The Rudolf Steiner Archive

A wise man of ancient Egypt once spoke to a wise man of Greece words to this effect: You Greeks are a people who live only in the present, without taking history into account. You speak of what is happening immediately around you and give no thought to how the present has been taking shape since primeval times.

What did the Egyptian sage mean by this? He wanted to convey that the thoughts of the Egyptians were concerned with great problems of the cosmos, with the evolution of the earth through different forms, and that the Greeks, at most, had only pictures of these things in myth and saga. But in reality the Egyptian sage wanted to indicate what had resulted from the use made of the mummified human being, as I have been trying to explain in the last two lectures. The Egyptians set out to bring into the rhythm of inbreathing, impulses derived from certain Spiritual Beings for whom dwelling places had been created in the mummies. Let us try to picture as clearly as possible the significance of the mummy in days when Egyptian Initiation-culture was at its prime.

The mummy was the human being after the spirit-and-soul had departed from his physical form. While a man is alive, the forces active in his etheric organism, his astral organism and Ego, work within this form. The form is irradiated and permeated by the human “tincture” proceeding from the blood and the rest of the organism. The mummy was bare form, a form that could exist on earth only because the human being exists on earth. The Egyptian Initiates used this form—in which the soul and the spirit were not actually present—in order to acquire a power which, without the cult of the mummy, they could not have possessed.

We must try to picture times when the life of soul was quite unlike that of today. Before the Egyptian epoch, all the ideas and thoughts of man, all the experiences of his inner life, were imparted to him directly from the spiritual world. Even when immersed in his thoughts, therefore, he was living in revelations of the spiritual world. In the days of the ancient Indian and ancient Persian civilisations, all the thoughts of man were revelations from the spiritual world. No thoughts were stimulated in him by the external world, by plants, animals or other human beings. His life of soul was replete with thoughts proceeding from the Spiritual and they shed abundant light upon the world. Man lived in communion with the plants and animals and he also gave them names. But these names, too, came to him as revelations from the Gods. When, in the epochs of ancient India and ancient Persia, man gave a name to a flower, it seemed to him that a divine voice said to him distinctly: This is the name by which the flower is to be known. When he gave a name to an animal, he was conscious of hearing inwardly: This is the name by which the animal is to be known. In the civilisations of ancient India and ancient Persia, all such names came to men via their inner life of soul.

In the civilisation of ancient Egypt it was different. Clairvoyant experiences were now fading more and more into twilight and man no longer had clear perception of what was being revealed to him from the spiritual world. As a result he felt it increasingly necessary to live in communion with external nature, with the kingdoms of the animals, the plants and the minerals. But this, too, was out of his reach, for the time was not yet ripe. It was to come in the real sense only after the Mystery of Golgotha. The development of the human being in ancient Egypt had not reached the point where he could have lived in direct communion with the external world. He was obliged, therefore, to mummify the human body. For out of what was present in the mummified form from which the soul and the spirit had departed, he could receive enlightenment about nature around him, about the plants, the animals, the minerals. The first facts of knowledge about these kingdoms of nature came to man from the Spirits who spoke to him from the dwelling places provided for them on earth in the mummies. In the days when the Gods ceased to speak to man from the super-sensible world, he had recourse to helpers who were now able to live on the earth because the human form was preserved by mummification.

But the matter was full of complication. True, it would have been possible for the Initiates to receive from the Moon-Beings indwelling the mummies, enlightenment upon what should be introduced into human life and directives for the guidance and education of men. But because the necessary faculties of soul were still undeveloped, it would not have been possible, even for the Initiates, to obtain, without further measures, enlightenment on nature, on the kingdoms of the plants, animals and minerals, from the Moon-Beings in the mummies. And yet in this very domain the Egyptians were great. With the help of the culture connected with the mummies, they founded, for example, a wonderful art of medicine.

Of course, when a “clever” man of today interprets these things, he says: By preserving the mummies, the Egyptians obtained knowledge of the various organs and founded a science of anatomy, not merely of medicine. This, however, is an illusory conception. The truth is that purely empirical research and logical deliberation would have been no use to the Egyptians for their intercourse with the external world was not of this character; it was much more delicate, much subtler. But something was achieved by this careful preservation of the mummified form, namely, that the souls of the Dead were fettered for a time to their mummies.

Herein lies the dubious character of Egyptian culture, a perpetual reminder that it was a culture in decline, in degeneration, and cannot be said to represent a golden age in human evolution. It was a culture that encroached upon the super-sensible destinies of men, for human souls after death were fettered, as it were, to the preserved, mummified form. And whereas through the Spiritual Beings indwelling the mummies, directives for human affairs could be received, it was not possible to obtain enlightenment about nature, about the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms directly, but only indirectly, in this sense, that the Moon-Beings were able to communicate secrets of nature to the human souls still fettered to the mummies. And so it was from the human souls lingering with their mummies that the Initiates of Egypt, in their turn, obtained enlightenment about the kingdoms of the plants, animals and minerals. A strange atmosphere pervaded Egyptian culture. The Initiates said to themselves: Before death our bodies are not suited to receive enlightenment about nature; a science of nature is beyond our reach; this can come only later, after the Mystery of Golgotha has taken place; our bodies now are unsuitable. Nevertheless we need enlightenment. As human bodies now are, men can acquire knowledge about nature only after their death. They live in the midst of nature here, but they cannot use the body in order to form concepts about nature. After death, however, such concepts can arise. Let us therefore detain the Dead for a period in order that they may give us enlightenment about nature.

Thus a dubious element was introduced into the historical development of humanity through Egyptian culture. Chaldean culture held aloof in this respect and was, so to speak, a culture of greater purity.

Now all these things—modern science, of course, will regard them as so much fantasy, but modern science holds the same opinion of a great deal that is true—all these things were known, particularly, to men of Hebrew antiquity. Hence the aversion to Egyptian culture indicated in the Old Testament although, through Moses, many elements of Egyptian culture found their way into the events there recorded. The Old Testament indicates the kind of attitude that prevailed in regard to all those things I have described as typifying Egyptian development. The attitude of the Initiates in ancient Egypt was this. They said: In order to acquire the powers that are essential for the direction and education of men, we must create external means since inner means are no longer available to us. But we must also anticipate something that will arise only in the future, namely, a science of nature. And there is no other way of achieving this than by letting the Dead, whom we fetter to their mummies, impart it to us. Time ran on and the Mystery of Golgotha took place. By the fourth or fifth century A.D., the old constitution of the soul, with its pictorial conception of the world, had completely passed away. Indications were already appearing of an epoch when men were to form their concepts of outer nature from outer nature herself and moreover when they would be capable of doing so. The whole organisation of man was inwardly transformed. He felt more and more that his soul remained empty when he waited for thoughts and ideas to be revealed to him directly out of the spiritual world. And so he turned to the observation of external phenomena; he formed his concepts and ideas from observations and, later on, from experiments. The process was exactly reversed.

And now, once again it was a matter of acquiring by other means something that was no longer within the reach of man's own powers. More and more since the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., it has been borne in upon men that a future must come when, despite the gift of intellect and the capacity to form thoughts and ideas about external nature through the intellect, this intellect must be spiritualized, so that thoughts will once again lead directly to Divine-Spiritual reality and the power inherent in such thoughts pass into the out-breathing. But this power has not yet come into existence. For the time being we have recourse only to the intellect that is bound up with the physical body.

Certain traditional conceptions which today have almost entirely died out and of which history knows nothing, were alive all through the early Middle Ages, from the fourth and fifth to the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and even later, although hidden in obscurity. Men now proceeded to make “mummies” of a certain kind, out of these conceptions—mummies that are analogous to those of Egypt although they take a different form and the analogy is not perceived. Modern humanity could have gained nothing by preserving the human form in the mummy, as was the custom in Egypt. What modern humanity preserved, was something different, namely ancient cults, mainly pre-Christian cults. And particularly since the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with the birth of a completely intellectualistic culture, ancient ceremonies and rites were preserved in all kinds of occult Orders. Wonderful cults of antiquity, occult rites and ceremonies have been continued in Orders and Lodges of different kinds. They are mummies, like the mummies of human beings in ancient Egypt, as long as they are not irradiated and quickened by the Mystery of Golgotha. There is a very great deal in these cults and ceremonies, but of the wisdom they contained in ancient times only dead elements have been preserved, just as the mummy preserved the dead form of man. And in many respects it is so to this very day. There are innumerable Orders where ceremonials and rituals of all kinds are enacted; but the life has gone out of them, they are mummified. Just as the Egyptian felt a kind of awe when he gazed at a mummy, so in modern man there is not exactly awe, but a feeling of uneasiness perhaps, when he comes across these mummified procedures in his civilisation. He feels them to be something mysterious, as the mummy was felt to be mysterious.

Now just as among the Initiates of Egypt there were some who acted unlawfully, who used the information conveyed to them by the Spirits indwelling the mummies to give false instruction and direction to humanity, so in the mummified ceremonies of many occult Orders an impetus is given to introduce a false twist here or there in the guidance of mankind. I told you that something made possible by mummification of the corpse, passed into the human being by way of the inbreathing. As I said yesterday, the Spiritual Beings needed by the Egyptians had no dwelling-place on earth. And this was provided by the mummies. Those Spiritual Beings and forces which by way of the out-breathing are to bear the inner configuration of man into the ether-world, find no paths in the everyday world, but they are able to move along paths created in these ceremonies—even though they are not understood and are mummified.

In the epoch of Egyptian civilisation, the Moon-Spirits found themselves homeless during the hours of the day. The Spirits who work in the out-breathing of man, these elementary Earth-Spirits who are to be the helpers of mankind today—they have no dwelling-place by night, but they slip down into these ceremonies and ritualistic enactments. There they find paths and are able to live. During the day it is still possible for these Beings to live as it were an honourable existence, for by day the human being thinks, and his intellectualistic thought-forms are passing outwards all the time with the breath as, driven through the cerebral fluid, through the spinal canal, it is then again exhaled. During the hours of night, however, when a man is not thinking, no thought-forms go forth from him; there are no little “ether-ships” upon which the Earth-Spirits can go forth into the world in order to impress man's form into the cosmos of ether. And so ways and directions for the Earth-daemons have been created through these mummified ceremonies. What is contained in all kinds of occult Orders, especially since the birth of modern intellectualism, has a basis similar to that of the cult of the mummy in Egypt, which so suddenly made its appearance. For the human being cannot have knowledge of outer nature without knowledge of himself and of his own form. When the Egyptians set out to acquire a knowledge of nature, they were able to have the mummified human form before them. When it behooved men of the modern age to find something that is not merely passive, ineffective thought elaborated by the intellect but that can really go forth into the world and produce an effect there, then they were obliged to surround themselves with symbolism, symbolism which points to what should really take shape within them in a spiritual sense.

These ceremonial forms and enactments in Lodges and Orders are devoid of soul—the soul has departed from them. As little as the soul of a man indwelt his mummy, as little does there inhere in these ceremonies the power of soul that once was present when they were conducted by the Initiates of olden time. Spiritual life pulsated through the ceremonies when they were being enacted among the ancient Initiates—a spiritual life flowed out from human beings into the ceremonies. In those days, man and the ceremony were one. Think, by way of comparison, of how externalised the ceremonies have become in Orders of the modern age!

The modern man cannot get beyond his intellect. I told you yesterday how even a Benedictine Father, whose vocation it is to be a servant of the Spirit, how even he cannot get away from intellectualism. Modern man cannot find his way out of intellectualism any more than the ancient Egyptian could find his way into it. The ancient Egyptians needed the souls of men already dead in order that a science of nature might be imparted to them. The man of modern times needs something that again imparts to him a spiritual science, a knowledge of the Spirit, because as yet he is unable to unfold this himself.

Now quite apart from the many occult Orders which have become pure mummies, have no deep background, and are carried on more out of a liking to dabble in mysteries, we find that as late as the first half of the nineteenth century there always existed, as well as these others, very earnest and sincere Orders, in which more was imparted than, for example, an average Freemason today receives from his Order. The Orders to which I am referring were able to impart more, because certain needs prevailed in the spiritual world among Beings belonging to the Hierarchy of the Angeloi who are of less interest to us on the earth but very important in our pre-earthly existence. Certain Beings of the Hierarchy of the Angeloi, too, have needs of knowledge, and can only satisfy them by letting human beings reach over, probingly as it were, to these genuine occult Orders before they have come down from pre-earthly into earthly existence. It has actually happened that in connection with certain Lodges working with ancient ceremonial forms, men of vision have been able to assert: Here there is present the soul of a human being who will descend to the earth only in the future. Before the man is born, the soul may be present in such a Lodge and, through their feelings, men can acquire a great deal from this source. Just as the human soul hovered around the mummy, was still bound in a sense to the mummy, so in certain occult Lodges the spirits of human beings not yet born hover in a kind of anticipatory existence. What happens in a case like this does not stimulate intellectual thoughts, for modern men have these thoughts naturally and need no such stimulus. But when they are working in their occult Lodges with the right mood of soul, they can receive communications from human beings not yet born, who are still in their pre-earthly existence and who can be present as a result of the ceremonies. Such men feel the reality of the spiritual world and can, moreover, be inspired by the spiritual world.

There is something in the biography of Goethe which strikes anyone who has a feeling for such things as very significant, particularly when it is mentioned by people who, although they do not know the whole truth, none the less indicate it out of a kind of half-conscious knowledge. Karl Julius Schröer, of whom I have often told you, was quite remarkable in this respect when he was speaking of Goethe. Again and again when he was lecturing on the works and biography of Goethe, a striking phrase would fall from his lips. Schröer would say: “Goethe experienced that once again and the experience rejuvenated him.” Schröer spoke of Goethe as a personality who, say at the age of seven, had had a certain experience; then at the age of fourteen, perhaps, he experienced something different, but the second experience really brought him back a little nearer childhood. Goethe became younger, was rejuvenated. At the age, say, of twenty-one, he was again rejuvenated. Schröer depicted Goethe as if, from stage to stage, he was constantly being rejuvenated.

Study Goethe's biography with care and you will find clear indications of this. Even when he had become a corpulent official in Weimar with a double chin, even in the days when in his dealings with certain people he was a surly, morose old man—and there is much to suggest that in his intercourse with others he was anything but pleasant—even then, in advanced age, Goethe underwent a rejuvenation. It would have been impossible for him, at a great age, to write the second part of Faust if he had not been thus rejuvenated. For about the year 1816 or 1817, Goethe was not a personality from whom one could have expected anything like the second part of Faust, which was written from the year 1824 onwards. A rejuvenation had actually taken place. Moreover Goethe himself had an inkling of this, at any rate in his younger years, when he depicts Faust being given a draught of youth. It is really part of his own biography.

When we investigate what was responsible for this, we realise that it was Goethe's membership of a Lodge. Other venerable figures of Weimar, perhaps only with the exception of Wieland, Chancellor von Muller and one or two others, were ordinary members of the Lodge like many bona fide officials in Weimar. It was their habit to go to Church on Sundays and also be members of the Lodge—the contrast did not worry them! It was the custom in such circles. But it was different in Goethe's case, different too, in the cases of Chancellor von Muller, Wieland and one or two others. They actually experienced these rejuvenations because in their souls they had intercourse with men as yet unborn. Just as the priests of the temples in ancient Egypt had intercourse with the souls of men after their death, so persons such as I have named had intercourse with human beings still living in pre-earthly existence. And from this existence before birth, human beings can bring spirituality into the world of the present. They bring, not intellectualism, but spirituality, which a man then receives through his feelings and which can pervade his whole life.

Thus it may be said that the first elements of intellectual thinking unfolded by mankind in the course of evolution, were learnt by the Egyptians from the Dead, And the first elements of spiritual truths, which have been learnt again by men in the modern age, were acquired from unborn human beings by certain outstanding personalities out of the Initiation-teachings given in occult Orders. Study Goethe's works and again and again you will find flashes of spiritual wisdom which he is not able to express in the form of thoughts but which he clothes in pictures often reminiscent of symbols used in occult Orders. The pictures came to Goethe in the way described. And there are many other such cases.

Now these unborn human souls can give enlightenment only about spiritual truths which can be experienced in the non-earthly world—about the things of heaven and what lies out-side the actual arena of earth-evolution. But because the elementary Earth-Spirits find a foothold in the ceremonies, communications can be made by the Unborn to these Earth-Spirits. And if there is anyone present at the ceremonies with a gift for hearing from the Earth-Spirits what has been communicated to them by the Unborn, such men can, in their turn, give voice to what the Unborn say to the Earth-Spirits. Think of the wonderful understanding of nature possessed by Goethe and by other men in those days, for example, the Danish writer Steven, or men like Troxler, or Schubert who wrote so prolifically on the subject of dreams and whose best inspirations came from the Nature-Spirits. And there were many others—more numerous in the first half of the nineteenth century than later on—who are examples of what came to men by this means. Often, too, something else happened. Communications made in this way by the Unborn to the Nature-Spirits did not always result in the voicing of spiritual secrets of nature. In some human beings these communications became part of their very soul. The forces of the Nature-Spirits were received into their individual qualities of soul and this expressed itself in the style in which such men wrote. Anyone who has a feeling for such things today will realise that the very style of historians such as Ranke or Taine or a typically modern English historian, is intellectualistic. Ranke's style in itself is intellectualistic. The sentences are strung together in an intellectualistic way; the subject is cleverly placed, the predicate just where it should be, and so on. It is all so clever that even a schoolmaster could be satisfied with it, but compare this kind of style with that of Johannes Muller in his twenty-four volumes of world-history: that is a style ... well ... as though an angel were speaking. And in other domains too, in the eighteenth century, many things were written in a style which has no trace of this lack of individuality, this irritating objectivity, but on the contrary, has a quality which makes us feel that elementary forces of nature are streaming through the writer, so that his style seems to flow from the cosmos, from the universe. In such cases something resembling what went out from the mummies to the Initiates of ancient Egypt, comes to modern man. These are facts of great significance, taking place behind the veils of outer history, and they must be recognised by anyone who desires really to understand the evolution of humanity. And so, although these things have remained unrecognised for a time because nowadays there are no ears to hear them—we see how preparation was made for the spiritual power that must enter into and live within the intellect in future ages if humanity does not wish to take the path leading towards the decline of the West depicted by Spengler.

The ancient Egyptians mummified the human form. Since the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., humanity has mummified ancient cults, making it possible, in this way, for forces from beyond the earth to work in the ceremonial of these old cults. Human beings themselves contributed little to these cults; but superhuman beings often contributed a great deal. It is the same with cults of the Churches, and those who have vision of realities can often dispense with the person who stands in the flesh before the altar, because—apart altogether from the officiating priests—they are able to perceive the presence of these Spiritual Beings in the ceremonies.

When we think about these things, it will be clear to us that if we really desire to approach what is all around us spiritually, quite a different kind of language is necessary from that to which modern man is accustomed. Nor shall we be surprised at the appearance of a work like Fritz Mauthner's Kritik der Sprache, which sets out to prove that the ideas men have conceived of Spiritual Beings are words and nothing more. And if words are not to be believed, then, obviously, one cannot believe in Spiritual Beings. Such is the purport of Mauthner's Kritik der Sprache.

Yes, but as far as a large proportion of modern humanity is concerned, Mauthner is quite right. A large proportion of modern humanity has nothing but words with which to speak of the super-sensible. Here, unfortunately, the Kritik der Sprache is right. What is necessary is that real spiritual substance shall again be brought into words. And so it was also necessary in the course of historical evolution that during a period when men themselves were unable to lay hold of this spiritual substance, it should be continued and developed for them by superhuman Beings and by unborn human beings, just as intellectuality was prepared for the Egyptians by those who had already passed through death. The Egyptians received from the Dead the intellectuality in which we are now steeped. We, in the present age, have to learn or at least study by way of the now mummified cult, the spirituality we have not yet acquired—for cult has many things to tell us. Through this different kind of mummy we must supplement our intellectual knowledge with the spirituality of the future. Mummified enactments have taken the place of the mummified human being; mummified ceremonies have superseded the mummified human form.

In this way we must study what proceeds behind the veils of world-history; otherwise every account of the flow of history remains a jumble of external, seemingly fortuitous happenings. But they are not fortuitous when their background is known and understood; they become so only if men refuse to recognise their background. They throw up waves, as it were, of which man believes that each is separate and distinct from the other, whereas the truth is that they all surge upwards together from the depths of an ocean. In reality, processes in history are waves thrown up to the surface, into the sphere of man's life, from the depths of a spiritual sea of world-evolution. In each historical fact we should perceive one such wave, and abandon the belief that one wave arises fortuitously by the side of another. Each wave, that is to say, each historical fact, arises from spiritual depths of that historical evolution which flows onwards eternally, from age to age.

I have been speaking to you about the secrets connected with the mummy and with cult and rites, indicating how the mummy enshrined secrets of antiquity before the Mystery of Golgotha, whereas cult and ceremonial rites in their more modern forms enshrine secrets whose full significance will be revealed only in the future. Today and tomorrow I want to add something to what has already been said and to begin with I will give you a picture in the form of a kind of narrative.

If you had been able to participate in many a scene in the Mysteries during a certain epoch of Egyptian development, in times when the custom of the mummification of bodies was at its height, you would have experienced something like the following. The Priest-Instructor in the Mysteries would have tried, first, to explain to his pupils that in the human head all the mysteries of the world lie concealed, in a very special sense. He would have bidden them regard the earth, the dwelling-place of man, as a mirror, a reflection of the whole cosmos. In very truth, everything that exists in the cosmos is also to be found in the earth itself. Looking upwards to the world of stars, we see the moon as our nearest neighbour among the heavenly bodies. Think of the earth and the moon circling around the earth.¹ We can picture the course taken by the moon as it moves around the earth and all that lies between the earth and the orbit of the moon. Those who rightly understand how to interpret what they find when they dig down into the earth, will say: What is present in the environment is mirrored, and condensed, in an outermost layer of the earth itself.

And now take another planet, which together with the earth, circles round the Sun. We can picture this planet, Venus, and its path. This sphere is filled with delicate, aeriform, etheric substance. Again a lower layer in the earth must be pictured as a reflection of what is outside in the cosmos. Proceeding in this way we have the whole earth as a mirror image of the universe, remembering that what exists out yonder in a state of extremely delicate, ethereal volatility is condensed and still further condensed when it is found in the earth's strata. Thus at the centre of the earth, the outermost periphery of the universe would be condensed into a single point.

In the epoch to which I am now referring, the Initiate of Egypt spoke to his pupils of those things I have very briefly outlined. But the Initiate also said to his pupils: To understand the interaction between the cosmos and its mirror image, the earth, let us study the human head. The human head is formed in the mother's body through the combined working of the whole universe and the earth. But—so the Initiate would have said to his pupils—no observation of the human head can, in itself, enable us to understand its real nature, for the head in itself does not reveal its secrets. It contains innumerable secrets and mysteries but they remain concealed.

The human head is active from the earliest period of germination in the body of the mother until death but it does not contain within itself the effects of its own activity. The mystery of the human head is that it is infinitely active, but the effects of its activities are to be found in the other parts of the organism, not in the head itself.

An Egyptian Initiate would have spoken to his pupils just as I am speaking to you now, except that he would, of course, have used the forms of expression current in those days.

Diagrams were sketched on the blackboard, of circles one inside each other, the smallest indicating the earth in the centre and the larger circles the paths around the earth of the moon and other planets with their interpenetrating spheres

He would have made the following intelligible to his pupils. When the human eye looks at a colour, the perception of the colour gives rise to a change in the brain. What is thus produced in the human eye, with the resulting change in the brain is, in truth, a deed of the outer world. The processes that take place in the brain itself are deeds of the outer world. But the brain itself does something. When the brain receives a colour-impression from outside and a nerve-process arises inwardly as a result, the brain brings about something in the astral body and Ego. The actual effect of this, however, manifests in the other parts of the organism, not in the brain itself. Whereas the working of the external world results in a change in the brain, the brain, for its part, works, for example, upon the heart or upon some other organ of the human body. You can only perceive what the human head does when you know exactly what happens in the human physical body—so would the Initiate have spoken to his pupils.

The Egyptians had knowledge of these things, but because the possibilities that had existed in still earlier times were no longer at their disposal, the Initiates were obliged to adopt methods different from those used by the Initiates of ancient Persia or ancient India. The Initiates of ancient India let their pupils carry out exercises of Yoga, made them breathe in a particular way; and by transforming the breathing process into a sensory process the pupils acquired knowledge of the human physical body. And how did they acquire it?

We know that when man breathes in, the breath-impulse passes through the lungs into the whole of the body, through the spinal canal into the brain. In the brain, the breath-impulse combines with the other processes there, and then recoils. It was this recoil that the pupil of Yoga observed. The breath-impulse passes first into the lungs, through the spinal canal into the brain, and there expands; then it recoils and passes through the different organs, into the chest, and so on. Observing the recoil of the breath downwards into the organism, the pupil of Yoga was able to watch what the brain was doing in the chest, in the abdominal organs and so on. In the recoil through the spinal cord and the expansion through the whole body, the pupil of Yoga was able to observe what the head brings about in the organism. Such was the art connected with the breath, in times when the breathing process was made into a sensory process, when through observation of the breathing, a human being could answer for himself the question: How does my head work in my organism?

I told you in the last lecture that at a certain stage of the Egyptian epoch, this art had been lost and the Egyptian Initiates were obliged to resort to other means. The Initiates of Egypt led their pupils to the mummies, taught them to mummify the human organism, taught them, through observation of what was there presented to them, something that had once been learned by inner means, through contemplation of the breathing process. But I told you, too, that although the pupils of the Egyptian Initiates were no longer capable of following these spiritual processes, which are revealed as the deeds performed by the brain in the human organism—and that was the point of importance—nevertheless the Initiates were helped, as they spoke to their pupils, by the spiritual Moon-Beings. These spiritual Beings who would otherwise have wandered homeless about the earth, found dwelling places in the mummies. These were the Beings who could be observed, whose speech was still understood in that period of ancient Egyptian development and through whom the first science of nature was imparted. What the pupil of Yoga was able to perceive inwardly, through cultivation of the breathing process—these things were now taught somewhat in the following way. The Initiates would say to their pupils: The human head is involved in a constant process of dying. It is really dying all the time, and every night the organism must make efforts to counteract this dying process in the head. But what the head does during this dying process between birth and death results in the influx of new life into the other organs of the body, so that inasmuch as the forces of these other organs—not their substance, of course, but their forces—are sent on into the future, during the period between death and a new birth they become head, the head of the next earthly incarnation. But the Initiates impressed upon their pupils the necessity of understanding what is contained in the actual forms of the organs, and it was for this reason that such scrupulous care was given to the preservation of the mummies. By way of the forms in the mummy, the Moon-Spirits were able to reveal the secrets of the organs, their connection with the human head, and how they bear within them those forces of germination by means of which they become head in the next earthly life. Such was the teaching given by the Initiates of Egypt to their pupils, by means of the mummy.

At a certain period, then, it became necessary to teach in an external way what had once been inner teaching in the days when the Yoga philosophy and religion were at their prime. This, indeed, was the great transition that took place from the culture of ancient India and ancient Persia to that of Egypt: what had once been a teaching by inner means was now taught by external means.

The teaching given by the Initiates of Egypt was brought to a majestic climax when they said to their pupils: And now steep yourselves in the plastic quality of the forms lying before you in the mummy. Here you have very faint indications of that which during the life of man on earth is perpetually passing away, namely, the inner components of the human head. But you have before you in great clarity and precision the forms of the rest of the human organism. Contemplation of the mummy will not help you to study the life-processes, or the perceptive processes; but the plastic quality of the forms of the inner organs of the human body, the heart, the lungs, the kidneys, the stomach, and so forth—all this you can study from the mummy. Try to picture the following. During life, the breath is drawn back into the head and then streams out into the organism. In this breath there is a plastic force, which has the tendency to shape the breath into the form of a mummy. The breath, in its drive from the head towards the body, has the tendency towards mummy-formation. And it is only because the body works against this impulse and brings about out-breathing, that this “nascent” mummy is transformed back again. Thus what is seen streaming from the human head into the other part of the organism, taking shape there as the breath passes onwards, is a form like the mummy, a form that takes shape rapidly. In that the breath is breathed out, it dissolves again. All that remains of it is a form of appearance of the etheric body, which is almost always there, notably during waking life. Observation of the etheric body gives the feeling that from the head outwards the etheric body is trying all the time to form itself into a mummy and is in turn dissolved into a kind of resemblance with the human physical organisation. The inner, plastic force of the human etheric body tends to make it assume the form of a mummy, and then to dissolve this form again so that finally the etheric body resembles the physical organism. This was taught as an apotheosis of all the manifold teachings given by the Initiates of ancient Egypt to their pupils with the help of those super-sensible, elementary Beings whom we may call the Moon-Spirits.

The Egyptian Initiates directed the attention of their pupils especially to the past, to the inner experiences of human beings in very ancient times. This, in truth, was the essence of Egyptian culture, which for us today is so fraught with riddles. Sphinxes, pyramids, mummies—they are all enigmas. But these enigmas are unveiled to spiritual science when we know that the sphinxes represent forms that were actually visible to men in the time of Atlantis, and when we remember that the teachings concerning the mummy given by the Egyptian Initiates to their pupils were an echo of the Yoga teaching imparted, for example, by Initiates of ancient India to their pupils. It was not difficult for an Initiate of ancient India to give such teaching because in those remote times the slightest impetus would enable a man to perceive within a human physical organism this momentary birth of the ether-mummy and its retransformation.

It is deeply interesting to contemplate how these mysteries were unveiled in the Egyptian centres of instruction where such intimate connections were thus established with death. Through the methods adopted in Egypt, death preserved forms, which, during life, are hidden from observation but of which there must be knowledge if the being of man is to be truly understood.

The mummies were displayed before the eyes of the ancient Egyptians and I have told you that there is something analogous for human beings who have lived since the Mystery of Golgotha. For them, cults and rites in many forms have been preserved. I told you that at the time when men needed such forms, they began to “mummify” ancient cults and rites. In its first, faint beginnings, this custom arose in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., but it comes more and more to the fore with the passage of time. In occult and other Brotherhoods, rituals are studied and enacted, but there is never anything essentially new in them. Ancient forms, ancient rituals, are preserved. Indeed those whose task it is to preserve these rites and ceremonies, who have to lead them, lay great stress upon the fact that the ceremonies and customs date back to very ancient times, that they have been preserved from remote antiquity. But we never find that the ceremonies or the effects produced by the rituals are really understood.

To “understand” such rites and ceremonies—what does this really mean? What does it mean to understand the nature of acts performed in rites and ceremonies? To answer this question we must go back to the times, say, of ancient India and ancient Persia and try to discover how ceremonies and rites were understood then. A man today is aware of a difference when, let us say, he touches a rose made of papier-mâché and when he touches a real rose. He is also aware of the difference, through his sense of smell, when he is near a rose. He is aware of the difference and says that the papier-mâché rose is a dead object whereas the rose picked from the rosebush is alive. In very early times, dating back to four or five thousand years before Christ, a man with true perception of the world seeing someone working with a machine or tool, say for cutting wood, would have called this a “dead” process; for even with the eye of spirit he would have seen not the physical substance but a kind of dead, shadow-image. But in ritualistic and ceremonial enactments he saw Spiritual Beings from the surrounding elementary world approaching and pervading all the forms and actions of the rite. He beheld spiritual reality in these enactments.

If you were to ask people today whether they have ever seen Spiritual Beings weaving and streaming through rituals and ceremonies in Churches or Lodges, you would find that this is never the case. In these ritualistic enactments today there is no more spiritual life than there was life in the Egyptian mummy of the human being who had been mummified. But inasmuch as these rituals were preserved, as the form of the human body was preserved in the Egyptian mummy, inasmuch as human enactments and rites were preserved by tradition—“mummified”, as it were—something was preserved that can and will be wakened into life when men have discovered how to bring into all their deeds the power that streams from the Mystery of Golgotha.

Men today have very little understanding of how to draw into their actions the power of the Mystery of Golgotha. Through the centuries, however, there were always individuals here and there who had some conception—even if not so clearly as in earlier times—of how the spiritual impulse that can live in the human being may be guided into all his actions, and of how the human being himself can be an intermediary between the Spirit and what comes to pass through him in the outer world. The right impulse must, of course, be at work before this can happen. Think of a man like Paracelsus. He was one of those isolated individuals who had an inkling, at least, that the spiritual must so live among men that it streams out from them into their actions. There is a great difference between man's mode of life today and what Paracelsus, for example, desired. Today people make a sharp distinction between certain domains of their life. For instance, they practise medicine, but according to materialistic conceptions. A doctor today may, of course, also be a religious man or woman in the modern sense; but the two domains are separated. Medicine is practised on the basis of materialistic principles and people seek what their souls need in an entirely separate sphere of religion—into which, as a result, a highly egoistical element finds its way. People only turn to religion when they want to know what is to become of them after death or how what they do tallies with what a God would be able to make of their deeds. Paracelsus had a very different attitude. He wanted to be a man of piety and religion as a doctor. He wanted each medical, each therapeutic deed also to be a religious deed. He regarded what he did with a sick man as the union of an external, human deed with a religious act. To Paracelsus, healing was still a sacred enactment and it was his constant ideal to make it so. His contemporaries had little understanding of this and today there is even less. It makes one's heart ache to hear the tradition which still persists in Salzburg, that Paracelsus was a drunkard and that returning to his house late one night in a state of intoxication, he met his death by falling over a rock and breaking his skull. If the real truth were told, one would, of course, have to point to the work of his enemies. Paracelsus' drunkenness was less responsible for his broken skull than were people who then proceeded to spread the fairy-tale about his habits.

Customs today are less violent in such matters—less violent but not so very different. A time will come when a deeper conception of the cult and of all ceremonial enactments will take root in men. And then the true teachers will be able to reveal to their pupils something similar to what was revealed by the Initiates of Egypt with the help of the mummy. The Egyptian Initiate was able to make his pupils realise that they could behold in the mummy something, which in still earlier times, became actual experience through transformation of the breathing process into a sensory process. And so, when the cult can once again be truly understood, those who possess this understanding will be able to make clear to their pupils that enactments in sacred cults and rites have an immeasurably greater significance for the cosmos than deeds performed by men in the external world with mechanical tools or the like. Tools, as you know, also play a part in cult and ritual. When true ceremonial, true ritualistic enactments are again established in place of what is customary today, Initiates will be able to say to their pupils: An enactment in cult or rite is a call to the spiritual Powers of the universe who through the deeds of men should be able to unite themselves with the earth. Such an enactment, performed according to a true rite, is different from an act of a purely technical nature. An act that is purely technical or mechanical, however, does bring something about, for with machines many things can be made and used in life. Clothes, for instance, are made with a sewing machine. The clothes are worn and eventually wear out. This is what happens to the products of machines. But it is not so with sacred enactments. I told you in the last lecture that provided a man has the requisite faculty and the true conception of sacred enactments, he can come into contact with spiritual Beings who are as closely connected with the earth as the Spirits who spoke to the Egyptians out of the mummies were connected with the moon. Through machines, through external technical devices, man comes into contact with the physical nature-forces of the earth. Through the sacred enactments of cult and ritual he comes into contact with the elementary-spiritual Powers of the earth, with those Powers who point the way to the future.

And so in times to come an Initiate will be able to say to his pupils: When you participate truly in a sacred enactment of cult or ritual, you are engaged in something of which the materialist says that it has no reality, or, if he is a cynic, he will say that it is all child's play. Nevertheless the enactments of a true rite contain spiritual power. The elementary spiritual Beings, who are evoked when such a rite is enacted, have need of the rite because from it they draw nourishment and forces of growth.

A time will come when the earth will no longer exist. Everything that is around our physical senses, everything that is present in the kingdoms of minerals, plants, animals, in air and clouds, even the radiance of the stars ... all this will pass away and, as I have described in An Outline Of Occult Science, the earth will prepare to pass over to the Jupiter embodiment. This future Jupiter planet will be a subsequent incarnation of the earth just as our own future earthly life will be a reincarnation of our present existence, save that the periods of time involved are immeasurably longer. Of the substance present today in minerals, plants, animals, in wind and clouds, not a single particle will remain in that distant future. The processes set up by machines and technical devices will have performed their task—and they too will have become things of the past. But within what was once earth, within what was once external, technical civilisation, something different will have been prepared.

Think of the earth and within it the different processes of nature and plant life. Machines are there, with all that they bring about on the earth; animals and the physical bodies of men move over the earth ... All this will pass away. But on this earth, in future time, sacred rites will be enacted out of a true understanding of the spiritual world. Through these rites and sacred enactments, elementary spiritual Beings are called down. As I have said, a time will come when the material substance in minerals, plants, animals, clouds, the forces working in wind and weather and also, of course, all the accoutrements used in rites and ceremonies, will pass away, will be dissipated in the universe. But the spiritual Beings who have been called down into the sphere of the rites and sacred enactments—these will remain when the earth approaches its end. They will remain, in a state of more perfect development, within the earth, just as in autumn the seed of next year's plant is concealed within the present plant; just as the dry, withered leaves fall away from the plant, so the substance in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms will disintegrate in the universe, but the perfected elementary Beings will be there, living on into the Jupiter existence as a seed of the future.

And so once again an Initiate will be able to bring the teaching given to his pupils to a grand climax. He will be able to say: “Just as the Initiate of Egypt, standing before the mummy, was able to explain to his pupils all the mysteries of the human head and therewith all the mysteries of the earth and the cosmos around the earth, I am able to explain to you how the earth will arise from its destruction—rise again through the spiritual Beings who develop onwards to the future in cults and rites enacted with true understanding.”

In the evolution of our epoch this conception has a glorious beginning. It can be pictured as follows. Human beings satisfied their hunger and thirst by what lay on the tables before them. But there came the Being Who dwelt in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, Who gathered His closest disciples around Him and said: “Here is bread, here is wine. Do not now look upon what your outer eyes see in bread and wine, upon what your tongue can taste and your physical body digest. All that is earthly bears within it the seeds of decay. But if you have within you the true impulse you can permeate earthly substance with the Spirit of the earth. For then it is no longer bread, nor is it wine, but something that can live in the inmost depths of man himself, something that lives and has its being in his body and that he can spiritualise and that will be carried over into the future when everything on the earth has passed away.” Christ entered into the body of Jesus of Nazareth and in his whole being, Jesus of Nazareth was spiritualised. He could point to bread and wine, saying: “This is not the true form of bread and wine. Their true form is what indwells the human being—this is My Body, this is My Blood.” And the words receive their full significance from those other words of Christ: “Heaven and earth will pass away but My Words will not pass away.”

I have said many times: The kingdom of plants, of animals, of minerals, all that lives in wind and storm, in clouds—even the radiance of the stars—will be dispersed and scattered; not one particle will remain. But what man prepares spiritually—this will remain.

In earlier times of the evolution of humanity it was known that words contain Spirit. The modern view is that when we speak, movement is brought into the air through the speech-organs and these movements then beat upon the drum of the ear [(Trommelfell, drum of the ear, so-called because the modern view is that the movements of the air, “drum” or beat upon the membrane.)], the nerves begin to move, and there the process ends. In earlier times it was known that words enshrine the movements of elementary Spirits, that forces in words spoken in sacred ritual, for example, stream into the external action and that the Spirit living in man unites with this external enactment. Thereby the elementary Spirits who are developing onwards to the future enter, in actual presence, into the sphere of the sacred rite. Men who understand these things can realise what the “word” signified in olden times. Today it means little more than “noise and smoke”, and Goethe was justified when he used the expression Schall und Rauch. But in days of yore the “word” signified the indwelling Spirit, not the abstract, conceptual properties, but the spiritual reality inherent in the word. In the word there is much that is spiritual. Christ indicates that the life with which man imbues the word is contained in what comes to pass in sacred enactments of rite and cult, namely, a process whereby elementary Spirits are borne on-wards to the fulfilment of their existence, and He said:

“Heaven and earth will pass away, but My Words will not pass away.”

And now think of the beginning of St. John's Gospel: “In the Beginning was the Logos, the Word ...” The Logos is the Christ. What, then, are the Bread and the Wine in the service of Holy Communion? The Bread and the Wine are the Body and Blood of the Logos. And as we have heard, the Logos relinquishes what is transient, seizes what is in the becoming, prepares what is to come.

Thus we can point to the Mystery of Golgotha as a glorious climax, just as teaching in days of old culminated in the revelation of the ether-body assuming the shape of a mummy and then immediately changing into a form resembling that of the human physical body. But I have emphasised over and over again that man will have to re-establish his connection with the spiritual world if the earth is to attain its goal. Just as the predecessors of the Egyptians, perceiving the breath and its expansion in the organism, inwardly experienced a nascent mummy-formation and its immediate re-transformation, so, in the future, men must perceive in the out-breathing process, in the passing of the out-breathed air into cosmic space, the communication to cosmic space of what takes shape within the human organism, the spiritualisation of the environment through the human being himself. The ancient Egyptians said: The mummy represents a form which the human being strives inwardly and spiritually to assume with every indrawn breath. Initiates of the future will say: Every out-breathing is a manifestation of man's striving to become a cosmos, a whole world. Contemplation of how the inbreathed air surges down from the head into the organism—this brings understanding of the human being. Contemplation of how the indrawn air is breathed out again by man into the world—this can bring understanding of the cosmos. Understanding of the cosmos will be born when Imaginative Knowledge is able to span the world; with Imaginative Knowledge we can also recognise what the human being himself sends forth into the external world with his out-breathing. It is what he is preparing for the future.

Thus what man does in the course of history and what comes to pass in the cosmos are interwoven, intermingled. Without realisation of this there can be no understanding of the world, for history must be studied in its cosmic aspect and historical happenings must reveal to us the workings of the cosmos.

We have been hearing in recent lectures how fundamental impulses in the development of history are expressed in such phenomena as the strange custom in Egyptian culture of mummifying the human body and in the modern age the preservation of ancient cults—which is also a kind of “mummification”, in this latter case of ceremonies and rites.

Thinking again of Egyptian culture as expressed outwardly in the phenomenon of mummification, we will combine the picture thus outlined with a theme of which I have spoken recently and have frequently expounded here, namely, the theme of ordinary human thinking, how this thought-activity is exercised by man, how he gradually unfolds the faculty of thinking during childhood, becomes to a certain degree accomplished in it during his youth and then puts it into operation until his death. This thinking, this intellectual activity, is a kind of inner corpse of the soul. Thinking, as exercised by the human being in earthly life, is viewed in the right light only when it is compared, as far as its relation to the true being of man is concerned, with the corpse left behind at death.

The principle, which makes man truly man, departs at death, and something remains over in the corpse, which can only have this particular form because a living human being has left it behind him. Nobody could be so foolish as to believe that the human corpse, with its characteristic form, could have been produced by any play of nature, by any combination of nature-forces. A corpse is quite obviously a remainder, a residue. Something must have preceded it, namely, the living human being. Outer nature has, it is true, the power to destroy the form of the human corpse but not the power to produce it. This human form is produced by the higher members of man's being—but they pass away at death.

Just as we realise that a corpse derives from a living human being, so the true conception of thinking, of human thought, is that it cannot, of itself, have become what it is in earthly life, but that it is a kind of corpse in the soul—the corpse of what it was before the human being came down from worlds of soul-and-spirit into physical existence on the earth. In pre-earthly existence the soul was alive in the truest sense, but something died at birth, and the corpse, which remains from this death in the life of soul, is our human thinking. Those who have known best what it means to live in the world of thought have, moreover, felt the deathlike character of abstract thinking. I need only remind you of the moving passage with which Nietzsche begins his description of philosophy in the era of Greek tragedy. He describes how Greek thought, as exemplified by pre-Socratic philosophers such as Parmenides or Heraclitus, rises to abstract notions of being and becoming. Here, he says, one feels the onset of an icy coldness. And it is so indeed.

Think of men of the ancient East and how they tried to comprehend outer nature in living, inwardly mobile pictures, dreamlike though these pictures were. In comparison with this inwardly mobile, live thinking, which quickened the whole being of man and blossomed forth in the Vedanta philosophy, the abstract thinking of later times is veritably a corpse. Nietzsche was aware of this when he felt an urge to write about those pre-Socratic philosophers who, for the first time in the evolution of humanity, soared into the realm of abstract thoughts.

Study the sages of the East who preceded the Greek philosophers and you will find in them no trace of any doubt that the human being lived in worlds of soul-and-spirit before descending to the earth. It is simply not possible to experience thinking as a living reality and not believe in the pre-earthly existence of man. To experience living thinking is just like knowing a living human being on earth. Those who no longer experienced living thinking—and this applies to Greek philosophers even before the days of Socrates—such men may, like Aristotle, have doubts about the fact that the human being does not come into existence for the first time at birth. And so a distinction must be made between the once inwardly mobile and living thinking of the East wherewith it was known that man comes down from spiritual worlds into earth-existence, and the thinking that is a corpse, bringing knowledge only of what is accessible to man between birth and death.

Try to put yourselves in the position of an Egyptian sage, living, let us say, about 2000 B.C.. He would have said: Once upon a time, over in the East, men experienced living thinking. But the Egyptian sage was in a strange situation; his life of soul was not like ours today; experience of living thinking had faded away, was no longer within his grasp, and abstract thinking had not yet begun. A substitute was created by the embalming of mummies whereby, in the way I have described, a picture, a concept of the human form was made possible. Men trained themselves to unfold a picture of the dead human form in the mummy and began, for the first time, to develop abstract, dead thinking. It was from the human corpse that dead thinking first came into existence.

The counterpart of this in modern times is that in occult societies here and there, rituals, cults and ceremonial enactments once filled with living reality have been preserved as dead traditions. Think only of rituals that you may have read, perhaps those of the Freemasons. You will find that there are ceremonies of the First Degree, the Second Degree, the Third Degree, and so forth. All of them are learnt, written or enacted in an external way. Once upon a time, however, these cults were charged with life as real as the life-principle working in the plants. Today, the ceremonies and rites are dead forms. Even the Mystery of Golgotha was only able to evoke in certain priestly natures here and there, those inner, living experiences which sometimes arose in connection with rites of the Christian Churches after the time of Christ. But up to now mankind has not been able to infuse real life into ceremonies and rites—and indeed something else is necessary here.

All present-day thinking is directed essentially to the dead world. In our time there is simply no understanding of the nature of the living thinking which once existed. The intellectualistic thinking current since the middle of the fifteenth century of our era is, in very truth, a corpse and that is why it is applied only to what is dead in nature, to the mineral kingdom. People prefer to study plants, animals and even the human being, merely from the aspect of mineral, physical, chemical forces, because they only want to use this dead thinking, this corpse of thoughts indwelling the purely intellectualistic man.

In the present series of lectures I have mentioned the name of Goethe. Goethe was, as you know, a member of the community of Freemasons and was acquainted with its rites. But he experienced these rites in a way of which only he was capable. For him, real life flowed out of the rites which, for others, were merely forms preserved by tradition. He was able to make actual connection with that spiritual reality of being, which flowed in the way described from pre-earthly into earthly existence and which, as I said, always rejuvenated him. For Goethe underwent actual rejuvenation more than once in his life. It was from this that there came to him the idea of metamorphosis¹—one of the most significant thoughts in the whole of modern spiritual life and the importance of which is still not recognised.

What had Goethe actually achieved when he evolved the idea of metamorphosis? He had re-kindled an inwardly living thinking, which is capable of penetrating into the cosmos. Goethe rebelled against the botany of Linnaeus in which the plants are arranged in juxtaposition, each of them placed in a definite category and a system made out of it all. Goethe could not accept this; he did not want these dead concepts. He wanted a living kind of thinking, and he achieved it in the following way. First of all he looked at the plant itself and the thought came to him that down below the plant develops crude, unformed leaves, then, higher up, leaves which have more developed forms but are transformations, metamorphoses of those below; then come the flower-petals with their different colour, then the stamens and the pistil in the middle—all being transformations of the one fundamental form of the leaf itself. Goethe did not say: Here is a leaf of one plant and here a leaf of another, different plant.² He did not look at the plant in this way, but said: The fact that one leaf has a particular shape and another leaf a different shape, is a mere externality. Viewed inwardly, the matter is as follows. The leaf itself has an inner power of transformation, and it is just as possible for it to appear outwardly in one shape as in another. In reality there are not two leaves, but one leaf, in two different forms of manifestation. A plant has the green leaf below and the petal above. Intellectualistic pedants say: “The leaf and the petal are two quite different things.” Nothing could be more obvious, as far as the pedants are concerned, for the one form is red and the other green. Now if someone wears a green shirt and a red jacket—here there is a real difference. As regards clothing, at any rate in the modern age, philistinism prevails and is, moreover, in its right place. In that domain one cannot help being a philistine. But Goethe realised that the plant cannot be comprised within such theories. He said to himself: The red petal is the same, fundamentally, as the green leaf; they are not two separate and distinct phenomena. There is only one leaf, manifesting in different formations. The same force works, sometimes down below and sometimes higher up. Down below it works in such a way that the forces are, in the main, being drawn out of the earth. Here the plant is drawing forces from the earth, sucking them upwards, and the leaf, growing under the influence of the earth-forces, becomes green. The plant continues to grow; higher up the sun's rays are stronger than they are below, and the sun has the mastery. Thus the same impulse reaches into the sphere of the sunlight and produces the red petals.

Goethe might have spoken somewhat as follows. Suppose a man who has nothing to eat sees another who has quantities of food and gets envious, literally pale with envy. Another time someone gives him a blow and then he reddens. According to the principle that speaks of two distinct and different leaves, it might be argued: Here are two men—two, because one is pale and the other is red. Just as little as there are two men, one who is red on account of a blow and the other who is pale because of envy—as little are there two leaves. There is one leaf; at one place it has a particular form, at another place a different form. Goethe did not regard this as particularly wonderful for, after all, a man can run from one place to another and the men you will see in different places are certainly not two different persons. Briefly, Goethe realised that this observation of things in strict juxtaposition is not truth but illusion, that there is only one leaf—green at one place, red at another; and he applied to the different plants the same principle he applied to the several parts of the single plant. Think of the following. Suppose some plant lives in favourable conditions. Out of the seed it forms a root, a stem, leaves on the stem, then petals, stamens and pistil within the stamens. Goethe maintained that the stamens too are only different formations of the leaf. He might also have said: Intellectualists argue that, after all, the red petals are wide and the stamen as thin as a thread, except perhaps for the anther at the top. In spite of this, Goethe maintained that the wide flower petal and the slender stamen are only different formations of one and the same fundamental leaf. He might have asked: Have you not noticed some person who at one time in his life was as thin as a reed and afterwards became very stout? There were certainly not two different people. Petals and stamens are basically one, and the fact that they are situated at two different places on the plant is immaterial. No man can run swiftly enough to be in two places at once, although the story goes that a clever banker in Berlin when he was being pestered on all sides, once exclaimed: “Do you think I am a bird which can be in two places at once?” ... A human being cannot be in two places simultaneously. The point here is that Goethe was seeking everywhere for manifestations of the principle of metamorphosis, of the unity within multiplicity, of the unity within the manifold. And thereby he imbued the concept with life.

If you grasp what I have now said, my dear friends, you will grasp the idea of Spirit. I have said that the whole plant is really a leaf manifesting in different formations. This cannot be pictured in the physical sense; something must be grasped spiritually—something that transforms itself in every conceivable way. It is spirit that is living in the plant kingdom. Now we can go further. We can take a plant that is normal and healthy because its seed has been properly placed in the earth, it has absorbed the gentle sun of spring, then the full summer sun and has been able to develop its seeds under the weakening sun of autumn. But suppose a plant exists in such conditions of nature that it has no time to develop a root, an adequate stem, leaves or petals, but is obliged to unfold very rapidly—so rapidly indeed that everything about it lacks definition. Such a plant becomes a mushroom, a fungus.

There you have two extremes: a plant that has time to differentiate into all its detailed parts, to develop roots, stem, leaves, flowers, fruit; and a plant placed in such conditions of nature that it has no time to form a root, with the result that everything about it remains indication only; it cannot develop stem and leaves, and is obliged to unfold rapidly and without definition the principle underlying the formation of petals, fruit and seed. Such a plant only just manages to take its place in the earth and unfolds with amazing rapidity what other plants unfold slowly. Think, for example, of the corn poppy. After slowly putting out its green leaves it can proceed to unfold its petals, then the stamens, then the jaunty pistil in the centre. But a mushroom must do all this very rapidly; there is no time for differentiation, no time for exposure to the sun, which would bring the beautiful colours, because the sun is absent during its brief period of development. In the mushroom we have a flower without definition; development has taken place far too rapidly. Here, too, there is fundamental unity. Two quite different plants are basically the same.

But before all this can be really thought through, one must change a little, inwardly. An intellectualist—Goethe might have said, a “rigid philistine”—looks at a poppy with its sappy, red flower and well-developed pistil in the centre. What he really ought to do is at the same time to look at a mushroom and keep the concept he has formed of the poppy so mobile and flexible that he is able to see within the poppy itself, in tendency at least, some kind of mushroom or toadstool. But that, of course, is asking too much of a pedant. You will have to place before him the actual mushroom so that his intellect may drag itself away from the poppy without inner exertion, without being kindled to life—for all he need do is to incline his head very slightly. Then he will be able to visualize the one object beside the other separately, and all is well!

Such is the difference between dead thinking and the inwardly alert, live thinking unfolded by Goethe in connection with the principle of metamorphosis. He enriched the world of thought by a glorious discovery. For this reason, in the Introductions to Goethe's works on Natural Science which I wrote in the eighties of last century, you will find the sentence: Goethe is both the Galileo and the Copernicus of the science of organic nature, and what Galileo and Copernicus achieved in connection with dead, outer nature, namely, clarification of the concept of nature to enable it to embrace both the astronomical and the physical aspects, Goethe achieved for the science of organic nature with his living concept of metamorphosis. Such was his supreme discovery.

This concept of metamorphosis can, if desired, be applied to the whole of nature. When a picture of the plant-form came to Goethe out of this concept of metamorphosis, it immediately occurred to him that the principle must also be applicable to the animal. But this is a more difficult matter. Goethe was able to conceive of one leaf proceeding from another; but he found it much more difficult to picture the form of one of the spinal vertebrae, for instance, being metamorphosed, transformed, into a bone of the head—which would have meant the application of the principle of metamorphosis to the animal and also to the human being. Nevertheless Goethe was partially successful in this too, as I have often told you. In the year 1790, while he was walking through a graveyard in Venice, he was lucky enough to come across a sheep's skull, the bones of which had fallen apart in a way very favourable for observation. As he examined these animal bones the thought dawned upon him that they looked like spinal vertebrae, although greatly transformed. And then he conceived the idea that the bones, at least, can also be pictured as representing one, basic bone-creating impulse, which merely manifests in different forms.

With respect to the human being, however, Goethe did not get very far because he did not succeed in passing on from his idea of metamorphosis to real Imagination. When real Imagination advances to Inspiration and Intuition, the principle of uniformity is revealed still more strikingly. And I have already indicated how this uniformity is revealed in the being of man when the concept of metamorphosis is truly understood. When Goethe contemplated the dicotyledons and visualised the flowers of such plants in simpler and more and indefinite forms, he could finally see them as a mushroom or fungus. And from this same point of view, when we study the human head, we can conceive of it as a metamorphosis of the rest of the skeleton.

Try to look at one of the lower jaws in a human skeleton with the eye of an artist. You will hardly be able to do otherwise, than compare it with the bones of the arm and of the leg. Think of the leg bones and arm bones transformed and then, in the lower jaws, you have two “legs”, except that here they have stultified. The head is a lazybones that never walks, but is always sitting. The head “sits” there on its two stultified legs. Imagine a man in the uncomfortable position of sitting with his legs bound together by some kind of cord, and you have practically a replica of the formation of the jaws. Look at all this with the eye of an artist and you can easily imagine the legs becoming as immobile as the lower jawbones—and so on.

But the truth of the matter is realised for the first time when the human head is conceived as a transformation of the rest of the body. I have told you that the head of our present earth-life is the transformed body (the body apart from the head) of our previous earth-life. The head, or rather the forces of the head, as they then were, have passed away. In some cases indeed they actually pass away during life! The head—I am speaking, of course, of forces, not substances—the forces of the head are not preserved; the forces now embodied in your head were the forces which were embodied in the other parts of your body in your previous life. In that life, again, the forces of the head were those of the body of the preceding life; and the body that is now yours will be transformed, metamorphosed, into the head of the future earth-life. For this reason the head develops first. Think of the embryo in the body of the mother. The head develops first and the rest of the organism, being a new formation, affixes itself to the head. The head derives from the previous earth-life; it is the transformed body, a form that has been carried across the whole span of existence between death and a new birth; it then becomes the head-structure and attaches to itself the other members. Accepting the fact of repeated earthly lives, we can thus see the human being as a metamorphosis recently perfected. The idea of plant-metamorphosis discovered by Goethe at the beginning of the eighties of the eighteenth century leads on to the living concept of development through the whole animal kingdom up to the human being, and contemplation here leads on to the idea of repeated earthly lives.

Goethe's participation in the ceremonial enactments of the cult to which he belonged was responsible for this inner quickening in his life of thought. Although it was not fully clear to his consciousness, he nevertheless had an inkling of how the human being, still living entirely as a soul in pre-earthly life, carries over forces which have remained from the bodily structure of the previous earth-life and which, having entered into the present life, develop within the protective sheaths of the mother's body into the head structure.

Goethe did not know this consciously but he had an inkling of it and applied it, in the first place, to the simplest phenomena of plant life. Because the time was not ripe, he could not extend the principle to the point that is possible today, namely to the point where the metamorphosis of the human being from one earth-life over to the next can be understood. As a rule it is said, with a suggestion of compassion, that Goethe evolved this idea of metamorphosis because, owing to his artistic nature, something had gone wrong with him. Pedants and philistines speak like this out of compassion. But those who are neither pedants nor philistines will realise with joy that Goethe knew how to add the element of art to science and precisely because of this was able to make his concepts mobile. Pedants insist, however, that nature cannot be grasped by this kind of thinking; strictly logical concepts are necessary, they say, for the understanding of nature. Yes, but what if nature herself is an artist ... presuming this, the whole of natural science which excludes art and bases itself only upon the concepts of logical deduction might find itself in a position similar to one of which I once heard when I was talking to an artist in Munich. He had been a contemporary of Carriere, the well-known writer on Aesthetics. We began, by chance, to speak about Carriere and this man said: “Yes, when we were young, we artists used not to attend Carriere's lectures; if we did go once, we never went again; we called him ‘the aesthetic rapture-monger’.” Now just as it might be the fate of a writer on Aesthetics to be called a “rapture-monger” by artists, so, if nature herself were to speak about her secrets she might call the strictly logical investigator ... well, not a rapture-monger, but a misery-monger perhaps, for nature creates as an artist. One cannot order nature to let herself be comprehended according to the laws of strict logic. Nature must be comprehended as she actually is.

Such, then, is the course of historical evolution. Once upon a time, in the ancient East, concepts and thoughts were full of life. I have described how, to begin with, these living concepts became actual perception through a metamorphosis of the breathing process. But human beings were obliged to work their way through to dead, abstract concepts. The Egyptians could not reach this stage but forced themselves in the direction of dead concepts through contemplating the human being himself in the state of death, in the mummy. We, in our day, have to awaken concepts to new life. This cannot happen by the mere elaboration of ancient, occult traditions, but by growing into, and moreover elaborating, the living concept which Goethe was the first to evolve in the form of the idea of metamorphosis. Those who are masters of the living concept, in other words, those who are able to grasp the Spiritual in their life of soul—they are able, out of the Spirit, to bring a new and living impulse into the external actions of men. This will lead to something of which I have often spoken to Anthroposophists, namely, that men will no longer stand in the laboratory or at the operating table with the indifference begotten by materialism, but will feel the secrets revealed by nature to listening ears as deeds of the Spirit which pervades and is active in her. Then the laboratory table will become an altar. Forces leading to progress and ascent will not be able to work in the evolution of humanity until true reverence and piety enter into science, nor until religion ceases to be a mere bolster for human egoism and to be regarded as a realm entirely distinct from science. Science must learn, like the pupils of the ancient Mysteries, to have reverence for what is being investigated. I have spoken of this in the book Christianity as Mystical Fact. All research must be regarded as a form of intercourse with the spiritual world and then, by listening to nature we shall learn from her those secrets, which in very truth promote the further evolution of humanity. And then the process of mummification—which was once a necessary experience for man—will be reversed. The Egyptians embalmed the human corpse, with the result that even now we can witness the almost terrifying spectacle of whole series of mummies being brought by Europeans from Egypt and deposited in museums. Just as human thinking was once rigidified as the outcome of the custom of mummification, so it must now be awakened to life.

The ancient Egyptians took the corpses of men, embalmed them, conserved death. We, in our day, must feel that we have a veritable death of soul within us if our thoughts are purely abstract and intellectualistic. We must feel that these thoughts are the mummy of the soul, and learn to understand the truth glimpsed by Paracelsus when he took some substance from the human organism and called this the “mummy”. In the tiny material residue of the human being, he saw the mummy. Paracelsus did not need an embalmed corpse in order to see the mummy, for he regarded the mummy as the sum-total of those forces which could at every moment lead man to death if new life did not quicken him during the night.

Dead thinking holds sway within us; our thinking represents death of soul. In our thinking we bear the mummy of the soul which produces precisely those things that are most prized in modern civilisation. If we have a wider kind of perception, the kind of perception, for example, which enabled Goethe to see metamorphoses, we can go through rooms where mummies are exhibited in museums and then out into the streets and see the same thing there ... it is merely a question of the level from which we are looking, for in the modern age of intellectualism there is little difference—the fact that mummies do not walk as human beings walk in the streets, is only an externality. The mummies in the museums are mummies of bodies; the human beings who walk about the streets in this age of intellectualism are mummies of soul because they are filled with dead thoughts, with thoughts that are incapable of life. Primordial life was rigidified in the mummies of Egypt and this rigidified life of soul must be quickened again for the sake of the future of mankind. We must not continue to study anatomy and physiology in the way that has hitherto been customary. This was permissible among the ancient Egyptians when corpses of the physical human being lay before them. We must not further mummify the corpse of abstract soul-life we bear in our intellectualistic thinking. There is a real tendency today to embalm thinking so that it becomes pedantically logical, without a single spark of fiery life.

Photographs of mummies are as rigid and stiff as the mummy itself. A typical standard work today on some branch of modern knowledge is a photograph, an image of the mummified soul; in this case it is the soul that has been embalmed. And if doubt arises because as well as the intellect which is certainly mummified, human beings have other characteristics, all kinds of bodily and other urges, for instance, so that the picture of the mummy is not very clear ... nevertheless it is there, unmistakably, in standard text books. The embalming process in such writings is very perceptible. This embalming of thought must cease. Instead of the embalming process applied by the Egyptians to the mummies, we need something different, namely, an elixir of life—not as many people think of this today, as a means of perfecting the physical body, but in a form which makes the thoughts alive, which de-mummifies them. When we understand this we have a picture of a profoundly significant impulse in historical evolution. It is a picture of how spiritual culture was once rigidified in the embalming of mummies and of how an elixir of spirit and soul must be poured into all that has been mummified in modern man in the course of his education and development, so that culture may flow onwards to the future. There are two forces: one manifests in the Egyptian custom of embalming and the other in the process of “de-embalming” which modern man must learn to apply.

To learn how to “de-embalm” the dead, rigid forces of the soul—this is a task of the greatest possible significance today. Failure to achieve it produces phenomena of which I gave one example here a short time ago. A man like Spengler realised that rigidified concepts and thoughts will not do, that they lead to the death of culture. In an article in Das Goetheanum I showed what really happened to Spengler. He realised that concepts were dead, but his own were not living! His fate was the same as that of the woman in the Old Testament who looked behind her. Spengler looked at all the dead, mummy-like thoughts of men and he himself became a pillar of salt. Like the woman in the Old Testament, Spengler became a pillar of salt, for his concepts have no more life in them than those of the others.

There is an ancient occult maxim that “wisdom lives in salt” ... but only when the salt is dissolved in human mercury and human phosphorus. Spengler's wisdom is wisdom that has rigidified in salt. But the mercury that brings the salt into movement, making it cosmic, universal—this is lacking; and phosphorus, too, is lacking in a still higher degree. For when one reads Spengler with feeling, above all with artistic feeling, it is impossible for his ideas to kindle inner enthusiasm, inner fire. They all remain salt-like and rigid and even produce a bitter taste. One has to be pervaded inwardly by the mercurial and phosphoric forces if it is a question of “digesting” this lump of salt that calls itself The Decline of the West. But it cannot really be digested ... I will not enlarge upon this particular theme because in polite society one does not mention what is done with indigestible matter! What we have to do is to get away from the salt, away from rigidity, and administer an elixir of life to the mummified soul, to our abstract, systematized concepts. That is the task before us.

• 1. See The Mystery of the Trinity lecture II, by Rudolf Steiner
• 2. Sketches of leaves of various shapes were made on the blackboard.

In the last few lectures we have been studying impulses of far-reaching influence in the historical evolution of humanity—great impulses which are like the tracks of stars across history, illuminating our understanding of particular events. Knowledge of an epoch in history can only be external and superficial if the underlying impulses are not perceived and understood. For these impulses are real powers; they work for the most part, and they work most powerfully, through the unconscious forces of the soul; what transpires outwardly and in full consciousness is only to be perceived in the right light when its origin can be traced back to them.

We will think of an event or, more precisely, a series of events well known to history and of profound significance in the whole life of the West during the Middle Ages—a series of events which, in the outer world, ended in a comparatively short time, after about a century or a century and a half, but the effects of which continued and (to those able to understand the deeper currents in the flow of world-history) have continued to this day. I refer to the Crusades which began in the eleventh century—1096 is the year usually assigned—and as a series of outer events continued until the year usually given as 1170. But we find that even external history mentions all kinds of enterprises and institutions that developed out of the Crusades.

We hear, for example, of the Templar Knights, who first assumed their real significance in outer life during the time of the Crusades. We hear, too, of Orders like that of the Knights of St. John, later the Knights of Malta, and others. Things that were inaugurated by these communities of secular and spiritual life, and thus sprang from the spirit pervading the Crusades, subsequently developed in such a way that, while their provenance in the Crusading spirit was less and less remarked, their effects and influences were clearly present in the life of the West.

Thinking, to begin with, of the external course of history, we know how the Crusades originated. Needs of the soul led adherents of Christianity in the West to believe that pilgrimages to Palestine would imbue their Christian impulses with fresh vigour; but they encountered obstacles, because Palestine and Jerusalem had fallen into the hands of a people of very alien character, namely, the Turks. The maltreatment inflicted by the Turks upon these pilgrims to Jerusalem had provoked an outcry all over Europe and from this was born the mood and spirit which gave rise to the Crusades—a mood which had been present for a long time, although in a different form. We see how men gave vent to this mood by demanding the liberation of the Holy Places of the West, the Holy Places of Christendom, from Turkish oppression.

We hear how Peter of Amiens, himself a victim of this oppression, traveled through Western Europe as a pilgrim and by his fervent preaching won over many hearts to the project of liberating Jerusalem from the Turks.

We know too that, to begin with, this led to no result. But soon a whole number of Knights in the West, gathering together under the leadership of Godfrey of Bouillon in the first real Crusade, succeeded in liberating Jerusalem, for a time at least, from the Turks.

The course of these events requires only brief mention, for the story is familiar enough in history. The really important thing is to study with insight and understanding what was working more or less unconsciously through human souls, in such a way that again and again, and for a long period of time, numbers of men, in most cases with extraordinary devotion and valour, set out upon these journeys to the East, these seven Crusades, under the leadership of the most distinguished princes of the West. The real question is this: Whence came that first fiery enthusiasm which swept across Europe, especially at the beginning of the Crusades? Once the ball had been set rolling—if I may so express it—interests of a different sort crept in, from the fourth Crusade onwards. There were European princes who went to the East with quite other motives, to enhance their power, their prestige and the like. Nevertheless the beginning of the Crusades is an historical event of prime importance. We cannot fail to be impressed by the spectacle of this mighty force prompting a large part of European humanity to an undertaking linked, as they felt, with the most sacred concerns of the heart. Men felt that these sacred concerns were vitally connected with the liberation of Jerusalem from the Turks, in order that Christians in Europe desirous of visiting the Grave of the Redeemer might find their ways cleared.

The dry, prosaic accounts of the historical facts to be read in books do not, as a rule, convey any real impression of the fire of enthusiasm that flamed up in Europe when that noble company of knights set out on the first Crusade, nor of the re-kindling of this enthusiasm by the ardour of men like Bernard of Clairvaux and others. There is an awe-inspiring grandeur about the birth of the Crusades, and we cannot help asking ourselves: What impulses were working in the hearts and souls of Europeans at that time—what were the impulses out of which sprang the spirit of the Crusades?

These impulses can only be rightly understood if we trace their development back through the centuries. A pivotal point in history and one which throws a flood of light upon subsequent happenings of incisive importance in Europe, is the reign of Pope Nicholas I, approximately in the middle of the ninth century, between the years 858 and 867. Before his inner eye, Nicholas I perceived three streams of spiritual life—three streams confronting him like great question marks (if I may use the term) of civilisation.

He saw the one stream moving as it were in spiritual heights, across from Asia into Europe. In this stream certain conceptions innate in oriental religion are making their way, in a much modified and changed form, across Southern Europe and Northern Africa, to Spain, France, the British Isles and especially to Ireland. In view of what will presently be said, I will call this the first stream. Springing from the Arabian regions of Asia, it flows across Greece and Italy but also across Africa into Spain and then upwards through the West. But its influence also rays out, in different forms, towards other parts of Europe.

Little is said of this stream in the tale told to us as history. We will speak today only of two characteristic features of this stream—which was immeasurably deep in content. One of these is what may be called the esoteric conception of the Mystery of Golgotha. I have often spoken to you of the conception of the Mystery of Golgotha held by those in whom vestiges of the ancient, pre-Christian Initiation-knowledge survived. There is an indication of this in the Bible itself—in the coming of the three Magi or Kings from the East. With their knowledge of the secrets of the stars they foresee the approaching Christ Event and set out in search of it. Pre-eminently, therefore, the three Magi are examples of men concerned less with the earthly personality of Jesus of Nazareth than with the all-important fact that a Spiritual Being had descended from worlds of spirit-and-soul, that Christ had come to dwell in the body of Jesus of Nazareth and would impart a mighty impulse to the further evolution of the earth. These men viewed the Event of Golgotha from a wholly super-sensible standpoint. Vision of the super-sensible truth was possible to men in whom the ancient principles of Initiation had been kept alive, for comprehension of this super-sensible Event, unintelligible in the natural and historical life of the earth, could be achieved with the help of this ancient Initiation-knowledge.

But it became more and more difficult to keep alive these ancient principles of Initiation and therefore more and more impossible to find appropriate language in which to convey how Christ had come down from super-sensible worlds, had passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, and how His Power continues to work through all the subsequent evolution of the earth. Men simply had no means of so shaping their concepts and ideas that they could find words to convey what had actually come to pass through Christ and through the Mystery of Golgotha.

And so in order to clothe this Mystery in words, men were forced more and more to pictorial forms of presentation. One such is the story of the Holy Grail, of the precious Cup, said, on the one hand, to be the Cup in which Christ Jesus had partaken of the Last Supper with His Apostles, and, on the other, the Cup in which the Roman soldier at the foot of the Cross caught the blood flowing from the Redeemer. This Cup was then carried by Angels ... and here is the touch of the super-sensible, tendered in faltering words, for what the old Initiates could have conveyed in clear concepts could now only be conveyed by pictures ... this Cup was carried by Angels to Mont Salvat in Spain and received there by the noble King Titurel; he built a Temple for the Chalice and there dwelt the Knights of the Holy Grail, keeping watch and ward over the treasure that shields the impulse flowing onwards from the Mystery of Golgotha.

And so we have there a deeply esoteric stream, passing over into a mystery. On the one side we perceive the influence of this deeply esoteric stream in the founding of academies in Asia, where men studied the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, endeavouring to understand the Event of Golgotha with the aid of Aristotelian concepts. Later on, in European civilisation, we see attempts made in such a poem as Parsifal to convey the living content of this esoteric stream in pictures. We see this same living content shimmering through the teachings that arose especially in the Schools of Ireland. We see too how the best elements of Arabian wisdom flowed into this stream but how, at the same time, Arabian thought introduced an alien element, coarsened and corrupted over in Asia by Turkish influence.

Of the character imparted to this first stream by the Arabian influence and by its advance from the East towards the West, we shall speak later, when the other streams have been considered. To indicate the fundamental character of this stream, one would be obliged to say: Those who were connected in any real way with this stream of spiritual life, held that the one and only way of salvation—and an echo of this is heard in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parsifal—lay in rising above the sensible and material into the super-sensible, in having at any rate some vision of the super-sensible worlds, in letting man share in the life of the super-sensible worlds, in bringing home to him that his soul belongs to a stream not immediately to be perceived by senses directed to terrestrial events.

The feeling characterizing this gaze upward into super-sensible, super-earthly regions was that, in order to be a full human being, man must belong to worlds transcending material existence, worlds whose happenings are hidden, as were the deeds of the Knights of the Grail, from the outward eye. The Mystery implicit in this stream was felt to be somehow imperceptible to the eyes of sense.

This, then, was the first stream, barely felt and yet looked at askance in Rome at the time of Pope Nicholas I in the ninth century. The whole tendency in Rome was to regard it as an inimical influence and one to which it would be unwholesome for Western humanity to yield. In the religious and intellectual life of Europe there must be nothing of the esoteric, nor anything even faintly deriving from the esoteric—such was the attitude.

This was the first and assuredly the most awe-inspiring question before Nicholas I, for he also discerned the grandeur of this stream of spiritual life. Although much dimmed since the third or fourth century (when a society had actually been founded in Italy for the extermination of all paths to spiritual knowledge) its radiance still shone, by way of many hidden embrasures, into the hearts of men, revealing itself now here, now there. What broke through in this way into the experience of men, often from mysterious strata underlying the progress of history, was denounced as heresy. The feeling also prevailed that the esotericism still faintly glimmering in this stream could no longer find its way into those concepts which, in the culture of Latin Rome, had departed more and more from the inwardness of Greek thought with its oriental colouring and had adopted the forms of Roman Rhetoric—in other words, had become formal and exoteric.

Yet on the other hand, among individuals and communities denounced as heretical sects, this stream flashed into life with tremendous power.

The second question of world-history before the soul of Nicholas I was this. All the knowledge gathered hitherto by the Catholic Church forced him to the conclusion that the Europeans of the West were incapable of bearing the great spiritual tension that is evoked in the souls of men if they are to scale the heights of spiritual, esoteric understanding.

A great uncertainty weighed upon the soul of Nicholas I. What will happen if too much of this esoteric-spiritual stream makes its way into the souls of the people of Europe?

In the East itself, greater and greater confusion had crept into what had once been the esoteric content of this stream. It was over in far-off Ireland that it maintained its purest form and for some time there were Schools in Ireland where the holy secrets were preserved in great purity.

But—so pondered Nicholas I—this is useless for the people of Europe. Nicholas I was, in reality, only repeating the view previously held by Boniface in a somewhat different form, namely that owing to their intrinsic character the people of Europe were not adapted for the inflow of spiritual life into their souls. And so the strange position arose that in the East the real, esoteric substance died away. Human beings living in the East and also in the East of Europe, in the regions of present-day Russia, could make no contact in their souls with this esoteric substance. But over in the East, purely in the form of feelings, and in so far as these feelings had not been utterly exterminated by the gradual advance of the Turanian peoples—the Turks—over in the East men had a dim feeling that the sublimely esoteric, which is not to be comprehended by the dawning intellect, flows in cult and ritual; but only when the cult has at the same time an actual centre in the outer world, a geographical centre.

And so in the East of Europe, while the esoteric, spiritual reality was forgotten, men turned to cult and ritual, clinging with greatest intensity of feeling to what they held to be the very heart and core of the cult: the Grave of the Redeemer.

Hard by the Grave of the Redeemer in Jerusalem was the place where He had celebrated the Last Supper with His Apostles, that Eucharistic meal that in metamorphosis became the Death on Golgotha, was consummated by this Death and then lived on—in the central rite, but also in the whole ritual—in the Mass.

In their estrangement, because they failed to reach an esoteric understanding of the spiritual reality, men gave their hearts to cult and ritual, and to that with which the cult was outwardly connected: the Grave of the Redeemer and the Holy Places in Jerusalem. Pilgrimage to Jerusalem came to be regarded as crowning all the solemn ceremonies, wherever they were celebrated. For the individual man, the ceremonies and ritual were to receive their crowning triumph when, having poured his very heart into what he had experienced in image in the ceremonies, he himself went forth on the pilgrimage to the Grave of the Redeemer.

Certain schools here and there in Asia were still able to grasp the concepts that, under tremendous stress, had been unfolded by the ancient Egyptians from contemplation of the mummy, of the mummified human corpse, but this knowledge had passed from the ken of the general population. Human understanding was incapable of grasping what is at once the Mystery of Man and of the Divine World.

And so in the days of Pope Nicholas I, the farther one looked to the East, the more clearly did one see this inward, heartfelt veneration of the cult; men clung passionately to the cult and to all the experiences evoked by the sacred acts, regarding as the crowning triumph of these experiences, indeed as the supreme act of worship, the pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre.

Looking over to the East from ninth-century Rome, in the days of Nicholas I, there arose the picture of the one influence—of which Nicholas I and his counselors said: This is not for the peoples of Europe, for the peoples of Middle and Western Europe—for they have too much of the intellect that is now storming into human evolution to be able to cling, with whatsoever fervour of the heart, to the mere contemplation of the ceremonial acts and to the actual pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre. In the people of Europe there is too much of the dawning intellect to enable them in this way to be fully Man. It was perceived that although this was possible in the East, it was not to be expected of the peoples of Middle Europe and the West.

Meanwhile the first great question still remained. Terrible danger seemed imminent if Europe were swept by the stream charged with such deep esotericism, with so much that can be fully grasped only by a spiritualised thinking.

Let me put it like this. Looking from the Rome of Pope Nicholas I towards the West, danger loomed. Looking towards the East, again danger. The stream outspread in the East and making its way far into Europe was seen, in reality, as a series of streams, as the stream of the esoteric cult in contrast to the other (Western) stream of esoteric life. Middle Europe must not, dare not be seized by either stream ... this, or something like it, was what was being said at the Papal Court of Nicholas I. What, then, must be done? The great treasure perceptible to those truly belonging to this first esoteric stream must be clothed in dogma. Words must be found, formulae coined and proclaimed; but the possibility of understanding through actual vision of what was thus proclaimed must be withheld from men.

The idea of Faith was born—the conception that without providing them with the means of vision, men must be given in the forms of abstract dogma, those things in which they can believe.

And so a third stream arose, taking hold of the religious and also the scientific life of Middle and Western Europe. The onset of the intellect was opposed by dogmas, dogmas that could not be described as vision restated in ideas, but such that the element of vision had departed from them; they were simply believed.

If that esoteric stream which penetrated to Ireland and died away in later times had been pursued in deed and truth, the souls of those belonging to it would inevitably have experienced union with the spiritual world. For the great question living in this esoteric stream was in reality this: How is the human being to find his orientation in the ether-world, in the etheric cosmos? The visions, which also included the conception of the Mystery of Golgotha as I described it just now, were connected with the etheric cosmos. Here, then, the great question was that concerning the nature of the etheric cosmos.

But in the middle stream which until far into the Middle Ages was clothed for the most part in Latinised forms of thought, the knowledge bearing upon the etheric cosmos became the content of dogma.

Just as in the West the question concerning the mystery of the etheric cosmos was an unconscious one, so in the East there had arisen the great, unconscious question as to the nature of the etheric organism, the etheric body of man.

Unconsciously astir in all those trends of feeling and knowledge in the East, which poured into cult, ceremony and ritual, was the question: How is man to adjust himself to the workings of his etheric body?—Just as in the South and West the question was: How is man to adjust himself to the etheric cosmos?

In earlier times the truth of the super-sensible world had been within man's reach as an outcome of his natural, dreamlike clairvoyance. It was not necessary for him to become conscious of the etheric in the cosmos and in his own being. A significant feature of the modern age was the great question which now arose concerning the nature and content of the etheric world—in the West, the question as to the etheric cosmos, in the East as to man's own etheric body.

The question concerning the etheric cosmos demands the exercise of supreme spiritual effort. A man must unfold thought to its highest potency if he is to penetrate the mysteries of the cosmos. In the lecture yesterday I told you that the way is opened up by study of Goethe's conception of plant-metamorphosis, but that this must pass on to the mighty metamorphosis that leads over from one earthly life to the next.

But in Rome, especially at the time of Pope Nicholas I, this was considered to be full of danger ... the living content of this stream must be stifled and concealed.

The Eastern stream too was involved in the struggle concerning the etheric world but particularly the etheric nature of man, the etheric body of man. With his physical body, man lives in contact with the outer world of nature, with the animals, plants and minerals, the machines and the like. But to live in and through the etheric body during his existence here on earth is only possible for man by the external means presented by ceremony and ritual, by participation in happenings and actions which are not, in the earthly and material sense, real. In the East, men longed to share in these acts in order that they might thereby experience the inner nature and working of their own etheric organism.

In the Rome of Pope Nicholas I, this too was considered unsuitable for Europe. It was decided to retain in the West only what the intellect had formulated into a body of dogmas—wherein super-sensible truths are matters of faith alone, no longer of actual vision. The dogmas were then promulgated over wider areas of the West and the esoteric stream was entirely obscured. The inner attraction to cult and ritual that had characterized Eastern Europe was also thought to be out of keeping with the nature of the peoples of Middle and Western Europe, and from this was born the modified form of the cult which now exists in the Roman Catholic Church.

If you compare the cult and ritual of the Eastern Church, the Orthodox Russian Church, with the form of cult practised in the Roman Catholic Church, you will perceive this difference: in the Roman Catholic Church it is more of the nature of a symbol for the eyes to contemplate; in the East it is something into which the soul penetrates with ardent devotion. In the West, men grew increasingly aware of the need to turn away from the cult—wedded as it now was to dogmatic interpretation—to the dogmas, and from the dogmas to explain the cult. In the East, cult and ritual worked as a power in themselves and what found its way over to the West was gradually confined within the externalised forms preserved in various occult communities. These communities exist to this very day and though emptied of all the esotericism of olden time, still play no insignificant apart in affairs.

How to inaugurate in Europe a form of cult which does not, as in the East, take hold of the etheric nature of the human being, and to establish a system of dogma which would make it unnecessary for men to direct their gaze to the spiritual world ... how to inaugurate a twofold stream of this character—such was the third great question confronting Nicholas I. And at this he laboured. The outcome of it all was the complete severance of the Eastern, Greek Church, from the Roman Catholic Church. Here, in what I have indicated, lie the inner reasons.

All that I have just been describing to you was still clearly perceptible in the middle of the ninth century, at the time of Pope Nicholas I. In the West, vestiges of esotericism still survived. In Spain particularly, but also in France and in Ireland, esoteric Schools existed. There were men who could still look into the spiritual worlds, whose understanding of Christianity derived from actual vision. Later on, nothing remained of this earlier power of vision, save a hint, save those mysterious, repeated glimpses of the Holy Grail or its secular reflection and counterpart, the Round Table of King Arthur. There men did feel the presence of something actually connected with vision of worlds beyond the earth, with living experience of these worlds.

Middle Europe, extending into those regions of the West where esotericism still survived, was the home of devout belief sustained by dogmas, combined with a world of ceremonies and rites not quite connected with the human etheric body. Of what was living in the East, I have already spoken. Any true portrayal of the life of soul as it was in Europe during the ninth century, would have to include description of these three different moods-of-soul in their many variations.

The account given by history is but a cursory, superficial expression of what was actually reigning in the depths. But as time went on, the esoteric stream was followed by a current, which in the forms of Arabian thought was becoming increasingly exoteric and formal. What men over in Asia had made of the Aristotelian teachings—that too flowed over in the wake of what had once been a very spiritual understanding, and under this influence the content of this esoteric stream became more and more materialistic. Already in the eleventh and twelfth centuries we see how esotericism begins to flicker out, to melt away as it were; this esoteric stream itself takes on a materialistic mode of thinking, that mode of thinking which in later metamorphosis becomes the materialism of natural science—which has its real origin in Arabian thought.

The middle stream—actually brought into being by Nicholas I but previously fostered by Boniface and supported by the Merovingians and Carolingians—although for long centuries bearing faint traces of the influence exercised by the Grail and other sacred lays in turning the eyes of soul to the super-sensible world, this middle stream tended more and more to introduce the element of materialism into cult and dogma. The older and purer conceptions of Transubstantiation, of the celebration of the Mass, for example, were followed by those crude, materialistic conceptions, which alone could have resulted in controversy over the Eucharist. When these quarrels arose they were proof of the fact that men no longer understood the Eucharist as originally conceived. Indeed it is a mystery that can be understood only in the light of spiritual knowledge.

And so materialism found its way into the stream that had flowed across to the West from the South and East; it found its way into the middle stream, and, fundamentally, also into the Eastern stream. The waves of materialism were surging on—and everywhere men strove to dam them back as best they could.

We pass now from the ninth century, from the days of Pope Nicholas I, to the eleventh century. We must picture the three great question marks standing like three terrible powers, soul-torturing powers, before a man like Pope Nicholas I. For he could not say—as in Congresses later on, when frontiers were drawn on maps according to opinions based upon external considerations—he could not say: I decree that there shall be a frontier here, and another frontier here ... for souls cannot be divided off in this way. What he could do was to indicate lines of direction and impart to the middle stream a certain strength, and herein his genius was particularly effective. Nevertheless the mood prevailing in the East spread far, far into the West. What mood? The mood in which the etheric organism of man is set aflame from within by the sacred acts of cult and ritual and in which, in a way more characteristic of Western Europe, these acts were now linked with their centre in Jerusalem.

With all the ardour for pilgrimage and the intense yearning towards the real centre in Jerusalem, Peter of Amiens, with less effect at the beginning, and then, later on, Bernard of Clairvaux with veritably blinding fervour, preached the Cross. With this mood of ardour in Europe there mingled the remains of the stream which had been kept alive in the West by the cult of the Grail, by the Arthurian cult—the remains of the esotericism which had here found its outlet ... and there arose the picture of Man in his physical form as a being to whom the earth is not really earth, but a particular place in the cosmos.

Some such conception was alive in the world of chivalry and knighthood or at least in that part of it that took shape in Western and Middle Europe and allied itself with the Crusading Spirit. And as a faint undertone only, but as the Crusades proceeded steadily increasing in strength, there mingled with this mood the temper of mind that had been engendered by Nicholas I as appropriate for European civilisation.

That is why there is something about the Crusades not fully to be explained by later circumstances. For the middle stream spreads out; beside it remains the stream belonging to the East of Europe, regarded in Europe itself as a backward tendency in religion; and the Western stream converts itself into branches of the occult, esoteric life, into all kinds of occult societies, Masonic Orders and the like. In the world of Scholasticism, the middle stream finally lays hold of science too, and then of the child of Scholasticism: natural science in its later form.

The spirit inspiring the Crusades cannot be understood by those who look only at what happened in later times; it can be understood only by those who perceive the effects of these impulses from the fourth and fifth centuries of the Christian era to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and who grasp the full significance of the question with which Nicholas I, in the ninth century, was so profoundly concerned: How can happenings in the outer world in which the human being himself participates, pre-eminent among them being the sacred acts of the cult, how can these be brought into connection with the living flow of spiritual life, with the life of the Spiritual Beings? In the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, the problem had already been set for the peoples of Europe. Just as on the one side they had lost the realities contained in cult and ritual, so too, on the other side, they had lost the realities yielded by spiritual vision. Just as in the East the realities of cult and ritual vanished into the mists of Asia and the conquests of the Turks sealed off the holy place around which the acts of the Christian cult must be centred, so, if I may speak in metaphor, did the esoteric secrets contained in the Western stream disappear into the Atlantic Ocean. And there arose as a reaction the mood, which asked: How are the sacred acts of the cult, with their centre in Jerusalem, to be infused with spiritual life?

Anyone who reads the sermons of Bernard of Clairvaux can feel to this very day how on the one hand, fervent devotion to the cult, to the outer symbol in which the esoteric is contained, speaks from his lips, and how, on the other hand, his heart is fired through and through by all that was once astir in the esotericism of the West.

Resounding in the tone and tenor of the sermons of Bernard of Clairvaux, not in what he actually says but in the artistic grandeur and majesty of his utterances, are those mysteries which the etheric cosmos would fain reveal to man and can no longer reveal, and on the other side all that strives, from out of the earth, to work in man's own etheric body. That is what drives men over to Asia, seeking for what they had lost in the West.

Esotericism, however, was really the driving force. By making a new link with the Grave of the Redeemer, men desired to glimpse again what the West had lost. The tragedy of the ensuing age was that this was not understood, that there were no ears ready to listen, let us say, to Rosicrucianism—I mean Rosicrucianism in its genuine form—which sought for Christ in heights of the Spirits, not at the physical grave.

Now, however, the time has come for mankind to realise that just as those who after the Redeemer's death came to the tomb, were told: He Whom ye seek is no longer here, seek Him elsewhere, so, too, it was said to the Crusaders: He Whom ye seek is no longer here, seek Him elsewhere.

The age is upon us when He Who is no longer here must be sought elsewhere, when He must be sought through a new revelation of the spiritual worlds. That is the task of those who are living at this present time and of that I wished to speak to you, in connection with our recent studies.

One can express the facts of the spiritual world in different ways, illuminating them from the most diverse sides. This sometimes sounds different. But it is precisely through these various illuminations that the facts of the spiritual world are fully presented to the soul. And so this evening, in a slightly different language and in a different light, I will share some of the things I have discussed in the last two lectures in the Goetheanum building for the human being's experience between death and a new birth.

We have heard how the human being initially, when the physical body has fallen away from him, enters into a state of cosmic experience. After the physical body has fallen away, he still carries his etheric organism within him; but he no longer feels, as it were, within this etheric organism, but he feels himself spread out soulfully into the world. But in these cosmic expanses, over which his consciousness is now beginning to spread, he cannot yet clearly distinguish the entities and processes from one another. He has a cosmic consciousness, but this cosmic consciousness still has no inner clarity. And besides, in the first days after death, this consciousness is occupied by the still existing etheric body. What is lost first is that in man which is bound to the head organization. I do not want to say anything ironic, but something very serious: one loses one's head, also meant in a spiritual sense, first of all when one passes through the gate of death. The head organization ceases to function.

Now it is precisely the head organization that mediates thinking in earthly existence. It is through the head organization that man forms his thoughts during his earthly existence in a certain activity. One loses the head organization first when one has passed through the gate of death, but one does not lose one's thoughts; they remain. They only become interspersed with a certain liveliness. They become dull, dusky, spiritual entities that point one out into the world. It is as if the thoughts had detached themselves from the human head, as if they still shone back on the last human life, which one experiences as one's etheric organism, but as if at the same time they would point to the world. One does not yet know what they want to tell us, these human ideas, which were, as it were, harnessed and penned up in the head organization and are now freed and point out into the world wide.

When the etheric body has dissolved for the reasons and in the way I characterized yesterday over at the building site, when the cosmic consciousness is no longer banished in this way to the last course of earthly life - in the other way, which I also characterized , it remains transfixed for the time being. When this etheric body has also been released from the human being, then the ideas that have been wrested from the head organization become, as it were, brighter, and one now notices how these ideas point one out into the cosmos, into the universe.

It is the case that one comes out into the cosmos in such a way that, initially, the plant world of the earth is the mediator. Don't misunderstand me: I'm not saying that the plants covering the ground at the place where one died are the ones that prepare the way out, but when we look at the plant world of the earth, it presents itself to the spiritual vision in such a way that what the physical eyes see is only a part of that plant world. I will draw what is taking place in a schematic way on the board (see drawing). Let us assume that this is the surface of the earth; plants grow out of the earth's surface (green). It is, of course, drawn out of all proportion, but you will understand what I mean. One follows these plants with the senses to the flowers (red). The spiritual view of these plants, however, shows that this is only part of the plant world, that from the flowers upwards an astral event and weaving begins. In a sense, an astral substance is poured out over the earth, and spiral formations (yellow) arise from this astral substance. Wherever the earth provides the opportunity for plants to arise, the flowing over of these astral world spirals gives rise to plant life.

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These world spirals now surround the earth everywhere, so you must not believe that the downpouring, downshining and downglittering of these astral world spirals is only where plants grow. It is present everywhere in different ways, so that one could also die in the desert and yet have the opportunity to encounter these plant spirals as they pour out into space.

These spirals of vegetation are the path by which one moves from the earth to the planetary sphere. So, in a sense, one slips out of the earthly realm through the spiritual extensions of the plant world of the earth. This becomes wider and wider. These spirals expand more and more, becoming wider and wider circles. They are the highways out to the spiritual world. But one would not get out there, one would have to stand still, so to speak, if one did not gain the possibility of having a kind of negative weights, weights that do not weigh down, but weights that push one up. And these weights are the spiritual contents, the ideas of the mineral formations in the earth, especially of the metals; so that one moves out into the world on the plant paths and is supported by the power that carries one from the metals of the earth to the planet stars. All mineral formations have the peculiarity that the ideas inherent in them carry us to a particular planet. Thus, let us say, we are carried by tin-like minerals, that is, by their ideas, to a particular planet; we are carried to a particular planet by what is in the earth as iron, that is, by the idea of iron. What the physical human being takes in from the mineral and plant world during his earthly existence is taken over in his spiritual counter-images, guiding the human being after death into the world's vastness. And one is really carried into the planetary movements, into the whole rhythm of the planetary movements through the mineral and plant kingdoms of the earth.

By gradually expanding one's consciousness to include the entire planetary sphere, so that one is aware of the planetary life in one's own inner world of the soul, one passes through the entire planetary sphere in this way. If there were nothing in the planetary sphere except the outpourings of plant and mineral existence in its vastness, one would experience everything that can be experienced in the secrets of the mineral and plant kingdoms. And these secrets are extraordinarily manifold, magnificent, powerful, they are full of content, and no one need think that the life that begins there for the spiritual person when he has left his physical organism is somehow poorer than the earthly life we spend from day to day. It is manifold in itself, but it is also majestic in itself. You can experience more from the secrets of a single mineral than you experience in earthly life from all the kingdoms of nature combined.

But there is something else in this sphere, which one passes through as the planetary sphere. These are the lunar forces, the spiritual lunar forces, which were characterized in the last 'Days'. The lunar sphere is there. However, the further one enters into an extra-terrestrial existence, the weaker and weaker its effectiveness becomes. Its effectiveness announces itself strongly in the first times, which are counted in years after death; but it becomes weaker and weaker the more the cosmic consciousness expands. If this lunar sphere were not there, one would not be able to experience two things after death. The first is that entity which I mentioned in the last days and which one has developed oneself during the last earth life from the forces which represent the moral-spiritual evaluation of one's own earth life. One has developed a spiritual being, a kind of spiritual elemental presence, which has as its limbs, as its tentacle formations, what is actually an image of the human moral-spiritual value. If I may express myself in this way: a living photograph, formed out of the substance of the astral cosmos, lives with the soul, but it is a real, living photograph on which one can see what kind of person one actually was in one's last life on earth. This photograph is in front of one as long as one is in the sphere of the moon. But in addition, in this sphere of the moon, one experiences all kinds of diverse elemental beings, of whom one very soon notices that they have a kind of dream-like but very bright dream-like consciousness, which alternates with a brighter state of consciousness, which is even brighter than human consciousness on earth. These entities oscillate, as it were, between a dull, dream-like state of consciousness and a brighter state of consciousness than that of a person on earth. You get to know these entities. They are numerous and their forms are extremely different from one another. In the condition of life I am now describing, these entities are experienced in such a way that when they enter a duller, dream-like consciousness, they float down to the earth, as it were, through the moon's spirituality, and then float back again. A rich life presents itself from such figures, floating down to earth and back again, flowing up and down, as I have just described. One learns to recognize that the animal kingdom on earth is related to these formations. One learns to recognize that these figures are the so-called group souls of the animals. These group souls of the animals descend. This means that some animal form wakes up on the earth below. When this animal form is more in a state of sleeping below, then the group soul comes up. In short, it can be seen that the animal kingdom is related to the cosmos in such a way that within the lunar sphere is the living environment for the group souls of the animals. Animals do not have individual souls, but whole groups of animals, the lions, tigers, cats and so on have common group souls. These group souls just lead their existence in the lunar sphere, floating up and down. And in this up and down floating, the life of the animals from the lunar sphere is brought about.

It is a law of the world that in this sphere, where we find the group souls of the animals, that is, in the lunar sphere, our moral-astral counterpart also has its life. For when one then, with cosmic consciousness, lives one's way further out into the cosmic expanses, one leaves behind in the lunar sphere, as I have described it, this living photograph of what one has achieved as a moral-spiritual being during one's last life on earth and also in earlier ones. In this way, one enters the planetary sphere, experiencing the plant, mineral and animal worlds. One is still absorbed in the lunar sphere, but in this way one lives one's way into the planetary sphere. One experiences the movements of the planets. One has stepped out into the cosmos on the paths of the plant being. One has been carried by the ideas of the mineral, especially the metallic beings. One feels that a particular kind of plant on Earth is an earthly image of what leads one there as a spiral path that widens more and more, let us say to Jupiter. But the fact that one is led to Jupiter depends on experiencing the idea of a particular metal and certain minerals of the Earth in a living way.

Once the path of the plants has led one to a planet – one always has with one the idea of the mineral on the earth that carried one out – one has arrived at the planet in question, then this idea that carried one out of the mineral, this idea that has become ever more and more alive, begins to resound in the planet in question. So that after death one experiences a gradual development along the lines of the plant kingdom, the mineral inner beings experiencing themselves in ideas that are more and more alive. These ideas become spiritual beings. When the one living idea arrives at one planet and the other at another planet, the mineral ideas that have now become spiritual beings feel at home. One type of mineral feels at home in Jupiter, the other type in Mars, and so on. And that which was only regarded as inconspicuous on earth now begins to resound in the respective planet when it has arrived, and to resound in the most diverse ways. So that what has mineral images on earth, which can only be seen with the senses, can now be heard resounding from the interior of the planets and in this way one lives into the harmony of the spheres. For in the universe, in the cosmos, everything is connected internally. What grows out of the ground down here on earth as the plant world is a reflection of what connects the earth to the planetary system as if along plant pathways. What is in the ground as a mineral is actually only an inconspicuous image of what works as a force up along the plant paths, but what has its home outside in the planets and what introduces world tones into the planet, which combine to form a great world harmony.

Thus, when one understands what is here on earth, one speaks the truth when one says to gold: I see in gold, which shines with its own peculiar color, the image of that which, in the sun, resonates a central cosmic tone for my soul when I have carried it up into the sun along certain plant pathways.

When a person has gone through this, when what I have described as necessary in the last days occurs, then the possibility begins for him to rise above the planetary sphere and enter the sphere of the fixed stars. He can only do this by extricating himself from the lunar sphere. This must, as it were, remain behind him. But what he experiences in the way described in the planetary sphere, what he experiences as the sense of the mineral-metallic realm of the physical earth, what he experiences as the guiding directions of the plant world of the earth, all the magnificent things he goes through there, are disturbed in a certain way disturbed by the impacts of the lunar sphere, it is darkened for him in a certain way by the fact that he experiences the elemental beings that belong to the animal kingdom and that, in addition to those actually quite harmonious movements in which they ascend and descend, thus in addition to these vertical movements, also have horizontal movements. In these horizontal movements, which are carried out by the group souls of the animals within the sphere of the moon, terrible archetypes for disharmonious, discrepant forces in the animal kingdom take place. There are terrible, savage struggles between the group souls of the animal kingdom. Through this impact of the lunar sphere into the planetary sphere, what can otherwise be experienced in inner peace and with dignity and majesty through the archetypal nature of the plant and mineral kingdoms is disturbed to a certain extent.

When the human being escapes from the lunar sphere and enters the sphere of the fixed stars, then what remains for him is a cosmic memory – we can call it that – of these powerful, majestic experiences of the planetary sphere with the archetypal nature of the earthly mineral and plant kingdoms. This remains with him as a memory. And he enters into a world of spiritual beings, of which, as I have already said, the physical, sensory image is the constellations of the stars, those star constellations which, when understood in the right way, are the expression, so to speak, the written characters from which one can experience the peculiarity, the deeds and the volitional intentions of the spiritual beings in the sphere of the stars. In a sense, one now experiences by vision the spiritual beings that do not walk on earth in physical bodies, which can only be experienced in this sphere of the stars. And one enters this sphere in order to penetrate one's own being with the deeds of these divine spiritual beings, within the same, one's own being with the cosmic consciousness – which has now expanded, for which spatial vision has passed over into a qualitative vision, for which temporal vision has passed over into simultaneity.

While here on earth we are enclosed in our own skin and the other human beings outside in theirs, doing what they have to do, while we are all next to each other here on earth, in this sphere of stars we are not only in each other as human souls, but we are also such that our cosmic consciousness expands and we feel the entities of the divine spiritual world within us. Here on earth we say “we” to ourselves, or rather, each of us says “I”. Out there, he says “I” by which he means: Within this my I, I experience the world of the divine-spiritual hierarchies; I experience them as my own cosmic consciousness. This is, of course, an even more powerful, expansive, diverse, meaningful and majestic world of experience that one now enters. And when one becomes aware of the forces that play into the soul of man from the most diverse entities of the divine-spiritual hierarchies, then one sees: they are forces that all interact, having cosmic intentions, which all, so to speak, aim at one point. One's own spiritual and soul activity is interwoven with the intentions of the divine spiritual hierarchies and their individual entities. And everything in which one is enveloped, into which one's own cosmic activity, felt within and encompassed by cosmic consciousness, passes, all this ultimately aims at constructing the spirit germ, as I have described it, of the human physical organism.

Indeed, the ancient mystery centers spoke of a profound truth when they said that man is a temple of the gods. What is built first in mighty, majestic grandeur out of the spiritual cosmos and then contracts into the human physical body, so as to be transformed that one no longer recognizes the original image, the mighty, majestic original image, is actually what the context of the divine-spiritual hierarchies builds in order to have its goal in this building.

This sphere of experience is such that, when we are in this sphere, we see the cosmos, which we see from the inside when we are in the earthly position, from a point from which we look out in all directions, from the outside. For when we enter the sphere of the stars, we feel even at the moment when we have snatched ourselves from the sphere of the moon that we are outside in the universe and actually looking at the cosmos from the outside.

I will try to sketch what is taking place (see drawing). Let us assume that the Earth is here. Of course, the proportions are not correct, but we will understand each other. We look out into the vastness of the cosmos. We see stars wandering outside, the planets, and the fixed stars are outside. Here on Earth, our consciousness is concentrated as if in a small point (red). We look out centrally into the universe. In the moment when we have escaped from the sphere of the moon, we arrive with our consciousness in the sphere of the stars. But we pass, as it were, only through the sphere of the stars, guided by the memory that remains to us from the experiences of the planetary sphere, and enter the sphere beyond the stars.

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In this sphere beyond the stars, space no longer actually exists. Of course, when I draw here, I have to draw what is actually qualitative in spatial terms. I can then draw it like this: While our consciousness on earth is, as it were, concentrated at this point as our ego (red), it is peripheral when it has reached beyond the sphere of the stars (blue). We look inwards from each point (blue arrows). This looking is only represented in the image of space. We look inward. If we have the constellation of Aries here (red at the top left) and if we see the sun (yellow) standing in the constellation of Aries from the earth, so that the sun, as it were, covers the constellation of Aries for us, and if we then go out into space, we see Aries standing in front of the sun. But to understand from the cosmic consciousness means something else: to see Aries standing before the Sun — than to look with the earthly consciousness and see the Sun standing before Aries. We see everything spiritually in this way. We look at the universe from the outside.

And in the development of the spirit germ of the physical organism, we actually have the powers of the spiritual-divine beings within us, but in such a way that, basically, we feel outside the whole cosmos, which we experience from the earth. And now, in our cosmic consciousness, we experience being with the divine-spiritual beings.

When we then look back and see, as it were, the constellations — but all in a qualitative rather than a spatial sense — above the sun, one time this, the other time that, then we recognize in what we are experiencing, by connecting it with the memory we have of how the metals and minerals, after the plant paths had been completed, had sounded in the planets, then we experience that this sounding, which was initially a world music, is transformed into the cosmic language, into the Logos. We read the intentions of the divine-spiritual beings among whom we are by experiencing the individual signs of this cosmic writing: The standing of Aries before the Sun, the standing of Taurus before the Sun and so on — by experiencing how this takes place and how the sounds that the metals make in the planets resonate with this writing. This instructs us how to work on the spiritual germ of the physical organism on earth.

As long as we are in the lunar sphere, we have a vivid feeling for this photograph of our moral and spiritual life on earth. We have a vivid feeling for what is going on among the group souls of the animals. But these are a kind of demonic, elemental entities. Now that we find the zodiac on the other side of the sun, we are learning to recognize what we have actually seen. For the memory of these animal forms, of these group soul forms of the animals, remains with us into the beyond of the sphere of the stars, and we make the discovery that these group souls of the animals are, so to speak, lower — if one human language), are the caricatured after-images of the magnificent forms that now permeate our cosmic consciousness beyond the sphere of the stars as the entities of the divine-spiritual hierarchies.

Thus, outside the sphere of the stars we have the entities of the divine-spiritual hierarchies, and within the sphere of the stars, insofar as it is interspersed with what spiritually belongs to the sphere of the moon, we have the caricatures of the divine-spiritual entities in the group souls of the animals. When I say caricatures, please do not take this in a pejorative sense. What a caricature is in the human-humorous-artistic view is, of course, something extraordinarily trivial compared to the grandiose caricature of the divine spiritual beings in the world of the moon sphere, which is at the same time the world of the group soul beings of the earthly animal kingdom. We owe an extraordinary debt to the experience we have in this sphere. I have already mentioned this in a more conceptual form in the last few days, now I would like to express it more in an imaginative way.

Imagine the human being is up there (see drawing on page 19, red). He looks back here. His actual area of perception of his spiritual and soul world is beyond the star sphere. This is where he has the field of his current activity. It is like standing on a high mountain, with sunshine above and fog below. In this cosmic experience, you have the entire surging, struggling, and discordant group soul of the animals below, but also their harmonious ascent and descent. Like a multiform mist, it propagates itself down below, lives itself out down there. And while gazing at the constellations, beholding the intentions of the divine-spiritual beings, while reading the intentions of the divine-spiritual beings, while learning in cosmic consciousness to understand how the temple the temple of the gods, this spirit germ of the physical body, has its secrets in itself, those secrets that correspond to the pure world of extra-terrestrial and extra-lunar existence, one looks down and sees what is going on in the sphere of spirituality of the animal kingdom. And by looking down as if from a sun-drenched mountain peak into a lower mass of fog clouds, one has the same experience as one has in cosmic thoughts: If you do not take with you all the strength with which you have now imbued yourself from this divine spiritual world as you descend back down, you will not emerge unscathed from this world of the foggy clouds of animal group souls. There you will find the image of your previous earthly life with a moral and spiritual evaluation. This will be floating in the fog down there. You have to take it up again. But there will be all the group souls of the animals, wildly rushing into each other; there will be all the wild hustle and bustle. You must take such strong powers with you from your beyond the sphere of the stars that you can take these powers of the group soul nature of the animals as far away from your destiny as possible. Otherwise, just as matter attaches itself to a crystal, what these group souls of the animals cosmetically exude towards your moral-spiritual core of being will attach itself to you. And you will have to take with you everything that you cannot then hold back through the powers you have accumulated, and you will have to integrate it as all kinds of urges and instincts for your next earthly existence.

However, one will only be able to draw from the hereafter the forces of the sphere of the stars that one has made oneself capable of drawing by developing in the inclination towards Christ, in the inclination towards the Mystery of Golgotha, in the truly religious, not in the egoistic religious, permeation of the soul in the sense of the words of St. Paul: “Not I, but the Christ in me.” This makes one strong to penetrate beyond the sphere of the stars, in the company of the divine spiritual beings, with those forces that one has to take with one as one's destiny core when going back down through the sphere of the moon from that which which is grouped in the disharmonious, discrepant play of the spiritual-animal environment and permeates this spiritual-soul core.

If one wants to describe what the human soul experiences between birth and death, what unites it with itself, what it incorporates into its perceptions, feelings and impulses of will, then one must describe the earthly world around the human being. But if one wants to describe what the human being experiences between death and a new birth, then one must describe what the archetypes of what is on earth are. If one wants to know what the minerals really are, then one must hear their essence resounding in the life between death and a new birth from the planets. If one wants to know what the plants really are, then one must study the essence of what grows out of the earth in a faint afterimage in the plant, on the paths that lead from the plant kingdom out into space and that are traced in the forms of plant formations. If one wishes to study the animal kingdom, one must become acquainted with the ebb and flow of the group souls of the animals in the sphere of the moon. And when one has extricated oneself from all this, when one has entered the sphere beyond the world of the stars, only then does one learn to recognize the actual secrets of the human being. And one learns to look back on all that one has experienced in the archetypal worlds of the mineral, the plant, and the animal.

One carries this out into those regions of the cosmos where one not only recognizes the actual secrets of the human being, but also experiences them vividly and is active in shaping them. One carries into these regions, like a cosmic memory, everything one has experienced with reference to minerals, plants and animals on the ascent. A rich and varied life takes place in the confluence of these memories and what one sees as the secrets of human existence, what one actively experiences and participates in, and in the confluence of this memory and this activity. And it is this varied life that a person goes through between death and a new birth.

Today I would like to continue the meditation I undertook yesterday by bringing it even closer to the human being himself. You can well imagine that what one is actually trying to depict through such a description is so rich and varied inwardly that any such description, like yesterday's, which covers such wide areas, can only grasp the matter from one point of view, and that a feeling for what is actually intended by such a description can only arise from descriptions from the most diverse points of view.

When we consider the human head formation, the head formation, we must be clear about the fact that this head formation does not only concern the externally observed head, limited downwards by the neck, but also the processes that take place in the human head, the internal organ processes. These are mainly present in the head as head processes, but they continue throughout the organism; so that essentially the head organization is found in the whole human being, but outwardly it reveals itself primarily in the head. The same applies to the chest organization, which essentially comprises breathing and blood circulation. This too extends into both the head organization and the metabolism and limb organization. We can speak of the human being in such a way that we distinguish between its individual organizational elements, but we must be clear about how they interact in the whole person.

If we now consider the organization of the human head, it undergoes quite different metamorphoses than the other parts of the human organism when passing through the spiritual world between death and a new birth. In the head we have an actual reproduction of that cosmic which, as a spirit germ, develops through such activity as I have characterized yesterday and already on the previous days. In the human head we have the complete reproduction, filled with material substance, of the universal whole.

If we could study the human head not with a physically constructed microscope but with our spiritual and soul abilities to enlarge, we would find the whole cosmos reproduced in its physical, etheric, astral and ego structure. We actually carry this entire cosmos within us, and most of it in our head organization. It is also true for this head organization that, between death and a new birth, the human being, in union with higher spiritual beings of the upper hierarchies, works out what will find the continuation of its development within human inheritance, which, so to speak, has been brought to a certain point by the human being himself in union with the beings of the higher hierarchies in the spiritual world, falls into the physical world and continues its development in the mother's organism through conception.

What we see as head formation has actually emerged from the cosmos, so that it itself comes down to earth in an astral state, which it finally reaches through the processing of the human being, and there, before conception, up to the physical state of development, , so that later on that which has now been left behind by the human being itself is clothed with an etheric body, after it has first cast off the germ of the physical body in the spiritual, and can then in turn connect with this spirit germ that has become physical.

But now it is the case that during the waking state, on a small scale, we are constantly continuing what we have accomplished on a large scale, in the universal between death and a new birth in union with divine spiritual entities. This activity, which is carried out here, takes place, so to speak, behind the ordinary human consciousness.

I would like to sketch this out for you. If we look at the human head of a normally functioning person, the following appears to the spiritual view: While we are awake, while the impressions of the external world are constantly approaching the human head through our waking state, everything that lives in the sense perception takes place for the consciousness. I would like to characterize what lives in sensory perception by first drawing the eye (see drawing), the nose, where the olfactory sensations take place, palate, mouth, where the taste experiences take place. This part, marked in red, is intended to schematically represent everything that a person actually experiences in their ordinary consciousness. But in the world of facts that takes place in a person, not only that takes place. You know, of course, that the brain is structured in the most diverse ways. I will only hint at this schematically (blue-green). What is combined and structured here in the brain is an image of the whole universe, the whole universe contracted into a small size and lined with earthly substances. The fact that this brain, in its ego part, its astral and etheric part, is then lined with physical earthly substance means that the earth, with its forces and components, has influence over this part of the human being.

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While our sensory perception is taking place, while the colors flood in and form internally into images, while the auditory impulses vibrate through the human organism and form through the structure of the auditory organ into auditory perceptions, while a similar thing happens with taste, smell and tactile perceptions, while this whole waking experience is maintained by the influence of the external physical-sensory world, it comes to life as a force within the unconscious parts of the human head organization. And while we perceive a color, hear a sound or have a taste perception, we unconsciously work to create an afterimage of, say, Jupiter's position in relation to the sun or to Mars (yellow). We are mapping a cosmic relationship within our own being. Throughout our waking life, something happens that we accomplish behind our ordinary consciousness: the reproduction of cosmic activity. What is accomplished behind our ordinary consciousness is nothing other than the echo of what we go through cosmically between death and a new birth or conception. There we have gone through it on a large scale, in the universal. We have gone through it in the spiritual, unperturbed by the earthly substance. We did not need to take off the earthly substance in fine portions, wrap it around axes in spiral lines and so on. We did everything in a spiritual substance. The spiritual-divine powers of the highest hierarchies accompanied us in our work. What we accomplished in their community, we do here in an unconscious way, by surrendering to the sensory perceptions in our brain, by reproducing what we have done outside in a spiritual way with spiritual beings in an earthly way with earthly substances. Through this activity, we carry our pre-earthly life into our earthly life and into our physical organization.

What we see through colors, hear through sounds, smell through scents, is there for us during our earthly existence. What takes place in the background are thoughts that have an ethereal vitality, which in the materiality of the brain have only their physical expression. The essential thing that matters is what ethereally weaves in the finest substantiality of the brain. There, living thoughts weave into each other. Our thoughts are, after all, only reflex images that are formed in this inner cosmos, where what we receive from outside reflects back and then becomes conscious to us. But what I have just described takes place behind the level of memory. Nothing needs to take place behind an ordinary mirror; but behind the mirror that reflects our abstract ideas back to our consciousness through our brain, an entire world existence is reflected in miniature in every single person. And these living thoughts that we develop are for the third hierarchy, for the hierarchy of the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai, the same as our abstractly reflecting thoughts are for us. Behind our consciousness, through our humanity, the third hierarchy unfolds its activity. There the essences of the archai, archangeloi and angeloi develop what must and can only be accomplished by placing the human being in the cosmos and on the earth. In the formation of his brain, he not only develops a mirror that reflects his ordinary earthly consciousness, the abstract ideas, but within the head something takes place that the hierarchy of the angels, archangels, and archai has to carry out on earth and through earthly existence. This is an event that is just as much connected with earthly existence as another event.

You can characterize earthly existence in such a way that you say: through the minerals this and that happens; through the plants it happens that they bloom, bear fruit; through the animals, yet another thing happens. Through man, the angeloi, archangeloi and archai pour their activity into the spiritual atmosphere of the earth. But this happens indirectly through the subconscious activity of the human head organization.

Our earthly existence is not exhausted by the blossoming of plants and the running around of animals, but continues into a spiritual existence. Beyond plants, beyond animals, beyond man, there is an activity of the angelic world, the spiritual world, the third hierarchy, and this activity is possible through the human mind.

I was able to point out to you yesterday that there is something astral about a plant (see drawing) when it grows out of the earth (green and pink). So we also have an astral form above it, a higher spiritual form (yellow) than is represented in the plant blossom itself. Thus the activity of the human head continues into the spiritual, and if we seek where it continues to, we find the activity of the beings of the third hierarchy in connection with earthly existence.

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This activity also has a very deep significance in cosmic evolution. In the background of one's own human existence on earth, in the background of what man must do without knowing it in his organic activity, the beings of the third hierarchy are his helpers. Man dies in his earthly existence. We have considered dying and sought to understand it. But what dying is for man, that is for the entities of the third hierarchy, submerging in human nature. If they only had this, this submerging in human nature, their consciousness would fade away; they would lose their entity. They must nourish their entity again and again, as it were. The entity of these creatures of the third hierarchy must be nourished from the substance of the world.

Now, as I said before, what is woven behind human consciousness are primarily etheric forms. Even during our earthly existence, there is not such a sharp boundary between the inner human ether and the outer cosmic ether that what is produced by human thoughts, by this human work of the brain behind the conscious thoughts, does not vibrate out into the cosmic ether. Man is actually surrounded around his head by the vibrations that are generated in the cosmic ether through his head activity, which is accomplished in union with the beings of the third hierarchy. And when man passes through the gate of death, then it is as I said yesterday: that the head activity drops away first, also in relation to the etheric. But in reality this means that whatever takes place in the head, even as subconscious matter, first disperses rapidly in the cosmic ether. Everything that is brought about by man in this way takes shape in the World Ether, and the beings of the third hierarchy feed on these shapes. Thus the beings of the third hierarchy, on the one hand, help man in relation to his head organization, and on the other hand, they themselves develop through what is accomplished within this head organization.

The fact that man is interwoven with the evolution of the earth during his earthly existence means that these entities of the third hierarchy also come into contact with earthly existence through him. Otherwise these entities of the third hierarchy would belong to a world from which they could not come into contact with earthly existence at all. But they must draw their spiritual nourishment from earthly existence in the way described. Thus man is included in a cosmic activity mediated by these entities of the third hierarchy. This cosmic activity passes, as it were, through his being. Of the higher entities standing directly above man, these beings of the third hierarchy are the least powerful. They could not transform what vibrates out into the world from man and should become his spiritual nourishment, if it were quite foreign to their nature. That is why it is also the case that what arises through the human head organization as a human effect is mixed as little as possible with what the human being is through his other being. Our thoughts remain logical even when a person accumulates much evil in terms of morality through his life. Thoughts remain cool towards the other human being. They remain cool to such an extent that they can become the aforementioned nourishment for higher beings.

If everything that a person has in his emotions were also to pass over into these living thoughts, which take place behind consciousness, then the angels, archangels and so on would not be able to absorb that either. It would be useless nourishment for them. It does, however, play into our ordinary reflected thoughts, whether we are moral or immoral beings. But if I now express the matter in localized terms, which can only be in the form of a suggestion: what takes place there in the back of our heads, behind ordinary consciousness, that is something that remains, so to speak, innocent, untouched by human moral aberrations. These human moral aberrations only exert an influence on the cosmic ether and on the cosmic astrality to the extent that the soul of the human being is bound to the chest, respiratory and blood circulation systems. In a sense, the head is a pure image of the cosmos. And what happens during life on earth as an image of universal cosmic activity behind the ordinary consciousness, where worlds are continually being formed and destroyed, what goes on there, is present in a certain purity in relation to the rest of human nature. But it is nevertheless the case that if one could, as it were, turn one's eyes around and they would become spiritually seeing, and these eyes, turned around in their cave and having become spiritually clairvoyant, could look back into the interior of the human cranial cavity, they would see stars shining continuously, stars that are in motion in relation to each other, a world of fixed stars. A whole little cosmos would become visible.

The human chest is organized differently from the human head. The place where breathing and blood circulation take place as a rhythmic human being is also influenced by the cosmos, but earthly conditions have a much greater influence there. They change much more what comes in from the cosmos as a replica. When our lungs are active, we could see what is going on inside the lungs as a star, as a planet, as a solar and lunar world, if we could, as it were, turn around and see what is only lined with earthly matter in its etheric-astral existence. But earthly conditions continually interfere with this inner existence. Here the earth itself has a much greater influence. You must bear in mind that only something as fine as what the eyes make of the world of colour, what is made out of the world of sound by the body, plays a direct, immediate role in the organization of the head for the formations that I have just described. This blends in with cosmic activity. And only that which is brought about by the rest of the organism through the breath, through the blood that also functions in the brain, is pushed in. This is precisely the material that fills it. It pushes itself in. But the configuration, the sculpture, this inner sculpture that takes place there, is thoroughly an afterimage of the cosmic. The earth has little influence there.

The chest organism is in a completely different situation. The chest organism takes in the air we breathe and processes it. This is something that is in the immediate vicinity of the earth, that does not enter the human organism in such a fine way as what the eyes make of colors. The air we breathe is coarser than the colored light that enters our organism. Therefore, the coarser inhaled air has a much stronger, more transformative influence on everything that is present in the chest organism as a reproduction of cosmic processes. And just wait until we look at the blood circulation! All human foodstuffs play a role in the blood circulation. They are first absorbed as food, changed by the digestive and nutritional activity, and sent into the circulating blood.

When the blood reaches the head, it is in an extremely refined state, one that the ancient intuitive art of clairvoyance correctly called a phosphoric state. It is an extraordinarily refined state. Here the reproduction of cosmic activity has power over matter, so that matter cannot unfold its own forces. If any salt that enters the brain wants to unfold its own forces, it is drowned out, overgrown by the directions and activities that the reproduction of the cosmos exerts in the even thicker blood circulation that takes place in the chest organs. In the chest organs, what comes from within the person has a much greater influence. There, what replicates the cosmos is changed in a much stronger way. And that is why, when you look at the human chest organization with a spiritual eye, it presents itself as I can roughly characterize it in the following way (see drawing).

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You can see how an image of the cosmos really does light up during inhalation. In the brain you can actually see an entire cosmos at play. This is only interrupted for the brain during sleep. Here, sleep does not interrupt anything, but the matter itself is constantly interrupting itself. Seen with spiritual eyes: the chest organization shows stars, and also shows star movements, but backwards in distortion and becoming quite indistinct towards the front. In a certain respect, man is also an after-image of the cosmos in terms of his chest organization, insofar as there are processes on our earth that depend entirely on the regular course of the year and the months. The plants come out and then pass away again. There is regularity. In the plant forms, those spiral paths that I have described unfold. There is a mineral tendency, which is admittedly spread over long periods of time, but which also occurs in a certain way in cosmic regularity. Certain changes take place in the air currents above the earth, which we can observe, for example, in the metamorphoses of the change in weather that occurs over the course of the year. But everything that is irregular in cloud formation, everything that is actually changing weather, falls into this. The whims of meteorology fall into this. The whims of meteorology fall into the cosmic.

Thus, in the human chest, with respect to what is connected to the back, there is a distorted cosmos, a cosmos that gives the impression as if we took our cosmos, which surrounds us, once at night , one giant tugging on one side, another giant tugging on the other, so that instead of a rounded cosmos we would get an elongated cylinder, somewhat thicker in the middle. Thus, in the mind's eye, the Cosmos appears to be receding, and towards the front it appears to be in confusion. Just as what is happening above the earth's surface is changeable, so the Cosmos appears to be in confusion towards the front. The whole thing is such that the Cosmos sometimes shines, sometimes disappears: it shines with inhalation and disappears with exhalation. Just as a person causes physical processes in himself through breathing, inhaling causes the distorted cosmos to shine, while exhaling causes it to darken.

The Indian yogi sought to relive this shining and darkening of the distorted cosmos through his yoga exercises. And from this he then tried to deduce the real form of the world by what he perceived in this way, by breathing in a lively manner until he had a perception of this inner distorted cosmos, and then by reflecting on it, he was able to explore it. Thus, as chest people, we also experience the cosmos a second time, but in a sense as if in a struggle against chaos. And we experience the cosmos a third time, and in such a way that it actually appears quite indistinct. This is because it is integrated into the human metabolic and limbic systems. It is hardly recognizable to what extent what is astral and, according to the I-being, integrated has emerged from the cosmos. That is why, during the lectures I have given here, I had to call what is incorporated “embryonic,” because it is actually an evolving cosmos. It is only when the human being moves his limbs or when the metabolism is active that what appears to be an evolving cosmos behaves very similarly to that in which it is immersed. When I lift a leg, the spiritual essence of this third human limb, as it were, strikes into the leg movement and into the inner processes that arise in connection with the leg movement.

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Schematically, I have to draw this third thing (see drawing) in such a way that there is no longer any sign of a cosmos like this, as it is clearly present in the human head organization, as it is present in the distortion, weakened in relation to the spiritual light, clouded, both in the arm organization and in the leg organization and in the nutrition organization (red). In fact, everything is still in a state of cosmic nebula. We can study cosmic nebulae out in the far reaches of space. But with spiritual vision we can also study the world nebulae on a small, microcosmic scale when we look at the third part of the human being, the limb-metabolic system, and when we see how this nebulous structure (bluish) is embedded in the stars (yellow), as if they wanted to emerge as a halo of light, but then immediately fade away at the moment of emergence. We can see how this is completely overwhelmed by what emanates from the earth. The chemical affinities, the chemical forces of the earth's substances play a major role in this.

During a person's life on earth, it is much more important how the individual earth substances relate to each other in their chemical forces than how what a person has brought with them from the cosmos relates. Nevertheless, the human being is also related to spiritual worlds through this part of his organization. He is related to spiritual worlds through his chest organization in that a spiritual hierarchy plays into his chest organization just as it does into his head organization. In the case of the head it is the third hierarchy; in the case of the chest organization it is the second hierarchy: the Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes. These develop through the earthly human being a cosmic activity in which they make use of what is taking place in the human chest organization. And their activity is such that it is much more spiritual than the activity of the third hierarchy; this third hierarchy can therefore bear what arises in the material image. Therefore, in the human head formation, one really has a material image of the cosmos. Here in the chest organization, there is a distortion for the very reason that the material does not become a faithful replica of the cosmos, so that it can be destroyed again and again, and also dissolved. The cosmic formation is not completed. So there is the earthly, which plays a strong role, and the cosmic, which is not finished in man, remains cosmic, so that a cosmic activity permeates man, insofar as he breathes, insofar as he has a circulation, in which the entities of the second hierarchy work, weaving and floating. And into this, man inserts that living photograph of which I spoke yesterday and in previous lectures, which is an image of his moral and spiritual qualities.

Thus, because man has lungs and the processes of the lungs continue as the breathing processes, because he has a circulation and what is affected by the circulation vibrates into the world ether and even into the world astral, he is enmeshed in the activity of the second hierarchy. His being itself creates cosmic effects, and the beings of the second hierarchy are integrated into what is accomplished cosmically through him. But into this, the further his earthly life progresses, man pushes more and more, the living image of his moral-spiritual qualities, this elemental being, of which I have told you that it is produced by man during his earthly life. Incidentally, every night this elemental being moves out of the person a little, and one can see the activity carried out by the second hierarchy in it. When you are awake, it moves back into the person, and the waking activity further intersperses it with the moral and spiritual evaluations of the person's quality.

The first hierarchy is now connected with the activity that takes place in the metabolic-limb man. The connection is primarily with seraphim, cherubim and thrones. Here man is most physical, most devoted to physical forces. The cosmic plays into him only as a mist. But into this, which is present in him as a faint cosmic activity, which is permeated by a strong, intense material activity in chemistry, in physical action, the activity of the seraphim, cherubim and thrones flames and undulates and pushes into it. For these, through their spirituality, master the strongest material substance, and it will be the entities of this Hierarchy that will one day transform the earthly processes of chemistry, of the physical itself, from the earth form into the form of Jupiter, as I have described in my “Occult Science in Outline”. But into this activity, which actually takes place in the cosmic, is inscribed during earthly life that which has been touched by the will part of the soul, as I have explained in the other lectures, and in which cosmic processes are involved in loose compositions with the actually earthly and the chemical and physical processes that overwhelm the cosmic.

In the limb metabolism system (see drawing), I would say that the earth is in its full possession of the human being. During the earthly course of life, the earthly predominates over the cosmic in this part. In the chest organization, the cosmic balances the earthly. In the head organization, the cosmic predominates. But the head organization can only be connected to the lowest kind of beings of the higher hierarchies. Where the earth predominates, the strongest spiritual beings work in man, because he is more torn from the earth of his being: seraphim, cherubim and thrones.

And when man passes through the 'gate of death', when the physical organism falls away, that which is only a nebulous spiritual being is taken up into the activity of the seraphim, cherubim, thrones and gradually woven into them. But that which was previously formed in the chest organism as the living image of the moral and spiritual man sinks down into this activity. That which was only, I might say, in the current of the middle hierarchy, now enters into the current of the first hierarchy. Thus it acquires greater intensity in the context of the Cosmos, so that man develops his karma as a living elemental being in its middle link. This is then taken over by the current of the first hierarchy. And while man lives through the time between death and a new birth, while he, as I have described to you, frees himself from his karmic image, ascends to the world where he can actually work together with higher beings on the spiritual archetype of the physical organism, while man experiences all this, which he then finds again in this image when he descends, something else is also taking place. While the human being enters the spirit world from the soul world and dwells there, that living image of his self-made destiny is in the meantime being led back by the beings of the highest hierarchy, the seraphim, cherubim and thrones, to the second hierarchy and finally handed over to the third hierarchy, the angels, archangels and archai. On descending again, the human being takes up this image, which he left with the first hierarchy, from the third hierarchy. When he now enters life again, it is incorporated into what takes place between the third hierarchy, the angeloi, archangeloi and archai, and his head organization. Everything that man has produced through his most earthly being and handed over to the cosmos after death, everything that man has developed within himself through having a substance organization dominated by the earth, everything that he must hand over after death to the seraphim , cherubim and thrones, and what he lets flow into the cosmos in this way, he actually receives again in the way in which the angels, archangels and archai work through his head organization in a new life on earth. Man hands over to the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones that which he has prepared for himself as his destiny, and receives it again from the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai. These carry it over into the activity that he will carry out in a new life on earth. In this way, what he handed over to the first hierarchy when he left his last life on earth is taken up into his new earthly destiny from the hand of the third hierarchy.

So you see that you can only understand the universe as a whole if you place the connection that our senses can survey and our minds can think into the context that arises from real vision. For there not only growing plants appear, not only water in cloud formations, in currents, there not only physical stars appear, there the whole cosmos appears in its living activity, spiritualized by a series of hierarchies, which also exercise a physical activity, an activity that permeates and surges through this physical activity. And events of a kind take place that, while man experiences existence between death and a new birth, his human destiny passes from the hand of the seraphim, cherubim and thrones to that of the angeloi, archangeloi and archai. In this way, each person receives what he or she is destined to experience in a new life. What a person has left to the highest hierarchy, he or she receives back from the hand of the third hierarchy, and together with the third hierarchy, he or she must bring it back into the world balance through balancing deeds during his or her earthly existence.

Address given during the first Anthroposophical College Course at the Goetheanum, in response to the call to academic youth.

Dear fellow students! You will understand that I cannot speak about the content of the call itself, since it is too closely associated with my person. And so it will be best if I, in the words that I am allowed to speak to you today, refer more to what actually announces itself as a desire from the current student body for new scientific and general cultural goals, as well as for social life.

When I consider this appeal, it reminds me of another appeal that was also supposed to start from Stuttgart some time ago: the appeal that was then intended to form a cultural council.

In 1919, when our work began in Stuttgart, it was initially based on the “Appeal to the German People and the Cultural World”, which I was allowed to write and which made its way around the world in March of the previous year. And this work was based on what I tried to set out as social guidelines in my book “The Key Points of the Social Question”. At that time a number of prominent people who stood by the convictions and social aims of the Kernpunkte decided to found a Cultural Council as one of their most important undertakings. They intended to show the world how to approach the renewal of spiritual life and the permeation of spiritual life with new impulses.

You know, in the “Key Points of the Social Question” attention is drawn to the fact that the most important aspiration of our time must be to raise a subconscious goal of present humanity to conscious action. That is precisely: the shaping of the social organism into a threefold one.

Anyone who has the slightest insight into the seething and pulsating life of humanity today can already feel that there is nothing utopian in these “key points”. Rather, it is the result of thirty to thirty-five years of observation that years of observation, what actually the majority of people fundamentally want, or let us say, actually should want according to their instincts, according to their feelings, but what they do not yet admit to themselves because they have a certain fear of raising it to their consciousness.

We can see the need for new paths to be taken in all three areas of life: in the spiritual, in the legal, state and political, and in the economic. And in my “Key Points” I tried to show how the main obstacles to walking on such new paths arise from the fact that over the last three to four centuries we have become accustomed to the suggestion that the unitary state must do everything. One could say that the unified state has gradually occupied the university system as well. The university system was annexed and occupied. Just consider that this university system has developed out of intellectual life itself. Consider that, in a time not so long behind us, the validity of the university system was based entirely on the individual fertility of the individual universities. Consider how people spoke of the law faculty in Bologna, how they spoke of the medical school in Salerno, how they spoke of other important schools; how they derived the reputation of the university system in the world from the special individual achievements of what was available in the individual universities. And it is basically only a more recent occupation or annexation, carried out by the states that were increasingly seizing power, that our higher education system finally ended up serving the external needs of the individual states. Today, in particular, anyone who feels connected to the pursuit of knowledge and the spirit and to the cultural aspirations of humanity should have some kind of historical memory of times when it was up to the universities to decide what they wanted to give the state and what they wanted to make of the state. And, I would like to say, a certain inner impulse, which comes from reflecting on things, should lead one to realize that, as was emphasized again and again at the end of the 18th century, at the beginning of the 19th century of the Age of Enlightenment, in the times of the Middle Ages, science was the servant of the theological and ecclesiastical establishment. How often has it been repeated, what Kant – you know that I am no Kantian – said with the words: the time is over when all the sciences followed in the train of theology. The sciences have become independent. They are called upon to carry the banner of all other culture. But basically only after such words had become popular from a justified feeling towards the spiritual life in the branches of science, only after that the state has created the current that has now made the university system the servant of the state, of politics, of jurisprudence. And, my esteemed fellow students, whether it is better for theology, that is, at least for something spiritual, to trail behind, or for the external state to trail behind, is still an open question. The coming times will have to pass judgment on that. For it was not nice, either, that, so to speak, a century after Kant spoke, science no longer wanted to follow theology, the rector of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, the famous physiologist Du Bois-Reymond, said that the gentlemen members of the Berlin Academy of Sciences felt very honored to be allowed to call themselves: the scientific protection force of the Hohenzollerns. This is ultimately the result of what I would like to call the occupation of the higher education system by the state. And it goes without saying that the state does not care for science, but for its “civil servants”. Recently, my dear fellow students, the rector of the University of Halle was able to publish an essay that throws a very strange spotlight on the old attitudes that he has come from after becoming rector. The rector of the University of Halle seems to be reasonably well informed about important events behind the scenes, because he points out with concern and in great detail in a newspaper article that there is an intention to close a large number of German universities and to establish civil service schools in their place, where civil servants will be trained in the right way. Yes, my dear fellow students, one must look at these things if one wants to understand that a relatively sharp language was used at the time in that appeal to a cultural council that originated in Stuttgart. Because what has had an effect on the university system has not only affected the appointment of professors and the inconvenience of the examination system, but has also affected the sciences, knowledge, and the spirit itself. And that is why a remedy was sought at the time, by calling upon everyone who was believed to have a heart and a mind for furthering the cause of education and spiritual matters in general. And it was the hope of those people who set to work on this appeal with a warm heart for such a cause that the first step was to turn to the representatives of spiritual life itself. Many well-meaning people thought that the university teachers themselves would see reason and go along with the emancipation of the university system from the state.

Well, my esteemed fellow students, a truly active support was not found. But all the more often one could hear how the gentlemen expressed themselves in a peculiar way. They said: Yes, if this threefold social order were realized, with its free spiritual life, then it would come about that instead of the minister of education and his civil servants, the teachers at the universities themselves would exercise a kind of administration of the entire educational system. No, said the gentlemen, I would rather be under the minister of education and his deputies than be subject to the decrees and measures that my colleagues make. And one could hear very strange statements about one's colleagues. And since one had the opportunity, in this journey through the opinions of university teachers, to hear what A said about B and B about A, not many of those remained who could be relied upon in this self-administration, this desire of the spiritual organism to be left to its own devices. One had quite sad experiences. You may already be aware that this whole cultural appeal, with all its good intentions, was in vain, that basically no one from the circle of spiritual workers wanted to stand up for a free spiritual life.

But one can also sense from external appearances what has happened in recent decades. Some people do not yet appreciate things in the right way. I would just like to emphasize that, for example, what one used to become by being part of the School of Spiritual Science was expressed in something that, so to speak, grew out of the scientific and the striving for knowledge itself. What had something to do with the quest for knowledge is the degree system at the various faculties. One only notices how the state examination system has crept into this degree system, which emerged from the self-administration of the universities. Finally, compared to the state examinations, what grew out of the universities, out of the sciences themselves, has become only a decoration.

Of course, such things are only symptoms at first. But as symptoms they show very clearly that a process of absorption of intellectual life by the political, by the external state life, has taken place to a high degree. And you can be quite sure that the state system, which I have pointed out today, and which only wants to be a state system, will kill the universities altogether because it does not need them as universities, as centers of learning. Because it has needed what it has needed from the universities so far only as a school for state officials, it will transform everything into schools for state officials. That is the tendency of the time. When something like this is mentioned, people always want to dismiss it as utopian, as the words of a false prophet. But one must also be able to see a little in the direction in which the times are moving. And finally, it has already progressed so far that we see a school of civil servants emerging from the law faculty, and an aspiration emerging from the medical faculty that aims to turn the healer of people into a mere cog in the state machine. And at the philosophy faculty? What is of much value today is what prepares people to be teaching officials, not educators, in the sense of the state! In Germany, the model country, in democratized Germany, teachers are no longer even called teachers or professors, but – horror of horrors! – Studienassessor or Studienoberassessor and the like. But these outward appearances have to do with the whole inner spirit of the sciences. And it was truly a sad thing that one had to realize that on the part of the teachers there is absolutely no heart and no sense for an independent intellectual life.

I must bear this in mind when I now take up the call that comes from the student body. If old age cannot do it – there is no other way to put it – then young people must feel it as their sacred duty to stand up for the freedom of intellectual life. Because we can be sure of one thing: if no one stands up for the freedom of intellectual life, if no one stands up for the original sources of a renewal of knowledge, then the times in which the next generation of our civilized humanity grows up will be dire. It is not without significance that a man as brilliant as Oswald Spengler can already prove scientifically, that is, with the means of the old science, that Western civilization is heading towards barbarism. We have learned to prove many things scientifically. Today, it is really being proved with great force that all our knowledge leads to barbarism.

This is something that, as one can believe, must weigh like a nightmare on the youth, who, after all, must not grow up today in blind faith in authority, who must not allow themselves a blind faith in authority, but who must look with seeing eyes at what is going on at the institutions they enter in order to grow into life. And one may therefore believe that it can make a certain beneficial impression, apart from everything - and I will and can disregard all that relates to me personally in the appeal - it makes a beneficial impression that now, in contrast to the old leaders, the led are speaking out and saying what they want, and that they are saying it in concrete terms. Because, my dear fellow students, the liberation of intellectual life, the independence of the intellectual organism, cannot be achieved through tirades or rhetoric. That which has been absorbed by the state must be pulled out again. But this can only happen if there is a real intellectual force. And just as in the age of materialism science was powerless in the face of the state's desires for absorption, so would a material science remain powerless in the face of the state's desires for absorption, transforming science into barbarism. To lift the spirit of science and knowledge out of politics, out of all that it is involved in today to its detriment, can only have a positive effect. Just as material science has fallen prey to unscientific powers, so too will spiritual science, through its own essence, through its own power, be able to pull this science out of the unspiritual powers again. And only it will be able to establish the free spiritual life, the spiritual part of the social organism that is independent.

Of course, you who are signing this appeal must realize that it will be perceived as a storm, especially when it comes from such a source. But, my esteemed fellow students, we cannot make progress without a storm today; without the will and courage to truly transform what needs to be transformed, we will not move forward, but instead continue to decline, into barbarism. It must be clear from the outset that this appeal cannot be favorably received by certain quarters. But I believe that all those who wholeheartedly and courageously subscribe to it are also aware that nothing at all could be achieved with an appeal that would be favorably received by certain quarters, to which I am alluding here. We must be prepared for a fight with those who want to do the opposite today.

Of course, it will be important not to simply issue a call in words and send it out into the world. My dear fellow students, I have seen many calls in the course of my life. And I know that appeals mean nothing if there are no people standing behind them, for whose will such an appeal is basically only an expression, even an external means of expression. People whose strength does not wane when they see how everything is opposed to what one wants in the early days, energetic people must stand behind such a cause, otherwise words of such severity are not justified. But they must be justified in our time, basically after all the experiences that have been made. But all that must be made clear as criticism to those who are concerned in this way through such criticism of the existing, all that must be juxtaposed to the positive work. And we will probably have to see, if what is intended is to succeed, that circles are formed and more and more circles are formed, ever larger and larger areas, completely internationally, that really work in the sense of spiritual science, that they fertilize the individual scientific disciplines with spiritual science.

It has gradually come to something strange when it has been a matter of connecting young, aspiring minds to the operation of spiritual life. I would think of many things if I wanted to talk about this chapter. I will just tell you an example of a nice scene that once took place at a philosophical faculty, where a young, hopeful doctor wanted to habilitate for – yes, for philosophy. He went to the professor, who held him in high esteem, and told him that he wanted to habilitate, and what would now be pleasant for him was that this would be chosen as the topic for his inaugural lecture. Then the professor, who, as I said, was well disposed towards the young doctor and who wanted this young doctor to become a private lecturer at his side, said: Yes, but that's not possible at all! I can't recommend you to my colleagues for a lectureship; they'd all turn on me. You've only written about philosophical events and personalities of the 19th century in philosophy; we can't allow someone like that to become a lecturer. You must have written about much, much older things. – Yes, said the young doctor, what should I do now, Mr. Hofrat? I thought what I wrote about Schopenhauer, about the development of aesthetics in the 19th century, would be good? Perhaps the Viennese present already realize who it is? Yes, said the Privy Councillor, it doesn't depend on what you write about, but only on it being old and unknown. Let us look up an old Italian esthete in the encyclopedia. They opened the encyclopedia and came to G, where the name Gravina was listed. Neither of them knew anything about him, but the professor in question thought it was the right thing to do. And the young doctor wrote his habilitation thesis on this interesting topic, a completely unknown, insignificant Italian esthete. And now the professor could admit him as a private lecturer. But the whole process took much longer than that; he had to work on it for at least a year and a half, I think, because it was not that easy to put the merits of this unknown Italian esthete in the right perspective.

That is just an extreme case. But you can imagine the huge number of such cases.

Let us just take a look at how it came about that, little by little, all freedom in the choice of dissertation topics basically ceased. In a subject such as modern philology, Wilhelm Scherer, for example, actually managed to schematize and organize the entire dissertation process. A student who came and asked for a dissertation topic was simply allowed to do that dissertation, whether it suited him or not, whether he had done something special on the subject or not, it did not matter. He was allowed to do the dissertation that could serve some professor who then wanted to write a detailed book on the subject by collecting the individual dissertations and the like. But this external activity corresponds more closely than one might think to the inner workings of the spiritual life. And I do not think I am mistaken if I say that it would be of the greatest benefit to you, my esteemed fellow students, if you could really counter the spirit that is blowing from there with a fresh, elementary source of scientific work. If you formed circles and, with all the tools and sources at your disposal, tried real, original, elementary scientific work. From group to group in individual cities, those who want to work in this spirit may come together – I would say that if you want my advice. If you want to work for the lively flourishing of scientific life, of the life of knowledge, then the chemist, the physicist, the philosopher, the lawyer, the historian, the philologist will be able to contribute to some common topic in a common effort. And if it is desired, then we who work in Dornach for these university courses will endeavor to create a kind of free committee of those lecturers who have lectured on the various branches of science that have been fertilized by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, and that this committee can make suggestions about what should be dealt with first. The topics should not be chosen out of the spirit that has come from people who govern in these fields to this day, but rather, it should be suggested more out of the need for the general spiritual life of humanity. And again, the free choice should be counted on. Those who have had some experience may say what is necessary. Those who see what is needed from this free committee may decide what they are particularly suited for. And so those who have now pioneered a kind of free college system here in Dornach by giving lectures could work together with those who, as enthusiastic students, are interested in the question of what will become of the spiritual life of Western civilization through this spiritual science.

This is roughly the way in which one could initially attempt to put the words of the appeal into practice in a positive way in scientific work. Of course, it is not yet time to give more detailed advice. But you can be sure that those working here in Dornach or in Stuttgart will always be ready to use all their strength to support, to support, to advise, to help wherever an enthusiastic student body wants to contribute its mite, there or there, in this or that group to what today must be a great, comprehensive, intensive task, an enormous ideal: to lead from a renewed spiritual research going back to the original sources, to a spiritual life - and thus to the general cultural and civilizing life of humanity - to an ascent, to a dawn, not to a decline, not to a sunset, as some believe.

And by promising that everything in me will be done to ensure that intensive scientific collaboration based on inner harmony takes place, by promising you this, I would like to answer the question that was put to me: what I advise as a positive thing to do first. If we really work together in this spirit, then the student body will be able to produce the results that have unfortunately not been produced by those who supposedly lead the student body, whose task it would be, however, to provide the student body with leaders. If they do not prove themselves as such, well, then a good school in breaking away from all belief in authority will be what you will have to go through if you stand on the ground of free scientific work. I believe I can foresee that you will be able to work well together with spiritual science and with all that is wanted from Dornach and from Stuttgart, if you place yourself on such ground. And it is from this attitude that I would like to have addressed you today, my esteemed fellow students.

My dear fellow students! It is clear from many statements of this kind that we are counting on you with all our hearts for what we are thinking of here as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. We are counting on you with all our hearts because, if we are to work against the impending downfall of Western civilization, it can only come from science, given the state of affairs today. Consider that what has brought us into today's situation, after all, basically also comes from science. I will point out much less what is actually, so to speak, on the palm of your hand: that the destructive anti-cultural institutions of the latest time are basically scientific results. It is easy to imagine that, so we don't have to discuss it here. But we want to consider something else. You see, the proletariat, if I may use the grotesque expression, has a kind of Janus face today. It is quite true that the proletariat must be brought in if the situation is to be reorganized today. That, again, is something that is as self-evident as can be. And perhaps I may remind you that in Stuttgart, among the nearer and more distant surroundings, the cold was at its worst when I once used a certain word in a public lecture, but which, I believe, was spoken out of a real insight into present conditions. I said that the bourgeoisie suffers first of all from a decadent brain and that it is absolutely dependent on replacing brain work with the work of the ether brain, with something spiritualized. That is as obvious as anything can be. By contrast, the proletarian, in the context of the present vertical migration of peoples, does not yet have a decadent brain. He can still work with his physical brain if only he can be persuaded to do so. This, of course, has caused a great deal of resentment among the bourgeoisie in the immediate and more distant vicinity. But today it is not a matter of whether people are more or less resentful, but of bringing the truth to light.

Now, however, the proletariat is revealing this. On the one hand, the proletarians will always be inclined to say to themselves: Yes, we don't want to know anything about what you are bringing us. It's too difficult for us; it's not of interest to us for the time being. But on the other hand, these proletarians are completely fed up with the waste products of the science of the 19th and early 20th centuries. They only work with what has fallen away from it. We must make up our minds to look at it that way. We must say to ourselves: Of course it will be quite difficult to enter the proletariat with what we are working out of science in a very serious way. But if we do not let up, if we do not let ourselves be deterred, but rather base ourselves on this social action: we must win the proletariat from science! then we will also certainly get through to the proletariat with something sound, just as one has come to the proletariat with Marxism and Bolshevism. It is only a matter of not losing our breath too soon, that we actually carry out what we have once recognized as correct. That was always and always my principle in anthroposophical work. Therefore, I never compromised, but simply made enemies with full insight into the matter, because there was no other way than to simply reject everything that came up amateurishly. And if it were worth the effort, it would be very easy to prove that the majority of our current enemies are people who were once rejected because of over-amateurism. You would see, if you went into the details, that this is the case. All you need is a substitute for memory. After all, memory is no longer as strong! If you have access to spiritual training, you know that. Then you know how to assess the enemies. They often emerge from the shallows only after years.

Therefore, you must not shrink from a powerful adherence to what was once recognized as correct, then it will also go with the proletariat. For the proletariat suffers only from an exaggerated sense of authority. But as soon as you have it for yourself, you would win it. It is still difficult today to make people understand that their leaders are their greatest enemies from the bottom to the top; that they are pests. But this must be taught to people little by little; then it will work. Then one will probably give the proletariat an interest in this healthy scientific work that we are scientifically developing. Then one will have an extraordinarily good audience in the proletariat. And for a long time to come, the proletariat itself must, of course, be an 'audience' in its mass.

But now I would like to point out something else. You see, for many years I have been active in the anthroposophical movement and have always tried to work in a certain direction, which consisted of bringing together the anthroposophical and the specifically scientific. I could give you specific examples of the difficulties that have always arisen in this regard. For example, many years ago a scholar approached us who was an extraordinarily learned man in terms of Orientalism and Assyriology. On the other hand, he was enthusiastic about anthroposophy. It would have been natural for someone who really had Orientalism and so on in his fingers as a scholar and was enthusiastic about anthroposophy to work on these two things at the same time. But he could not be brought to do that; the man could not be brought to build a bridge from one area to another. He could make progress in both, but he could not build a bridge. Nevertheless, it must also be the case that this bridge must be tried absolutely. And you can find it; you can find the entrance to every single science through anthroposophy.

On the other hand, I found a well-known professor of botany who was also an enthusiastic 'theosophist'. The man in question wrote botanical works and he wrote about theosophy. He did not belong to the Anthroposophical Society, but to the Theosophical Society. He wrote about theosophy in the same way that Annie Besant wrote about it. He was completely a botanist when he closed the book on Theosophy and completely a 'Theosophist' when he taught or wrote books on Theosophy, without one being able to recognize that he was a botanist. He even found it abhorrent when I spoke to him about botany and wanted to prepare a kind of bridge.

You see, this is the result of the culture of the last few centuries, this double bookkeeping – that is what I must always call it. One wants that which relates to life in the specialist journal, and that which one then needs for the mind, for the “interior”, as one calls it, in the Sunday supplement of one's political newspaper. Politics is in between; according to the “tripartite structure” that has existed up to now, you want to get that from the political paper. These things are the ones that you actually have to see through above all. And then you will perhaps be the ones most qualified to help find this bridge everywhere. In a sense — it won't always appear so radically — things are like that.

You see, poor Hölderlin already expressed the beautiful word at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century when he said to himself, when he looks around his Germany, he finds officials, factory owners, carpenters and tailors everywhere, but — no people. He finds scholars, artists and teachers and so on, but — no people. He finds young and older and old, sedate people, but – no people.

One would like to say today: We actually have the least of all in our learned professions, that there are people there! We have sciences, and the scientists actually swim around as something factual. Basically, we actually live to a high degree quite apart from science, in that we feel like human beings. Just think, if we today – I mean, if we summarize all of our scholarly knowledge – if we do a piece of work today to habilitate, what do we do then? We cannot just sit down and write what flows from our soul into such a scholarly work. That doesn't work. Then we would very soon be reproached: Yes, he writes from the wrist. You mustn't do that. You mustn't write from the wrist, but you have to study the books for your doctoral dissertation, which you otherwise don't pay attention to, maybe don't even read, only open at the pages where something is written that you have to quote. In short, you have to have as external a relationship as possible to what you are working on, and you absolutely must not have an internal relationship to it! When people meet again, I can tell you about a strange meeting in Weimar that took place during my working hours at the local Goethe-Schiller Archive, where I was able to attend the meetings of the Goethe Society. As soon as someone said something that was related to Goethe, or as soon as someone touched on something scientific, they would say: There's another group talking shop, that's not on! The purpose of the gathering was something that had to be avoided at all costs, so as not to be seen in a bad light of talking shop. But all of this is essentially to blame for the fact that we have ended up in this situation. In Weimar, one could really see all the specialists – many of them offered a kind of combination of all subjects – in these seven years, and there was basically no strong differentiation by nationality. For example, when Mr. Thomas from a very Western university in America writes, there is no real difference between the work and thinking of any Schmidt or Scherer student, even in his work and thinking - he worked on Goethe's “Faust.” It was basically international, because Thomas only differed from the others in that he sat on the floor and crossed his legs when he sat on the floor in front of the bookcase. That was how he distinguished himself as an American. But otherwise he worked like the others. The only exception was a Russian councilor. The man didn't know what questions he was researching. But when he came to an inn in the evening, where people would gather, they would always say to the others: “Don't look around, because the councilor is walking around!” Because he kept starting to talk about what he knew of Goethe's Faust, people avoided sitting with him. These things are actually more important than one would usually think; for they could be amply multiplied and would still explain something about how the scientific life has developed bit by bit. And we want to get out of this! We certainly do not want to become pedants or new-fangled simplifiers, but we must realize that man stands higher than all science, that he need not let himself be tyrannized by it. And the emancipation of the spirit is actually working towards combating science as such in its abstraction, and putting man first. So that we not only have science as Bölsche writes about the “immortality” of science. Wilhelm Bölsche has also set up a kind of spiritual science, but he seeks it in libraries, which are, however, full of paper and blackened print of the actual spirits.

But this is what we must work towards: this humanization of scientific life, this: putting people in the foreground in so-called objective science. Objective science must actually have its existence in life in man. And having this does not make one dry and arid. On the contrary, by combating abstract thinking, one becomes a useful co-worker in that which we so urgently need: the combating of barbarism in the life of Western civilization.

This is what is most urgently needed by those who enter the learned professions, or professions supported by the sciences. Therefore, I believe that it will be extraordinarily beneficial if you get together at the individual universities and freely address such topics scientifically, develop such topics, as it is to be attempted from the bodies that we already have, especially from the Waldorf school. I am not thinking that a school-like operation should be set up, not at all, my dear fellow students, but I am thinking of something else. We will try, so to speak, to shape the threads in such a way that they are woven out of the necessities of the time, that they are basically found in view of what actually lies in the ethos of the overall context of our culture. And then certain individuals among our Waldorf school teachers, the body of teachers, which in turn should maintain a kind of unity with those who have presented here, should simply be given the task of identifying the topics that need to be resolved today. And it should only be said to the student body what tasks are necessary according to the insights that these circles can have. The rest is therefore not letting oneself be led by the tasks, but it is a fathoming of what is particularly necessary today. And there will be the opportunity to work really correctly from scientific foundations. I would like to emphasize that it must be avoided that small scientific circles, more or less really or supposedly working, isolate themselves and believe that they can do enough with that today. This could, of course, be very useful and will be very useful, and it must also be done, but we also need a broad student movement that is truly aware today: things cannot go on as they would among young people if these young people were only to follow in the footsteps of those who still hold office today out of old traditions and old times. If one says that the Social Democrats must get rid of their leaders, then it is above all necessary that the youth of today get rid of the old leaders in a certain way. That will be more difficult than it should be.

Because, you see, I cannot, of course, avoid the issue that is actually at stake. And I must ask you to be quite clear about the fact that I am talking about these things with complete honesty and sincerity. You can be quite sure: we would make easy progress in the anthroposophically oriented spiritual movement if we had the freedom to work only for the spirit and as a stimulus to the spirit. Assigning posts, awarding degrees, letting students fail their state exams – that is what the others do. And that is an important factor. We certainly do not underestimate it in our field. For we know full well what courage and boldness are needed today, especially for the prospective scholar and prospective scientific worker, to be and remain with us. Because, in fact, we can offer him very little today. If we can gradually build up our individual movements, then things will improve. When the Waldorf School was founded, I said: the founding is nice, but it has no meaning if at least ten more schools are not founded in the next quarter, because then it is only established. And I have definitely envisaged – as I always follow up practical ideas, not just ideas that can be handed down – that if we can found schools everywhere, then we will be able to appoint to our schools those who, under certain circumstances, do it the way Dr. Stein told us himself. But it is not a system. He enrolled, saw what a few lectures were like, but otherwise he read cycles and other things, read what was quoted there, and completed his academic studies. Of course, this cannot be generalized, because probably only three quarters of the professors would agree that if there were only students like Dr. Stein, they could actually only attend the first three lectures and then go for a walk. This cannot be easily realized for the general public today. So I do not want to propagate that. But I just want to draw your attention to the fact that at any rate the spirit that sits on the chairs in the lecture halls today, if it is transferred to the school benches, does not bring us any future. Out of this necessity you must already find the courage to at least in some way ally yourselves with what is wanted here. But on the other hand, I thought practically, as the Waldorf School was founded: if we are able to truly emancipate spiritual life, we will have more and more Waldorf Schools, and then we will also be able to offer our young friends from the student body a future. It is not at all unidealistic for me to say that. But then it will be easier. But we have to support each other from both sides. We will only be able to work on founding independent schools and universities if we see an understanding student body coming towards us. To do this, we need not only small groups, but a student movement that wants to work on a large scale and advocate on a large scale for what is being considered here.

I must point out that what I have said in these days as the reason for the World School Association is meant very seriously. I think of it as international, so that it is to be created, so to speak, out of the thinking and feeling of today. If we can first make the world understand that there are really only two movements today that have to struggle with each other, on the one hand Bolshevism, which is leading the world into the swamp, and on the other hand the threefold social organism, then people will also be faced with a choice as soon as they see that the old impulses will no longer work! Either it must happen, that those who want to advance civilization in a reasonable way must gradually live into the impulse of threefolding, or, if people are too lazy to do so, Bolshevism will flood Europe and barbarize European culture. If people understand this, they will be easier to win than they are today.

There are three things that must be taken into account. When one speaks to the international world today about a project such as the one in Dornach, and that money is needed for it, people take the view that it must all be idealism! You can't be so mean as to give money for it! Money is much too dirty to be used for such an idealistic cause. In short, people are not easily won over to something like this unless they are prepared for it for a long time. And since we cannot complete our building in Central European countries because of the foreign currency, we are dependent on other parts of today's civilized world. But they don't give us any money just like that. Basically, they are very tight-fisted. On the other hand, people are still relatively easy to win over if you tell them you want to set up sanatoriums. You can get as much money as you want. We can't do that now, set up sanatoriums, but we can get involved in the middle way. The middle way is what I mean by the world school association. The World School Association can finance all cultural institutions if it is understood in the right way. And there is still some understanding for the establishment of the school-based approach, but less for something that is directly the building. We have to work for what is in the middle, so to speak. Therefore, it is important that this foundation of the World School Association, which we will have as something universal, be prepared in a certain way, that the mood be set for this World School Association. And so I would like to suggest that it would be best if you were to include in your decisions, in your strongest initiative, that you approach everyone you can, and convince them that this World School Association must spread across all countries, that it is up to them to emancipate intellectual life. That it must finance as many free schools across the world as possible. The emancipation of spiritual life must be pursued on the grandest scale. We must come to emancipate ourselves from that which, in essence, enslaves us spiritually. But we can only do that if we create the right mood. The tyranny is greater than one might think. From a place in Europe, I will attempt to inaugurate this founding of the World School Association myself. But what must come first is to create the right mood for it. Because today you can't achieve anything by forming groups of twelve or fifteen people to work things out. Rather, it is important that we spread this idea as widely as possible: a world school association must come into being. Now, I can well imagine, and I am quite satisfied with the fact, that of course the students can't exactly open their wallets very wide. That is not necessary. The others belong to this. But what the student can open, that is – you know, I mean this cum grano salis – what the student can open, that is his mouth. That is what I mean: that you can make it possible for the World School Association to open its mouth wherever you go. So that when we establish this World School Association in the near future, we will not fall on deaf ears, but on prepared people. That is what must be.

As you can see, we have enough to do. What we need is nothing more than real courage and a clear view of the world. Why should we not be able to overcome with youthful strength the things that must be overcome because they still tower over our time with all the hallmarks of the old age and seek to oppress us? We must not let ourselves be oppressed. We must realize today that we are dancing on a knife's edge, or, as we might say, on a volcano. It is not the case, my dear fellow students, that things will continue as they are now. We are heading for very, very sad times. But we can remedy these sad times by growing into them with courage and energy. And I believe that spiritual science, anthroposophy, can be of help to you in this. It can be of help to everyone.

I ask you in conclusion only: do not pursue things particularistically, sectionally, but in the broadest style. Do not exclude anyone, but include everyone who wants to work with you. The only thing that should count is the will to work honestly with us in the direction we have set, the direction of growing into the scientific professions. It seems to me, my dear fellow students, that we must not sin in this direction any longer. We must be broad-minded. We must regard everyone who honestly wants to work with us as a very welcome co-worker. We must not allow any distinction to arise between people and people, but we must let everyone who simply has the will to work with us, work with us. This should also be the case, as it has always been in the anthroposophical movement. We have never demanded that anyone give up anything they otherwise represent in the world. No one has ever had to give up anything; they only had to accept what the Anthroposophical movement could give them. And perhaps I may recall something personal. You know how I am always reproached for having once been part of the Theosophical movement. It was not a matter of me going along with it! The Theosophical Society actually approached me; it joined me for a time, until it threw out what I stood for. But I said to the Theosophists at our first meeting in London that it was not a matter of us accepting anything from the center, but rather of us bringing to the common altar what we had to bring at that particular time.

In this sense, we can work together to the greatest extent possible. And if you work in the style of such work, especially in student circles, then we will make progress.

At the suggestion of German students, a meeting was held on the afternoon of 9 April 1921 to discuss the question of how anthroposophical work could be built up at universities. Dr. Steiner spoke at the end.

Dr. Stein has, however, pointed out the three most important things to be considered here: whether to organize or not, as desired. But above all, I would like to emphasize one thing: if you are involved in a movement like ours, it is necessary to learn from the past and to lead further stages of the movement in such a way that certain earlier mistakes are avoided.

What it will depend on in the first place is this: that anthroposophy, to the extent that it can already be accepted by the student body in terms of understanding and to the extent that it is at all possible through the available forces or opportunities, that anthroposophy in its various branches be spread among the student body as positive spiritual content. Our experience has basically shown that something real can only be achieved if one can really build on the basis of the positive.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to point out that years ago an attempt was made to establish a kind of world federation for spiritual science, and that nothing came of this world federation, which actually only wanted to proceed according to the rules of formal external organization. It ended, so to speak, in what the Germans call a “Hornberg shooting”. But because a sense of cohesion and collaboration were needed at the time, the existing adherents of anthroposophy had to be brought together in the “Anthroposophical Society”. These were now more or less all people who had simply been involved with anthroposophy. It is only with such an organization, where there is already something in it, that one can then do something.

Of course it will be especially necessary for the student body not only to work in the sense of spreading the given anthroposophical problems in the narrower sense, but also to work out general problems and the like in the sense that Dr. Stein just meant. Of course, it will not be so necessary at first to work towards dissertations with such things. It has often, really quite often, happened that I have been asked by younger students in recent times along the following lines: Yes, we actually want to combine anthroposophy with our specific science. How can one act so that one works in the right way towards one's goal after graduation, after the state examination? What should you do? How should you organize your work? — I always gave the following advice: Try to get through the official studies as quickly as possible, to get through them as quickly as possible, and I am always very happy to help with any advice. Choose any scientific topic that seems to emerge from the course of your studies, as a dissertation or state examination paper or the like. Whichever topic you choose, each one is of course diametrically opposed to the other approaches in anthroposophical terms; there can be no doubt about that. Each is diametrically opposed. But now I advise you to write your dissertation in such a way that you first write down what the professor can censor, what he will understand; and take a second notebook, and write down everything that arises for you in the course of your studies and that you believe should actually be worked in from anthroposophy. You then keep that for yourself. Then you write your two pages — that is how long a dissertation must be — and you submit them. And try to complete them. Then you can really help anthroposophy energetically with what you have acquired in addition to this one in the second notebook. For one only really realizes what significant problems arise, specialist and specialized problems, when one is put in the position of having to work scientifically on a certain topic and the like. But there is a danger of unclear collaboration with the professors. And submitting dissertations to the professors that are written “in the anthroposophical sense” – these are usually not suitable for professors – I do not consider this to be favorable because it actually slows us down at the pace that the anthroposophical movement should be taking.

We need as many academically trained colleagues as possible. If there is anything that is seriously lacking in the anthroposophical movement today, it is a sufficiently large number of academically trained colleagues. I do not mean the externality of needing, let's say, stamped people. It is not meant that way. But first of all, we need people who have learned to work scientifically from within. This inner scientific work is best learned in one's own work. Secondly, however, we need co-workers who come from the student body as soon as possible, and who are no longer held back by considerations for their later professional studies. — You see, it is not at all surprising that it is as difficult as it is in Switzerland, for example. As a student, of course, it is easy to join such an association in the first few semesters if you are free-minded enough to do so. Then come the last semesters. You are busy with other things, and it becomes more difficult. And so, one by one, the threads you have pulled are torn away. This has just been emphasized.

So I would like to say, especially for scientific collaboration: During such a transition period, the topics must be dealt with in two ways: one that the professor understands and the other that is saved for later. Of course, I am not saying that very special opportunities that arise should not be seized, and that these opportunities, which are there, should not be vigilantly observed by the student body in the most eminent sense and really exploited in the sense and service of the movement. On the one hand, I hope, and on the other hand, I fear almost silently, that our dear friend, Professor Römer in Leipzig, will now be inundated with a huge number of anthroposophical dissertations! But I think that would also be one of the things he would probably prefer. And such a document of student trust would show that he is not one of the professors just mentioned. That would come from the foundation.

Now, however, we need an expansion of what has already been discussed here in Dornach, namely a kind of collaboration after all. You will work out among yourselves later how this can best be done technically. It would be good if, with the help of the Waldorf teachers, who would be joined by other personalities from our ranks – Professor Römer, Dr. Unger and others – a certain exchange could take place, especially regarding the choice of topics for dissertations or scientific papers, without in any way compromising the free initiative of the individual. It can only be in the form of advice. It is precisely for this scientific work that a closer union should be sought – you do not need an organization, but an exchange of ideas.

The economic aspect is, of course, a very, very important one. It is a fact that the university system in particular, but actually more or less the entire higher education system, will suffer greatly from our economic difficulties. Now it is a matter of really seeing clearly that it is only possible to help if it is possible to advance such institutions, as for example for Germany it is the “Kommende Tag”, as it is here the “Futurum”. So that a reorganization of the economic situation of the student body can also emanate from these organizations. I can assure you that all the things we are tackling in this direction are actually calculated on rapid growth. We do not have time to take our time; instead, we actually have to make rapid progress with such economic organizations. And here I must say that the members of the student body, perhaps with very few exceptions, can help us above all by spreading understanding for such things. It has really happened in relation to other things that the student could get something from his father for this or that, could get something from his relatives. Not everyone has only destitute friends. And then there really is something that works like an avalanche. Just think about how powerfully something like an avalanche works, based on experience: when you start somewhere, it continues. Something like this continues to have an effect when you act out of the positive: try to study these brochures that have been published by “Kommender Tag” and “Futurum”, and try to create understanding for something like this.

It is this understanding that the oldest people in particular find extremely difficult to work their way up to. I have seen how older people, I would say, have chewed on the desire to understand what “Tomorrow” or “Futurum” want, how they have repeatedly fallen back on their old economic prejudices, like a cat on its paws, with which they have rushed into economic decline, and how they cannot find their way out. I believe that my dear fellow students really do have a clear understanding that could also have an effect on the older generations. We cannot make any progress in any other way. Because I can tell you: when we have come so far in relation to these economic institutions that we can effectively do something, that we first of all have enough funds to do something on a large scale – because only then does it help – and on the other hand can overcome the resistance of the proletariat, which is simply hostile to an economic improvement in the situation of students, then it must indeed be the first concern of these our economic organizations to work economically in relation to the student body.

The “struggle problems”! Yes, you see, the point is this. The Anthroposophical Society, even if it was not called that in the past, has existed since the beginning of the century, and it has actually only ever worked positively, at least as far as I myself am concerned. It let the opponents rant and rave, do all sorts of things. But of course the opponents then come up with certain objections. They say, this has been said, that has been said, yes, that has not even been refuted. It is indeed difficult to find understanding for the fact that it is actually the person making the claim who has the burden of proof, not the person to whom it is attributed. And we could really experience it, again and again, that strange views emerged precisely among academics, I now mean lecturers, professors, pastors and those who had emerged from the ranks of academics. Just think, for example, of the things said against anthroposophy, anthroposophists and so on by professors who are, I would say, 'revered' by the outside world (but I say this only with caution) – things that are so well documented that following up the evidence is a mockery, a bloody mockery, of all possible methods of making a claim in science. and so on, which are so documented that if one follows these documents with reasons, it is a mockery, a bloody mockery of all possible methods of asserting something in science. Therefore, with someone like Professor Fuchs, I simply had to say: It is impossible that this person is anything other than a completely impossible anatomist! Am I supposed to believe that he conscientiously tests his things when, after all that has been presented, he tests my baptismal certificate in the way he has tested it? You have to draw conclusions about the way one person treats one area from the way they treat another. Such things simply show – through the fact that people step forward and show their particular habits – the symptoms of how science is done today. Even the things that are presented at universities and technical colleges today are basically no better founded than the things that are asserted in this way; it is only that the generally extremely loose habits in scientific life are emerging in this way. And that is what is needed: to raise the fight to a higher level, so to speak.

And here it is not necessary, as my fellow student wished, for example, and as I very well understand, to play the game as a “fighting organization.” That is not necessary. Rather, only one thing: to avoid what has occurred so frequently in the Anthroposophical Society. In the Anthroposophical Society, this always came to the fore, as incredible as it is – not in everyone, of course, but very often: one was obliged to defend oneself against a wild accusation, and then to use harsh words, for example, say, in the case when a gentleman of Gleich invents a lecturer “Winter” by reading that I myself have held winter lectures, then invents a personality “Winter” and introduces it into the fight in a very evil way. Yes, you see, I don't think one would say too harsh words in this case if one were to speak of foolishness! Because here, even when it occurs in a general, we are dealing with a genuine, pure-bred idiot. And in the Anthroposophical Society, it was usually the case that one was not wronged by the one who acted somewhat like Mr. von Gleich, but by the one who defended himself. Until today! We have learned from experience that one must not become aggressive in this way. In the eyes of many people, to become aggressive means to defend oneself in this way. It is necessary to follow things with a watchful eye and to reject them, without emphasizing that one is a fighting organization or the like. You have to be positive about it. And then the others must stand behind them, behind the one who is obliged to defend himself. It is not a matter of us becoming fighting cocks ourselves; but it is a matter of the others standing behind us if it should become necessary to defend ourselves. And it is a matter of really following the symptoms of the world-descriptive, scientific, religious and so on in this respect in our time, taking an interest in them.

Take this single phenomenon: I was obliged to characterize in the appropriate way the philosophical, or what should one call it, scribblings of Count Keyserling – in my opinion it does not matter what you call them – because in his incredible superficiality he mixed in the madness that I had started from Haeckel's views. This is not only an objective untruth, but in this case a subjective untruth, that is, a lie, because one must demand that the person who makes such an assertion search for the sources; and he could have seen the chapter that I wrote in the earliest years of my writing in my discussions with Haeckel, in the introduction to Goethe's natural science writings. You can all read it very well. Now Count Keyserling has had a small pamphlet published by his publisher: “The Way to Perfection”. I will not characterize this writing further, but I recommend that one or two of you buy this writing and pass it around; because if everyone wanted to buy it, it would be a waste of money; but I still recommend that you read it so that you get an idea of what, so to speak, goes against all wisdom in this writing “The Way to Perfection” by Keyserling. There is the following sentence, which he made up, more or less, as I remember it – it is not literal: Yes, if I said something incorrect, that Dr. Steiner started from Haeckel, Dr. Steiner could have simply rectified that; he could have corrected me, because I have — and now I ask you to pay close attention to this sentence — because I have no time for a special Steiner source research.

Now then, you see, we have already brought it so far in scientific morality that someone who founds a “school of wisdom” considers it justified to send things out into the world that he admittedly has no time to research, that he therefore does not research! Here one catches a seemingly noble thinker - because Count Keyserling always cited omnipotence in his writing; that is what is so impressive about Count Keyserling, that he always cites omnipotence. All present-day writing has arrived at a point where it is most mired and ragged. And despite the omnipotence, there is a complete moral decline of views here. And so people have to be told: Of course, nobody expects you to do Steiner source research either; but then, if you don't do any Steiner source research, if you don't have time, then – with regard to all these things about which you should know something about the matter: Keep your mouth shut!

You see, it is necessary that we have no illusions, that we simply discard every authority principle that has arisen through convention and the like, that we face ourselves freely, really, truly examining what is present in our time. Then we will be able to notice quite a lot of it today.

I would advise you to look at some of the sentences that the great Germanist Roethe in Berlin occasionally utters, purely in terms of form – I will completely disregard the view, which one can certainly respect. Then you will find it instructive. We do not need to be a fighting organization. But we must be ready and alert to take action when the things that are leading us so horribly into decline actually materialize. Do we need to be an organization of anthroposophical students to do that? We simply need to want to be alert, decent, and scientifically conscientious people, then we can always take a stand against such harm from our most absolute private point of view. And if we are also organized for positive work, then the number of those who are organized for it can stand behind us and support us. We need the latter. But it would not be very clever of us to present ourselves as a fighting organization. On the other hand, it is important that we really work seriously on improving our current conditions. And to do that, we first have to take note of the terrible damage that is coming to light in one field or another – and which is really easy to see, because it involves enormous sums of money – and have the courage to take a stand against it in whatever way we can.

You have already done something if you can do just that: simply set the record straight for a small number of your fellow students with regard to such things, even if it happens only in the smallest of circles. Yesterday, I said to one of our members here regarding the World School Association: I think it is particularly valuable, especially with regard to such things, to start by talking to one or two or three others, that is, to very small groups, even if there are only two of them; and, to put it very radically, if someone can't find anyone else, then at least say it to yourself! So these things are quite tangible in terms of what the individual is able to do. Some will be able to do much more, as has actually already happened with a doctor who was a member and whose fellow students proved to be very enthusiastic. The point is not to make enemies by appearing as fighting cocks in a wild form, but also not to shy away from the fight when others start it. That's it: we must always let the other start; and then the necessary help must stand behind us, which does not allow the tactic to arise, because it has arisen: that we would have started. If they start from the other side, then one is forced to defend oneself; and then you can always read that the anthroposophical side has used this or that in the fight as an attack and so on. They always turn the tables. That is the method of the opponents. We must not let that happen.

As for the World School Association, I would just like to say this: in my opinion, it would be best if the World School Association could be established independently of each other in Entente and neutral countries, but also in the German-speaking area of Central Europe. If it could happen at the same time, so that things could develop independently of each other, so to speak, it would be best. Of course, a certain amount of vigilance is required to see what happens. I believe that Switzerland, in particular, should mediate here. It would be good if we could do it right now. I can assure you: things are on a knife's edge – and if the same possibilities for war existed today as existed in 1914, then we would have had war again long ago. Things are on a knife edge in terms of sentiment and so on. And we won't get something like this World School Association off the ground if, for example, it is founded in Germany now, and then the others, if only for a week, have to play catch-up. It would simply not come off; it would be impractical to do so.

On the other hand, we must not allow any doubt to arise about our position regarding these matters. This School of Spiritual Science is called the Goetheanum. We gave it this name during the First World War while we were still here. The other nations, insofar as they have participated in anthroposophy, have adopted the name and accepted it. We have never denied that we have reasons to call the School of Spiritual Science 'Goetheanum', and it would therefore not be good if in Germany things were allowed to appear as some kind of imitation from the other side.

So it would be a matter of proceeding in this regard — forgive the harsh word — a little less clumsily, of doing it a little more skillfully in the larger world cultural sense! Switzerland would now have to work with full understanding here. So it would actually have to be taken up simultaneously by Central Europe, by the Entente and by the neutral countries.

For the time being, I don't know whether it will take off in just one or two places. This morning I received the news that the committee, which was convened yesterday and which wanted to work so hard, went to bed a few minutes after yesterday's meeting left the hall; it was postponed until tonight. We will wait and see if they meet tonight. We have already had very strange experiences; and based on this knowledge, that we have already had the most diverse experiences, I have taken the liberty of speaking to you here about the fact that the experiences made should be taken into account in the further course of the movement.

On the other hand, I am convinced that if the necessary strong impulse and proper enthusiasm can be found among my fellow students, especially for what I myself and other friends of mine have mentioned in the course of this lecture: enthusiasm for the truth – then things will work out.

I would also like to say: I recently read an article from a feature page, and I can assure you that what recently took place in Stuttgart is not the slightest bit an end, but only a beginning, and I can assure you that things will get much, much worse. I have often said this to our friends here – a very, very long time ago already. I recently read a piece from a feature article in which it says: “Spiritual sparks, which flash like lightning after the wooden mousetrap, are thus sufficiently available, and it will take some of Steiner's cleverness to work in a conciliatory way so that one day a real spark of fire from the Dornach glory does not bring about an inglorious end.

I really do think that whatever must occur as a reaction against such action, which will grow ever stronger and stronger, will have to be better shaped and, above all, more energetically carried out. And I believe that you, my dear fellow students, need to let all your youthful enthusiasm flow in this direction, in what we have often mentioned here during this course: enthusiasm for the truth. Youthful enthusiasm for the truth has always been a very good impulse in the further development of humanity. May it be so in the near future through you in a matter that you recognize as good.

Address in Dornach after the fire of the Goetheanum on New Year's Eve 1922/23.

My dear friends! Esteemed attendees! I would have to read you a book if I wanted to share with you all the extraordinarily kind words and the words of heartfelt connection with what has been lost here as a result of the terrible catastrophe; I will therefore take the liberty of just sharing the names of those who have signed such words of sympathy and devotion to the cause. Some of them are a sign of how deeply the hearts of many people have been touched by what may be communicated from here to the world. Some of them are also signs of truly heartfelt desires and energetic resolutions of will to regain what we have lost. The widespread sympathy for our work and for our loss will certainly be a source of strength for many of you, and for this reason alone I am allowed to communicate all this here. For our cause should not be merely a theoretical one; our cause should be one of labor, of philanthropy, of devoted service to humanity, and therefore, what should be said from here should also include the communication of what is being done or intended to be done. I will only take the liberty of mentioning those names that do not belong to personalities who are here, because what the hearts of those who are here have to share has been expressed more silently, but no less deeply and clearly, in these days, in these days of truly painful togetherness. So you will allow me not to mention the dear friends of the cause who have expressed their sympathy in writing. You know them, of course. [The names are read out.]

We may assume that what has been attempted here is deeply rooted in many hearts, and I would like to fill this evening's lecture by interrupting the reflections of these days, as it were, and remember that it was a course that brought a large number of friends from outside to join the friends who otherwise try to work on the anthroposophical matter here at the Goetheanum. And in particular, I would like to turn first in thought to the young, to the younger friends who have come here for this course and who, to the greatest satisfaction of all those who are serious about anthroposophy, have recently found their way into this movement in such a beautiful, deep and heartfelt way.

We must be absolutely clear about the significance of young souls, souls that are striving to acquire all that can be acquired by a young person today in the way of science, art and so on, finding each other to work within the anthroposophical movement. These younger friends who have come to this course here are among those who came here recently, saw the Goetheanum, saw it again and probably thought that they would leave it in a different state than they are now on their return journey. And if I turn first to these younger friends in my thoughts, it is because everyone who cares about the anthroposophical movement must feel that everything that concerns any group or individual within the movement is their direct concern. Most of our younger friends are people who want to find their way into anthroposophical work through what is today called spiritual life. And I would particularly like to speak first to those who belong to academic life and have felt the urge — but hardly generated by it — to join with others within the anthroposophical movement for further striving.

Above all, it is the holy earnestness of the striving for the fulfillment of the human soul with spiritual life that has driven these young people. Within anthroposophy, however, there is talk of a spiritual life that cannot be acquired in direct contemplation in the easy way that is particularly loved today. And it is made no secret of the fact – not even in the literature, from which everyone in the broadest circle can see for themselves what they will find within the anthroposophical work – that the paths to anthroposophy are difficult. But difficult only for the reason that they are connected with the deepest, but also with the most powerful, of human dignity, and because, on the other hand, they are also connected with what is most necessary for our age, our epoch, what may be said that the discerning person, who correctly appreciates the phenomena of decline in our time, must recognize the necessity of such progress as is at least attempted by the anthroposophical movement.

Now it should certainly not be forgotten that the anthroposophical cause can be of value to the modern man in many ways. He can indeed benefit from it if he tries with true inner devotion to gain a direct insight into the spiritual worlds, and thereby convince himself that everything that is communicated from the spiritual worlds is absolutely based on truth. But I must emphasize again and again that, however necessary it may be for individuals, or perhaps for an unlimited number of people, to take this serious and difficult path in the present day, anyone with unbiased, common sense can gain an insight into the truth of anthroposophy that is based entirely on real inner reasons.

This must be emphasized again and again, lest the objection, which is quite invalid, seemingly gains validity: that actually only the one who clairvoyantly looks into the spiritual world can somehow gain a relationship to what is proclaimed as truth in the anthroposophical movement. Today's general intellectual life, general civilization and culture, they indeed bring forward so many prejudices that it is difficult for man to come to full consciousness in the healthy human mind, to convince himself of the truth of the anthroposophical cause without clairvoyance.

But it is precisely in this area that the Anthroposophical Society should lead the way and focus its work, so that the prejudices of contemporary civilization are increasingly overcome. If the Anthroposophical Society does its duty in this direction, then one can hope that those inner powers of knowledge will arise even without clairvoyance in those who, for whatever reason, cannot strive for the exact clairvoyance that is being spoken of here, but that they can still come to a fully-fledged conviction of the validity of anthroposophical knowledge.

But there is another very special path that younger academics can now find for themselves to anthroposophy. Consider what academic study should and could actually provide today as a solid starting point for coming to one's own view – and I say this expressly: for coming to one's own view – of the anthroposophical spiritual knowledge, if science and knowledge and inner life within our school system were present in the way that the possibility for this is actually available today.

But consider how little younger people today are inwardly connected with what they are supposed to strive for as their science, as their knowledge, within the present civilization. Consider how it cannot be otherwise today, for the most part, than that the individual sciences approach younger people more or less as something external. They approach with a system that is not at all suited to letting the often extraordinarily significant, so-called empirical knowledge speak for itself in its full value. Yes, my dear friends, today within every science that is cultivated, there are harrowing truths, sometimes harrowing truths in details, in specialties. And there are, in particular, such truths that, if properly presented to young people, would act as a kind of mental microscope or telescope, so that, if properly used by the soul, they would unlock tremendous secrets of existence.

But precisely those things that would be tremendously revealing if they were properly cultivated, that would carry hearts and minds away if they came from the depths of humanity and personality within academic life to the youth, precisely those things must be said today in many cases are often brought to young people within a spun-out, indifferent system, often with indifference, so that the relationship of young people to what our empirical science has produced in the most diverse fields of information remains a thoroughly external one. And one would like to say: many, indeed most, of our young academics today go through their studies without any inner interest, letting the subject pass by more or less as a panorama, so to speak, in order to be able to take the necessary repetitions for the exams and find a permanent position.

It almost sounds paradoxical to say that the hearts of academic youth should also be involved in everything that is presented to them. I say that sounds like a paradox, although it could be so. For the possibility exists, because for those who have a subjective disposition for it, sometimes even the driest book or lecture can be enough to be deeply moved, if not by the power of the writer or lecturer, then perhaps by one's own strength, even in one's heart. But I must say that sometimes it goes quite deeply to the soul when one notices, perhaps even in the best of the young friends who come to the anthroposophical movement, that through no fault of their own, but through their destiny within today's civilization ization life, not only have they received nothing for their hearts from the current knowledge base, but — perhaps some will not forgive me for saying this, but most of the young academics here will probably understand — they have also received nothing for their minds.

Today, in this age, as a result of the development of science, which I have tried to characterize during this scientific course, we have reached a point in the development of civilization where it is possible that, without any Anthroposophy, through the mere practice of the life of science and knowledge by fully human beings, young people would have to experience what I would call a kind of deep mental oppression from ordinary natural science. Yes, contemporary science is such that precisely those who study it diligently and earnestly and take its things seriously feel something like a mental oppression, can feel something of what comes over the human soul when it wrestles with the problem of knowledge. For anyone who looks around a little from this or that point of view, which is available within natural science today, is confronted with great world problems, world problems which, however, are often clothed, I might say, in small formulations of facts. And these formulations of facts urge one to seek something in one's own soul, which, precisely because these scientific truths exist, must be solved as a riddle; otherwise one cannot live, otherwise one feels oppressed.

Oh, if this oppression were the fruit of our scientific studies! Then not only the longing for the spiritual world would arise from this oppression, which takes hold of the whole person, but also the gift to look into the spiritual world. Even if one takes knowledge that cannot satisfy the human being, it is precisely through the unsatisfactory, when it is brought to the soul and heart in the right way, that the highest striving can be kindled.

That, my dear friends, is what is sometimes felt as so terrible, so devastating, within the realm of knowledge in the present day, that no claim is made to allow people to feel how the things that are present in the present in such a way that he is prevented in his young life from even approaching what is most human in nature, if he does not, precisely because of a particularly strong yearning, free himself from that which only afflicts him with the obstacles that are placed in his way.

And if we look away from the natural sciences to the humanities, we see that during the age of natural science they have reached a state in which, if a young person were to be given instructions that would treat these humanities from a fully human point of view, they would be able to devote themselves to them in such a way that they would at least receive what I would call a spiritual sense of urgency. All the abstract ideas, the results of documentary research and all the other things that are contained in the humanities today, if they were at least presented to young people with a human element, could pursue the goal of awaken in him the urge to ascend into the fresh air that is to be brought into the field of today's spiritual contemplation through anthroposophical world view.

Anyone who has followed the spirit of my lectures on the scientific development of modern times will certainly not be able to say that I have criticized this natural science of the present unnecessarily. On the contrary, through my lectures I have proved its necessity, have tried to prove that natural science and, finally, also spiritual science of the present time can be nothing but foundations, for they served and must serve as the foundations of civilization, which must be laid once so that further building can be built on them.

But man cannot help it, being human, being full of humanity in body, mind and soul. And since today's young people have to live in an age in which they are inevitably confronted with something that does not include the human being at all, the noblest and most powerful human striving could nevertheless be aroused if only that which is necessary but not humanly satisfying were to be offered to them today in the highest sense of the word, out of full humanity. If that were to happen, our young people would need nothing more than to hear about the achievements of today's physical science and today's spiritual science at the academies themselves; and from this they would receive not only the innermost urge but also the ability to absorb spiritual science in full humanity. And from what would then live in young people, it would arise of its own accord that the anthroposophical form of science would also become that which is necessary for us to progress in human civilization.

I believe that our younger friends, if they reflect on the words I have spoken, which may sound somewhat paradoxical, will find that they go some way to characterizing the main difficulties they have had to endure during their academic years. And I can assume that this difficulty is the reason why they have come to us. But for many of them, this difficulty belongs to the past, a past that can no longer be made up for. For what one should actually have in a certain period of youth can no longer be had in the same form later. But nevertheless, I believe that one thing can serve as a substitute. What should be a substitute for what one can no longer have is the realization of the task that younger people in particular have among us to cultivate anthroposophical life in the present. |

Set yourselves this task: to do for the anthroposophical movement what you already know, from your own conviction, can be done for it, or what you can, in the course of time, become convinced of in your innermost being, in your very individual innermost being, that it is necessary for the further civilization of mankind: then you will be able to carry something in your heart for longer than this earthly life lasts: then you will be able to carry the awareness of having done your duty to humanity and the world in an age of greatest human difficulties. And that will be a rich reward for what you may rightly lose.

If you have a true sense of the situation of young people in our age, you will also look in the right way at the fact that academic youth has found its way into our circles, and then, if I may may say so, the talent will gradually arise within the Anthroposophical Society to gain a relationship with this youth, on the part of those who, let us say, do not belong to it as youth in this or that respect.

But I believe that there is a word that can come from our present mourning, that I can also speak to the oldest members of the Anthroposophical Society, and that is this: that the human being who today can truly understand himself as a human being within the Anthroposophical Society, and that this, in turn, must be taken seriously if civilization is to continue for humanity, if the forces of decline are not to gain the upper hand over the forces of ascent. It has almost come to this within general culture and civilization of the present day, that it almost sounds funny when someone says: When a person is in his spiritual-soul life between falling asleep and waking up, he should have ensured that his spiritual-soul life can behave in the right way during this time. But within the anthroposophical movement, you learn that this spiritual-soul, as it lives between falling asleep and waking up, is the germ that we carry into the eternity of the future. What we leave behind in bed when we sleep, what is visible to us when we perform our daily work from morning to evening, that we do not carry out through the gate of death into the spiritual, into the supersensible world. But we do carry out into the spiritual, supersensible world that which is subtlest in our natures and exists outside the physical and etheric bodies when we are between falling asleep and waking up. We shall not concern ourselves here with the significance of the life of sleep for man here on earth. But it can be made clear to man through anthroposophical spiritual science that this fine, substantial something, imperceptible to ordinary consciousness, , lives between falling asleep and waking, is precisely what he will carry within him when he has passed through the gate of death, when he has to fulfill his task in other worlds than this earthly world. But the tasks he has to perform there, he will be able to perform them, depending on how he has cultivated these spiritual and mental abilities. Oh, my dear friends, in that spiritual world, which is around us just as the physical world is, those human soul beings also live a present existence who are not in a physical body right now, but may have to wait for decades, centuries, for their next embodiment on earth. These souls are there just as we physical people are there on earth; and in what happens here among us physical people, what we later call historical life, not only do the earthly people work in it, but also those forces that reach out from people who are currently between death and a new birth. These forces are there. As we stretch out our hands, so these beings stretch their spiritual hands into the immediate present. And it is a desolate historiography when only the documents are recorded that deal with the earthly, while the true history that takes place on earth is also influenced by the spiritual forces from the spiritual world of those who are between death and a new birth. We also work together with those who are not embodied on earth.

And just as we commit a sin against humanity if we do not educate young people in the right way, we commit a sin against humanity, a sin against the noblest work to be done from invisible worlds by not embodied human beings, we commit a sin against the evolution of humanity if we do not cultivate our own spiritual nature so that it passes through the portal of death in such a way that it can develop there more consciously and more consciously. For if the soul and spiritual aspects are not cultivated on earth, it happens that this consciousness, which in a certain way immediately and then more and more between death and a new birth begins to shine, remains clouded in all those souls who do not cultivate a spiritual life here. When a person becomes aware of his full humanity, then the spiritual belongs to it.

Those who truly understand the impulses of the anthroposophical movement should take it seriously, knowing that what has been acquired through anthroposophical spiritual science is a world-life treasure, a world-life force. It is a sin in the higher sense to neglect to cultivate that which must be there in order to further develop the earth, in order to further develop mankind on earth, because its absence must lead to the downfall of the earthly. And in many ways, it depends on feeling the deep seriousness of connecting with a spiritual and comprehensive human cause, in addition to what one may more or less accept in theory from spiritual science.

And that, my dear friends, is something that does not apply to a particular category of people, it is something that most certainly applies to young and old alike. But that also seems to me to be the one thing in which young and old can come together, so that one spirit may prevail within what is the Anthroposophical Society.

May the younger people bring their best, may the older people understand this best, may understanding on one side find understanding on the other: only then will we move forward. Let us, from the sad days we have gone through, from the painful suffering we have been imbued with, let us let resolutions enter our hearts that are not mere wishes, not mere vows, but that are so deeply rooted in our souls that they can become deeds. Even in a small circle, we will need deeds if we want to make up for the great loss.

Youthful deeds, if they are in the right direction, are deeds that can be used around the world. And the most beautiful thing that one can want as an older person is to be able to work together with those people who can still perform youthful deeds. If one knows this in the right way, oh, my dear friends, then youth will indeed come to meet you with understanding. And only then will we ourselves be able to do what is necessary to compensate for our great loss, when young people, who can offer us what was once necessary for the future, can see – and most certainly then to their own satisfaction – beautiful examples of what older people can do to compensate for this loss.

Let us endeavor to see the right and powerful in each other, so that strength may be added to strength, for only in this way will we make progress.