The Rudolf Steiner Archive

My dear sisters and brothers,

New members have again come to this School today. It isn't possible to repeat every time the introduction which describes the duties and meaning of this Michael School. Therefore, I ask the members who wish to give the verses to the new members, to do so in the manner I will describe at the end of the Lesson, and to give them the introduction, which everyone who wishes to be a member of this School must necessarily know.

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And so, we will also begin directly today to inscribe in our souls the words which sound forth, to those who are open-minded enough, from all the kingdoms of nature and the hierarchies of the world which surround us as human beings. In the past, these words sounded forth to man from all the stones and plants, clouds, stars, from the sun and the moon, from the springs and the rocks. They sound forth to him in the present; they will sound forth to him in the future.

O man, know thyself!
So resounds the Cosmic-Word.
You hear it strong in soul,
You feel it firm in spirit.

Who speaks with such cosmic might?
Who speaks with such depth of heart?

Does it work through distant radiant space
Into your senses' sense of being?
Does it ring through weaving waves of time
Into your life's evolving stream?

It's you yourself who,
In feeling space, in experiencing time,

Create the Word, feeling foreign
In space's soulless void
Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destroying flow.

My dear sisters and brothers, in the description of the path of knowledge we have reached the place where we stand before the Guardian at the abyss of being. The Guardian of the Threshold has made clear to us that what surrounds us in the exterior world can never reveal our own being to us; how our observation of nature, what on and from the earth lives and moves, what shines and speaks from the realm of the stars—to the extent we can perceive it with the senses and with our reason—all that offers nothing to clarify the being of our own self; that the brightness, this glistening in the sunshine, this living and interweaving which is so grand and powerful, so beautiful and magnificent in the outer world, remains dark and gloomy for our true self-knowledge.

Then it was described how we approach the Guardian little by little, who appears to us in the figure of a spiritual cloud, thus showing us an image of ourselves, which in turn shows us what we should strive for as human beings in order to achieve self-knowledge.

Then we reached the Guardian of the Threshold. He showed us what the true shape of our willing, feeling and thinking is before the countenance of the gods. He showed us how being fainthearted and having fear of knowledge lives in us, as hate for knowledge, as doubt about the knowledge that is nevertheless in us, because the character of our times has driven it into us. He showed us the animal form of our willing, feeling and thinking. It must be a shattering experience for us when the Guardian of the Threshold awakens the forces which lead to true self-knowledge in our souls.

Then the Guardian of the Threshold raised us, first showing us, however, how our thinking, as we use it in normal life, is the corpse of the living thinking which was in us before we descended to physical-sensory existence. He showed us how our body, in earthly existence, is a coffin for the deceased living thinking, which lies in the coffin as a corpse. But we use this corpse for our usual abstract thinkingbetween birth and death in order to understand the things of the physical-sensory world.

Once we grasp how dead this thinking is, we can learn from the corpse that lies before us. We look at this corpse. We say to ourselves: This corpse could never have come into being the way it is now. It is what remains of a human being whose soul and spirit were within it. The living person, the ensouled person, the spiritualized person must have existed beforehand in what lies before us as a corpse. Thus, we approach the reality of our thinking when we become aware of its deadness, and realize that it is the corpse of the living thinking that was in us before we descended into physical-sensory earthly existence.

Then the Guardian reminds us that our feeling is only half-alive, whereas our willing is fully alive, but we are only conscious of this externally.

The Guardian of the Threshold also reminds us that in order to gradually find the transition to living thinking, we should look up to the heavenly heights; that to grasp the nature of feeling we should look out to the cosmic reaches, and to gain an idea of the nature of will we should look to the world's depths, to the earthly depths.

But at the same time the Guardian shows us how we are placed with our thinking—when we look up to the cosmic thinking in which our earthly-physical thinking is rooted—between light and darkness; how the light can be dangerous if we devote ourselves unilaterally to it, how the darkness can be dangerous if we devote ourselves unilaterally to it, how we must seek our direction and goal in the middle between light and darkness if we are to find the truth, how we stand in the middle between warmth and cold with our feeling, and how we can vanish in the sensual embers of feeling if we surrender ourselves to the warmth, and on the other hand harden in the cold.

The Guardian of the Threshold indicates to us how we should walk in the middle between soul-warmth and soul-cold on the Christ-path. The Guardian of the Threshold indicates to us that when we seek willing in the earthly depths we find ourselves in the middle between life and death; how life would have us vanish in timidity; how death would have us cramped in nothingness; that we must findwilling in the Middle Way. That, my dear sisters and brothers, is what the Middle Way is—as it has been described since ancient Mystery times—which the human being must tread if he wants to follow the path to the spirit.

The Guardian of the Threshold, before whom we stand as the earnest first representative of Michael, for the real leader of this School is Michael, gives us further guidance: how we can escape from this apparent thinking, from this dead thinking into the living essence of thinking. For this we must be prepared above all to strictly adhere to the laws which are prescribed for every esotericist in golden letters—he must only seize the gold—which the Guardian of the Threshold now repeats to us.

He makes us attentive to the yawning abyss of being before us, which we must fly over, because with earthly feet we cannot cross; how we will have then entered the spiritual world, for there on the other side of the yawning abyss deep, night-cloaked darkness is still before us. But we must enter beyond the yawning abyss of being into that deep, night-cloaked, cold darkness. Out of it warmth must come to us, out of it must come light which illumines our own Self, which warms our own Self. We cannot find the firm support-point in the spirit if, whenever we are over there, we do not remember the pledge that our soul makes, now that we are in this situation, after having received the previous admonitions from the Guardian of the Threshold, who now says:

Do not forget that as long as you are an earthly human being, even when you have crossed over to the spiritual world, that once you have returned you must adhere to the laws of the earth. When you enter the spiritual world with your thinking, you may not believe that when you return and organize your work and your thoughts in the earthly environment you may fly around dreaming within the earthly environment. You must reserve the flying for your thinking when you are in the spiritual world. You must practice deep, inner, intimate modesty, always wanting to be a man among men when you cross back to the ordinary world of ordinary consciousness. It is precisely by wishing to stay modest in the world, by abstaining from using the laws of the spiritual life in the ordinary world, that you will have the strength to grasp thinking in a way that it can serve you in spiritual worlds.

The Guardian of the Threshold therefore teaches us about thinking thus:

You climb down to the earthly element
With forces of your will unfolding;
As thinker you bestride the earthly realm,
Your animal-likeness will be shown
To you by your own force of thought;
The fear you feel of self you must
Transform into courage of soul.

We must go through this by letting the mantric verse work on us. We must, if we wish to enter into the essential element of the earth, that means in the spiritual element of the earth; we must, my dear sisters and brothers, come to the point where we realize that our thinking is at first animal-like. We must experience fear of our own Self that is still animal-like; then the fear will give birth to its opposite and become the courage we need. That is the Guardian of the Threshold's urgently strong, earnest admonition, which cuts deeply into the heart. He admonishes us that we should feel this way when we tread the earth-element. We have already heard about treading the elements from the Guardian of the Threshold.

He admonishes us further: when, as feeling beings, we enter the fluid element, in the world of the water-beings, that we should not be aware of fear of our own Self, but we should be aware of how we sleep dreaming in this water element, which is our sculptor, as we have seen. And it is just when we become conscious that we live a plant-like existence in our earthly human feeling, that this feeling awakens us, for it shows us how lame our Self is. We will awaken once we have the humility to recognize the lameness of our Self.

Thirdly, when we feel ourselves to be in the air element with our willing—first in the earth-element with thinking, then in the water-element with feeling, then with willing in the air-element—then we will feel in this air-element that we have nothing in willing except what our normal memory gives us: memory-image-forms. We must seize these image-forms, which rest passively in our thoughts, with the will; then we are grasping the air-element in inner images. And our own soul will appear to us as if it were ossified. If we eliminate the earth and the air in thought and imagine ourselves wanting to breathe in the air-element, how ossified will we seem. But just by feeling this death by cold that we pass through, the spiritual fire will come to us, which we need in order to really grasp our willing.

The verses are profound, which the Guardian of the Threshold presents to our souls. Only if we observe them well and have fear of ourselves and know that we are nullified if we only perceive the earth in thought, will we have the courage in our souls for living thinking. When we sense how lame in feeling we are on earth, half living and lame, will the strength grow in us which allows us to awaken, so that we are awake in spiritual life, with the feeling we had before we descended to earthly physical existence. Then, when we have willingly descended into the air-element with our memory, we feel sclerotic and shivering with cold. But it is just when we feel this shivering from the cold the opposite happens, the spiritual fire awakens, showing us that our earthly willing is sleeping, but rooted in the living willing which was in us before we descended to earthly existence. We must learn to remember our existence before we descended to earthly existence.

In respect to feeling, the Guardian of the Threshold admonishes us:

You live with the water-element
Through feeling's weaving dream alone;
To wake pervading water's being
Will show the soul in you
To be a sluggish plant-like being;
But lameness of your Self
Must Lead to self-awakening.

In respect to willing, the Guardian speaks:

You sense in the waves of air
The image-forms of memory only;
Through willing to seize the essence of air,
Your own soul will threaten you
As coldly hardened stone;
But self-hood's death by cold,
It must give way to spirit-fire.

[The mantra is written on the blackboard with the corresponding underlining:]

The Guardian speaks with great earnestness:

You climb down to the earthly element
With forces of your will unfolding
As thinker you bestride the earthly realm,
Your animal-likeness will be shown
To you by your own force of thought
The fear you feel of self you must
Transform into courage of soul.

You live with the water-element
Through feeling's weaving dream alone;
To wake pervading water's being
Will show the soul in you
To be a sluggish plant-like being;
But lameness of your Self
Must Lead to self-awakening.

You sense in the waves of air
The image-forms of memory alone;
Through willing to seize the essence of air,
Your own soul will threaten you
As coldly hardened stone;
But self-hood's death by cold,
It must give way to spirit-fire.

We descend from thinking to feeling in memory when we let this verse work on us. And when we arrive at the depths of memory—where soul-life otherwise vanishesbecause the images of memory arise anew—there is the boundary, just as a mirror is a boundary. What comes to us from without arrives at something like a memory-wall, then it returns again and again. If one does not look behind the mirror, one does not see behind the memory-wall. But here the Guardian of the Threshold advises us that we must push through what is otherwise a boundary in order to enter the realm of spirit.

After the Guardian of the Threshold has referred us more to our interior with his admonishing verses and has left us time to process the contents of the verses in the soul—for when we use these mantric verses in meditation, we must allow ourselves a very long time, especially at this point, so they can work in us with their force and really bring our I downward through thinking, feeling and remembrance to what lies behind all remembrance—then the Guardian tells us how we should comport ourselves in respect to the outer world.

He draws our attention again up to the light, which however only lives in us in what seem to be thoughts. It is light that thinks in us. When the light pervades us, it thinks in us. But in earthly life light is only the appearance of a thinking that thinks itself. If we don't go beyond it, untrue spiritual being will lead us to the illusion of self-hood rather than to true self-hood So we must realize that if we only concentrate on thinking, we will wind up with the illusion of self-hood. But it is just this understanding of ourselves as earthly human beings, after having gone through the delusion of self-hood—through thinking, which, however, is capable of carrying us over the abyss of being to grasp the world's hardships and problems—that will enable us to gradually find support for experiencing existence in thought.

From light's shining force
Your thoughts you retain within;
When shining light in you itself does think,
Will then an untrue spirit-being cause
Illusion of self-hood to arise in you.
Reflecting on the needs of earth
Preserves your human state of being.

Now the Guardian of the Threshold teaches us how in feeling, at first, we only retain the wonderful, all-embracing forms of the world. But when we only retain these forms in feeling, our spiritual experience remains powerless. Self-hood suffocates if we always only stare, feeling, at what has been formed in the world. But if we begin to love all that is worthy in the world around us, we find being in feeling and we rescue our humanity.

The world's forms you only retain
In feelings held fast within;
When world-form feels itself in you,
The powerless experience of spirit
Will stifle in you the sense of self-hood;
But love of all that's worthy on earth
Will rescue for you your human soul.

Generally, we try to hatch thoughts from earthly values. We only retain the illusion of light if we don't consider the earth's weighty problems. We retain what is formed on the earth only in vague feelings if we don't experience this earthly interweaving of forms and gestalt with love.

And what can we retain of the world's life by willing? Our willing exists in the world's life. But if we only retain it by willing, we again fail to reach being. When the life of the world completely engulfs us, destructive spiritual exaltation kills the experience of Self. Immersion in the world's willing causes spiritual exaltation to erupt, which kills us. But if we develop the will in spiritual dedication to the higher worlds, if we think about what we are willing in the physical-sensory world in a way that the gods act in us, who inspire and give impulse to our willing, if we will in the service of the gods, then God lets his being give impulse to us as humans, and we sense real being in godly permeated willing.

You only retain of worldly life
The will within;
If worldly life takes hold in full,
Destructive spirit exaltation
Will kill experience of Self in you;
But spirit-dedicated earthly willing
Allows the God in man to reign.

These are the three admonitions which the Guardian of the Threshold calls out to us in the most earnest moments.

[The mantra is written on the blackboard:]

The Guardian speaks as though the Cosmic-Word itself were resounding:

From light's shining force
our thoughts you retain within;

—It is as though the Guardian wanted to bring our attention to what we are actually doing. He says that we have not yet gotten over forming mere thoughts about light's shining—

When shining light in you itself does think,
Will then an untrue spirit-being cause
Illusion of self-hood to arise in you.
Reflecting on the needs of earth
Preserves your human state of being

The world's forms you only retain
In feelings held fast within

—Once again, the admonition that in our vague, unfocused feelings only what is so wonderfully formed by the world is alive. At first the forming of the world is apprehended in the microcosm through the vagueness of feelings—

When world-form feels itself in you

—that is, not when we sense the world-form with our feelings, but when the world-form penetrates us, the macrocosm into the microcosm—

When world-form feels itself in you,
Experience of spirit is powerless,

—we become aware of our own powerlessness—

When world-form feels itself in you,
Experience of spirit is powerless,
And stifles in you the sense of self-hood;
But love of all that's worthy on earth
Will rescue for you your human soul.

We need this rescuing, for we are about to cross over the abyss. If we only carry over the thoughts instilled by the illusion of light, if we only carry over the vague feelings about world-form, then spiritual exaltation destroys the true light on the other side; powerless feeling, asleep, destroys the experience of the spiritual. We need awareness of the earth's needs, of all that the earth suffers, in order to be worthy to cross over to the spiritual world and not be destroyed by worldly thinking. We need love for what is worthy on the earth in order not to be turned to dust if we cross over with vague feelings. And thirdly, for willing we need this:

You only retain of worldly life
The will within;
If worldly Life takes hold in full,

—and it will do so over there—

Destructive spirit exaltation
Will kill experience of Self in you;
But spirit-dedicated earthly willing
Allows the God in man to reign.

We may not merely carry over to the spiritual world what we have on this side. We must carry over a stronger soul than we have here. We must prepare the soul:

[As the following is spoken, the words between quotation marks are underlined on the blackboard:]

On the other side, we find “light's shining force”. It lives in our thinking. We need “Reflecting on the needs of earth”. Compassion for all the earth's suffering will preserve our “human state of being”.

Over there, because we are coming to the World-formation, we don't only need our “feelings”, we need “love for all that's worthy on earth”; then our “human soul” will be rescued. Here [in the first verse]: preserve our human state of being; here [in the second verse:] the human soul is rescued.

We must enter the full “worldly life”, which in our “willing” is only a weak reflection, is too flimsy to pass over. And we must develop “spiritually developed earthly willing” for the “god in man” to reign.

This is the escalation:

Light's shining force
World-formation
love for all that's worthy on earth

Thoughts
Feelings
Willing

We need:
Reflecting on the needs of earth,
Love for all that's worthy on earth,
Spiritually developed earthly willing;

for we need:
to preserve our human state of being,
to rescue the human soul,
to receive the reigning God within us.

That, my dear sisters and brothers, is what the Guardian places before our souls so that we may develop the wings of soul needed to cross over.

In the next esoteric lesson, to be held on Wednesday, it will be necessary that we receive the mantras through the Guardian of the Threshold—who in this case is Michael's representative at the threshold to the spiritual lands—the mantras which are the first that we speak when we arrive in the spiritual realm, which, however, appears before the human being when receiving these mantras as deep, night-cloaked, cold darkness.

Today, though, after this has been shown to our souls, let us again contemplate what speaks to us from all being, encouraging us toward all that the Guardian of the Threshold has placed before us with such firmness:

O man, know thyself!
So resounds the Cosmic-Word.
You hear it strong in soul,
You feel it firm in spirit.

Who speaks with such cosmic might?
Who speaks with such depth of heart?

Does it work through distant radiant space
Into your senses' sense of being?
Does it ring through weaving waves of time
Into your life's evolving stream?

It's you yourself who,
In feeling space, in experiencing time,

Create the Word, feeling foreign
In space's the soulless void
Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destroying flow.

And what has been placed before our souls by the Guardian of the Threshold's words is Michael's message in this rightfully established Michael School. If we receive them with the right attitude, Michael's being is present in this room, consecrating and strengthening what has been placed before our souls. Therefore, it may be accompanied by Michael's Sign. Michael's Sign is:

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and Michael's Seal, which he has impressed on the Rosicrucian mood for centuries, and which is expressed in the dictum:

ex deo nascimur

In Christo morimur

Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus

The first words, “I revere the Father”, are spoken accompanied by the gesture:

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The second words, “I love the Son” are accompanied by the gesture:

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The third words, “I unite myself with the Spirit”, are accompanied by the gesture:

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The first gesture means:

I revere the Father

the second gesture:

I love the Son

the third gesture.
I unite myself with the Spirit.

Thus, we may understand what is spoken as having been strengthened by Michael's sign and confirmed by Michael's Seal, which is thus, thus and thus, [indicating the Seal gestures on the blackboard] which is impressed over the Rosicrucian words.

So, should the verses live, which have been given through Michael's Sign, and sealed by the Michaelic Rosicrucian-School for your souls:

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The following is spoken, accompanied by the Seal Gestures:

ex deo nascimur

In Christo morimur

Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.

My dear sisters and brothers, the mantric verses which are given in this School may only be possessed by the School's rightful members, that is, those who have the blue membership certificate. Someone who could not be present at a lesson after the date of his admittance at which he could have been present, may receive the verses given after the date of his admittance from another member who has rightfully received them here in the School. For this it is necessary to obtain permission from either Dr. Wegman or myself.

This is not an administrative measure, but it is a basis of an occult school that a real action precedes something like this. Only the person who wants to give the verses to another may make the request to Dr. Wegman or to me, not the one who wants to receive them. Therefore, one can request the verses from another. But permission may not be requested by the one who is to receive the verses, but the one who is to give them. It would be useless for the recipient to ask.

Whoever copies something other than the mantras may keep it for a week; thereafter he is obliged to burn it, for what lives in this School should only live within the School and not outside it. This has nothing to do with power or arbitrary measures. It is all based on occult laws. Because if anything falls into the wrong hands, it loses its effectiveness for those for whom it is intended. If misuse prevails in that mantric verses or the contents of what is given here are given to the wrong people, the mantric verses and what is being given here lose their effectiveness for those who are present. These are facts, not some kind of arbitrary measures.

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The program for tomorrow is: again at 9.30 the Pastoral Medicine lesson, at 12 o'clock the speech-formation course, at 5.30 the course for theologians and at 8 o'clock the lecture for members.

My dear sisters and brothers,

Once again, I must say that the introduction about the character and the responsibilities connected with the School cannot be repeated for the new arrivals each time. Therefore, I must request that those of you who were already here and have the mantras inform the new members concerning the contents of the introduction.

Today we will once again begin with the words which contain the fundamental exhortation to the human being, which resound to him from all the kingdoms of nature and from all the spiritual hierarchies, if he has the necessary sensibility, to seek his own being, and also exhort him to recognize, through his own being, the world in its true spiritual nature. They resound from all that interweaves and lives in the earthly depths, in water and air, in warmth and light, from what lives in the mountains and springs, in rocks, in the plants and animals, in the physical human form, in human souls, in human spirits, what lives in the residents of the stars, in the spiritual hierarchies—it resounds thus:

O man, know thyself!
So resounds the Cosmic-Word.
You hear it strong in soul,
You feel it firm in spirit.

Who speaks with such cosmic might?
Who speaks with such depth of heart?

Does it work through distant radiant space
Into your senses' sense of being?
Does it ring through weaving waves of time
Into your life's evolving stream?

It's you yourself who,
In feeling space, in experiencing time,
The Word create, feeling foreign
In space's soulless void,

Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destroying flow.

My dear sisters and brothers, the description of the spiritual path which leads from the sunny, light-filled world in which we live on earth appears on the other side of the yawning abyss of being at first as a gloomy, night-cloaked darkness. The path which leads us to where we become aware that, when we seek our own being in all that lives in the depths, flows in the air, all that creeps and flies, in all that our senses perceive in the majestic glow of the stars, in the powerful depths of universal space, in the immeasurably distant flow of time, that all that does not contain our being, the true source of our humanity, that it becomes gloomy when we look here for our humanity. The description has led us thus far to show that we must find the way past the Guardian of the Threshold, who has told us so much about the meaning of the spiritual world, over to what is still night-cloaked, black gloom, so that it can become bright there, and in this brightness the light arises to illumine before the eyes of our soul our own being, and therewith the being and essence and interweaving of the world.

It must be clear to us that in the moment—and we have come so far in the description—when we have crossed over the abyss of being, past the Guardian of the Threshold, in that moment an important change takes place in the human being, that is, in ourselves.

Let us look, my dear sisters and brothers, at our human existence as it is between birth and death on earth: we grasp the world thinking, we grasp the world feeling, we act in the world by willing. But thinking, feeling and willing are interwoven in our human earthly existence. If we want to carry out something in the near future, we consider it first, so what we carry out is already present as a seed in our thoughts. We see it flowing out in impulses of will. We feel that it is worthy. We feel love flowing to this or that being. Because we feel it, we form a thought about it. Or we go beyond that and carry out a deed of love towards the being, we let ourselves grow wings of love, and are urged forward to willing. But all that—thinking, feeling, willing—is closely related to our humanity as it unfolds between birth and death in the physical world. We are at one in thinking, feeling and willing.

And the truth is that we are only really awake in our thoughts. They are bright and clear, although the Guardian of the Threshold had revealed them to be illusory. They are bright and clear, we are awake in them.

Our feeling is darker and less clear. We are closer to existence in feeling, but the content of what we feel is like a dream, so that we can only speak of dream-feeling, even when awake.

The will, however, as it emerges from our being, remains at first completely unclear to our normal consciousness. We have the thought that we want this or that; the thought appears, grasps the organism; the organism acts, carries out the thought; we see what we have carried out, again with thought. But the will itself rests in deep sleep, as do the things in our soul rest between falling asleep and awakening.

But the initiate sees the thoughts in their living state, which they were in before the human being had descended from the supersensible world to the sensory one. He sees radiant being in the thoughts. But this radiant being he sees is not the illusion of thoughts as in ordinary thinking.

We stand beside the Guardian of the Threshold. The abyss of being is there; before us—beyond the abyss, beyond the threshold—is the black, night-cloaked gloom; but from out of the darkness gleaming, living shapes are moving. We say to ourselves—because we sense that the kind of thoughts we had as physical persons have abandoned us—we say to ourselves: There is our flowing, living thinking. It doesn't belong to us now, it belongs to the world. Light on light, thought extracts itself from the black gloom. We know that thought, all our thinking, is there as the first brightness within the black gloom that we are approaching.

And then we see something further down. We have the feeling—and the Guardian of the Threshold points to it with an admonishing gesture—we see how the darkness below is becoming fire-like. Fire, dark fire yes, but fire that we can sensepsychically, spreads out below us. What we recognize as our willing comes towards us over the abyss of being. The initiate gradually learns the following: What happens when thinking merges with willing? The thought—of what is wanted—is grasped; then this thought merges with corporeality as beneficent fire. What brings the will to existence is warmth, which is fire when our own will meets us from out of the darkness.

And between this warmth, from which our willing streams toward us across the abyss of being (for our human will is a mere reflection of our cosmic will)—between this warm, dark out-streaming from below, which has at most a whiff of bluish-violet, and the bright lights of thoughts above, between both there is an interweaving, flowing warmth rising, light descending. Light-enveloped warmth rising, warmth-enveloped light streaming down: that is our feeling.

It is a powerful picture which the Guardian of the Threshold draws. And now we know that when we cross over from the sensory world, from the world of physical reality in which we are between birth and death, into the world of the spirit, then we will be—in thinking, feeling and willing—no longer the unity that we are here; there we are Three. In the universe, we are Three: our thinking merges with light across the threshold; our will becomes fire; our feeling becomes light-enveloped fire.

We must have the courage to expand and intensify the Self, the I, so that it holds the Three together when we cross over. We can do this once we are permeated with what could otherwise be a banality: that our head is the source of all our senses and thinking: All our senses and thoughts are distributed over the whole body, but what is especially expressed in our head is that in its roundness, with an opening below, it imitates the shape of the universe. If we can say to ourselves in all seriousness and inner ardency: my head is inwardly and outwardly an imitation of the world's shape, we feel then, in that we want to view the head from within, how this perspective expands to include the universe, which is only concentrated in our head for our earthly vision.

We should then intensely feel how our heart, the physical expression of our soul, does not only beat because of what is in our body, because of what is enclosed within the skin; we breathe in the air, which is the impetus of the heartbeat, we breathe it out again. The world in all its grandeur and majesty participates in our heartbeat. What is sensed in our heart is not merely what is within us: it is the universal pulse-beat.

If we consider how our limbs work through willing, it gives us the strength to not only will what is within us. Consider for a moment how the forces of heredity are in us when we are born, how the forces of karma, which we have acquired through many, many earth-lives, live in our willing. Let us think of all that, and feel: when we will, world-force lives in our limbs, not merely human force.

Just think, my dear sisters and brothers, while still here at the Guardian of the Threshold's side he points over to the brightly lit, universally living and acting thoughts; to what wells up as warmth, light-bringing, light-filled; to what spiritually wafts over us from below like warm wind—the universe's fire, which is the ur-force of the will.

So we hear, resounding, what the Guardian of the Threshold has to say to us in this situation:

Behold the Three

(thinking, feeling, willing; man is split in three)

Behold the Three,
They are the One,
When you in earthly life
the human imprint bear.

Experience the head's cosmic form

The Guardian makes this sign:

[It is drawn on the blackboard.]

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so that we stop and feel the head's cosmic form in this closed, upward pointing triangle. Let us concentrate on this.

Feel the heart's cosmic beat

The Guardian makes this sign:

[It is drawn on the blackboard.]

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for us to feel in this sign the wave-like pulse of the universe, which crosses in the heart.

Consider the cosmic force of the limbs.

The Guardian of the Threshold makes the other sign:

[It is drawn on the blackboard:]

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We should concentrate on this line in order to sense the mantric force of this line and of the whole verse.

Then the Guardian of the Threshold strengthens it again:

They are the Three,
The Three, which as the One
In earthly being live.

This is the verse by which the Guardian announces how we are to prepare—through forceful courage, through ardent striving for knowledge—to sense the wings which carry us over from the One to the Three. In the physical world, we are the One. In the spiritual world, we are the Three, which we experience in imaginative pictures.

[Written on the blackboard]

The Guardian reminds us:

See the Three,
They are the One,
When you in earthly life
The human imprint bear.

[Alongside the first sign on the blackboard is written:]

Experience the head's cosmic shape
the cosmic shape can be experienced in the head

[Alongside the second sign is written:]

Sense the heart's cosmic beat
the cosmic beat can be sensed in the heart

[Alongside the third sign is written:]

Consider the limbs' cosmic force
the cosmic force can be considered in the movement of the limbs.

The escalation is:

[The following words are underlined:]

Experience
Sense
Consider

Shape
Beat
Force

The three lines must be strengthened by concentrating on these figures.

[Written:]

They are the Three,
The Three, which as the One
In earthly being live.

My dear friends, when we are standing here in earthly existence—and we are still doing so, we are just preparing to cross to the spiritual world—we ascribe to our head our spirit, in that it contains thoughts. At first, though, this spirit is only apparent. The thoughts are the appearance of the spirit. We ascribe the thoughts to our head, that is, we ascribe the spirit to our head, because the spirit lives in the form of thoughts during earthly existence.

But we can do something else, recalling the Guardian of the Threshold's admonition. In this situation, as we are preparing to cross over the abyss of being, we must endeavor to concentrate on the force we normally use when we move a limb, when we walk or stand, when our will pervades us. We must endeavor to concentrate to the extent that we will each thought, as though it were being pushed out. We must sense the thought being pushed out as when we stretch out an arm: thus, reality passes through the will into the thoughts. Then the things perceived by our senses, whereas they came to us previously as the appearance of color or tone, now stream toward us from the multifaceted sensory appearance as cosmic will.

My dear sisters and brothers: Learn to extend your thoughts out to the world as you learn to stretch out your hands through willing. Just as the objects of the world respond when you extend your will to them, offering resistance, so do the spirits offer resistance when you extend your thoughts to them, in that the will permeates them. If we do this, we are interweaving reality in wisdom. The Guardian of the Threshold's admonishes us once again.

The Guardian's last admonition:

The head's spirit,
You can will it;

(otherwise we only think it, now we will it; and when we do so, willing becomes something different)

And willing

(the willing of thoughts)

provides you with
The senses' multi-forming heaven-weave;
You interweave with wisdom.

The next thing the Guardian of the Threshold points to is the heart, in which the rhythm of our humanity is concentrated. We cannot bring anything except feeling into the heart, that is, feeling here in the sensory world between birth and death. But we must also bring the feelings to the heart when we are in the spiritual world.

If we could feel the heart as if the world were feeling our heart, because we are, after all, in the world, then our feeling would be different. Just as willing becomes “the senses' multi-forming heaven-weave”, so feeling becomes something which must be conceived of in a way that we can say—Look: thinking, the spirit's head, becomes the will; feeling remains feeling, but rays out to thinking on one side and willing on the other. It is both at the same time. Therefore, at this point we must get used to concentrating on a line in which we interweave what rays upward and downward.

This line must read as follows: “And feeling becomes your will's thinking, your thinking's will, the awakening seed of cosmic life.” Then you live in the glow. This is not a dying away glow, it is the world's revelation in beauty, which can also be called “glow” in the sense of “gloria”. The glow here means gloria.

Thus, the Guardian's second admonition is:

The heart's soul,
You can feel it;
And feeling becomes for you
The awakening seed of cosmic life:
Will's thinking, thinking's will.
You live in the glow.

[This second verse is written on the blackboard and “heart's” and “feeling” are underlined:]

The heart's soul,
You can feel it;
And feeling becomes for you
The awakening seed of cosmic life:
Will's thinking, thinking's will.
You live in the glow.

You must, my dear sisters and brothers, by practicing this, try to think that—the will's thinking, the thinking's will—flow together in one, because it is so in the world.

The third thing to which the Guardian of the Threshold points is the force of our limbs. The Guardian of the Threshold demands that that our spirit wills our limbs, that we do not feel that what we do is the result of exerting our own force, but that we observe it as if we stepped out of our bodies and were standing beside ourselves. Then the will's thinking becomes the thinking which we unfold here: the will's goal-oriented human striving. And now we recognize the virtue of human diligence, what human will can accomplish in the world's evolution. The guardian of the Threshold admonishes us:

[The third verse is written on the blackboard and “limbs” is underlined.]

The limbs' force,
You can think it
And thinking becomes
The will's goal-oriented human striving.
You strive in virtue.

The escalation is:

[Now the following three words are underlined:]

weave
live
strive.

The other escalation is:

wisdom
glow
virtue.

Now I will read the lines as the appear to us at first when the Guardian speaks them to us:

The head's spirit,
You can will it;
And willing becomes for you
The senses' multi-formed heaven's interweaving.
You interweave in wisdom.

The heart's soul,
You can feel it;
And feeling becomes for you
The will's thinking, thinking will's
Awakening seed of cosmic life.
You live in the glow.

The limbs' force,
You can think it;
And thinking becomes
The will's goal-oriented human striving.
You strive in virtue.

That is the Guardian of the Threshold's last admonition.

That is the decisive point which is indicated by the words which are spoken here as the words Michael himself speaks, because this Esoteric School has been founded and is sustained by Michael and his force. Now we have come to the important point in our instruction where, if we have conscientiously practiced all that we have learned, it gives us wings to fly over the yawning, deep abyss of being.

Everything which has been said in this Michael School shall again be accompanied by the sign and seals of Michael; for all has been given in such a way that while it resounds through the space of this School, Michael is present, which may be confirmed by his sign:

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and which may be confirmed by his seal, which he has impressed on the threefold Rosicrucian verse:

Ex deo nascimur

In Christo morimur

Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus

the seal makes us feel the first line in this gesture:

[The lower seal is drawn on the blackboard.]

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the second line in this gesture:

[the middle seal gesture is drawn on the blackboard]

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the third verse in this gesture:

[the upper seal gesture is drawn on the blackboard]

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As we know, this first gesture means [beside the lower gesture is written:]

I revere the Father

We feel this as we say “Ex deo nascimur” and confirm it by the gesture, which is Michael's seal.

The second gesture means [beside the second gesture is written:]

I love the Son

We feel this while saying “In Christo morimur”, thus expressing the feeling through what lies in the Michael-Seal.

The third gesture means:

I unite with the spirit

It accompanies, in feeling, “Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus”. It is the gesture which is Michael's seal upon the third part of the Rosicrucian verse.

Thus, Michael's Sign and Seal accompany the path onward, which will be followed in this School for spiritual development:

[the Michael-Sign is made]

[The following three lines are spoken, accompanied by the three seal-gestures:

Ex deo nascimur

In Christo morimur

Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.

Then the moment comes when the Guardian of the Threshold's decisive words resound as though coming from Michael, as though from the cosmic distances. After the Guardian has said how we are to prepare ourselves—and we feel this preparation to be necessary—then his words resound as though coming from Michael, as though coming from the cosmic distances:

Come in.
The door has opened.
You will become
A true human being.

We must create the feeling that we are not speaking ourselves, but that as we are speaking it becomes objective, that we hear it, as if it is coming from the other side:

[Across the mantra “See the three” on the blackboard, the following is written in red chalk:]

Come in.
The door has opened.
You will become
A true human being.

In the following lessons, what resounds on the other side of the threshold will be described.

But now let us again consider—for all real development always leads back to the starting point—how from all the beings of the world the challenge speaks to us about what we have learned from the Guardian's mouth:

O man, know thyself!
So resounds the Cosmic-Word.
You hear it strong in soul,
You feel it firm in spirit.

Who speaks with such cosmic might?
Who speaks with such depth of heart?

Does it work through distant radiant space
Into your senses' sense of being?
Does it ring through weaving waves of time
Into your life's evolving stream?

It's you yourself who,
In feeling space, in experiencing time,

The Word create, feeling foreign
In space's soulless void,
Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destroying flow.

Once more—confirming all, confirming Michael's presence—the sign and seal of Michael:

[the Michael-sign is made]

[The following is spoken together with the seal-gestures:]

Ex deo nascimur

In Christo morimur

Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.

The mantric verses given here in order to practice contain the force necessary to experience what is described here. Only the members of this Class may possess them, no one else. If someone who belongs to the School cannot attend a lesson during which he would have received the corresponding verse, he may receive it from another member who was present. But for each time this happens permission must be received either from Dr. Wegman or myself. However, the one who is to receive the verse may not request permission, but only the one who is to give it.

Once permission has been granted to give someone the verses, it continues to hold good for that particular person. For every other person, permission must be obtained from Dr. Wegman or myself. It would be useless for the one who wants to receive the verses to request permission; only the one who is to give them should ask. So, if one wants to have the verses, he must go to someone who has them legitimately. The latter should then ask for each individual to whom he wishes to give them.

If someone makes notes of something else, other than the verses, he is only authorized to keep them for one week; after that they must be burned. We must really observe the occult rules. An occult rule is contained in all I have said and insist upon. This is not an arbitrary administrative measure, but because if esoteric things fall into the wrong hands, then, my dear sisters and brothers, the mantras lose their force. It is simply based on an occult law.

*

At twelve o'clock tomorrow is the Speech Formation course; at 10.45 the Theology course; at five o'clock the Pastoral Medicine course and at eight o'clock the lecture for members.

My dear sisters and brothers,

Since the Christmas Conference an esoteric breath flows through the whole Anthroposophical Society. And those members of the Anthroposophical Society who have taken part in the general members' lectures will have noted how this esoteric breath flows through all the work within the anthroposophical movement now, and should do so in the future.

This was a necessity which, above all, flows from the spiritual world, from where the revelations come which should live in the anthroposophical movement.

Therefore, the necessity arose to create a certain nucleus for anthroposophical esoteric life, to create real esoteric life, and therewith the necessity arose to build a bridge to the spiritual world itself.

In a certain sense the spiritual world had to manifest the will for the creation of such a School. For an esoteric school cannot be created by human arbitrariness, nor from that human arbitrariness called “human ideals”; rather must this esoteric school be the body for something which flows out of spiritual life, so that everything that occurs in such a school presents the outer expression of an activity which in reality occurs in the spiritual world itself. Therefore, this esoteric school could not have been created without first asking the will of Michael, which since the last third of the nineteenth century has been guiding human affairs - something which I have often mentioned here in members' lectures.

In the course of time this will of Michael again and again cyclically intervenes in human affairs from the spiritual world. And when we look back in the evolution of time, we find that this same Michael-Will - which we can also call the Michael Reign - was active in the spiritual affairs of humanity, in the great questions of civilization before the Mystery of Golgotha, in the time of Alexander in Greece through the Chthonian and Celestial mysteries, and which was to spread to Asia and Africa. Where the Michael-Will reigns, there is always cosmopolitanism. What differentiates people on earth is overcome during the Michael age.

The most important influence, related to Aristotle and to Alexander, which was under the impulse of Michael, was followed by that of Oriphiel, and after Oriphiel came the Anael impulse, the Zachariel impulse, then the Raphael impulse, then the Samael impulse, then the Gabriel impulse, which extended into the 19^th century. And since the seventies of the nineteenth century we are again under the sign of Michael's reign. It is in its beginnings. But Michael's impulses must flow into all legitimate esoteric activities in a conscious manner - what can be clear to you, my sisters and brothers, through the general lectures for members.

And everything connected with the Christmas Conference leads to what is constituted as the basis of the anthroposophical movement's formation of this Esoteric School inspired and guided by Michael. It therefore rightfully exists in our times as a spiritual institution. All those who want to be rightful members of this School must accept this in their lives with the deepest sincerity. They must feel that they don't merely belong to an earthly community, but to a supersensible community, whose guide and leader is Michael himself. Therefore, everything communicated here is not to be understood as my words, insofar as they are the content of the lessons, but rather as what Michael communicates in an esoteric manner to those who feel they belong with him in this age. Therefore, what these lessons contain will be Michael's message for our age.

And it is because of this that the anthroposophical movement will receive its true spiritual strength. For this it is necessary that what membership in this School means be taken with the utmost earnestness. It is really necessary, my dear sisters and brothers, truly and deeply necessary, that it be indicated in the utmost earnest manner the sacred earnestness with which the School must be taken.

And here within the School it must be repeatedly said: in anthroposophical circles there is much too little earnestness for what really flows through the anthroposophical movement, and at least the esoteric members of the Esoteric School must be in the forefront of what humanity can gradually develop as the necessary earnestness. Therefore, it is necessary that the leadership of the School retain for itself the right to allow only those to enter as rightful, worthy members of the School who, in every aspect of their lives, want to be worthy representatives of anthroposophy; and the decision about whether this is the case or not must lie with the School's leadership.

Do not consider this, my sisters and brothers, as a limitation of freedom. The School's leadership must also have its freedom and be able to recognize who belongs to the School and who does not, just as each one is free to decide whether to belong to the School or not. So, a free, ideal-spiritual contract, so to speak, between each member of the School and the leadership must be agreed upon. In no other way could esoteric development be called healthy, especially not one which is worthy of the fact that this Esoteric School exists under the direct force of the Michael impulse itself.

Conscientious care of the mantric verses so that they do not fall into unauthorized hands is the first requisite; but also, to really be a worthy representative of the anthroposophical cause.

I only need to mention a few things to show how little the anthroposophical movement is still grasped with complete earnestness. It has happened that members of the School have reserved their seats by placing on them the blue membership certificates, which gives them the right to participate in the School. [1] It has happened in the Anthroposophical Society that whole piles of the News Sheets, only intended for members, have been found on the trolley cars that run from Dornach to Basel. And I could add many other examples to this list. And amazing things happen as a result of this lack of earnestness. Even with things that in everyday life are taken seriously, at the moment when those within the anthroposophical movement are expected to do so, they do not take them seriously.

These are things which must be considered in connection with the firm structure that this School must have. Therefore, these things must be said, because if they are not observed, one cannot worthily receive what is given here in the School as revelations from the spiritual world. At the end of each lesson, your attention is expressly drawn to the fact that the being of Michael is present while the revelations from the spiritual world are given, and are confirmed by Michael's sign and seal.

All these things must live in the members' hearts. And worthiness, profound worthiness must reign in all that is bound even in thought to the School. For only in this way what today is to be carried through the world as an esoteric stream can live. And that includes the duties incumbent on each individual.

The mantric verses written here on the blackboard can only be possessed, in the strictest sense of the word, by those who have the right to be present. And if a member of the School is unable to attend a lesson during which mantric verses are given, another member, who has the verses, may give them to him; but it must be for each individual case, that is, for each person to whom the verses are to be given, that permission must be requested, either from Dr. Wegman or from me. Once permission is granted in respect to a person, it remains valid. But permission must again be requested for each other individual. This is not an administrative rule, it is an occult rule that must be strictly adhered to. For every act of the School must be connected to the School's leadership: and that begins with having to request permission from the School's leadership for acts having to do with the School. Not the one who is to receive the mantras may ask, but only the one who is to give them, using the modality that I have just described. If someone takes notes on what is said here, except for the mantras, he is obliged to keep them for only one week, and then to burn them.

All these things are not arbitrary rules, but they relate to the occult fact that esoteric matters are only effective if they are embraced by the School members' attitude. The mantras lose their effectiveness if they fall into the wrong hands. And it is a rule so firmly inscribed in the cosmic order, that the following once happened and a whole group of mantras, which had been in effect within the anthroposophical movement, have been rendered ineffective.

I was able to give mantric verses to a number of people; I also gave them to a certain person, who had a friend. The friend was somewhat clairvoyant. And it happened that while the two friends were sleeping in the same room, the clairvoyant friend, when the other one merely repeated the mantra in thought, surreptitiously copied it and then did mischief with it by giving it to others as coming from himself. It was necessary to look into the matter, which revealed why the mantra became ineffective for all those who possessed it.

Therefore, my dear sisters and brothers, you must not take these things lightly, for esoteric rules are strict; and when someone has made such an error, he should not excuse himself by claiming that he was unable to avoid it. Of course, if someone runs through a mantra in his mind, and someone else copies it clairvoyantly, he certainly can do nothing about it. Nevertheless, the rules are applied with an iron necessity. [2]

I mention this so that you can see how little arbitrariness is involved, and how these things are being read from the spiritual world and that the practices of the spiritual world apply. Nothing is arbitrary in what occurs in a rightly existing esoteric school. And the earnestness from this esoteric school should stream out to the whole anthroposophical movement. For only then will this School be what it should be for the anthroposophical movement. But when something is done which only springs from personal motives and then it is pretended that it is because of devotion to the anthroposophical movement- well, I don't mean to say that it should not happen, because obviously, people today must be personal - but then it is also necessary that truth lives in what is personal, that for instance if someone comes here to Dornach for personal pleasure he should admit it and not pretend otherwise. There's nothing wrong with coming to Dornach for personal pleasure, in fact it is good. But one should admit it and not sidestep it by declaring pure dedication to spiritual life.

I mention this; I could just as well mention another example, which is more real, for it is really the case that when most of our friends come to Dornach, a will to sacrifice is involved, and that only in the least of cases is untruthfulness involved. But I've chosen this example because it is the least applicable and thus the least harmful. If I had mentioned other examples, what I would like to have as a calm prevailing mood in the hearts and souls of all who are sitting here now could not exist in the necessary degree.

After that introduction, I would like to start with the verse that is the beginning and end of Michael's proclamation to all unbiased human beings, and which contains what all entities in the world are saying, if one listens to them with the soul. For from all that lives in the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms, what sparkles down from the stars, what acts into our souls from the domains of the hierarchies, from all that crawls under and on the earth as worm-life, from what speaks in rocks and springs and fields and thunder and clouds and lightning; all these spoke to unbiased human beings in the past, speak at the present and will speak in the future:

O man, know thyself!
So resounds the Cosmic-Word.
You hear it strong in soul,
You feel it firm in spirit.

Who speaks with such cosmic might?
Who speaks with such depth of heart?

Does it work through distant radiant space
Into your senses' sense of being?
Does it ring through weaving waves of time
Into your life's evolving stream?

It's you yourself who,
In feeling space, in experiencing time,
The Word create, feeling foreign
In space's soulless void,
Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destroying flow.

The previous lesson ended, my dear sisters and brothers, with the Guardian of the Threshold giving the last admonitions before one passes over the yawning abyss of being; the Guardian of the Threshold spoke the weighty, moving words:

Come in,
The gate has opened;
You will become
A true human being.

Our souls and hearts have been exposed to the important, weighty, meaningful words spoken by the Guardian of the Threshold on behalf of Michael. And everything he said was to prepare us for the attitude we must have when we come over after the gate has been opened - over the yawning abyss of being, where one does not come walking with earthly feet, where one flies with the spiritual wings that grow when the soul is imbued with a spiritual attitude, with spiritual love, with spiritual feeling.

And now, now, my dear sisters and brothers, will be described what the human being experiences when he stands on the other side of the yawning abyss of being. The Guardian of the Threshold indicates to him: turn around and look back! Until now you have been looking at what appeared to you as black, night-cloaked gloom, about which you had to say that it will become inner light and will illumine your own Self. With the last admonitions—the Guardian of the Threshold says—I let it become lighter, at first most gently. You feel now the first light around you. But turn around, look back!

And now, when he who has crossed over the yawning abyss of being and turns around and looks back, he sees himself as an earthly human being, what he is during his physical incarnation, over there in the part of his being that he has left behind and which now lies in the earthly sphere. He observes his own human self there. He has embodied himself in spiritual being with his spirit-soul. The earthly environment is over there now. He stands there in the region, in which we first were with all our humanity, where we saw what crawls beneath and flies above, where we saw the sparkling stars, the warmth-giving sun, where we saw what lives in the wind and weather, and where, knowing that despite all its majesty, how the sun blazes and illumines, despite all the beauty and greatness accessible to the senses, we said to ourselves: our own humanity is not here; we must seek it on the other side of the yawning abyss of being, in what seems at first, to the senses, to be black, night-cloaked gloom.

The Guardian of the Threshold has shown, by the three beasts, what we actually are. Now will be described how in the gloom that is beginning to be light, we should begin to look back on what we as humans are in the sensory world, together with what was our only world in sensory earthly existence.

And now the Guardian of the Threshold points directly back there to the earthly man, which we ourselves also are during earthly existence, and to which we must continually return, into which we must always penetrate when we leave the spiritual world and return to our earthly duty. For we may not become dreamers and go into raptures, we must return completely to earth life. Therefore the Guardian of the Threshold directs us to look at the person who stands over there, who we ourselves are, in a way that at first draws our attention to what this person is. [An outline of a human being is drawn on the blackboard.]

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He knows that he perceives the outer world through the senses, which are mostly situated in the head, and that he perceives his thinking through the impulse of the head.

But the Guardian of the Threshold now says: Look into this head. It is like looking into a dark cell, for you do not see the creative light within it. The truth is that what you had as thinking over there in the sensory world is mere seeming, mere images, not much more than mirror-images.

The Guardian of the Threshold admonishes us to be very aware of this, but also to be aware that what is only appearance in earthly thinking is the corpse - as we have heard in previous lessons - of a living thinking in which we were immersed in the soul-spiritual world before we descended to this earthly life. There thinking lived! Now thinking rests as dead thinking, as seeming thinking in the coffin of our bodies. And all the thinking we use in the sensory world is dead thinking. It was alive before we descended.

And what has this thinking accomplished? It has created everything that is within the head, within this dark cell - as it appears to the senses - that is light-creating essence. The brain, which rests within as thinking's support, has been created by living thinking. [The interior of the head, yellow, is drawn on the blackboard.] It is living thinking that creates the support for our earthly semblance of thinking.

Observe the brain's convolutions, observe what you carry within the dark cell that enables you to think, my sisters and brothers, observe the semblance of thinking in the dark cell, then you will find in what is felt above as thinking [drawing: red arrows] from out of which streams the force of will into thinking, so that each thought is streamed through with will. How the will streams into thinking can be sensed.

And now we look back from the other side of the threshold at how that other person, who we ourselves are, has waves of will streaming out of his body into the head, which create the will, and finally, when we follow them back to the turning points of time which lead to our previous incarnations, how they create the waves of thought from worlds past into our present incarnation and form our heads, all of which makes the semblance of thinking in this incarnation possible.

Therefore, we must be strong, the Guardian of the Threshold tells us, and imagine dead thinking being cast out into the cosmic nothingness, for it is only seeming. And the willing that then arises we should consider as what comes over from previous incarnations and interweaves and works, making us thinkers. Within [drawing: yellow] are the creating cosmic thoughts. These creating cosmic thoughts enable us to have human thoughts.

Therefore, the first words the Guardian of the Threshold speaks after he has let us cross the threshold, and after he has announced that the gate has opened, that we can become true human beings, the first words he speaks are:

See behind thinking's sensory light,
How in the gloomy spirit-cell
Willing arises from the body's depths;
Let be cast, through your strength of soul,
Dead thinking into the cosmic void;
And willing, it will arise
As cosmic thought's creation.

The first words we hear on the other side, as we look back at the figure, which we ourselves are:

[The first mantra is written on the blackboard, together with a heading. Blackboard writing is always in italics.]

The Guardian is heard in the brightening darkness:

I

See behind thinking's sensory light,
How in the gloomy spirit-cell
Willing arises from the body's depths;
Let be cast, through your strength of soul,
Dead thinking into the cosmic void;
And willing, it will arise
As cosmic thought's creation.

And then the Guardian of the Threshold adds - and one must strain to hear him: Now imagine that you are observing that figure on the other side who you yourself are; you turn around again and look into the darkness and try with all your inner imaginative force of remembrance - as one does when retaining a physical after-image in the eye. Try with all your strength to draw before you something like a gray outline of what you saw over there, but avoid drawing anything except the outline of the figure. [It is drawn.]

Then, if one succeeds in seeing this gray outline of a figure, behind it appears an image of the moon [a sickle moon, yellow, is drawn], the gray figure before it.

If one is able to keep inner calm, one sees the moon in the distance. The gray figure outline is also there, but it is active in us. And if we practice this over and over, we feel we have arrived at the spiritual figure of the head that we had over there, not the physical human figure, but at the spiritual figure of the head that we had over there, if we can feel what karma brings to us from previous earthly incarnations. [yellow arrow at the right of the sickle moon.]

Therefore, you should meditate on this picture that I have drawn here, the sickle moon with this arrow; let the mantra unfold, with this picture as the marker for the gradual familiarization with what forcefully comes over from previous earthly existences.

And secondly, the Guardian of the Threshold points with a stronger gesture to what feeling is to the person over there, who we ourselves are, and he admonishes that we are to see this feeling as a dim dream. In fact, we see feeling - which makes the person over there more real than thinking, for thinking is illusion, whereas feeling is half reality - we see the person's feeling enfold in numerous dream-pictures during the day. We learn by observing it that feeling, for the spirit and in the spirit, is dreaming.

But what kind of dreaming is feeling? In this feeling, not only the individual dreams, but within it the whole surrounding world dreams. Our thinking is our own. That's why it's illusion. The world lives in our feeling. The world's existence is within it.

Now we must achieve, to the extent possible, tranquility of heart, the Guardian warns, so that we can extinguish what lives and interweaves as feeling in the dream-pictures, just as dreams are extinguished in deep sleep. Then we can reach the truth of feeling, and we can see human feeling interwoven with the cosmic life that is present in spirit in all our surroundings. And then the real spiritual human being appears to us, who in his body lives at first in his half-existence. The human being appears to us from out of sleeping feeling. We feel ourselves to be on the other side of the threshold, on the other side of the yawning abyss of being, for feeling has fallen asleep and the cosmic creative powers, which live in feeling, have appeared around us.

See in feeling's weaving in the soul,
How in sleep's dim-like dawning
Life streams in from cosmic distance;
Let in sleep through tranquil heart
Human feeling waft away hushed;
And cosmic life spiritualizes
As the human being's power.

[This second part is written on the blackboard.]

II

See in

(Before it was “behind”, here it is “in”; all the words in a mantric verse are important.)

feeling's weaving in the soul,

(Before it was “thinking”, here “feeling”; there “sensory light”, here “weaving in the soul”; “weaving” is much more real than merely semblance of light.)

[In the first part “thinking” and “sensory light”, and in the second part “feeling's” are underlined.

How in sleep's dim-like dawning
Life streams in from cosmic distance;

(There it was “Willing arises from the body's depths;”, here “Life streams in from cosmic distance;”)

[In the third line of the first part “Willing” is underlined, and in the second part “Life”.]

Let in sleep through tranquil heart
Human feeling waft away hushed;

It is enhanced: Here [in the first part] it involved letting flow through the soul's force; here [in the second part] one must waft away human feeling. [the word “waft” is underlined.]

And cosmic life spiritualizes

—here [in the first part] it was the willing that is still in the human being; here it is cosmic

As the human being's power.

—the enhancement relative to cosmic thought's creation.—

[In the first part “cosmic thought's creation” and in the second part “human being's power” are underlined.]

The Guardian of the Threshold indicates to us that we should look back once again at the gray figure that stands over there, which we are ourselves in earthly life, but this time after having turned away, in our minds we turn it around in a circle. We will find, when we rotate the figure, that the sun appears behind it and rotates with it. [It is drawn - left, red]. And we will realize that at the moment we are brought into physical existence from the spiritual world, our etheric body has been compressed from the cosmic ether. Therefore, just as the first verse belongs to this [the drawing of the gray figure and the first verse are numbered “I”], this second verse belongs to this. [The drawing of the red rotating form and the second verse are numbered “II”.]

Then the Guardian of the Threshold refers us to our will, which is active in our limbs. And he strongly draws our attention to the fact that whatever relates to the will is in a sleeping state, even when we are awake. He explains how as the thought works downward - I explained it last time, so may say it now -, how as the thought carries warmth downward into our limbs' movement so that it becomes will: this becomes clear in spiritual cognition and spiritual seeing. Normal consciousness hides this when we are sleeping, as it hides life in general during sleep. Now we should observe the will in the limbs as though sunken in deep sleep. The will is asleep. The limbs are asleep. We should see this as a firm mental image. Then, when it is firm, we realize how thinking, the source of willing in earthly man, sinks down into the limbs. Then it becomes light in him. The will becomes bright. It wakes up. When we first see it in its sleeping state, we find that it wakes up when thinking sinks downward and light from below streams upward, which is the force of gravity. Feel the force of gravity in your legs and arms when you let them relax: that is what streams upward, and which meets with the downward streaming thinking. We observe human will transformed into its reality and thinking appearing as what ignites the will in man in an enchanting, magical way. That is the truly magical effect of thinking on the will. It is magic. Now we become aware of it. The Guardian of the Threshold says:

See above the bodily effects of will,
—in the aura—
How into sleeping fields of activity
Thinking sinks down from head forces;
Let through the soul's vision of light
human will transform itself;
And thinking, it appears
As the magical essence of will.

[This third verse, with underlining, is written on the blackboard.]

III

See above the bodily effects of will,

Now we imagine that the Guardian of the Threshold again points to the person over there, who we are ourselves, telling us to look and retain the picture, but not to turn around, but to let this picture sink below the surface of the earth beneath where the figure is standing. We look over there. There stands the one who we ourselves are. We make the picture and develop the strong force to look below, as though a lake were there and we were looking at this image as now being within the earth, but not as a mirror-image, but as an upright figure. [Draws.]

We imagine this picture: the earth [A white arc is drawn.] belonging to the third verse [This drawing and the third verse are given the number III.] We imagine: how the earth's gravitational forces rise, how the gravitational forces illuminate the limbs, feet and arms [white arrows]. In later observation, we acquire an idea of how gods and humans cooperate between death and a new birth to arrange karma.

That is what the Guardian of the Threshold admonishes us about when he speaks to us for the first time after we have crossed over the yawning abyss of being.

See behind thinking's sensory light,
How in the gloomy spirit-cell
Willing arises from the body's depths;
Let be cast, through your strength of soul,
Dead thinking into the cosmic void;
And willing, it will arise
As cosmic thought's creation.

See in feeling's weaving in the soul,
How in sleep's dim-like dawning
Life streams in from cosmic distance;
Let in sleep through tranquil heart
Human feeling waft away hushed;
And cosmic life spiritualizes
As the human being's power.

See above the bodily effects of will,
How into sleeping fields of activity
Thinking sinks down from head forces;
Let through the soul's vision of light
human will transform itself;
And thinking, it appears
As the magical essence of will.

The circle always closes. We are looking again at the starting point, listening to all the beings and all the processes of the world:

O man, know thyself!
So resounds the Cosmic-Word.
You hear it strong in soul,
You feel it firm in spirit.

Who speaks with such cosmic might?
Who speaks with such depth of heart?

Does it work through distant radiant space
Into your senses' sense of being?
Does it ring through weaving waves of time
Into your life's evolving stream?

It's you yourself who,
In feeling space, in experiencing time,
The Word create, feeling foreign
In space's soulless void,
Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destroying flow.

By this affirmation, Michael is present in this, his rightfully existing School. His presence is confirmed by his sign, which should loom over everything given in this School:

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

It is confirmed by his seal, that he has impressed on the esoteric striving of the Rosicrucian School, and which lives on symbolically in the threefold verse:

Ex deo nascimur

In Christo morimur

Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus

And as Michael impresses his seal, the first sentence is spoken with this gesture:

[draws: Image 1, the lower seal gesture, yellow]

The second sentence with this gesture:

[draws: Image 1, the middle seal gesture, yellow]

The third sentence with this gesture:

[draws: Image 1, the upper seal gesture]

The first gesture means:[3]

I esteem the Father

It lives mutely as we say: “Ex deo nascimur”.

[lower seal gesture]

The second gesture means:

I love the Son

It lives mutely as we say: “In Christo morimur”.

[middle seal gesture]

The third gesture means:

I unite with the Spirit

It lives mutely in the Sign, which is Michael's Seal, as we speak: “Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus”.

[upper seal gesture]

Thus, today's Michael affirmation is confirmed by means of his Sign and Seals:

[Michael's Sign]

[spoken with the seal gestures:]

Ex deo nascimur

In Christo morimur

Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.

Translator's notes:

[1] It is a fairly common practice in Germany and Switzerland for people who come early to a function to place a paper, notebook, or hat on a chair to reserve their places.

[2] It seems to me, although the editors of the German original say nothing about it, that Rudolf Steiner was being ironic here, that a School member gave the mantra to his unauthorized friend, who then passed it on to others, and that the member then used the “clairvoyant” story as an excuse.

[3] The Michael Sign and Seals: From the stenographic notes of the seven recapitulation lessons, it is not possible to determine when Rudolf Steiner only wrote the words on the blackboard or when he spoke the words and wrote them, or only spoke them.

---

This was the last Lesson for the Esoteric School. Rudolf Steiner was unable to continue because of illness. He died on March 30, 1925.

What humanity needs to take in, with an eye to developmental necessities, is an expansion of consciousness in all areas of life. Humanity lives today in such a way that what it does, what it engages in, is actually only linked to the events between birth and death. In everything that happens, we only ask about what takes place between birth and death. It will be essential for the recovery of our lives that we ask about more than just this period of time in our lives, which we spend under very special conditions. Our life includes what we are and do between birth and death, and also what we are and do between death and a new birth. In this materialistic age, people are not very aware of the role played by the life between death and birth that we have gone through before descending to this life through birth or conception; nor are they aware of how things are already taking place in this life here in the physical body that point to the life we will lead after death. Today we want to point out a few things that can show how certain cultural areas will take on a different view of the whole of human life, in that human consciousness will and must extend beyond life in the supersensible worlds.

I believe that a certain question may arise for people when they consider the full extent of our artistic life. Let us look at the supersensible life from this perspective today. Something will emerge from it that can later be used to look at social life.

We know that the actual high arts are sculpture, architecture, painting, poetry and music, and we are adding something to these arts from certain foundations of anthroposophical life and knowledge, such as eurythmy. The question that I mean, which could arise for people in relation to the arts, would be: What is the positive, the actual reason for introducing art into life? In the materialistic age, art has only to do with the immediate reality that takes place between birth and death. In this materialistic age, however, people have forgotten the supersensible origin of art and more or less merely aim to imitate what is in the external, sense-perceptible world. But anyone who has a deeper feeling for nature on the one hand and for art on the other will certainly not be able to agree with this imitation of natural existence in art, with naturalism. For the question must always be raised again and again: Can, for example, the best landscape painter somehow conjure up the beauty of a natural landscape on canvas? A person who is not educated will have the feeling, even in the presence of a naturalistically conceived landscape, however good it may be, that I expressed in the preface to my first mystery, The Portal of Initiation: that no imitation of nature will ever be able to reach nature. Naturalism will have to prove itself contrary to feeling for the better-sensed. Therefore, only that which goes beyond nature in some way will be recognized by the discerning observer as legitimate in art. It is that which attempts to give something other than what mere nature can present to man, at least in the way it is presented. But why do we, as human beings, develop art at all? Why do we go beyond nature in sculpture and poetry?

Anyone who develops an appreciation of the world's interconnections will see how, for example, a sculptor works in a unique way to capture the human form, how an attempt is made to express the human in the shaping of the form; how we cannot simply take the human form, as it appears to us in a natural man, suffused with inner inspiration, with flesh tints, with everything we see in a natural man except the form, we cannot incorporate this into the form when we are creating a sculptural work of art, when we are creating a human being. But I believe that the sculptor who creates human beings will gradually develop a very special sense. And I have no doubt that the Greek sculptor had the feeling I am about to describe, and that it was only in the naturalistic era that this feeling was lost.

It seems to me that the sculptor who forms the human figure has a completely different way of feeling when he sculpts the head and when he sculpts the rest of the body. These two things are actually fundamentally different from each other in the work: sculpting the head, and sculpting the rest of the body. If I may express myself somewhat drastically, I would like to say: when you are working on the sculptural design of the human head, you have the feeling that you are constantly being absorbed by the material, that the material wants to draw you into itself. But when you are sculpting the rest of the human body, you have the feeling that you are actually pricking and pushing into the body everywhere without authorization, that you are pushing into it from the outside. You have the feeling that you are shaping the rest of the body from the outside, that you are forming the forms from the outside. You have the feeling that when you shape the body, you are actually working inside it, and you have the feeling when you shape the head that you are working out of it.

This seems to me to be a very peculiar feeling in plastic design, which was certainly still characteristic of the Greek artist and which was only lost in the naturalistic period, when one began to be a slave to the model. One wonders: where does such a feeling come from when one intends to form the human figure with a view to the supersensible?

All this is connected with much deeper questions, and before I go on to this, I would like to mention one more thing. Just consider how strongly one has the feeling of a certain inwardness of experience in relation to sculpture and architecture, despite the fact that sculpture and architecture apparently form externally in the external material: In architecture, one inwardly experiences the dynamics, one inwardly experiences how the column supports the beam, how the column develops into the capital. One inwardly experiences that which is outwardly formed. And in a similar way it is the case with sculpture.

This is not the case with music, and it is especially not the case with poetry. In poetry, it seems quite clear to me that in the shaping of the poetic material it is, to put it drastically, as if when one begins to shape the words – which one can still hold in one's larynx when speaking prose – into iambs or trochees, when one puts them into rhyme, they run away and one has to chase after them. They inhabit the atmosphere around you more than your inner self. You feel poetry much more externally than, for example, architecture and sculpture. And it is probably the same with music if you focus your feelings on it. Musical notes also animate your entire surroundings. You actually forget space and time, or at least space, and you live out of yourself in a moral experience. You don't have the feeling that you have to chase after the figures you create, as you do with poetry; but you do have the feeling that you have to swim in an indeterminate element that spreads everywhere and that you dissolve in the process of swimming.

There, you see, one begins to nuance certain feelings towards the whole essence of the artistic. One gives these feelings very specific characteristics. What I have described to you now, and what, I believe, the fine artistically sensitive can empathize with, cannot be believed when one looks at a crystal or any other mineral natural product, or at a plant or an animal or a physically real human being. One feels and senses differently in relation to the whole of external physical and sensory nature than one feels and senses in relation to the individual branches of artistic experience that I have just described.

One can speak of supersensible knowledge as transforming ordinary abstract knowledge into intuitive knowledge and can point the way to experiential knowledge. It is absurd to demand that in higher fields, one should prove in the same pedantic, logical, philistine way as one proves in the rough natural sciences or the like or in mathematics. If one familiarizes oneself with what the sensations become when one enters the field of art, then one gradually enters into strange inner states of mind. Very definite nuances of soul state arise when one really experiences the plastic, the architectural, inwardly, when one goes along with the dynamics, mechanics, and so on, in architecture, when one goes along with the rounding of the form in sculpture. A remarkable path is taken by the inner world of feeling: here one is confronted with an experience of the soul that is very similar to memory. Those who have the experience of remembering, the experience of memory, notice how the architectural and sculptural feeling becomes similar to the inner process of remembering. But then again, remembering is on a higher level. In other words, by way of the feeling for architecture and sculpture, one gradually comes close to the soul feeling, the soul experience, which the spiritual researcher knows as the memory of prenatal states. And indeed, the way one lives between death and a new birth in connection with the whole universe, by feeling that one moves as a spiritual soul or a spiritualized spirit in certain directions, crossing paths with beings , one is in balance with other beings, and what one experiences and lives between death and a new birth is initially remembered subconsciously and is in fact recreated in architectural art and sculpture.

And when we relive this spatial quality with our inner presence in sculpture and architecture, we discover that we actually want nothing more in sculpture and architecture than to somehow conjure up into the physical-sensory world the experiences we had in the spiritual world before our birth, or before our conception. When we build houses not purely according to the principle of utility, but when we build houses that are architecturally beautiful, we shape the dynamic relationships as they arise from our memory of experiences, of experiences of balance, of vibrating formative experiences and so on, which we had in the time between death and this birth.

And in this way one discovers how man actually came to develop architecture and sculpture as arts. The experience between death and the new birth rumbled in his soul. He wanted to bring it out somehow and put it in front of him, and he created architecture and he created sculpture. That humanity in its cultural development has produced architecture and sculpture is essentially due to the fact that the life between death and birth has an effect, that the human being wants this out of his inner being: as the spider spins, so he wants to bring out and shape what he experiences between death and this birth. He carries the experiences from before birth into physical, sensual life. And what we see in the overview of the architectural and sculptural works of art that people create is nothing other than the realization of unconscious memories of the life between death and this birth.

Now we have a real answer to the question of why man creates art. If man were not a supersensible being who enters into this life through conception or birth, he would certainly not create any sculpture or architecture.

And we know what a peculiar connection exists between two successive or, let us say, three successive earthly lives: what you have today as a head is, in the formative forces, the headless body of your previous incarnation, and what you have today as a body will transform into your head by the next incarnation. The human head has a completely different meaning: it is old; it is the transformed previous body. The forces that one has experienced between the previous death and this birth have formed this outer form of the head; the body, which carries within itself the seething forces that will be formed in the next earthly life.

So there you have the reason why the sculptor feels differently about the head than about the rest of the body. With the head, he feels something like: the head wants to absorb him because the head is formed from the previous incarnation through forces that reside in its present forms. With the rest of the body, he feels something like: he wants to push into it and the like, by developing it plastically, because the spiritual forces that lead through death and lead across to the next incarnation are seated in it. The sculptor in particular senses this radical difference between the past and the future in the human body. What the formative forces of the physical body are, and how they work from incarnation to incarnation, is expressed in plastic art. What is now seated deeper in the etheric body, which is our equilibrium carrier, the carrier of our dynamics, comes out more in architectural art.

You see, you cannot really grasp human life in its entirety if you do not take a look at the supersensible life, if you do not seriously answer the question: How do we come to develop architecture and sculpture? — The fact that people do not want to look at the supersensible world stems from the fact that they do not want to look at the things of this world in the right way.

Basically, how do most people react to the arts that reveal a spiritual world? Actually, like a dog to human speech. The dog hears human speech, but probably thinks it is barking. Unless he is a “Mannheim Rolf,” he does not perceive the meaning that lies within the sounds. This was an apt dog that caused quite a stir some time ago among people who deal with such useless arts. This is how man stands before the arts, which actually speak of the supersensible world that man has experienced: he does not see in these arts what they actually reveal.

Let us look, for example, at poetry. Poetry clearly emerges for those who can feel it through – but when characterizing such things, one must always bear in mind that, with some variation, Lichtenberg's saying applies: Ninety-nine percent more is written than our globe's humanity needs for its happiness, and than is real art – real poetry emerges from the whole person. And what does it do? It does not stop at prose: it shapes prose, it introduces meter and rhythm into prose. It does something that the prosaic man of the world finds superfluous for life. It specially shapes that which – already unformed – would give the meaning that one wants to associate with it. When you listen to a recitation, which is real art, and you get a sense of what the poetic artist makes out of the content of the prose, then you get a peculiar character of the sensations. One cannot perceive the mere content, the prose content of a poem as a poem. One perceives as a poem how the words roll in iambs or in trochaics or in anapaests, how the sounds repeat themselves in alliterations, assonances or in other rhymes. One perceives much else that lies in the how of the shaping of the prosaic material. That is what must be conveyed in the recitation. If one recites in such a way that one merely brings the prose content, however seemingly profound, out of one's inner being, then one believes one is reciting “artistically”! If you can really hold this peculiar nuance of feeling, which includes the feeling of the poetic, then you come to say to yourself: This actually goes beyond ordinary feeling, because ordinary feeling clings to the things of sensual existence, the poetic does not cling to the things of sensual existence. I expressed it earlier by saying: the poetically shaped then lives more in the atmosphere that surrounds you; or you want to burst out of yourself in order to actually experience the words of the poet correctly outside of yourself.

This comes from the fact that you create something out of yourself that you cannot experience at all between birth and death. One develops something of the soul that one can also leave between birth and death if one only wants to live. One can live and die quite well until death without doing anything other than making the sober prose content the content of life. But why does one feel the need to add rhythm and assonance and alliteration and rhymes to this sober prose content? Well, because one has more in oneself than one needs until death, because one also wants to shape out during this life what one has more in oneself than one needs until death. It is foresight of the life that follows death: because one already carries within oneself what follows after death, therefore one feels impelled not just to speak, but to speak poetically. And just as sculpture and architecture are connected with prenatal life, with the forces within us from prenatal life, so poetry is connected with the life that takes place after death, or rather with the forces within us that are already within us for the life after death. And it is more the ego, as it lives here between birth and death, as it passes through the gate of death and then lives on, that already carries within itself the powers that poetry expresses.

And it is the astral body that already lives here in the world of sound, that forms the world of sound into melody and harmony, which we do not find in the physical world outside, because what we experience after death is already in our astral body. You know, this astral body that we carry within us only lives with us for a while after death, then we also discard it. Nevertheless, this astral body has the actual musical element in it. But it has it in the way it experiences it here between birth and death in its life element, the air. We need the air if we want to have a medium for musical feeling.

When we arrive at the station after death, where we discard our astral body, we also discard everything that reminds us of our musical life on earth. But in this moment in the world, the musical element transforms into the music of the spheres. We become independent of what we experience as musical in the air and live our way up into a musicality that is the music of the spheres. For that which is experienced here as music in the air is, above, the music of the spheres. And now the reflection lives itself into the element of air, becomes denser, becomes that which we experience as earth music, which we imprint on our astral body, which we develop, which we relive as long as we have our astral body. After death we discard our astral body: then — forgive the banal expression — our musicality leaps up into the music of the spheres. Thus we have in music and in poetry a pre-life of that which after death is our world, our existence. We experience the supersensible in two directions. This is how these four arts present themselves to us.

And painting? There is still another spiritual world that lies behind our sensory world. The coarse-materialistic physicist or biologist speaks of atoms and molecules behind the sensory world. They are not molecules and atoms. Behind them are spiritual beings. There is a spiritual world that we live through between falling asleep and waking up. This world, which we bring over from sleep, is what actually inspires us when we paint, so that we bring the spiritual world that surrounds us spatially onto the canvas or onto the wall in general. Therefore, when painting, one must be very careful to paint from the color, not from the line, because the line lies in painting. The line is always something of the memory of prenatal life. If we want to paint in an expanded consciousness that includes the spiritual world, then we must paint what comes out of the color. And we know that color is experienced in the astral world. When we enter the world that we live through between falling asleep and waking up, we experience this color. And however we want to create a harmony of colors, however we want to put the colors on the canvas, it is nothing other than what is pushing us: we push into it, we let flow into our waking body what we have experienced between falling asleep and waking up. That is in there, and that is what the person wants to put on the canvas when painting. In turn, what emerges in painting is the reproduction of a supersensible reality. So that the arts actually point to the supersensible everywhere. For those who can perceive it in the right way, painting becomes a revelation of the spiritual world that surrounds us in space and permeates us from space, in which we find ourselves between falling asleep and waking up. Sculpture and architecture bear witness to the spiritual world that we live through between death and a new birth before conception, before birth; music and poetry bear witness to how we live through life post mortem, after death. In this way, that which is our share in the spiritual world penetrates into our ordinary physical life on earth.

And if we philistinely regard what a person presents as art in life as being only connected with what happens between birth and death, then we actually take away all meaning from artistic creation. For artistic creation is definitely a way of bringing spiritual, supersensible worlds into the physical, sensual world. And it is only because man is pressed by that which he carries within him from prenatal life, because he is pressed in the waking state by that which he carries within him from the supersensible life during sleep, because he is pressed by that which is already within him and which wants to shape him after death, that he places architecture, sculpture, painting, music and poetry in the world of sensory experience. That people do not usually speak of supersensible worlds is merely because they do not understand the sensory world either, especially not even understand what spiritual human culture once knew, but what has been lost and what has become an externalization: art.

If we learn to understand art, it is a true proof of human immortality and of the human being having come into existence. And we need this so that our consciousness expands beyond the horizon that is limited by birth and death, so that we can connect what we have in our physical life on earth to the superphysical life.

If we now create out of a knowledge that, like anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, goes straight for the spiritual world, to include the spiritual world in the imagination, in the thinking, in the feeling, the feeling, the will, then there will be fertile soil for an art that, so to speak, synthetically summarizes the prenatal and the afterlife.

And let us consider eurythmy. We set the human body itself in motion. What do we set in motion? We set the human organism in motion so that its limbs move. The limbs are what primarily lives itself over into the next earthly life, what points to the future, to what happens after death. But how do we shape the movements of the limbs that we produce in eurythmy? We study, in a way that is both sensory and supersensory, how the larynx and all the speech organs have developed out of the head — through the intellectual and sentient faculties of the chest — out of our previous life. We directly connect the prenatal with the afterlife. We take only that part of the human being that is the physical material: the human being himself, who is the tool, the instrument for eurythmy. But we allow what we study inwardly to appear in the human being, what is formed in him from previous lives, and we transfer this to his limbs, that is, to that which is formed in the afterlife. In eurythmy we provide a form of human organism and movement that is direct outward proof of the human being's life in the supersensible world. We connect the human being directly to the supersensible world by letting him or her eurythmize.

Wherever art is created out of a true artistic spirit, art is a testimony to the connection between human beings and the supersensible worlds. And when, in our time, man is called upon to take the gods, as it were, into his own soul forces, so that he does not merely wait in faith for the gods to bring him this or that, but wants to act as if the gods lived in his active will , then humanity will want to experience it, where, so to speak, man must pass from the externally shaped objective arts to an art that will take on completely different dimensions and forms in the future: to an art that directly represents the supersensible. How could it be otherwise? Spiritual science also wants to directly represent the supersensible, so it must, so to speak, also create such an art out of itself.

And the pedagogical-didactic application will gradually educate people who, through education in this direction, will find it natural that they are supersensible beings because they move their hands, arms and legs in such a way that the forces of the supersensible world are active within them. It is indeed the soul of the human being, the supersensible soul, that comes to life in eurythmy. It is the living out of the supersensible that comes to light in the eurythmic movements.

Everything that is brought by spiritual science is truly in harmony inwardly. On the one hand, it is brought so that the life in which we live can be seen more deeply and more intensely, so that we learn to direct our gaze to the living proofs that are there for the unborn and the immortal; and on the other hand, what is supersensible in man is introduced into human will.

This is the inner consistency that underlies spiritual science when it is oriented anthroposophically. As a result, spiritual science will expand human consciousness. Man will no longer be able to walk through the world as he did in the materialistic age, when he only had an overview of what lives between birth and death, and perhaps still had a belief in something else that , which makes him happy, which redeems him, but of which he cannot form a concept, of which he only allows himself to be preached in a sentimental way, of which he actually only has an empty content. Through spiritual science, man is to receive real content from the spiritual worlds again. People are to be released from an abstract life, from a life that only wants to stop at perception, at thinking between birth and death, and that at most still absorbs in words some vague references to a supersensible world. Spiritual science will bring about an awareness in people that broadens their horizons and enables them to perceive the supersensible world when they live and work here in the physical world. We go through the world today, having turned thirty, and know that what we have at thirty has been instilled in us at ten, at fifteen: we remember that. We remember that when we read at thirty, our learning to read twenty-two or twenty-three years ago is linked to the present moment. But we do not consider that at every moment between birth and death, what we have lived through between the last death and this birth vibrates and pulses within us. If we turn our gaze to what has been born out of these forces in architecture and sculpture, and understand it in the right sense, then we will also transfer it to life in the right sense and in turn gain a sense for the superfluous shaping of prose into rhythm and beat and rhyme, into alliteration and assonance in poetry, in the face of philistine, prosaic life. Then we will correctly connect this nuance of feeling with the immortal essence within us, which we carry through death. We will say: No human being could become a poet if it were not for the fact that what actually creates in the poet is in all people: the power that only comes to life externally after death, but that is already in us now.

This is the inclusion of the supersensible in the ordinary consciousness, which must be expanded again if humanity is to avoid sinking further into what it has rushed into by contracting its consciousness so much that it only really lives in what takes place between birth and death, and at most allows itself to be preached to about what exists in the supersensible world.

As you can see, spiritual science is everywhere when we speak of the most important cultural needs of the present.

I may say that the question of how one should speak about the arts is one with which I have actually wrestled throughout my whole life, and I will take the liberty of taking as my starting point two stages within which I have attempted to make some headway with this wrestling. It was for the first time when, at the end of the 1880s, I had to give my lecture to the Viennese Goethe Society: “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic.” What I wanted to say at the time about the essence of the arts made me feel like a person who wanted to speak but was actually mute and had to use gestures to express what he actually had to point out. For at that time it was suggested to me by certain conditions of life to speak about the nature of the arts through philosophical judgments. I had worked my way out of Kantianism into Herbartianism in philosophy, and this Herbartianism met me in Vienna in a representative personality, in the esthetician Robert Zimmermann. Robert Zimmermann had completed his great History of Aesthetics as a Philosophical Science a long time before. He had also already presented to the world his systematic work on Aesthetics as a Science of Form, and I had faithfully worked my way through what Robert Zimmermann, the Herbartian aesthetician, had to communicate to the world in this field. And then I had this representative Herbartian Robert Zimmermann in front of me in the lectures at the University of Vienna. When I met Robert Zimmermann in person, I was completely filled by the spirited, inspired, excellent personality of this man. What lived in the man Robert Zimmermann could only be extraordinarily and deeply appealing. I must say that, although Robert Zimmermann's whole figure had something extraordinarily stiff about it, I even liked some things about this stiffness, because the way this personality, in this peculiar coloring that the German language takes on in those who speak it from German-Bohemia, from Prague German, from this linguistic nuance, was particularly likeable. Robert Zimmermann's Prague German was exceptionally appealing to me in a rare way when he said to me, who was already intensively studying Goethe's Theory of Colors at the time: Oh, Goethe is not to be taken seriously as a physicist! A man who couldn't even understand Newton is not to be taken seriously as a physicist! And I must say that the content of this sentence completely disappeared behind the flirtatious and graceful manner in which Robert Zimmermann communicated such things to others. I was extremely fond of such opposition.

But then I also got to know Robert Zimmermann, or perhaps I already knew him, when he spoke as a Herbartian from the lectern. And I must say that the amiable, likeable person completely ceased to be so in aesthetic terms; the man Robert Zimmermann became a Herbartian through and through. At first I was not quite clear what it meant when this man entered, even through the door, ascended the podium, laid down his fine walking stick, strangely took off his coat, strangely walked to the chair, strangely sat down, strangely removed his spectacles, paused for a moment, and then, with his soulful eyes, after removing his spectacles, let his gaze wander to the left, to the right, and into the distance over the very small number of listeners present, and there was something striking about it at first. But since I had been intensively studying Herbart's writings for quite some time, it all became clear to me after the first impression, and I said to myself: Oh yes, here we are entering the door to Herbartism, here we are putting down the fine walking stick of Herbartism, here we are taking off our Herbartism coat, here we are gazing at the audience with our glasses-free eyes. And now Robert Zimmermann, in his extraordinarily pleasant dialect, colored by the Prague dialect, began to speak about practical philosophy, and lo and behold, this Prague German clothed itself in the form of Herbartian aesthetics.

I experienced this, and then, from Zimmermann's subjective point of view, I understood well what it actually meant that the motto of Zimmermann's aesthetics on the first page was the saying of Schiller, which was indeed transformed into Herbartianism by Robert Zimmermann: The true secret of the master's art lies in the annihilation of material by form – for I had seen how the amiable, likeable, thoroughly graceful man appeared to be annihilated as content and reappeared in Herbartian form on the professorial chair. It was an extraordinarily significant impression for the psychology of the arts.

And if you understand that one can make such a characterization even when one loves, then you will not take amiss the expression that I now want to use, that Robert Zimmermann, whom I greatly admired, may forgive me for using the word ” Anthroposophie', which he used in a book to describe a figure made up of logical, aesthetic and ethical abstractions, that I have used this word to treat the spiritualized and ensouled human being scientifically. Robert Zimmermann called his book, in which he carried out the procedure I have just described, “Anthroposophy”.

I had to free myself from this experience, in which the artistic, so to speak, appeared to be poured into a form without content, when I gave my lecture on “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic”. I was able to accept the fully justified part of Zimmermann's view, that in art one is not concerned with content, not with the what, but with what is made out of the content of what is observed and so on through the imagination, through the creativity of the human being. And from Schiller we also saw Herbart taking form. I could well see the deep justification for this tendency, but I could not help but contrast it with the fact that what can be achieved as form by real imagination must be elevated and must now appear in the work of art in such a way that we get a similar impression from the work of art as we otherwise only get from the world of ideas. To spiritualize what man can perceive, to carry the sensual into the sphere of the spirit, not to extinguish the material through form, that was what I tried to free myself from at the time, from what I had absorbed in a faithful study of Herbart's aesthetics.

However, other elements had also been incorporated. A philosopher of the time, whom I liked just as much as Robert Zimmermann, who is extremely dear to me as a person, Eduard von Hartmann, he wrote in all fields of philosophy, and at that time he also wrote about aesthetics, about aesthetics from a partly similar, partly different spirit than Robert Zimmermann had written. And again, you will not interpret the objectivity that I am trying to achieve as if I were being unkind for that reason. Eduard von Hartmann's aesthetics can be characterized by the fact that Eduard von Hartmann took something from the arts, which were actually quite distant from him, and called it aesthetic appearance. He took what he called aesthetic appearance from the arts, just as one would roughly proceed by skinning a living person. And then, after this procedure, after he had, so to speak, skinned the arts, the living arts, Eduard von Hartmann made his aesthetics out of them. And the skinned skin — is it wonderful that it became leather under the hard treatment it then received at the hands of the aesthete, who was so far removed from the arts? — That was the second thing I had to free myself from at the time. And I tried to include in my lecture at the time what I would call the mood: the philosopher, if he wants to talk about the arts, must have the renunciation to become mute in a certain respect and only through chaste gestures to hint at that which, when speaking, philosophy can never quite penetrate, before which it remains unpenetrating and must hint at the essential like a silent observer.

That was the mood, the psychological characterization, from which I spoke at the time in my lecture on “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic”.

Then later on I was given the task of making a second stop on the way to the question that I characterized at the beginning of my present consideration. It was when I spoke to anthroposophists about the “essence of the arts”. And now, in view of the mood of the whole environment at that time, I could not speak in the same way. Now I wanted to speak in such a way that I could remain within artistic experience itself. Now I wanted to speak artistically about art. And I knew once more that I was now on the other side of the river, beyond which I had stood at the time with my lecture “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic”. And now I spoke in such a way that I carefully avoided slipping into philosophical formulations. For I felt that slipping into philosophical characterization immediately takes away the actual essence of art from the words. The inartistic quality of mere concepts used to stir up the forces from which speech arises. And I tried to speak about the arts from that mood, which in the strictest sense avoids slipping into philosophical formulations. Today I am supposed to speak about the psychology of the arts again.

It is not particularly easy, after having lived through the other two stages, to stop at any other point. And so I could not help but turn to life with my contemplation. I sought some point through which I could enter into life through my contemplation of the artistic. And lo and behold, I found the amiable romantic Novalis as if he were something self-evidently given. And when, after this glimpse of Novalis, I ask myself: What is poetic? What is contained in this special form of artistic experience in poetic life? — the figure of Novalis stands before me alive. It is strange that Novalis was born into this world with a peculiar basic feeling that lifted him above the external prosaic reality throughout his entire physical life. There is something in this personality that seems to be endowed with wings and floats away in poetic spheres above the prose of life. It is something that has lived among us humans as if it wanted to express at one point in world history: this is how it is with the external sensual reality compared to the experience of the truly poetic. And this personality of Novalis lives itself into life, and begins a spiritual and thoroughly real love relationship with a twelve-year-old girl, Sophie von Kühn. And all the love for the girl, who is still sexually immature, is clothed in the most magnificent poetry, so clothed in poetry that one is never tempted to think of anything sensually real when considering this relationship. But all the fervor of human feeling that can be experienced when the human soul floats freely above prosaic reality, as in poetic spheres, all the fervor of this feeling lives in this love of Novalis for Sophie von Kühn. And this girl dies two days after her fourteenth birthday, at the time when other people are so strongly touched by the reality of physical life that they descend into the sexuality of the physical body. Before this event could happen to Sophie von Kühn, she was transported into spiritual worlds, and Novalis, out of a stronger consciousness than the instinctive-poetic one that had been with him before, decided to die after Sophie von Kühn in his living soul experience. He lives with the one who is no longer in the physical world. And those people who approached Novalis after that time with the most intimate human feelings say that he, walking around alive on earth, was like someone who had been transported into the spiritual worlds, who was talking to something that is not of this earth, does not really belong to this earth. And within this poetic reality, transported into prose, he himself feels that what other people see only in the control of external forces, the fullest expression of the will, merging into reality, already appears within the poetic-ideal world, and he speaks of “magical idealism” to characterize his direction in life.

If we then try to understand everything that flowed from this wonderfully formed soul, which was thus able to love without touching reality, external reality, which was thus able to live with what was truly wrested from it before a certain stage of external reality was reached, if we open ourselves to all that then flowed from this Novalis soul, then we receive the purest expression of the poetic. And a psychological question is resolved simply by immersing oneself in the artistic stream of poeticization that flows from Novalis's poetic and prose writings.

But then one has a strange impression. One has the impression, when one delves psychologically into the essence of the poetic in this way, into a reality of life, into that of Novalis, that one then has something floating behind the poetic that resonates through everything poetic. One has the impression that this Novalis emerged from spiritual and soul spheres, bringing with him what, with poetic radiance, showered the outwardly prosaic life. One has the impression that a soul has entered the world that has brought with it the spiritual and soul in its purest form, so that it has inspired and spiritualized the whole body, and that it has absorbed space and time into the state of mind, which was spiritual and soul, in such a way that space and time, stripping off their outer being, reappeared poetically in the soul of Novalis. In Novalis' poetry, space and time seem to be devoured.

You see, with a strong soul and a strong spirit, poetry enters the world, and out of its strength it integrates space and time. But it overwhelms space and time, melting space and time through the power of the human soul, and in this melting of space and time through the power of the human soul lies the psychology of poetry. But through this process of melting space and time in Novalis, something resounds that was like a deep fundamental element within it. You can hear it everywhere, you can hear it through everything that Novalis has revealed to the world, and then you cannot help but say to yourself: What soul, what spirit is, it came to light there, to remain poetic, to poetically melt space and time by appropriating space and time. But there remained at first something as the foundation of this soul, something that lies most deeply within the human soul, so deeply that it can be discovered as a creative power by shaping the deepest inner conditions of the human organism itself, by living in the innermost being of the human being as soul. Musicality, the musical, the sounding artistic world, was a fundamental element in all of Novalis's poetry. This reveals itself out of the harmony of the world and is also what creates artistically out of the cosmos in the most intimate aspects of the human being.

If we try to enter the sphere in which the spiritual and soul-life in man create most intimately, then we come to a musical form within the human being, and then we say to ourselves: Before the musician sounds his tones out into the world, the musical essence itself has taken hold of the musician's being and first embodied, shaped into his human nature the musical, and the musician reveals that which the world harmony has unconsciously placed in the depths of his soul. And that is the basis of the mysterious effect of music. That is the basis for the fact that, when speaking about music, one can really only say: The musical expresses the innermost human feeling. — And by preparing oneself with the appropriate experiences for contemplation, by entering into this Novalis poetry, one grasps what I would call the psychology of music.

And then one's gaze is drawn to the end of Novalis's life, which occurred in his twenty-ninth year. Novalis passed away painlessly, but surrendered to the element that had permeated his poetry throughout his life. His brother had to play for him on the piano as he died, and the element that he had brought with him to infuse his poetry was to take him back when he died, passing from prosaic reality into the spiritual world. To the sound of the piano, twenty-nine-year-old Novalis died. He was searching for the musical homeland that he had left in the full sense of the word at his birth, in order to take the musicality of poetry from it.

So one settles in, I think, from reality into the psychology of the arts. The path must be a tender one, the path must be an intimate one, and it must not be skeletonized by abstract philosophical forms, neither by those that are taken from rational thinking in the Herbartian sense, nor by those that are a bone from external observation of nature in the Gustav Fechnerian sense.

And Novalis stands before us: released from the musical, allowing the musical to resonate in the poetic, melting space and time with the poetic, not having touched the external prosaic reality of space and time in magical idealism, and then drawing it back into musical spirituality.

And the question may arise: What if Novalis had been physically organized to live longer, if what had musically resonated and poetically spoken in the inner effective psychology of the human soul and human spirit had not returned to its musical home at the age of twenty-nine, but had lived on through a more robust physical organization, where would this soul have found itself? Where would this soul have found itself if it had had to remain within the prosaic reality from which it had departed at the time when it was still time, without contact with outer space and outer time, to return to the spaceless world of music?

I have no desire to give this answer in theoretical terms. Again, I would like to turn our gaze to reality, and there it is; it too has played itself out in the course of human development. When Goethe had reached the age at which Novalis withdrew from the physical world out of his musical and poetic mood, the deepest longing arose in Goethe's soul to penetrate into that artistic world which had brought it to the highest level in the development of that entity which can express itself in space and time. At this stage of his life, Goethe felt a burning desire to go south and to discern in the works of art of Italy something of that from which an art was created that understood how to bring the genuinely artistic into the forms of space and time, especially into the forms of space. And when Goethe stood before the Italian works of art and saw that which could speak not only to the senses but to the soul from out of space, the thought escaped his soul: here he realizes how the Greeks, whose work he believed he recognized in these works of art, created as nature itself creates, and which natural creative laws he believed he was tracking down. And he was overwhelmed by the spiritual and the soul-stirring that met him in the forms of space, the religious feeling: There is necessity, there is God. — Before he had moved to the south, he had searched for God together with Herder in the reading of Spinoza, in the spiritual and soul-stirring expression of the supersensible in the external sensual world. The mood that had driven him to seek his God in Spinoza's God together with Herder had remained. He had not found satisfaction. What he had sought in Spinoza's philosophy about God was awakened in his soul when he stood before the works of art in which he thought he could again discern Greek spatial art, and the feeling escaped him: There is necessity, there is God.

What did he feel? He apparently felt that in the Greek works of art of architecture and sculpture, what lives in man as spiritual and soulful has been created, what wants to go out into space and what gives itself to space, and when it becomes pictorial, also spatially to time. And Goethe has experienced the other thing psychologically, which is on the opposite pole to the Novalis experience. Novalis has experienced how, when man penetrates into his innermost being in space and time and wants to remain poetic and musical, space and time melt away in human comprehension. Goethe experienced how, when the human being works and chisels his spiritual soul into the spatial, the spatial and temporal does not melt away, how it surrenders in love to the spatial and temporal, so that the spiritual soul reappears from the spatial and temporal in an objectified way. How the spirit and soul of the human being, without stopping at the sensory perception, without remaining seated in the eye, penetrates to get under the surface of things and to create the architecture out of the forces that prevail under the surface of things, to shape the sculpture, experienced Goethe in those moments that led him to the saying: “There is necessity, there is God.” There is everything that is of divine-spiritual existence in the human subconscious, that man communicates to the world without stopping at the gulf that his senses form between him and the world. There is that which man experiences artistically when he is able to impress, to chisel, to force the spiritual-soul into the forces that lie beneath the surface of physical existence. — What is it in Novalis that makes him, psychologically, musical-poetic-creative? What is it in Goethe that impels him to feel the utter necessity of nature-making in the plastic arts, to feel the utterly unfree necessity of nature-making in 'the spatial, in the material works of art? What is it that urges him, despite the feeling of necessity, to say: there is God?

At both poles, with Novalis and with Goethe, where at the one pole lies the goal that the path to the psychological understanding of the poetic and the musical must take, and where at the other pole lies the goal that the psychological understanding must take if it grasp the plastic-architectonic. At both poles lies an experience that is inwardly experienced in the field of art, and in relation to which it is its greatest task of reality to also carry it outwardly into the world: the experience of human freedom.

In ordinary mental, physical and sensual experience, the spiritual and soul-like penetrates to the organization of the senses; then it allows the senses to glimpse what external physical and material and in the senses, external physical-material reality encounters inner spiritual-soul existence and enters into that mysterious connection that causes so much concern for physiology and psychology. When someone is born into life with the primal poetic-musical disposition, which is so self-sustaining that it seeks to die out under the sounds of music, then this spiritual-soul-like does not penetrate to the sensory organs Then it permeates and spiritualizes the whole organism, shaping it like a total sensory organ, and then it places the whole human being in the world in the same way as otherwise only the individual eye or the individual ear is placed in the world. Then the soul-spiritual takes hold within the human being, and then, when this soul-spiritual engages with the material world externally, it is not absorbed into the prosaic reality of space and time, but space and time are dissolved in the human perception. That is how it is at one pole. There the soul lives poetically and musically in its freedom, because it is organized in such a way that it melts the reality of space and time in its contemplation. There the soul lives without touching the ground of physical prosaic existence, in freedom, but in a freedom that cannot penetrate into this prosaic reality.

And at the other pole, there lives the soul, the spiritual part of man, as it lived, for example, in Goethe. This soul and spiritual part is so strong that it not only penetrates the physical body of man right down to the sense openings, but it penetrates these senses and extends even beyond the senses. I would say that in Novalis there is such a delicate soul-spirituality that it does not penetrate to the full organization of the senses; in Goethe there is such a strong soul-spirituality that it breaks through the organization of the senses and beyond the boundaries of the human skin into the cosmic, and therefore longs above all for an understanding of those areas of art that carry the spiritual-soul into the spatial-temporal. That is why this spirituality is organized in such a way that it wants to submerge with that which extends beyond the boundaries of the human skin, into the ensouled space in sculpture, into the spiritualized spatial power in architecture, into the suggestion of those forces that have already internalized themselves as spatial and temporal forces, but which can still be grasped externally in this form in painting.

So it is here too a liberation from necessity, a liberation from what man is when his spiritual and soulful self is anchored in the gulfs of the sensory realm. Liberation in the poetic-musical: freedom lives in there, but it lives in such a way that it does not touch the ground of the sensual. Liberation in sculptural, architectural, and pictorial experience: but freedom is so strong that if it wanted to express itself in any other way than artistically, it would shatter the external physical-sensual existence because it dives below the surface.

This is felt when one truly engages with what Goethe so powerfully said about his social ideas, let us say in “Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years”. What cannot be entrusted to reality, if it is to be shaped in freedom, becomes musical-poetic; what in contemplation one must not bring to the reality of sensual physical imagination, if it is not to destroy external reality, what must be left in the formation of spatial and temporal forces, must be left in the mere reproduction of the block of wood, because otherwise it would destroy the organic, to which it is death, becomes sculpture, becomes architecture.

No one can understand the psychology of the arts without understanding the greater soul that must live in the sculptor and the architect than in normal life. No one can understand the poetic and musical without penetrating to the more that lives in the spiritual and soul life of a human being, who cannot allow this spiritual more, this spiritual projection of the physical organization to the physical and sensual, but must keep it behind it in freedom. Liberation is the experience that is present in the true comprehension of the arts, the experience of freedom according to its polar opposites.

What is man's form is what rests in man. This form is permeated in human reality by what becomes his movement. The human form is permeated from within by the will and from without by perception, and the human form is initially the external expression of this permeation. Man lives in bondage when his will, his inwardly developed will, which wants to enter into movement, must stop at the sphere in which perception is taken up. And as soon as man can reflect on his whole being, the feeling comes to life in him: There lives more in you than you, with your nervous-sensory organization, can make alive in your intercourse with the world. Then the urge arises to set the dormant human form, which is the expression of this normal relationship, in motion, in such movements that carry the form of the human form itself out into space and time. Again, it is a wrestling of the human interior with space and time. If one tries to capture it artistically, the eurhythmic arises between the musical-poetic and the plastic-architectonic-picturesque.

I believe that one must, in a certain way, remain inwardly within the arts when one attempts to do what still remains a stammering when talking about the arts and about the artistic. I believe that not only is there much between heaven and earth that human philosophy, as it usually appears, cannot dream of, but that what lies within the human interior, when conditions with the physical body enter into, first brings about liberation within the artistic towards the two poles. And I believe that one cannot understand the artistic psychologically if one wants to grasp it in the normal soul, but that one can only grasp it in the higher spiritual soul of the human being, which goes beyond the normal soul and is predisposed for supersensible worlds.

When we look at two such eminently artistic natures as Novalis and Goethe, I believe the secrets of the psychology of the arts reveal themselves to us phenomenally, out of reality. Schiller once felt this deeply when he spoke the words at the sight of Goethe: Only through the dawn of the beautiful do you enter the realm of knowledge. In other words, only by artistic immersion into the full human soul can you ascend into the regions of the sphere toward which knowledge strives. And it is a beautiful, I believe an artist's saying, when it is said: Create, artist, do not speak — but a saying against which one must sin, because man is, after all, a speaking being. But just as it is true that one must sin against such a word: “Form, artist, do not speak” – it is also true, I believe, that one must always atone for this sin, that one must always try, if one wants to talk about the arts, to form in speaking. Artist, do not speak; and if you are obliged to speak about art as a human being, then try to speak in a creative way, to create through speech.

after the eurythmic-dramatic presentation of the “Easter Vigil”

Among the Easter performances that have just passed before our minds were also those that depict how a soul that is about to pass through the gate of death through its own decision is brought back into the world of earthly life through the Easter message. I believe that, of the many impressions that the Faust story can have on us, this scene must be one of the most profound. Now, after the transformation, I would like to say, after the transformation, ¹ the scene that signifies the world with its evolution, bring that you have absorbed as a prospect within the Faustian poetry into your soul, in connection with what was said here yesterday, so to speak, before the transformation, about that meaningful real vision that can arise in the human soul when it steps before the symbol of Jesus Christ resting in the tomb. Let us bear in mind that yesterday we were able to say that the sight of what is connected with human life through its development on earth in relation to the world of Lucifer and Ahriman is evoked through a corresponding spiritual contemplation or spiritual perception. Let us bear in mind that in the Faust epic we have a soul which announces itself to us immediately at the beginning of the poem as having absorbed Ahrimanic knowledge and insights. And then let us look into this soul as it struggles out of its connection with the Ahrimanic wisdom towards the — we may say from our point of view — Christ-imbued source of life: a momentous moment that is presented to us for a human soul. Let us visualize this human soul! There she stands before us with all the knowledge she has absorbed through observing the external material world and its interrelations, with the insight she has been able to gain through the instruments by which the external naturalist attempts to penetrate the interrelations of nature... And what has this soul come to with all the research that is linked to the various instruments and also to the phial containing the juices that “quickly make one drunk” for earthly life? We feel how an Ahrimanic nature already rules at the side of the Faust soul, and how this Ahrimanic nature is linked to what is earthly death. Do we not see how this human soul, filled with Ahrimanic nature, draws the result of its Ahrimanic insights? And this result of knowledge that Ahriman can give to man on earth is what is summarized in the words:

I greet you, you only vial!
Which I now bring down with devotion,
In you I honor human wit and art.
You epitome of the sweet slumber potions,
You distillation of all deadly subtle powers,
Do show your favor to your master!
I see you, pain is alleviated,
I grasp you, the striving is diminished,
The spirit's flood tide ebbs away little by little.
I am expelled into the high sea,
The mirror tide glistens at my feet,
A new day beckons to new shores.

And already this soul has the vision of coming to the other shore, where it may be able to find that which it must believe it cannot find on this earth because of its ahrimanic entanglement. Already it has the vision of crossing over to the other shore:

A chariot of fire floats, on light wings,
Towards me! I feel ready,
On a new path to penetrate the ether,
To new spheres of pure activity.
This lofty life, this divine bliss!
You, still a worm, and do you deserve them?
Yes, just turn your back resolutely
to the lovely sun of the earth!
Dare to tear open the gates,
before which everyone likes to sneak by.
Here it is time to prove by action
That manly dignity does not give way to the height of the gods,
Not to tremble before that dark cave,
In which the imagination condemns itself to its own torment,
To strive towards that passageway,
Around whose narrow mouth the whole of hell is aflame;
To take this step serenely,
And, even if it means flowing into nothingness,

And now that he has also taken up the other Ahrimanic instrument, he is ready to take the path over to those realms that he learned in Ahriman's school are numberless to the soul as long as it is enclosed in the earthly body. And this soul is torn out of this mood by the sound of the Easter bells and the choir of the Easter song. And so the Faust soul has lived an earthly life to now seek within the earthly body what this human soul, as a result of its seeking in the earthly body, is to carry through the gate of death, so that it can carry it up into the spiritual realm where it needs it for its further development.

What you have heard today from the first part of Goethe's “Faust”, and much of what belongs to this part, to this scene of Goethe's “Faust”, first appeared as the completed first part of the poem in 1808. But before that, in 1790, Goethe had already published “Faust, a fragment”, this fragment, which did not yet have the last Gretchen scene. But this fragment did not even have the scene that has brought the events of such significance for Faust's soul to our own soul today. In 1790, Goethe published his fragment without this Easter scene and without the monologue that leads to the deepest depths of human and spiritual experience. And at the end of the 19th century, what Goethe had finished in the 1780s, even as early as the 1770s, was discovered in the 1790s. It was then published under the tasteless title “Urfaust”. In this Urfaust, we do not find, one might say, of course, this Easter scene. Why is it not there? Yes, Goethe, who was a child of his time, had to mature in order to be able to depict the effect of the Christ impulse on Faust's soul in his own way, in accordance with his soul; he first had to mature for this. And Goethe was not ripe for it until 1790. The nineties saw the deepening of Goethe's soul, which found its reflection in the well-known “Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily”. It falls into the time between the moment when “Faust” was published without the Easter scene and the moment when it was published with the Easter scene. Goethe's soul experienced a profound deepening through what it developed in the “Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily”. And it was only through this experience that Goethe realized how he could allow the Easter experience scene to affect Faust's soul.

Now, let us look into this soul of Faust itself, and try to put ourselves in the place of the beginning of Goethe's “Faust,” which is more or less the same in the various successive publications. We know that it reads:

I now, alas! have philosophy,
Jurisprudence and medicine,
And unfortunately also theology!
Thoroughly studied, with hot endeavor.
There I stand now, I poor fool!
And am as wise as before;
I am called Magister, even Doktor,
And for ten years now,
Up and down and hither and thither,
I have led my students by the nose –
And I see that we cannot know anything!

So he has been a lecturer for ten years. Let us assume that he entered the teaching career regularly, then we might think that he became a lecturer around the age of thirty. In fact, he has been leading his students by the nose since the age of thirty! Let us recall what I said yesterday. In the thirties, the human being will stand before the image of the Jupiter existence when he visualizes the seduction I spoke of yesterday. And a vision, a prophetic vision of this seduction, is what one has before one when one stands before Christ Jesus lying in the tomb. Do we not have this vision dramatically developed in Faust? Does he not stand before us before the Easter Mystery, and does he not stand before us, one might say, at the end of the 1830s, before the Easter Mystery? May we not assume that in his feelings, what man must feel from the Easter Mystery, rumbles like a premonition of the Jupiter experience with Lucifer and Ahriman? In Goethe's time one could not present it as one can present it now, but Goethe could present the rumbling sensation in the heart towards the Easter Mystery, and it rumbled in Faust's soul. And is it not as if Faust felt, when Mephisto-Ahriman approaches him, how his soul has fallen prey to the Ahrimanic powers? How he has to save himself from something? Yes, but from what? From what must he save himself? Can we not say that Goethe sensed something of this when, as a mature man, as a mature soul, he allowed the spirit of his own Faust to take effect on him again, as he was able to sense it in his time, of the Easter mood that we have been picturing in our minds these days, and that this gave rise to the need to insert the Easter scene into “Faust”, which did not have this Easter scene before? The “Faust” was re-written into Christian verse with the insertion of the Easter scene between the years 1790 and 1800.

So what years did Faust have to live through? Before which years of life did he shudder so much that he wanted to reach for the vial himself? Well, before the second, descending part of life, that part of life of which we have said how man, when he stands before the vision of the Jupiter existence, knows that later on he must carry to Jupiter that which the Christ can give him as provisions for the journey, because otherwise he would have to go without nourishment in the second half of life. What is Faust seeking? He seeks nourishment for the soul for the second half of life. We have all been seeking it since the time when the Mystery of Golgotha has passed over the evolution of our Earth. We are all seeking it. For that which will take physical and psychic form on Jupiter is already living in the depths of our souls, and we must all feel something of this Faustian mood. We need a power that we cannot have through that which, as human beings, only gives us freedom and thus leads us to Ahriman and Lucifer; we need a power for those impulses in us that are connected with the descending half of life. It is the power of Christ, the power of Christ, which the Christ has after he has passed through the gate of death and has not lived through in an earthly body the second half of man's life. Why did he not live through it? Because this power, which must be bestowed upon people in the second half of life, had to flow into the earth aura so that all people can find themselves through the evolution of the earth. Through the Easter mystery, that which we need to enable us to journey through our entire life on earth with our soul is resurrected. And now imagine this profound connection in Goethe's “Faust”. Faust has absorbed within himself — Goethe knew how to absorb this, because he presented it without the Easter mystery when he published his fragment without the Easter mystery — Faust has absorbed within himself what man can absorb through the connection with Lucifer and Ahriman, what gives us the possibility of a free soul. But Faust, who measures the depths of the soul, is aware that he cannot continue to live with him; he needs something else in order to live. And Goethe was ripe to show what Faust needs, what is the impulse of the Easter Mystery. Does not the Easter Mystery stand profoundly before us in what Goethe made of his “Faust” only as a fully mature man, what he could not yet have included in 1790 because he did not yet understand it?

How did the poetic idea for this poem, which takes us to such depths, come about in the young Goethe? We know that the young Goethe was deeply impressed both by the puppet show of Faust, which he saw, where the fate of Faust was simply presented through puppets, and by the folk play of “Doctor Faust”. This thoroughly popular element came before Goethe's soul. What then is this Faust? And Goethe's soul immediately realized: this Faust must be the striving human being in general, who, through his striving, can dive down into all the depths of the human soul and must find the way up to the bright heights of the spirit. That an inner path must be traversed by a human soul, the young Goethe knew that. For what is it, after all, if not a meditation that Faust experiences in his soul as he gazes at the various signs? It is a meditation that ultimately leads him to the vision of the Earth Spirit that flows through and permeates the Earth. The meditation receives the words in response:

In the flood of life, in the storm of action,
I surge up and down,
Weaving back and forth!
Birth and death,
An eternal sea,
A changing weaving,
A glowing life,
So I work at the whirring loom of time
And weave the living garment of divinity.

Meditation and counter-meditation! It leads Faust into the depths of life, but how to get out? How to ascend to spiritual heights?

Now that we have placed ourselves before the soul, what a grandiose idea of the striving Faust in Goethe's soul arose from the puppet show and the folk play, and what form this grandiose idea took through the penetration of the Goethean soul into the mystery of the soul, we now ask ourselves: What did Goethe make of Faust throughout his life? After we have realized the magnitude of what Goethe's soul was capable of through the impact of the Faust impulse, we may well ask ourselves: What did these impressions become in artistic and poetic terms? Well, one thing I just said can help us in our quest to understand this 'Faust' in aesthetic and artistic terms as well. Goethe published a fragment that roughly concludes with the cathedral scene in 1790. What makes the “Faust” seem so grandiose to us today is not in it. He added it later, when he was in Rome. In 1787, he added what we now know as the “Witches' Kitchen”. He inserted other scenes into the manuscript at other times. The original manuscript was written and copied by someone else, and at the time the later scenes were added, Schiller himself described it as a “yellowed manuscript”. And when Schiller called upon Goethe at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century to do something to round off Faust, Goethe said that it would be difficult for him to take on the old monster Faust again and to appropriately complete what had been left unfinished for so long. Goethe was afraid of incorporating into this his “Faust” that with which he had later matured, into all that he was and had appeared by the year 1790.

And now let us look at the first part of this “Faust”. Is it not a work that we can clearly see has been patched together from what was created at different times? If people were not attached to traditional judgments, they would see in “Faust” the most magnificent poetic idea that has ever come into the world with regard to the individual human being. At the same time, they would have to admit to themselves that in terms of art and poetry, this “Faust” is the most inconsistent, that it is a thoroughly disharmonious work, into which one could still put many things that are not in it, that has cracks and fissures everywhere, that is artistically far from perfect. Goethe's great genius could only ever complete fragments of what was before his soul. And however much we may admire the magnificent beauty of individual scenes, if we are not merely attached to the traditional judgment that literary historians have passed, but if we are unbiased, we cannot deny that “Faust” as it is is not a harmonious work of art, that it is glued in many places, but shows cracks and fissures everywhere. Why is this so? At a very advanced age, Goethe once again undertook to complete the second part of his Faust, for which he already had individual scenes, to which he added what he could add in his very old age. For example: the beginning of the classical-romantic phantasmagoria, the Helena interlude, was already completed around the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, and some parts were completed earlier. And again, we have every reason not to say, as some literary historians say, that one cannot understand the second part of “Faust,” or, as a very clever man, who is by no means stupid, said, that “Faust” is “a cobbled-together, patched-up concoction of old age.” It is not! On the other hand, it is a work whose task was so great that even Goethe's rich life experience was not enough in his time to shape it. One may well have one's own opinion even about the greatest things in the world. But why is that so? Well, I have already indicated on one occasion, in a lecture series held in The Hague, that this Faust is by no means, I would say, so extraordinarily young in world history. Faust, as he lived in the folk play that Goethe saw and as he lived in the puppet show, represents the human being descending into the depths of spiritual life and the human being wanting to rise to the light of the heights; he represents him in such a way that the greatest poet of modern times needed the Easter mystery for the liberation of his soul. As he appears in the folk play, he is a combination of the external physical reality, of the Dr. Georg Faust, who lived in the second half of the Middle Ages and wandered around like a tramp; of whom Trithem of Sponheim as well as other important men who met him report, and who even had a certain respect for him, the respect that one has for a remarkable personality who, through the way he expresses himself emotionally, knows many things and is capable of many things. And it was not for nothing that this real Doctor Faust was called by the name, as I have once stated here:

Magister Georgius Sabellicus Faustus Junior, fons necromanticorum, Magus Secundus, Chiromanticus Aeromanticus, Pyromanticus, in hydra arte secundus.

That was the name he gave himself. Now, it was common in those days to have many titles, and a long list of similar-sounding titles could be said of Giordano Bruno and many other important minds of the Middle Ages. If today's sophisticated people may find it strange that Trithem von Sponheim and others who knew about the existence of this real Faust thought that he was in contact with demonic powers of the world and the earth and through them was able to accomplish many things, then we must remember that in Luther's time, for example, there was nothing special about telling such a story. We know how Luther himself wrestled with the devil. We know that all this was common practice, the views and stories of that time. But a feeling lived in all this, which helped to shape Faust in the popular consciousness. The feeling lived — I say the feeling and not the concept, not the idea — natural science is coming up, natural science, which brings the Ahrimanic part of real reality before the human soul. And from this arose the feeling that Faust is a personality, and always has been, who has something to do with these Ahrimanic powers. People saw, as it were, the secret spiritual connecting threads that went from the soul of Faust to the Ahrimanic powers. And they found that Faust's destiny was tied to this inclination towards the Ahrimanic powers. That the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic has to do with the entire evolution of the human soul was still sensed and felt from the remnants of ancient clairvoyance and clear-sighted knowledge. And so the Faust figure was linked to this feeling of man's connection with the Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers. But at the same time, this intuitive knowledge was already descending into twilight, becoming unclear. And so, one might say, the feeling arose that one could depict the striving human being with all his temptations and dangers for his soul in the figure of Faust. But how this striving of the human being is connected with Lucifer and Ahriman was no longer known exactly. It had become blurred, and that is where the tremendous vagueness came from, which one gets a sense of when one picks up the medieval Faust book, in which all that the folk character is said to have experienced is where everything is thrown together in a grotesque ragout of all kinds of adventures that the human soul experiences in its quest to master all possible demonic and elementary spirits, Ahriman and Lucifer. After they were no longer seen in their full form, after they were shattered and ground into a ragout with all possible elemental spirits of nature, the figure of Doctor Faust was now placed in this ragout in this folk book. It was only Goethe's inspired insight that was able to discern in this gruesome ragout the mighty fundamental idea and to develop it to the point of the Easter Mystery. But it is really quite interesting to observe how, I might say, Lucifer and Ahriman were gradually dismembered into such ragout pieces.

If we go back and search for the figure of Faust in ancient times, we can look in books that were written as popular books at the time and that were in the hands of all those who were dealing with matters related to such things at the time. Augustine's works were very widespread when this book was written, cobbled together, glued together. One has the feeling of a bookseller who wanted to make a book that was as thick as possible, and not as if it were from a writer or even a literary man. But he must have known his Augustine, especially the biography of Augustine. And Augustine presents himself to us in all his development in such a remarkable way. How he at first cannot understand what Christianity is in its essence, how he gradually overcomes the inner resistance that he must bring to bear on Christianity in the development of his soul, first to what can now become known to him from the Manichaean doctrine. And from a great and important man within the Manichaean sect, Augustine receives knowledge from the Manichaean bishop Faustus. And we almost sense who this Faustus senior is, in comparison to whom the Faustus I mentioned earlier calls himself Faustus junior. He is the one whom Augustine once encountered in ancient times, the one who represented something of the Manichaean doctrine as Faustus, as bishop of the Manichaeans.

But what did he represent of the Manichaean doctrine? That which is corroded by Ahriman, that which no longer allows one to see how man, with his soul, is connected to the whole cosmos, to all cosmic, all stellar impulses. One can say: Even in the Manichean Bishop Faustus, the bond of knowledge that leads up to the cosmic insights that show how the human soul is born out of the cosmos, and which one must know if one wants to understand the Easter mystery in truth, is already torn. So it could be that in the person who wrote the folk book about Doctor Faust, precisely through the figure that Augustine describes as the Manichean bishop Faustus, it could emerge in this writer and compiler through the figure of Faustus, who had fallen prey to Ahriman. But since everything had become blurred, he did not understand that it was going against Ahriman. We see the scraps of the Ahrimanic danger shimmering through the stories of the folk play, but we see nothing clear. Yet we can get a clear feeling that Faustus is to be presented as the representative of the striving human being, so that danger threatens him from the Ahrimanic side. And much of what has been added to the Faust figure as it developed up to Goethe has been added by that Manichean Bishop Faustus, Faust senior. Many chapters of the folk tale seem as if they had been copied, but badly copied, only from the book in which Augustine describes his own development and his encounter with Bishop Faustus. We can prove that the Ahrimanic trait in the Faust figure points in this direction, and that when the folk book was written only the last dark urge remained to depict the Ahrimanic elements of human nature in the Faust figure.

And now, what about the Luciferic element? How were the Luciferic elements chopped up into those ragout pieces, which were then cooked into the ragout of elemental spirits and pieces of Lucifer and Ahriman, as I just said? Yes, we have to search if we want to find the connection between Faust and Lucifer. We can also search for it historically, we don't even have to go terribly far, we just have to go to Basel, and we can find clues in Basel as to how Lucifer was chopped up into a ragout. We are told that Erasmus of Rotterdam met with Faust in Basel, where they wanted to have a meal in the college, but could not find the right food. And since Erasmus lacked something that should now taste good to him, he told Faust, who was sitting with him and wanted to eat with him, but they had nothing right. So the Faust saga tells us that Faustus was now able to suddenly bring to the table, cooked and roasted, from somewhere - we don't know where - very strange birds that were not otherwise available in Basel. So we see a scene between Erasmus of Rotterdam and Faust, in which Faust is able to present such birds, which could not be bought in Basel at the time, nor far and wide in the surrounding area, to Erasmus. What is it actually? As such, it is not at all comprehensible in the legend, one can say, completely incomprehensible, but it becomes more understandable to us if we go back and bring together what we can gain from the writings of Erasmus of Rotterdam, who himself tells us that he made the acquaintance of a certain Faustus Andrelinus in Paris. This Faustus Andrelinus was an extremely learned man, but also an extremely sensual man. At first, Erasmus became so familiar with this Faustus that he had no real taste for the sensual sides of this Faustus. But again, we hear about a meal that the two are said to have eaten together. Now, however, two learned gentlemen of the time, such as Erasmus of Rotterdam and Faustus Andrelinus – we cannot expect them to serve each other such birds and in such a way, as Faustus of Basel is said to have served them to Erasmus. So it is likely that what has been handed down to us is just a kind of, I would say, joking speech that the two exchanged at the meal. But we do get a little behind this jocular talk when we also hear within this talk that Faust – this time it is probably Faust – was not satisfied with what was served to him, and demanded something else. Faust would now like to eat, in order to particularly torment himself, strange birds and rabbits; yes, strange birds and rabbits. Erasmus initially has the idea that this must mean something. So he behaves exactly like some theosophists who reflect on what things mean. Well, then the other one says, okay, he wants to do without the rabbits. Erasmus said: Could it not mean flies and ants? He wants to do without the rabbits. But the birds really are flies, and he wants to kill himself with flies for a change. Now we are very far. Now the birds have transformed into flies through astral transformation. And in Goethe we have the god of the flies in the figure of Mephisto. All that is needed is the spirit that commands these beings, and it could conjure up these beings. And so we have built the connecting bridge from the incomprehensible Basel legend and the strange birds to the flies that simply come from the devil. And we need not be surprised that the devil presents flies to him whom he invites to the table. But what kind of soul Faustus Andrelinus has, what kind of soul he has, that much becomes clear to us when we follow Erasmus a little further on his journey in Paris. In Paris, Erasmus was not yet quite inclined to engage with this Faustus Andrelinus character. But then he has to make a trip to London. There he writes that he has now learned – truly, Erasmus, think! , that he had manners like a coarse peasant, — that he has now learned to bow and even knows how to move around on the court parquet! And, yes, Erasmus writes it, that he lives in an atmosphere where, as you come and go, you always kiss each other by mistake. One recognizes from this that he wants to meet the tastes of his Parisian friend. He writes: “Come over here.” And if the gout prevents you too much, come over through the air in the spirit chariot. That is an element for you! — One sees that Faustus has a connection with the Luciferic kind of soul tendency.

With Goethe, we then encounter how Faust carries out his seductions by seducing Gretchen and so on. Lucifer has really fallen so far from the surroundings of the Faust figure that one must already do such literary investigations if we want to state the connection of Faust with Lucifer in the Parisian Faust. But we literally see Faust standing there, Lucifer and Ahriman at his side, albeit indistinctly through the confused time, boiled down into a ragout in the folk play. Should we be surprised to find in the folk play and folk drama, and even in Marlowe's Faust, something that is a remnant of ancient beliefs, still rooted in those times when man's connection with Ahriman and Lucifer was recognized through atavistic clairvoyance? But all this has become blurred, and in the literary product of which we have spoken, it is presented in a thoroughly blurred way. Goethe sensed the deep connection. But what could Goethe not do? He could not separate Lucifer and Ahriman from each other. They merged for him into the hybrid figure of Mephisto, in whom one does not really know whether it is the devil, Ahriman, or the real Mephisto. For he has also taken upon himself what Lucifer has. Goethe receives the ragout, as it were; he senses that Ahriman and Lucifer are at work, but he cannot yet sort it out; he devours them in the occult impossibility of the figure of Mephisto, who is a hybrid of Ahriman and Lucifer. One would like to be able to name the time that Goethe looked into by getting to know the Faust book: the last darkening of an old knowledge of this matter, the dying evening twilight of the old knowledge of Ahriman and Lucifer. And Goethe's Faust is the first dawn of the as yet unascended knowledge of Ahriman and Lucifer, dark and confused in the figure of Mephisto, Ahriman and Lucifer still mixed up. But already with the need to depict what the human soul can have by allowing itself to be affected by what has flowed into the earth's aura through the Christ being having passed through the mystery of Golgotha!

The Easter Mystery appears to us as the dawn of a new era of spiritual life for humanity in Goethe's “Faust”, which, despite its grandiose nature, still has something confused about it, something of a dark, foggy dawn. It appears to us as something within this dark dawn that we can see when we climb a mountain and see the sun rise earlier than we could see it before we stood on the mountain. We feel how one of the greatest of men, in his striving for the renewal of ancient knowledge, turns his soul towards the Paschal Mystery, when we allow Goethe's Faust to take effect on us. And if we allow it to take effect on us in the right way, then we feel what can take place in the heart of one of the greatest of men when this human heart has been touched by the Paschal Mystery, as Goethe himself felt at the same time. There is also something in this intuitive presentiment of Goethe to the Easter Mystery in Goethe's anticipation of it, is something like a hint: Yes, after the dawn, into which the first dark-light rays of the Easter Mystery shine, will come the sun of a new spiritual knowledge. The human soul will rise from the grave of darkened knowledge into which it too must descend. In the course of its development, the human soul will experience the Easter Mystery, the resurrection of that which is the Christ impulse in its deep, grave-like depths, when it unites with the power that emanates from the contemplation of the Christ Easter Mystery.

So, one would like to say, we feel Goethe's call and, after letting the tragedy of the Easter mystery take effect on us, would like to transform it into the call: May spiritual knowledge appropriate to the future rise in human hearts, in human souls! May human hearts and human souls, after sensing the deepest tragedy of the Easter mystery, feel and experience its depth in their innermost being, and may they experience resurrection in themselves through Christ!

May you, today, through the words that I have taken the liberty of speaking to you, absorb something of the feeling in your soul, so that you are united here, in our building dedicated to spiritual research, so that you, through the power of your souls into the future, something of that resurrection impulse which is so powerfully illustrated in the Easter mystery, and from which we could see how the greatest spirits of that time, which has now passed away, longed for it.

Feel in “Faust” something of what the magical sound of the Easter bells can resonate in the spirit of your souls.

• 1. At the words “Christ is Risen,” the black color of the scene transformed into a red one.

after a eurythmy-dramatic presentation

Today we have preceded the Easter scene in 'Faust' with the scene in which the Earth Spirit appears to Faust. Eight days ago, we were able to tie in many thoughts from 'Faust' that can be meaningful to those who want to approach the laws of the world, the life of the world, in a spiritual scientific way. It is not just to give you explanations of Goethe's 'Faust' that I am taking up Goethe's poetic creation last time on Easter Sunday and this time here. The reason is because the human soul can truly perceive something of the artistic images that confront us in “Faust” that must be called the development of this soul into the spiritual worlds, which one can call becoming familiar with the spiritual worlds. To the extent that we can, so to speak, immerse ourselves in “Faust” from a spiritual scientific point of view, we may indeed tie one or the other reflection to this poetic creation. In essence, Goethe's 'Faust' is the expression of the striving into the spiritual world in Goethe, and thus the expression of how, at an important turning point in modern history, a mind as deep as Goethe's tried to enter the world that we seek through our spiritual deepening.

Last time, we were able to convince ourselves that Goethe lived in a time in which it was really not yet possible to find the way into the spiritual worlds in a clear, I would say unambiguous, way. We were able to convince ourselves that such truths as those of the significance of Lucifer and Ahriman still hovered before Goethe's soul as an unclear realization, one might say, like an unclear sense of the spiritual world, and we were able to convince ourselves that in the figure of Mephistopheles the two figures of Lucifer and Ahriman have been conflated, so that Goethe has before him an unclear figure in Mephistopheles, to whom he cannot get close in an unambiguous spiritual-scientific relationship. And so we can see precisely in this striving of Goethe's, as it is expressed in 'Faust', with what seriousness and with what inner conscientiousness, one might say, with what responsibility before our own soul we should pursue what spiritual-scientific deepening is intended to open up. When a spirit so profound encounters such difficulties in the way of what many, many people today are seeking, there is truly an opportunity to learn a great deal from Goethe's own quest and striving. One would wish that everyone who has delved a little into the results of our spiritual science would again approach this document, Goethe's “Faust”, which is a document from the dawn, not yet from the time after the sunrise of spiritual-scientific endeavors. Last time I said that Goethe needed the maturity of his life to emerge from the state of his soul in his youth. Goethe's soul cannot be satisfied with just seeing in the world what the sensory eyes see and what the mind, bound to the brain, perceives. And what lived and raged in his soul for the deeper spiritual foundations of life, he shaped it in the striving Faust, who is not a likeness of Goethe, but who does present certain aspects of Goethe's striving and Goethe's life in a truly artistic way. And so we have here, in the scene with the Earth Spirit, one of the oldest parts of Goethe's Faust that he wrote down.

Last time I spoke about Goethe's “Faust” in such a way that if I were misunderstood as I often am, one could go and say that I had called “Faust” a defective work of art and would even have said some harsh words about it. And someone who is particularly inventive might say that I have undergone a change in my view of Goethe, for I was of course once an admirer of Goethe and have now proved myself to be someone who criticizes Goethe. Now, I should not need to mention that I venerate Goethe no less than I ever did, that he appears to me as the most magnificent spirit of modern times. But what is venerating devotion to a personality should never lead us to a blind sense of authority, but should always keep us clear-sighted for that which we have recognized as truth.

The various parts of Faust can be said to have been pieced together, not to mention glued, and it can be said that at the time when Goethe wrote the oldest parts of Faust in the 1770s, 18th century, was really incapable of writing the later parts, that he really had to mature first in order to come from his longing for the spiritual world to what one might call his understanding of Christianity. It was only through the maturity of life that Goethe was able to continue Faust, who is searching for the spirit world, in such a way that Faust comes to be preserved in life through the Austrian memory, and that Faust even comes to take the Gospel into his own hands and to begin translating the Gospel of John. When one hears some people today saying that they need no spiritual knowledge to fathom the depths of Christianity, that this spiritual science is unnecessary stuff, because Christianity can be sufficiently understood by what every pastor proclaims from the pulpit, that mere belief must prevail, especially in this Christianity, and one compares such soul mood with what must be said about Goethe, who, as one of the deepest took decades to mature to his understanding of Christianity, then one can get an idea of the tremendous arrogance, the tremendous conceit, that is in people who, conceited and haughty, always speak of the simplicity of their minds, and who dismiss what they do not need — the content of spiritual science, what they do not need according to their view.

In the scene with the Earth Spirit, we see something of what occupied Goethe in his youth, in his thirties, and also in the last twenties of his life. We can see from this earth spirit scene and from what preceded it, the so-called first Faust monologue, how Goethe immersed himself in so-called occult-mystical literature and how he tried to find the spiritual world through meditation and meditative devotion, through what this literature gave him. We see him in the scene that has been presented to us today, in the midst of his search through meditation, which arises from the allusions that he, as it is said here, can gain from an occult-mystical book, from an old mystical book by Nostradamus, as he strives through his meditation, which arises from a mystical book, to rise up into the spiritual worlds.

Let us try to imagine the worlds to which Faust, and thus also Goethe, actually wants to go. When the soul of man has really managed to strengthen its inner power so that the spiritual-soul core of man's being is released from the instrument of the physical body, when the soul, so to speak, with its powers that are not perceptible to it in ordinary everyday life, has slipped from the physical body, what becomes – not the physical body itself in its spatial boundaries, but the physical life, with which the human being is always spiritually connected because a ray or stream goes to this physical life – what becomes for the human soul this physical experience? In the time between death and a new birth, a ray or stream of spiritual life goes back to what we have experienced on earth, as you can see from the illustrations of earlier lectures. So there is always something like a spiritual reaching out, or even more than a spiritual reaching out, back to what is physical experience. What then does this physical experience become for the human soul, which has been freed from the use of the instrument of the physical body? I would like to say: the whole physical experience becomes a soul organ for the person who has emerged from this physical experience. The physical experience becomes, as it were, an eye or an ear; the whole human being becomes a sense organ, a spiritual sense organ, an organ, one might say, of the whole earth, which looks out into space. In order for our eye to see physical objects, we have to be outside of our eye. The eye has to be embedded like a kind of independent organ in the eye socket, which is even closed off by bony walls, so that the eye is a relatively independent organ. In a similar way, the ear is also closed. Again, the whole physical apparatus of the brain is enclosed in the head cavity and closed off from the rest of the human body. The physical experience of the human being must become so closed off that it becomes a kind of sensory organ, a kind of eye or ear through which the human being, who is outside of what his physical experience is, looks out into the vastness of space.

What is experienced there can also be described as follows: one can say that one is now in the world that is presented in the book 'Theosophy' as the soul world. This is the world that one first enters when one has the experience of being outside the body with the soul that has become independent and having one's own physical experience outside of it. In the Vienna Cycle of April 1914, I described how, in the life between death and a new birth, the human being has a spiritual-soul sense organ through his last life on earth to perceive the rest of the world, that is, he perceives the rest of the world through this life on earth. In this world we find our deceased for quite some time after their death, until they advance to another world, which can only be reached by a later state of development of the soul, even for the human initiate. In this world, into which we enter, many things must strike the observer. Only details about this world can be said. From the various lectures, one must gather what characterizes this supersensible world. Above all, what the soul immediately notices is that, having become free from the body and entering into a new world, the soul now sees the stars going out, feels the stars going out. The soul settles into an elementary world, so that it now weaves with the sea of air, itself surges with the warmth surging in the world, radiates out with the light, and since the soul radiates out with the light, it cannot see external objects through the light. That is why the sun and stars fade, and the moon extinguishes its light before the soul. It is not an external looking at, in which one then is, it is a co-experiencing of the elemental world. And at the same time it is a co-experiencing of that which one calls the power of historical happenings, of historical becoming. In this world one can see in process what history really does in human life.

In its further meditative development, the soul can then struggle up to a higher experience. Then, not only its own experience becomes a spiritual-soul sense organ, but the whole earth becomes a sense organ. To put it quite paradoxically, but you will understand me, the human soul must advance to such an experience, of which one can say: The human being is now something in which the whole globe is inserted, as otherwise the eye or ear is inserted into our body, and as we otherwise see with our eyes, hear with our ears, so we perceive the cosmic space with the whole earth and its experiences. There we become aware that what physicists say about the sun and the stars is mere materialistic dreaming. The stars have indeed already gone out, the sun, the moonlight has gone out in the previous world. But now we become aware that where we suspected the sun there is a community of spirits, that everywhere we suspected a star there is a spiritual world. And we become aware, by remembering our life on earth, that the materialistic reverie of which the physicists speak is a fantastic one, because when stars or suns appear to us, it is because somewhere in the spiritual world there is the seat of a spiritual community, just as the earth is the seat of a community of people. But just as little as one would perceive the physical bodies of a distant star, only the human souls, so little can it be said that something up there among the stars could interest us that is not of a spiritual-soul nature. But what we see, we must imagine as the vapors of the earth's atmosphere, which collide with what is coming in, and the physical eye can see nothing of what the star really is, but only the vapor that the earth itself throws out into space. All that we see as the starry sky is nothing but the material, albeit ethereal, material of the earth itself woven together, it is a curtain that the earth draws across what is behind it. But when the soul comes to live itself out in this world, then it perceives that out there are not these fantastic stars, these materialistic-fantastic stars that physicists speak of, but living beings, living communities of beings, floating up and down, weaving back and forth in the outer space of the universe, passing the gifts from top to bottom, and in turn the gifts are passed from bottom to top. If you translate the words into the spiritual:

How everything is woven into the whole,
One thing within the other lives and works!
How heavenly powers ascend and descend
And pass the golden buckets!

— Powers, but now in the sense in which we speak of primal forces -,

With wings that smell of blessing
From heaven through the earth they penetrate,
Harmoniously through all the universe they resound!

But if we imagine all this in spiritual and mental terms, then we have roughly the world in which the soul lives out itself.

Now, what did Faust have of all that has been described here at the time when he is presented to us? He has opened an old book, written by someone who has recorded an ancient observation in signs: this was given by the sign of the macrocosm. But Faust is naturally not in a position to project his soul into worlds where the entities in space develop their great happenings. Faust is not able to reach that level. He only sees the sign that someone who has reached that level has written down, the sign of the macrocosm. But a dream, a presentiment is evoked that this sign means something. So imagine yourself in your soul, that you had never heard of spiritual science, that you had the sign in front of you, but that you had an inkling that someone had once seen something similar that you would also like to see, then you are in Faust's soul. At first you can dream yourself into it, so that your imagination brings to life something through these outer signs, which are essentially the signs of the zodiac, the signs of the elements, the signs of the planets. You can even begin to break out with overflowing feeling into the words:

What a spectacle!

But this strikes back at you, for now you become aware that you have nothing but the sign in the book, nothing but a fantasy...

But alas! only a spectacle!

Even just a spectacle as an inner fantasy! And you are thrown back. The sign has brought you to nothing, on the contrary, it has thrown you back, has brought you the feeling: there is the world of the spirit, before which you stand, but nowhere can you find an entrance.

Where can I grasp you, infinite nature?
Your breasts, where? You, the sources of all life,
On which heaven and earth depend,
Where the withered chest presses –

Nothing but feeling inside the elements, in the light and in the air, as I said, in the subordinate world. And now even more clearly expressed. Faust has pushed his way up into the spiritual world, fallen back into the world that I described earlier as the next supersensible world. This with the air and light life, that expresses itself very well in the words:

You spring up, you water, and must I languish in vain?

He has fallen back completely, back from the spiritual world into the elemental world. But he is not yet able to recognize this either. It helps him that he opens the book and sees the sign of the earth spirit. That is the sign that someone has written who has had this lower world, the elemental world, as his own world. Now he feels at home in it. He has a presentiment of being at home in it.

How differently this sign affects me!

— because he feels something in it, because he has turned away from the appearance of meaning and feels something of the world's inner workings. Now he is actually always speaking of this world:

Already I feel my powers increased,

— that which one experiences when one lives in warmth and light -,

I glow like new wine.

Imagine feeling warmth in your soul when you live and weave in the world as a heat wave!

I feel brave enough to venture out into the world.

It really is like moving in the elements. I told you that life on earth becomes a sense organ, and just as you feel your eyes and ears within you, you now feel your sense organs in the earth.

To bear the earth's sorrow and its joy,
To battle with the storms around me,

when you are a wave in the air.

Clouds gather overhead,
The moon hides its light.

No wonder! I have just described to you how this happens, how stars like the moon go out. The light goes out because it goes with the light itself.

It steams! – Red rays
Twitch around my head

This is now internal perception.

A shuddering blast
From the vaulted roof descends
And seizes me!
I feel it, thou art hovering around me, implored spirit.
Reveal thyself!
Ha! how my heart is torn!
To new feelings
All my senses are awakened!

Do you not notice how life is expressed in the elements here?

I feel my heart completely given to you!
You must, you must! Even if it costs me my life!

And now, out of his meditation, he speaks the spell that is added to the sign of the earth spirit, a meditative, suggestive spell that really does lead him to the sight of the spirit, who is the leader of the spirits in whose realm we enter when we enter the elemental world. But immediately we realize that Faust is not actually ready for this world, and above all cannot feel ready for this world. What will become of him, then, of Faust? He will come to self-knowledge, in the sense that this is the highest knowledge of the world, in that we all experience what can be experienced when we swim and weave and roll and dwell in the elemental world. But Faust cannot recognize what individualizes itself in it.

This spiritual conversation between Faust and the Earth Spirit is so very characteristic of the state of maturity of Goethe at the time when he wrote the scene, as he describes his tremendous striving into the spiritual world.

Spirit: Who calls me?

Faust is already turning away. Of course, it doesn't sound like what we usually hear with our ears, that it sounds to us from afar, but rather so that we live in the sounds. It sounds different from what can be heard on earth, very different. Just as one does not see what one sees through the light, but rather shines with it. It looks different. Faust wanted to become a superhuman. That is, he wanted to enter the spiritual world, but he is seized by horror at this spiritual world. Through this encounter with the earth spirit, it becomes clear to Faust that one must become a different person than one was before as a human being if one wants to enter the spiritual world, that one cannot enter this spiritual world with one's ordinary powers, feelings and passions. Faust must have felt this deeply, how he was first thrown back, falling from the higher spiritual world into the elemental world, and how he is now thrown back in the elemental world in his knowledge, because he has remained only the ego he used to be, because he did not develop into this elementary world, to which the suggestive meditation brought him, which he carried out through the saying attributed to the earth spirit. He was able to see for a moment what kind of beings are within. But the spirit says to him:

Where are you, Faust, whose voice resounded for me,
Who with all his powers penetrated me?

That this voice resounded from the subconscious, I have already pointed out, that this was the Faust whom the outer Faust himself does not even really know.

Is it you, surrounded by my breath,
Trembling in all depths of life...

This “you” now refers to the ordinary Faust, while the striving Faust was the higher human being Faust.

A timid, cringing worm?

But now Faust's defiance awakens. He wants to plunge into the world for which he is not ready:

Shall I yield to you, flame formation?
It is I, I am Faust, I am your equal.

Now he can still hear how the spirits of the elemental world, into which he has transferred himself, live with human history, with what takes place on earth through the races and cultures, and how they live with it. And the secret of the elemental world is expressed by the earth spirit; it never speaks of being, but of becoming, of happening.

Spirit: In the floods of life, in the storm of action
I surge up and down,
Weaving back and forth!
Birth and grave,
An eternal sea,
A changing weaving,
A glowing life,
So I labor at the whirling loom of time
And weave the living robe of divinity.

Not in space, but in time: read the lectures given in The Hague!

Faust can grasp that this is the spirit that walks through history:

You who wander the wide world,
Busy spirit, how close I feel to you!

You who wander the wide world! You who are the spirit that belongs to the spirits of the age, how close I feel to you! — So he says in his presumptuousness. The spirit now tells him what Faust himself later calls the word of thunder, which strikes his soul like a word of thunder and in turn strikes him back into the ordinary world in which he is because he is not yet mature. He should seek self-knowledge and in the self expanded to the world, the spiritual world. He cannot yet find it, so the word of thunder must sound to him from this earth spirit:

You resemble the spirit that you comprehend,
Not me!

What spirit is it then that Faust comprehends? What spirit does Faust comprehend? He, the image of the deity, who cannot comprehend the earth spirit? How can he then advance in self-knowledge? What kind of human spirit can Faust comprehend? Enter the other Faust, wearing a dressing gown and nightcap: this is the spirit you comprehend! You do comprehend Wagner! You have not progressed any further, for the other part of you lives only in defiance, as a passion! In self-knowledge he comes a little further. That is precisely what is so remarkable about Goethe's Faust, that is the beautiful artistic form of Goethe's Faust, that what is brought onto the stage in real form is always, at bottom, a piece of self-knowledge. Just as Mephistopheles is a piece of self-knowledge, so is Wagner also a piece of Faust's self-knowledge. Wagner is Faust himself. And it would not be wrong to stage “Faust” in such a way that the character of Wagner, dressed in a dressing gown and nightcap, to whom Faust turns away, would be a likeness of Faust himself. Then people would immediately understand why it is precisely this Wagner who comes in. What Wagner says is basically what Faust already understands; he only recites the rest. He just lets it out. He believes he is elevating himself to the highest truths, which he can recite in a phrase-like manner, but which he does not experience inwardly. And now a piece of self-knowledge takes place. Wagner speaks the truth. Basically, Faust has not spoken his innermost experiences, he has recited.

Forgive me! I hear you declaim.

That is one truth: he only declaimed. And it is a piece of self-reflection to realize that you do not approach the spirit of the world in this way, but at most read a Greek tragedy. So many people, when they approach spiritual science, want to declaim about the highest truths, even if it is often a self-declamation about the highest truths. Basically, they want nothing more than to benefit from this spiritual science, to profit from it, to delude themselves with a hazy mist. With regard to today, it can be said that this is often the case in some circles. Some people are very interesting when they talk about their visions. In earlier times, we heard this from the priests; now the actors have learned it even better, so that the priests can learn something from the actors. If Faust were to go only as far as his understanding, he would have to say the words that Wagner speaks, his mirror image. But he goes beyond the limits of his passion, and goes beyond with the Luciferic, not with the genuine, full, human core of the soul, but with the Luciferic core. It is the Lucifer in Faust who now answers what Faust is, but what stands before us as Wagner:

Yes, when the pastor is an actor;
How that may come about in time.

This contempt, this arrogance comes from the Luciferian in Faust, because if Faust were not seized by Lucifer, he would speak as Wagner does when he expresses only what he can honestly admit as the subject of his understanding. The other thing is a dark foreboding in him of something he wants to get to. But this soliloquy – really, it is only a conversation with himself – does get him a little further. You get so much further in life when you encounter yourself in another. You don't like to admit to yourself that you have these or those qualities. But when they confront you in another, you are more willing to study them. In this way, we acquire self-knowledge when a quality presents itself in the form of another, as in Faust by Wagner. Faust has not yet reached the point where he would say to himself, now that Wagner is gone: Yes, that is actually me. — If he had already fully penetrated to himself with his understanding, he would say: I am only a Wagner, the Wagner is only here in my head!

How all hope does not fade from the mind,
That clings forever to stale evidence,
With greedy hand digs for treasures,
And is glad when it finds earthworms!

For up to now he has done nothing else, except seek the spirits in the manner described. It is self-knowledge that confronts Faust in Wagner. Who sent Wagner into him? The Earth Spirit sent him in, the Earth Spirit:

You resemble the spirit you comprehend,
Not me!

And now Faust shall see what spirits he resembles. He does not resemble the Earth Spirit, who is the ruler of the Earth, but he shall see one of the forms within him: there is your Wagner! This Wagner is in you!

But now there is not only Wagner in Faust, but the Luciferic element is opposed to Wagner, that is, opposed to itself. There is another element in him.

If you look at “Faust” in its earlier form, as it was at the beginning, it is the case that Goethe did not finish the following after the earth spirit scene at the time. It continues like this: conversation with Wagner, then with the student, Mephisto... Mephisto enters, of whom Goethe does not quite know whether he is Lucifer or Ahriman. If he had studied spiritual science, Lucifer would appear now. But he has the other one, who is sent to him by the earth spirit. The earth spirit sends him Wagner, sends him Mephisto, we would say Lucifer. Faust is to get to know little by little what is in him. Mephisto is sent by the earth spirit: There you have another one of the spirits that you understand. Try to understand the Lucifer that is in you, and not immediately look at the spirit of the earth!

How unclear Goethe was about the matter can be seen from the fact that a small piece, which was later left out, is in the original writing, in four lines. In 1775 there were four lines after the scene where Mephisto has brought Faust so far that he has led him to Gretchen, and that Faust now wants to force himself on Gretchen. There are four lines that were no longer in the fragment as early as 1790. After Faust, who is actually Lucifer – Goethe just mixes them up – has asked Mephisto to take care of the jewelry for Gretchen, Mephisto says in the old manuscript, after Faust has left:

He acts as if he were a prince's son.
If Lucifer had a dozen princes,
They would surely conjure up something for him;
In the end, he would get a commission.

There it is, Mephisto himself calls himself Lucifer. As I said, the four lines were later omitted. So what was Goethe actually trying to do in his earlier days, when he wanted, one might say, to express himself in his “Faust”? Well, he wanted to show how man should come to self-knowledge. But, one might say, there is an inkling of it in this first scene, which Goethe wrote in his youth, and which you can now read with clarity, where it is described in “How to Know Higher Worlds?” the encounter with the Guardian of the Threshold. You foresaw in Faust how the human being, who gradually realizes how different entities are within him, divides himself up, how he divides himself up into Wagner and Lucifer-Mephisto. He gets to know himself bit by bit in his individual parts, he gets to know himself as Wagner, he gets to know himself as Lucifer-Mephisto. But as I said, Goethe first had to mature in order to really see the great significance of the Christ impulse for humanity, as far as that was possible in his time. Therefore, we see how Goethe, in his later years, sought to supplement what he had written earlier about Faust's striving until man encounters himself in his various images, including the image of Lucifer, by having Faust come into contact with what has been incorporated into earthly development through Christ. One could say that the cultic symbols of Christ approach Faust. And so we see in Faust the document that shows us how Goethe himself brought occultism to Christianity, to the Christ impulse, and how we are indeed continuing today to work on the path that Goethe took with regard to its first steps. In Goethe's time one could only get a glimpse. Today, the time has come when it is possible for man, through spiritual science, to truly enter into the realm of spiritual life, into which all of Goethe's striving was directed. Today, Faust must be understood differently than Goethe himself understood him. Yes, the world is progressing, and if we do not fully recognize that the world is progressing, then we are not serious enough about the world. But such experiences, that one splits, that one encounters oneself in one's true form, in a Luciferian form, such experiences do bring one forward, but always only a little way. We must part with the belief that we can see the whole spiritual world if we have only made small advances, such as we can make through meditation. One always advances only a little.

There are two natures in Faust: the Wagner nature and that which now strives forward. When Goethe wanted to point this out in his later years, he did it very beautifully. Goethe felt the need, when Faust had already approached Christianity, to show what the Wagner nature in Faust is. Therefore, he lets Wagner and Faust take the Easter Walk together. It is now the case that, as is naturally dramatic, two people are presented to us, showing what is going on in Faust's soul. The higher man in Faust strives forward, but the Faust-Wagner holds Faust back. A spark of comprehension of the spiritual world has been kindled in Faust, so that he now sees not only the sensual poodle, and there really is something like a soul force in Faust that expresses itself in the conversation with Wagner:

Faust: Do you see the black dog roaming through the seed and stubble?

Now the nature of Wagner awakens in Faust.

Wagner: I saw him long ago, he seemed unimportant to me.
Higher Nature: Look at him closely! What do you think the animal is?
Wagner Nature: A poodle, who in his own way is trying to follow his master.

These are objections that Faust himself actually raises. And now it continues. Faust begins to see the supersensible behind the sensual; he already senses it. So, it is a hunch, brought on by the experiences he has had. A spark of the spiritual world has entered into him. And it is beautiful, one wants to say, how infinitely artistically sincere and honest Goethe is, one just has to understand him. When Faust now feels the Luciferic in himself – as you know, the Luciferic is connected with obstinacy, with inner egoism – he, Faust, now also carries this Luciferic into his being gripped by the Christ impulse. It is a Luciferian trait that the Gospel of John, in that he wants to translate it, does not seem perfect to him at all. For the understanding, the Goethe commentators are a bit curious, who really go along with the poet, because they always go along with the poet, even where he distributes the things he wants to say among his characters. Faust does not yet understand the text of the Gospel at all, otherwise he would stop at “In the beginning was the word”. He falters because he does not yet understand it. The professors present it as if Faust understood it better, but he does not yet understand it. What appears to him now is the power, the deed – so he brings rationalism and intellectualism into the gospel. This now evokes the opposite phenomenon. Whereas he was once pushed down into the sensual world, he is now drawn up into the spiritual world. By fully asserting his limitations, by setting 'sense and power and action', he is pushed up into the spiritual world, because there is already a spark of spiritual power in Faust. Then the spirits come and again as the messenger of the earth spirit... Mephisto, this unclear figure between Lucifer and Ahriman. So you see, one must understand Goethe's struggle to penetrate Faust's spiritual world, and one can learn an infinite amount from it, especially for our present time.

What I particularly wanted to do in the last lecture on Easter Sunday and in this lecture was to show you how it is more difficult for a spirit that wants to delve deeper to penetrate to the Christ impulse than for a spirit that remains in its infinite pride and conceit and does not want what spiritual science can offer it. On the other hand, I also wanted to use Faust to illustrate how powerful the impact of the Christ Impulse has been on the world. There will come a time when we will learn to understand the inner nature of the Christ impulse ever better and better, precisely through what spiritual science has to give. It stands there in the world – I would like to say, as an illustration of the development of humanity on earth, brought about by world history, of what the Christ impulse is – the fact stands that centuries after the Christ impulse entered into the development of humanity on earth, something occurs in this development of humanity that is also not properly understood. But at the moment when one begins to understand it correctly, one is led precisely through this understanding to a deeper feeling for the Christ event. You know, of course, that six hundred years after the Christ impulse entered into the evolution of mankind, a prophet arose in a certain community who initially rejected what had entered into the evolution of mankind through the Christ impulse: Mohammed. Today we must no longer profess the superstition of the 19th century, which, out of rationalism, seeks to explain in a belittling way what must be explained out of spiritual insight. And it must appear ridiculous to anyone who really wants to penetrate into spiritual science when a particularly learned and clever man says of Mohammed: Yes, he claims that the angel who whispered in his ear what he wrote in the Koran approached him in the form of doves! But Mohammed - so the rationalist scholar says - was a mere juggler. He put some grains, which doves like to eat, into his ear, so the doves flew up and took the grains, but flew away again when they had had them! Yes, there have been such explanations, within and outside of Christianity, in the very clever 19th century.

There will come a time when such explanations will really only be laughed at, even though they are fully capable of satisfying materialism. We have to take Muhammad more deeply; we have to be clear that what lived in his soul was really such intercourse with the spiritual world as Goethe sought for his Faust. But what did Muhammad feel? What did he find? Today I can only hint at it, another time I will explain it more precisely. What did Mohammed find? Well, you know, Mohammed first strove for a world for which he had an expression, it is only one word: God. The world becomes a monism, a monistic expression of God. This world has nothing of the essence of Christianity, of course. But Mohammed does look into the spiritual world; he enters the elementary world of which I have spoken today. He promises his believers that they will enter, when they have gone through the gate of death, into this spiritual world. But he can only tell them about the spiritual world that he has come to know. What kind of spiritual world is this? This spiritual world, of which Mohammed tells his believers, is the Luciferian world, which he regards as paradise, the world that is to be aspired to. And when one passes from the abstract to the real, and adds, by way of interpretation, the meaning of Islam's striving in the spiritual world, one recognizes what spiritual science also proclaims. But this spiritual world is the world in which Lucifer rules; reinterpreted, the Luciferian world becomes a paradise, the world that people are just beginning to strive for.

I believe that it must make a deep impression on our souls if we can delve into the essence of historical development in such a way, through a very important phenomenon. It must give us pause when we learn in the progression of religious life how a great prophet emerged with the error that the Luciferic world is paradise. I do not want you to take this in just as abstract truths, I believe it can shake the soul if you let it affect you. But what does the Muslim do to enter his spiritual world? Perhaps we could later have a note handed in at the door from each of our dear friends here who has read the entire Koran. It would be interesting to count the slips of paper of those who have read it. But it is not easy to read the Koran completely, with its endless repetitions, which Westerners find so endlessly boring to read. But among Muslims, there are people who claim to have read it from beginning to end seventy thousand times in their lives. That means: to have brought a word that was given to the soul in such a way that this word has become alive in the soul! Even if we cannot learn anything in terms of content from such a religious community with regard to Christianity, we can still learn that within that community of people, even spiritual error is treated quite differently than what we are called to recognize as spiritual truths. At most, a European might read Faust, then, when he has forgotten it, read it again, and when he has forgotten it again, read it once more. But those who have read Faust a hundred times will also be sought after. It is also understandable within the context of Western education to date. How could anyone read everything that is printed in the West seventy thousand times? It is quite understandable. But we should still acquire something, that it is one thing to simply inform oneself about a content that is meaningful for the soul's life, and something else to live with it, again and again, so that one becomes completely one with it, completely one. It is something that one must first gain an understanding of, something that one cannot even understand according to the thinking habits of our national community. But we should reflect on such things. Not just to tell you something, but to stimulate your reflection, words are spoken as they are in this reflection. To increase our sense of responsibility towards ourselves and towards the world, with regard to what spiritual science can and should be for us.

We live in difficult times in many respects. The very difficult external events that surround us at present are only the outward sign of our very difficult times. It is not good to look at these very difficult times as if they were an illness, as we often call an illness an illness, because an illness is often a healing process, the true illness has preceded the physically apparent illness. So also what is now going through the world as mourning events has been preceded by something pathological, and we are to see into much deeper things than humanity is inclined to see into. Oh, a great pain can be deposited on the soul of the one who looks at the present time with the tasks it has, and with the little understanding that so many people have for these tasks. When one sees how people judge, think, feel and perceive the world today, and how these thoughts, feelings and perceptions lead to external events, and how people learn so little from these external events, then an infinitely meaningful pain is deposited on the soul. It is this feeling of pain that must now often come over the soul. If one can really look back over the past months of trial, to mention only the most recent, and turn one's gaze to what people have learned through these months of trial, to what judgment confronts one in relation to what confronted one eight months ago: it is the same kind of judgment, the same kind of feeling. What made people believe they were right eight months ago, they still think so, they even want the sad events to have occurred in order to prove them right in what they believed was right eight months ago.

I cannot express how infinite the pain is that one feels at the small way in which human souls have changed in recent months according to the assumptions that had to be made for this change, so that our time really would be a time of trial, a time of learning. But of those who stand within spiritual science, one would wish that they absorb much of what can be learned when such considerations as these are undertaken in connection with Faust. Again and again one would like to point out to souls the deep seriousness and the sacred striving for truth that must be connected with our spiritual-scientific view. And in such a movement there must be retribution for everything that does not arise out of deep sincerity and a deep sense of truth. We must really try to overcome everything that can make one say to the one who utters it: Forgive me, I hear you declaiming!

Is it not strange, when we see the stage traditions according to Wagner often on the stage today, and when scholars, when rationalists and intellectuals deride what Wagner is, instead of them knocking on their hearts and seeing themselves in the Wagner. This Wagner sits on the chairs everywhere, in the laboratories, and our scientific literature, our philosophical literature, would contain a deep truth if the majority of the authors chose the pseudonym “Wagner”. For they are written by Wagner, these philosophies of the present.

I am quite sure that many a person who lives in the ranks of spiritual science also has sufficient reason to beat their breasts, to examine themselves in self-knowledge, to see how much of their soul is mere self-promotion and how much arises from absolute honesty, from an absolute sense of truth! With this admonition to your hearts, to the deepest powers of your soul, I close this reflection.

following a eurythmy presentation of the first scene of the second part of “Faust”

It will be understood that it is hardly possible to give a Whitsun lecture in the usual sense this year, especially at this time, namely at Whitsun itself. Let us consider what characterizes the time of Whitsun in the document of Christianity, the New Testament. We will find that the significant characteristic of the Pentecost is that the Spirit is poured out on those who are called apostles. And the consequence of the outpouring of the spirit is, as we see from the second chapter of Acts, that the people of the most diverse languages, who are gathered together at the Feast of Pentecost, ten days after the so-called Ascension, each hears what is to be proclaimed to them in a way that sounds familiar to him, even though each one expressly emphasizes that he is only capable of his mother tongue.

And so the outpouring of the spirit at the Feast of Pentecost appears like the outpouring of the spirit of love, of unity, of harmony among those who speak the most diverse languages across the globe. Or, to put it better, to match the wording of the Bible, the matter could be put in the following way. One could say: In the Pentecost proclamation, something is given that resonates so powerfully with the human mind that everyone can understand it, even though they only understand their mother tongue.

Almost everyone feels that it contradicts what surrounds us at this year's Pentecost festival if only one interpretation of what this Pentecost proclamation can mean is given. We need only consider that nineteen centuries after this Pentecostal proclamation, the world has managed to follow this Pentecostal proclamation in such a way that this Pentecost now sees thirty-four different speaking peoples fighting with each other, in a sense completely contradicting the meaning of Pentecost. Perhaps this language of fact will at least lead a certain number of people to realize that the Pentecost message has not yet spread throughout the world in a far-reaching way, that it has not yet sufficiently taken hold of people's minds and that it must speak to the minds of men in a new form, more urgently, more meaningfully than it has spoken up to now, so that it can be understood in the future in the way in which it must be understood.

And so this year, as a Whitsun reflection, a general point of view will be taken, so to speak, a point of view that can bring us closer to the new Whitsun proclamation from a certain side, which we mean by spiritual science. For we must regard what has just been explained in the lectures that we have completed here as a Pentecostal proclamation to humanity; we must understand this spiritual science as a Pentecostal proclamation.

Let us take what we know about the Mystery of Golgotha and let it enter our soul. What is the essence of this Mystery of Golgotha? This essence of the Mystery of Golgotha consists in the fact that a spiritual entity, which we know to belong to the cosmic spheres, descended and underwent earthly destinies, earthly suffering in a physical human body, that the Christ-entity lived for three years in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Through what the Christ-being experienced in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, this Christ-being has been united since the Mystery of Golgotha with what we can call the spirit of the earth, what we can call the auric of the earth. So that for us the entire evolution of the earth breaks down into a time before the Mystery of Golgotha, when that which the Christ-spirit is can only be hinted at when man rises through initiation out of the earthly sphere, in order to perceive not that which lies within the earthly sphere, but that which the earth has no part in, which is only predetermined for it for a later future, and in the time after the Mystery of Golgotha. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, we know that the human being, with his spiritual soul, does not need to flee from the earth, but can remain within the earthly sphere and can perceive within this earthly sphere the impulses contained in the Christ-being.

Now we must realize that for centuries until our time, a part of humanity has become aware that the Christ Impulse is connected with earthly existence. Something has changed in the collective consciousness of those human beings who have felt and sensed something of the Christ Impulse. Something has changed in the overall consciousness of these people. The belief has entered the soul that the Christ is with man, that the human mind can unite with the Christ, that the human mind can experience something within earthly existence that is vividly imbued with the Christ impulse. But an understanding of what the Christ impulse is in the entire earthly existence in the development of humanity must first really penetrate into human souls through spiritual science. And for this it is necessary to recognize how this Christ impulse works in the human soul in such a way that two other spiritual impulses are, as it were, kept in balance.

This is what our sculpture, which we are erecting in the east of our building, will have to depict. There we will place the representative of humanity, the representative of the human being insofar as this human being can experience the deepest things in himself, insofar as this human being can experience what one experiences when one has taken up the Christ impulse as a living impulse in one's soul. For my sake, the main figure in the building in the east can be called the Christ; he can also be called the representative of the internalized human being in general. But one will have to see this spirit, which speaks through a human body, in connection with two other spiritual entities, with Lucifer and Ahriman. The representative of humanity will have to express his relationship to Lucifer and Ahriman while standing upright. Everything about this figure must be purely characteristic. Above all, you will notice later, when this figure has just been set up, that the gesture of the raised left hand and the gesture of the lowered right hand are very special. This gesture of the hands will be understood when one sees how, above, on the rock toward whose summit the left hand of the Representative of Humanity is raised, the left arm rises, just as above, on this rocky summit, Lucifer falls from the reason that he breaks his wings.

Now one can easily believe that this breaking of the wings would be caused by the power emanating from the arm of the representative of humanity, as if, as it were, this power radiated out to Lucifer and broke his wings. That would be a false conception. And hopefully we will succeed in preventing this false conception from arising through the vivid description. For it is not a matter of something emanating from the fully Christianized human being that breaks Lucifer's wings, but rather that Lucifer experiences something within himself when he senses the proximity of the Christ, which leads to the breaking of his wings. Because he cannot bear the Christ-power, the Christ-impulse, he breaks his wings. It is a process that is not brought about by a battle between Christ and Lucifer, but it is a process within Lucifer himself, something that Lucifer must experience within himself, and there must be no doubt for a moment that it would be impossible for Christ to feel hatred or feelings of struggle against Lucifer. Christ is Christ and only fills the world-being with positive things, does not fight any power in the world! But it must fight against the power that now comes into its proximity as the power of Lucifer. Therefore, the hand raised on the left must not work aggressively, nor must the left half of the face work aggressively with this peculiar gesture. Rather, it is as if it is pointing out that, in the context of the world, Christ has something to do with Lucifer. But it is not a fight. The fight arises only in the soul of Lucifer himself. He breaks his own wings, they are not broken by Christ.

And it is the same with Ahriman, who crouches in a rocky cave under the right side of the thoroughly Christianized human being, under which the earth is driven upwards: the material that is driven into people, but which cannot gain strength and weakens because the power of Christ is near it.

In turn, the power of Christ, flowing through the arm into the hand, must betray nothing of hatred against Ahriman. It is Ahriman himself who weakens and who, through what is going on in his soul, wraps the hidden gold in the veins of the earth around him like fetters, so that he makes fetters out of the gold of the earth and forges them for himself. He is not forged by Christ, he forges himself on by feeling the proximity of Christ.

But this only lays bare, I might say, the primal relationship, which must be recognized so that what the Christ impulse is can really be understood by human souls.

A simple parable can be used to explain this Christ impulse in abstract terms. Imagine a pendulum. The pendulum swings to one side, then falls to the lowest point under its own gravity and swings to the other side, and so on until there is a point on this other side that we call the point of equilibrium. This point would be a dead point, a stationary point, if the pendulum did not now swing to the other side. There is life in the pendulum in that it swings to both sides and has a resting point in the middle.

Since the Mystery of Golgotha, we can imagine the evolution of the Earth in the following way: a pendulum swing to one side, to the Luciferic side, and a pendulum swing to the other side, to the Ahrimanic side. And the point of equilibrium is the Christ in the middle.

That this must first be recognized may be seen from a significant historical fact. We all admire the painting that Michelangelo called 'The Last Judgment'. You know it from reproductions of the original, which is in the Sistine Chapel. We see there, painted with magnificent mastery by Michelangelo, Christ, sending some to hell, triumphantly, to the evil spirits, and sending the others, the good, to heaven. And if we look into the face of this Christ, we see the wrath of the world in him. And if we have taken in spiritual science, if we have truly united in love with our minds everything that we have been able to take in of spiritual science so far, then today, despite our admiration for what Michelangelo created, we say: This is not Christ, because the Christ does not judge! People judge themselves, as Lucifer and Ahriman experience their own processes, not what is brought about by any kind of struggle of the Christ against them.

When Michelangelo created his Christ, the time had not yet come to recognize the Christ in true perfection. I might say that a lack of clarity still prevailed in people. In Christ Himself, something was seen of which we know today that it must be attributed to Lucifer or Ahriman. And we can understand something of it today when people have found something of Lucifer or Ahriman in the Michelangelo Christ, for He is not yet free, as Michelangelo portrays Him, from that of which the Christ is completely free.

If we take a good look at ourselves, we can see that from the perspective that gave birth to Michelangelo, it was impossible to create an image of Christ that corresponded to a true understanding of the mystery of Golgotha, because the one thing that had to be known was still unresolved: the relationship between Christ, Lucifer and Ahriman.

How often has it been emphasized in our circles that it is a false sentiment to point to Lucifer and say, “I want to flee from him,” or to point to Ahriman and say, “I want to flee from him.” That would only mean wanting to make a pact with weakness, would mean advising the pendulum to remain in a state of equilibrium, not to swing to the left or to the right, but always to remain at rest. We cannot escape the world forces that we call Lucifer and Ahriman; we just have to find the right relationship with them. And we find this right relationship when we understand the Christ impulse in the right way, when we see in the Christ Being the guide who can place us in the right relationship with the Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers, which must one day be the powers of the world.

Let us consider everything that Lucifer brings into human life. He brings into it everything that is connected with perception, with the passions, with the life of feeling and of the emotions. Life would be dry, sober, abstract if it were not for the living sensation and feeling that permeate it. If we look at the development of history, we see what passion, often called the noble passion — and rightly so, the noble passion — has achieved in history, what feeling and sensation have achieved. But we are never able to cultivate feelings and sensations at all without entering the sphere of Lucifer. It is only because we never enter this sphere without the guidance of the Christ impulse.

And on the other hand, we see how necessary it has become, especially in more recent times, to understand the world more and more, to develop science, to master the external forces of nature. Ahriman is the master of that which is external science, of that which lives in the external forces of nature. And we would remain foolish and stupid if we wanted to flee the Ahrimanic element. It is not a matter of fleeing the Ahrimanic element, but of entering, under the guidance of the Christ Impulse, into that sphere in which Ahriman rules in the world. And thus not indolently seeking merely the point of rest, but to witness the living movement of the world pendulum, to experience it in such a way that we do not take a step without the guidance of the Christ Impulse. Knowledge of Christ is only possible when the relationship of the Christ impulse to the Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces of the human soul has become clear. Therefore, the proclamation of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic side of the world is part of what our spiritual scientific movement had to take up, since it was aware that it had to place itself on the ground of the Christ impulse. And that is why you cannot find anything in the non-Christian theosophical teaching about the Ahrimanic and Luciferic elements, because this Luciferic and Ahrimanic element had to arise at the moment when the spiritual scientific movement had to reckon with the Christ impulse in a serious way.

I think it is something extraordinarily important for the human soul to feel how spiritual science has the task of really bringing something new into human consciousness, something so new that we ourselves may measure it against such great creations of humanity as the Michelangelesque Christ of the “Last Judgment”. And what we have in mind through spiritual science must appear to us as the new Pentecostal proclamation in the true sense of the word.

Around Easter time, we saw how one of the great minds of modern times, Goethe, wrestled with the question of how to relate the one he presented as the representative of humanity, Faust, to the Christ impulse. And we have seen how Goethe was not yet able to do this in his youth, but only in his mature years. And so, in many ways, spiritual life, as it has developed up to the present day, appears to us as a struggle, as an unceasing struggle. It truly appears to us in such a way that we must become extremely modest when we see how the most exquisite spirits of humanity have labored to gain insights and perceptions of what the Christ Impulse signifies. We realize how modest we must be in our human striving for this knowledge of the Christ Impulse.

Goethe – as we have seen – was initially concerned with allowing what works around people as a Luciferic and Ahrimanic element to really take a back seat to his representative of humanity, to Faust. And we have seen how Goethe mixed up the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic element so that it is not easy to distinguish them in the figure of Mephistopheles. We have shown in the Easter lectures how the Luciferic and Ahrimanic elements are mixed together in the figure of Mephistopheles, because Goethe was not yet able to have a clear insight. Basically, Goethe felt throughout his life the striving within him to come to a clear understanding of the relationship between man and Lucifer and Ahriman. When, at the end of the 18th century, he was asked by Schiller, as a mature man, to continue his “Faust” and saw again what he had written in his youth, he called what he had put together at different times a tragelaph – half animal and half human; that is how his “Faust” appeared to him. And he called his “Faust,” to indicate the difficulty of continuing it now, “a barbaric composition,” so that we have the judgment of Goethe, who must have known more about his “Faust” than those who are not Goethe, that the “Faust” is a tragelaph, “half animal and half human,” that it is a “barbaric composition”! What I wanted to present at Easter, and what can so easily be misunderstood, ultimately leads back to a judgment of Goethe's own. Yes, of course, very clever people see in “Faust” a perfect work of art, see in “Faust” that which cannot be surpassed. It was not Goethe's opinion and must not be our opinion either. Even if we see in Faust a rise to the highest, we must realize that this Faust suffers above all in its inner composition from the fact that in his figure of Mephistopheles, Lucifer and Ahriman are mixed together in a completely inorganic way.

But despite all this intermingling, Goethe felt darkly: Lucifer and Ahriman should have appeared together. Goethe just mixed everything together and called it all “Mephistopheles”, so that in the individual scenes in “Faust” Lucifer is often Lucifer, in other parts Mephistopheles or Ahriman. But this was quite clear to Goethe: something is happening in the human being that is taking place under the influence of Lucifer and Ahriman, of Lucifer and Mephistopheles. Such things happen in people.

Now let us look at the end of the first part of Goethe's “Faust”. How does it end? Faust has incurred the most terrible guilt imaginable, has a human life on his conscience, has betrayed a person, incurred the terrible guilt, towards himself and towards the other person. And the last word of the first part of “Faust” is: “Her zu mir!” (To me!), at the same moment as, only through a voice as if from heaven, resounding: “Heinrich, Heinrich!” (Henry, Henry!) We therefore know from this end of the first part where Faust has come. He has come to Mephistopheles. Mephistopheles has him. There is no doubt about that.

And now we see the beginning of the second part. This beginning of the second part presents us with a charming scene: “Faust, tired, restless, lying on a flowery meadow, seeking sleep.” Ghosts appear. And from what they say, we get the impression: we are dealing with nature, yes really, with nature – we just need to go out at this time of year – and we have this nature. Whitsun nature, for example! Whitsun mood, for example! This Whitsun mood has an effect on Faust. And afterwards he continues on his journey through life.

A scholar made a comment about what Goethe had done, which, it can be said, has something to it, even though the remark is philistine and pedantic. The scholar said: When you have incurred a grave guilt, as Faust did towards Gretchen, then go to a charming region, to a flowery meadow, perhaps go on a mountain expedition, and your soul will be cured and capable of further deeds. One could say that, realistically Ahrimanically conceived, this saying of the scholar Rieger has much to be said for it. For it should actually be unbearable for all people who, in the usual sense of today, have a purely materialistic world view, to let the second part of “Faust” have an effect on them, after the great, powerful guilt that Faust has taken upon himself is characterized in the first part. But unfortunately, when it comes to the human and personal, we do not take humanity's greatest work of literature – for that is “Faust”, despite being a barbaric composition and a tragicomedy in its first part – we do not take it literally enough. If we took it literally enough, we would know that the line “Her zu mir!” (“To me!”) is true... Mephistopheles has Faust. As he has him, Faust is now lying on a flowery meadow, restlessly seeking sleep. We must not think of Faust as being separate from the infernal powers at the beginning of the second part. But Goethe was striving for true spiritual knowledge. How close Goethe was to spiritual knowledge may be seen from a passage in a letter that Goethe once wrote to his friend, the musician Zelter. It is a significant passage! Goethe writes: “Consider that with every breath an etheric Lethestrom permeates our entire being, so that we remember the joy only moderately, the suffering hardly.” With every breath, our inner being is indeed permeated by an etheric life stream, but that means nothing other than: Goethe knew very well about the etheric body that humans have. Of course, in his time he only brought this up in his circle of friends.

How Goethe stood by the entire human being, how he, looking at this human being, said to himself: This human being can become guilty, because something dwells in him that is under Mephistophelian influence, that belongs to Mephistopheles belongs. As Goethe looked at this human being, who belongs to this sphere, it was clear to him at the same time that something lives in human nature that can never fall prey to this influence, that can be protected from the Ahrimanic-Luciferic influence. And it is this element in Faust that can be protected from the influence of Ahriman and Lucifer that we are dealing with at the beginning of the second part. Faust, who was capable of guilt, who allowed himself to be drawn by Mephistopheles into the most trivial, most banal pleasures of life, who then tempted Gretchen, has become guilty. In our spiritual language we would say: This part of Faust must wait until the next incarnation.

But there is something in the nature of man that is his higher self, that remains in relationship to the spiritual powers of the world. Therefore, the spiritual powers of the world confront this eternal in Faust. We must not imagine the Faust that we see at the beginning of the second part in the realistic sense as Faust who has become so and so much older, but he is really only the representative of the higher self in Faust. He still wears the same form. But this form is the representative of something that could not have been guilty in Faust. This, which could not have been guilty in Faust, now enters into a relationship with the servants of the Earth Spirit.

From his youth, Goethe longed to gain an insight into the nature of human guilt, of evil in the world, and yet to know that something hovered over all that must have a balancing effect on guilt and evil. And so Goethe ventured, since he had to surrender, so to speak, Faust's one nature to Mephisto – “Come to me!” And we must be quite clear about this: now, at the beginning of the second part, it is not the same Faust that speaks as we know from the first part, but a different, a second nature that only externally bears Faust's form and that can enter into that which, as a spiritual being, permeates the external world. But what has no immediate connection with Faust's outer physical body must find its way into it. For the physical body naturally retains, as long as we remain in the same incarnation, all the signs of the guilt into which we have fallen. Only that in us which frees itself from the physical body can truly connect with what the higher self is. And so Faust must undergo this transformation, which we can call the transformation of guilt into higher knowledge.

He will carry what he bears as guilt into his next incarnation. For this incarnation, he bears the guilt as the source of a higher knowledge that opens up to him, a more precise knowledge of life. And so, despite bearing the most monstrous guilt on his soul, the possibility opens up for Faust that his higher self will be brought into connection with what pervades, lives through and interweaves the world as spiritual.

Faust's higher self comes into contact with a spirit of the earth aura. Goethe wanted to show, so to speak, that what is highest in man could not be grasped by Mephistopheles, we would say: Lucifer-Ahriman, — that must have been preserved, that must be able to enter into other spheres. And so Goethe is quite sincere when he says that this higher self in Faust now enters into a relationship with what the elemental world contains as spiritual beings.

We shall see later how this is connected with what has already been said here in the Easter lectures. But now let us consider how these spiritual beings, which are under the guidance of the air spirit, for such is Ariel, how these spirits, which we can thus call air spirits, are connected with the outer processes of nature, but how they reveal themselves as that which is another spiritual world, in contrast to the self that is not exposed to the influence of Lucifer and Ahriman in the supermundane nature:

When the blossoms of spring rain
Over all, floating sinks,
When the fields of green blessing
All earth-borns flashes,

— so when nature sprouts and sprouts in the spring-whitsun time, then the elemental spirits come out. They are small for the external material, they are great as spirits, for they are exalted above that which in the human heart can fall prey to good or evil.

Small elf spirit size
Hasten where it can help;
Whether it be holy or evil...

— this is left to the next incarnation, it is not the concern of these spirits —

Whether he is holy or evil,
The man of sorrows laments...

The spirits are dealing with his higher self, which is preserved from what has to play out in karma or incarnation. But these spirits can only work in their own element, in which the human being is with his essence when he has left the outer bodily shells as a spiritual soul. And now Goethe explains what these elves, with their greatness as spirits, have to achieve:

You who hover around this head in airy circles,
Show yourselves here in a noble elfin way,
Calm the grim bouquet of your hearts;
Remove the glowing, bitter arrows of reproach,
His innermost being cleansed of the horror he has experienced.

This cannot happen to Faust, who is exposed to Ahriman-Lucifer. This purification is called: Bring out Faust's higher self, present it purely. - And now something that proceeds like an initiation with Faust, who is outside of his body, is taken seriously:

There are four pauses in the night,

— from six o'clock in the evening until six o'clock in the morning the elves fulfill their duty by connecting the soul from falling asleep to waking up with what spiritually permeates and interweaves earthly existence.

Now without delay, she fills it kindly.

— the four pauses that the soul experiences from falling asleep to waking up.

First sinks his head upon the cool pillow,
Then bathes him in the dew from Lethes flood;
Joints soon are the cramp-frozen limbs,
When he strengthened towards the day rests;

- when he has taken in what the spirit that permeates the world has to offer, when this spirit has entered into that which is preserved in Faust's being as a higher self.

The elves' most beautiful duty perform,
Give him back to the holy light.

What happens externally between falling asleep and waking up are real, actual processes, similar to an initiation. And now we see what happens in each of the three hours from six to nine, from nine to twelve, from twelve to three and from three to six. First, there is the break from six to nine:

When the air is gently warmed
Around the green-bordered square,
Sweet scents, veiled in mist
Dawn descends;
She softly whispers sweet peace,
Lulls the heart to child-like calm,
And to the eyes of this weary one,
Locks the day's gate shut!

The soul is gone, separated from the body.

The second part:

Night has already fallen,
Star joins star in holy union;
Great lights, little sparks
Glitter near and shine afar;
Glitter here in the lake, reflecting,
Shine above the clear night,
Sealing the deepest rest,
The moon's full splendor reigns.

The harmony and wisdom of the spheres are absorbed by the great lights, the small sparks. And the secrets of the moon, all that we absorb in spiritual science from the secrets of the spheres, is sunk into Faust's higher self.

The third part of sleeping:

The hours have already faded away,
Pain and joy have vanished away;
Feel it first! You will recover;
Trust the new day's view.
Valleys green, hills swell,
Bushes to shadowy rest;
And in swaying silver waves
The seed of the harvest undulates.

Inwardly connecting with the existence of nature; we have also spoken of this before. Read the last Hague cycle, how the human soul, when it rises from the body, becomes one with the surging and weaving of external existence. But it also means the becoming in the soul of Faust:

And in surging silver waves
The seed - the soul of Faust - surges towards the harvest.

And do you remember how I said that during sleep, man desires to re-enter the body? That is the last part of the night.

Desire to fulfill desires.
Look at the brightness there!

The sun can already be sensed.

You are gently embraced,
Sleep is a shell, throw it away!

An important sentence! A great poet does not write empty phrases! What does it mean: Sleep is a shell, throw it away!? — For someone who sleeps through an ordinary sleep, sleep is not a shell; for someone for whom this time from falling asleep to waking up becomes an absorption for the secrets of the world, sleep is a shell.

Do not delay to take heart,
When the crowd hesitantly roams;
Everything can be achieved by the noble,
Who understands and quickly seizes.

And now the tremendous roar that announces the approach of the sun, reminding us of what Goethe said in the “Prologue in Heaven” in the first part of “Faust” about this sounding of the sun:

The sun sounds in the old way
In brotherly spheres of singing,
And its prescribed journey
It completes with a thunderclap.
Its sight gives strength to the angels,
When no one can fathom it;
Its incomprehensibly high works
Are glorious, as on the first day.

When the sun comes up and the light pours over the physical plane, the soul, when it is outside the body, hears this approach of the sun as music of the spheres, as a special element in the music of the spheres. Spirits hear it naturally. Man does not hear it because he must hear through his physical body. But that is incorporated in the physical plane, and when the sun is in the physical plane, that is the time when man can be awake. Therefore spirits must withdraw. What Ariel, the spirit of the air, now says to his servants, that is suggestive of the approach of the music of the spheres. The spirits can hear it. He who is outside of his body can hear it. Faust can still hear it, this rising of the music of the spheres. Then he returns to his body. Then Ariel has the task of disappearing. Ariel instructs his servants what they have to do: they have to disappear from the physical plane. Because when the sun, which they can only find as a sounding sun, strikes them with its light, they go deaf from it. They go deaf from the light, while they can easily bear the sounding sun, in whose tones they themselves live.

Hark! Hear the storm of the hours!
The new day is already born
for the ears of the spirit.
The gates of rock creak and clatter,
Phoebus' wheels roll and clatter;
What a roar brings the light!
It trumpets, it trompets,
The eye blinks and the ear is amazed,
Unheard-of things cannot be heard.
Slip to the flower corollas,
Deeper, deeper, to dwell in silence,
In the rocks, under the foliage;
If it strikes you, then you are deaf.

And now the elves disappear. Faust returns to his body. But Faust remains unconscious of his guilt. He does not stand before us. He has descended deep into Faust's subconscious and remains there until the next incarnation. Faust, who has just experienced being with the whole spiritual cosmos, must now realize how what he has experienced relates to the four breaks of sleep-life, to how he now perceives the world. He now lives as a higher self in his body.

A person who, after sleeping one night and not having everything within himself that Faust has within himself, a person who then, after waking up in the morning, would say: You, Earth, were also constant this night – would be a fool, because no one expects anything other than that the Earth was also constant this night. But indeed, if one has gone through what Faust experienced as an initiation with the spirits of the earth, then one has experienced something through which one could indeed believe that the whole earth had been transformed. Then it is justified to say that one has become a new person, or rather, that the new person has been awakened in one: “You, Earth, were also constant this night - despite what I have experienced. Then the world appears completely new, because it is indeed given to a new person.

Life's pulses beat freshly alive,
Gently welcoming ethereal dawn;
You, Earth, were also constant this night
And breathe newly refreshed at my feet,
You are already beginning to surround me with joy,
You stir and move a strong resolve,
To strive for the highest existence forever. —

Even now, when the mind has freed itself from what must be stored for the next incarnation!

In the twilight the world is already revealed,
The forest resounds with a thousand-voiced life,
Valley after valley a strip of mist has poured out;
But heavenly clarity descends into the depths,
And twigs and branches, freshly refreshed, have sprung
from the fragrant abyss where they slept submerged.
And color after color is released from the ground,
where flowers and leaves drip with dew,
A paradise is all around me.

This is what a person sees when he, I am not saying, undergoes the initiation, but when he lives the initiation. And he has reason to see the world anew. He would not utter the words he now speaks if only the person who had become guilty and who would live under the impression of this guilt in this incarnation were in him.

Look up! The mountain peaks
already announce the most solemn hour;
They may enjoy the eternal light early,
Which later turns down to us.
Now to the green meadows of the alp
new splendor and clarity is bestowed,
And step by step it has succeeded; –
She steps forward! – namely, the sun – and unfortunately already blinded,
I turn away, pierced through by eye pain.

The higher self is now unable to see what the senses were able to see, the sun. Nevertheless, Faust has learned so much that the sun is now something essentially different for him. And now something stirs within him that is connected with human knowledge:

So it is when a yearning hope
The highest wish,
Finds wings spread open at the gates of fulfillment.

What fulfillment gates? Only those that have become close to him during his sleep. But even the ordinary world now appears to him as if it were breaking like a blaze of flames from eternal reasons:

But now from those eternal depths
A blaze of fire breaks out, we stand amazed;
We wanted to light the torch of life,
A sea of fire embraces us, what a fire!
Is it love? Is it hate?...

We know this from the past, but what we are experiencing now is more than love and hate.

Is it love? Is it hate? The feelings that burn within us,
Alternating between pain and joy,
So that we look down at the earth again,
To hide ourselves in the most youthful veil.

He cannot look at the sun now; he looks at the waterfall, in which the sun is reflected, and which shows him the colors of the rainbow in an arc. He turns away from the sun. He becomes a world observer, just as this world shines in as a reflection of spiritual life – this world of which one can say: All that is transitory is only a parable of the eternal.

So let the sun remain behind me!

He has looked at it before. Now he turns to the waterfall.

The waterfall, breaking through the rock,
I look at it with growing delight.
From fall to fall it now rolls in a thousand,
Then again in a thousand streams,
Foam rushing high into the air.
But how wonderful it is to benefit from this storm,
The colorful arch of changing duration arches...

- which reflects in seven colors what is in unity in the sun.

Sometimes drawn in, sometimes dissolving into thin air,
spreading cool, fragrant showers around.
It reflects human endeavor.
Contemplate it, and you understand more precisely:
We have life in its colored reflection.

We have life in its colored reflection! – This is how far Faust has come after this night: he no longer wants to plunge into life as Faust did in the first part, when he was thrown into guilt and evil, but instead turns to its colored reflection. It is the same colored reflection that we call spiritual science, which appears to him only as a colored reflection, and through which we gradually ascend to experience reality.

What now follows, the second part, is the colored reflection of life at first. It is nonsense to understand this second part merely realistically. We have Faust, who, with his higher self, contemplates life through the physical body in its colorful reflection; he now carries this physical body through life as something he is preserving, so that everything in him can develop that, as his higher self, preserves him from that which comes in later incarnations.

It was quite difficult for Goethe to continue his “Faust” after Mephistopheles' word had been spoken: “Come to me!” But we see how Goethe strives to penetrate the secrets that we today recognize as the secrets of spiritual science. How he approaches them. And then follow this second part, how Mephistopheles really has Faust at first, how Mephistopheles is everywhere in what happens at the “imperial court” and so on. And how, through the after-effects of the initiation living in him, Faust gradually breaks away from Mephistopheles in the course of the action of the second part. But these are further secrets of the second part. Goethe himself said that he had mysteriously included much in this second part! — People have not taken the word seriously enough. Through spiritual science, they will now gradually learn to take such words more and more seriously.

But there is one thing you will have gathered from today's reflections, and that is that Goethe, in his “Faust”, strives to go further in this respect than in the first part, to express something in his “Faust” of the mood that is really symbolically hinted at here in the course of the seasons.

When Pentecost approaches, and when the spirits of the elemental world draw near to men in such wise that it may be said of them:

When the blossoms' spring rain
Over all, floating sinks,
When the fields' green blessing
All earthly born,
Little elves, size of a ghost,
Hurry, where they can help,
Whether holy or evil,
The unfortunate man laments them.

Pentecostal mood! Outpouring of the spirit in the next sentences, which the choir speaks, in the four times of sleep from falling asleep to waking up!

Thus we also show through this Faust from a certain point of view the necessity that humanity be handed down little by little what spiritual science wants to proclaim to it as a new Pentecost message. Faust is so well suited to show us how complicated that is, which exists down there at the bottom of human nature. It lives down there in human nature, which is constantly exposed to the Ahrimanic-Luciferic powers of the world, and there lives that which man can find when he places himself in the guidance of the Christ impulse.

Why do we speak of a threshold? Why do we speak of a guardian of the threshold? We speak of it because, as if by a grace of the wisdom-filled steering of the world, what struggles and rumbles and wages war in our everyday lives was initially withdrawn from the human soul, down there on the deep underground of the human soul. It is as if there were a surface, and below it rumbles and fights and wages war in our everyday life. And even what we live through in our everyday life is a continuous victory. Only it must be fought for again and again. And in the future it will only be fought for again if people will know that which has unconsciously guided them up to now, a benevolent, wisdom-filled world guidance. In the depths of the soul we must really find that which is not known in ordinary everyday life, but which the spiritual can experience. In those human depths where the human being is connected with those powers of the world that transcend good and evil with their spiritual magnitude.

I would like to express this with a Whitsun saying, in which I have combined how man, at the bottom of his soul, has elemental powers that oppose each other, and how that which lives in his consciousness is victory over that which wages war down there in the depths of his soul.

We will speak tomorrow, or perhaps the day after tomorrow, about how these things relate to the context of human life. Today, however, I would like to conclude with this Whitsun saying, which basically expresses what always lives as the innermost nerve in our spiritual science, and to which we have also referred today:

Where sense knowledge ends,
There stands the gate,
Which reveals the realities of life
To the soul's existence;
The soul creates the key,
When she grows strong within herself
In the struggle that world powers
on their own ground
with human forces,
When they banish through themselves
the sleep that envelops the powers of knowledge
at the boundaries of their senses
with a spiritual night.

If you combine the reflections I presented here yesterday with the other lectures I gave here a week ago, you will, to a certain extent, gain an important key to much of spiritual science. I will only mention the main thoughts that we need for our further considerations, so that we can orient ourselves. About a week ago I pointed out the significance of the processes that, from the point of view of the physical world, are called processes of destruction. I pointed out that, from the point of view of the physical world, one actually only sees the real in what arises, what, as it were, emerges from nothingness and comes into noticeable existence. Thus, one speaks of the real when the plant struggles up from the root, developing leaf by leaf until it blossoms, and so forth. But one does not speak of the real in the same way when one looks at the processes of destruction, at the gradual withering, the gradual fading, the ultimate flowing away, one might say, to nothingness. But for anyone who wants to understand the world, it is eminently necessary that he also looks at the so-called destruction, at the processes of dissolution, at that which ultimately results for the physical world like flowing into nothingness. For consciousness can never develop in the physical world where mere sprouting and sprouting processes are taking place, but consciousness begins only where that which has sprouted in the physical world is in turn worn away and destroyed.

I have pointed out how those processes that life evokes in us must be destroyed by the soul-spiritual if consciousness is to arise in the physical world. It is indeed the case that when we perceive anything external, our soul-spiritual must instigate processes of destruction in our nervous system, and these processes of destruction then mediate consciousness. Every time we become aware of something, the processes of consciousness must arise out of processes of destruction. And I have indicated how the most significant process of destruction, the process of death, is precisely the creator of consciousness for the time we spend after death. Through the fact that our soul and spirit experiences the complete dissolution and detachment of the physical and etheric bodies, the absorption of the physical and etheric bodies into the general physical and etheric world, our soul and spirit draws the strength – from the process of death our soul and spirit draws the strength to be able to have processes of perception between death and a new birth. The saying of Jakob Böhme: 'Thus, then, death is the root of all life' acquires through this a higher significance for the whole context of world phenomena.

Now you will often have asked yourselves: What actually is the time that passes for the human soul between death and a new birth? It has often been pointed out that for the normal human life this time is a long one in relation to the time we spend here in the physical body between birth and death. It is short only for those people who use their lives in a way that is contrary to the world, who, I will say, come to do only that which in a real and true sense can be called criminal. Then there is a short lapse of time between death and a new birth. But for people who have not fallen prey to selfishness alone, but live their lives in a normal way between birth and death, there is usually a relatively long period of time between death and a new birth.

But the question must, I would say, burn in our souls: What determines whether a human soul returns to a new physical embodiment at all? The answer to this question is intimately connected with everything that can be known about the significance of the destructive processes I have mentioned. Just think that when we enter physical existence with our souls, we are born into very specific circumstances. We are born into a certain age, driven to certain people. So we are born into very specific circumstances. You must realize very thoroughly that the content of our life between birth and death is actually filled with everything we are born into. What we think, what we feel, what we sense, in short, the whole content of our life depends on the time into which we are born.

But now you will also easily be able to understand that what surrounds us when we are born into physical existence depends on the preceding causes, on what has happened before. Suppose, if I am to draw this schematically, we are born at a certain point in time and walk through life between birth and death. (It was drawn.) If you add what surrounds you, you do not stand there in isolation, but are the effect of what has gone before. What I mean is: you are brought together with what has gone before, with people. These people are children of other people, who in turn are children of other people, and so on. If we consider only these physical relationships of succession in generations, you will say: When I enter into physical existence I take something on from the people around me; during my education I take on much from the people around me. But these people, in turn, have also taken on very much from their ancestors, from the acquaintances and relatives of their ancestors, and so on. You could say that people have to search ever higher up to find the causes of what they themselves are.

If you then let your thoughts go further, you can say that you can follow a certain current upwards through your birth. This current has, as it were, brought with it everything that surrounds us in the life between birth and death. And if we continue to follow this current upwards, we would then come to a point in time where our previous incarnation lay. So by following the time upwards, before our birth, we would have a long time in which we dwelled in the spiritual world. During this time, many things have happened on earth. But what has happened has brought with it the conditions in which we live, into which we are born. And then, in the spiritual world, we finally come to the time when we were on earth in a previous incarnation. When we talk about these circumstances, we are definitely talking about average circumstances. Of course, there are many exceptions, but they all lie, I would say, in the line I indicated earlier for natures that come to earthly embodiment more quickly.

What determines whether we are born here again after a period of time has passed? Well, if we look at our previous embodiments, we were also surrounded by circumstances during our time on earth, and these circumstances had their effects. We were surrounded by people, these people had children, and passed on to the children their feelings and ideas. But if you follow the course of historical life, you will say to yourself: there will come a time in the course of evolution when you will no longer be able to recognize anything truly the same or even similar in the descendants as in the ancestors. All this is transferred, but the basic character that is present at a particular time appears in the children in a weakened form, in the grandchildren even more weakened and so on, until a time approaches when there is nothing left of the basic character of the environment in which one was in the previous incarnation. So that the stream of time works to destroy what the basic character of the environment once was. We watch this destruction in the time between death and a new birth. And when the character of the earlier age has been erased, when there is nothing left of it, when what it was like in an earlier incarnation has been destroyed, then the time comes when we enter earthly existence again. Just as the second half of our life is actually a kind of wearing down of our physical existence, so between death and a new birth there must be a kind of wearing down of earthly conditions, a destruction, a annihilation. And new conditions, new surroundings, into which we are born, must be there. So we are reborn when all that for the sake of which we were born before has been destroyed. So this idea of destruction is connected with the successive return of our incarnation on earth. And what our consciousness creates at the moment of death, when we see the body fall away from our spiritual and mental self, is strengthened at this moment of death, at this contemplation of destruction for the contemplation of the process of destruction that must take place in the circumstances on earth between our death and a new birth.

Now you will also understand that someone who has no interest at all in what surrounds him on earth, who basically is not interested in any person or any being, but is only interested in what is good for himself, and simply steals from one day to the next, that he is not very strongly connected to the conditions and things on earth. He is also not interested in following their slow erosion, but comes very soon to repair them, to really live with the conditions with which he must live, so that he learns to understand their gradual destruction. He who has never lived with earthly conditions does not understand their destruction, their dissolution. Therefore, those who have lived very intensely in the basic character of any age, have absorbed themselves in the basic character of any age, will, above all, tend, if nothing else intervenes, to bring about the destruction of that into which they were born, and to reappear when a completely new one has emerged. Of course, I would say that there are exceptions at the top. And these exceptions are particularly important for us to consider.

Let us assume that one lives one's way into such a movement, as the spiritual-scientific movement is now, at this point in time, where it does not agree with everything that is in the surrounding world, where it is something completely alien to the surrounding world. In this sense, the spiritual-scientific movement is not something we are born into, but something we have to work on, something we want to enter into the spiritual cultural development of the earth. In this case it is a matter of living with conditions that are contrary to spiritual science and then reappearing on earth when the earth has changed so much that the spiritual-scientific conditions can truly take hold of cultural life. So here we have the exception to the upside. There are exceptions downwards and upwards. Certainly, the most earnest co-workers of spiritual science today are preparing to reappear in an earthly existence as soon as possible, by working at the same time during this earthly existence to eliminate the conditions into which they were born. So you see, when you take the last thought, that you are helping, so to speak, the spiritual beings to direct the world by devoting yourself to what lies in the intentions of the spiritual beings.

If we consider the conditions of the times today, we have to say: on the one hand, we have something that is heading towards decadence and decline. Those who have a heart and soul for spiritual science have been placed in this age, so to speak, to see how it is ripe for decline. Here on earth they are introduced to that with which one can only become acquainted on earth, but they carry this up into the spiritual worlds, now see the decline of the age and will return when that is to bring about a new age, which lies precisely in the innermost impulses of spiritual striving. Thus the plans of the spiritual guides, the spiritual leaders of earthly evolution, are effectively furthered by what such people, who occupy themselves with something that is, so to speak, not the culture of the time, absorb into themselves.

You are perhaps familiar with the accusations that are very often made by people of today to those who profess spiritual science, namely that they deal with something that often appears to be outwardly unfruitful, that does not outwardly intervene in the conditions of the time. Yes, there is really a necessity for people in earthly existence to occupy themselves with that which is of significance for further development, but not immediately for the time. If anyone objects to this, then he should just consider the following. Imagine that these were consecutive years:

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We could then go further. Suppose these were consecutive years and that these were the grain crops w w of the consecutive years. And what I am drawing here would always be the mouths > that consume these grains of grain. Now someone may come and say: Only the arrow that goes from the grains of grain to the mouths > is important, because that sustains the people of the following years. And he can say: Whoever thinks realistically only looks at these arrows going from the grain to the mouth. But the grain cares little about this arrow. It does not care at all, but has only the tendency to develop each grain of wheat into the next year. The grain kernels only care about this arrow; they don't care at all about being eaten. That is a side effect, something that arises along the way. Each grain kernel has, if I may say so, the will, the impulse to go over into the next year to become a grain kernel again. And it is good for the mouths that the grains follow this arrow direction, because if all the grains followed this arrow direction, then the mouths here would have nothing more to eat next year! If the grains from the year 1913 had all followed this arrow, then the mouths from the year 1914 would have nothing more to eat. If someone wanted to carry out materialistic thinking consistently, he would examine the grains of corn to see how they are chemically composed so that they produce the best possible food products. But that would not be a good observation; because this tendency does not lie in the grains of corn at all, but in the grains of corn lies the tendency to ensure further development and to develop over into next year's grain of corn.

But it is the same with the end of the world. Those truly follow the course of the world who ensure that evolution continues, and those who become materialists follow the mouths that only look at this arrow here. But those who ensure that the course of the world continues need not be deterred in their striving to prepare the next following times, any more than the grains of corn are deterred from preparing those of the following year, even if the mouths here long for the completely different arrows.

I pointed this out at the end of Riddles of Philosophy, pointing out that what we call materialistic knowledge can be compared to eating grain seeds, that what happens in world events really happens in the world, can be compared to reproduction, to what happens from one grain seed to the next year's. Therefore, what is called scientific knowledge is just as insignificant for the inner nature of things as eating is without inner significance for the growth of grain fruits. And today's science, which is only concerned with the way in which what can be known about things is received by the human mind, is doing exactly the same as the man who uses the grain for food, because what the grains of corn are when we eat them has nothing to do with the inner nature of the grains of corn, just as the outer knowledge has nothing to do with what develops inside the things.

In this way, I tried to throw a thought into the hustle and bustle of philosophy, and it will be interesting to see whether it will be understood or whether such a very plausible thought will be met again and again with the foolish objection: “Yes, but Kant has already proved that knowledge cannot approach things.” He proved it only from the point of view of knowledge, which can be compared to the consumption of grains of wheat, and not from the point of view of knowledge that arises with the progressive development that is in things. But we must familiarize ourselves with the fact that we have to repeat again and again to our age and to the age to come, in all possible forms, only not in hasty forms and not in agitative forms, not in fanatical forms, what the principle and essence of spiritual science is, until it is drummed into us. For it is precisely the characteristic of our age that Ahriman has made the skulls so hard and thick, and that they can only be softened slowly. So no one should shrink, I would say, from the necessity of emphasizing again and again, in all possible forms, what the essence and impulse of spiritual science is.

But now let us turn to another conclusion that was drawn here yesterday in connection with a number of assumptions: the conclusion that reverence for the truth must grow in our time, reverence for knowledge, not for authoritative knowledge, but for the knowledge that one acquires. There must be a growing realization that one should not judge out of nothing, but out of one's acquired knowledge of the workings of the world.

Now, by being born into a particular age, we are dependent on our environment, completely dependent on what is in our environment. But, as we have seen, this is connected with the whole stream of development, with the whole striving that leads upwards, so that we are born into circumstances that depend on the preceding circumstances. Just consider how we are placed into them. Of course we are placed in it by our karma, but we are still placed in that which surrounds us as something quite definite, as something that has a certain character. And now consider how we thereby become dependent in our judgment. This is not always clearly evident to us, but it is really so. So that we have to ask ourselves, even if it is related to our karma: What if we had not been born at a certain point in time and in a certain place, but fifty years earlier in a different place? How would it be then? Wouldn't we have received the form and inner direction of our judgments from the different circumstances of our environment, just as we have received them from where we were born?

So that on closer self-examination we really come to the conclusion that we are born into a certain milieu, into a certain environment, that we are dependent on this milieu in our judgments and in our feelings, that this milieu reappears, as it were, when we judge. Just think how it would be different, I just want to say, if Luther had been born in the 19th century and in a completely different place! So even with a personality who has an enormous influence on their surroundings, we can see how they incorporate into their own judgments that which is characteristic of the age, whereby the personality actually reflects the impulses of the age. And this is the case for every person, except that those for whom it is most the case are the least aware of it. Those who most closely reflect the impulses of their environment, into which they were born, are usually the ones who speak the most about their freedom, their independent judgment, their lack of prejudice, and so on. On the other hand, when we see people who are not as thoroughly dependent as most people are on their environment, we see that it is precisely such people who are most aware of what makes them dependent on their environment.

And one of those who never got rid of the idea of dependence on their environment is the great spirit, of whom we have now seen another piece pass before our eyes, is Goethe. He knew in the most eminent sense that he would not be as he was if he had not been born in 1749 in Frankfurt am Main and so on. He knew that, in a sense, his age speaks through him. This moved and warmed his behavior in an extraordinary way. He knew that by seeing certain times and circumstances in his father's house, he formed his judgment. By spending his student days in Leipzig, he formed his judgment. By coming to Strasbourg, he formed his judgment. That is why he wanted to get out of these circumstances and into completely different ones, so that in the 1880s, one might say, he suddenly disappeared into the night and fog and only told his friends about his disappearance when he was already far away, after he could not be brought back under the circumstances at the time. He wanted to break out so that something else could speak through him. And if you take many of Goethe's utterances from his developmental period, you will notice this feeling, this sense of dependence on the environment everywhere.

Yes, but what would Goethe have had to strive for if, at the moment when he had truly come to realize that one is actually completely dependent on one's environment, if he had connected his feelings, his perceptions of this dependence with the thoughts we have expressed today? He would have had to say: Yes, my environment is dependent on the whole stream of evolution right back to my ancestors. I will always remain dependent. I would have to transport myself back in thought, in soul experience, to a time when today's conditions did not yet exist, when completely different conditions prevailed. Then, if I could transport myself into these conditions, I would come to an independent judgment, not just judging as my time judges about my time, but judging as I judge when I completely transcend my time.

Of course, it is not necessary for such a person, who perceives this as a necessity, to place himself in his own previous incarnation. But essentially he must place himself at a point in time that is connected with an earlier incarnation, where he lived in completely different circumstances. And when he now transfers himself back into this incarnation, he will not be dependent as before, because the circumstances have become quite different, the earlier circumstances have since been destroyed, perished. It is, of course, different if I now transfer myself back to a time when the whole environment, the whole milieu has disappeared. What do you actually have then? Yes, one must say: before, one lives in life, one enjoys life; one is interwoven with life. One can no longer be interwoven with the life that has perished, with the life of an earlier time; one can only relive this life spiritually and mentally. Then one would be able to say: “We have life in its colorful reflection.”

Yes, but what would have to happen if such a person, feeling this, wanted to depict this emergence from the circumstances of the present and the coming to an objective judgment from a point of view that is not possible today? He would have to describe it in such a way that he would be transported back into completely different circumstances. Whether this is exactly the previous incarnation or not is not important, but rather the circumstances on earth were completely different. And he would have to strive to fill his soul with the impulses that were there at that time. He would have to, as it were, place himself in a kind of phantasmagoria, identify with this phantasmagoria and live in it, live in a kind of phantasmagoria that represents an earlier time.

But that is what Goethe strives for by continuing his “Faust” in the second part. Consider that he has initially brought his Faust into the circumstances of the present. There he lets him experience everything that can be experienced in the present. But in spite of all this, he has a deep inner feeling: “This cannot lead to any kind of true judgment, because I am always inspired by what is around me; I have to go out, I have to go back to a time when the circumstances have been completely changed up to our time, and so they cannot affect the judgment.” Goethe therefore allows Faust to go all the way back to classical Greek times and to enter, to come together with the classical Walpurgis Night.

That which he can experience in the deepest sense in the present has been depicted in the Nordic Walpurgis Night. Now he must go back to the classical Walpurgis Night, because from the Nordic Walpurgis Night to the classical Walpurgis Night, all conditions have changed. What was essential in the classical Walpurgis Night has disappeared, and new conditions have arisen, which are symbolized by the Nordic Walpurgis Night. There you have the justification for Faust's return to Greek times. The whole of the second part of “Faust” is the realization of what one can call: “In the colored reflection we have life.”

First, there is still a passage through the conditions of the present, but those conditions that are already preparing destruction. We will see what is developing at the “imperial court,” where the devil takes the place of the fool and so on.

We see through the creation of the homunculus how the emergence from the present is sought, and how in the third act of “Faust” the classical scene now occurs. Goethe had already written the beginning around the turn of the 18th century; the most important scenes were not added until 1825, but the Helena scene was already written (800) and Goethe calls it a “classical phantasmagoria” to suggest through the words that he means a return to conditions that are not the physical, real conditions of the present.

That is the significant thing about Goethe's Faust poetry, that it is, I would say, a work of striving, a work of wrestling. I have really emphasized clearly enough in recent times that it would be nonsense to regard Goethe's Faust poetry as a completed work of art. I have done enough to show that it cannot be considered a finished work of art. But as a work of striving, as a work of wrestling, this Faust epic is so significant. Only then can one understand what Goethe intuitively achieved when one opens oneself to the light that can fall from our spiritual science on such a composition and sees how Faust looks into the classical period, into the milieu of Greek culture, where within the fourth post-Atlantic period very different conditions existed than in our fifth post-Atlantic period. One is truly filled with the greatest reverence for this struggle when one sees how Goethe began to work on this Faust in his early youth, how he abandoned himself to everything that was accessible to him at the time, without really understanding it very well. Truly, when approaching Faust, one must apply this point of view of spiritual science, for the judgments that the outer world sometimes brings are too foolish in relation to Faust.

How could it escape the attention of the spiritual scientist when, time and again, people who think they are particularly clever approach and point out how magnificently the creed is expressed by this Faust, and say: Yes, compared to what so many people say about some confession of faith, one would have to remember more and more the conversation between Faust and Gretchen:

...feeling is everything;
name is sound and smoke,
fogging up heavenly glow.

Well, you know what Faust is discussing with Gretchen, and what is always mentioned when someone thinks they have to emphasize what should not be seen as religious reflection and what should be seen as religious sentiment. But what is not considered is that in this case, Faust was formulating his religious creed for the sixteen-year-old Gretchen, and that all the clever professors are then demanding that people never progress beyond the Gretchen point of view in their religious understanding. The moment you present that confession of Faust to Gretchen as something particularly sublime, you demand that humanity never rise above the Gretchen point of view. That is actually easy and convenient to achieve. It is also very easy to boast that everything is feeling and so on, but you don't realize that it is the Gretchen point of view.

Goethe, for his part, strove quite differently to make his Faust the bearer of an ongoing struggle, as I have now indicated again with reference to this placing himself in a completely earlier age in order to get at the truth. Perhaps at the same time or a little earlier when Goethe wrote this “classical-romantic phantasmagoria”, this placing of Faust in the world of the Greeks, he wanted to make clear to himself once again how his “Faust” should actually proceed, what he wanted to present in “Faust”. And so Goethe wrote down a scheme. At that time, there was a version of his “Faust” available: a foundation, a number of scenes from the first part and probably also the Helena scene. Goethe wrote down:

“Ideal pursuit of influence and empathy in all of nature.”

So, as the century drew to a close, Goethe took up, as he said, “the old thread, the barbaric composition”, at Schiller's suggestion. That is how he rightly described his “Faust” at the end of the century, because it was written scene by scene. Now he said to himself: What have I actually done there? And he stood before the soul of this striving Faust: out of erudition, closer to nature.

He wrote down: “I wanted to set forth

1. Ideal striving for influence and empathy in all of nature.

2. Appearance of the spirit as a world and deed genius.

This is how he sketches the appearance of the earth spirit.

Now I have shown you how, according to the appearance of the earth spirit, it is actually the Wagner who appears, and who is only a means to the self-knowledge of Faust, which is in Faust himself, a part of Faust. What is arguing in Faust? What is Faust doing now that something is arguing in him? He realizes: Until now you have only lived in your environment, in what the outer world has offered you. He can see this most clearly in the part that is within him, in Wagner, who is quite content. Faust is in the process of attaining something in order to free himself from what he is born into, but Wagner wants to remain entirely as he is, to remain in what he is on the outside. What is it that lives out itself outwardly in the world from generation to generation, from epoch to epoch? It is the form into which human striving is molded. The spirits of form work outside in that which we are to live in. But man must always, if he does not want to die in the form, if he really wants to progress, strive beyond this form. “Struggle between form and formlessness,“ Goethe also writes.

”3. Struggle between form and formlessness."

But now Faust looks at the form: the Faust in Wagner in there. He wants to be free of this form. This is a striving for the content of this form, a new content that can arise from within.

We could also have looked at all possible forms and studied all possible styles and then built a new building, as many architects of the 19th century did, as we find it everywhere outside. We would not have created anything new from the form that has come about in the evolution of the world: Wagner nature. But we preferred to take the 'formless content'. We have sought to take the spiritual science that is vividly experienced from what is initially formless, what is only content, and to pour it into new forms.

This is what Faust does by rejecting Wagner:

Let him not be a shallow
Let him not be a foolish fool!
With little art, reason and right sense

“4. Preference for formless content,” Goethe also writes.

And that is the scene he has written, in which Faust rejects Wagner:

“Preference for formless content over empty form.”

But over time, the form becomes empty. If, after a hundred years, someone were to perform a play exactly as we are performing it today, it would again be an empty form. That is what we must take into account. That is why Goethe writes:

“5. Content brings form with it.”

That is what I want us to experience! That is what we want to achieve with our building: form brings content with it. And, as Goethe writes, “Form is never without content.” Of course it is never without content, but Wagnerian natures do not see the content in it, which is why they only accept the empty form. The form is as justified as it can possibly be. But the point is to make progress, to overcome the old form with the new content.

“6. Form is never without content.”

1. Ideal striving for influence and empathy in all of nature.
2. Appearance of the spirit as a world and deed genius.
3. Conflict between form and formlessness.
4. Preference for formless content over empty form.
5. Content brings form with it.
6. Form is never without content.

And now a sentence that Goethe writes down to give his “Faust”, so to speak, the impulse, a highly characteristic sentence. For the Wagnerian natures, they think about it: Yes, form, content - how can I concoct that - how can I bring it together? — You can very well imagine a person in the present day who wants to be an artist and who says to himself: Well, spiritual science, all right. But it's none of my business what these tricky minds come up with as spiritual science. But they want to build a house that, I believe, contains Greek, Renaissance, Gothic styles; and there I see what they are thinking in the house they are building, how the content corresponds to the form. One could imagine that this will come. It must come, if people think about eradicating contradictions, while the world is precisely composed of contradictions, and it is important that you can put the contradictions next to each other. So Goethe writes:

"7. These contradictions, instead of uniting them, are to be made more disparate.

That is, he wants to present them in his “Faust” in such a way that they emerge as strongly as possible: “These contradictions, instead of uniting them, make them more disparate.” And to do that, he juxtaposes two figures again, where one lives entirely in form and is satisfied when he adheres to form, greedily digs for treasures of knowledge and is happy when he finds earthworms. In our time, we could say: greedily striving for the secret of becoming human and glad when he finds out, for example, that the human being has emerged from an animal species similar to our hedgehogs and rabbits. Edinger, one of the most important philosophers of the present day, recently gave a lecture on the emergence of the human being from a primal form similar to our hedgehog and rabbit. The theory that the human race descended from apes, prosimians, and so on, is no longer accepted by science; we have to go further back, to an earlier point of divergence between the animal species. Once upon a time there were ancestors that resembled the hedgehog and the rabbit, and on the other hand we have man as our ancestor. It is not true that because man is most similar to the rabbit and the hedgehog in certain things in terms of his brain formation, he must have descended from something similar. These animal species have survived, everything else has of course died out. So dig greedily for treasures and be glad if you find rabbits and hedgehogs. That is one striving, striving only in form. Goethe wanted to place it in Wagner, and he knows well that it is a clever striving; people are not stupid, they are clever. Goethe calls it: “Bright, cold, scientific striving.” “Wagner,” he adds.

“8. Bright, cold, scientific striving: Wagner.”

The other, the disparate, is what one wants to work out with all the fibers of the soul from within, after not finding it in the forms within. Goethe calls it “dull, warm, scientific striving”; he contrasts it with the other and adds “student” to it. Now that Wagner has been confronted with Faust, the student also confronts him. Faust remembers how he used to be a student, what he took in as philosophy, law, medicine and, unfortunately, theology. What he said to himself when he was still like the student: “All of this makes me feel as stupid as if a mill wheel were turning in my head.” But that's over. He can no longer put himself back in that position. But it all had an effect on him. So:

“9. Dull, warm, scientific striving: schoolboy.”

And so it continues. From this point onwards, we actually see Faust becoming a schoolboy and then once again delving into everything that allows one to grasp the present.

Goethe now calls the rest of Part One, insofar as it was already finished and was still to be finished:

“10. The enjoyment of life as seen from the outside; in dullness and passion, first part.”

Goethe is clear about what he has created. Now he wants to say: how should Faust really come out of this enjoyment of life into an objective worldview? — He must come to the form, but he must now grasp the form with his whole being. And we have seen how far he must go back, to where completely different conditions exist. There the form then meets him as a reflection. There the form meets him in such a way that he now absorbs it by becoming one with the truth that was justified at that time, and discards everything that had to happen at that time. In other words, he tries to put himself in the position of the time insofar as it was not permeated by Lucifer. He tries to go back to the divine point of view of ancient Greece.

And when you immerse yourself in the outside world in such a way that you enter it with your whole being, but take nothing from the circumstances into which you have grown, then you arrive at what Goethe describes as beauty in the highest sense. That is why he says: “Enjoyment of the deed”. Now no longer: enjoyment of the person, enjoyment of life. Enjoyment of the deed, going out, gradually moving away from oneself. Settling into the world is enjoyment of the deed outwards and enjoyment with consciousness. “ii. Enjoyment of the deed outwards and enjoyment with consciousness: beauty, second part.”

What Goethe was no longer able to achieve in his struggle because his time was not yet the time of spiritual science, he sketches out for himself at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century. For Goethe has very significant words at the end of this sketch, which he wrote there, and which was a recapitulation of what he had done in the first part. He had already planned to write a kind of third part to his “Faust”; but it only became the two parts, which do not express everything Goethe wanted, because he would have needed spiritual science to do so.

What Goethe wanted to depict here is the experience of the whole of creation outside, when one has emerged from one's personal life. This whole experience of Creation outside, in objectivity in the world outside, so that Creation is experienced from within, by carrying what is truly within outwards, that is sketched out by Goethe, I would say, stammering with the words: 'Enjoyment of Creation from within' - that is, not from his standpoint, by stepping out of himself.

“12. Enjoyment of Creation from Within.”

With this “Enjoyment of Creation from Within,” Faust had now entered not only the classical world, but the world of the spiritual.

Then there is something else at the end, a very strange sentence that points to the scene that Goethe wanted to do, did not do, but did want to do, that he would have done if he had already lived in our time, but that shone before him. He wrote:

"13. Epilogue in Chaos on the Way to Hell.

I have heard very clever people discuss what this last sentence: “Epilogue in Chaos on the Way to Hell” means. People said: So, in 1800, Goethe really still had the idea that Faust goes to hell and delivers an epilogue in the chaos before entering hell? So it was only much, much later that he came up with the idea of not letting Faust go to hell! I have heard many, many very learned discussions about this, as well as many other discussions! It means that in 1800 Goethe was not yet free from the idea of letting Faust go to hell after all. But they did not think about the fact that it is not Faust who delivers the epilogue, but of course Mephistopheles, after Faust has escaped him in heaven!

The epilogue would be, as we would say today, Lucifer and Ahriman on their way to hell; on their way to hell, they would discuss what they had experienced with the striving Faust.

I wanted to draw your attention to this recapitulation and to this exposition by Goethe once again because it shows us in the most eminent sense how Goethe, with all that he was able to gain in his time, strove towards the path that leads straight up into the realm of spiritual science.

We shall only be able to view Faust aright if we ask ourselves: Why has Faust, in its innermost core, remained an incomplete work of literature, despite being the greatest work of striving in the world, and why is Faust the representative of all humanity in that he strives out of his environment and is even carried into an earlier age? Why has this Faust nevertheless remained an unsatisfactory work of literature? Because it represents the striving for what spiritual science should incorporate into human cultural development.

It is good to focus attention on this fact: that at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, a work of literature was created in which the figure of Faust, who forms the center of this work, was to be lifted out of all the restrictive limitations that must surround human beings, by having him go through his life in repeated lives on earth. The significance of Faust lies in the fact that, however intensely he has outgrown his nationality, he has nevertheless outgrown nationality and grown into the universal human condition. Faust has nothing of the narrow limitations of nationality, but strives upward to the general humanity, so that we find him not only as the Faust of modern times, but in the second part as a Faust who stands as a Greek among Greeks. It is a tremendous setback in our time, when in the course of the 19th century people began to place the greatest emphasis on the limits of human development again, and even see in the “national idea” an idea that could somehow still be a cultural force for our era. Mankind could wonderfully rise to an understanding of what spiritual science should become, if one wanted to understand something like what is secretly contained in “Faust”.

It was not for nothing that Goethe said to Eckermann, when he was writing the second part of his “Faust”, that he had secretly included in the “Faust” much that would only come out little by little.

But anyone who wants to understand the present must judge this present from a higher vantage point than this present itself is.

That is what I have tried to put into your souls as a feeling in these days, a feeling that I have tried to show you follows from a truly inner, living understanding of spiritual science, and how it has been striven for by the greatest minds of the past, of whom Goethe is one.

Only by not merely absorbing what arises in our soul in these contemplations as something theoretical, but by assimilating it in our souls and letting it live in our soul's meditations, does it become living spiritual science. May we hold it so with this, with much, indeed with all that passes through our soul as spiritual science.

Tomorrow we will attempt to present the final scene of Goethe's “Faust” in eurythmy. It will be apparent that my reflections today and tomorrow will be linked to the end of the second part of Goethe's Faust. We are, of course, dealing with one of the greatest poetic attempts in world evolution, with regard to the entire second part of Goethe's Faust, but especially with regard to the final scene, which is based on the most significant spiritual truths. Nevertheless, as true as it is that Goethe's “Faust” allows for different degrees and levels of understanding, it is also true that one can always go further and further in terms of seeking out what has flowed from Goethe's infinitely rich spiritual life into “Faust” and especially into the second part of “Faust”.

Furthermore, we shall see that the very end of the second part has so many occult truths to reveal to us, if we go to the subtleties in the presentation of the same, as hardly any other writer in the world has tried to reveal so far. And we shall see that these truths are enshrined by Goethe in the second part of “Faust” with a wonderful—to use an apparently pedantic expression—occult-appropriate science.

Now I must frankly admit to you that I would not dare to speak about Faust in the way I want to, if I did not have a Faust and Goethe problem that has never been dormant since 1884. Therefore, perhaps I may be permitted to hint at many things in aphorisms, which would require much more detailed substantiation for anyone who does not start from spiritual science. Nevertheless, I must confess that I do not approach the subject without a certain shyness, especially when it comes to linking occult observations to Goethe's “Faust” or to any other work of literature. For then all the lamentable things that have been done by occultists and non-occultists in the interpretation of poetry arise before my eyes.

One must really be somewhat appalled at the occultistic discussion of poetry when one considers what has been done in the world with regard to such interpretations, whether from the side of science or from so-called theosophists! And so please allow me to send a kind of introduction in advance, from which you can see how little inclined I myself am to dream occult truths, occult insights, into any kind of poetry of the spiritual development of humanity, and how hard I try to present only what can really be considered absolutely established.

Now, it is my custom when I have to talk about a subject to first immerse myself in the subject in a broader sense. When taking occult considerations seriously, it is necessary to immerse oneself in the whole atmosphere in which the subject is placed. And so I endeavored to immerse myself in Goetheanism once again.

For this purpose, I had to procure a great deal of literary material that I had studied decades ago. So I took up Goethe's “Prophecies of Bakis” again. These are thirty-two sayings clothed in enigmatic form, so to speak thirty-two riddles. Now you can imagine that an enormous amount has been written about what Goethe called “prophecies” and over which he poured, so to speak, oriental wisdom – it is a particular food for literary historians. Thus, in the thirty-two riddle verses, the most diverse people have seen the most colossal secrets.

I will give you a characteristic example in a moment. It is the twenty-ninth and thirty-third riddle verse that Goethe coined. It is quite good that we delve into these types of riddle verses before we go to the last scene of “Faust”.

One thing I know and revere, even worship at its feet;
Placed on the crown of the head, it is cursed by everyone.
I know one thing, and it firmly presses the lip shut;
But in the next moment it is the loathing of the world.

It must be said: it sounds quite mysterious! And the thirtieth riddle is:

This is the highest, and at the same time the basest!
Now the most beautiful, and at once the most hideous too.
Drink it up, and taste no deeper:
Beneath the enticing foam the dregs sink to the bottom.

Before we imagine how a theosophist might “interpret” these mysterious verses, let us look at an exoteric. We will not be able to make sense of what he says, but that does not matter; it shows us what is meant by “science”: “A most remarkable turn! Goethe chose this form to conceal and at the same time reveal his meaning.” Another Goethe interpreter has referred to these verses as “Freedom and Love”. The good man is at a loss and now wants to point out an explanation himself. “The highest, and at the same time the most abominable.” That should be: youth. That is both the highest and the most abominable. He says: That solves the mystery by itself.

That is an exoteric! An esoteric could say: You have to go much deeper than that!

One I know and venerate, yes, worship at its feet;
Placed on the crown of the head, it is cursed by everyone.
One I know, and it firmly presses the lips together;
But in the next moment it is the loathing of the world.

This refers to the plant, one could say, which represents the inverted human being. It can be associated with the Logos and Lucifer, or with white and black magic, and so on! Such explanations are widespread in the theosophical literature by the thousands.

Now, the art of familiarizing oneself with spiritual science does not consist in knowing how to apply what one has absorbed in spiritual science to anything at all, but in knowing how to relate to it in the right way – in our case, for example, to Goethe. Spiritual science should not lead us to all kinds of craziness, but should take us to where truth flows. And then one finds that the first two lines of the first verse mean — a slipper, and the last two, a cigar. Goethe hated cigar smoke. Yes, that is the truth, it is not profound, but it is as Goethe meant it. And the solution of the second verse is: spirit. As the spirit it is the highest, in alcohol as intoxication it is the most abominable. It is quite good to demonstrate such a process once, because you really should not be blinded by the art of interpretation and all sorts of profound arts, but you should be guided to where the truth is.

Goethe has also been made into a national chauvinist. But he was not at all. Take the fifth verse:

Two I see! The great one! I see the greater one! The two
rubbing with hostile power, one upon the other. Here are rocks and land, there are rocks and waves!
Which is the greater one, the fate speaks only.

This was taken to refer to the struggle between France and England for control of the continent. However, the commentator quoted above rejects this and says that the French Revolution and the German people are meant. This is quite foolish! What is really meant is life and death!

Now, this matter must be taken very seriously indeed. Just because something can be proved, that is absolutely no proof that the matter is right.

I wanted to say this in advance so that you do not think that I want to fall into the same error when explaining the final scene of 'Faust'. This final scene presents us with what could be called 'Faust's Ascension'. As is well known, Faust has gone through severe aberration, and also through all the possible madness and confusion of the wider, larger world. This is how it should be shown: Faust is to be led under the influence of Ahriman-Mephistopheles through the aberrations of the world, but the deepest thing that is embodied as the eternal in the human breast should not be able to be corroded by that which comes from Mephisto-Ahriman. In the end, Faust should still be able to be absorbed by the good spiritual worlds. That is what Goethe set out to achieve with his Faust epic.

Anyone who has learned something about the spiritual worlds through spiritual science and has little artistic sense within them can generally form an idea of how they would imagine it. For Goethe, who was an artist in the most intimate and highest sense, it was not so easy. He could not simply depict how Faust ascends to heaven and turn it all into an abstract, allegorical construct. For him, that would have been symbolism, a straw he was not willing to use. He wanted art. He wanted something that would endure and be secure in the face of true reality. That is what he wanted to be there. And so it occurred to him: How should I now present this on the stage, so that Faust is led into heaven? One can only place objects of the physical plane into it, they can only hint at something symbolic, but that would be straw, that would be no art! Even with all kinds of machinery one could only represent straw. Goethe first had to seek the means through which Faust can penetrate as a soul into the spiritual worlds. One cannot penetrate into the spiritual worlds through the air, one cannot penetrate through the external physical elements. Where is something real that can provide the means by which Faust can penetrate? That can only be what the spiritual represents on earth. Yes, where is that on earth? That is the consciousness that receives the spiritual! That is, Goethe first had to create a reality of consciousness that would receive the spiritual. He does this by placing people in his scenes, people in whose consciousness the spiritual can be said to live: monks, anchorites, and he layers them on top of each other. And one can say that a soul's ascent into the spiritual worlds is a real process. To present a spiritual process before an ordinary parquet floor would not be real, it is not rooted there; but it is rooted in the souls that Goethe presents. So he first tried to depict the consciousnesses that observe the spiritual process. So he presents the choir and the echo, which can perceive the elementary world of the spirit in the sensual-physical. They have prepared themselves not only to see the outer physical nature, but also within the physical plan the spiritual world into which the soul of Faust must enter.

And now it is described in such a way that only these monks can feel it. For just take the words, they are really not descriptions of physical processes:

Forest, it sways along.

It is as if one feels the elemental world emerging from natural things.

Woods, they sway towards it.
Rocks, they press against it.
Roots, they cling to it.
Trunk close to trunk up to it.
Wave after wave splashes against it.
Cave, the deepest, protects it.
Lions, they slink silently –
friendly around us,
a place consecrated to honor,
a holy love-nest.

There is an echo to this chorus. This is not without significance. It is meant to suggest to us how truly all-encompassing that which comes from elementary nature is.

Now we are led at the same time to something that becomes a wonderful intensification in Goethe. We are presented with three advanced anchorites, the Pater ecstaticus, the Pater profundus and the Pater Seraphicus, three who have attained higher levels than the others, who as anchorites only describe the processes just described. But there is a wonderful progression from the Pater ecstaticus through the Pater profundus to the Pater Seraphicus.

The Pater Ecstaticus is concerned with the lower stages of perfection, with sensory experiences, with being within oneself. The Pater Profundus has already progressed to the point of going from within outwards, of experiencing that which nature lives through as spirit and which is at the same time human spirit. Seen from the spiritual point of view, he stands higher than the Pater Ecstaticus. We can say: the Pater Profundus sees the spirit in the cosmos, which for him simultaneously becomes spirit in man. The Pater Seraphicus sees directly into the world of the spirit; for him it does not reveal itself through nature, but he deals directly with the spirit.

Hence the mysticization of the Pater ecstaticus through inner development. What is said now means nothing but inner states:

Eternal bliss,
glowing bond of love,
boiling pain of the chest,
foaming divine joy.
Arrows, pierce me,
Lances, vanquish me,
Maces, crush me,
Lightning, batter me;
That the vain
All evaporate,
Shine the permanent star,
Eternal love's core.

We have already covered the Pater profundus, which leads to the stage of feeling the spirit through nature.

Like the rocky abyss at my feet
It weighs heavily on the deep abyss,
Like a thousand streams that flow radiantly
To the horror of the foam of the flood,
How straight, with its own powerful drive,
The trunk carries itself into the air:
So it is the almighty love
That forms and nurtures everything.
There is a wild roar around me,
As if the forest and rocky ground were surging!
And yet, lovingly in the roar,
The water rushes to the gorge,
Called to water the valley;
The lightning, which struck down in flames,
To improve the atmosphere,
Which carried poison and haze in its bosom:
Are messengers of love, they announce
What surrounds us eternally,
My innermost being may also ignite it,
Where the mind, confused, cold,
Tormented in dull senses,
A crowd of locked chains of pain.
Oh God! Soothe the thoughts,
Enlighten my needy heart.

Now, in the Pater Seraphicus, there comes an immediate grasp of the spiritual world into which Faust is to be accepted, that is, of the spirits in whose midst Faust is now to enter. For this, a consciousness must first be presented: that is the Pater Seraphicus; he provides the medium through which the blessed boys can appear. And now, again, wonderfully, I would say expertly and appropriately observed:

What a morning cloud floats
Through the firs' swaying hair!
Do I sense what lives within?
It is a young ghostly host.

Goethe has children appear who died immediately after they were born; in the vernacular, they are called midnight babies.

Faust is to join the company of such midnight babies first; they know nothing of the world, their consciousness of the past has been clouded by their birth, and they know nothing of the new world yet. This belongs together with the ascension of Faust. As in the physical world there is no lightning without thunder, so in the spiritual world such an ascension of Faust is not without the blessed boy's realization of himself.

That a lover is present,
Do you feel, so just approach;
But from rugged earthly ways,
Happy ones! you have no trace.

Spiritual beings can only see the physical plane through our eyes and ears, otherwise they see the spiritual. When a ghost sees a hand, it sees the will that moves the hand and the form; if it wants to see the physical of the hand, it must use a physical eye.

Descend into my eyes
world and earthy organ,
You can use them as yours,
Look at this area!
(He takes it in.)
These are trees, these are rocks,
waterfall that crashes
And with tremendous rolling
Shortens the steep path.

The blessed boys are now inside with Father Seraphicus. He gives them so much of his spiritual strength that they can ascend to higher spheres. This shows once again the connection between the spiritual and physical worlds. When we meditate, the spirits also benefit, which is why we should read to the dead. In this way, Pater Seraphicus gives the fruit of his meditation to the boys, and through this they ascend.

Rise to higher spheres,
Always grow unnoticed,
As, according to an eternally pure way,
Strengthen God's presence.
For that is the food of the spirits,
Which in the freest ether reign:
Eternal Love's revelation,
That to bliss unfolds.

To know the “Faust” as here in Goethe a deepest occult truth of a world poem has been incorporated, means to be closer to the occult than any number of “occult” explanations can give.

Now the boys are in their own territory. They have crossed over from the realm of the spirits of form into the realm of the spirits of movement.

Now come the angels, bringing Faust's entelechy, that is, his immortality. They have snatched this member of the spirit world from Mephistopheles and bring it up with the words:

The noble limb
Of the spirit world is saved from evil:
Whoever strives for it,
We can redeem him;
And if he has received love
From above,
The blessed host meets him
With a warm welcome.

The younger angels:

Those roses, from the hands
Of loving, holy penitents,
Helped us win the victory
And complete the great work,
To gain this treasure of souls.
Evil retreated when we scattered,
devils fled when we struck.
Instead of the usual punishments of hell
the spirits felt the torment of love;
even the old master of Satan
was permeated with acute pain.

It is an occult sentence: to Mephisto-Ahriman, love is a consuming fire and a terrible gift of darkness.

Rejoice! It is accomplished.

Now the more perfect angels:

We are left with a remnant of earth
to bear,
And if it were made of asbestos,
It is not clean.
When strong spiritual power
The elements
Gathered up in itself....

What kind of earthly remnant is this? Our soul, when it lives on earth, absorbs through its perceptions, ideas and feelings what is going on on earth, and in so doing, the soul, as it were, draws to itself what lives in the elements of the physical plane. This cannot be separated immediately. Just as corpses used to be wrapped in a fabric made of asbestos to hold the ashes together, Faust's soul has a remnant of the material world that is not pure, even if it is like the asbestos that withstands fire.

No angel parted
The united dual nature
Of the two intimate ones,
Only eternal love
Can separate them.

The angels cover their faces before the incarnation. This is a secret that can only be seen by those entities that can descend deeper than angels who have not experienced the incarnation. Only love can separate this.

Now the angels become aware of the blessed boys. The blessed boys receive what is being led up:

Release the flakes.

Here Goethe again draws on physical processes to characterize spiritual processes. When the Benedictine monks die, they are wrapped in a special garment, the “flocca”, which is brown in color; all Benedictines are buried in the same flocca, hence the word “flakes”.

Here I have tried to take a liberty with respect to what is actually there in Faust. I have said: all this must be revealed to us through consciousness. Up to now, everything passes through the consciousness of the choir, the anchorites. Now Faust himself must ascend through consciousness, but he must ascend through full consciousness, he must fill a new consciousness completely, a new consciousness that is, however, identical with him, for he ascends as a fully developed human being.

Much in Faust is still unfinished, and certainly unfinished is the Pater Marianus, whom Goethe later called Doctor Marianus. This Doctor Marianus is there so that Faust may appear through his consciousness, so I simply let Doctor Marianus be Faust himself. The anchorite Doctor Marianus is at the same time Doctor Marianus and Faust.

Now it is a matter of the profound mystery of love, as permeating the world in the fully Christian sense.

Faust, speaking in a profane sense, has seduced Gretchen, Gretchen has even been executed, she has become innocently guilty, in her there is that innocence which rests enclosed in the mystery of man, and her love is an “eternal, enduring star”. If one wants to express this in an image, one comes to the Mater Dolorosa Gloriosa. She brings with her three penitents, she does not look at the guilt of these three, but at what is innocently guilty in them. To Doctor Marianus this secret is revealed.

Here the view is unobstructed,
The spirit is uplifted.
There women pass by,
Floating upwards;
The glorious one in the middle
In a wreath of stars,
The Queen of Heaven,
I see it in the radiance.
(Enraptured)
Supreme ruler of the world!
Let me in the blue
Stretched out celestial vault
See your secret.
Appreciate what moves the man's chest
Seriously and tenderly
And with holy love
Towards you carry.

Our courage is unconquerable
When you command us,
Suddenly the heat subsides
As you pacify us.
Maiden, pure in the most beautiful sense,
Mother, worthy of honor,
Our chosen queen,
Equal to the gods.

Around her,
light clouds swirl.

Goethe quite appropriately allows the soul to emerge first from the nebulous clouds, and then to solidify into a finished form.

The chorus of penitents follows. It is magnificent that Goethe has taken, I would almost say, love in its sensual form and here has given it a religious transfiguration – for the second time; the Bible has already done so for the first time. Mary Magdalene has loved much in the real sense, but she has simply loved, and Christ sees only love, not sin, and so she also belongs to Christ. Then there is Maria Aegyptiaca and Una Poenitentium, otherwise known as Gretchen. It could also be called Doctor Marianus, otherwise known as Faust.

The blessed boys accept Faust into their circle. Faust seeks to find something of Mary in Gretchen through the Queen of Heaven, so a mystic choir may express what has taken place. This mystic choir contains great, succinct words:

All that is transitory
Is but a parable,
The inadequate,
Here it becomes reality;
The indescribable,
Here it is done;
The eternal feminine
Draws us on.

With this skeleton, I wanted to show you that Goethe really did depict this last scene appropriately, based on spiritual insight, and that he knew how to create the real foundations everywhere: the foundations of consciousness.

As one who is familiar with the subject knows, really understands, so has Goethe described. However, one must immerse oneself in what Goethe wanted. One must be in his intentions, as it were, have the dead Goethe standing before you as a living being. Because some things are not so easy to understand.