin epoch, we are slowly moving towards the second.

Experiences deriving from the influences of Lucifer and Ahriman are all the time playing into human life. In this basic experience of man during the Fourth Post-Atlantean or Greco-Roman epoch, Lucifer's influence was the greater; in our own epoch, Ahriman is the predominant influence. Lucifer is connected with all those experiences which, lacking the definition imparted by the senses, remain undifferentiated and obscure.

Lucifer is connected with the experience of breathing, of the in-breathing and the out-breathing. The relationship between a man's breathing and the functioning of his organism as a whole must be absolutely regular and normal. The moment the breathing process is in any way disturbed, instead of remaining the unconscious operation to which no attention need be paid, it becomes a conscious process, of which we are more or less dreamily aware. And when, to put it briefly, the breathing process becomes too forceful, when it makes greater claims on the organism than the organism can meet, then it is possible for Lucifer (not he himself but the hosts belonging to him) to enter with the breath into the organism.

I am speaking here of a familiar experience of dream-life. It may arise in many forms and with growing intensity. A nightmare in which the disturbed breathing process makes a man conscious in dream, so that experiences of the spiritual world intermingle with the dream and give rise to the anxiety and fear which often accompany a nightmare—all such experiences have their origin in the Luciferic element. When, instead of the regular breathing, there is a feeling of being choked or strangled, this is connected with the possibility that Lucifer may be mingling with the breathing.

This is the cruder form of the process, where, as the result of a diminution of consciousness, Lucifer intermingles with the breathing and, in the dream, takes the form of a strangler. That is the crude form of the experience. But there is an experience more delicate and more intangible than that of being physically strangled. It does not, as a rule, occur to people that a certain familiar experience is really a less crude form of that of strangulation. Yet whenever anything becomes a problem in the soul or gives rise to doubt concerning one thing or another in the world, this is a subtler form of the experience of being strangled. It can truly be said that when we feel obliged to question, when a riddle, either great or trifling, confronts us, then something seems to be strangling us, but in such a way that we do not heed it. Nevertheless, every doubt, every problem is a subtle form of nightmare.

And so experiences which often take a crude form, become much more subtle and intangible when they arise in the life of soul itself. It is to be presumed that science will be led some day to study how the breathing process is connected with the urge to question, or with the feeling of being assailed by doubt; but whether this happens or not, everything that is associated with questioning and doubt, with feelings of dissatisfaction caused when something in the world demands an answer and we are thrown back entirely upon our own resources—all this is connected with the Luciferic powers.

In the light of Spiritual Science it can be said that whenever we feel a sensation of strangulation in a nightmare, or whenever some doubt or question inwardly oppresses or makes us uneasy, the breathing process becomes stronger, more forceful. There is something in the breathing which must be harmonized, toned down and modified if human nature is to function in the right and normal way.

What happens when the breathing process becomes excessively vigorous and forceful? The ether-body expands, becomes too diffuse; and as this takes effect in the physical body, it tends to break up the physical body. An over-exuberant, too widely extended ether-body gives rise to an excessively vigorous breathing process and this provides the Luciferic forces with opportunity to work.

The Luciferic forces, then, can make their way into the human being when the ether-body has expanded beyond the normal. One can also say that the Luciferic forces tend to express themselves in an ether-body that has expanded beyond the limits of the human form, that is to say, in an ether-body requiring more space than is provided within the boundaries of the human skin.

Of attempts made to find an appropriate form in which to portray this process, the following may be said.—In its normal state, the ether-body moulds and shapes the physical form of man. But as soon as the ether-body expands, as soon as it tries to create for itself greater space and an arena transcending the boundaries of the human skin, it tends to produce other forms. The human form cannot here be retained; the ether-body strives to grow out of and beyond the human form. In olden days men found the solution for this problem. When an extended ether-body—which is not suited to the nature of man but to the Luciferic nature—makes itself felt and takes shape before the eye of soul, what kind of form emerges? The Sphinx!

Here we have a clue to the nature of the Sphinx. The Sphinx is really the being who has us by the throat, who strangles us. When the ether-body expands as a result of the force of the breathing, a Luciferic being appears in the soul. In such an ether-body there is then not the human, but the Luciferic form, the form of the Sphinx. The Sphinx is the being who brings doubts, who torments the soul with questions.

And so there is a definite connection between the Sphinx and the breathing process. But we also know that the breathing process is connected in a very special way with the blood. Therefore the Luciferic forces also operate in the blood, permeating and surging through it. By way of the breathing, the Luciferic forces can everywhere make their way into the blood of the human being and when excessive energy is promoted in the blood, the Luciferic nature—the Sphinx—becomes very strong.

Because man is open to the Cosmos in his breathing, he is confronted by the Sphinx. It was paramountly during the Greco-Latin epoch of civilization that, in their breathing, men felt themselves confronting the Sphinx in the Cosmos. The legend of Oedipus describes how the human being faces the Sphinx, how the Sphinx torments him with questions. The picture of the human being and the Sphinx, or of the human being and the Luciferic powers in the Cosmos, gives expression to a deeply-rooted experience of men as they were during the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch, and indicates that when, in however small a degree, a man breaks through the boundaries of his normal life on the physical plane, he comes into contact with the Sphinx-nature. At this moment Lucifer approaches him and he must cope with Lucifer, with the Sphinx.

The basic tendency of our Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch is different. The trend of evolution has been such that the ether-body has contracted and is far less prone to diffusion or expansion. The ether-body, instead of being too large, is too small, and this will become more marked as evolution proceeds. If it can be said that in the man of ancient Greece, the ether-body was too large, it can be said that in the man of modern times the ether-body is compressed and contracted, has become too small. The more human beings are led by materialism to disdain the Spiritual, the more will the ether-body contract and wither. But because the organization and functions of the physical body depend upon the ether-body—inasmuch as the ether-body must permeate the physical in the right way—the physical body too will always tend to dry up, to wither, if the contraction of the ether-body is excessive; and if the physical body became too dry, men would have feet of horn instead of the feet of a normal human being. As a matter of fact, man will not actually find himself with feet of horn, but the tendency is there within him, owing to this proclivity of the ether-body to weaken and dry up. Now into this dried-up ether-body, Ahriman can insinuate himself, just as Lucifer can creep into an extended, diffuse ether-body. Ahriman will assume the form which indicates a lack of power in the ether-body. It unfolds insufficient etheric force for properly developed feet and will produce hornlike feet, goat's feet.

Mephistopheles is Ahriman. There is good reason, as I have just indicated, for portraying him with the feet of a goat. Myths and legends are full of meaning: Mephistopheles is very often depicted with horses' hoofs; his feet have dried up and become hoofs. If Goethe had completely understood the nature of Mephistopheles he would not have made him appear in the guise of a modern cavalier, for by his very nature Mephistopheles-Ahriman lacks the etheric forces necessary to permeate and give shape to the normal physical form of a human being.

Yet another characteristic of Mephistopheles-Ahriman is due to this contraction of the ether-body and its consequent lack of etheric force. The best way to understand this will be to consider the nature of man as a whole. Even physically, the human being is, in a certain respect, a duality. For think of it.—You stand there as a physical human being. But the in-breathed air is inside you, is part of you as a physical being. This air, however, is sent out again by the very next exhalation, so that the “man of air-and-breath” pervading you, changes all the time. You are not merely a man of flesh, bone and muscle, but you are also a “breath man.” This “breath man,” however, is constantly changing, passing out and in. And this “breath man” is connected with the circulating blood.

Within you, separate as it were from this “breath man” is the other pole: the “nerve man” with the circulating nerve-fluid. The contact between the “nerve man” and the blood is a purely external one. Just as those etheric forces which tend towards the Luciferic nature can only find easy access to the blood by way of the breath, so the etheric forces which tend towards the Mephistophelean or Ahrimanic nature can only approach the nervous system—not the blood.

Ahriman is deprived of the possibility of penetrating into the blood because he cannot come near the warmth of the blood. If he wants to establish a connection with a human being, he will therefore crave for a drop of blood, because access to the blood is so difficult for him. An abyss lies between Mephistopheles and the blood. When he draws near to man as a living being, when he wants to make a connection with man, he realizes that the essentially human power lives in the blood. He must therefore endeavor to get hold of the blood.

That Faust's pact with Mephistopheles is signed with blood is a proof of the wisdom contained in the legend. Faust must bind himself to Mephistopheles by way of the blood, because Mephistopheles has no direct access to the blood and craves for it. Just as the Greek confronted the Sphinx whose field of operation is the breathing system, so the man of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch confronts Mephistopheles who operates in the nerve-process, who is cold and scornful because he is bloodless, because he lacks the warmth that belongs to the blood. He is the scoffer, the cold, scornful companion of man.

Just as it was the task of Oedipus to get the better of the Sphinx, so it is the task of man in the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch to get the better of Mephistopheles. Mephistopheles stands there like a second being, confronting him. The Greek was confronted by the Sphinx as the personification of the forces which entered into him together with excessive vigor of the breathing process. The human being of the modern age is confronted by the fruits of intellect and cold reason, rooted as they are in the nerve-process. Poetic imagination has glimpsed, prophetically, a picture of the human being standing over against the Mephistophelean powers; but the experience will become more and more general, and the phenomenon which, as I have said, will appear in childhood, will be precisely this experience of the Mephistophelean powers.

Whereas the child in Greece was tormented by a flood of questions, the suffering awaiting the human being of our modern time is rather that of being in the grip of preconceptions and prejudices, of having as an incubus at his side a second “body” consisting of all these preconceived judgments and opinions. What is it that is leading to this state of things?

Let us be quite candid about the trend of evolution. During the course of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, so many problems have lost all inner, vital warmth. The countless questions which confront us when we study Spiritual Science with any depth, simply do not exist for the modern man with his materialistic outlook. The riddle of the Sphinx means nothing to him, whereas the man of ancient Greece was vitally aware of it. A different form of experience will come to the man of modern times. In his own opinion he knows everything so well; he observes the material world, uses his intellect to establish the interconnections between its phenomena and believes that all its riddles are solved in this way, never realizing that he is simply groping in a phantasmagoria. But this way of working coarsens and dries up his ether-body, with the ultimate result that the Mephistophelean powers, like a second nature, will attach themselves to him now and in times to come.

The Mephistophelean nature is strengthened by all the prejudices and limitations of materialism, and a future can already be perceived when everyone will be born with a second being by his side, a being who whispers to him of the foolishness of those who speak of the reality of the spiritual world. Man will, of course, disavow the riddle of Mephistopheles, just as he disavows that of the Sphinx; nevertheless he will chain a second being to his heels. Accompanied by this second being, he will feel the urge to think materialistic thoughts, to think, not through his own being, but through the second being who is his companion.

In an ether-body that has been parched by materialism, Mephistopheles will be able to dwell. Understanding what this implies, we shall realize that it is our duty to educate children in the future—be it by way of Eurythmy or the development of a spiritual-scientific outlook—in such a way that they will be competent to understand the spiritual world. The ether-body must be quickened in order that the human being may be able to take his rightful stand, fully cognizant of the nature of the being who stands at his side. If he does not understand the nature of this second being, he will be spellbound by him, fettered to him. Just as the Greek was obliged to get the better of the Sphinx, so will modern man have to outdo Mephistopheles—with his faunlike, satyrlike form, and his goat's or horse's feet.

Every age, after all, has known how to express its essential characteristic in legend and saga. The Oedipus legends in Greece and the Mephistopheles legends in the modern age are examples, but their basic meanings must be understood.

You see, truths that are otherwise presented merely in the form of poetry—for instance, the relations between Faust and Mephistopheles—can become guiding principles for education as it should be in the future. The prelude to these happenings is that a people or a poet have premonitions of the existence of the being who accompanies man; but finally, every single human being will have this companion who must not remain unintelligible to him and who will operate most powerfully of all during childhood. If adults whose task it is to educate children today do not know how to deal rightly with what comes to expression in the child, human nature itself will be impaired owing to a lack of understanding of the wiles of Mephistopheles.

It is very remarkable that indications of these trends are everywhere to be found in legends and fairy-tales. In their very composition, legends and fairy-tales which seem so unintelligible to modern scholars, point either to the Mephistophelean, the Ahrimanic, or to the Sphinx, the Luciferic. The secret of all legends and fairy-tales is that their content was originally actual experience, arising either from man's relation to the Sphinx or from his relation to Mephistopheles.

In legends and fairy-tales we find, sometimes more and sometimes less deeply hidden, either the motif of the riddle, the motif of the Sphinx, where something has to be solved, some question answered; or else the motif of bewitchment, of being under a spell. This is the Ahriman motif. When Ahriman is beside us, we are perpetually in danger of falling victim to him, of giving ourselves over to him to such an extent that we cannot get free. In face of the Sphinx, the human being is aware of something that penetrates into him and as it were tears him to pieces. In face of the Mephistophelean influence he feels that he must yield to it, bind himself to it, succumb to it.

The Greeks had nothing like theology in our modern sense, but were very much closer to the wisdom of Nature and the manifestations of Nature. They approached the wisdom of Nature without theology, and questions and riddles pressed in upon them.

Now the breathing process is much more intimately connected with Nature than is the nerve-process. That is why the Greek had such a living feeling of being led on to wisdom by the Sphinx. It is quite different in the modern age when theology has come upon the scene. Man no longer believes that direct intercourse with Nature brings him near to the Divine Wisdom of the world, but he sets out to study, to approach it via the nerve-process, not via the breathing and the blood. The search for wisdom has become a nerve-process; modern theology is a nerve-process. But this means that wisdom is shackled to the nerve-process; man draws near to Mephistopheles, and owing to this imprisonment of wisdom in the nerve-process, the premonition arose at the dawn of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch that Mephistopheles is shackled to the human being, stands at his side.

If the Faust legend is stripped of all the extraneous elements that have been woven around it, there remains the picture of a young theologian striving for wisdom; doubts torment him and because he signs a pledge with the Devil—with Mephistopheles—he is drawn into the Devil's field of operations. But just as it was the task of the Greek, through the development of conscious Egohood, to conquer the Sphinx, so we, in our age, must get the better of Mephistopheles by enriching the Ego with the wisdom that can be born only from knowledge and investigation of the spiritual world, from Spiritual Science.

Oedipus was the mightiest conqueror of the Sphinx; but every Greek who wrestled for manhood was also, at a lower level, victorious over the Sphinx. Oedipus is merely a personification, in a very typical form, of what every Greek was destined to experience. Oedipus must prove himself master of the forces contained in the processes of the breathing and the blood. He personifies the nerve-process with its impoverished ether-forces, in contrast to those human beings who are altogether under the sway of the breathing and blood processes. Oedipus takes into his own nature those forces which are connected with the nerve-process, that is to say, the Mephistophelean forces; but he takes them into himself in the right and healthy way, so that they do not become a second being by his side, but are actually within him, enabling him to confront and master the Sphinx.

This indicates to us that in their rightfully allotted place, Lucifer and Ahriman work beneficially; in their wrongful place—there they are injurious. The task incumbent upon the Greek was to get the better of the Sphinx-nature, to cast it out of himself. When he was able to thrust it into the abyss, when, in other words, he was able to bring the extended ether-body down into the physical body, then he had overcome the Sphinx. The abyss is not outside us; the abyss is man's own physical body, into which the Sphinx must be drawn in the legitimate and healthy way. But the opposite pole—the nerve-process—which works, not from without but from within the Ego, must here be strengthened. Thus is the Ahrimanic power taken into the human being and put in its right place.

Oedipus is the son of Laios. Laios had been warned against having a child because it was said that this would bring misfortune to his whole race. He therefore cast out the boy who was born to him. He pierced his feet, and the child was therefore called “Oedipus,” i.e., “club foot.” That is the reason why, in the drama, Oedipus has deformed feet.

I have said already that when etheric forces are impoverished, the feet cannot develop normally, but will wither. In the case of Oedipus this condition was induced artificially. The legend tells us that he was found and reared by shepherds after an attempt had been made to get rid of him. He goes through life with clubbed feet. Oedipus is Mephistopheles—but in this case Mephistopheles is working in his rightful place, in connection with the task devolving upon the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch.

The harmony between ether-body and physical body so wonderfully expressed in the creations of Greek Art, everything that constituted the typical greatness of the Greek—of all this, Oedipus is deprived in order that he may become a personality in the real sense. The Ego that has now passed into the head becomes strong, and the feet wither.

The man of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch has quite a different task. In order to confront and conquer the Sphinx, Oedipus was obliged to receive Ahriman into himself. The man of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, who confronts Ahriman-Mephistopheles, must take Lucifer into himself. The process is the reverse of that enacted by Oedipus. Everything that the Ego accumulates in the head must be pressed down into the rest of man's nature. The Ego, living in the nerve-process, has accumulated “Philosophy, Law, Medicine, and, alas, Theology too”—all nerve-processes. And now there is the urge to get rid of it all from the head—just as Oedipus deprived the feet of their normal forces—and to penetrate through the veils of material existence.

And now think of Faust standing there with all that the Ego has accumulated; think of how he wants to throw it all out of his head, just as Oedipus deprives his feet of their normal forces. Faust says: “I have studied, alas! Philosophy, Jurisprudence and Medicine too, and saddest of all, Theology” ... he wants to rid his head of it all. And moreover he does so, by surrendering himself to a life that is not bound up with the head. Faust is Oedipus reversed, i.e., the human being who takes the Lucifer-nature into himself.

And now think of all that Faust does, so that having Lucifer within him, he may battle with Ahriman, with Mephistopheles who stands beside him. All this shows us that Faust, in reality, is Oedipus reversed. The Ahriman-nature in Oedipus has to get the better of Lucifer; the Lucifer-nature in Faust has to help him to overcome Ahriman-Mephistopheles. Ahriman-Mephistopheles operates more in the external world, Lucifer more in the inner life. All the misfortunes that befall Oedipus because he must take the Ahriman-nature into himself, are connected with the external world. Doom falls upon his race, not merely upon himself. Even the doom that falls upon him is of an external character; he pierces his eyes and blinds himself; similarly, the pestilence which sweeps his native city—this, too, is an external doom. Faust's experiences, however, are of the soul—they are inner tragedies. Again in this respect, Faust reveals himself as the antithesis of Oedipus.

In these two figures, both of them dual—Oedipus and Sphinx, Faust and Mephistopheles—we have typical pictures of the evolution of the Fourth and Fifth Post-Atlantean epochs.

When history, in time to come, is presented less as a narration of external happenings and more as a description of what human beings actually experience, then and only then will the significance of these fundamental experiences be fully understood. For then man will perceive what is really at work in the onflowing evolutionary process, of which ordinary science knows only the external phantasmagoria.

In order that the Ego should be strengthened, it was necessary for Ahriman-Mephistopheles to enter into Oedipus—the typical representative of the Greeks. In the man of the modern age, the Ego has become too strong and he must break free. But this he can only do by deepening his knowledge of spiritual happenings, of the world to which the Ego truly belongs. The Ego must know that it is a citizen of the spiritual world, not merely the inhabitant of a human body. This is the demand of the age in which we ourselves are living. The man of the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch was called upon to strive with might and main for consciousness in the physical body; the man of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch must strive to become conscious in the spiritual world, so to expand his consciousness that it reaches into the spiritual world.

Spiritual Science is thus a fundamental factor in the evolution of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch.

In the lecture on the Kalevala, (14th November, 1914), I made a statement which you will probably not have found easy to understand. You will remember, I spoke of a “being” that stretches across Europe from west to east; and I spoke of it as having three limbs that reach out in an easterly direction. I said that for the ancient Finnish folk these three limbs were known as Wainamoinen, Ilmarinen, and Lemminkainen, and that they were what we today, in our more materialistic language, call the gulfs of Riga, Finland and Bothnia. You will probably have wondered how I could say that these gulfs had anything to do with a being, when they are obviously nothing else than extensions of the surface of the sea. There is no body; how then can it be possible to speak of a being?

I can well imagine that this difficulty might arise in your minds, and it is typical. For again and again you will find that truths which come from the spiritual world lay themselves open to the charge of being contradictory. The very fact that they do so is significant and is quite as it should be; and the only way to arrive at a satisfactory solution of the contradiction is in every case to make a still deeper study of the matter in question. And this I want to do today in respect of certain problems in spiritual knowledge. But first let me preface what I have to say with a few introductory words.

We will glance, to begin with, at some of the prejudices concerning the nature of man that are prevalent in the materialistic thought of our time. Let us take one example. Various physical processes are to be found in man, among others processes of the brain and nervous system; and it is common knowledge that when these processes take place, processes take place also in the soul. The conclusion is drawn that the processes in the soul are no more than the expression of the physical processes. The materialist studies what goes on in the body of the human being, finds there—or rather pre-supposes hypothetically—delicate nerve-processes, and says: The thinking, feeling and willing processes are in reality only accompanying phenomena of what is going on all the time as physical processes. This view is quite commonly held today and it will undoubtedly strike deeper and deeper root into the materialistic thinking of the near future. From the point of view of logic it is about as clever as the following would be.—Suppose someone walking along a road discovers tracks on it—here, parallel ruts, and here again, marks like the soles of human feet. He thinks this over and says to himself: “The material of which the road is made has undergone certain changes and influences, with the result that it has in some places become packed together so as to form ruts, whilst at other places it has been sucked downwards and we see on the surface what looks like the impress of a human foot.”

Such a conclusion is of course a crudely mistaken one, the truth being that a wagon has passed and made the two ruts with the wheels, and a man has also been walking on the road and made the other impressions with his feet. Not the nature of the soil, but the man and the wagon are responsible for the tracks.

The case is no different with the processes that go on in our nervous system! Whenever we think or feel or will, we are setting up processes that are of the nature of soul-and-spirit. And so long as we live in the physical world, these processes are united with the physical body, they leave their tracks in it—just as the wagon and the man leave their tracks behind in the road. But these tracks in the body have no more to do with the material of which the body is made than have the tracks in the road to do with the materials of which the road is constructed. In reality, the processes that take place in the matter of the brain and in the matter of the nerves have nothing whatever to do with the actual thought-processes. The relation between them is no nearer than the relation between what the man and the wagon are doing and what is going on in the surface of the earth over which they are moving. It is really quite important to take a little trouble to consider the matter in this light. For it reveals to one that the anatomist or physiologist who investigates merely the physical processes in the organism is like a spirit-being who moves about under the earth without ever coming up to the surface, and who has never even seen men or wagons. All he can do is to observe from below that unevennesses occur in the surface of the earth; he never comes close up to them, and he sees them always from the other side. Investigating them in this limited way, he imagines the earth itself has given rise to them by its own activity. The moment such a spirit were to come out on to the surface, he would become acquainted with the true state of affairs. This is exactly how it is with the anatomist and physiologist who work from the materialistic point of view. They are always under the earth—for to know nothing of Spiritual Science is to be “under the earth!” What they investigate is the material processes, and these have nothing to do with what is happening above in the realm of soul-and-spirit. It will be man's task in the near future to free himself from this anatomical and physiological thinking and work through to a spiritual-scientific thinking. Then he will feel as an underground imp might feel who was suddenly lifted up above the earth and saw for the first time how the tracks he had observed from below had really come about. Imps burrowing under the earth—that is what the scientists are, who take account only of the spiritual that is under the earth—for even the material is spiritual! And mankind will have to experience the great shock that must inevitably come when these underground imps come out into the open—into the realm, that is, of the soul-and-spirit.

These introductory words were necessary in order to prepare you for the subject of today's lecture, which I think you will find helps to solve the contradiction of which we were speaking—that the gulfs of Bothnia, Finland and Riga are obviously mere surfaces, and yet I spoke as though they were a being, or rather limbs of a mighty being stretching from west to east.

We are accustomed to speak of ourselves as beings of space, and we are right; as human beings we are spatial beings. When, however, we come to consider what we are in reality, that is quite another matter. The fact is, man is in reality something altogether different from what we imagine him to be when we look at him only in the outer Maya, in the phantasmagoria of external appearance. There he appears of course as a being of space, spatially enclosed within his skin. But directly we try to carry our thought a little deeper, we are confronted with three great problems or riddles in respect of the human form.

The first of these riddles conceals itself under all manner of puzzling and mystifying illusions. For the external Maya of appearance deceives us again and again in regard to our own existence; and you can find traces of this deception in the science of the present day, particularly at certain points where science is quite at a loss and has been forced to construct all manner of hypotheses. Hypotheses have for example been constantly brought forward to account for the fact that man has two eyes and two ears and yet does not see or hear double. How is it that these organs are symmetrically disposed? How is it that they are present not singly but in pairs? This simple fact offers science a hard nut to crack, and you have only to glance through the literature on the subject to find what a very great deal has been written on this question of why we see with two eyes and hear with two ears.

Man is really coarsely organized; we can sometimes find evidence of this in the very way we speak. For in reality we have also two noses! Only they have grown together and are not so obvious as the two eyes and two ears. Hence we do not speak of two noses, but of one nose; crudely organized as we are, we never discover that we have two! It is nevertheless the case that in all human perception a symmetry comes to expression, a right-and-left symmetry. Had he not two ears, two eyes, and two noses, man would not attain to the perception of his own I or Ego.

Correspondingly, man needs also for the Ego experience two hands. When we clasp the hands together and feel the one with the other, we immediately get something of an Ego experience. And it is really a similar process, when we unite into one whole the perceptions of two eyes or two ears. Every time we make a sense perception, we perceive the world from two sides, from left and from right. And to the fact that we have these two directions of perception left and right, and bring them together—to this fact we owe our Ego-nature as human beings. Otherwise we would not be I- or Ego-men at all. If, for example, our eyes were situated near our ears and we had no possibility of combining the lines of vision, we would always remain beings who are involved in a Group Soul. To be an Ego-being we must make the right and the left meet. Throughout the whole realm of human perception there is always this crossing of right and left in the middle. Look at this vertical line on the blackboard. Imagine that a plane projects out here from the blackboard along this line. Everything comes, from left and right, up to this line of incision. We, my dear friends, are ourselves actually in this plane. We are not in space, we are only in this surface, this plane. We are not beings extended in space, we are surface beings, that come about through the crossing of the impulse from the left with the impulse from the right. And if to the question: Where are you? you want to find an answer, not in accordance with Maya, but in accordance with reality, then you must not point to the space where your body is standing and say: “I am here,” but you will have to say: “I am in the place where my left man and my right man meet.” In reality you are there, and only there. Just as we had surfaces in the case of the being of whom I spoke before, surfaces where air and water meet, so in man we have the left half and the right half. In that being the two halves were different, in man they are alike; but man is also a surface being, man is a plane. It is Maya that we see him as having form and figure.

Whence then has man this form and figure? He has it because he stands in the midst of a battle. A being from the left is fighting in man with a being from the right. If we were able to be entirely within our left half we would have a powerful perception of the one being, and if we were in our right half we would have a correspondingly powerful perception of the other being. Our existence as a double being arises from the fact that the Luciferic being is fighting in us from the left and the Ahrimanic being from the right.

Let us try to make a picture of it in our minds. From the left the Luciferic being fights his way through and throws up, as it were, his fortifications, and from the right Ahriman fights his way through and throws up his fortifications. And all that you can do is to stand in the middle between the two. The left part of you—your left man, as it were—is the fortification set up by Lucifer, and your right man is the fortification set up by Ahriman. And the whole art of life consists in finding the true balance between them. We do it unconsciously whenever we perceive with the senses. When we hear with the left ear and with the right ear, and then unite into a single perception the impulses that reach us in this way, or when we feel with the left hand and with the right hand and unite the two perceptions, we are placing ourselves into the surface that lies on the boundary of the conflict between Lucifer and Ahriman. As narrow as—no, narrower than—the blade of a knife is the space that is left to us in the middle, where we have to play our part. Our organism does not really belong to us; we are a battlefield for the Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers—and for other powers too, of like nature with them, but into that subject we cannot enter now.

We men are thus in reality surface beings wedged between two entities that are no concern of ours! Our left man does not concern us, neither does our right man: what concerns us is the process that goes on between the two.

And now we can develop a little further the comparison I made use of before. For, as we all recognize, there are processes perpetually going on under the earth; but it is not these that make the tracks in the road. Similarly, what happens in you in the right and left half of your organism, all the processes that take place between Lucifer and Ahriman, have nothing whatever to do with the experience you have in your soul. What goes on down below the surface of the earth—the worms creeping about, the changes in temperature in accordance with the seasons of the year, and so forth—all this has no connection with the tracks that have come in the road, and it is these tracks that are comparable with what takes place in the organism of man. Our researches in physiology and anatomy reveal to us the fight that is being waged within us between Lucifer and Ahriman, but they do not compel us to give ourselves up to the superstition that the life of the soul owes its origin to these processes going on between Lucifer and Ahriman. That is a complete mistake; the life of the soul takes its course within the soul itself—that is to say, in the surface, in the plane, not in the spatial organism at all.

Now the working of Lucifer and Ahriman is not the same in all parts of the human organism, and it is interesting to observe its gradation. Beginning from the head, we find that there Lucifer and Ahriman have thrown up fairly equal fortifications; the left and right halves of the head are very similar. This means that the forces of left and right have in the head not much possibility of interplay and the surface between them is left comparatively undisturbed. There in the middle is the surface, with Lucifer on the left and Ahriman on the right; and because the left and right halves of the head are so similar in form, Lucifer and Ahriman spring back from one another, and in between them man is able to develop a quiet surface activity. Thinking, pure thought as such, is very little disturbed by Lucifer and Ahriman; because in the head they recoil from one another.

When, however, we follow the form of man further down, we find a change. On one side Lucifer works powerfully and builds up the stomach, on the other side Ahriman does the same and builds up the liver. The stomach is the means with which Lucifer fights from left to right; and no true understanding can come about of the relation between stomach and liver, until we see how Lucifer has built up the stomach as a kind of weapon of defence, and Ahriman the liver. These two—stomach and liver—are perpetually waging war one against the other, and physiology would do well to study the conflict. And if the heart of man tends to lean a little over towards the left, then that is an expression of the fact that Lucifer from one side and Ahriman from the other are trying each to grasp something for himself, The whole left and right relationship is an expression of the fight that is being waged in man between Lucifer and Ahriman. We said that in the case of man, what lies on either side of the middle surface is, generally speaking, alike. We have, however, already seen that this is true only for the upper part of man; as we follow the form of man downwards, the similarity gradually disappears. In the case of the being of whom I spoke before, with the three outstretched limbs—Lemminkäinen, Ilmarinen and Wainämöinen—the one half is air and the other water; the two halves are totally different in kind. And even in man, when we attain to clairvoyant knowledge it becomes clear to us that there are two distinct halves. For no sooner have we suggested away the physical body and turned our attention to the etheric body, than we find that the left half grows brighter and clearer than the right half. The left half is all shining and gleaming with radiant light, and the right half is wrapped in darkness and gloom. Yes, that is actually how it is with the left-right human being.

There are, however, other directions in accordance with which man takes up his position in the world of space. Expressed in the language of occultism, this means nothing else than that he is placed in still other ways into the midst of the fight between Lucifer and Ahriman. Let us go on, then, to consider how man stands in space with a forward and backward orientation, looking before and behind. Instead of observing him as a being of left and right, we will now direct our thoughts to the front and back of the human form. From this aspect also we find that man is not the being of space he appears to be. For as from left and from right Lucifer and Ahriman do battle with one another across man, and what shows in space is really only the barricades they put up one against the other, so also from behind Ahriman is fighting and from in front Lucifer. From behind Ahriman thrusts forward his activity, and from in front Lucifer thrusts forward his activity in opposition. Man stands in the middle between them. In connection, however, with the forward and backward direction in man we discover that Lucifer and Ahriman do not succeed in coming so close to one another as to leave nothing but a surface between them. We find here a somewhat different state of affairs. Ahriman comes only as far as the plane which can be drawn through the spinal column, and Lucifer as far as the plane which can be drawn through the breast bone, where the ribs end and meet. In between these two planes lies a space which separates Lucifer and Ahriman one from the other, where the effects of their working are thrown together in confusion. There they stand and fight—not at close quarters, but as though shooting at one another across the intervening space. And there stand we in the midst of the fight. Thus, in respect of the direction before and behind, man is a being that has space.

In the left-right direction the fight between Lucifer and Ahriman is waged principally in the sphere of thought. Thoughts are whirled across from left and from right and meet in the surface in the middle. Cosmic thoughts and cosmic forms of thought impinge upon one another here on the human surface in the middle. In the direction before and behind, Lucifer and Ahriman do battle more in the realm of feeling. And since here the opposing forces do not approach one another so nearly, in the space that is left between them we ourselves have room to be together with our own feelings. When we have thoughts that offer opposition to one another from left and from right, then we have the feeling that these thoughts belong to the world. With our thoughts we think the objects that are in the world outside. When we make our own thoughts, then these thoughts are a mere phantasmagoria; they do not any longer belong to the world. In our feelings, on the other hand, we belong to ourselves; for there Lucifer and Ahriman do not quite meet, there we have room to be active in between them. This is the reason why in our feelings we are so essentially within ourselves.

We human beings are creatures of the beings of the higher hierarchies, and they have created us in accordance with the manner of their working. We are beings of surface between left and right because the higher beings have made us so and placed us so into space. It is they, the Gods, who do not suffer Lucifer and Ahriman to come together in man. We are in this sense creatures of the good Gods. The good Gods, working out of their creative thoughts and purposes, took as it were this resolve. “A conflict is going on,” they said, “between Ahriman and Lucifer. We must set up a wall and enclose a region which they will not be able to enter, where they will not be able to carry on their strife at close quarters.” We human beings have thus been placed into the struggle between Lucifer and Ahriman as creatures of the good Gods; and the better we stand our ground in the struggle, the more truly are we creatures of the good Gods.

In respect of the before and behind, there the good Gods do not allow Lucifer to enter right into us; they created a barricade in the place where the ribs meet in the breast bone. And the wonderfully constructed tower that encloses the spine and the brain is a fortification the good Gods have erected against Ahriman. Ahriman cannot pass this line; all he can do is to send his arrows of feeling across to Lucifer. There in the space between stand we ourselves, separating the two from each other.

There is still a third direction in man, the direction from above downwards. Here again we have to make the discovery that the true state of affairs is not as it seems in external appearance. For from below upwards works Ahriman, and from above downwards Lucifer. Again we find that the good Gods have thrown up a barrier against Lucifer; at a certain plane in man his influence is held in check. You will find the plane by taking the skeleton and removing from it the skull. There where the skull rested on the cervical vertebrae, imagine a horizontal surface. This invisible horizontal surface is the barrier, where man can take his stand and hold up the Luciferic influence that comes from above. Lucifer can come no further, he can only shoot his arrows thence down into man. And his arrows are now arrows of will. From left to right fly arrows of thought, from front to back arrows of feeling and from above downwards as well as from below upwards, arrows of will.

Here, too, we have left to us an intermediate field of action. For about in a line with the diaphragm, you have the surface that acts as a barricade against the upward pressure of Ahriman. Ahriman can reach only as far as the diaphragm with his missiles of will, he can come no further with his will, with his essential being; and in between the two planes lies our own field of action.

You see how complicated the human being is! Take any one portion of the human figure—for example, the left side of the face. As a being of thought, Lucifer can fill entirely this left side of the human countenance; as a being of feeling he can also penetrate it up to a point; and as a being of will he can enter right into and through it from above. And you can go on to discover for every part of the body how Lucifer and Ahriman work in the human being of space by means of cosmic impulses of thought and feeling and will, remembering always that as beings of thought we are actually only surface beings, whilst as men of feeling we have a space between the before and the behind where we can unfold an activity of our own, and again as men of will we have a field of activity between the above and the below, between the surface we imagined drawn through the top of the cervical vertebrae and the surface of the diaphragm. You see, you have first to abstract all those parts that do not belong to man at all, before you can build up a true idea of the human form. Then, and only then, are you in a position to do this.

The truth is, the whole form of man has been put together by forces working from without. It receives its distinctive character from outside itself, and we do not understand the form of man so long as we consider it merely as it appears at first sight; we only understand it when we know how it is connected with the whole cosmos of space, when we are able to see how from right and left, from above and below, from before and behind, Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces are bearing in upon man, and giving him the character of a being of space.

And now, my dear friends, this is also the way in which you must approach something else that has been shaped and formed in accordance with the true cosmic working in the world. I mean our building here in Dornach. If you look at the Goetheanum [ The first building, destroyed by fire on New Year's Eve, 1922/23. ] merely in its outward appearance, you might be disposed to think that the actual building itself, the space occupied by the wood, was the most important part. That is, however, by no means the case. The most important part is what, judging by appearances, does not exist! Take any one of the forms; the essential part of that form is not the shaped and sculptured wood, but is where there is nothing—where the air bounds the wood. The way to obtain the true and real Goetheanum would be to take an immense mound of wax and make a model of the inside of the building, and then study this model or impression. What you go into when you enter the building, what you stand within and cannot see but can only feel—that is the thing that matters. I said once on a former occasion that our building is built on the principle of a “Gugelhopf” [ A shaped cake made in Vienna. Note by Translator. ] cake mould. Imagine you have a tin mould and you bake your cake in it. Which is the more important—the mould or the cake? Obviously the cake. What matters is that the cake should receive the proper “Gugelhopf” shape. As far as the mould is concerned, all that matters is that the mixture, when it is poured into the mould and baked, should turn into a cake of the desired form.

Similarly, in our building it is not the surrounding walls that are of importance, it is what is enclosed within the surrounding walls. And within the walls will be the feelings and thoughts of the people who are in the building. These will develop aright if those who are in the building turn their eyes to its boundary, feel the forms and then fill these forms with forms of thought. What is inside the building will be like the cake, and what we build is the mould that holds and shapes the cake. And the mould has to be of such a kind that it leads to the development of right thoughts and right feelings. This is the principle underlying the new art in contradistinction to the art of olden times. In the art of olden times the essential thing was what is outside in space; but in the new art something else is of account. What is outside is no more than the mould, and the essential thing cannot really be created by the artist at all, it is what is within.

Nor is this true only of plastic forms. It is equally true of painting. The important thing is, not what is painted, but the experience in feeling to which the painting gives rise. Painting too is no more than a cake mould!

The truth is, my dear friends, we have here touched the very heart and core of the moment in evolution in which we stand. This is the step in evolution that has now to be taken, the step forgive the trivial comparison—from the cake mould to the cake. The cake is in this case the Spiritual; to enter into the world of the Spirit—that is the direction in which all our endeavor must now be set. If we fail to recognize this fact, we shall never be able to appraise correctly what we are trying to do here in art. For if we look at this art from the standpoint of the old, we can very easily exclaim: “But I see nothing beautiful in it!” We mean, I see no beautiful cake mould—never suspecting that the mould is not what matters at all, but the cake that is to be inside it. When we once understand this principle in art, my dear friends, we shall be very near understanding the whole meaning and significance of the step forward in spiritual evolution which is to be made through Spiritual Science. Through Spiritual Science man must learn to work his way out of the “Gugelhopf” mould into the “Gugelhopf” itself. He must, for example, get free of the superstition that the origin of thought lies in the brain processes, when as a matter of fact in the processes that go on in the brain cosmic processes are at work and conflicts are being waged between Lucifer and Ahriman. Man must learn to see that the thoughts and feelings of the human soul are tracks graven into the twistings and turnings of these conflicts and have nothing to do with the material processes—in other words, with the Luciferic and Ahrimanic processes.

Let me draw another comparison. Suppose we were to go into a beautiful garden—beautiful particularly in the whole arrangement and lay-out of the flower beds—and we wanted to pronounce an opinion on this beautiful garden. And suppose we were able to look down a hole in the earth and spied there a little underground imp who said to us: “I will tell you how it is that here are roses and over there are violets, and why you find a bush in one place and flowers in another. For I creep about all the time under the surface, and I can see the earth and the soil which has caused all these flowers—violets, roses and the rest—to spring up.” We could answer: “Yes, you describe these processes very nicely; all that you tell me is quite true and must necessarily happen. But for the garden to come into existence as I see it, something else is required—gardeners must have been at work there. They work, however, in a region which you have never seen and about which you have never troubled your head at all.”

In like manner, we must learn to say to the anatomist and physiologist: “I find your activity when I look down through a hole in the earth. Down there you are creeping about and discovering processes which certainly have to take place, but which have nothing at all to do with what takes place in the soul and spirit above ground. And you will only be able to interpret correctly what takes place down below, when you study the relationships that hold sway between the Luciferic and Ahrimanic worlds and those other hierarchies who bring Lucifer and Ahriman into balance.”

Here we must refer to another fact in human evolution, that has hitherto only had influence in man's conception of the Ego, but that we shall learn to know in a much fuller and wider way through Spiritual Science. A time will come in the future when men will say: “We are told in the Bible of the breath of Jehovah which was breathed into man. But into what part of man was the breath breathed?”

If you recall all that I have said in this lecture, you will be able to see that the region into which the breath was breathed is the intervening region that is in between the onsets from before and behind and from above and below—there, in the middle, where Jehovah created man, as it were in the form of a cube. There it was that he so filled man with His own being, with His own magic breath, that the influence of this magic breath was able to extend into the regions in the rest of man that belong to Lucifer and Ahriman. Here in the midst, bounded above and below and before and behind, is an intervening space where the breath of Jehovah enters directly into the spatial human being.

What I have been giving you in this lecture is spoken in respect of the human being of physical space. As you see, even here we can widen our outlook and learn to behold man as he stands within the cosmos. But there are also moral and spiritual aspects of what is apparently external and spatial. And in these aspects too, where the workings of the human soul are concerned—if not in so striking a way as in the case of spatial man, yet here too, what meets us at first is found to be no reality, but only a phantasmagoria. In morality, in logic and in all the activity of the soul, Lucifer and Ahriman are working one upon the other, and man stands at the boundary between them. Of this most important and significant chapter in the understanding of the human being we will speak tomorrow.

From the previous lecture you will have been able to see that the very form of man's body is a result of the co-operation of Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers.

It is particularly important in the present age for man to recognize this co-operation between Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers; for only by such recognition can he gradually learn to understand the forces that are at work behind the external phantasmagoria of existence. We know very well that we have no occasion either to hate Ahriman or to fear Lucifer, since their powers are inimical only when they are working outside the realm where they belong. We spoke on this subject at some length in Munich last year [ see Secrets of the Threshold, by Rudolf Steiner. ]; and we have also given indications in this direction in lectures here in Dornach.

When we saw last time how the physical spatial body of man owes its form to the interaction of Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers, we were dealing with the most external element of human life in which Lucifer and Ahriman play a part. We come a little nearer to the inner nature of man when we pass from the physical to the etheric body. The etheric body may be regarded as the shaper of the physical body. At the foundation of our physical organism—and embedded at the same time in the whole etheric world—lies this etheric organism, in perpetual inner movement. Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers are active here too, as well as in the physical body. Man as etheric being—and it is important to recognize the fact—is also placed into the counterplay of these forces.

In order to give focus to our study of this question, let us now turn our attention to the three fundamental activities of the human being in so far as he is not physical human being. I refer to the activities of Willing, Feeling and Thinking.

So long as we regard man in respect of his physical body alone, we do not of course see this willing, feeling and thinking. Only in its physiognomy or in the performance of certain gestures or the like, does the physical body give us any indication of what is in man's inner nature. The etheric body, however, which is in perpetual movement, is continually giving expression to man's thinking, feeling and willing.

A purely external science finds itself in difficulties when it comes to consider these activities of the human soul. If you will study the various philosophies you will find that one gives pre-eminence to the will, another to thought; and there are again others which consider feeling as the most important force in man. But as to how thinking, feeling and willing unite in man to form a whole—to that problem none of the philosophies of modern times can offer a solution. This inability to form a correct idea of the relationship between thinking, feeling and willing in the life of the soul is not unlike the difficulty someone might experience who, in order to relate himself rightly to the world around him, set out to form a clear conception of man as he appears in the external world. We do not know—so say the philosophers—whether the human soul in its essential nature has more the character of willing or feeling or thinking. It is exactly as if someone were to say: “I have no idea what a ‘man’ really is. One person brings me a five-year-old child and says: There is a man for you! Then another person comes along and points me out a much taller being, who is what is called ‘middle-aged.’ Finally a third person comes and shows me an entirely different being, with wrinkled countenance and grey hair. And now I am really at a loss to know what the being called ‘man’ is, for I have been shown three totally different beings with this name.” Of course the true answer is that they are all of them “man.” The one is very young, the second somewhat older and the third quite old; they are very different in appearance. But by taking all three ages together we acquire a knowledge of “man.” It is the same with willing, feeling and thinking. The difference there too is one of age. Willing is the same soul-activity as thinking, but willing is still a child. When it grows a little older, it becomes feeling, and when it is quite old it is thinking. The matter is made difficult by the fact that the different ages live together in our soul in these three activities.

We have explained on other occasions (and you may read of it in my book The Threshold of the Spiritual World) that when we leave the physical world we come into a world where the law of change prevails instead of the law of persistence or fixity. There all is in constant change; what is old can suddenly grow young again and vice versa. Hence in that world the three activities can and actually do appear at one and the same time. Willing shows itself contemporaneously as young willing, as older willing (i.e., feeling) and at the same time also as quite old willing (i.e., thinking). The different ages are in that world intermingled, everything is mobile. This is how it is with the etheric body of man.

These changes cannot, however, simply come about of themselves. To begin with, a uniform and single action of the soul does not come to consciousness at all in ordinary life, we are quite incapable of bringing such a thing into consciousness. If we think of the etheric body in the likeness of a flowing stream—for it is in the etheric body that we have to make our observations—then we are obliged to say that this stream of soul-activity does not come to consciousness at all in our life; but into this stream, into this perpetual movement of the etheric body that flows in the current of time, Luciferic—and again Ahrimanic—activity enters. Luciferic activity has the result of making the will young. When the activity of our soul is streamed through by Luciferic activity the result is will. When the Luciferic influence predominates, when Lucifer makes his forces felt in the soul, then will is active in us. Lucifer has a juvenating influence on the whole stream of our soul-activity.

When, on the other hand, Ahriman brings his influence to bear on our soul-activity, he hardens it, it becomes old, and thinking is the result. Thinking, the having and holding of thoughts, is quite impossible in ordinary life unless Ahriman exerts his influence within our etheric body. We cannot get on in our life of soul, in so far as this comes to expression in the etheric body, without Ahriman and Lucifer. If Lucifer were to withdraw entirely from our etheric body, we would have nothing to fire our will. If Ahriman were to withdraw entirely from our etheric body, we would never be able to attain cool thinking. In between stands a region where Lucifer and Ahriman are in conflict. Here they interpenetrate; their activities play into one another. It is the region of feeling. The etheric body has actually this appearance; one can perceive in it Luciferic light and Ahrimanic hardness. If you could look at it, you would not of course see it as we might try to show it in a drawing; you would see it all in movement. But there are places where the etheric body seems to be quite untransparent, as if it had ice tracings in it. Forms and figures show themselves which resemble the patterns made by ice on a window pane. These are hardenings in the etheric body, and they are the result in it of the life of thought. This freezing of the etheric body at certain places is due to Ahriman; his forces have found entry there by means of thought. There are also places which seem to be full of light. Here the etheric body is transparent and gleams and glows with light. It is Lucifer who sends his rays into the etheric body of man and makes there centers of will. Then there are regions in between, where the etheric body is in perpetual movement and activity. Here you see at one moment hardness—and then suddenly the hardness is caught by a ray of light and melts right away. Hardening and dissolving, in perpetual alternation—such is the expression of the activity of feeling in the etheric body.

Not only, therefore, is the form of the physical body of man called into being by the interplay of Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces—now creating a balance, now disturbing it again—but in the whole etheric body too, Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces are continually active. When the Ahrimanic forces gain the upper hand, we have an expression of thinking; when the Luciferic forces are in ascendance, we have an expression of willing; and when they are in mutual conflict one with the other, we have an expression of feeling. Thus do Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces play into one another in the etheric body of man. We human beings are as it were ourselves the resultant of these forces, we are placed into their midst.

Now we must not imagine that we are present in this interplay with our full Ego. Our earthly Ego, the Ego that we have acquired in the course of earth evolution, can only come to its full consciousness in the physical body. Not until the time of Jupiter will the Ego be able to unfold itself completely within the etheric body. In all that takes place within the etheric body the real Ego of the human being has no immediate part. Had the progress of world evolution gone on without the intervention of Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces, then man would have been an altogether different being. He would, for example, have been able to have perceptions in his physical body, but he would not have been able to have thoughts. The capacity to have thoughts he owes to the fact that Ahriman can acquire influence over his etheric body. And he has impulses of will because Luciferic forces can acquire influence over his etheric body. These forces are therefore necessary for man, they must needs be present.

We have said that with our earthly consciousness we cannot descend fully into the etheric body. Only in the physical body can we experience our full Ego-consciousness. With the etheric body we enter a world with which we cannot fully identify ourselves. And it is so, that when Ahriman enters into our etheric body, something more enters in with him besides the thoughts he forms there. Nor is it only impulses of will that enter our etheric body with Lucifer. And the same must be said of the feelings, the realm where the two are in conflict. In so far as Ahriman lives in our etheric body we dive down with our etheric body into the sphere of the elementary Nature spirits—the Earth, Water, Air and Fire spirits. We are not cognizant of the fact because we are not able to descend fully into our etheric body with our Ego. Nevertheless it is always so. Within this etheric body not only does there live the power of the thoughts that we ourselves think, but the influences also of the Nature spirits; these enter in and make themselves felt. When a man has met with these Nature spirits he is able afterwards to tell of some experience he has had which he did not have in his ordinary Ego-consciousness. For it is when he, is in an abnormal condition that man meets the Nature spirits, namely, when the etheric body is to some extent loosened from the physical body.

How can such a thing happen? It can happen in the following way. The etheric body of man is in communion with the whole surrounding etheric world, therefore also with the whole sphere of the Nature spirits. Let us imagine, to take a simple case, that a man is walking along a road. When he is walking along a road in the daytime with his ordinary consciousness, his etheric body is properly in his physical body and he perceives with his Ego-consciousness what one is normally able to perceive with the Ego-consciousness. But now suppose that he is walking along a path by night. When we walk along a path by night, it is generally dark, and this fact will of itself produce in many persons a “creepy” feeling. And just because he gets into this condition, then the peculiar sensations that he experiences enable Lucifer to seize hold of him. His etheric body becomes loosened from the physical body, and then this emancipated etheric body can enter into relation with the surrounding etheric world.

Now let us suppose that the man comes into the vicinity of a churchyard where etheric bodies are still present over the graves of recently deceased persons. In the condition in which he is, with his etheric body loosened, he is perhaps able to perceive something of the thoughts which are still remaining in the etheric bodies of the dead persons. Suppose someone has died only a short time ago leaving debts behind him; he died with the thought that he has incurred debts. Then it can be that this thought is still present in the etheric body of the person after he has died. We do not of course ordinarily perceive the thoughts in the etheric body of a dead human being. But for a man who has come into the condition I have described it might well be possible. He could enter into relation with the etheric body of the other and perceive within it the thought: “I have incurred debts.” And then because this experience strengthens the Luciferic power in him, there arises in him the feeling: “I must pay the debt for him.” He experiences in this way in his etheric body something he would never experience in the physical body in normal life. Such an experience does not happen to us in ordinary human life, and when it comes it makes an extraordinary impression upon our consciousness. For it arouses the knowledge: “I have had a strange and singular experience. I have not had this experience within the body, nor can I ever have it within the body.” We have the feeling quite distinctly that we are somewhere else than in our body, and that is a strange, an unaccustomed feeling. We experience at the same time an overpowering desire to return once more into the body, we long for help to return again into the body.

This feeling of longing to return attracts to us certain elementary Nature spirits for whom this very feeling in us is food and nourishment. They come, because they are attracted by the feeling, “I want to be drawn into my physical body,” and they help us to find the way back to it. If one is asleep in the ordinary way, one finds the way back quite easily. But when one has undergone an experience such as I have described, it is difficult to find the way back. You must not of course imagine that we see the situation as we perceive things in the physical body; no, we see it imaginatively, in pictures. Someone comes to us—it is really a Nature spirit, appearing perhaps in the guise of a shepherd, and gives us the advice: “Go to a certain castle, I will take you there in my wagon,”—or some similar words. The situation may even be still further developed. The body which we have left and outside of which we have had the experience, may assume the appearance of an enchanted castle from which we have to release someone when we return into it. So do we “imaginate” in pictures the longing for the physical body and the help that the Nature spirits bring to us. And then we come back into the physical body—that is to say, we wake up.

People who have had such experiences will tell us that they feel they have in actual reality come into contact in this way with the thoughts of a dead man. They say to themselves: “That feeling I had was not something that was merely in myself, it was no mere dream that I dreamed, it was a feeling that communicated to me something that was taking place in the world outside. It is of course all expressed in pictures, but it does truly correspond to an event.” I will now read to you such a picture, where a man narrates what he has experienced. As you will see, it was an experience somewhat similar to the one of which I have spoken. He describes it as follows. “When I had taken leave of the soldiers I met three men. They wanted to exhume a dead person who owed them three marks. I was filled with compassion and at once absolved the debt, in order that the dead man might rest in peace and not be disturbed in his grave. I walked on a little further. A strange man with pale countenance accosted me, invited me to mount a leaden carriage, and persuaded me to go with him to a castle. In the castle, he said, dwelt a princess, who had declared she would marry only a man who came to her on a carriage of lead. He turned to the driver and said: ‘Drive in the direction of the sunrise.’ Then came a shepherd who said: ‘I am the Count of Ravensburg.’ He ordered the driver to drive faster. We came to a door and we could hear a tumult within. The door was opened. The princess asked the man whence he came and how it had been possible for him to drive in company with that old man—and behold, I saw that he who had led me thither was a spirit. Then I entered in at the door and took possession of the castle.”

That is to say, he came back into his body. There you have the description of just such an experience as I have been speaking of.

And what is such an event, when it happens to someone who then tells others of it? It is a Märchen (a fairy-tale [ see Goethe's Standard of the Soul, by Rudolf Steiner. ]).

You must not imagine that an experience of this nature is the only way in which man comes into relationship with the external etheric world through his etheric body. There is another. And that is, in an activity which is only half conscious, an activity in which the Ego only half participates—namely, the act of Speech. Our speaking is not so conscious as our thinking. It is not the case that speaking is something which belongs to us and which we have in our power. In speech live etheric Powers, and a good part of our speaking is unconscious. The Ego does not reach fully down into speech. When we speak we are in communication through our etheric body with the surrounding etheric world. We learn to think as individuals, but not to speak. We are taught to speak through the fact that our Karma places us into a particular set of circumstances in life. We have already seen how we may come into relation with the Nature spirits in abnormal conditions when the etheric body is loosened, and now we find that inasmuch as we speak and do not merely think silently, we come into relation with the Folk Spirits. The Folk Spirits enter our etheric body and live there—without our being aware of it. This life of the Folk Spirit within the human being really belongs just as little to his fully conscious Ego activity as does the “Märchen” of which I have told you. So much, then, for the activity of Lucifer and Ahriman in man's etheric body.

The Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces enter also into the astral body. When we come to study the astral body of man, we must turn our attention to what is the distinguishing mark of the astral human being as he is on earth—namely, consciousness. In the physical body form and force are the essentials, in the etheric body, movement and life: in the astral body, consciousness. Now in the body of man we have not only one consciousness, but two; the ordinary waking state and the state of sleep. But, strange to say, neither of these two states is entirely natural to us. Natural would be for us an intermediate state between the two, a state which, as a matter of fact, we never really consciously have.

If we were perpetually awake we would scarcely be able to develop in a proper, orderly manner through the various ages of life. Something is always present in us which is less awake than we are in our day-consciousness, and only by virtue of this are we in a position to evolve and develop. Ask yourselves, how much do you expect to be able to evolve through all that you experience and receive in ordinary life? For the most part, we merely satisfy thereby our desire, our curiosity, or our need of sensation. It is not often we act with deliberate intent to place what we experience in waking day life in the service of our development. The truth is, development takes place through the fact that something is continually sleeping in us, even in the daytime. I am not alluding to the habit of dropping off to sleep in the daytime! But when man is wide awake by day, something still remains fast asleep in him, and this it is which brings it about that he does not remain for ever a child, but evolves further.

The ordinary waking state is what comes to consciousness through our astral body. In this ordinary waking state we are, however, too strongly awake, we are too intensely given up to the external world; we are, in fact, quite lost in it. How does this come about?

The reason is that the waking consciousness lives under the influence of Ahriman. Ahriman has great power over our waking consciousness. It is quite different in the case of the sleep consciousness. In sleep consciousness we are too little awake. We are too engrossed in our own evolution; we are so completely and so powerfully within ourselves that all consciousness is obliterated. In sleep consciousness, Lucifer has the upper hand.

This is then how the matter stands with our astral body. When we are awake, Ahriman has the upper hand over Lucifer, and when we are asleep Lucifer has the upper hand over Ahriman. They are in equilibrium only when we dream; there they pull with equal force, they strike a balance between them. The ideas which are called forth by Ahriman in day consciousness and which he causes to harden and crystallize, are dissolved and made to disappear under the influence of Lucifer; everything becomes pictures when Ahriman is no longer busy fixing them in rigid ideas. They melt and become mobile in themselves. A state of equilibrium is induced in a pair of scales by having both scale-pans equally laden; we have, then, not a state of rest but a state of equilibrium. It is the same with the life of man. We have not in man a state of rest, but a state of equilibrium; and the two forces which hold the scales and each of which at certain times brings extra weight to bear, are Lucifer and Ahriman. In waking consciousness Ahriman's side sinks down, in sleep consciousness Lucifer's. Only in the intermediate state, where we dream, are the two scale-pans held in poise, not at rest, but delicately poised in equilibrium.

We can go on to carry our study into still higher regions of human life. Here too we shall find evidence of how Lucifer and Ahriman fill the world with their inter-working. Two ideas play a great part in human life. One is the idea of duty. We might also say, when we consider it from a religious point of view, the idea of commandment or behest. We speak sometimes, do we not, of the “behest of duty.” The other idea, which can be placed over against it, is the idea of right (or rights).

If you will reflect a little on the part played in human life by these two ideas of duty and of right—I mean, the “right” one has to do this or that—you will very soon realize that they are polar opposites, and that men's inclinations are turned now more in the direction of duty, and now again in the direction of right. We live certainly in an age when people are more ready to speak of right than duty. All possible spheres of life claim their rights. We have Workers' Rights, Women's Rights, and so on and so on.

Duty is the opposite idea of right. Our age will be followed by an age when duties will be more regarded than rights, and this will be directly attributable to the influence of the anthroposophical spiritual world-conception. In the future—certainly, in a rather distant future—we shall have movements where less and less emphasis will be laid on the demand for rights and people will inquire more and more as to their duty. The question will rather be: What is our duty as man, as woman, e.g., in this or that situation of life? The present epoch that demands rights will be succeeded by an epoch that asks after duties.

We said that right and duty play into life like two polar opposites. Whenever a man turns his thought and attention to duty, he looks right away from himself. Kant has given great and grand expression to this fact. He pictures duty as a lofty goddess, to whom man looks up: “Duty, thou great and exalted Name, thou has nought to do with fondness nor with favor; all that thou requirest is to submit thyself and serve.” Man beholds duty, so to say, raying down upon him from regions of the spiritual world. In a religious sense, he feels duty as an impulse laid upon him by the Beings of the higher Hierarchies. And when man surrenders himself to duty, he goes right out of himself. It is in this going-out-of-himself in the feeling of duty, that man can begin to learn how to get beyond his ordinary self.

There is, however, a danger to man in all such going-out-of his ordinary self, in all such endeavor after spiritualization. If man were to give himself up entirely to this, he would lose the ground from under his feet, he would lose his feeling of gravity. Therefore he must endeavor, when he surrenders himself to duty, to find within himself at the same time something that shall give him weight, so that he may keep his sense of gravity. Schiller expressed it very beautifully when he said that man has the best relation to duty when he learns to love duty.

This is really saying a great deal. When a man speaks of learning to love duty he no longer merely surrenders himself to duty; he rises out of himself, taking with him the love with which otherwise he loves himself. The love that lives in his body, in his egoism—this love he takes out of himself, and loves with it duty. So long as it is self-love, so long is it a Luciferic force. But when man takes this self-love out of himself and loves duty in the way that otherwise he loves only himself, he releases Lucifer. He takes Lucifer into the realm of duty and gives him, so to say, a justified existence in the impulse and feeling of duty.

If, on the other hand, a man cannot do this, if he cannot draw forth the love out of himself and offer it to duty, then he will continue to love only himself; and since he cannot love duty, he is obliged to subject himself to her, he becomes a slave to duty, he becomes, as we say, a man who “does his duty,”—hard and cold and uninspired. He hardens in an Ahrimanic sense, notwithstanding that he follows duty devotedly.

You see how duty stands, as it were, in a midway position. If we surrender ourselves to her, she annuls our freedom, we become her slaves, because Ahriman draws near on the one hand with his impulses. But if we bring ourselves—if we bring all our power of self-love—as an offering and offer it up to duty, bringing thus to duty the Luciferic warmth of love, then the result is that, through the state of balance induced in this way between Lucifer and Ahriman, we find a right relation to duty.

Thus we are truly, in a certain connection, redeemers of Lucifer. When we begin to be able to love our duty, then the moment has come when we can help towards the redemption and release of the Luciferic powers; we set free the Lucifer forces which are held in us as by a charm, and lead them forth to fight with Ahriman. We release the imprisoned Lucifer (imprisoned in self-love) when we learn to love our duty.

Schiller sets himself this very question in his “Aesthetic Letters”: How is it possible to rise above slavery to duty and attain to love of duty? Of course he does not use the expressions “Lucifer” and “Ahriman,” because he does not see the problem in its cosmic aspect. Nevertheless these wonderful letters of Schiller on the Aesthetic Education of Man are directly translatable into Spiritual Science.

Right, on the other hand, immediately shows that it is united with Lucifer. Man does not need to learn to love his right, he loves it already! It is perfectly natural that he should do so. It is natural for Lucifer to be connected with right in man's feeling—man feels that this or that is his right. Everywhere that right asserts itself, Lucifer is speaking there too. It is very often only too evident how Lucifer makes his voice heard in the demand of some right. Here it is a question of calling in something that can be set over against right. We have to call in Ahriman to create a polarity to Lucifer. And this we can do by cultivating the polar opposite of love.

Love is inner fire, its opposite is calmness—the quiet acceptance of what happens in the world. As soon as we approach our right with this quiet and calm interest we call in Ahriman. It is not easy to recognize him here, for we set him free from his merely external existence, we summon him into ourselves and warm him with the love that is already united with right. Calm and peace of mind have the coldness of Ahriman; in the quiet understanding of what is in the world, we unite our warmth and our understanding love with the coldness that is in the world outside. And then we release Ahriman, when we meet what has come about with understanding, when we do not merely demand our rights out of self-love but understand what has come about in the world. This is the eternal battle that is waged between Lucifer and Ahriman. On the one hand man learns in a conservative way to understand the conditions that are in the world, he learns to understand how they have come about from cosmic, karmic necessity. That is one aspect of the matter. The other aspect is that he feels in his heart the urge to make new conditions possible, continually to let the old give place to the new. This is the revolutionary current in human life. In the revolutionary stream lives Lucifer, in the conservative stream Ahriman, and man in his life of right lives in the midst between these two poles.

Thus we see how right and duty show each of them a state of equilibrium between Lucifer and Ahriman. We only learn to understand how the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body manifest in life, or how duty and right come to expression in the life of duty and the life of right, when we learn to recognize the interplay of great spiritual Powers, above all of those spiritual Powers who bring about the state of equilibrium.

For just as what is in the external world stands under the influence of the spiritual forces that bring about balance, so does our moral life too belong in a world of polar opposites. The whole morale of human conduct, the whole ethical life of man with its poles of right and duty, only become comprehensible when we take into account the instreaming forces of Lucifer and Ahriman. And when we look at the life of man in history, that takes its course in an alternation between, on the one hand, revolutionary and warlike—that is to say, Luciferic—movements, and on the other hand, conservative—that is, Ahrimanic—movements, there too we find a condition of balance between Lucifer and Ahriman. In no other way is the world to be understood than by recognizing in it these opposite forces and influences.

What we behold in the world outside is dualistic, it shows itself to us in opposites. And in this connection Manichaeism, correctly understood, has its complete justification. How Manichaeism is fully justified even within a spiritual monism—of that we shall have more to say in the future. The object I have had in view in these lectures is to show you how the whole world is a result of the working of balance.

Particularly evident is the result of the working of balance in the life of art. With this as our starting-point we will go on in later lectures to consider the arts and their evolution in the world, and the part that has been taken by different spiritual Powers in the evolution of the life of art among mankind.

Some time ago, we spoke here, at least in some allusions, of what is called occult reading and occult hearing, and today and tomorrow I will take up these considerations of those discussions about occult reading and occult hearing, because then I will be able to develop some important ideas about our structure in connection with them.

If we look at the outer scientific consideration, insofar as it concerns the life of the soul, today, we find many difficulties in this outer scientific consideration, as soon as we want to come to a reasonably satisfactory overview of the relevant concepts. Among the many difficulties, the one that arises when we consider the outer science of human memory is truly no small one.

Now I would have to cite a lot here if I wanted to talk about this or that that external psychology or the doctrine of the soul has to say about human memory. But it would not get us very far if I wanted to explain all of that. I just want to draw your attention to the difficulty for this external science when it comes to understanding memory and its peculiarities.

Human memory presents itself to us in such a way that we can recall to our consciousness at a later time perceptions, concepts, and ideas that we have absorbed at some time in the past. So there is the psychological fact that, for example, we have some kind of perception or experience today, and that after some time, without being confronted with the same fact that caused the perception or experience, we can vividly recall the idea of the fact, of the experience, from within.

This seems to indicate that the human soul stores everything it takes in from the outside. For example, when we meet someone, we get an impression of them. We transform this impression into a mental image and then store this mental image in our subconscious; when we need it, we retrieve it.

Wouldn't it then be the case that our soul, insofar as it develops the power of our memory, would be, let's say, a box in which all ideas and experiences can be placed and stored, and from which they can be taken out when needed to be brought up into consciousness. So all kinds of experiences would be stored down there in this soul cabinet, and they could be retrieved from there.

When you read books about memory today, you get the impression that the authors often believe that the soul is a kind of storage cabinet for all kinds of experiences. Now imagine walking around with your soul and carrying a cabinet for all your impressions and experiences with you in this soul. It must be freely admitted that there is a difficulty here. Various scientific concepts have been used to try to bridge this difficulty, but nothing particularly satisfactory has emerged from them. This difficulty will only be overcome when we acquire a deeper insight into the structure of the human being in the physical body, in the etheric body, in the astral body and in the I. For this etheric body of man must indeed be studied if one is to gain a real knowledge of the nature of human memory, and the astral body must be studied no less for this purpose.

Let us assume that we can at least form some kind of idea, comparatively speaking, of what this astral body of man actually is. In the waking hours of everyday life, the human being does not experience himself in his astral body, any more than he experiences himself in his ether body. The human being experiences himself in his I from waking up to falling asleep, and all experiences are I-experiences. In the astral body, the human being does not experience himself. This astral body is, as I have emphasized on other occasions, fundamentally infinitely wiser than the I-human being. It can do much more than the I-human being can do. This astral body can actually read what I have indicated to you as occult writing. The astral body can read this occult writing; it can really read it.

Among many other ideas through which one can evoke an understanding of the astral body, one can also have the idea that it is a reader of occult writing. And the etheric body, on the other hand, is, among many other qualities it has, something like a writing tablet in which the occult writing is continually being inscribed through the processes of the world.

While we live - and we always live, whether we are awake or asleep, between birth and death, and from death to a new birth - processes and events are constantly taking place in the universe, in the cosmos. There is essence in the cosmos. All this is imprinted and written into the etheric body. The etheric body of the human being is indeed a true reflection of the entire cosmos. There is nothing in the cosmos that is not impressively imprinted in the etheric body of the human being and, if one wants to use the expression, imaginatively mirrored. And the human astral body is constantly reading what the world inscribes into the etheric body. This takes place in the subconscious, so that the human astral body reads what the world inscribes into the etheric body.

But now, when we ourselves, in our conscious, waking day-life, encounter an event or even an object that makes an impression on us, we form a mental image of this object. When we form this mental image of the object, the astral body is the first to be involved. It is in a state of vehement movement while we form a mental image of an object or form the mental image of the impression of an external event. What we form as an idea, what we experience as soul, is also written into the etheric body of the human being and remains there. Just as the world with its events continually inscribes itself into our etheric body, we also inscribe into our etheric body what we ourselves experience as soul. It remains there inscribed. When we remember something, a complicated process actually takes place. Our astral body reads what has been written into our etheric body, and the result of this reading is the emergence of an image that we call a memory.

Now, in this way, memory would be traced back to a kind of reading of our astral body in the etheric body. And indeed, as soon as we know this, we will no longer arrive at the naive idea that the soul is a kind of storage cabinet for what we have experienced, but we will see: there are in fact few habits - I say explicitly habits, we will understand the word even better tomorrow - into which the astral body repeatedly places itself when it has experienced something, and which it then impresses into the etheric body. Just as our writing has few letters, so our astral body has few, very few habits. And just as we communicate the whole infinite abundance of what human beings have to say to each other about themselves and the world through various groupings of our few letters in writing, so what memory retains is formed from a few habits through their combinations.

If we know that it is a matter of reading, then we will no longer believe that every single experience has to be written down. Instead, a few habits of the astral body are combined and then fixed in the etheric body. Just as we can fix a new word with the old letters when we hear it, so we can fix each new experience in the etheric body with a few habits of the astral body. This is because both our etheric body and, in particular, our astral body are connected to the entire cosmos. We must not take what an older wisdom teaching has emphasized from the cosmos as something that was emphasized by chance, but rather it has a deep meaning and importance.

If we take the twelve constellations of the entire zodiac, we can say that our astral body is indeed in living connection with these twelve constellations. These twelve constellations really do mean twelve certain habits for our astral body, twelve certain ways of moving. And then our astral body is also connected with the seven planets, as we have often discussed. These in turn determine certain habits in him. Through these habits – I say expressly 'habits' – which are ignited in our astral body by the planets of our solar system, something similar arises in the astral body to the vowels; and through the habits that are stimulated in it by the influence of the zodiac, something similar arises to the consonants.

What I mean to say is this: Let us assume that at some moment in our lives – and such moments are always present because we are always in contact with the world – our astral body is in contact with the forces that stream out of the constellation of Aries. Because our astral body is in connection or under the particular influence of that which radiates out of the constellation of Aries, the possibility develops in this astral body to close itself in its particular form, to give itself a boundary; while if the astral body is more under the influence of Libra, a movement develops in it that allows it to be more open to the rest of the world.

Thus a definite tendency of motion develops under the influence of each constellation. Under the influence of this or that constellation, the astral body particularly stretches its upper part upwards, and under the influence of one of the other constellations, it particularly stretches its lower part. Twelve such special movements correspond to twelve such habits, and in turn seven special habits under the influence of the planets. These are more inner movements under the influence of the planets, whereby the inner parts move or bring themselves into a relationship with each other. Thus, our astral body has, in fact, 12 + 7 = 19 habits, implanted by the cosmos.

Just as we can write anything with our characters, with the signs for the vowels and consonants by combining them, if we want to express what we bring to light with our wisdom, so our astral body forms everything it has to form through the combinations of these nineteen habits. When a person comes up to us with a face that looks at us in a certain way, good or evil, our astral body makes certain movements that are combined from these nineteen habits. This is then written into the etheric body, and at a later time the astral body can read what is written into the etheric body. And that is what memory is based on! As soon as you go beyond what the senses and the mind bound to the senses reveal, you immediately come to the relationship of the human being to the cosmos. The physical body only conceals this relationship of the human being to the cosmos.

We therefore have a continuous inner reading, and if we could go back, also historically, to the origin of writing, we would find that in fact in the oldest pictographic writings, man is imitated in this inner reading of man. It is not the case that writing came about by chance, but the original consonant signs were imitations of the signs of the zodiac and the original vowel signs were imitations of the planetary images. The outer reading was nothing more than a reproduction in the outer world of what man had as an inner reading.

This is connected with the attitude that people in ancient times had towards the art of writing. It was considered to be something tremendously sacred because it was taken from cosmic secrets. And it is still known from Egyptian culture that the copyists, if they made mistakes, exposed themselves to the most severe punishments, even the death penalty, depending on the magnitude of the mistake they made, under the strict laws there, if the mistake was big enough. It was considered something infinitely high and sacred to write down what man could know of the sacred secrets, because one still had a sense of the context of these characters and all the sacred secrets of human nature and their connection with the divine.

That is the important thing, as we gradually absorb spiritual science within us, to regain the sense of the sacredness of the hidden pages of human nature. This sense is much more important than the mere theoretical absorption of spiritual-scientific things. But it is also connected with the fact that at the moment when, in the course of the development of humanity, one had to give up all connection with the sacred of Scripture, one also felt that, basically, I would say, something creepy was taking place in the history of humanity. Take a book from a library from the early Middle Ages and try to imagine how such a book came into being, how a monk, I would say, spent years, even decades, writing this book, how he spent a long, long time painting a single letter. Then one knew that writing was considered something sacred. One knew that through writing one was connected to the good gods, and in a sense what one entrusted to writing was a carrying out into the outer world of what comes from the good gods.

But you know, it is a sign of evolution that everything that comes from the good gods can be distorted in the world by Ahriman or Lucifer. The moment when the very ordinary art of printing was created, which then developed into that from which man mainly draws his wisdom today, by bending his head over the paper on which there are horrible signs, which are only the ape-like old characters that reveal to him what people thought or did not think about the world and its secrets, the art of writing was shifted. As a result, the written word has indeed entered a new stage, the stage where it has lost all nimbus of the sacred, where the Ahrimanic stage of written communication has begun, so to speak. And so, just as the ancient characters are the externalization of hidden secrets, albeit in a reproduction, in symbolism, just as these characters are the externalization of hidden secrets into the outer world, and just as these secrets correspond to the nature of the entities of the spiritual world that progress in the good sense. What we have today, especially in the form of printed matter – but in a broader sense it also applies to handwriting – is of a distinctly Ahrimanic character. And the people sensed this when they attributed the art of printing to the 'black forces', calling it a 'black art', and even attributing its invention to the devil.

There is a deeper connection when one associates the invention of the art of printing with Faust, just as Goethe associates the art of printing with what Faust goes through in a certain phase of his life. The Ahrimanic epoch of the art of communication has arrived with the invention of printing. We know, of course, that we must rightly unlearn to make a sign of the cross before all things that are called Ahrimanic. But we also know that we must call things by their right name and understand them. We, as spiritual scientists, must not be among those who say: the art of printing is Ahrimanic, so we must therefore eradicate it. We will not do that, it would never occur to us, because we understand that the Ahrimanic is also necessary in world evolution, that it also belongs to world progress. But we must also see things as they are. We must not reinterpret things in order to make it easier for ourselves, to allow ourselves to live in the world without Lucifer and Ahriman. It is more pleasant not to know that Ahriman stares at us from almost every book we read today. But it is necessary for those who see the world in its true light to endure this state and not to reinterpret it into something else. To understand the world is the task of those who feel more and more drawn to spiritual science.

In our time, we see an external natural science that would like to reduce everything to a kind of mechanical movement of the smallest mass particles. I have often spoken about this world view that external natural science is creating of our world. We are told: Oh, colors - red, yellow, green, violet, blue - are nothing but vibrations in reality! Color is only something that the eye causes. From so and so much vibration of the ether, red arises, from so and so much vibration yellow, from so and so much blue, from so and so much vibration violet. - And one would like to say that the modern world observer has the tendency to erase from the world picture that which he perceives with his senses in the world and to replace it with a material vortex.

One of the last great minds to have rebelled against this, which can be called a whirling dance of material particles, especially in the field of the theory of colors, is Goethe. And because the modern world has increasingly embraced this materialistic view, this obliteration of the manifold world around us, it has not been able to understand what Goethe actually wanted to say in his theory of colors.

Spiritual science will restore some order here, and Goethe's theory of colors will be appreciated to the extent that spiritual science permeates people. For Goethe, it undoubtedly seemed like a kind of madness - I say “madness”, but given his particular expressions, he might also have said “great madness” - to think that the colors flooding the world are nothing more than what the eye evokes from a vortex of vibrations, from a vibrating cosmos.

This vibrating cosmos – I have often referred to it as a fantasy of modern science – was simply not present for Goethe; for him, it was one of Mephistopheles's temptations. With his alert senses, Goethe was truly devoted to the full range of colors and the flood of colors in the world, and he lived in the flood of colors. It would have seemed to him the most desolate gray theory if he had had to replace this flooding sea of colors with the horrible vibrations of modern physics.

Why was that? Because Goethe - one may say the word in the deepest sense - had a universally developed, healthy human nature and through this healthy human nature always strove to place himself in the right relationship to the world. Such a healthy nature - I will now say something seemingly very trivial, but it is not trivial, rather it contains a significant wisdom - such a nature as Goethe's also sleeps healthily. Yes, a trivial truth! But for the spiritual researcher, healthy sleep actually means a great deal. During sleep, the human being is outside of his physical and etheric body, present in his I and his astral body. There he is truly immersed in the experiences that bring his astral body into connection with the entire starry cosmos, for example. Everything that can be influenced by the zodiacal constellations and the planets lights up in the astral body. Just as the human being lives with the external world in a state of wakefulness, so the human being lives with the world of the stars in a state of sleep. But you all know that: the human being does not know very much about this life with the world of the stars, and that is important to understand why the human being does not know much about this coexistence with the world of the stars. Why is that?

You don't overlook a landscape when it is covered with fog. The fog moves across the landscape and the parts of the landscape, the rivers, mountains, plains and so on, do not appear to us when they are interspersed with fog. In the same way, when a person sleeps, they are permeated by a fog, a mental fog. What is this mental fog? It is a fog of desires, consists of desires, and these desires are formed by the longing for the physical body. When the person is out of the physical body and etheric bodies, that is, in the time from falling asleep to waking up, he continually has the desire for the physical body; he wants to return to his physical body. He is taken out of the physical body by the forces of the cosmos, and only when these forces release him does he slip back into the physical body when he wakes up. There his desire for the physical body is satisfied again.

In a person like Goethe, healthy sleep is present because the desire for the physical body is less than in some other people, and therefore the influences from the cosmos are greater than in other people during sleep. You can easily imagine a person like Goethe being more receptive to the influences of the cosmos during sleep, and that is his healthy sleep. The desire for the physical body is there, but healthier than in other people. And why is it healthier? It is healthier precisely because Goethe is so healthily devoted to the impressions of the outside world while awake, because, for example, he did not allow himself to substitute something theoretical, such as vibrations, for colors, but because he observed colors themselves in their reality, in their full-bodied reality. There is a difference between a person like Goethe, who, although full of wisdom, walks through nature and sees green as green, violet as violet, and the relationship of green to violet or to yellow and so on, and thus sees the content directly as color, or whether a dry theorist walks through the field and does not see the colors, but speculates about what kind of a trillion or a million vibrations correspond to green or red or yellow.

Why does he then go through the world as such a dry theorist? Because he is not devoted to the world of colors, but because he is too strongly devoted to his physical body, even if it is initially his physical brain. All gray theory arises from being too devoted to the physical body during the waking hours. We would not have any materialistic theories today if people had not been so strongly devoted to the physical body. The more a person selflessly devotes himself to the things of the world during waking life, the more he has the opportunity to be devoted to the influences of the extraterrestrial cosmos during sleep, and then to bring back the healthy after-effects of these impressions into daily life. Then he will not, like the dried-up physicist described above, see swirling atomic vortices behind the flowing colors, but spirit, elementary spirituality, real spiritual activity.

Thus, to know that behind the impressions of the senses is the living spiritual world is an after-effect of healthy sleep. For when one cannot, during the waking hours, selflessly surrender to what is flowing outside in the world, but instead forms horrible theories about it, which are actually phantasms, then when one falls asleep one has a stronger overpowering urge for the physical body and not only darkens one's consciousness towards the impressions during sleep, but also lessens, besides one's consciousness, the intensity and strength of these impressions themselves. This is connected with the fact that, in fact, the more spiritual science is taken to life the human soul life, the more precisely such wisdom as Goethean physics will take hold of people again, compared to the dull theories that are now wreaking havoc in external science.

The assimilation of spiritual science in humanity is connected with many things. It will truly mean a tremendous change when the general consciousness is once imbued with the truth: at night, you as a human being are in the extra-terrestrial universe in a spiritual way and in the daytime you immerse yourself in your physical and etheric bodies. There is much that we will learn to feel and sense together with this knowledge.

For example, let us now turn to something more spiritual. We will have to learn that what we call life with the folk spirit, with the folk soul, to which we count ourselves in the narrower sense, is present when we enter the physical and etheric bodies of the human being. Thus, we are in contact with the national soul from the moment we awaken until we fall asleep, for that which the national soul is, the forces and activities it develops, are poured into the physical body and the etheric body: into the physical body more the racial aspect, into the etheric body more the national aspect. It is poured into the veils we enter when we awaken. In this way we are actually continually exchanging forces with our own folk soul. The science that is universally human, that has nothing to do with the configurations and differentiations that are poured into people through the folk souls, this science must indeed be won by that part of human nature that can free itself, can become independent of the physical, just as a person is independent of it when asleep. This science is necessarily general and human because it is gained through those members of human nature that are independent of the physical body and the etheric body.

If one were to assume that someone who can truly see into the spiritual world and gain knowledge of it could be bound by popular prejudices, then one would simply not take the secrets of initiation into due consideration. Just as life in sleep is quite different from waking life in the cases mentioned above, but the two are related, so it is also with regard to the relationship between the human being and the nature of the folk soul. From the moment a person falls asleep until they wake up, they are not together with the forces that come directly from the folk soul, for these can only be sent into the physical and etheric bodies alone. Thus, anyone who has attained conscious inner experience of their ego and their astral body is, while experiencing this, experiencing what they then have to form into spiritual science, yes, outside of the physical and etheric body; they experience outside of the physical and etheric body. But one is nevertheless not outside the world. While one is with one's folk spirit as soon as one slips into one's physical body and thus also into one's etheric body, one is outside one's own folk soul when one slips out of the physical and etheric bodies, as it is when sleeping or in initiation, which works into the physical and etheric bodies. One is outside, but one is not outside the realm of folk souls in general, because they are spiritual beings. And when one is outside one's physical and etheric body in the spiritual world, one is actually only outside of one folk soul that has a particular significance for one at the present time, namely, one's own folk soul, the one that is active in the physical and etheric bodies. By being in community with it or coming into community with it during waking hours, interest in it is lost during sleep and during initiation. The peculiar fact emerges that during sleep and during initiation one is essentially with all other folk souls, only not with one's own.

So if you imagine the round dance of contemporary folk souls, then as a human being, when you are in your physical body and perceive it while you are awake, you are together with your own folk soul; but when you are asleep or in a state of initiation, you are together with all the other folk souls, except your own. That is an objective truth.

Now you can see how nonsensical it would be for someone who can consciously be with other folk souls to fail to recognize the other folk souls, or to treat them with sympathy or antipathy. It is as if one did not want to recognize the folk souls. Only for the one who has not progressed to initiation does it make sense to feel sympathy or antipathy for this or that folk soul, because he does not know that he is really together with the other folk souls for the sleeping half of his life. But there is a difference now. While in waking life one is connected, so to speak, with one national soul, with one's own, in sleeping life one is connected with the other national souls, thus not with the effects that emanate from one, but with the interaction of the others, so to speak with what the other national souls perform as a round dance in harmony.

So you can easily imagine life with one folk soul and life with the other folk souls. The former is life when awake, the latter is life when asleep. During sleep or during initiation, you are with the interaction of the other folk souls. A person cannot be alone with their own folk soul unless they are constantly awake. It is quite impossible for him to do so, because he would have to be constantly awake. The difference is that when we are awake, we exchange forces with our own folk soul; when we are asleep, we do not exchange forces with our own, but with the totality, with the roundelay of the other folk souls.

But there is a way to be with a particular folk soul even in sleep, to be more influenced by the forces emanating from one folk soul rather than from the totality of folk souls. Then, in sleep, one is, as it were, spellbound by this one folk soul. The remedy for this is to particularly hate this folk soul when awake. A folk soul that one particularly hates while awake is torn out of the dance of the other folk souls and it captivates and fetters one to its particular characteristics. If I may express myself in a trivial way, my dear friends, it must be said - you will not hold it against me in this case: to really hate a national soul in the waking state is to condemn oneself to having to sleep with that national soul! This is truly an occult truth, albeit a distressing one, a truth about which there is really nothing to laugh. This must be faced if one also wants to gain an understanding from a certain point of view of how spiritual science must influence by spreading itself throughout the world, the attitudes of people, how it must permeate all feeling and sensing.

I have deliberately formulated what I have to say about the relationship between the human being and the folk soul in a way that makes you laugh. I had to do that because very often, as an occultist, one has the tendency to help people through what is most harrowing, most tragic, not by saying it in all its tragic gravity, since that would crush people, but by saying it in such a way that it helps people to be able to absorb it like any other scientific idea.

However, it should not be forgotten that spiritual science shows us in a very thorough way to what extent we want to accept the world as Maja. Because as soon as we penetrate into spiritual science with the deepest seriousness, it becomes serious, I would say, it becomes really deeply serious with it and with all that it should be for man. It may be said that most people today still have something against spiritual science because they cannot understand with their intellect what spiritual science is actually supposed to make of man. People today do not understand the basic nerve of spiritual science. But it is not only that they cannot understand it with their intellect, there is something much deeper. When we penetrate deeper into the wisdom of spiritual science, we find that it also makes demands on our minds and wills. It shows us the human being in a light that we usually do not want to have ourselves. Not only does our mind prefer to turn to Maja than to reality, but so does our will.

If I may speak in a trivial way again, I can say: it is extremely uncomfortable to live with the deeper wisdom of spiritual science, because life must take on a different face under the influence of spiritual science. In the moment when one knows what it means when Capesius and Strader stand opposite each other in their spiritual forms and exchange words, but in truth these words cause tumult and turmoil in the most elementary forces of the world, in that moment, when one knows what is is going on in the world, in the whole cosmos, when a person experiences this or that in his soul, then the full seriousness of spiritual science becomes apparent, and only then do we realize how people not only want to live in maya with their minds, but also with their wills. We need only develop this or that sympathy or this or that antipathy, and what we do there then becomes the cause of being driven as a sleeping or dead human being into the realm of this or that being of the cosmos and effecting this or that there. For through our being with this or that being of the cosmos, cosmic events happen again.

With such words, one would like to evoke a feeling of how spiritual science really wants to speak not only to people's minds, but to grasp the whole person, the whole soul, because people's lives today are at a stage from which the signs of the times clearly show us how this life must be grasped if it is to continue, by that wave which encompasses the spiritual secrets and does not merely leave man in Maya, but leads him into true reality. These are the things we must consider if we want to come to a deeper understanding of our spiritual scientific will. And tomorrow we will continue to speak of such things and will probably end up with something that is connected with a fundamental idea of our structure.

Yesterday I pointed out that much will depend on how at least the main concepts and main images of spiritual scientific knowledge are incorporated into general cultural life. Yesterday I tried to give some examples of how it might be thought that the way people think would really take up the main ideas of the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the I, and really make these ideas fruitful for the most diverse areas of life and science.

Today I would like to point out another example. What we distinguish as physical body, etheric body, astral body and I, these are members of the human soul, we could also say of the human soul life, which, of course on a much higher plane, are related to each other in much the same way as, I would say, on a lower plane the individual color nuances of our color scale. And just as there can be no real knowledge of the inner nature of light and its inner relationships to the rest of the world without imagining this division into color shades, so there can be no real knowledge of the soul without having ideas about how soul members such as I, the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body relate to one another. But just as the individual colors do not simply stand next to each other, but merge into one another, so that one cannot always exactly indicate in the color scale where one shade ends and where the other shade begins, so it is also with these soul members: they merge into one another, and only our minds actually separate them as we usually do.

Now it is important to consider, for example, the transition of the I and the astral body into the eye. What we call the I of the human being really merges into the astral body, just as the red nuance of the color spectrum merges into the orange nuance. We must only realize once and for all what we are actually talking about when we speak of the human ego. We speak of the human ego, and we must of course be quite clear about the fact that the actual essence of the ego is outside of everything that can be observed as the physical human body. The ego experiences itself only in inner experiences. As is well known, the etheric body and the astral body are not experienced directly at all. Rather, the physical body is experienced through external observation, through external perception, and the I in its manifold experiences is experienced in an internal way. This is absolutely the case for experiences on the physical plane. Between the physical body and the I within stand the astral body and the etheric body; both belong to such facts of the event, we can say, that are not directly experienced by the human being on the physical plane. Neither can the etheric body be directly observed externally without prior esoteric training, nor can the astral body be experienced. It contains everything that is often called the sum of subconscious or unconscious mental experience.

The I is divided into the most diverse experiences of consciousness. And now let us single out one such experience of consciousness, or rather, one conscious mode of experience. Conscious life is indeed very diverse, but we want to highlight, as I said, a very simple, elementary mode of experience, the way we experience taste. Just as the I experiences the experiences of sight, hearing, smell and imagination, so it also has taste experiences, interactions with the external physical world. I am referring to the very ordinary taste experiences that are related to nutrition, not those that are called artistic.

What we experience when we have a taste sensation is an experience of the I, in that this taste experience is consciously occurring for us. So when we bring a food into our mouths and have a taste experience, this taste experience is an experience of our I. The manifold taste experiences are simply manifold experiences of the I.

Now, in an interesting way, we can study the transition from the ego to the astral body, from conscious experiences to subconscious experiences, through taste experiences. It is not difficult to see that the taste experiences, as it were, die away when the food has travelled a certain distance through the digestive system. For conscious life, the taste experiences die away, but this is only apparent. In reality, to put it in rough terms, the taste experience of the mouth merges into the taste experience of the whole organism; and the whole organism is basically permeated by taste experiences in the course of the food entering our body, in the course of digestion and so on; and what we consciously taste is only a small part of the general tasting that our whole body experiences.

Not only the nerve endings of our mouth taste, but our entire digestive tract tastes, and as the nutrients enter the organism, into the blood and so on, the whole organism tastes again what the digestive organs have prepared for it. One could say that the whole organism is permeated by taste sensations. And this organism is so permeated and permeated with taste sensations that one can speak of differentiated tastes. One can speak of organ tastes. Each organ has its own specific taste experience; the stomach has its own specific taste experience, the liver, lungs and heart have their own special taste experiences. The general taste differentiates into the organ taste.

Here we see how the sphere of I-experiences submerges into the sphere of astral experiences. These differentiated organ tastes are unconscious; they do not come to the consciousness of the human being, and yet they are infinitely significant. For the normal development of human life depends on the normal development of these organ tastes, and aging consists partly in the fact that the astral body gradually becomes dulled to the habit of tasting. Do understand me. The astral body dulls in relation to the habit of tasting; but the word “habit” is used in the sense in which I used it yesterday; little by little it dulls. But if the stimulus is no longer exerted on the astral body and thereby also on the etheric body and the physical body, which finds its expression in the fact that one tastes, then the possibility no longer exists for the astral body to permeate the life events of the etheric body and the physical body through taste experiences. A good deal of what we call aging is based on the astral body becoming dulled to tasting, and the fact that a single human organ loses the fresh ability to taste, that is, is not permeated by its astral body in the appropriate way, results in organ diseases.

Now you understand that certain perspectives arise under this condition. Firstly, there is the perspective that is important in a pedagogical-hygienic sense: it is not to be underestimated to have a well-developed sense of taste. I have already discussed this for our friends on one occasion when I was talking about child education. It is important to realize that one should develop a living relationship with the different foods one eats, that it matters to a certain extent whether one eats lettuce or spinach, but that one should have a living relationship with the differentiations of the plant world in lettuce and spinach. For what one experiences in tasting lettuce and spinach are living relationships between the macrocosm and the microcosm, and these living relationships continue in the subconscious taste experience of the astral body, which passes through all the organs. Those who become vegetarians, for example, should not associate this with false asceticism, for instance by using their vegetarianism to dull themselves as much as possible to the friendly relationship with the nature of nature. Instead, they should develop the ability to taste the subtle differences between the individual food types. One can do this particularly well as a vegetarian because one is able – if the word is not misunderstood, I would like to say – to taste those fine, refined differences between the individual plants and what one prepares from them as food, whereas, of course, if one is not a vegetarian, one has more brutal differences with meat dishes. Because if we become blunted in this respect, there is a real danger that we will extend this blunting from the conscious part of the astral taste experiences to the subconscious part of the taste experiences. But by doing so, we cut off the living influences that emanate from the astral body to the lower limbs of our organism. And it is an uncomfortable sight to come to some vegetarian restaurants and see how people pile a mountain of all kinds of mixed food on their plates and stuff it into their mouths without understanding, and then act particularly superior to what the ordinary person has in terms of a friendly relationship with their natural environment when it comes to taste experiences.

That is one thing, my dear friends. Once our understanding of the outer experience in relation to eating is penetrated by our understanding of the astral body and its workings, then a healthy hygiene of eating will really arise, and we will need it because the unconscious instinctive life of the human race will gradually be lost and must be replaced by a conscious relationship with the cosmic environment.

But on the other hand, there is also another perspective, and that is that there really is a certain relationship between the whole plant world that is spread out over the earth and the human organism, the microcosm. And this relationship is expressed in the specific taste of an organ. What I am saying is really true and not just a symbol: any plant growing outside tastes only to a certain organ in the human being, it does not taste to other organs. A particular organ can be stimulated by the forces of this plant, but not another. Once these relationships have been studied, something very important will have been gained.

I have told you on various occasions: although the plant, when we take its form, consists of the physical body and the associated etheric body, it stretches, as it were, as it develops upwards, its flowering into the surrounding astrality, and when we look over a bed of plants, we find astrality spread over the plants, astrality that belongs to the plants. Not every plant has its own particular astral body, but it is the case that the general astrality – spread over the surface of the earth as air is spread out physically – becomes specific. That which, as it were, descends from the earth's astral body to a particular flower, let us say a lily flower, expresses itself differently than that which descends to a clover flower. There the general astrality is specified.

This relationship that exists between the astrality of the earth and the entire spread out carpet of plants, this relationship also exists internally between the human astral body and its individual organs. In this respect, too, the human being is a microcosm, only that an unhealthy relationship can arise between the human astral body and its individual organs, in that individual organs lose their living sense of taste and become dulled. The relationship that exists between the general astrality of the earth and the entire plant cover is essentially - and I say essentially - a healthy one, and if one finds out the relationships between the individual plants and the human organs, then one also finds the possibility of stimulating the organs again by supplying the substances of the individual plants and making them healthy from within. For when the substances of a particular plant are introduced into the human organism, the affinity that the plant has with the general astrality of the earth is also introduced. If this affinity to the astrality of the earth is dulled in individual organs of the human organism, it can be stimulated again, also in the human astral body, by introducing the forces of the plant in question into the human organism.

You can see from this the possibility of setting up a plant system that corresponds in some way to the human organization and which at the same time represents a rational system of certain remedies for certain organ diseases. One would get beyond the purely empirical, trial-and-error search, and one would really be able to rationally ascend to a rationalization of plant therapy by parallelizing the human organ tastes with the forces of the plant world.

All these aspects arise in an extremely fruitful way if one really wants to engage in making anthroposophy or spiritual science fruitful for life. And just imagine, after the few samples that could be given yesterday and today, what wonderful and stimulating tasks for contemporary life arise from spiritual knowledge! One can only hope that humanity will not be too lazy in the near future to devote itself to a greater extent to the penetration of science with what spiritual science has to offer in detail.

It is certainly infinitely important that the central insights of spiritual science be communicated to humanity, because if these central insights were not communicated, the basis for further development would be lacking. But instead of taking these central insights, as many feel tempted to do, in all sorts of new, poorly written repetitions of what already exists, but to say the same thing over and over again, the focus should be on developing the individual chapters of these central insights and really introducing spiritual-scientific insights into science and life. I mention this for the reason that there are really quite a lot of people within our movement, and some of them stand out in particular, who find it more comfortable to reproduce and repeat what is already available in the literature, instead of getting involved in introducing spiritual scientific knowledge into the areas that are particularly close to them.

When we consider this, the repeated emphasis on the fact that spiritual science must become a pervasive attitude in human life takes on a different shade of meaning.

Not so much the setting up of these or those program points, as it was popular in the time immediately preceding our sad epoch, but rather the living-grasping of spiritual-scientific knowledge, that will bring about a more dignified epoch, that we can lead out of the chaotic events of our present time. The less people believe that what we have to defend now already exists in any real area of European humanity, the less they will believe that and the more they will believe that they have a new future to expect and hope for, a more spiritual future, a future of more spiritual views, the more they will find what is right.

The fact that there has always been a presentiment of what spiritual science must one day bring to clear consciousness has often been touched upon here, especially in this place, and even provided with external evidence. Again and again we have to be reminded that, while spiritual science is in a certain sense something radically new in our time, it was well prepared in the entire newer spiritual life, so that wherever there is active spiritual life, intuitions have arisen not only of spiritual scientific knowledge, but intuitions of the far-reaching significance of this spiritual scientific knowledge. You see, the following is an interesting example: a European spirit once tried to reflect on which influences had become particularly significant for his inner life. This European spirit, who was thinking about which influences had become particularly significant for his inner life, then mentioned three relatively newer spirits that had had a great influence on his life. He mentions Emerson, whom you have also characterized from certain points of view in these lectures, Ruysbroek and the German mystic Novalis. These three spirits have had a particular influence on this Central European spirit, as he himself explains. Now this European spirit seeks to gain a certain measure of what must enter into human spiritual life if this spiritual life is to truly experience the necessary new fertilization. And here the spirit says something most remarkable. It says: If you look, for example, at Shakespeare or Sophocles, you will find that human conflicts are presented, but ultimately - so the person concerned thinks - what kind of conflicts are they that play out around Hamlet and Ophelia, around Antigone or Electra? Of course, he says, they are highly significant conflicts for the earthly beings called human beings, but, he says, if a spirit were to come down from another planet, that is, from completely different experiences, from a planet where experiences are completely different, he would not be particularly interested in what is going on around Ophelia or Wallenstein or Mary Stuart. That may interest people from the earth, but if a spirit came from another planet, he would demand that people have something to tell him that is not only of interest to creatures from the earth, but that is of interest to creatures that belong to the cosmos in the broader sense. And the person in question believes that there are still very few such souls who have something to say that could also give a spirit descending to earth something. And the thinker in question counts the poet Novalis among these souls. He finds the soul experiences in Novalis's poetry so fine, so intimate, so brought out of what cannot only interest people, what does not only live in the temporal, but what weaves and lives in the eternal, so that for such a spirit as Novalis, a being could also be interested that descended from another planet. I will read to you the words he wrote when he got to know Novalis, or got to know what Novalis has to give as his soul experiences. They are very beautiful words, so beautiful that I would like to read what the thinker in question has to say with reference to the Novalis experiences:

“But if other proofs were needed,” says the thinker in question, in connection with what he himself experienced with Novalis, and which he thinks would also interest the spirits of other planets: “But if other proofs were needed, it would” - namely the human soul - “lead him among those whose works almost stir to silence. She would open the gate of the realm where some loved her for her own sake, without caring about the small gestures of her body. They would climb together to the lonely plateaus where consciousness is heightened by a degree, and where all those who are plagued by restlessness about themselves attentively survey the immense ring that connects the world of appearances with our higher worlds. She would go with him to the borders of humanity; for at the point where man seems to end, he probably begins, and his most essential and inexhaustible parts are only in the invisible, where he must be on his guard unceasingly. On these heights alone are thoughts that the soul can approve of, and images that resemble her, and that are as imperious as she is. There humanity has reigned for a moment, and these dimly illuminated peaks are perhaps the only lights that announce the earth to the spiritual realm. Their reflection truly has the color of our soul. We feel that the passions of the mind and body would resemble the tolling of bells in the eyes of a higher reason; but in their works, the people mentioned have come out of the little village of passions and said things that are also of value to those who are not of the earthly community."

These are truly beautiful and glorious words! The speaker believes he experienced them through Novalis, beautiful and glorious words that characterize how humanity must truly come to something that directly connects with the eternal, that leads us beyond mere earthly experiences into the experiences of the cosmos. Maurice Maeterlinck spoke of Novalis in the words I have read to you, and that was some time ago, not in the last few months! But you can see from this that wherever there are people who are able to reflect, and when they have time to reflect, there is a true and genuine awareness of the path into the spiritual world that the evolution of humanity must truly take.

I would like to give you another example. In spiritual science today, we consciously speak of how, through initiation, one can experience oneself in the I and astral body, separate from the physical body and etheric body, a conscious experience of oneself, as otherwise happens unconsciously during sleep. At the same time, spiritual science is able to provide the necessary information about the experience of death. What the spiritual scientist experiences outside the body with regard to the physical body and ether body is the same as what the soul experiences after death, looking back at its physical body and the fate of the ether body. spiritual scientist speaks in a special way of a view of the physical body and the ether body merging into the world process from the point of view that the soul gains when it has passed through the gate of death. It means an infinity for the further development of all human consciousness, of all human spiritual-cultural life, that such conceptions can enter into this spiritual-cultural life, such as the conception that people will more and more come to know that when the soul has passed through the gate of death, it looks back on the whole past life and on what is happening to the body, just as you now look back in your memory on your experiences in the ordinary life between birth and death. When the time comes that it is as trivial as looking back at experiences in the body after death, just as one looks back at experiences of earlier times in the life between birth and death, when it has become natural to look back in this way, then something tremendous will have been achieved. And from various things that I have discussed with you, you will realize how necessary it is that such an awareness of general humanity be achieved as quickly as possible.

And now let us see whether these ideas, which are now being given fully consciously in such clear outlines in elementary spiritual science, whether such ideas - if we look for an intuitive understanding - were always completely foreign to the human race before spiritual science arose. When Fichte delivered a series of lectures in which he sought to transform the way his people were brought up - a transformation such as Pestalozzi had called forth, only more universally - Fichte said that there were certainly many people who could not go along with the idea that one could, as it were, reshape and revive the human race through such thoughts. Such people cling to the old that they can imagine, Fichte said. And now he sought a comparison to express very clearly what they have learned and to which they cling. Fichte sought a comparison, and this comparison is very strange. I will read it to you.

“Time,” says Fichte - he means all the people of the time who cannot imagine that something new can arise from the old - “time appears to me like a shadow that stands over its corpse, from which an army of of diseases has just driven out, stands and laments and cannot tear his gaze away from the once-so-beloved shell and desperately tries every means to get back into the dwelling of the plagues. The invigorating breezes of the other world, into which the deceased has entered, have already taken her in and surround her with a warm, loving breath. Secret voices of the sisters (by which he means the other spiritual beings that surround us) already greet her and welcome her, and she is already stirring and expands within her in all directions, in order to develop the more glorious form into which she is to grow; but she has no feeling for these airs or hearing for these voices, or if she had, she is overcome with pain at her loss, with which she believes she has lost herself at the same time.

Yes, is it not as if someone who comes from the field of spiritual science were to take a comparison from that field of looking at the corpse after death? This is how Fichte spoke in 1808. We can see from this how everything tends towards spiritual science, and how in the best minds this spiritual science arises as an inkling, but, as this example shows, as an inkling that expresses itself in very specific forms.

You will understand, from what you are accustomed to hearing from me, and especially how you are accustomed to hearing it, how such words are meant. But could not a very definite intuition, a very definite feeling arise in the souls of men when they read something like this, which was expressed in 1808? Could it not evoke a very definite feeling in the souls of those who take human culture seriously? Could these souls not say to themselves: Should we not, in view of the fact that such presentiments existed, have clung to them and actually have made some progress long ago in the spiritual-scientific knowledge of the world? And then such souls might perhaps come to the realization: How ashamed we are! If only many souls were to have such feelings, it would be a great blessing for the development of the spiritual life of humanity. But I think that many souls will continue to choose the easier way for a long time to come, accepting what they like, for example, in the words of Fichte, but reading right over the things they do not like. And when one points this out to them, they will say: Well, great minds are allowed to be contrary in certain respects. And then they make such comparisons that are not taken from reality at all.

It will be possible to permeate life with what spiritual science, through its concepts, stimulates in the human soul. And it is truly for no other purpose than to point out as forcefully as possible how life can be permeated by spiritual concepts that our building was actually built and will show all the details that it will contain.

In this building, no sin is to be committed against the naive life and feelings of human beings. All those who repeatedly emphasize that artistic creation must proceed unconsciously believe that they do not commit this sin in themselves or in others. In truth, it is only more comfortable when artistic creation proceeds unconsciously than when it is elevated to knowledge. For knowledge, when it becomes knowledge of the cosmos, is just as naive as the primitive unconscious, which so often in life, out of people's comfort, is presented as that which is necessary in art, in phrases such as I have just given.

Consider the following, which you can draw as a consequence from a variety of discussions. You will also get the impression that important impulses can and must be given from spiritual science for artistic details as well. When we look at a person in the light of today's spiritual science, we know that this person has not developed in the way that today's natural science presents it one-sidedly, but that this person needed a Saturn, Sun, and Moon development and then the previous Earth development to become what he has become. And we know, even when we consider the individual parts of the outer physical human form, that whole generations of beings from the higher hierarchies have been working on it over long periods of time, and that their activity was as specified as we have described it in the evolution of Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth.

We know that what appears today as a finished part of the human being, for example the head, first had to go through the evolution of the sun, moon and the whole of the earth so far in order to become what it is today, that it had to be transformed and remodeled, that it first existed during the evolution of the sun, that it reappeared and was transformed during the evolution of the moon, and that it was again transformed during the evolution of the earth. If we then consider how man should actually be studied, we will first come to feel the full complexity of this human organization and its connection with the macrocosm, and then gradually learn to recognize it.

Today I will only hint at a few things that will be explained in more detail in the near future. I will hint at them because they will lead us to a final thought. As I said, I will elaborate on this in the next few days. For example, we have parts of our organism which, in their configuration, still clearly bear the original impulses of the old Saturn development, but which have been transformed and reshaped many times, so that they cannot easily be recognized in their present form without studying the Akasha Chronicle. Schematically represented (see drawing p. 148, a), the bones surrounding the spinal cord were first laid down during the ancient Saturn evolution, still in the element of warmth, and were always transformed during the next evolutions. Those bones that attach as ribs were then added at the time of the moon evolution. They have been less remodeled because their first rudiments were laid less long ago.

Other organs have been set upward, first during solar evolution, and then remodeled. That which we today call the human skull, the human head, was laid down during solar evolution and then remodeled many times. But if only the changes that the evolution of the sun has brought about in the human skull had taken place, then man would have to carry his head in a way that it cannot be carried, namely, so that it would always be directed upwards. Therefore, during the evolution of the earth through the influence of the sun, a ninety-degree turn has occurred, so that what should be directed upwards is now directed that way. Instead of thus drawing the solar arrow for the evolution of the earth, we must now draw it for the evolution of the earth (see illustration). It is part of the normal evolution that the human form has undergone under the influence of the cosmos that the shape of the head, having been directed upwards, has been directed forwards, turned towards the front.

Those spirits, then, who have remained behind in their development on the moon, have brought with them the endeavour to turn people's heads upwards by penetrating and pervading them. People who have the tendency to carry their nose high in an unsympathetic way, as one says, are seduced by such Luciferic spirits. There is a real background to this. It is truly a truth of physiognomy and the cosmos, and one is quite right when one says of someone who carries his nose up: Well, Lucifer is in his neck! That is absolutely true. Therefore, it is infinitely important for life to really know these cosmic relationships.

If we take the human outer limbs – arms and legs – the legs are limbs that belong directly to the development of the earth and are completely aligned with the earth. However, the arms are developed in such a way that if a person had only followed the development of the earth, they could only lower their arms downwards. But since he can also raise them upwards, he can direct them at will towards the lunar evolution, that is to say, with each raising of the arms he gives them a Luciferic character. Therefore, anyone with a fine intuitive perception will feel that every arm movement performed in this way (arms raised forward and upward) has a Luciferic character. Let us bear this in mind and now imagine a person who simultaneously bows his head and raises his hand, but in such a way that these two movements are captured in a human gesture: the person bows his head and raises his arm. This bowing of the head is a counteraction against the luciferianity of the head. The raising of the arm is a bringing of a luciferian element into the arm. But now it is so: by letting Lucifer enter into the arm, and supporting the bowed head with the forehead on the arm, one redeems the Luciferic power flowing through the arm through the counteraction of the Christ-power in the head. One redeems, as it were, Lucifer in the arm through Christ in the head.

Paint the human figure with the correct gesture, the head resting on the arm, and you have expressed it in this gesture. Man forms a gesture that expresses: Lucifer is redeemed by Christ! - And if you add a bending of the knees, you have intensified this gesture. Raise both arms up and suppress the force of the lifting, as happens when folding the hands (so the arms are raised with folded hands), and then try to lead the Christ force with the folded hands to the Luciferic force streaming upwards, by paralyzing it, as it were.

Human gestures become an expression of the whole life of the world, of the spiritual life of the world. One must feel how such knowledge of the secrets of the cosmos can deepen the ordering of the human form in art! But you can also ask yourself: What actually happened when the upward orientation of the head, which can be compared to the Luciferic, was turned forward, and the human being stands on the earth with the head turned forward? He thereby became an earthly being! That which is not an earthly being cannot have legs and feet in the human sense. Man does not get his head, and with it his countenance, from the earth, but from the cosmos; but it comes into being in its form through turning to the earth. If we take other genii, other spirits, we cannot possibly make them with human legs. To make genii, who do not belong to earthly existence, with human legs is simply wrong, is actually wrong. This can really be seen from spiritual scientific knowledge. And our art in our building should take full account of these perceptions that come from spiritual scientific knowledge.

You can see, therefore, that a new impulse can really be given in relation to artistic design. When spiritual science is no longer understood as a gray theory, but as something that will enter into people as perception and feeling, then it will be recognized that it can have a fruitful effect on all endeavors of human cultural development. A small beginning is to be made with this in our building.

Today we want to undertake a consideration that may seem out of place in the series of considerations we have been pursuing here, but which will nevertheless be useful for understanding the whole.

It is an ancient question as to how man can bring that which is really in the world outside into his knowledge, into his world of ideas. For us, the question is not as urgent as it must be for people outside our spiritual-scientific stream, because we know that it is possible to live one's way up into the spiritual worlds and to gain certainty about a true being, about a true reality behind the external reality that is present on the physical plane, by penetrating into the spiritual worlds. But only from the present into the future will humanity in general be able to rise to such a point of view of extra-bodily knowledge, as it were, and for a long time to come the question will have an infinitely great significance, how one can get into the knowledge, into the world of ideas of existence, of reality.

It is important for us to have some knowledge of this question because we must try to pave the way for an understanding with those who are still somewhat outside or even very much outside our spiritual movement. We must be able to provide information about the riddles and questions that those who have not yet come closer to this spiritual movement feel when they hear one or the other of the results of spiritual research. The question I have in mind is truly the most profound, the most tragic question that humanity has ever asked itself. For however much philosophical and other scientific investigation has been carried out, the question I have indicated arises from a state of mind and has an effect on the whole state of mind and mood of the person.

Man, let us approach the matter from this point of view, wakes up in the morning from a world that must remain unknown and mysterious to him if he does not penetrate into spiritual science, and he makes his thoughts about the world into which he enters when he wakes up. In these thoughts, he then wants to obtain what can be called a world view. The person who truly approaches these things with all their soul senses something of the weakness of the life of thought, of the life of ideas. He senses, one could say, this: that he is condemned in his inner being to live in ideas about the nature of the processes of the outer world, to make such ideas for himself; and he finds, again, that these ideas are, so to speak, only ideas after all, that they are not strong enough to absorb real being into themselves.

We feel this weakness of the imaginative life particularly when we reflect on the memory images. We bring up from past epochs of life what facts and experiences we have gone through. We bring them up by imagining them afterwards, perhaps after a long time. We must keep saying to ourselves: Yes, we have the experience only in our imagination, and the imagination does not have the power to conjure up reality anew.

This is one way in which we can truly feel how powerless the human being is, so to speak, in the face of the full-bodied, full-bodied reality of his imaginative life. The other is when we enter the world of the creative imagination. In this world of the creative imagination, we can conjure up beautiful and satisfying images in our minds, and we can feel how we are unable to somehow penetrate into real existence with what we conjure up in our imagination. The more materialistically minded people assume that the feelings that one can have towards this world of fantasy images. They say: When you form ideas about a higher spiritual world, about God and the spiritual world, what guarantees do you have that these ideas you form are anything other than figments of the imagination? What guarantees do you have that with these ideas, even if they give you the deepest bliss, you are penetrating into a world of genuine reality? What underlies the feelings in the face of this powerlessness of imagining, of forming ideas, has led to the, one might say, millennia-old philosophical struggle with regard to the question: How can man, with his concepts, his ideas, penetrate into a reality?

There are enough schools of philosophy, even if we disregard the most extreme skepticism, which believe that a satisfactory answer to this question, a satisfactory solution to this mystery of the human mind, has not yet been found. Certainly, people can pass over these world mysteries, these questions, with a certain mental complacency. But even those who pass by with their consciousness and live their lives in this way will still feel that this dissatisfaction with the riddles of the world makes waves in their astral body and evokes certain moods towards the world, melancholic moods; moods that one might try to overcome with cynicism can arise. But such a passing by of the world's riddles can certainly not lead to real satisfaction in the inner soul life, to the harmony of the soul.

For us, it is necessary to approach these riddles of the world in the same way that we have to approach many things; it is necessary for us to look into the essence of human nature and ask where this riddle comes from, why it exists. That it can be experienced as infinitely tragic has been shown by certain philosophers who have almost despaired in the solution of this riddle and have spoken of a deity that, as it were, misleads humanity in the chaos of world phenomena and has created human nature in such a way that it cannot arrive at a satisfactory world view.

Now let us recall something that has been discussed often in this or that context, but which can be useful to us precisely in the face of these world riddles. We have often spoken about what our life of thoughts, senses and ideas actually is. I have said that basically it is a kind of reflection. It is indeed the case - I have dealt with this particularly clearly here - that in the case of human beings we are dealing with what I will schematically indicate here: This is the physical body. Outside of this physical body, there lives, as it were, in the infinite universe, that which is the actual soul-spiritual essence of the human being. In the waking life of the day, this spiritual-soul essence extends into the bodily-soul essence. This creates a reflection, and this reflection is actually what we perceive as the content of our waking life. Truly, our body is like a mirror, and just as we do not see the mirror, but rather what is reflected in the mirror, so when a person is awake, we do not see what is actually happening in the body, but we see the reflection, what is reflected in it from the external physical world.

But to the extent that we are in the waking consciousness of the day, our I, that which we are as spiritual beings, is also in this world of mirror images. For the world around us is Maja, it is a sum of mirror images. Our waking self is in this sum of mirror images, and basically, as beings on the physical plane, we are nothing more than a mirror image among mirror images.

Let us just realize that for a moment. What remains of our entire imaginative life, in so far as we are on the physical plane, when we extinguish our day-consciousness? Then the I is also extinguished. When it is not mirrored, as is the case in deep, dreamless sleep, then the I is also extinguished. And when we wake up and have the world of mirror images before us, then our I is also in this world of mirror images; so that, insofar as we live on the physical plane, we can have nothing of ourselves but a mirror image.

We go through the world as beings of the physical plane and never have anything of ourselves but a mirror image. We live in the world; but insofar as we are conscious, we have before us, not the living fact, but the reflection of this living fact. We live as mirror images among mirror images; and what we learn to recognize through spiritual science – that we live as mirror images among mirror images, as Maja among the components of the great Maja – is what man feels when he feels the powerlessness of all spiritual experience in the face of the fully-fledged reality. In everyday life, a person does not say to himself, “I am a reflection among reflections,” but he does feel it, and he feels it most keenly when he asks himself, “How can I, with this reflection, attain the real, fully-substantial existence?”

Let us try to understand what is going on here. Imagine you have a reflective wall in front of you; it reflects what is spread out in the room, for example a table. However, you do not see the table, but you see the reflection. Imagine you wanted to go into the reflection, take the table out and place something on it. You would not be able to do that because you cannot place plates or soup bowls on the mirrored table. Just as it is impossible to place plates and soup bowls on the mirrored table, it is equally impossible to derive the essence of the soul's immortality from what a person experiences on the physical plane and has around him between birth and death in a waking state. For the real soul is immortal, not its reflection, which we experience on the physical plane. Just consider that very clearly.

Man longs to recognize that which continually eludes him and which, while he lives on the physical plane, only continually presents him with a mirror image. The philosophies of all times have endeavored to deduce reality from the mirror images, to prove immortality from the mirror images. They have undertaken the task, symbolically speaking, of taking the table out of the mirror image, putting it in the room and placing plates and bowls on it.

If you go through the philosophies that are not fertilized by spiritual science, they appear to you as such a futile endeavor. Basically, if you try to go through my book “The Riddles of Philosophy”, you will find in it the story of how, since the beginning of mankind's philosophical struggle, philosophy has, as it were, tried to get the table out of the mirror and put plates and bowls on it. Therefore, now that we do have such a spiritual-scientific movement, a final chapter had to be added to the book, which shows that what was there before must be supplemented by spiritual science, which is not concerned with mirror images but with realities. Now you might say: Then the book is certainly one that we do not need to read, because why should we concern ourselves with the futile struggle of humanity? Why should we take philosophy into consideration at all, since it is only concerned with the futile efforts of humanity? Yes, it is not like that at all, it really is not! What we do when we immerse ourselves in this struggle, which is indeed futile from a certain point of view, is nevertheless something infinitely meaningful, something that cannot be replaced by anything else. Philosophy will certainly always remain fruitless for the knowledge of the immortal soul nature, for the knowledge of the spiritual world and also of the divine being, but it will not remain fruitless for the development of certain human powers, for the development of certain human abilities. Precisely because philosophy as such proves unsuitable for attaining the things mentioned, because it remains, as it were, insensitive to them, it strengthens all the more the powers of the human soul. And even if it cannot convey knowledge, it does, by being a concentrated life of thought, prepare the soul to make itself suitable for penetrating into the spiritual world. What we gain by working out philosophy lifts us into the spiritual world more than anything else. Precisely because no forces are lost in acquiring real knowledge, therefore all forces are applied to the elevation of human abilities. But we must accept precisely from this consideration that experiencing on the physical plane, because it is an experience in images, has something unreal, something unreal, and that basically, by immersing ourselves in the philosophical world, we are experiencing something unreal in soul and spirit. But does it have a meaning, does it have a significance, that we experience soul and spirit on the physical plane as something unreal? Can we find a wisdom of the world order in this? We have to ask ourselves such a question, and to answer it, we have to bring some insights of spiritual science to mind.

When a person has progressed a little through meditation, through concentration, in short, through intensifying his spiritual-soul experience, he enters into an experience that is, as it were, an alert sleep, a living in the spiritual world. And the first experience that a person has when he is, as it were, at the starting point of the initiation, is such that the person experiences moments when the spiritual world enters his consciousness in a dream-like, shimmering, flickering way. He only realizes this afterwards, when he says to himself: Now you have experienced something of the spiritual world. Usually, disciples of initiation pay too little attention to this experience, otherwise they would progress more easily.

If man did not lose consciousness during sleep, he would live in this spiritual world during the whole time, from falling asleep to waking up. He is really in it the whole time in a world of objective weaving of thoughts. Those who carefully follow the instructions in “How to Know Higher Worlds” will find that, when they wake up, they know: you emerge as if you had been swimming under the sea and now you are emerging into the air; you emerge as if you had been weaving with your soul experiences in a world of thoughts. It is as if you were to catch the last shreds of this experience when you wake up.

This can make a great impression, although it is immediately lost and usually very difficult to hold onto in the memory. But it is important for those who want to move forward to catch just such moments of awakening, because that is when consciousness arises: Before you woke up, you were in a weaving objective world of thought with your astral body, and by immersing yourself in your physical body, you encounter your physical body, which reflects back to you what you have lived through all night, at first in such a way that it glitters in the soul. This awareness can arise and should be noted, and it is extremely important that it arises. When one has such an awareness, one begins to know why it is difficult to really get the thoughts one experiences during sleep and also during initiation into the physical world, into physical thinking; for one lives with one's thoughts quite differently out of the body than in the body.

To make this clear, let us consider the moment of waking up and being awake. When you wake up, you and your spiritual being dive into your physical body. It is not surprising that you continue to live in the weaving of thoughts, because you have been living in the weaving of thoughts throughout the whole night while you were asleep. What happens is as follows. Imagine – I will draw it schematically – you enter your physical body from the outside. While you are not yet inside, but still outside, you are in a wonderful world of weaving thoughts, in which the spirits of the next higher hierarchies develop their activity. Before you wake up, you are in the world of the angeloi, the archangeloi, the archai and so on with your soul-spiritual experiences. Just as you are in the physical world among animals, plants and minerals, you are in the world of the higher hierarchies during sleep. And this being-in, this working of the higher hierarchies on your soul being, that happens precisely with the powers of thought that prevail there. And now you dive into your physical body. By diving into the physical body, you concentrate your thoughts by being captivated by the small part of the body that your head encloses. There you have to concentrate and draw together what is spread out outside. What happens is that the life of thought moves in and submerges into the nervous system. The life of thought actually moves through the senses into the nervous system. And what happens then? It actually happens that the physical substance is continually seized by the thought experience, first the substance of the etheric body, then also the physical substance. And indeed, when you stuff a thought into the physical, it has a kind of killing effect; by grasping a thought in your physical body, you actually kill something in your nervous system. “Killing” is actually the right word for it.

We now think something – and after some time we reflect on what is inside us. So many nerve corpses as we have cherished thoughts are now in us. What remains when we have thought something is really nothing but corpses, so that when we fall asleep at night, we have to leave our physical body to itself so that it can dispose of the thought corpses that we have created during the day through our thinking.

Do these thought corpses have to be there? Yes, they have to be there, because these thought corpses are actually the imprints of thinking; and if we could not form these thought corpses, we would be just as unable to consciously grasp a thought during the day as we are at night. During the night we are involved in the weaving of thoughts in the spiritual world. We do not have a physical body at our disposal into which we could press the thought corpses. During the night, the thought passes away and dissolves in the universal life of thought. The difference is that during the day we can hold on to thoughts by turning them into corpses that we can bury in the physical body. There the life of thought hardens, and this hardening has the effect that we can have the life of thought consciously.

This is the more exact process. Here we have another example of how materialism fails to explain everything. The materialist believes that he must look for the cause of thinking in what goes on inside, in the process of putting corpses into the ground. But what actually takes place are processes of secretion of thought, processes of the dead body. And the nervous system is there so that the process of secretion can be produced through the activity of thought. What thought leaves over, what it cannot use, what it expels, is examined by physical physiology. But during the waking hours of the day something takes shape that can be called the dying away of thinking in the physical body. The powers of thought that one develops are used to produce, as it were, casts or imprints of oneself. The forces go into these casts. During the night they do not go into such casts, for then we live, as it were, in the general ocean of spiritual existence. But because we cannot form such impressions in normal life without initiation, our thoughts also dissolve in this general sea. When we want to grasp them in the morning, they have simply dissolved; not even memory can hold on to them.

So if we grasp the process very precisely, we can say: some thought process develops. As it enters our body, it produces those secretions in the nerves. But before it produces these secretions, it reflects itself. Before it passes into the body and the bodily activity, it first reflects itself; the evocation of this activity is a reflection.

Imagine looking at an object with your eyes or hearing a sound with your ears or tones resonating. The sound resonance is outside. This sound enters the ear. A process begins in the auditory nerves, namely this cadaverization and secretion. And what you hear is therefore the reflected sound, actually an inner echo.

In this way, in our everyday experience, we are completely in a world of mirror images, and our own being is interwoven into this world of mirror images. For we would grasp our true being if we felt ourselves floating outside our body in the spiritual realm, if we felt: Now one of the angeloi seizes you; now you are weaving in the angeloi, you merge into the realm of the archangels, into the realm of the primal forces and so on. - Then we would feel carried into the realms of the higher beings. We would feel the immortality of the soul and know: just as these beings carry the happenings in the world from world age to world age, so they carry us with them from world age to world age. But in ordinary life, man does not perceive this. He is immersed in the physical body, and the experience of one's own self in true being dies during life in the physical body, and only the world of mirror images remains.

We can therefore shine a deep light into the process of knowledge, and one would wish that an awareness of the nature of this process of knowledge would truly take hold of the age. For this recognition of the world as a sum of mirror images, and the recognition that the actual being lies behind it, that is already an ascent to what humanity is really meant to be led to through spiritual science. We can therefore say no more and no less than: Man enters the physical plane, and by entering the physical plane, he is actually transferred from the world of reality into a world of unreality, into a mere world of images. And we must feel the full gravity of this realization, that we stand within a world of images when we think on the physical plane, when we perceive and imagine.

Thus we can say that the spiritual entities, by handing us down to the physical plane, have taken us out of the world of real reality and placed us in a world of unreality. And we recognize this at first as a fact of the spiritual world, even if it is not yet the world plan. We only recognize it as a fact of the world plan when we raise the question: Why are we, insofar as we are beings of the real physical world, placed in a world of unreal images? Why? - Suppose we were not, suppose we were placed on the physical plane in such a way that we had not images but realities. What does that actually mean? It would mean that we perceive the physical world; for example, we hear a sequence of sounds. The effect of this sequence of sounds goes into our ear, into our auditory nerves, and causes a change there. If we were only able to enjoy what is going on in the auditory nerves and were unable to project it up into our imaginations, then we would be in reality; we would have realities, not images. But that is not the case. We are really thrown out of the world of realities and placed in a world of images, in a world of unrealities. If we were really in the world of realities, in a world of reality, then we could never have the opportunity to give reality to a world ourselves, because we cannot give reality to what we experience as reality. An object that I take in my hand from the outside is something. It is not just an image, the object is something. Just as I cannot push the table that I see in the mirror, I cannot do anything real with the world that is only given to me in images. But if it is a matter of us creating realities ourselves, then it is just right that we live in a world of images, because then the images have no reality, but we can give them reality. Do we do that?

Yes, my dear friends, we do, in one area of our lives we do that. We do that when we act morally. In the moment when moral impulses flash through our mental life, in that moment we create something in the world that would not be there without us. When we imagine the world, we have only images; when we act morally, we place realities into the world. We would never be able to live with our morality in a world that would already appear to us as real. For then we would encounter the world everywhere with what we want to do morally.

Take animals, for example. They experience the world quite differently from human beings. They do not experience it as a world of images, but as a world of real realities. This is why animals cannot develop morality. Human beings can develop morality because they can place moral impulses into the world themselves, which is otherwise only a world of mirror images. What man lets flow into the world as moral impulses flows into the world as a reality that comes from him. The gods have placed us on the physical plane and made our spiritual experience a world of unreality, so that we may be in a position to place moral impulses as reality into this unreality. There you have creation out of nothing, creation into nothing through images that are only pictures, only unrealities.

If we look again at the sleeping person, we can say: insofar as this sleeping person is outside of his physical body and his etheric body, he experiences the world of weaving thoughts, into which the beings of the higher hierarchies are interwoven. But something else also permeates and flows through this world. What is it? The beings of the higher hierarchies are not merely thought beings; they are real beings, they have substance, and what they have as substance we do not experience in our thoughts, but in our will, namely in the will that is permeated by love. In our will, by placing the moral impulses into the world, which is otherwise only a world of images for us, we bring down the substance of the higher beings into our world. What we really do out of moral impulses is nothing other than bringing down the substance of the beings of the higher hierarchies into our world.

Our thoughts, when we live with our spiritual and soul being in our physical body after waking up, are mirrored in a part of our body: so to speak, the products of the deposit of our waking thought life are formed in the nervous system. The nature of moral impulses, which basically come from the nature of the higher hierarchies, goes into our whole body, permeating our whole being, our whole organism, not just the nervous system; so that the human being can be seen as twofold: as a nervous human being, and alongside that, the whole of the rest of the physical human being, into which everything that is experienced in the person's moral impulses flows. But we come out of the world of spiritual realities by immersing ourselves in our physical body. As we immerse ourselves in our physical body, emerging from the worlds of thought, they flicker and glitter, reflecting back, forming the corpses of thoughts in the nervous system. We just do not perceive this flickering and glittering in our ordinary lives. Thoughts live in us, but they are not living beings in us; they are reflected, and what we perceive is a kind of reading of the dead thoughts. But these thoughts that reflect themselves are a living thing, and that has great significance in the order of the world. When a person stands before you and you look at this person and are aware: he perceives, he thinks, what is in his mind as a web of thoughts goes into his nervous system, is reflected in everything perceptible, in sounds and colors - what happens to the spiritual light that goes into him, that makes impressions on his nervous system? What happens to the impressions that arise? You see, the cherubim come, collect this light and use it for the further world order, and we are all the candlesticks that are set up in the world order. By thinking, perceiving and imagining, we are the candlesticks of the cherubim in the world order. Just as this light here in the physical world illuminates space, so we are the candlesticks in the spiritual world for the cherubim. When we think, light arises in us; the light of thought radiates out from us and illuminates the world in which the cherubim live.

When we carry into our body from the world of hierarchies those substances from which moral impulses are born and these penetrate our entire organization, our volitional impulses, our actions, take place. Everything we do is the result of these volitional impulses being active in us. It is not just what happens externally in the world through us, but, insofar as it is moral action, this moral action is gathered by the seraphim, and this moral action is the source of warmth for the whole cosmic order. Under the influence of people who act immorally, the seraphim freeze, that is, they receive no warmth with which they can heat the whole cosmic world. Under the influence of moral action, the seraphim acquire the powers by which the cosmic world order is maintained, just as physical warmth maintains the physical world order.

You see, the worldview that spiritual science gives us becomes very real. It brings us to the realization: When you think, when you imagine, you are the kindled light of the cherubim. When you act, when you do something, when you unfold the will, then you are the source of warmth, the source of fire of the seraphim. We stride through the world, conscious that we are not useless good-for-nothings in it, but stand in the world order for the benefit of the whole world order, and conscious that it is also in our power to be a source of darkness in the world. For if we want to be dull and stupid and not think, then we increase the darkness, and the consequence of this is that the cherubim have no light. If we are bad and immoral, we increase the coldness in the whole world order, and the seraphim have no warmth.

Spiritual science does not give us mere theories, as external science can do if it is not a practical science and leads to technical application. Spiritual science gives us something through which we first learn to know what we as human beings are in the whole order of the world. What follows from spiritual science, the essential, is what is important. It is a heightened sense of responsibility towards our humanity. One feels what tasks one has towards the cosmos by being human. One feels that one can be human in the right sense and can be human in the wrong sense, that one can give one's all to darkness and cold or to light and warmth in the world order.

With this practical goal in mind, one would like to bring spiritual science into the world so that it can take hold of hearts. For one can be sure that spiritual science will then really be able to create a new human soul condition and thus a completely new form of human experience on earth and further in the universe, that it is not just a matter of passing on knowledge, but a source of true, genuine life forces. It is so ardently desired that this be grasped, be grasped so very deeply by those who today feel the urge for this spiritual science! For this spiritual science is still too much taken as something external, still too much so that it, like other knowledge, is to satisfy curiosity or, let us say, the thirst for knowledge. But the seriousness with which spiritual science is placed in life must grow. That is what our time so urgently needs: not just belief in the spiritual world, but the possibility of relating to the spiritual world in such a way that the human soul truly draws near to the spiritual world. And as the child draws nourishment from its mother's breast, so does the human soul draw the substance of life for a new form of earthly experience, of earthly activity, of knowing itself in the spiritual order of the world, from what spiritual science is able to reveal to it.

Only when the relationship of people to spiritual science is imbued with this magical breath of feeling and perception will spiritual science be understood in its true, innermost core. But it will be necessary for it to take root in particular among those who participate in a common work of spiritual scientific endeavors.

What else should our building be if not something in which we all participate – especially those who are working on it – participate as a community, in a confluence of attitudes that spiritual science awakens! That is the tremendously important and significant thing. If the building is erected in this spirit, then it will not only be this dry building with its forms, but will be something that radiates far out into the world; it will be what those who worked on it have created in loving, genuine collaboration. Whatever they have poured into the structure, whatever they have left behind in it, no matter how loosely it may be connected with the structure, if it is directed in love towards what the structure should be, then it may be the smallest activity. And if it flows from the human attitude that seeks to merge with the cosmic order, then this structure will be something that is not just dead, but alive, truly alive.

That is the secret of our thought corpses, that we can always revive them again for a certain time. And the other side, that of remembrance, I discussed last time: that which thoughts have produced in us as thought corpses and which remains in its form, just as human corpses remain on earth, can be revived by later soul forces. And when a memory emerges, that which is only a thought corpse will shine again in us for a while in a living way.

Let us work to ensure that our building is similar in the human order, so that those who come to see it are unconsciously transported into the sphere of love with which it is built! For then it will not be merely a collection of dead forms, but something that comes to life when you look at it, like the thought-corpses of memory. And then, for all future time, the way we work on it will determine whether this structure will be something that can be revitalized again and again by those who encounter it.

By allowing these thoughts to work on our soul, we gain a living relationship to this building of ours, the living relationship that humanity really needs by living from the present into the future. For much will not be allowed to remain dead, but will have to live, but will only be able to live through the emergence of that new attitude that must be a result of spiritual science and spiritual knowledge.