The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today I want to clarify certain deep world-mysteries, the knowledge of which has been lost in modern civilization. To realize some of what has been lost, think of the modern conception of the planetary system, that it originated in some kind of rotating, primeval nebula, from which the various planetary bodies coalesced. From this picture we can easily speculate that there are no fundamental differences between these heavenly bodies. This in fact is the prevailing attitude towards them. If the whole planetary system is viewed as a rotating nebula, out of which the heavenly bodies gradually separated, what essential difference is there between, for example, the Moon and Saturn? It is of course true that important research in the last century into earthly substances, particularly into minerals, has led to knowledge about the material composition of the heavenly bodies, and even a certain kind of physics and chemistry for them. This has made it possible for ordinary text-books to give specific details about Venus, Saturn, the Moon, and so on. But all this amounts to no more than making an image of, let us say, the physical organism of man, leaving out of account altogether the fact that he is a being of soul and spirit. With the help of Initiation-science we must again learn to realize that our planetary system, too, is permeated with soul and spirit. And today I want to speak of the various planetary individualities and of their individual characteristics.

Let’s begin with the planet nearest the Earth, the planet with whose history is bound up with the Earth's history, though only in a certain sense, and which once played an entirely different part in earthly life from the part it plays today. You know from my book Outline of Occult Science that there was once a cosmic age, relatively speaking not in a very remote past, when the Moon was still united with the Earth. The Moon then separated from the Earth and now circles around it.

When we speak of the Moon as a physical body in the heavens, its physical nature is only the most external revelation of the spirit behind it. To those who have knowledge of both its outer and its inner nature, the Moon in our universe presents itself initially as a gathering of spiritual beings living in great seclusion. Outwardly, the Moon acts as a mirror of the universe, and its reflection of the light of the Sun is evident to the most superficial observation. We can say that what comes from the Moon is sunlight, shining upon the Moon and then reflected. First and foremost, then, the Moon is a mirror of sunlight. Now, as you all know, we see what is outside or in front of a mirror but we do not see what is behind it.

The Moon not only mirrors sunlight, but also reflects everything that radiates upon it, although sunlight is by far the strongest. All the heavenly bodies in the universe send their rays toward the Moon, and the Moon, as a mirror of the universe, then radiates it all back in every direction. It can be said, therefore, that the universe is before us in a twofold aspect. It reveals itself directly on Earth, but also in what is radiated back by the Moon. The Sun's rays work with tremendous power in themselves, but also in their reflection from the Moon. Every other radiation in cosmic space is also reflected by the Moon. There is the manifest universe, and there is also its reflection from the Moon.

Anyone capable of observing the mirror-pictures thrown back in all directions by the Moon would have the whole universe before him in reflection. Only that which is within the Moon, that and that alone remains, if I may so express it, the Moon's secret. It remains hidden, just as what is behind a mirror remains hidden. What is behind the outer surface of the Moon, in the innermost sphere of the Moon, is significant above all in its spiritual aspect.

The high spiritual beings peopling this innermost sphere of the Moon are high beings who shut themselves off in strict seclusion from the rest of the universe. They live in their Moon “fortress”. A person can develop certain heart qualities in relation to sunlight to such an extent that he does not see the reflection from the Moon, and only for such a person does the Moon become as it were inwardly transparent, and only then can the person penetrate into th universe’s Moon-fortress. He then makes the significant discovery, that through the utterances, the teachings of those high beings who have withdrawn into seclusion in this Moon-fortress, certain secrets can be revealed that were once in the possession of the most advanced spirits on Earth, secrets which have long since been lost.

The farther we go back in the evolution of the Earth, the less do we find the abstract truths that pride present-day humanity. More and more we find pictures, truths expressed in pictures. We can wrestle our way through to glimpse some of these deeply significant truths by studying what is still preserved, as a last echo of oriental wisdom, in the Vedas and the Vedanta. We can press on to the primal revelations hidden behind the myths and sagas, and we can realize with wonder and awe that a glorious wisdom was once possessed by men who received it without intellectual effort, as grace from the spiritual world. And finally, we can come to all that was once taught to primeval humanity on Earth by the high beings who have now withdrawn into the universe’s Moon-fortress, after leaving the Earth together with the Moon. A certain memory has been preserved of what these high beings once revealed to the peoples of a remote past, to human beings whose nature was quite different from human nature as it is today. If we succeed in fathoming this mystery, which I will call it the universe’s Moon-mystery, we realize that these high beings now entrenched in the Moon-fortress were once the great teachers of earthly humanity, but that all consciousness of the realities of spirit and soul hidden in this fortress has been lost. What is still transmitted to the Earth from the heavens represents only what the outer surface, the walls, as it were, of the Moon-fortress, what the outer surface radiates back from the rest of the universe.

This Moon-mystery was one of the deepest secrets in the ancient Mysteries, for it is primal wisdom that the Moon enshrines within itself. What the Moon is able to reflect from the whole universe forms the sum-total of the forces which sustain the animal world of the Earth now, especially the forces that are connected with the sexual nature of animals. These forces also sustain the animal element in man and are connected with his sexual nature in its physical aspect, so we see that the lower nature of man is a product of what radiates from the Moon, while the highest wisdom once possessed by the Earth lies concealed within the Moon-fortress.

In this way one gradually comes to a knowledge of the “individuality” of the Moon, to an understanding of what the Moon is in reality. All other knowledge of the Moon is only like information we could glean about a human being from a pasteboard image of him displayed in some exhibition. Such an image would tell us nothing whatever about the man's individuality. Equally it is not possible for a science that refuses any approach towards initiation to know anything about the individuality of the Moon.

We turn now to Saturn. In earlier times Saturn was regarded as the outermost planet of our system, Uranus and Neptune having been added much later. We will leave them out of consideration now and think of Saturn as a kind of antithesis to the Moon. The nature of Saturn is to receive many diverse impulses from the universe but not allow them to stream back, at all events not to the Earth. Saturn too, of course, is irradiated by the Sun, but what Saturn reflects of the solar rays has no significance for earthly life. Saturn is an entirely self-engrossed heavenly body in our planetary system, raying his own being into the universe. When we contemplate Saturn, he tells us always what he is. Whereas the Moon, contemplated in its external aspect, tells us about everything else in the universe, Saturn tells us nothing at all about the impulses he receives from the universe. He speaks only of himself, tells us only what he himself is. And just what he is, that reveals itself gradually as a kind of memory of the planetary system.

Saturn presents himself to us as the world body who has steadfastly participated in whatever has come to pass in our planetary system and has faithfully preserved it in memory, in his cosmic memory. He is silent about the cosmic-present. He receives the things of the cosmic-present into himself and works upon them in his life of spirit and soul. True, the hosts of high beings dwelling in Saturn lend their attention to the outer universe, but mutely and silently they receive the happenings in the universe into their realm of soul, and they speak only of past cosmic events. That is why Saturn is like a kaleidoscopic memory of our planetary system. He holds faithfully and silently what has already come to pass in the planetary system. He holds its secrets within himself.

In trying to fathom the mysteries of the universe we normally turn to the Moon, although normally in vain, for we must win the confidence of the Moon beings if we are to learn anything from them about cosmic mysteries, but this is not necessary with Saturn. With Saturn, all that is necessary is to be open to receive the spiritual. And then, to the eyes of spirit and soul, Saturn becomes a living historian of the planetary system. Nor does he withhold the stories he can tell of what has come to pass in the planetary system. In this respect Saturn is the exact opposite of the Moon. Saturn speaks unceasingly of the planetary system’s past with such inner warmth and zest that intimate acquaintance with what he says can be dangerous, for the devotion with which he tells of past happenings in the universe arouses in us an overwhelming love for the cosmic-past. Saturn is the constant tempter of those who listen to his secrets. He tempts them to give little heed to today’s earthly affairs and to immerse themselves in what the Earth once was. Above all, Saturn speaks graphically about what the Earth was before it became Earth, and for this reason he is the planet who makes the past unendingly dear to us. Those who have a particular inclination towards Saturn in earthly existence are people who like to be gazing always into the past, who are opposed to progress, who ever-and-again want to bring back the past. These indications give some idea of the individuality, the individual character of Saturn.

Jupiter is a planet with a different character. Jupiter is the thinker in our planetary system, and thinking is the activity cultivated by all the high beings in his world-domain. Creative thoughts received from the universe radiate to us from Jupiter. Jupiter contains, in the form of thoughts, all the educational-craft of the different beings of the universe. Whereas Saturn tells of the past, Jupiter gives a living portrayal of what is congruent, what is present now in the universe. It is necessary, however, for a person to earnestly, intimately take in what he presents to the eyes of the spirit. If a person does not unfurl his own thinking, then he comes for example, how can I say it, not as a clairvoyant, then he comes upon the secret mysteries of Jupiter, which he finds reveal themselves only in thoughtforms, and only when the person himself thinks, only then he comes upon the secret mysteries of Jupiter, who is the thinker of the universe.

When a person attempts to fathom any of the significant enigmatic questions concerning the possibilities of his own being, and then comes up against human physical and etheric obstacles, and especially when he comes up against human astral obstacles, and he is on the wrong tack, then the beings of Jupiter step in and help him. The beings of Jupiter are really the helpers of human nature for the unfolding of human wisdom. And whomever has properly tried to work out in clear thinking an enigmatic question of the possibilities of his own being, and cannot come to a groundbreaking insight, if the person patiently keeps it in mind and continues to work on it, he finds that the Jupiter beings actually help him during the night. And many who have come to a better understanding of a day-riddle at night, as if out of a dream, many would have to admit, if they were really to look at the truth, that the Jupiter-powers bring spirited animated impetus into human thinking, if I may so depict it. As therefore Saturn is the guardian of memory of the universe, Jupiter is the thinker of the universe. To Jupiter the human being owes all that he really knows of the universe’s present spiritual state. To Saturn the human being owes all that he has of the universe’s soul-spiritual past. It was due to intuition that it was normal in ancient Greece, where people lived intimately with the presence of spirit, it was normal then to hold Jupiter in high honor.

A stimulus to the whole development of the human being is given also through the part played by Jupiter in the cycle of the year. You all know that as far as his apparent movement is concerned, Saturn moves slowly, very slowly, round his orbit, taking some 30 years. Jupiter moves faster, taking about 12 years. Because of this quicker movement Jupiter is able to bring satisfaction to man's need for wisdom more quickly. And when in a certain sense a person’s destiny is expressed in the World-All, when at that very time there exists a special relationship between Jupiter and Saturn, then there may come into a person’s destiny a wonderful illuminated glimpse, in which, with thinking, much will be revealed in the present concerning the past. And if we look in humanity’s world-history, into the epoch of the Renaissance, where a resurgence of old impulses entered in, especially in the last phases of the Renaissance, this renewal of old impulses is associated with a specific planetary configuration between Jupiter and Saturn.

But, as already said, Jupiter is in a certain respect impenetrable and his revelations remain in the unconscious if a man does not bring to them clear and active light-filled thinking of his own. And that is why in ancient times, when active thinking was still at a very early stage of development, the progress of humanity was in truth always dependent upon the relation between Jupiter and Saturn. When Jupiter and Saturn together formed a certain planetary configuration, many things were revealed to our ancestors in those days. Modern man is more dependent on things removed from their development, which means, Saturn-memory and Jupiter-wisdom are disconnected in a modern person’s soul-spiritual development.

We now come to Mars. It is difficult to find appropriate expressions for these things, but Mars may be called the great “Talker” in the planetary system. Unlike Jupiter, who translates his wisdom in thought-forms, Mars always smothers the souls beholden to him with chatter about virtually everything accessible to him in the universe, which for him is not everything. Mars is the most talkative chatterbox planet in our system, and he is particularly active when sleeping human beings talk during dreaming. Mars has a great longing to be talking always, and whenever some quality in human nature enables him to make a man loquacious, he stimulates this tendency.

Mars does little thinking. He has few thinkers, but many talkers, in his sphere. His spirits are always on the watch for what arises here or there in the universe and then they talk about it with great zest and fervor. In humanity’s evolutionary course, Mars is the planetary individuality who in manifold ways instigates human beings to make statements about world-mysteries. Mars has his good and his less-good sides; he has his genius and his daemon. His genius works in such a way that men receive from the universe the impulses for speech. The influence of his daemon results in speech being misused in many and various ways. In a certain sense Mars may be called the Agitator in our universe. He is always out to cajole whereas Jupiter wants only to convince.

The planet Venus is again different. In a certain way, I could say, Venus repels, wards off the whole universe. She is demure, prudish, aloof concerning the universe; she does not wish to know anything about the universe. She regards any submission to the universe, I might say, any external universal exposure and submission, as if it would cause her maiden purity, her virginity, to be lost. She is deeply shocked when any impression from the external universe attempts to approach her. She has no desire for the universe and rejects every dancing- partner – it is very difficult to express these things, because the circumstances and conditions have to be described in terms of earthly language –. On the other hand, Venus is highly responsive to everything that comes from the Earth. The Earth is, so to speak, her lover. Whereas the Moon reflects the whole surrounding universe, Venus reflects nothing at all of the universe, and wants to know nothing of it, but she lovingly reflects whatever comes from the Earth. If we are able to glimpse the mysteries of Venus with the eyes of soul, the whole Earth with all of her soulful secrets is there before us once again.

The truth is that human beings on Earth can do nothing in the secrecy of their souls without it being reflected back again by Venus. Venus gazes deeply into the hearts of human beings, for that is what interests her, that is what she will allow to approach her, so that the most intimate experiences of earthly life are reflected again from Venus, in a mysterious and wonderful way. In the reflection she transforms everything, just as a dream transforms the happenings of physical existence. Venus transforms the occurrences of earthly life into dream-pictures. In reality, therefore, the whole sphere of Venus is a world of dreaming. The secrets of human beings in their earthly existence are transformed by Venus into dream-pictures of infinite diversity. She has a very great deal to do with poets, although they are not aware of it.

I said before that Venus wards off the rest of the universe. She does not, however, repel everything in the same way. In her heart, Venus repels what approaches her from the universe but not what comes from the Earth. As I said before, she declines every would-be suitor, but for all that she listens attentively to the utterances of Mars. She transforms and illuminates her dreamlike experiences of earthly things with what is communicated to her from the universe through Mars.

All these things have their physical side as well. Impulses go out from these sources into what is done and into what comes into existence in the world. Venus receives into herself everything that comes from the Earth and she listens always to Mars, without wanting him to know it. And from this process, although the Sun is there in between to regulate it, spring the forces which underlie the organs connected with the formation of human speech.

If a person wants to become familiar with the impulses in the cosmos connected with the formation of human speech, then the person must turn his gaze to this noteworthy living and weaving that plays out between Venus and Mars. And when destiny happens to play out just so in how Venus stands in relationship to Mars, that there may be a tremendous significance for the development of the speech of a folk-soul group, the speech of the folk will be inwardly deepened when Venus for instance stands in quadrature, 90 degrees from Mars. On the other hand, a language tends to become superficial, poor in qualities of soul, when Venus and Mars are in conjunction, and this in turn has an influence upon the people or nation concerned. In this manner impulses are portrayed as they form in the World-All and have their effect on the folk they pertain to.

We come next to Mercury. In contrast to the other planets, Mercury is not interested in things of a physical, material nature as such, but in whatever is capable of combining, of coordinating. Mercury is the domain of the masters of combining concepts and ideas in thinking, whereas Jupiter is the habitation of the masters of wisdom-filled thinking. When a human being comes down from pre-earthly life into a contemplation of the possibilities of his existence on earth, the Moon impulse provides the forces for his physical existence, Venus provides the forces for his basic qualities of heart and temperament, but Mercury provides the impetus for his capacity of reasoning about things, of making sense of them, especially for his intellect. The high master-crafters of coordinative inner knowing have their habitation in Mercury.

There is a remarkable connection between these planets and the life and being of a human being. The Moon, which enshrines beings living in strict seclusion, and reflects only what is first radiated to it from the universe, builds and fashions the outer form, the body of man. It is therefore by the Moon that the forces of heredity are incorporated in bodily constitution. Within the Moon sit those high spiritual beings, who in complete seclusion cosmically muse upon what is fostered and transmitted in the stream of heredity flowing from generation to generation by way of the physical.

It is because the Moon beings remain so firmly entrenched in their fortress that modern scientists know nothing essential about heredity. From a deeper insight, and in terms of cosmic language, at the present time when heredity is discussed in one or another forum of science, these forums may be said to be “Moon-forsaken” and “Mars-bewitched”. For science speaks under the influence of the daemonic Mars-forces and has not even begun to approach the real mysteries of heredity.

Venus and Mercury, on the other hand, bring into the human being the karmic element that is connected more with the life of soul and spirit and comes to expression in his qualities of heart and in his temperament. And then Mars, and especially Jupiter and Saturn, when a man has a right relationship with them, act as liberating factors. They wrest man away from what is determined by destiny and make him into a free being. Biblical words in a somewhat changed form might be used as follows. Saturn, the faithful custodian of cosmic memory, says, “Let us make man free in the realm of his own memory”. This influence of Saturn is forced into unconsciousness as a human being’s memory becomes his own possession, as he thereby acquires the sure foundation of his personal freedom. The inner will-impulse contained in acts of free thinking, however, is due to grace bestowed by Jupiter. It would be in Jupiter's power to rule over and control all the thoughts of men. He is the one in whom we find the thoughts of the whole universe if we are capable of gaining access to them. But Jupiter too has withdrawn, leaving men to think as free beings.

The element of freedom in speech is due to the fact that Mars too has been gracious. Because Mars was obliged as it were to acquiesce in the resolution made by the other outer planets and could not exercise any greater coercion, man is free, in a certain respect, in the realm of speech too, not entirely, but in a certain respect free. From another point of view therefore, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn may also be called the liberating planets, for they give man freedom. On the other hand, Venus, Mercury and the Moon may be called the destiny-determining planets.

In the midst of all these deeds and impulses of the planetary individualities stands the Sun, creating harmony between the liberating and the destiny-determining planets. The Sun is the individuality in whom the elements of destiny-necessity and human freedom interweave in a most wonderful way. And no-one can understand what is contained in the flaming brilliance of the Sun unless he is able to behold this interweaving life of destiny and freedom in the light which spreads out into the universe and concentrates again in solar warmth.

Nor can we grasp anything essential about the nature of the Sun as long as we take in only what the physicists know of it. We can grasp the nature of the Sun only when we know something of its nature of soul and spirit. In that realm, it is the power which imbues warmth in the element of necessity in destiny, which transmutes destiny into freedom in its flame, and if freedom is misused, which condenses it once more into its own active substance. The Sun is, as it were, is the flame in which freedom becomes a luminous reality in the World-All, and at the same time the Sun is the substance, as condensed ashes, in which misused freedom is molded into destiny, until destiny itself can become luminous and pass over into the flame of freedom.

Yesterday I gave you a description of the starry sky nearest to us. If you think back to this description, you will have to say to yourselves above all: if we draw such a picture of the starry heavens from spiritual knowledge, it looks quite different from what is otherwise said in this field today. Yesterday, precisely in order to make this emerge clearly, I spoke in the way I have just done. I had to speak in a way that must seem absurd, perhaps even ridiculous, to anyone who acquires knowledge about these subjects today through contemporary education. And yet, the fact of the matter is that a kind of healing of our sick spiritual life can only take place if this total change of perspective — especially of such things as we discussed yesterday — can take place.

And one would like to say: Wherever thinking takes place today, but thinking takes place in such a way that it runs into the old, conventional ideas, one sees on the one hand how thinking everywhere points to this new kind of spiritual knowledge. But one also sees how people are not able to keep up with such spiritual insight, and how they therefore actually remain at a loss everywhere and - which is perhaps the worst thing in the present moment of history - are not aware of their helplessness, indeed do not want to be aware of it.

Let us imagine how what I described yesterday from a completely different point of view is described today. Yesterday I spoke about the moon, Saturn, Jupiter and so on, and I presented the individualities, the spiritual individualities that can be associated with these words. I showed you, as it were, our planetary system as a gathering of spiritual beings that work out of different impulses, but in such a way that these impulses also have something to do with earthly events. We saw living beings appearing in the universe with a certain character. We could speak of living beings in Saturn, the Moon and so on. But the whole way of speaking differs from what is said about such things today. There is the assumption – I repeat it again – of a primeval nebula that existed once, which was in a rotating, circling motion and from which the individual planets split off, which today one looks at with complete indifference as more or less luminous physical bodies that rush along in space.

This view that the heavenly bodies are such indifferent bodies, to which nothing else can be applied than physics, especially mathematics, to calculate their orbits, to possibly explore whether the substances found on Earth are also present there, this indifferent view of the heavenly bodies, is something that has actually only become common among mankind in the last three to four centuries. And it has become customary in a very definite way. Today things are just not understood. Because man has lost the possibility of looking into the spiritual, or, as it was only the case in the later Middle Ages, at least to have a presentiment of it, it has also become possible to completely lose the spiritual. Then the physical concepts that arose on earth, the mathematical and computational concepts, were regarded as something certain, and now that was revealed out there in the celestial space was also calculated. A certain assumption was made here – I must already present these theoretical considerations today – we have learned how to calculate something on earth, how to do physical science on earth, and have now extended this calculation on earth, this physical science, to the whole of the heavens and believed that the calculation results that apply on earth also apply to the heavens.

On earth, we speak of time, of matter, of motion; for physicists, one could say, of mass, also of speed and so on: all concepts that have been gained on earth. Since the time of Newton, these have also been extended to the heavens. And the whole conception that one has of what is going on in the world is nothing more than a mathematical result obtained on earth and then projected into the heavens. The whole of Kant-Laplace's theory is indeed an absurdity the moment one realizes that it is valid only on the assumption that the same laws of calculation apply out there in space as on earth, that the concepts of space, time and so on are just as applicable out there as on earth.

But now there is a strange fact, a fact that is causing people a lot of headaches today. We live in a very strange time, which is announced by manifold symptoms. In all popular gatherings held by monists and other bundlers, people are presented with the fact that the stars shine out there through the known processes. The whole beautiful doctrine of spiral nebulae and so on, as presented to the outer eye, is presented to a believing audience by popularizing speakers and writers. And today's man has his education from these popular speakers and popular writers. But this education is actually, basically, only the result of what physicists and other so-called learned people thought and devised decades ago. In such popular gatherings, everything that was considered important by experts decades ago is reheated. But today the experts are being shaken up by something completely different. That which is shaking them up is, for example, the so-called theory of relativity.

This theory of relativity, Einstein's theory of relativity, is what concerns the thinking physicists today. Now, the details of this theory of relativity can be discussed, as I have already done here and there; but today we are not concerned with its inner validity, but with the fact that it exists and that physicists are talking about it. Of course there are physicists who are opposed to it, but there are many physicists who simply talk about the theory of relativity. But what does that mean?

Yes, it means that this theory of relativity destroys all the concepts on which our view of the movements and nature of celestial bodies in space is based. For decades, what is written in astronomy books today, what is still presented to a lay audience in popular lectures and books, has been valid; it has been valid. But physicists are working to dismantle and destroy the most popular concepts – time, movement, space – and declaring: none of it is as we thought it was. — You see, at least for physicists today it is already something of a matter of conscience to say, for example: I point my telescope at a distant star. But I have calculated that it takes so much time for the light from that star to reach the Earth. So when I look through my telescope, the light that enters my telescope has taken so many light-years. The light that enters the telescope must therefore have started out up there so many light-years ago. The star is no longer there, it is no longer there at all. I get the beam of light into my telescope, but what is in the extension of the telescope is not the star at all. And if I look at a star next to it, from which the light now takes much fewer light-years, it still arrives at the same time. I turn my telescope: the star comes to a point of light that was perhaps there so-and-so many years ago. Now I turn my telescope again: a star falls into my telescope that is not there at all, but was there a completely different number of years ago. And so I form views of my starry sky! Everything is there from the time when it was there, but actually it is not there at all. Actually nothing is there: everything is thrown over and under.

This is exactly how it is with space. We perceive a distant sound somewhere. When we approach it, it appears to us at a different 'pitch' than when we move away from it. Space becomes decisive for the way we perceive things. And of course that makes people scratch their heads. Time, which plays a role in all calculations, has suddenly become something quite uncertain, something merely relative. And of all that is so popularly drawn out into space, the modern physicist – and he is aware of this – can only say: There is something that was once there, is still there, will once be there. Well, there is something there. And that something that is there causes its light emissions to coincide with the crosshairs of my telescope at a certain point in time. — That is the only wisdom that remains, the coincidence of two events. So, what once happened somewhere, sometime, coincides with what is happening today in the crosshairs of my telescope. Only of such coincidences can one speak – says today's physicist – it is all relative; the concepts from which the world building has been theoretically constructed are actually of a merely relative, not at all absolute value. That is why physicists today are talking about a radical revolution in all the concepts of physics. And if you went straight from a popular lecture for laypeople to a lecture by a relativity theorist today, you would find that the popularizer is handing down to people something that is built on the ideas that the experts say: “It's all melted like snow in the sun!”

You see, we cannot just say that a physical world view has been built up out of certain concepts over the past three to four hundred years; rather, we have to say that today there are already enough people who have dissolved these concepts out of these concepts, who have destroyed them. After all, this world view, which is considered certain, no longer exists for a large number of thinkers. So the matter is not quite so simple that what is said from a completely new point of view may be ridiculed. Because what is said from the other point of view melts away in the present like snow in the sun. It is actually no longer there for those who understand something of the matter, or at least want to understand something. So that one actually stands before the fact that people say: What is described here from the point of view of spiritual science is absurd because it does not agree with what we consider to be right. But if they now take the relativity point of view, then these people must say: That is absurd, what we have considered to be right! That is how things stand today. But actually the majority of humanity is asleep, watching as if asleep as these things unfold and letting them happen. But it is important to realize that the worldview that has celebrated such great triumphs as such is actually in ruins today.

The facts of the spiritual world will only become clear to a wider public when people at least begin to loosen the pointy cap they sleep under. So, one does not just have the option of thinking that what speaks out of such a tone as I did yesterday is absurd in the face of today's science, because this science is, for example, quite negative in its theory of relativity; it actually says everywhere what is, and humanity will have to steer towards an understanding of that which is.

These things should be explained by such representations, as I tried to give them yesterday with regard to individual stars in our planetary system. But what do we see there? We see that, to a certain extent, it is precisely following the course of world development. What would an old-fashioned physicist, not a newcomer to physics (because most newcomers are relativists), what would an old-fashioned physicist say if he heard something as outrageous as what I said yesterday? If he did not immediately say that it is all crazy and twisted, and that is perhaps what he would say at first, he would still claim: That contradicts the firm foundations of science. But what are the firm foundations of science? They are the concepts of space, time and so on that have been gained on earth. Now the relativity theorists are destroying these concepts for the universe, declaring them invalid.

Anthroposophy, however, takes a practical approach: it disregards earthly concepts when talking about the moon and Saturn and Jupiter and so on. It no longer speaks in earthly terms, but attempts – however difficult it may be – to characterize Venus and Mars in a way that is no longer possible with earthly concepts. And so, in order to penetrate into the cosmos, we must be willing to lose our earthly concepts. I wanted to show you how the cosmos fits into contemporary spiritual life and how things stand in contemporary spiritual life. There is only a relationship with earthly concepts when one reaches out into the cosmos. Just imagine, when we go to the moon, as I characterized it yesterday, to those entities that are anchored in the moon as in a world fortress and actually live behind the surface of the moon - where they, if may I put it, their world business, when we come to these entities, which can only be approached with a clairvoyantly sharpened gaze, we find that these entities work in secret. Because what is inside the moon does not go out into the world, and everything that comes from the moon is reflected out of the world. Just as the moon does not absorb sunlight but reflects it, so it also reflects everything else that happens in the universe. Everything that happens in the universe is reflected back by the moon as if by a mirror. Processes take place within it that remain hidden.

But I have told you: the spiritual beings who are entrenched in this lunar fortress, as in the universe, and who conduct their world business in there, were once on earth before the moon split off from the earth. They were the first great teachers of human souls on earth. And the great ancient wisdom that is spoken of is basically the heritage of these lunar beings, who now live in secret within the moon. They have withdrawn themselves.

When one speaks in this way about the universe, moral concepts enter into the ideas that one develops. One forgets the physical concepts of the earth; moral concepts enter into the description. We ask ourselves: Why have these lunar entities withdrawn, why do they work in secret? Yes, when they were still on earth, they did indeed suggest an enormous wisdom to people. If they had remained on earth, they would have continued to suggest this wisdom to people, but people would never have been able to enter the age of freedom.

These entities had, so to speak, made the wonderful decision to withdraw from Earth, to retreat to a secluded place in the universe, far from human existence, in order to carry out their world business there, so that people would no longer be influenced by them, so that people could all absorb the impulses of the universe and become free beings. These entities have chosen a new dwelling place in the universe to gradually make freedom possible for people.

Yes, that speaks differently than is spoken of by the physicist, who, if he heard that the moon had split off from the earth, would simply calculate the speed at which it happened, the forces by which it happened, and would only ever have the earthly forces and the earthly speeds in mind. They are completely disregarded when we speak of the moon as I did yesterday. But if we leave aside the physical, what remains are such resolutions, such great cosmic-moral impulses. The important thing is that we move from physical verbiage, which applies to the physical conditions of the earth, to a discourse in moral ideas about the universe.

The important thing is that one does not merely put forward theories that are to be believed, but that there is a moral world order. This has completely confused the human soul in the last three to four centuries, that one has said: One can know some things about the earth, and, based on what is known on earth, calculate the universe and construct theories such as the Kant-Laplace theory, but with regard to the moral and divine order of the world, one must believe. This has greatly confused people, because the insight has been completely lost that one must speak in earthly terms about the earth, but that one must begin to speak cosmically the moment one rises up to the universe. There, physical speech gradually gives way to moral speech. What is otherwise at most imagined is practically carried out.

If you find a description of the sun by a physicist today, it is some kind of gas ball steaming out there, and its eruptions are described like terrestrial eruptions. Everything is projected onto this cosmic body in the same way as what happens on earth, and with the same calculations that we have acquired here, we then calculate how a ray of light passes the sun or the like. But the calculations we use here on Earth no longer apply when we go out into space. And just as the strength of light decreases with distance in a square, the laws no longer apply in outer space. We are only related to the universe in our morality. By rising above the physical as human to the moral, we here on earth become similar to what works in outer space as realized morality.

Thus we must say: in the ultimate sense, Anthroposophy is a science. It actually implements what arises as a demand. It no longer speaks in earthly concepts, except for the moral ones, which, however, are already supermundane on earth. It speaks in such moral concepts when it soars to the universe. This must be taken into account. And from this point of view, the concepts that we need to understand on earth must be gained, which cannot be understood just now.

You see, the beings that are anchored in the moon, I said, only work as if in a fortress. There they do their world business. For everything that the moon gives to the world, that the earth gives, is reflected and mirrored. But this is a state that has only just occurred in the course of evolution in the cosmic becoming. It used to be different. And into the, I would like to say, soft, slimy form that the earth itself and all beings once had, these beings worked when they still walked on earth. And it is in connection with these effects that the spinal cord column develops in both humans and animals. So that the spinal cord column in humans and in animals is an inheritance from very ancient times, when the moon beings were still connected with earthly existence. This can no longer arise today. The spinal column is an inheritance; it can no longer arise today.

But with regard to the four-footed animals, these entities made the spine so strong that it remains horizontal. In the case of humans, they made it so that it could become vertical, and the human being could then become free through the vertical spine for the universe and its influences at the moment when these lunar beings retreated to the lunar fortress.

And so we will gradually come to explaining the earthly from the universe, and to judging spiritual forces and impulses in the right way in earthly existence as well. It is the case that human minds have been invaded by ideas that have only emerged in the last three or four hundred years. And all of them under the influence of the view that the only thing one can apply to the whole universe to explain it is what one has gained from physical events and from the physical things of the earth. One has made the whole universe into a physical image of the earth. Now, however, people have realized: Something coincides with my crosshairs, but that was there once! The whole story does not apply in this way. And if one takes into account stars that are far enough away, today's physicist can say: What I record as a map is not there at all. I draw two stars next to each other: one of them was there, say, a thousand years ago, the other was there six hundred years ago. No, the stars were never there, side by side, as I see them in my crosshairs, coinciding as the rays of light.

So it all melts away, it is not really like that at all. With these concepts, you do not get what is out there. You calculate, calculate, calculate. It is just as if the spider weaves its web and then imagines that this web weaves through the whole world.

The reason for this is that these laws, according to which one calculates, no longer apply out there, but at most one can use the morality that is within us to get concepts of what is out there. Out there in the starry sky, things happen morally, sometimes also immorally, ahrimanically, luciferically, and so on. But when I take morality as a generic term, things happen morally, not physically. But this is something that must be rediscovered, because the other has become so firmly entrenched in people's minds over the last two or three centuries that even doubts such as those of the relativity theorists — for their negations have a great deal to be said for them — cannot dislodge it from people's minds. It is also understandable, because if even this last chimera, the time-space calculation that they perform, if even this still disappears from their minds for the starry sky, then there is nothing left in these minds, and people do like to retain something in them. For something else will only be able to be in it if one rises to the possibility of looking at the starry sky as we did yesterday.

Now we must realize that all this points to the fact that it is necessary for people of the present time to form clear ideas about what has actually happened in the last three to four centuries, and what has found its preliminary expression in the greatest of all wars that have ever taken place on earth, and in the chaotic conditions that will become even more chaotic in the near future. What is required of humanity is to really come to terms with these issues. And in this respect it is interesting to take a look beyond the Earth with its present level of intellectual development.

Within the civilization in which the Westerner with his American followers live, everything that has been developed in the last three to four centuries under the influence of a phenomenally magnificent technology and a magnificent world traffic - which is only now breaking down - is considered so solid that, of course, anyone who does not adopt the same concepts is a fool. Now it is true that the Orient is in a state of decadence, but one must also say: What one has to express again today from the sources of our own anthroposophical research, as I did yesterday, was, albeit in a completely different way, once in ancient times, still oriental wisdom.

We cannot accept this oriental wisdom in its old form today, as I have often discussed. We have to regain it from the Western mind, from the Western soul. But it was once, I would like to say, the custom to speak about the stars in the way that I began to speak about them yesterday, based on the old clairvoyance, on this dream-like old clairvoyance. Only that has been completely lost to humanity, and European humanity today considers all of this to be absurd, which was once considered the highest human wisdom.

Now, as I said, although this was once a great and original wisdom in the Orient too, today people there are in a state of decadence. But in a certain sense, at least externally and traditionally, something of such a way of looking at the universe has been preserved in the Orient, I would even say a soulful way of looking at the universe. And the technical culture of Europe impresses the Orientals very little. These souls, who today in the Orient lovingly engage with the ancient wisdom, fundamentally disdain what has developed in Europe as a mechanical culture and civilization. They study what concerns the human soul from their ancient scriptures. In this way, some inwardly experience an, albeit decadent, enlightenment, so that something of the soul's view of the world still lives in the Orient. And it is not unnecessary to also look at the way in which these people, who still have some kind of reflection of an ancient culture, look at the European-American intellectual scene. Even if it is only for the sake of comparison, it is still interesting.

A remarkable book has been published by a certain Rãmanãthan, an Indian from Ceylon, entitled “The Culture of the Soul among the Western Nations” [the title was written on the board]. This Rãmanãthan speaks in a remarkable way. He obviously belongs to those people over there in the Orient who, within Indian civilization, have said to themselves: These Europeans also have very strange scriptures, for example the New Testament. Now these people, to whom Rãmanãthan also belongs, have studied the New Testament - but of course in the way that the soul of these people can study the New Testament - and have absorbed this New Testament, the work of Christ Jesus, through the New Testament according to the state of their soul. And there are already people over there – as this book by Rãmanãthan shows – who now speak of the Christ Jesus and the New Testament from the remnants of an ancient culture. They have formed very specific ideas about the Christ Jesus.

And now this man writes a lot about these ideas of Christ Jesus, and of course he addresses the book - he wrote it in English - to the Europeans. He addresses the book, which is written by the Indian spirit about Jesus in the Gospels, to the Europeans, and he says something very strange to the Europeans. He says to them: it is quite extraordinary that they know nothing at all about the Christ Jesus. There are great things in the Gospels about Christ Jesus, but the Europeans and Americans know nothing about it, really know nothing about it! And he gives the Europeans and the Americans a strange piece of advice. He says to them: “Why don't you have teachers of the New Testament come from India, they will be able to tell you how it actually is with Christ Jesus.

So these people in Asia, who are dealing with European progress today and who then read the New Testament, tell these Europeans: If you want to learn something about the Christ Jesus, then you must have teachers come to you from us, because all the teachers who speak to you understand nothing about it, it is all misunderstood! —And he explains this in detail. He says: In Europe, at a certain time, a certain understanding of words took the place of an understanding of spiritual essence. The Europeans cling to a certain understanding of words with regard to all things. They do not carry a spiritual understanding in their heads, but the words they learn from their individual populations rise up into their heads, and then they think in words.

It is a remarkable way in which these Indians, despite their decadence, still come to this insight, because so far the story is quite striking. Even in physics and mathematics, thought is done in words today, not in things. In this respect, people today are quite strange. If someone wants to be very clever, then he quickly quotes: “For just where concepts are missing, a word comes at the right time.” But today it happens mostly out of the urge that the person in question has run out of all concepts: then the Goethean saying quickly comes to mind. But then he does not notice that. He does not realize that he is quite bitter in this vice at the moment when he criticizes it.

So this Indian says to the Europeans: You have only a word-understanding of all things, and you have extended this word-understanding over the New Testament, and thereby you have killed the Christ for four centuries. He no longer lives among you, he has been dead for four centuries. Get teachers from India so that he can be awakened again.

He says: For three to four centuries, the Europeans have known nothing at all about Christ. They cannot know anything because they do not have the concepts and ideas through which one can know something about Christ. — The Indian says to the Europeans: You need a renaissance of Christ Jesus. You have to rediscover the Christ, or someone else has to discover him for you, so that you have him again! - So says the Indian, after he has come to read the Gospel. He realizes that strange things have happened in Europe in the last three to four centuries. And then he says: If the Europeans themselves want to find out which Christ lives in the New Testament, they would have to go back a long way. Because this lack of understanding of Christ has been slowly prepared, and actually the Europeans would have to go back to Gnosticism if they still wanted to learn something from their own scriptures about the Christ.

A strange phenomenon! There is an Indian, who is only representative of many, who reads the New Testament and says to the Europeans: There is nothing that helps you more than going back to the Gnostics.

But the Europeans only have the Gnostics in the counter-writings. The Europeans know nothing of the Gnostics. It is a strange fact: the writings of the Gnostics have all been destroyed, only the polemics of the Christian church fathers against the Gnostics have survived, with the exception of the 'Pistis Sophia' and a few others, but these cannot be understood as they are, any more than the Gospels themselves can be understood. '

But now, if you are not a Gnostic but rediscover the Christ through modern spiritual science, the theologians come along and say: There the Gnosis is being warmed up again - the Gnosis, which they do not know, however, because they cannot know it from any external things. But 'warming up Gnosticism' is what it is, and that must not be done, because it distorts Christianity. This is also a divergence between East and West. Those who study the New Testament in the East find that one must go back to the first centuries. When theologians of the present day are confronted with something that appears as the description of Christ in today's anthroposophy, and which, to them, sounds like an unknown gnosis, they say: He wants to revive gnosis, that must not be allowed, it distorts Christianity.

Yes, the judgment of the Indian is quite remarkable. This Rãmanãthan actually says: What the Europeans now call their Christianity is falsified. The Europeans say: The Rãmanãthan falsifies our Christianity. But the Rãmanãthan comes quite close to the right view, albeit with his decadent view. The right thing is always a falsification of the wrong. It is only important to call these things by their right name. The right thing is always a falsification of the wrong, because if one did not falsify the wrong, one would not arrive at the right.

But that is the way things are today. Just think of the abyss you are looking into when you take this example from Rammanathan. For example, someone might say: Read the Gospels impartially. — It is difficult for a European today to read them impartially, after having been presented with the mistreated translations for centuries and having been educated in certain ideas. It is difficult to read them impartially. But if someone reads them impartially, even from his point of view, then he discovers a spiritual Christ in the Gospels. For that is what Ramanathan discovered in the Gospels, even if he cannot yet see it in the anthroposophical sense. But Europeans should still take note of this advice from the Ceylonese Indian: Let preachers of the Christ come to you from India, for you have none.

In these matters, one must have the courage today to look into the development that has taken place over the last three to four centuries, and only through this courage is it possible to truly emerge from the immense chaos into which humanity has gradually plunged. This tendency towards ambiguity clouds all concepts and ultimately also causes social chaos. For that which takes place between people does take place after all out of their souls, and there is already a connection between the highest truths and the destruction of external economic conditions. And so one must again be willing to lose one's earthly concepts if one wants to penetrate into the cosmos.

In yesterday's lecture I wanted to give you an example of how the cosmos fits into present-day spiritual life and how things stand in present-day spiritual life. A relationship with earthly concepts only exists when one comes out into the cosmos.

During his earthly existence, the human being alternates in the states of consciousness, which we have already considered from many points of view during these days, between the states of complete waking, sleeping and dreaming. And I have just tried to explain the full significance of dreaming during the short lecture cycle at the delegates' meeting. Today, let us first ask ourselves the question: Is it part of the essential nature of man as an earthly being to live in these three states of consciousness?

We must be clear about the fact that within earthly existence, only man lives in these three states of consciousness. The animal lives in a fundamentally different cycle. The animal does not have the deep dreamless sleep that man has for the longest time between falling asleep and waking up. On the other hand, the animal does not have the complete wakefulness that man has between waking up and falling asleep. The animal waking state is actually somewhat similar to human dreaming. Only the conscious experiences of higher animals are more definite, more saturated, I might say, than the fleeting human dreams. But on the other hand, the animal is never unconscious to the same high degree as man is in deep sleep.

The animal therefore does not differ to the same extent from its surroundings as does man. The animal does not have an external world and an internal world in the way that man has them. If we translate into human language, the animal actually reckons, what lives as a dull consciousness in the higher animals, with its entire inner being to the outside world.

When an animal sees a plant, it does not initially have the feeling that there is a plant outside and that it is a closed being inside, but rather a strong inner experience of the plant, an immediate sympathy or antipathy. In a sense, the animal feels within itself what the plant expresses. That in our present age people are so little able to observe what does not reveal itself in a very crude way, this circumstance alone it is, which prevents them from simply seeing from the behavior, from the behavior of the animal, that it is as I have said.

Only man has this sharp, clear distinction between his inner world and the outer world. Why does man acknowledge an outer world? How does man come to speak of an inner world and an outer world at all? He comes to it through the fact that he is always outside his physical and etheric bodies with his I and with his astral body in the state of sleep, that he, so to speak, leaves his physical and etheric bodies to themselves in sleep and is with those things that are the outer world. During our state of sleep, we share the fate of external things. Just as tables and benches, trees and clouds are outside our physical and etheric bodies when we are awake, and we therefore call them the external world, so our own astral body and our own ego belong to the external world during sleep. And when we belong to the external world with our ego and our astral body during sleep, something happens.

To understand what is happening, let us first consider what actually happens when we face the world in a normal waking state. The objects around us are external to us. And gradually, human scientific thinking has come to recognize only that which can be measured, weighed and counted as certain for these physical things of the outside world. The content of our physical science is, after all, determined by weight, by measure, by number.

We calculate with the calculation operations that once applied to earthly things, we weigh the things, we measure them. And what we determine by weight, measure and number, that is actually given by the physical. We would not describe a body as physical if we could not somehow prove its reality with the scales. But that which, for example, colors are, that which sounds are, that which even sensations of warmth and cold are, that which is the actual sensory perceptions, that weaves so over the heavy, measurable, countable things. When we want to define any physical thing, what constitutes its actual physical essence is precisely what can be weighed and counted, and what the physicist actually only wants to deal with. Regarding color, sound and so on, he says: Yes, something is happening out there that also has to do with weighing or counting. — He himself says of the color phenomena: There are vibrations out there that make an impression on people, and people describe this impression as color when the eye determines it, as sound when the ear determines it, and so on. - Actually, one could say: the physicist today does not know what to do with all these things - sound, color, warmth and cold. He regards them simply as properties of what can be determined with the scales, with the measuring stick or by calculation. In a sense, colors adhere to the physical, sound breaks away from the physical, and warmth or cold undulate out of the physical. We say: that which has a weight, that asked for the blush, or it:st red.

When a person is in the state between falling asleep and waking up, it is different with the I and with the astral body. In this state, things are not there at all in terms of measure, number and weight. According to earthly measure, number and weight, things are not there. When we are asleep, we do not have things around us that can be weighed, strange as it may seem, nor do we have things around us that can be counted or measured directly. You could not apply a yardstick as I and as an astral body in a state of sleep. But what is there, if I may express it in this way, are the free-floating, free-weaving sensations. Only that in his present state of development, man does not have the ability to perceive the free-floating blush, the waves of the free-weaving sound, and so on.

If you want to draw a schematic picture of the matter, you could do it like this. [Here he begins to draw on the board] You could say: Here on earth we have tangible solid things, and the red, the yellow, that is, what the senses perceive in the physical world, adheres to these tangible solid things, so to speak. When we are asleep, yellow is a free-floating being, red is a free-floating being, not attached to such conditions of heaviness, but freely weaving and floating. It is the same with sound: it is not the bell that sounds, but the sound that weaves.

And it is true that when we walk around in our physical world and see something, we pick it up; only then it is a thing, otherwise it could also be an optical illusion. Weight must be added. That is why one is so inclined to regard something that appears in the physical without it being perceived as heavy, such as the colors of the rainbow, as an optical illusion. If you open a physics book today, you will find that it explains that what you see is an optical illusion. What is actually real is the raindrop. And so you draw lines into it that actually mean nothing at all for what is there, but which you imagine through space; you then call them rays. But the rays are not there at all. Then one says: the eye projects that outwards. This projection is something that is used in physics today in a very strange way. So I take up the idea: we see a red object. To convince ourselves that it is not an optical illusion, we pick it up and it is heavy: this is how we verify its reality.

The one who now becomes aware in the I and in the astral body outside the physical and etheric body also finally comes to the conclusion that something like this is already there in this free-floating and free-weaving colored, sounding; but it is different. In a freely floating colored shape, there is a tendency to move out into the vastness of the world; it has an opposite gravity. These things on earth want to go down to the center of the earth [drawing, downward arrows], while those [upward arrows] want to go out freely into space.

And there is also something similar to a measure. You see it when you have, let's say, a small reddish cloud [plate 4], and this small reddish cloud is surrounded by a mighty yellow structure. Then you measure, but not with the scale, but qualitatively you measure with the red, with the stronger shining the weaker shining yellow. And just as the measuring rod tells you: that is five meters, so here the red tells you: if I were to spread out, I would enter the yellow five times. I have to expand, I have to become more powerful, then I will also become yellow. — So the measurements are made here.

It is even more difficult to explain counting here, because in earthly counting we usually only count peas or apples that lie next to each other indifferently. And we always have the feeling that when we make two out of one, the one is actually quite indifferent to the fact that there is another two next to it. In human life it is already different; there it is sometimes the case that one is dependent on the two. But that also goes into the spiritual. But in actual physical mathematics, the units are always indifferent to what is associated with them. That is not the case here.

If there is a one of a certain kind somewhere, it requires any, say, three or five others, depending on the case [drawing, red dots and rings]. This always has an inner relationship to the others, there the number is a reality. And when consciousness begins to perceive what it is like to be out there with the ego and the astral body, then one also comes to determine something like measure, number and weight, but in an opposite way.

And then, when seeing and hearing out there are no longer a mere swimming and groping of red and yellow and sounds, but when one begins to perceive things in such an orderly way in there too, then the perception of the spiritual entities that actualize and realize themselves in these free-floating sensory perceptions begins. Then we enter into the positive spiritual world, into the life and activity of spiritual beings. Just as we enter into the life and activity of earthly things here on earth by determining them with the scales, with the measuring rod, with our calculations, so we enter into the comprehension of spiritual entities by acquiring the merely qualitative, opposite heaviness, that is, by wanting to expand with ease in space, measuring color by color and so on. These spiritual essences now also permeate everything that is outside in the realms of nature.

With the waking consciousness, the human being sees only the outer side of minerals, plants, and animals. But in what lives as spiritual in all these beings of the nature kingdoms, there the human being is when he sleeps. And when he then goes back into himself when he wakes up, then his I and his astral body retain, so to speak, the inclination, the affinity to external things and cause the person to recognize an external world. If the human being had an organization that was not designed for sleep, he would not recognize an external world. Of course it is not a matter of someone suffering from insomnia. For I am not saying that a person does not sleep, but that a person does not have an organization that is designed for sleeping. It is a matter of being attuned to something. That is why a person who suffers from insomnia becomes ill, because it is not suited to his nature. But that is just how things are: precisely because man dwells in sleep with what is in the outer world, with what he then calls his outer world when awake, he also comes to an outer world, to a view of the outer world.

This relationship of man to sleep gives the earthly concept of truth. How? Well, we call it truth when we can correctly recreate an external event within us, when we can correctly experience an external event within us. But for this we need the mechanism of sleep. We would have no concept of truth at all if we did not have the mechanism of sleep. So that we can say: we owe truth to the state of sleep. In order to devote ourselves to the truth of things, we must also spend a certain amount of time with them in our existence. Things only tell us about themselves when we are with them in our souls during sleep.

The dream state is different. As I explained to you in the short series during the delegates' meeting, the dream is related to memory, to the inner life of the soul, to that which lives primarily in memory. When the dream is a free-floating world of sound and color, we are still half outside of our body. When we completely submerge, the same forces that we unfold in the dream, weaving and living, become forces of memory. In this way we no longer differ from the outer world. Our inner life coincides with the outer world, we live so intensely in the outer world with our sympathies and antipathies that we do not perceive things as sympathetic or antipathetic, but the sympathies and antipathies themselves show themselves pictorially.

If we did not have the ability to dream and the continuation of this dream power within us, we would have no beauty. The fact that we have any predispositions for beauty at all is based on our ability to dream. For the prosaic existence, we have to say: we owe it to the power of dreaming that we have memory; for the artistic existence of man, we owe beauty to the power of dreaming. So: 'the state of dreaming is connected with beauty'. The way we perceive beauty and create beauty is very similar to the weaving force of dreaming.

We behave similarly when experiencing beauty and when creating beauty – only with the application of our physical body – as we behave outside of our physical body, or half-connected to our physical body, when dreaming. There is only a small gap between dreaming and living in beauty. And only because in today's materialistic time people are so coarse that they do not notice this gap, there is so little awareness of the full significance of beauty. In order to experience this free floating and weaving, one must necessarily devote oneself to it in dreams. Whereas when one surrenders to freedom, to the inner exercise of will, and thus lives after the jolt, one no longer has the sensation that it is the same as dreaming, because it is just the same, only with the application of the powers of the physical body.

People today will think long and hard about what was meant in older times when one said “chaos” [the word “chaos” is written on the blackboard]. There are many different definitions of chaos. In reality, chaos can only be characterized by saying: When a person enters a state of consciousness in which the experience of heaviness, of earthly measure, just ceases, and things begin to feel half light, but do not yet want to reach out into the world , but still maintain themselves horizontally, in balance, when the fixed boundaries dissolve, when the floating indeterminacy of the world is still seen with the physical body, but already with the soul-constitution of dreaming, then one sees chaos. And the dream is merely the shadowy approach of chaos to man.

In Greece, people still had the feeling that you can't really make the physical world beautiful. The physical world is just a necessity of nature, it is what it is. You can only make that beautiful which is chaotic. If you transform chaos into cosmos, then beauty arises. That is why chaos and cosmos are interchangeable terms. You cannot create the cosmos – which actually means the beautiful world – from earthly things, but only from chaos, by shaping chaos. And what you do with earthly things is merely an imitation in the substance of the shaped chaos.

This is the case with all artistic endeavors. In Greece, where mystery cults still had a certain influence, people still had a very vivid idea of this relationship between chaos and the cosmos.

But if you travel around in all these worlds - in the world in which man is unconscious when he is in a state of sleep, in the world in which man is half-conscious when he is in a state of dreaming - if you travel around everywhere: you will not find goodness. These beings that are in there have been predestined with wisdom from the very beginning of their lives. In them, you find ruling, weaving wisdom; in them, you find beauty. But there is no point in our, as terrestrial human beings, trying to get to know these entities and speak of goodness in them. We can only speak of goodness when there is a difference between the inner and outer world, so that the good of the spiritual world can or cannot follow.

Just as the sleeping state is truth, the dreaming state is beauty, so the waking state is goodness, assigned to the good [it is written on the board]. |

Sleeping state: truth
Dreaming state: beauty
Waking state: goodness

But that does not contradict what I have said in recent days, that when one leaves the earthly and comes out into the cosmos, one is led to drop even earthly concepts in order to speak of the moral order of the world. For the moral order of the world is just as predetermined, just as necessarily predetermined in the spiritual as causality is here on earth. It is just that there it is spiritual: the predetermination, the being-determined-in-oneself. So there is no contradiction.

But we must be clear about human nature: if we want to have the idea of truth, then we must turn to the state of sleep; if we want to have the idea of beauty, then we must turn to the state of dreaming; if we want to have the idea of kindness, then we must turn to the state of waking.

Thus, when a person is awake, he is not destined for his physical and etheric organism according to truth, but rather destined for goodness. So we must come to the idea of goodness all the more.

Now I ask you: What does contemporary science strive for when it wants to explain the human being? It does not want to ascend by explaining to the awake person the path from truth through beauty to goodness; it wants to explain everything according to an external causal necessity, which only corresponds to the idea of truth. One does not come to that which lives and weaves in man in an awakened state, but only to that which the sleeping person is at most. Therefore, if you read anthropological works today and do so with an awakened eye, awake to the soul peculiarities and forces of the world, then you get the following impression. You say to yourself: That is all very nice, what we are told by today's science about man. But what is this human being like, of whom science tells us? He is constantly lying in bed. He cannot walk. He cannot move. Movement, for example, is not explained at all. He is constantly lying in bed.

The human being that science explains can only be explained as a person lying in bed. There is no other way. Science only explains the sleeping human being. If you want to get him moving, you have to do it mechanically. That is why it is also a scientific mechanism. You have to introduce a machine into this sleeping human being that will get this lump up and moving when it is time to get up and put it back into bed in the evening.

This science, however, tells us nothing about the human being who walks around in the world, who lives and breathes, who is awake. For what sets him in motion is contained in the idea of kindness, not in the idea of truth, which we gain from external things. This is something that is given very little consideration. When a modern physiologist or anatomist describes the human being, one has the feeling that one would like to say: Wake up, wake up, you are asleep, you are asleep! — People get used to this state of sleep under the influence of this world view. And what I have always had to characterize: that people actually oversleep everything, that is because they are obsessed with science. Today, because the popular magazines report on everything everywhere, even the uneducated are obsessed with science. There have never been so many obsessed people as there are today, obsessed with science. It is quite peculiar how one has to speak when describing the real conditions of the present day. One has to use completely different tones than those that are currently in use.

And so it is when a human being is placed in an environment by the materialists. When materialism was at its height, people wrote books such as one that sounded in a certain chapter, which states: Man is actually nothing in himself. He is the result of the oxygen in the air, he is the result of the degree of cold or heat under which he is. He is actually - so ends this materialistic description - a result of every draft of air.

If you go along with such a description and imagine the person to be what the materialistic scientist describes, then it is in fact a highly neurasthenic person. The materialists have never described any other people. If they did not realize that they were actually describing people asleep, when they wanted to move on but had fallen out of step, they never described people as anything other than highly neurasthenic individuals who, due to their neurasthenia, are bound to die the very next day and who cannot live at all. For this epoch of science has never grasped the living human being.

There lie the great tasks which must lead men out of the conditions of the present back to such conditions under which the further life of world history is possible. What is needed is an advance in spirituality. The other pole must be found to what has been attained. What exactly has been attained in the course of the 19th century, which was glorious for the materialistic world view? What has been achieved?

In a wonderful way – it can be said quite sincerely and honestly – it has been possible to determine the external world in terms of measurement, number and weight as an earthly world. In this respect, the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century have achieved something magnificent and tremendous. But the sensations, the colors, the sounds, they are all fluttering around in the indefinite. Physicists have completely stopped talking about colors and sounds; they talk about air vibrations and ether vibrations, which are neither colors nor sounds. Air vibrations are not sounds, but at most the medium through which sounds propagate. And there is no grasp of what the sensory qualities are. We must first come to that again. Actually, today we see only what can be determined by means of scales, measures, calculations. The rest has eluded us.

And if the theory of relativity also introduces the magnificent disorder described to you yesterday into what can be measured, weighed, counted, then everything becomes fragmented, everything diverges. But after all, this theory of relativity itself fails at certain limits. Not with regard to concepts – one does not escape the theory of relativity with earthly concepts; I have already discussed this elsewhere – but with reality one always escapes the concepts of relativity. For that which can be measured, counted, weighed enters into quite definite relationships with regard to measure, number and weight in the outer, sensory reality.

Once upon a time in Stuttgart, a physicist or a group of physicists took umbrage at the way the theory of relativity was treated by anthroposophists. Then, in a discussion, he demonstrated a simple experiment that it is actually immaterial whether I hold the matchbox and stroke the match: it will burn; or whether I hold the match and stroke the matchbox: it will also burn. It is relative.

Certainly, here it is still relative. And in relation to everything that is related to a Newtonian space, or to an Euclidean space, it is all relative. But as soon as that reality comes into consideration, which appears as heaviness, as weight, then it is no longer as easy as Einstein imagined, because then real conditions arise. Here one must really speak in paradoxes again. Relativity can be asserted if one confuses the whole of reality with mathematics and geometry and mechanics. But if one enters into the true reality, then that no longer works. After all, it is not just relative whether one eats the roast veal or whether the roast veal eats one! You can travel back and forth with the matchbox, but you have to eat the roast veal, you can't let the roast veal eat you. There are things that set limits to these relativity concepts. These things are such that if they are now told outwardly, one will say: There is not the slightest understanding for this serious theory. But the logic is already as I say it: it is no different, I cannot do it differently.

So it is a matter of seeing how, by taking into account weight – that is, what actually makes physical bodies – how, in reality, I might say, colors, sounds and so on cannot be accommodated anywhere. But with this tendency, something extraordinarily important is lost. Namely, the artistic element is lost. As we become more and more and more and more physical, the artistic element leaves us. No one today will find any trace of art in what the physics books describe. There is nothing left of art, everything must come out. It is indeed dreadful to study a physics book today if you still have any sense of beauty. Because everything that beauty is woven from, color and sound, is outlawed, and only recognized when it adheres to the heavy things, precisely because of that, art is no longer important to people. Today it is no longer important to anyone. And the more physical people become, the less artistic they become! Just think about it: we have a great physics. There is truly no need to rebuke opponents who say, in the field of anthroposophy, that we have great physics. But physics thrives on the denial of the artistic. It thrives on the denial of the artistic in each individual, because it has arrived at a way of treating the world in which the artist no longer cares about the physicist.

I don't think, for example, that the musician today attaches much importance to studying the physical theories of acoustics. It's too boring for him, he doesn't care. The painter also doesn't like to study the terrible color theory that is contained in physics. He usually turns, if he cares about colors at all, to Goethe's color theory. But that is wrong, according to physicists. Physicists turn a blind eye and say: Well, it's not so important whether the painter has a correct or a false theory of colors. It just so happens that under today's physical world view, art must perish. Now we have to ask ourselves the question: Why was there art in older times?

If we go back to very ancient times, to the times when people still had an original clairvoyance, it was the case that people did not notice so much of measure, number and weight in earthly things. They did not care so much about measure, number and weight, they were more devoted to the colors, the sounds of earthly things.

Just think that chemistry has only been calculating with weight since Lavoisier; that is a little more than a hundred years! Weight was only applied to a world view at the end of the 18th century. The consciousness that everything must be determined according to earthly measure, number and weight was simply not present in the older humanity. One was devoted to the color carpet of the world, the weaving and undulation of sound; one was devoted not to the vibrations of the air, but to the undulations and weaving of sound. One lived in it, even by living in the physical world.

But what possibilities did one have by living in this sensual perception free of heaviness? It gave one the possibility, for example, when one approached a person, not to see the person at all as one sees him today, but one looked at the person as a result of the whole universe. Man was more a confluence of the cosmos. He was more of a microcosm than what stands within his skin on this small patch of earth, where man stands. Man was thought of more as an image of the world. The colors flowed together from all sides, giving man his colors. The harmony of the world was there, resonating through man, giving man his form.

And humanity today can hardly understand the way in which the ancient mystery teachers spoke to their students. Because if someone today wants to explain the human heart, they take an embryo and see how the blood vessels expand, and how a tube initially forms and then the heart gradually takes shape. No, the ancient mystery teachers didn't talk to their students like that! That wouldn't have seemed much more important to them than knitting a sock, because after all, the process looks very similar. On the contrary, they emphasized something else as being tremendously important. They said: The human heart is a result of the gold that lives everywhere in the light and that streams in from the universe and actually forms the human heart. They had the ideas: The light weaves through the universe, and the light carries the gold [see drawing]. The gold is everywhere in the light, the gold weaves and lives in the light. And when a person is in their earthly life, then their heart – you know, after seven years it changes – is not built from the cucumbers and lettuce and roast veal that a person has eaten in the meantime, but these old teachers knew: it is built from the gold of the light. And the cucumbers and the salad are only the stimulus for the heart to build itself up out of the light-woven gold of the whole universe.

Yes, people spoke differently, and one must become aware of this contrast, for one must learn again to speak in this way, only on a different level of consciousness. For example, what once existed in the field of painting, which then disappeared, where one still painted from the universe because one did not yet have the gravity, that has left its last trace - let us say, for example, with Cimabue and especially with the icon painting of the Russians. The icon is still painted from the external world, from the macrocosm; in a sense, it is a section of the macrocosm. But then one arrived at a dead end. One could not go further because this view simply no longer exists for humanity. If one had wanted to paint the icon with an inner part, not just out of tradition and prayer, then one should have known how to treat gold. The treatment of gold in the picture was one of the greatest secrets of ancient painting. To bring out what is human in the background of gold, that was ancient painting.

There is an enormous gulf between Cimabue and Giotto. For Giotto had already begun to do what Raphael would later take to a particularly high level. Cimabue still had tradition, but Giotto was already becoming a naturalist. He realized that tradition was no longer coming to life in the soul. Now you have to take the physical human being; now you no longer have the universe. You can no longer paint out of gold, you have to paint out of the flesh.

This has finally come to the point that, after all, painting has passed over to what it had in many ways in the 19th century. The icons, they have no heaviness at all, the icons have “shone in” from the world; they have no heaviness. You just can't paint them anymore today, but if you painted them in their original form, they would have no weight at all.

Giotto was the first to paint things in such a way that they had weight. From this it became that everything that is painted also has weight in the picture, and one then paints it from the outside; so that the colors relate to what is painted, as the physicist explains that the color arises on the surface through some special wave vibration. Art, in the end, also reckoned with weight. Giotto began it in an aesthetic-artistic way, and Raphael then brought it to the highest level.

So that one can say: The universe has departed from man, and the heavy man became that which one could only see. And because the feelings of the old days were still there, the flesh became as little heavy as possible, but it became heavy. And so the Madonna was created as the opposite of the icon: the icon, which has no weight, the Madonna, which has weight, even if she is beautiful. Beauty has been preserved. But icons cannot be painted at all, because man does not experience them. And it is an untruth when people today believe that they experience icons. That is why the icon culture was immersed in a certain sentimental untruth. This is a dead end in art, it becomes schematic, it becomes traditional.

Raphael's painting, painting that is actually based on what Giotto did with Cimabue, this painting can only remain art as long as the old splendor of beauty still shines on it. To a certain extent, it was the sunny Renaissance painters who still felt something of the gold weaving in the light and at least gave their pictures the radiance with which the gold weaving in the light made them shine from the outside.

But that came to an end. And that is how naturalism came about. And so today, in terms of art, humanity is caught between two stools on the ground, between the icon and the Madonna, and is dependent on discovering what pure weaving color and pure weaving sound is, with their opposite weight, opposite to measurability, to weighable countability. We must learn to paint from color. Even if we approach this today tentatively and poorly, it is our task to paint from color, to experience color itself, detached from the heaviness of experiencing color itself. In these things, one must be able to proceed consciously, also artistically consciously.

And if you look at what has been achieved in the simple attempts at our programs, you will see that, even if it is only a beginning, a start has been made to free colors from heaviness, to experience color as an element in itself, to make colors speak. If we succeed, then, in contrast to the unartistic physical world view that allows all art to evaporate, an art is created from the free elements of color and sound that is free from heaviness.

Yes, we are also sitting between two chairs, between the icon and the Madonna, but we have to get up. Physical science will not help us here. I have told you: one must always remain lying down if one applies only physical science to the human being. But now we must get up! For that we really need spiritual science. This contains the element of life that carries us from heaviness to the weightless color, to the reality of color, from the very bondage in musical naturalism to the free musical art and so on.

In all areas, we see how it is about a rousing, about an awakening of humanity. That is it, that we should take up this impulse to awaken, to look out, to see what is and what is not, and everywhere the challenges lie to move forward. That is why I really had to conclude with just such reflections, as I have brought to you, both at the delegates' meeting and now in these days, before this summer break, which is due to the English trip. These things are already getting to the nerve of our time. And it is necessary that one lets the other shine into our movement, as I have tried to hint at.

I have described how the modern philosopher has come to admit: What does this intellectualism lead to? Building a giant machine that you place in the center of the earth to blast the earth out into all the spaces of the universe! He admitted that this is the case. The others do not admit it to themselves!

And so I have tried in the most diverse places – for example, when I showed you yesterday how the concepts that were still there thirty or forty years ago are now being dissolved by the theory of relativity, simply melting away like snow in the sun – I have tried to show you how everywhere you look there are calls to really strive towards anthroposophy. For, as the philosopher Eduard von Hartmann says: If the world is as we have to imagine it – that is, as he imagines it in the 19th century – then we must actually, because we cannot endure it in it, blow it up into space, and it is only a matter of our being so far that we can carry it out. We must long for the time when we can blast the world into all the expanses of the universe. Before that happens, relativists will have ensured that people no longer have any concepts! Space, time, movement dissolve, then one can already fall into such despair that under certain conditions one already sees the greatest satisfaction in this blasting out into the whole universe. But you just have to familiarize yourself with what lies as certain impulses in our time.

That is what has caused the last lectures to be held in the way they have been: where external culture shines into our ranks. They were also an invitation to open our eyes. And I tried to shape these lectures in such a way that they show what it means: the Anthroposophical Society should make every effort to get out of sectarianism, to get beyond sectarianism.

My dear friends, I am sorry to have to say goodbye to you for a few weeks with these words, but I would like you to use this time to reflect on how to get out of this sectarianism! Otherwise, the situation will arise that the Anthroposophical Society will get more and more into sectarianism. And there are strong tendencies not to throw off the sectarianism, but to sail right into the sectarian nature.

How it is possible to avoid sectarianism is something that must occupy our feelings. And I wanted to touch on this point very briefly because it is extremely necessary to do so. I wanted to draw attention to the fact that, in these last lectures, I have tried to speak in such a way that, so to speak, we look out into the world everywhere, that there is no spinning into a sect, but a life in the world with open eyes, with a practical mind, an inner connection with the world. This is entirely compatible with the utmost immersion in the spiritual. That is why I told you that today a person must even know that there may be an Indian today, Rãmanãthan, who looks at European culture and says to the Europeans: Let yourselves be taught about the Jesus of India, because you understand nothing about Jesus Christ. We only understood the matter when we started reading the New Testament.

If we allow ourselves to become ensnared in such sectarianism, as there were strong tendencies towards during the delegates' meeting, then we will not achieve the great task of anthroposophy in the present, and this must be achieved, because 'it is a human task.

Having said this, I would like to take leave of you for a few weeks and we will announce the next events in due course. In the next few weeks, lectures and eurythmy performances will take place at various locations in England.

So we want to prepare ourselves for a summer break in such a way that during this summer break we let our hearts be particularly alert to the right feeling of how we should feel so that the development of humanity can continue in the right way.

To-day I would like first to remind you how events which take place behind the veil of appearance, outside the physical, sense-perceptible world, can be described in pictorial terms. One has to speak in this way of these events, but the pictures correspond throughout with reality.

With regard to sense-perceptible events, we are living in a time of hard tests for humanity, and these tests will become harder still. Many old forms of civilisation, to which people still mistakenly cling, will sink into the abyss, and there will be an insistent demand that man must find his way to something new. In speaking of the course that the external life of humanity will take in the early future, we cannot—as I have often said—arouse any kind of optimistic hopes. But a valid judgment as to the significance of external events cannot be formed unless we consider also the determining, directing cosmic events which occur behind the veil of the senses.

When a man looks out attentively with his physical eyes and his other senses at his surroundings, he perceives the physical environment of the earth, and the various kingdoms of nature within it. This is the milieu in which comes to pass all that manifests as wind and weather in the course of the year. When we direct our senses towards the external world, we have all this before us: these are the external facts. But behind the atmosphere, the sun-illumined atmosphere, there lies another world, perceptible by spiritual organs, as we may call them. Compared with the sense-world, this other world is a higher world, a world wherein a kind of light, a kind of spiritual light or astral light, spiritual existence and spiritual deeds shine out and run their course. And they are in truth no less significant for the whole development of the world and of man than the historical events in the external environment of the earth and on its surface.

If anyone to-day is able to penetrate into these astral realms, wandering through them as one may wander among woods and mountains and find signposts at cross roads, he may find “signposts” there in the astral light, inscribed in spiritual script. But these signposts have a quite special characteristic: they are not comprehensible without further explanation, even for someone who can “read” in the astral light. In the spiritual world and in its communications, things are not made as convenient as possible: anything one encounters there presents itself as a riddle to be solved. Only through inner investigation, through experiencing inwardly the riddle and much else, can one discover what the inscription on a spiritual signpost signifies.

And so at this time—indeed for some decades now, but particularly at this time of hard trials for mankind—one can read in the astral light, as one goes about spiritually in these realms, a remarkable saying. It sounds like a prosaic comparison, but in this case, because of its inner significance, the prosaic does not remain prosaic. Just as we find notices to help us find our way—and we find signposts even in poetical landscapes—so we encounter an important spiritual signpost in the astral light. Time and time again, exactly repeated, we find there to-day the following saying, inscribed in highly significant spiritual script:

O Man,
You mould it to your service,
You reveal it according to the value of its substance
In many of your works.
Yet it will bring you healing
Only when it reveals to you
The lofty power of its spirit.

Injunctions of this kind, pointing to facts significant for man, are inscribed, as I have said, in the astral light, presenting themselves first as a kind of riddle to be solved, so that men may bring their soul-forces into activity.

Now, during our days here, we will contribute something to the solving of this saying—really a simple saying, but important for mankind to-day.

Let us recall how in many of our studies here the course of the year has been brought before our souls. A man first observes it quite externally: when spring comes he sees nature sprouting and budding; he sees how the plants grow and come to flower, how life everywhere springs up out of the soil. All this is enhanced as summer draws on; in summer it rises to its highest level. And then, when autumn comes, it withers and fades away; and when winter comes it dies into the lap of the earth.

This cycle of the year—which in earlier times, when a more instinctive consciousness prevailed, was celebrated with festivals—has another side, also mentioned here. During winter the earth is united with the elemental spirits. They withdraw into the interior of the earth and live there among the plant-roots that are preparing for new growth, and among the other nature-beings who spend the winter there. Then, when spring comes, the earth breathes out, as it were, its elemental being. The elemental spirits rise up as though from a tomb and ascend into the atmosphere. During winter they accepted the inner order of the earth, but now, as spring advances and especially when summer comes on, they receive more and more into their being and activity the order which is imposed upon them by the stars and the movements of the stars. When high summer has come, then out there in the periphery of the earth there is a surging of life among the elemental beings who had spent the winter in quiet and silence under the earth's mantle of snow. In the swirling and whirling of their dance they are governed by the reciprocal laws of planetary movement, by the pattern of the fixed stars, and so on. When autumn comes, they turn towards the earth. As they approach the earth, they become subject more and more to the laws of earth, so that in winter they may be breathed in again by the earth, once more to rest there in quietude.

Anyone who can thus experience the cycle of the year feels that his whole human life is wonderfully enriched. To-day—and it has been so for some time past—a man normally experiences, and then but dimly, half-consciously, only the physical-etheric processes of the body which occur within his skin. He experiences his breathing, the circulation of his blood. Everything that takes its course outside, in wind and weather, during the year; all that lives in the sprouting of the seed-forces, the fruiting of the earth-forces—all this is no less significant and decisive for the whole life of man, even though he is not conscious of it, than the breathing and blood-circulation which go on inside his skin.

When the sun rises over any region of the earth, we share in the effects of its warmth and light. But when a man accepts Anthroposophy in the right sense, not reading it like a sensational novel but so that what it imparts becomes the content of his mind, then he gradually educates his heart and soul to experience all that goes on outside in the course of the year. Just as in the course of a day we experience early freshness, readiness for work in the morning, then the onset of hunger and of evening weariness, and just as we can trace the inner life and activity of the forces and substances within our skin, so, by taking to heart anthroposophical ideas—entirely different from the usual descriptions of sense-perceptible events—we can prepare our souls to become receptive to the activities that go on outside in the course of the year. We can deepen more and more this sympathetic participation in the cycle of the year, and we can enrich it so that we do not live sourly—one might say—within our skin, letting the outer world pass us by. On the contrary, we can enrich our experience so that we feel ourselves living in the blossoming of every flower, in the breaking open of the buds, in that wonderful secret of the morning, the glistening of dew-drops in the rays of the sun. In these ways we can get beyond that dull, conventional way of reacting to the outer world merely by putting on our overcoat in winter and lighter clothes in summer and taking an umbrella when it rains. When we go out from ourselves and experience the interweaving activities, the flow and ebb, of nature—only then do we really understand the cycle of the year.

Then, when spring passes over the earth and summer is drawing near, a man will be in the midst of it with his heart and soul; he will discern how the sprouting and budding life of nature unfolds, how the elemental spirits fly and whirl in a pattern laid down for them by planetary movements. And then, in the time of high summer, he will go out of himself to share in the life of the cosmos. Certainly this damps down his own inner life, but at the same time his summer experience leads him out—in a cosmic waking-sleep, one might say—to enter into the doings of the planets.

To-day, generally speaking, people feel they can enter into the life of nature only in the season of growth—of germination and budding, flowering and fruiting. Even if they cannot fully experience all this, they have more sympathy and perception for it than they have for the autumn season of fading and dying away. But in truth we earn the right to enter into the season of spring growth only if we can enter also into the time when summer wanes and autumn draws on; the season of sinking down and dying that comes with winter. And if during high summer we rise inwardly, in a cosmic waking-sleep, with the elemental beings to the region where planetary activity in the outer world can be inwardly experienced, then we ought equally to sink ourselves down under the frost and snow-mantle of winter, so that we enter into the secrets of the womb of the earth during mid-winter; and we ought to participate in the fading and dying-off of nature when autumn begins.

If, however, we are to participate in this waning of nature, just as we do in nature's growing time, we can do so only if in a certain sense we are able to experience the dying away of nature in our own inner being. For if a man becomes more sensitive to the secret workings of nature, and thus participates actively in nature's germinating and fruiting, it follows that he will livingly experience also the effects of autumn in the outer world. But it would be comfortless for man if he could experience this only in the form it takes in nature; if he were to come only to a nature-consciousness concerning the secrets of autumn and winter, as he readily does concerning the secrets of spring and summer. When the events of autumn and winter draw on, when Michaelmas comes, he certainly must enter sensitively into the processes of fading and dying; but he must not, as he does in summer, give himself over to a nature-consciousness. On the contrary, he must then devote himself to self-consciousness. In the time when external nature is dying, he must oppose nature-consciousness with the force of self-consciousness.

And then the form of Michael stands before us again. If, under the impulse of Anthroposophy, a man enters thus into the enjoyment of nature, the consciousness of nature, but then also awakes in himself an autumnal self-consciousness, then the picture of Michael with the dragon will stand majestically before him, revealing in picture-form the overcoming of nature-consciousness by self-consciousness when autumn draws near. This will come about if man can experience not only an inward spring and summer, but also a dying, death-bringing autumn and winter. Then it will be possible for the picture of Michael with the dragon to appear again as a forcible Imagination, summoning man to inner activity.

For a man who out of present-day spiritual knowledge wrestles his way through to an experience of this picture, it expresses something very powerful. For when, after St. John's tide, July, August and September draw on, he will come to realise how he has been living through a waking-sleep of inner planetary experience in company with the earth's elemental beings, and he will become aware of what this really signifies.

It signifies an inner process of combustion, but we must not picture it as being like external combustion. All the processes which take a definite form in the outer world go on also within the human organism, but in a different guise. And so it is a fact that these inner processes reflect the changing course of the year.

The inner process which occurs during high summer is a permeation of the organism by that which is represented crudely in the material world as sulphur. When a man lives with the summer sun and its effects, he experiences a sulphurising process in his physical-etheric being. The sulphur that he carries within him as a useful substance has a special importance for him in high summer, quite different from its importance at other seasons. It becomes a kind of combustion process. It is natural for man that the sulphur within him should thus rise at midsummer to a specially enhanced condition. Material substances in different beings have secrets not dreamt of by materialistic science.

Everything physical-etheric in man is thus glowed through at midsummer with inward sulphur-fire, to use Jacob Boehm's expression. It is a gentle, intimate process, not perceptible by ordinary consciousness, but—as is generally true of other such processes—it has a tremendous, decisive significance for events in the cosmos.

This sulphurising process in human bodies at midsummer, although it is so mild and gentle and imperceptible to man himself, has very great importance for the evolution of the cosmos. A great deal happens out there in the cosmos when in summer human beings shine inwardly with the sulphur-process. It is not only the physically visible glow-worms (Johannis Käferchen) which shine out around St. John's Day. Seen from other planets, the inner being of man then begins to shine, becoming visible as a being of light to the etheric eyes of other planetary beings. That is the sulphurising process. At the height of summer human beings begin to shine out into cosmic space as brightly for other planetary beings as glow-worms shine with their own light in the meadows at St. John's time.

From the standpoint of the cosmos this is a majestically beautiful sight, for it is in glorious astral light that human beings shine out into the cosmos during high summer, but at the same time it gives occasion for the Ahrimanic power to draw near to man. For this power is very closely related to the sulphurising process in the human organism. We can see how, on the one hand, man shines out into the cosmos in the St. John's light, and on the other how the dragon-like serpent-form of Ahriman winds its way among the human beings shining in the astral light and tries to ensnare and embrace them, to draw them down into the realm of half-conscious sleep and dreams. Then, caught in this web of illusion, they would become world-dreamers, and in this condition they would be a prey to the Ahrimanic powers. All this has significance for the cosmos also.

And when in high summer, from a particular constellation, meteors fall in great showers of cosmic iron, then this cosmic iron, which carries an enormously powerful healing force, is the weapon which the gods bring to bear against Ahriman, as dragon-like he tries to coil round the shining forms of men. The force which falls on the earth in the meteoric iron is indeed a cosmic force whereby the higher gods endeavour to gain a victory over the Ahrimanic powers, when autumn comes on. And this majestic display in cosmic space, when the August meteor showers stream down into the human shining in the astral light, has its counterpart—so gentle and apparently so small—in a change that occurs in the human blood. This human blood, which is in truth not such a material thing as present-day science imagines, but is permeated throughout by impulses from soul and spirit, is rayed through by the force which is carried as iron into the blood and wages war there on anxiety, fear and hate. The processes which are set going in every blood-corpuscle when the force of iron shoots into it are the same, on a minute human scale, as those which take place when meteors fall in a shining stream through the air. This permeation of human blood by the anxiety-dispelling force of iron is a meteoric activity. The effect of the raying in of the iron is to drive fear and anxiety out of the blood.

And so, as the gods with their meteors wage war on the spirit who would like to radiate fear over all the earth through his coiling serpent-form, and while they cause iron to stream radiantly into this fear-tainted atmosphere, which reaches its peak when autumn approaches or when summer wanes—so the same process occurs inwardly in man, when his blood is permeated with iron. We can understand these things only if we understand their inner spiritual significance on the one hand, and if on the other we recognise how the sulphur-process and the iron-process in man are connected with corresponding events in the cosmos.

A man who looks out into space and sees a shooting-star should say to himself, with reverence for the gods: “That occurrence in the great expanse of space has its minute counterpart continuously in myself. There are the shooting-stars, while in every one of my blood-corpuscles iron is taking form: my life is full of shooting-stars, miniature shooting-stars.” And this inner fall of shooting-stars, pointing to the life of the blood, is especially important when autumn approaches, when the sulphur-process is at its peak. For when men are shining like glow-worms in the way I have described, then the counter-force is present also, for millions of tiny meteors are scintillating inwardly in their blood.

This is the connection between the inner man and the universe. And then we can see how, especially when autumn is approaching, there is a great raying-out of sulphur from the nerve-system towards the brain. The whole man can then be seen as a sulphur-illuminated phantom, so to speak.

But raying into this bluish-yellow sulphur atmosphere come the meteor swarms from the blood. That is the other phantom. While the sulphur-phantom rises in clouds from the lower part of man towards his head, the iron-forming process rays out from his head and pours itself like a stream of meteors into the life of the blood.

Such is man, when Michaelmas draws near. And he must learn to make conscious use of the meteoric-force in his blood. He must learn to keep the Michael Festival by making it a festival for the conquest of anxiety and fear; a festival of inner strength and initiative; a festival for the commemoration of selfless self-consciousness.

Just as at Christmas we celebrate the birth of the Redeemer, and at Easter the death and resurrection of the Redeemer, and as at St. John's Tide we celebrate the outpouring of human souls into cosmic space, so at Michaelmas—if the Michael Festival is to be rightly understood—we must celebrate that which lives spiritually in the sulphurising and meteorising process in man, and should stand before human consciousness in its whole soul-spiritual significance especially at Michaelmas. Then a man can say to himself: “You will become lord of this process, which otherwise takes its natural course outside your consciousness, if—just as you bow thankfully before the birth of the Redeemer at Christmas and experience Easter with deep inner response—you learn to experience how at this autumn festival of Michael there should grow in you everything that goes against love of ease, against anxiety, and makes for the unfolding of inner initiative and free, strong, courageous will.” The Festival of strong will—that is how we should conceive of the Michael Festival. If that is done, if nature-knowledge is true, spiritual human self-consciousness, then the Michael Festival will shine out in its true colours.

But before mankind can think of celebrating the Michael Festival, there will have to be a renewal in human souls. It is the renewal of the whole soul-disposition of men that should be celebrated at the Michael Festival—not as an outward or conventional ceremony, but as a festival which renews the whole inner man.

Then, out of all I have described, the majestic image of Michael and the Dragon will arise once more. But this picture of Michael and the Dragon paints itself out of the cosmos. The Dragon paints himself for us, forming his body out of bluish-yellow sulphur streams. We see the Dragon shaping himself in shimmering clouds of radiance out of the sulphur-vapours; and over the Dragon rises the figure of Michael, Michael with his sword.

But we shall picture this rightly only if we see the space where Michael displays his power and his lordship over the dragon as filled not with indifferent clouds but with showers of meteoric iron. These showers take form from the power that streams out from Michael's heart; they are welded together into the sword of Michael, who overcomes the Dragon with his sword of meteoric iron.

If we understand what is going on in the universe and in man, then the cosmos itself will paint from out of its own forces. Then one does not lay on this or that colour according to human ideas, but one paints, in harmony with divine powers, the world which expresses their being, the whole being of Michael and the Dragon, as it can hover before one. A renewal of the old pictures comes about if one can paint out of direct contemplation of the cosmos. Then the pictures will show what is really there, and not what fanciful individuals may somehow portray in pictures of Michael and the Dragon.

Then men will come to understand these things, and to reflect on them with understanding, and they will bring mind and feeling and will to meet the autumn in the course of the year. Then at the beginning of autumn, at the Michael Festival, the picture of Michael with the Dragon will stand there to act as a powerful summons, a powerful spur to action, which must work on men in the midst of the events of our times. And then we shall understand how this impulse points symbolically to something in which the whole destiny—perhaps indeed the tragedy—of our epoch is being played out.

During the last three or four centuries we have developed a magnificent natural science and a far-reaching technology, based on the most widely-distributed material to be found on earth. We have learnt to make out of iron nearly all the most essential and important things produced by mankind in a materialistic age. In our locomotives, our factories, on all sides we see how we have built up this whole material civilisation on iron, or on steel, which is only iron transformed. And all the uses to which iron is put are a symbolic indication of how we have built our whole life and outlook out of matter and want to go on doing so. But that is a downward-leading path. Man can rescue himself from its impending dangers only if he starts to spiritualise life in this very domain, if he penetrates through his environment to the spiritual; if he turns from the iron which is used for making engines and looks up again to the meteoric iron which showers down from the cosmos to the earth and is the outer material from which the power of Michael is forged. Men must come to see the great significance of the following words: “Here on earth, in this epoch of materialism, you have made use of iron, in accordance with the insight gained from your observation of matter. Now, just as you must transform your vision of matter through the development of natural science into Spiritual Science, so must you rise from your former idea of iron to a perception of meteoric iron, the iron of Michael's sword. Then healing will come from what you can make of it.” This is the content of the aphorism:

O Man,
You mould it (iron) to your service,
You reveal it (iron) according to the value of its substance
In many of your works.
Yet it will bring you healing
Only when it reveals to you
The lofty power of its spirit.

That is, the lofty power of Michael, with the sword he has welded together in cosmic space out of meteoric iron. Healing will come when our material civilisation proves capable of spiritualising the power of iron into the power of Michael-iron, which gives man self-consciousness in place of mere nature-consciousness.

You have seen that precisely the most important demand of our time, the Michael-demand, is implicit in this aphorism, this script that reveals itself in the astral light.

Yesterday there stood before us the picture of Michael battling with the Dragon, as shown to us through an inner understanding of the course of the year. And art can really be nothing else than a reflection of what human beings feel in relation to the universe. Of course this is possible at various levels and from various standpoints; but on the whole we can speak of a work of art only when it expresses human feeling in such a way that through it the soul is opened to the secrets of the universe.

To-day, in the same spirit that led us to the culminating picture of Michael and the Dragon, we will carry further our study of the seasons of the year.

We know from yesterday's lecture that when autumn draws on, a kind of in-breathing by the Earth, a spiritual in-breathing, occurs, and the elemental beings are drawn back into the bosom of the Earth. Those who went out in the height of summer and turned back at Michaelmas are drawn further and further in, until in the depths of winter they are united most intimately with the Earth.

Now we must realise that in winter the Earth is above all self-contained, enclosed in itself. It has drawn back everything of a spiritual nature which it had allowed to stream out from itself during the summer. Hence in the depths of winter the Earth is more earthly, more truly itself, than at any other time. And while for our further studies we must keep firmly in view this winter character of the Earth, we must of course not forget that when winter prevails over half the Earth, the other half is experiencing summer. This is a fact we must keep in the background of our minds. But just now we are concerned with the coming of winter to one part of the Earth. It is then that the Earth unfolds its own nature in the deepest sense; the nature that makes it truly Earth.

Let us now look at this Earth of ours. It has a solid core, hidden below its visible outer surface, which in turn is largely covered by water, the hydrosphere. The continents are only floating, as it were, in this great watery expanse. And we can picture the hydrosphere as extending up into the atmosphere, for the atmosphere is always permeated by a watery element. Certainly this is much thinner than the water of the sea and the river, but there is no definite boundary in the atmosphere where the watery element comes to an end. Hence if we are to show schematically what the Earth is like in this respect we shall have, first, a solid core in the centre. Around it we have the watery regions (blue). I must of course indicate the jutting up of the continents: they will have to be exaggerated, for they should really be no more prominent than the irregularities on the skin of an orange. Then I must put in the hydrosphere, this watery part of the atmosphere all round the Earth. Let us look at this picture (blue) and ask ourselves what it really represents? It is not something made up out of itself: it is water shaped by the whole cosmos. The reason why this body of air and water is spherical is because the cosmos extends round it as a sphere on all sides. And this means that strong forces play in on the Earth as a whole.

The effect is that if we were to look at the Earth from some other planet, it would appear to us as a great water-drop in the cosmos. There would be all sorts of prominences on it—the continents, which would be rather differently coloured—but as a whole it would appear to us as a great water-drop in the midst of the universe.

Let us now consider this from a cosmic standpoint. What is this great water-drop? It is something which takes its shape from its whole cosmic environment.

If one approaches the matter from a spiritual-scientific point of view, bringing Imagination and Inspiration to bear on it, one comes to know what this water-drop really is. It is nothing other than a gigantic drop of quicksilver; but the quicksilver is present in an extraordinarily rarefied condition.

The possibility of these high attenuations has been shown by the work of Frau Dr. Kolisko. At our Biological Institute in Stuttgart the attempt has been made to put this on an exact footing. It has been possible to make dilutions of substances up to one part in a trillion, and in fact to establish precisely the effects which such high dilutions of particular substances can have. Hitherto, in homoeopathy, this has been merely a matter of belief; now it has been raised to the level of exact science. The graphs which have been drawn leave no doubt to-day that the effects of the smallest particles follow a rhythmical course. I will not go into details; the work has been published and these findings can now be verified. Here I wish to point out only that even in the earthly realm the effects of enormous dilutions must be reckoned with.

Here we are concerned with something of which we can say, when we use it on a small scale—this is water. We can draw water from a river or a well and use it as water. Yes, it is water, but there is no water that consists solely of hydrogen and oxygen. It would be absurd for anyone to suppose that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen only. In the case of mineral waters and such-like, it is of course obvious that something else is present. But there is no water composed solely of hydrogen and oxygen: that is only a first approximation. All water, wherever it appears, is permeated with something else. Essentially, the whole water-mass of the Earth is quicksilver for the universe. Only the small quantities we use are water for us. For the universe, this water is not water, but quicksilver.

Hence we can say, first of all, that in so far as we are considering the hydrosphere in relation to water, we have to do with a drop of quicksilver in the cosmos. Embedded as it were in this drop of quicksilver, naturally, are metallic substances—in brief, all the earthly substances. They represent the solid mass of the Earth, and they tend to assume their own special forms. Thus in the structure as a whole we observe [the general spherical form of quick]silver. Ordinary metallic quicksilver, one might say, is only the symbol produced by nature for the general activity of quicksilver, leading quite definitely to a spherical form. Embedded in the whole sphere are the metallic crystals, with the manifold variety of their own distinctive forms. Hence we have before us this formation of warmth, water, air: its tendency, as I have said, is to assume a spherical form, with individual crystal forms within it.

Even if we single out the air (dark red) which surrounds the Earth as its atmosphere, we can never speak simply of air, for the air always has a tendency to contain warmth in some degree: the air is permeated with warmth (violet). Thus we must add this fourth element, warmth, which enters into the air.

Now this warmth, which comes into the air from above, carries pre-eminently within it the sulphur-process, imparted to it from the cosmos. And to the sulphur-process is added the mercurial process, as I have described it in connection with the hydrosphere. Thus we have air-warmth—the sulphur-process; water-air—the mercurial process.

If now we turn towards the inner part of the Earth, we come to the acid-formation process, and especially to the salt-process, for the salts derive from the acids; and this is what the Earth really wants to be. Hence, when we look up into the cosmos, we are really looking at the sulphur-process. When we consider the tendency of the Earth to form itself into a cosmic water-drop, we are really looking at the mercurial process. And if we turn our gaze to the solid earth underfoot, which in spring gives rise to all that we see as growing, sprouting life, we are looking at the salt-process.

This salt-process is all-important for springtime life and growth. For the roots of plants, in forming themselves out of the seeds, depend for their whole growth on their relation to the salt-formations in the soil. It is these salt-formations—in the widest sense of the term—which give substance to the roots and enable them to act as the earthly foundation of plant-life.

Thus in turning back to the Earth we encounter the salt-process. This is what the Earth makes of itself in the depths of winter, whereas in summer there is much more intermingling. For in summer the air is shot through with sulphurising processes, which indeed occur also in lightning and thunder; they penetrate far down, so that the whole course of the season is sulphurised. Then we come at Michaelmas to the time when the sulphur-process is driven back by meteoric iron, as I told you yesterday. During summer, too, the salt-process mingles with the atmosphere, for the growing plants carry the salts up through their leaves and blossoms right up into the seeds. Naturally, we find the salts widely distributed in the plant; they etherealise themselves in the etheric oils and so on; they approach the sulphurising process. The salts are carried up through the plants; they stream out and become part of the being of the atmosphere.

In high summer, accordingly, we have a mingling of the mercurial element, always present in the Earth, with the sulphurising and salt-forming elements. If at this season we stand here on Earth, our head actually projects into a mixture of sulphur, mercury and salt; while the arrival of deep winter means that each of these three principles reverts to its own inner condition. The salts withdraw into the inwardness of the Earth, and the tendency for the hydrosphere to assume a spherical shape reasserts itself—imaged in winter by the snow-mantle that covers parts of the Earth. The sulphur process withdraws, so that there is no particular occasion to observe it. In place of it, something else comes to the fore during the deep winter season.

The plants have developed from spring until autumn, finally concentrating themselves in their seeds. What is this seeding process? When plants run to seed, they are doing what we are constantly doing in a dull human way when we use plants for food. We cook them. Now the development of a plant to blossom and then to seed-production is nature's cookery; it approaches the sulphur-process. The plants grow up into the sulphur-process. They are most strongly sulphurised, so to speak, when summer is at its height. When autumn draws on, this combustion process comes to an end.

In the organic realm, of course, everything is different from the processes we observe in their coarse inorganic form; but the outcome of every combustion process is ash. And in addition to the salt-formation, which comes from quite another quarter and is needed within the Earth, we must add all that falls down on to the Earth from the blossoming and seeding of plants as a result of the cooking or combustion process. This falling down of ash—just as ash falls down in our stoves—plays a great role which is usually overlooked. For in the course of seed-formation—which is fundamentally a combustion process—the seed-nature is continually showering down on the Earth, so that from October onwards the Earth is quite impregnated with this form of ash.

If therefore we observe the Earth in the depths of winter, we have first the internal tendency to salt-formation; besides this we have the mercurial shaping-process in its most strongly marked form; and while in high summer we have to pay attention to the sulphurising process in the cosmos outside the Earth, we now have in winter the ash-forming process.

So, you see, the tendency which reaches its culmination at Christmas is prepared in advance from Michaelmas onwards. The Earth is gradually more and more consolidated, so that in deep winter it becomes really a cosmic body, expressing itself in mercurial formation, salt-formation, ash-formation. What does this signify for the cosmos?

Now, if we can suppose that a flea, let us say, were to become an anatomist and were to study a bone, it would have before it an exceptionally small piece of bone, because the flea itself is so small and it would be examining the bone from a flea's perspective. The flea would then discover that in the bone we have to do with phosphoric lime in an amorphous condition, with carbonic acid, lime and so forth. But our flea anatomist would never come to the point of realising that the fragment of bone is a small part only of a complete skeleton. Certainly, the flea jumps, but in studying the tiny piece of bone he would never get beyond it. Similarly, it would not help a human geologist or mineralogist to be able to jump about like a gigantic earth-flea. In studying the mountain ranges of the Earth, which in their totality represent a skeleton, he would still be working on a miniature scale. The flea would never come to describing the skeleton as a whole; he would hack out a tiny piece with his little hammer. Suppose this were a tiny piece of collar-bone; nothing in the constituents of the little piece, carbonate of lime, phosphate of lime and so on, would reveal to the flea that it belonged to a collar-bone, still less that it was part of a complete skeleton. The flea would have hacked off a tiny piece and would then describe it from his own flea-standpoint, just as a man describes the Earth when somewhere—let us say in the Dornach hills—he has hacked out a bit of Jura limestone. Then he describes this bit, and works up his findings into mineralogy, geology, and so on. It is still the same flea-standpoint, though certainly somewhat enlarged.

This, of course, is no way to arrive at the truth. We need to recognise that the Earth is a single whole, most firmly consolidated during winter through its salt-formation, its mercurial formation and its ash-formation. Let us then ask what the whole nature of the Earth signifies when we look at it not from the flea's point of view, but in relation to the cosmos.

We will first consider salt-formation, taking this in the widest sense to connote a physical deposit, exemplified in the way ordinary cooking-salt dissolved in a glass of water will separate out as a deposit on the bottom of the glass. (I will not now go into the chemical side of this, though the result would be the same if I did). Now a salt-deposit of this kind has the characteristic of being porous, as it were, to the spiritual. Where there is a salt-deposit, the spiritual has a clear field of entry. In mid-winter, accordingly, when the Earth consolidates itself on the basis of salt-formation, the effect is, first of all, that the elemental beings who are united with the Earth have, one might say, an agreeable abode within it. But other spiritual elements, too, are drawn in from the cosmos and are able to dwell in the salt-crust which lies immediately below the Earth's surface. Here, in this salt-crust, the Moon-forces are particularly active—I mean the remains of those Moon-forces which were left behind, as I have often mentioned, when the Moon separated from the Earth.

These Moon-forces are active in the Earth chiefly because of the salt present in it. So in winter—beneath the snow cover which strives in one direction, one might say, towards the quicksilver form and in the other passes down into the salt deposits—we have the solid earth-substance, the salt, permeated with spirituality. In winter the Earth does indeed become spiritual in itself, through the consolidating influence, especially, of its salt-content.

Now water—that is, cosmic quicksilver—has the inner tendency to shape itself spherically. We can see this inner tendency everywhere. And because of this the Earth in mid-winter is enabled not only to become rigid through its salt-content and to permeate the salt with spirit, but also to vivify the spiritualised substance and to lead it over into the realm of life. In winter the whole surface of the Earth is reinvigorated. The quicksilver principle, working into the spiritualised salt, activates everywhere this tendency towards new life. Below the Earth's surface, in winter, there is a tremendous reinforcement of the Earth's capacity to produce life.

This life, however, would become a Moon-life, for it is chiefly the Moon-forces that are active in it. But because ash falls down from the seeds of plants, so that everything I have just described is impregnated with ash, something is present which keeps the whole process in the domain of the Earth.

The plants have striven upwards into the sulphur-process, and out of this process the ash has fallen down. This is what draws the plant back to Earth, after it has striven up into the etheric-spiritual. So in the depths of winter we have on the Earth's surface not only the tendency to absorb the spirit and to reinvigorate itself, but the tendency also to transform the Moon-like into the earthly. Through the remains of the fallen ash the Moon is compelled to promote Earthly life, not Moon life.

Now let us turn from the Earth's surface and look at the air-formation that surrounds the Earth. For the air, it is of the utmost importance always, but especially in midwinter, that the Sun radiates warmth and light through it—though the light is less relevant to our immediate considerations.

You see, science treats things always in isolation from one another, as in reality they never are. Air, we are told, consists of oxygen and nitrogen and other elements. But in fact this is not so: the air is not made up merely of oxygen and nitrogen, for it is always rayed through by the Sun. That is the reality: air is always permeated in the daytime by the activity of the Sun. And what does this activity signify? It signifies that the air up above is always seeking to tear itself away from the Earth. If salt-formation, mercurial formation and ash-formation were alone active, then nothing but the earthly would be there. But up above, because the activities striving upwards from the Earth are taken up into the activity of Sun and air, Earth-activity is transmuted into cosmic activity. The power to work on its own accord in the living-spiritual is taken away from the Earth. The Sun makes its power felt in everything that grows and sprouts upwards from the Earth. And so, in a certain region above the Earth, a quite special tendency is apparent to spiritual vision. On the Earth itself everything seeks to become spherical (dark red); in this upper region the sphere is continually impelled to flatten out into a plane (reddish). Naturally it will tend to resume its spherical shape, but up there the spherical is always inclined to flatten itself out. The upper influences would really like to break up the Earth, to disintegrate it, so that everything might become a flat surface, spread out there in the cosmos.

If this were to come about, the Earth's activities would disappear completely, and up above we should have a kind of air in which the stars would be active. This is very plainly expressed in man himself. What part do we as human beings have in the sun-filled air above? We breathe it in, and because of this the activity of the Sun extends right into us, downwards certainly in a sense, but chiefly upwards. Through our head we are continually drawn away from the influences of the Earth, and on this account our head is enabled to participate in the whole cosmos. Our head would really always like to go out into the region where the plane prevails. If our head belonged only to the Earth, especially in winter-time, our whole experience of thinking would be different. We should then have the feeling that all our thoughts wished to take a rounded shape. In fact they do not; they have a certain lightness, adaptability, fluidity, and this we owe to the characteristic incursion of the activity of the Sun.

Here we have the second tendency; here the Sun-like strikes into the Earthly. But this is at its weakest in winter. If we were to go still further out, something else would come into the picture. Then we should have to do no longer with the activity of the Sun, but only with the activity of the stars, for the stars in turn have a great influence on our head. Inasmuch as the Sun gives us back to the cosmos, so to speak, the stars have their own deeply penetrating influence on our head, and so on the whole formation of the human organism.

But now I must tell you that what I have just been describing no longer holds good to-day, for in a certain way man has emancipated himself, in his growth and his whole evolution, from the Earth's activities. If were to go back to the old Lemurian time, or especially to the Polarian time that preceded it, we should find the whole thing quite different. We should observe that everything that occurred on the Earth had a great influence on the human organism. You will indeed have gathered this from the account of the evolution of the Earth given in my Occult Science. In those early times we should find man placed in the very midst of the activities I have been telling you about. To-morrow I will describe how man has emancipated himself from all this; to-day I will speak as though we were still fully involved in it. And here we come to something that to present-day understanding will seem highly paradoxical.

We can ask the question: What does a mother become when she is beginning to develop a new human being? Originally—after all that has first to happen in order that a new human being may come into existence on Earth—it is the salt-forming Moon-forces which chiefly influence the female organism at that time. So we can say that while a woman is otherwise and in general a human being, the salt-forming Moon-forces then have the strongest influence on her. We can put this in spiritual-scientific terms by saying: The woman becomes Moon, just as the Earth—especially just below its surface—becomes Moon when Christmas approaches.

So it is not the Earth only which becomes mostly Moon when deep winter prevails; this tendency of the Earth to become Moon occurs again, in like manner, when a woman prepares herself to receive a new human being. And precisely because of this, the Sun-influence on her becomes different, just as it is different in mid-winter, compared with high summer. And the formation in the woman of the new human being stands wholly under the influence of the Sun. Because the woman takes up the Moon-activities, the salt-activities, so strongly into herself, she becomes able to take up the Sun-activities on their own account. In ordinary life the Sun-activities are taken up by the human organism through the heart and from there spread out over the whole organism. But directly a woman prepares herself to bring forth a new human being, the Sun-activities are concentrated on the forming of this new life. Thus we can say schematically: The woman becomes Moon so that she can take up the Sun-activities into herself; and the new human being, existing first as an embryo, is in this sense wholly Sun-activity. The embryo is enabled to come into being through this concentration of Sun-activities.

The old instinctive clairvoyance knew this in its own way. At one time in old Europe a remarkable idea prevailed. It was thought that before a new-born child had taken any earthly nourishment, it was a quite different being from what it became after imbibing its first drop of milk. That was the old Germanic belief. For these people had an instinctive feeling that the new-born infant was a Sun-being, and that through the first earthly nourishment it received it became a creature of Earth. Hence the new-born infant did not at first belong to the Earth at all. Again, according to occult laws which I might touch on at some other time, old Germanic custom gave the father—at whose feet the child was always laid directly it was born—the right either to let it grow up or to destroy it; for it was not yet a creature of Earth. If it had taken one single drop of milk, he no longer had the right to destroy it. It would then have to remain an Earth-creature, because it had been ordained by nature, by the world, by the cosmos, to be one. In such old customs there lives something of immensely profound significance.

Here indeed is the basis of the saying: The child is of the Sun. So it is possible now to look on the woman who has borne the child as a being who is in the deepest sense related to all earthly processes. For the Earth prepares itself in mid-winter through the salt-tendency—that is, the Moon tendency—so that it may be best able to receive the Sun-element. The Earth then reaches out beyond the Sun-element to the heavens, to which also the human head belongs.

Hence we can say something like this. In order to bring the essence of Christmas rightly before our souls, let us transpose ourselves into the being of man. In the Christmas spirit is expressed the coming to birth of the Jesus-child, who is ordained to receive the Christ into himself. Let us look closely at this. If we look at the figure of Mary, we are bound to see that her head reflects something heavenly in its whole appearance, its whole expression. We must then indicate that Mary is preparing to take into herself the Sun, the child, the Sun as it rays through the encircling air. And then we can see in the form of Mary the Moon-Earthly element.

Now imagine how this could be portrayed. First we have the Moon-Earth element, spread out below the Earth's surface. Then, going out into the great spaces, we find a raying forth from man into the cosmos, and this could be shown as a heavenly Earth-star radiance, sent out by the Earth into the cosmos. The head of Mary is like a radiant star, which means that her whole countenance and bearing must give expression to this star-radiant quality.

If then we turn to the breast, we come to the breathing process; to the Sun-element, the child, forming itself out of the clouds in the atmosphere, shot through by the rays of the Sun.

Further down we come to the Moon-like, salt-forming forces, given outward expression by bringing the limbs into dynamic relation with the Earth and letting them arise out of the salt and the Moon-elements in the Earth. Here we have the Earth in so far as it is inwardly transfigured by the Moon.

All this would really have to be shown through a kind of rainbow colouring. For if we were to look from the cosmos towards the Earth, through the shining of the stars, it would be as though the Earth were wishing to shine inwardly, beneath its surface, in rainbow colours. On the Earth we have something related to the Earth-forces, to gravity and to the formation of the limbs, which can be expressed only through the garment which follows the Earth-forces in its folds. So we should have the garment down below, in relation to the Earth-forces. Then we should have to portray, a little higher up, that which gives expression to the Earth-Moon element. We could even picture the Moon, if we wished to symbolise; but the Moon-element is clearly expressed in the configuration of the Earth.

Higher up still, we must bring in that which comes forth from the Moon-element. We see how the clouds are permeated with many human heads, pressing downwards; one of them is condensed into the Sun resting on Mary's arm: the Jesus-child. And all this must be completed, in an upward direction, through the star-radiance expressed in the countenance of Mary.

If we understand the depths of winter, how it shows us the connection of the cosmos with man, with man who takes up the birth-forces in the Earth, the only possible way of presenting the woman is in this form: formed out of the clouds, endowed with the forces of the Earth: with the Moon-forces below, with the Sun-forces in the middle, and above, towards the head, with the forces of the stars. The picture of Mary with the little Jesus-child arises out of the cosmos itself.

If we understand the cosmos in autumn, so as to represent all its formative forces in a picture, we come by necessity to an artistic portrayal of Michael and the Dragon, as I indicated yesterday. In the same way, everything we feel at Christmas-time flows together into the picture of Mary and the child—that picture which hovered so often before painters in earlier times, especially in the first Christian centuries, and of which the last echoes have been preserved in Raphael's Sistine Madonna.

The Sistine Madonna was born out of the great instinctive knowledge of nature and the spirit which prevailed in ancient times. For it is a picture of the Imagination which must in fact come to a man who transposes his inner vision into the secrets of Christmas in such a way that they become for him a living picture.

Hence we can say: The course of the seasons must come to expression for inner vision in clear and glorious Imaginations. If one goes out with one's whole being into the world, the approach of autumn becomes the glorious Imagination of Michael's fight with the Dragon. Just as the Dragon can be represented only in a sulphurous form—born out of the sulphur-clouds—and just as the sword of Michael emerges when we think of the meteoric iron as concentrated in the sword and blended with it, so out of all that we can feel at Christmas time, arises the picture of Mary the mother, the folds of her robe following the forces of the Earth, while in the region of the breast—even these details are apparent in the painting—her garment has to be inwardly rounded, taking on the quicksilver form, so that here one has a feeling of inward enclosure. Here the Sun-forces can find entry, and the innocent Jesus-child, who must be thought of as having yet received no earthly nourishment, is the Sun-activity resting on Mary's arm, with the radiance of the stars above. That is how we have to represent the head and eyes of Mary, as though a light were shining out from within them towards men. And the Jesus-child in Mary's arm must appear as though emerging from the rounded cloud-shapes, tender and lovable, inwardly sheltered; and then the garment, subject to earthly gravity, expressing what the force of earthly gravity can become.

All this is best rendered in colours. Then we have the picture which comes to shine out for us as a cosmic Imagination at Christmas-time—a picture we can live with until Easter, when out of cosmic relationships once again an Easter Imagination can arise; we will speak of it tomorrow.

You will see from this that art is drawn from the heavens and their interplay with the Earth. True art is an expression of that which man experiences in the cosmos, spiritual-psychical-physical, which reveals itself to him in magnificent Imaginations. So, in order to represent all that is involved in the inner struggle for the development of self-consciousness out of nature-consciousness, nothing will do but the grand picture of Michael's fight with the Dragon; and in order to bring before us everything that can work from nature into our souls during the deep winter season, we have an artistic, imaginative expression of it in the picture of the Mother and child.

To observe the course of the seasons is to follow the great cosmic artist, so that the things which the heavens imprint on the Earth are brought to life again in powerful pictures—pictures which grow into realities for the mind of man.

Thus the course of the year can reveal itself to us in four Imaginations: the Michael Imagination, the Mary Imagination and—as we shall see later on—the Easter Imagination and the St. John Imagination.

We must realise clearly how it is that in the depths of winter the Earth, in relation to the cosmos, is a being enclosed within itself. During the winter the Earth is, so to speak, wholly Earth, with a concentrated Earth-nature. In high summer—to add this contrast for the sake of clarity—the Earth is given over to the cosmos, lives with the cosmos. And in between, during spring and autumn, there is always a balance between these extremes.

All this has the deepest significance for the Earth's whole life. Naturally, what I shall be saying applies only to that part of the Earth's surface where a corresponding transition from winter to spring takes place.

Let us start, as we have always done in these lectures, by considering the purely material side. We will look at the salt-deposits which we have had to treat as the most important factor in winter-time. We will study this first in the limestone deposits, which are indeed a phenomenon of the utmost importance for the whole being of the Earth.

You need only go out-of-doors here, where we are surrounded everywhere by the Jura limestone, and you will have before you all that I am going to begin by describing to-day. Ordinary observation is so superficial that for most people limestone is simply limestone, and outwardly there really is no perceptible difference between winter-limestone and spring-limestone. But this failure to distinguish between them comes from the standpoint which yesterday I called the flea-standpoint. The metamorphoses of limestone appear only when we look further out into the cosmos, as it were. Then we find a subtle difference between winter-limestone and spring-limestone, and it is precisely this which makes limestone the most important of all deposits in the soil. After all the various considerations we have gone into here, and since we know that soul and spirit are to be found everywhere, we can allow ourselves to speak of all such substance as vivified, ensouled beings. Thus we can say that winter-limestone is a being content within itself.

If we enter into the being of winter-limestone with Intuition—the Intuition described in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds—we find it permeated throughout with the most diverse spirituality, made up of the elemental beings who dwell in the Earth. But the limestone is as it were contented, as a human head may be when it has solved an important problem and feels happy to have the thoughts which point to the solution. We perceive—for Intuition always embraces feeling—an inner contentment in the whole neighbourhood of the limestone formations during the winter season.

If we were to swim under water, we should perceive water everywhere; and similarly, if we move spiritually through the process of limestone formation, we perceive this winter contentment on all sides. It expresses itself as an inner permeation of the winter-limestone by mobile, ever-changing forms—living, spiritual forms which appear as Imaginations.

When spring approaches, however, and especially when March comes, the limestone becomes—we may say—dull in respect of its spiritual qualities. It loses them, for, as you know from previous accounts, the elemental beings now take their way, through a kind of cosmic-spiritual breathing-out into the cosmos. The limestone's spiritual thinking qualities are dulled, but the remarkable thing is that it becomes full of eager desire. It develops a kind of inner vitality. A subtle life-energy arises increasingly in the limestone, becoming steadily more active as spring draws on, and even more so towards summer, as the plants shoot up.

These things are naturally not apparent in a crude outward form, but in a subtle, intimate way they do occur. The growing plants draw water and carbonic acid from the limestone in the soil. But this very loss signifies for the limestone an inner access of living activity, and it acquires on this account an extraordinary power of attraction for the Ahrimanic beings. Whenever spring approaches, their hopes revive. Apart from this, they have nothing particular to hope for from the realm of outer nature, because they are really able to pursue their activities only within human beings. But when spring draws near, the impression which the spring-limestone makes on them gives them the idea that after all they will be able to spread their dragon-nature through nature at large. Finding the spring-limestone full of life, they hope to be able to draw in also the astral element from the cosmos in order to ensoul the limestone—to permeate it with soul. So, when March is near, a truly clairvoyant observer of nature can witness a remarkable drama. He sees how everywhere the hopes of the Ahrimanic beings play over the Earth like an astral wind, and how the Ahrimanic beings strive with all their might to call down an astral rain, as it were. If they were to succeed, then in the summer this astral rain would transform the Earth into an ensouled being—or at least partly, as far as the limestone extends. And then, in autumn, the Earth would feel pain at every footfall on its surface.

This endeavour, this illusion, lays hold of the Ahrimanic beings every spring, and every spring it is brought to nothing. From a human standpoint one might say—surely by now the Ahrimanic beings must have become clever enough to give up these hopes. But the world is not just as human beings imagine it to be. The fact is that every spring the Ahrimanic beings have new hope of being able to transform the Earth into an ensouled, living being through an astral rain from above, and every year their illusions are shattered.

But man is not free from danger in the midst of these illusions. He consumes the nature-products which flourish in this atmosphere of hopes and illusions; and it is naïve to suppose that the bread he eats is merely corn, ground and baked. In outer nature these hopes are shattered, but the Ahrimanic beings long all the more to achieve their aim in man, who has a soul already. Thus every spring man is in danger of falling a victim—in subtle, intimate ways—to the Ahrimanic beings. In spring he is much more exposed to all the Ahrimanic workings in the cosmos than he is during other times of the year.

But now, if we direct our gaze upwards, to where the elemental beings of the Earth ascend, where they unite themselves with the cloud-formations and acquire an inner activity which is subject to planetary life, something else can be seen. As March approaches, and down below the Ahrimanic beings are at work, the elemental beings—who are wholly spiritual, immaterial, although they live within the material Earth—are transported up into the region of vapour, air and warmth. And all that goes on up there, among the active elemental beings, is permeated by Luciferic beings. Just as the Ahrimanic beings nourish their hopes and experience their illusions down below, so the Luciferic beings experience their hopes and illusions up above.

If we look more closely at the Ahrimanic beings, we find they are of etheric nature. And it is impossible for these beings, who are really those cast down by Michael, to expand in any other way than by trying to gain domination over the Earth through the life and desire that fill the limestone in spring.

The Luciferic beings up above stream through and permeate all the activities that have risen up from the Earth. They are of a purely astral nature. Through everything that begins to strive upwards in spring, they gain the hope of being able to permeate their astral nature with the etheric, and to call forth from the Earth an etheric sheath in which they could then take up their habitation.

Hence we can say: The Ahrimanic beings try to ensoul the Earth with astrality (reddish); the Luciferic beings try to take up the etheric into their own being (blue with yellow).

When now in spring the plants begin to sprout, they assimilate and draw in carbonic acid. Hence the carbonic acid is active in a higher region than it is in winter; it rises into the realm of the plants, and there it comes under the attraction of the Luciferic beings. While the Ahrimanic beings strive to ensoul the living limestone with a kind of astral rain, the Luciferic beings try to raise up a sort of carbonic acid mist or vapour from the Earth (blue, yellow). If they were to succeed, human beings on Earth would no longer be able to breathe. The Luciferic beings would draw up all that part of man, his etheric nature, which is not dependent on physical breathing, and by uniting themselves with it they would be able to become etheric beings, whereas they are now only astral beings. And then, with the extinction of all human and animal life on Earth, up above there would be a sheath of etheric angel-beings. That is what the Luciferic spirits strive and hope for, when the end of March comes on. They hope to change the whole Earth into a delicate shell of this kind, wherein they, densified through the etheric nature of man, could carry on their own existence.

If the Ahrimanic beings could realise their hopes, the whole of humanity would gradually be dissolved into the Earth: the Earth would absorb them. Finally there would arise out of the Earth—and that is Ahriman's intention—a single great entity into which all human beings would be merged: they would be united with it. But the transition to this union with the Earth would consist in this: man in his whole organism would become more and more like the living limestone. He would blend the living limestone with his organism and become more and more calcified. In this way he would transmute his bodily form into one that looked quite different—a sclerotic form with something like bat's wings and a head like this. This form would then be able to merge gradually into the earthly element, so that the whole Earth, according to the Ahrimanic idea, would become a living Earth-being.

If the Luciferic beings, on the other hand, could absorb the etheric nature of man, and thus condense themselves from an astral to an etheric condition, then out of them would arise something like an etheric form, in which the lower parts of the human organism would be more or less absent, with the upper part transformed. The body would be formed of Earth-vapour (blue), developed only as far down as the breast, with an idealised human head (red). And the peculiar thing is that this being would have wings, born as it were out of clouds (yellow). In front, these wings would concentrate into a sort of enlarged larynx; at the sides they would concentrate into ears, organs of hearing, which again would be connected with the larynx.

You see, I tried to represent the sclerotic form through the figure of Ahriman in the painting in the dome of the Goetheanum and plastically in the wood-carving of the Group. Similarly, the Luciferic shape, created out of Earth-vapour and cloud-masses, as it would be if it could take up the etheric from the Earth, is represented there.¹

Thus the two extremes of man are written into the life of the Earth itself: first, the extreme that man would come to if under the influence of Ahriman he were to take up the living limestone and thereby become gradually one with the Earth, dissolved into the whole living, sentient Earth. That is one extreme. The other extreme is what man would come to if the Luciferic beings were to succeed in causing a vapour of carbonic acid to rise from below, so that breathing would be extinguished and physical humanity would disappear, while the etheric bodies of men would be united with the astrality of the Luciferic angel-being up above.

Again we can say: These are the hopes, the illusions, of the Luciferic beings. Anyone who looks out as a seer into the great spaces of the cosmos does not see in the moving clouds, as in Shakespeare's play, a shape which looks first like a camel and then like something else. When March comes, he sees in the clouds the dynamic striving forces of the Luciferic beings, who would like to create out of the Earth a Luciferic sheath. Man sways between these two extremes. The desire of both the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic beings is to blot out humanity as it exists to-day.

These various activities are manifested within the life of the Earth. The hopes of the Luciferic beings are shattered once more every spring, but they work on in man. And in spring-time, while on one hand he is exposed to the Ahrimanic forces, he is also exposed more and more—and right on through the summer—to the Luciferic beings.

These forces, certainly, work in so subtle a way that they are noticed to-day only by someone who is spiritually sensitive and can really live with the course of events in the cosmos round the year. But in earlier times, even in the later Atlantean period, all this had great significance.

In those earlier times, for example, human reproduction was bound up with the seasons. Conception could occur only in the spring, when the forces were active in the way I have described, and births could therefore take place only towards the end of the year. The life of the Earth was thus wholesomely bound up with human life.²

Now a principle of the Luciferic beings is to set free everything on Earth, and among the things that have been freed are conception and birth. The fact that a human being can be born at any time of the year was brought about in earlier times by this Luciferic influence, which tends always to loosen man from the Earth, and it has become an established part of human freedom. Next time I will speak of influences that are still active, but to-day I wished to show you how in earlier times the aims of the Luciferic beings were actually achieved, up to a certain point. Otherwise, human beings could have been born only in winter.

As against this, the Ahrimanic beings try with all their might to draw man back into connection with the Earth. And since the Luciferic beings had this great influence in the past, the Ahrimanic beings have a prospect of at least partly achieving their purpose of binding man to the Earth by merging his mind and disposition with the earthly and turning him into a complete materialist. They would like to make his capacity to think and feel depend entirely on the food he digests. This Ahrimanic influence bears particularly on our own epoch and it will go on getting stronger and stronger.

If, therefore, we look back in time, we come to something accomplished by the Luciferic beings and bequeathed to us. If we look forward towards the end of the Earth, we see man faced with the threatening prospect that the Ahrimanic beings, since they cannot actually dissolve humanity into the Earth, will contrive at least to harden him, so that he becomes a crude materialist, thinking and feeling only what material substance thinks and feels in him.

The Luciferic beings accomplished their work in freeing man from nature, in the way I have described, at a time when man himself had as yet no freedom. Freedom has not arisen through human resolve or in an abstract way, as the usual account suggests, but because natural processes, such as the timing of births, have come under human control. When in earlier times it became obvious that children could be born at any season, this brought a feeling of freedom into the soul and spirit of man. Those are the facts. They depend far more on the cosmos than is commonly imagined.

But now that man has advanced in freedom, he should use his freedom to banish the threatening danger that Ahriman will fetter him to the Earth. For in the perspective of the future this threat stands before him. And here we see how into Earth-evolution there came an objective fact: the Mystery of Golgotha.

Although the Mystery of Golgotha had indeed to enter as a once-for-all event into the history of the Earth, it is in a sense renewed for human beings every year. We can learn to feel how the Luciferic force up above would like to suffocate physical humanity in carbonic vapour, while down below, the Ahrimanic forces would like to vivify the limestone masses of the Earth with an astral rain, so that man himself would be calcified and reduced to limestone. But then, for a person who can see into these things, there arises between the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic forces the figure of Christ; the Christ who, freeing Himself from the weight of matter, has Ahriman under his feet; who wrested Himself free from the Ahrimanic and takes no heed of it, having overcome it, as we have shown here in painting and sculpture. And here is shown also how the Christ overcomes the force that seeks to draw the upper part of man away from the Earth. The head of the Christ-figure, the conqueror of Ahriman, appears with a countenance, a look and a bearing such that the dissolvent forces of Lucifer cannot touch them. The Luciferic power drawn into the earthly and held there—such is the form of the Christ as He appears every year in Spring. That is how we must picture Him: standing on the earthly, which Ahriman seeks to make his own; victorious over death; ascending from the grave as the Risen One to the transfiguration which comes from carrying over the Luciferic into the earthly beauty of the countenance of Christ.

So there appears before our eyes, between the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic forms, the Risen Christ in his Resurrection form as the Easter picture; the Risen Christ, with Luciferic powers hovering above and the Ahrimanic powers under His feet.

This cosmic Imagination comes before us as the Easter Imagination, just as we had the Virgin and Child as the Christmas Imagination in deep winter, and the Michael Imagination for the end of September. You will see how right it was to portray the Christ in the form you see here—a form born out of cosmic happenings in the course of the year. There is nothing arbitrary about this. Every look, every trait in the countenance, every flowing fold in the garment should be thought of as placing the Christ-figure between the forms of Lucifer and Ahriman as the One who works in human evolution so that man may be wrested from the Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers at the very time, the time of Easter and Spring, when he could most readily fall victim to them.

Here precisely in the figure of Christ we see again how nothing can be rightly done out of the arbitrary fancies which are favoured in artistic circles to-day. If a man wishes to develop full freedom in the realm of art, he does not bind himself in a slavish, Ahrimanic way to materials and models; he rises freely into spiritual heights and there he freely creates, for it is in spiritual heights that freedom can prevail. Then he will create out of a bluish-violet vapour a kind of breast-form for the Luciferic element, and a form consisting of wings, larynx and ear as though emerging from reddish clouds, so that this form can appear in full reality as an image both of what these beings are in their astral nature and of the etheric guise they threaten to assume.

Place vividly before you these wings of Lucifer, working in the astral and striving towards the etheric. You will find that because these wings are actually feeling about in the cosmic spaces, they are sensitive to all the secrets of force in the cosmos. Through their undulating movement, these wings, with their wave-like formation, are in touch with the mysterious, spiritual wave-activities of the cosmos. And the experience brought by these waves passes through the ear-formation into the inwardness of the Luciferic being and is carried further there. The Luciferic-being grasps through his ear-formation what he has sensed with his wings, and through the larynx—closely connected with the ear—this knowledge becomes the creative word that works and weaves in the forms of living beings.

If you picture a Luciferic being of this kind, with his reddish-yellow formation of wings, ears and larynx, you will see in him the activity which is sensitive to the secrets of the cosmos through his wings, experiences these secrets through the inward continuation of his ear-formation, and utters them as creative word through the larynx, bound up with wings and ears in one organic whole.

So was Lucifer painted in the cupola, and so is he represented in the sculpture-group which was intended to be the central point of our Goetheanum. Thus, in a certain sense, the Easter mystery was to have stood at this central point. But a completion in some form will be necessary, if one is to grasp the whole idea. For all that can be seen as the threatening Luciferic influence and the threatening Ahrimanic influence belongs to the inner being of the Nature-forces and the direction they strive to take in spring and on into summer; and standing over against them is the healing principle that rays out from the Christ. But a living feeling for all this will be attained when the whole architectural scheme is completed and what I have described exists in architectural and sculptured form, and when in the future it will be possible to present in front of the sculpture a living drama with two leading characters—man and Raphael

Within this architecture, and in the presence of the sculpture, there would have to be enacted a kind of Mystery Play, with man and Raphael as chief characters—Raphael with the staff of Mercury and all that belongs to it. In living artistic work everything is a challenge, and fundamentally there is no sculpture and no architecture which—if it is to be inwardly in accord with cosmic truth—does not call for a presentation in the space surrounding it of the artistic action it embodies. At Easter this architecture and sculpture would call for a Mystery Play, showing man taught by Raphael to see how far the Ahrimanic and Luciferic forces make him ill, and how through the power of Raphael he can be led to perceive and recognise the healing principle, the great world-therapy, which lives in the Christ-principle. If all this could be done—and the Goetheanum was designed for all of it—then at Easter there would be, amid much else, a certain crowning of all that can flow into mankind from the Ahrimanic and Luciferic secrets.

You see, if we learn to recognise the springtime activity of the Ahrimanic influence in the living limestone, through which a greedy endeavour is being made to take up the cosmic astral element, then we learn also to recognise the healing forces that reside in everything of a salt-like nature. The difference is not apparent in the coarser kind of activities, but it comes out in the healing ones. Thus we learn to know these healing influences by studying the working of the Ahrimanic beings in the salt-deposits of the Earth. For whatever is permeated by Ahrimanic influences during one season of the year—we will go more closely into this next time—is transformed into healing powers at another season. If we know what is going on secretly in the products and beings of nature, we learn to recognise their therapeutic power. It is the same with the Luciferic element: we learn to recognise the healing forces active in volatile substances that rise up from the Earth, and especially those present in carbonic acid. For just as I explained that in all water there is a mercurial, quicksilver element, so in carbonic acid there is always a sulphurous, phosphoric element.

There is no carbonic acid which consists simply—as the chemists say—of one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms: no such thing exists. In the carbonic acid we breathe out there is always a phosphoric, sulphurous element. This carbonic acid, CO₂, one atom of carbon and two of oxygen, is merely an abstraction, an intellectual concept formed in the human mind. In reality there is no carbonic acid which does not contain a phosphoric, sulphurous element in an extraordinarily diluted state, and the Luciferic beings strive towards it in the rising vapour.

Again, in this peculiar balance between the sulphur-element that becomes astral and the limestone that becomes living, the forces we can recognise as healing influences are expressed.

And so, among much else that is connected with the Easter Mystery, we should have the Easter Mystery Play enacted in front of the painting and the sculpture, and through it the communications about ways of healing which are given in the course of the year to those willing to listen would reach a climax in a truly living, artistically religious form. They would indeed be crowned by being placed in the whole course of the cosmos and the seasons; and then the Easter festival would embrace something that could be expressed in the words: “The presence of the World-Healer is felt: the Saviour who willed to lift the great evil from the world. His presence is felt.” For in truth He was, as I have often said, the Great Physician in the evolution of mankind. This will be felt, and to Him will sacrifice be offered with all the wisdom about healing influences that man can possess. This would be included in the Easter Mystery, the Easter ritual; and by celebrating the Easter festival in this way we should be placing it quite naturally in the context of the seasonal course of the year.

To begin with, in describing the powerful Imaginations which come before man at Michaelmas and Christmas, I was able to show them to you only as pictures. But in the case of the Easter Imagination, where over against the activities of the Nature-spirits there arises the higher life of the spirit, as this can develop in the neighbourhood of the Christ, I could show how the Imagination can lead directly to a ritual in the earthly realm, a ritual embracing things which must be cherished and preserved on Earth—the health-giving healing forces, and a knowledge of the Ahrimanic and Luciferic forces which could destroy the human organism. For Ahriman hardens man, while Lucifer wishes to dissolve and evaporate him through his breathing. In all this the forces that make for illness reside.

All that can be learnt in this way under the influence of the great teacher Raphael—who is really Mercury in Christian terminology and in Christian usage should carry the staff of Mercury—can be worthily crowned only in so far as it is received into the mysteries and ritual of Easter. Much else can come into them; of this I will speak in later lectures.

• 1. The central motif (painted from a sketch by Rudolf Steiner) in the small dome of the first Goetheanum, and in Rudolf Steiner's woodcarving of the Representative of Humanity.
• 2. See the lecture entitled Christmas at a Time of Grievous Destiny, given in Basle, 21st December, 1916. Printed in The Festivals and their Meaning, Vol. I: Christmas. (Rudolf Steiner Press.)

If now we go forward from Easter, the spring festival, we shall need to penetrate much more spiritually into the subject than we had to do in considering the previous seasons of the year. This may sound like a contradiction, but it is not so. In thinking of the Christmas season, we had to start from the way in which earthly mineral limestone is gradually transformed, and we carried this thought over to the time of Easter. In general, we have been turning our eyes on the active working of the spiritual in the material realm. Now in summer, high summer, man is really bound up with the being of Nature. From spring onwards into summer, Nature becomes constantly more active, more satisfied inwardly, and man with his whole being is woven into this mood of Nature. We can indeed say that in high summer man experiences a kind of Nature-consciousness. During spring, if he has the perception and feeling for it, he becomes one with all that is growing and sprouting. He blossoms with the flower, germinates with the plant, fruits with the plant, enters into everything that lives and has its being in the world outside. In this way he spreads out his own being over the being of Nature, and a kind of Nature-consciousness arises in him. Then, since in autumn Nature dies away and thus bears death within itself, man too, if he participates in what autumn—the time of Michaelmas—means for Nature, must experience in himself this dying away; but with his own self he must not take part in it. He must raise himself above it. In place precisely of a Nature-consciousness, a strengthening of his self-consciousness must occur. But in the glow of summer, just because a Nature-consciousness is then at its height in man, it is all the more necessary for the cosmos that—if only man is willing—the cosmos should bring the spiritual to meet him.

Hence we can say: In summer man is bound up with Nature, but, if he has the right feeling and perception for it, objective spirituality comes towards him from out of Nature's interweaving life. And so, to find the essential human being during the St. John's time, at midsummer, we must turn to the objective spirituality in the outer world, and this is present everywhere in Nature. Only in outward appearance is Nature the sprouting, budding—one might say the sleeping—being which calls forth from the powers of sleep the forces of vegetative growth, in which a kind of sleeping Nature-life is given form. But in this sleeping Nature, if only man has the perception for it, the spiritual which animates and weaves through everything in Nature is revealed.

So it is that if we follow Nature in high summer with deepened spiritual insight and with perceptive eyes, we find our gaze directed to the depths of the Earth itself. We find that the minerals down there send their inner crystal-forming process towards us more vividly than at any other time of the year. If we look with Imaginative perception into the depths of the Earth at St. John's-tide, we really have the impression that down there are the crystalline forms in which the hard earth consolidates itself—the very crystalline forms which gain their full beauty at the height of summer. At midsummer everything down below the earth shapes itself into lines, angles and surfaces. If we are to have an impression of it as a whole, we must picture this crystallising process as an interweaving activity, coloured throughout with deep blue.

I will try to show it on the blackboard, though of course I can do so only in a quite sketchy way. So we can say: On looking downwards, we have an impression of line-like forms, suffused with blue, and everywhere the blue is shot through with lines which sparkle like silver, so that everywhere within the silver-sparkling blue the crystallising process (white) can be discerned. It is as though Nature wishes to present her formative power in a wonderful plastic design, but a design that cannot be seen in the way we see with ordinary eyes. It is seen in such a way that one really feels oneself dissolved into the plastic design, and feels every silver-gleaming line down there to be within oneself, part of oneself. One feels that as a human form one has grown out of the blue depths of the earth's crust, and one feels oneself inwardly permeated with force by the silver-gleaming crystal lines. All this one feels as part of one's own being. And if one comes to oneself and asks—How is it that these silver-sparkling crystal lines and waves are working within myself? What is it that lives and works there, silver-gleaming in the blue of the Earth?—then one knows: That is cosmic Will. And one has the feeling of standing upon cosmic Will.

So it is when one looks down into the depths of the Earth. And if one looks up to the heights, how is it then? The impression one has is of out-spreading cosmic Intelligence. Human intelligence—as I have often said—is not of much value at its present stage. But the heavens at midsummer give one the feeling that cosmic Intelligence is alive everywhere—the intelligence not of single beings but of many beings who live together and within one another. Thus we have up there the out-spreading Intelligence woven through with light; the living Intelligence shining forth (yellow) as the polaric opposite of the Will. And while down below we feel—in that blue darkness everything is experienced only as forces, up above we feel—everything is such that in perceiving it we are illumined, permeated, with a feeling of intelligence.

And now within this radiant activity there appears—I cannot put it otherwise—a Form. When we were speaking of autumn, I had to name Michael as the most significant figure who rises before our souls out of the weaving of Nature. As to how Gabriel—to use the old name—enters into the time of Christmas, we shall have more to say. In the last lecture I showed you how at Easter, the season of spring, the figure of Raphael comes before us. He comes in dramatic guise, as the mediator who arouses in us the rightful approach, through reverence and worship, to what the Easter Imagination, the cosmic Easter Imagination, is. And now, for the St. John's time, there comes before us—to describe it in human terms, which are of course bound to be only approximate—an extraordinarily earnest countenance, which arises glowing warmly out of the pervading radiant Intelligence (red head in the yellow). We have the impression that this figure forms its body of light out of the radiant Intelligence. And for this to happen at the height of summer, something I have already described must come in: the elemental spirits of the Earth must soar upwards. As they do so, they weave themselves into the shining Intelligence up above, and the shining Intelligence receives them into itself. And out of that gleaming radiance the figure I have just mentioned takes form.

This form was divined by the old instinctive clairvoyance, and we can give it the same name by which it was known then. We can say: In summer, Uriel appears in the midst of the shining Intelligence.

It is with great earnestness that this representative of the weaving cosmic forces, seeking to embody himself in a vesture of light, appears in the time of summer. There are further things we can observe as the deeds accomplished by Uriel in the radiant light—Uriel, whose own intelligence arises fundamentally from the working together of the planetary forces of our planetary system, supported by the working of the fixed stars of the Zodiac; Uriel, who in his thoughts preserves the thoughts of the cosmos. And so, quite directly, the feeling comes: You clouds of summer, radiant with Intelligence, in which are reflected up above the blue crystal-formations of the earth below, just as these blue crystal-formations mirror in turn the shining Intelligence of the summer clouds—out of your shining there appears in high summer, with earnest countenance, a concentrated Imagination of Cosmic Understanding.

Now the deeds of this embodied cosmic Understanding, this cosmic Intelligence, are woven in light. Through the power of attraction residing in the concentrated cosmic Intelligence of Uriel, the silver forces (white) are drawn upwards, and in the light of this inwardly shining Intelligence, as seen from the Earth, they appear as radiant sunlight, densifying into a glory of gold. One has the immediate feeling that the gleaming silver, streaming up from below, is received by the sunlit radiance above. And the earth-silver—the phrase is quite correct—is changed by cosmic alchemy into the cosmic gold which lives and weaves in the heights.

If we follow these happenings further, on through August, we gain an impression of something that completes the form of Michael, already described. I told you what the sword of Michael is made of, and whence the dragon draws his coiling life. But now, in the radiant beauty which appears spiritually out of the cosmic weaving at the height of summer, we ask ourselves: Whence does Michael, who leads us over to the autumn time of Michaelmas, derive his characteristic raiment—the raiment which first lights up in golden sunshine and then shines forth inwardly as a silver-sparkling radiance within the golden folds? Where does Michael acquire this gold-woven, silver-sparkling raiment? It comes from that which is formed in the heights through the upward-raying silver and the gold that flows to meet it; from the transmutation by the sun's power of the silver sparkling up from the Earth. As autumn approaches we see how the silver given by the Earth to the cosmos returns as gold, and the power of this transmuted silver is the source of that which goes on in the Earth during winter, as I have described. The Sun-gold, formed in the heights, in the dominion of Uriel, during high summer, passes down to weave and flow through the depths of the Earth, where it animates the elements that in the midst of winter are seeking to become the living growth of the following year.

So you see that when we come to the time of sprouting, springing life, we can no longer speak of matter permeated by spirit, as we speak of the Earth in winter. We have to speak of spirit woven through with matter—that is, with silver and gold.

Of course you must not take all this in a crude sense; you must think of the silver and gold as diluted beyond human measure. Then you will come to feel that all this is a kind of background for the cosmic, light-filled deeds of Uriel, and a clear impression of the countenance and gaze of Uriel will come before you.

We feel a deep longing to understand this remarkable gaze, directed downwards, and we have the impression that we must look around to find out what it signifies. Its meaning first dawns upon the mind when as human beings we learn to look with spiritual eyes still more deeply into the blue, silver-gleaming depths of the Earth in summer. And we see that weaving around these silver-gleaming crystalline rays are shapes—disturbing shapes, I might almost call them—which continually gather and dissolve, gather and dissolve again.

Then we come to perceive—the vision will be different for everyone—that these shapes are human errors which stand out against the natural order of regular crystals here below. And it is on this contrast that Uriel directs his earnest gaze. Here during the height of summer the imperfections of mankind, in contrast to the regularity of the growing crystal forms, are searchingly surveyed. Here it is that from the earnest gaze of Uriel we gain the impression of how the moral is interwoven with the natural.

Here the moral world-order does not exist only in ourselves as abstract impulses. For whereas we habitually look at the realms of Nature and do not ask—is there morality in the growth of plants, or in the process of crystallisation?—now we see how at midsummer human errors are woven into the regular crystals which are formed in the normal course of Nature.

On the other hand, all that is in human virtue and human excellence rises up with the silver-gleaming lines and is seen as the clouds that envelop Uriel (red). It enters into the radiant Intelligence, transmuted into cloud-shaped works of art.

It is impossible to look towards the increasingly earnest gaze of Uriel, directed towards the depths of the Earth, without also seeing there something like wing-like arms, or arm-like wings, raised in earnest admonition, and this gesture by Uriel has the effect of imparting to mankind what I might call the historic conscience. Here at high summer appears the historic conscience, which at the present time has become uncommonly feeble. It appears, as it were, in Uriel's warning gesture.

Of course, you must picture all this as an Imagination. These things are quite real, but I cannot speak of them in the way a physicist speaks of positive and negative, of potential energy and so on. I have to speak in pictures that will come to life in your souls. But everything expressed in these living pictures is reality; it is there.

And now if we have gained the impression of the connection of human morality with the crystalline element below and of human virtues with the shining beauty above, and if we take these connections into our inward experience, the real St. John Imagination will come to meet us. For the St. John Imagination is there, just as we have the Michael Imagination, the Christmas Imagination, the Easter Imagination.

So to spiritual observation there appears, as a kind of culmination, this picture: Above, illuminated as it were by the power of Uriel's eyes, the Dove (white). The silver-sparkling blue below, arising from the depths of the Earth and bound up with human weaknesses and error, is gathered into a picture of the Earth-Mother (blue). Whether she is called Demeter or Mary, the picture is of the Earth-Mother. So it is that in directing our gaze downwards, we cannot do otherwise than bring together in Imagination all those secrets of the depths which go to make up the material Mother of all existence; while in all that is concentrated in the flowing form above we feel and experience the Spirit-Father of everything around us. And now we behold the outcome of the working together of Spirit-Father with Earth-Mother, bearing so beautifully within itself the harmony of the earthly silver and the gold of the heights. Between the Father and the Mother we behold the Son. Thus arises this Imagination of the Trinity, which is really the St. John Imagination. The background of it is Uriel, the creative, admonishing Uriel.

That which the Trinity truly represents should not be placed dogmatically before the soul, for then an impression is given that such an idea, or picture, of the Trinity can be separated from the weaving of cosmic life. This is not so. At midsummer the Trinity reveals itself out of the midst of cosmic life, cosmic activity. It stands forth with inwardly convincing power, if—I might say—one has first penetrated into the mysteries of Uriel.

If we were to present St. John's-tide in this way, there would have to be an arched or vaulted background, with the figure of Uriel and his gesture in the manner I have described. And against this background a living picture of the Imagination of the Trinity would have to emerge. Special arrangements would be necessary; the effect would have to be that of painting done instantly, perhaps by making artistic use of vaporous substances or the like. And if the true Imagination of these things is to be called up for people to witness, it must be at St. John's time. At Easter we have the complete picture only when we bring it into dramatic form, with Raphael present as a teacher in the Mystery Play that would have then to be presented; Raphael who leads man into the secrets of healing nature, of the healing cosmos. In a similar way, at St. John's time, all that can then be seen in weaving pictures would have to be transposed into powerful music, so that the cosmic Mystery, as it can be experienced by man at this season of St. John, would speak to our hearts.

We must imagine how all that I have described should find artistic expression, on the one hand, in pictorial and plastic art. But what is experienced in this way must be given life by the musical tones that embody the poetic motif which plays through our souls when we feel our way into great Uriel, active in the light, who calls up in us a powerful impression of the triune, the Trinity. The silver-shining that rays up from below, and is revealed in the form-giving beauty of the light above, must be expressed at St. John's-tide through appropriate musical instruments. Thus we should find, through these musical harmonies, our own inner harmony with the cosmos, for in them the secret of man's living together with the cosmos at St. John's tide would have to sound forth. All this would have to be given voice in the music, so that in looking up to the heights we would be looking at the weaving gold of the cosmos, and would see the glowing form of Uriel emerging from the light-filled gold and directing his gaze and his gesture down to the Earth, as I have described it. All this would have to be not in any fixed form, but in living movement. That would be one motif, a heavenly motif through which a man can feel himself united, on one side, with the shining Cosmic Intelligence.

On the other side, down below, he feels himself united with the tendency to fixed form; with that which is immersed in the bluish darkness from out of which the silvery radiance streams forth. Down there he feels the material foundation of active spiritual being. The Heights become Mysteries, the Depths become Mysteries, and man himself becomes a Mystery within the Mysteries of the Cosmos. Right into his bony system he feels the crystal-forming power. But he feels also how this same power is in cosmic union with the living power of light in the heavens above. He feels how all that comes about through mankind as morality in these Mysteries of the Heights lives and weaves in these Mysteries of the Depths, and in the conjunction between the two. He feels himself no longer sundered from the world around him, but placed within it, united above with the shining Intelligence, in which he experiences, as in the womb of worlds, his own best thoughts. He feels himself united below, right into his bony system, with the cosmic crystallising force—and again the two united with one another. He feels his death united with the spirit-life of the universe; and he feels how this spirit-life craves to awaken the crystal forces and the silver-gleaming life in the midst of earthly death.

All this, too, would have to sound forth in musical tones—tones which carry these motifs on their wings and make them part of human experience. For these motifs are there. They do not have to be sought out; they can be read from the cosmic activity of Uriel. Here it is that Imagination passes over into Inspiration.

Man, however, lives in a certain sense as an embodied Inspiration, as a being brought into existence by Inspiration, in the Mysteries of the heights and depths and in the Mysteries of their conjunction. He lives in the Mysteries to which the Spirit-Father points upward; the Mysteries to which the Spirit-Mother points downwards, the Mysteries which are united by the fact that the Christ, though the working together of the Spirit-Father and the Spirit-Mother, stands directly before the human soul as the sustaining Cosmic Spirit.

That which is woven out of all these cosmic secrets I may put before you somewhat in the following way. It is as though the human being, placed in the midst of all that goes on in high summer, were to feel something like this. The first words endeavour to represent how the gaze of Uriel concentrates itself into Inspiration, united with the Spirit-tones of the whole choir:

Here in these nine lines are the Mysteries of the Heights, the Mysteries of the Depths, and the Mysteries of the Midst, which are also those of the inner being of man. And then we have the whole gathered up as a cosmic statement of these Mysteries of the Heights, the Depths and the Midst, sounding out as though with organ and trumpet tones:

Here you have that which can permeate the human being at midsummer, supporting him, exalting him, confirming him—the St. John Imagination filled with Inspiration, the St. John Inspiration filled with Imagination—in these words:

Schaue unser Weben
Das leuchtende Erregen
Das warmende Leben
Lebe irdisch Erhaltendes
Und atmend Gestaltetes—
Als wesenhaft Waltendes
Fühle dein Menschengebeine
Mit himmlischen Scheine
Im waltenden Weltenvereine

Es werden Stoffe verdichtet
Es werden Fehler gerichtet
Es werden Herzen gesichtet.

During the last few days I have brought before you the four cosmic Imaginations which can be called up through an intimate human experience of the seasons of the year. If we are to arrive at an understanding of the whole place and situation of man in the world, we must seek it through the working together of the Beings who appear in conjunction with these imaginative pictures. And here I would like first to say something by way of introduction.

If we open our souls to the impressions which may come to us from the content of these pictures, then at the same time there will come to us much that has been experienced in the course of human evolution as an echo of old, instinctive clairvoyance; to-day this is sometimes treated historically, but fundamentally it is not understood. Real poets and spiritually inspired men lay hold of these often wonderful voices which sound from the traditions of the past, and make use of them just when they wish to express their highest and greatest conceptions. But even then they are very little understood. So in the first part of Faust there rings out a wonderful saying which is scarcely at all understood, though it is quoted often enough. It occurs when Faust, having opened the book of Nostradamus, comes upon the sign of the Macrocosm:

Wie alles sich zum Ganzen webt,
Eins in dem andern wirkt und lebt!
Wie Himmelskräfte auf- und niedersteigen
Und sich die goldnen Eimer reichen,
Mit segenduftenden Schwingen
Vom Himmel durch die Erde dringen,
Harmonisch all das All durchklingen

How each the Whole its substance gives,
each in the other works and lives!
See heavenly forces rising and descending,
their golden urns reciprocally lending:
on wings that winnow sweet blessing
from heaven through the earth they're pressing,
to fill the All with harmonies caressing.¹

A magnificent picture—but if one knows Goethe one must say that it is real to him only through his feelings. For what Goethe has evidently drawn from his reading of old traditions and his feeling for them—all this stands in its full significance before our souls only if we have in mind the four great cosmic Imaginations, as I described them to you—the Autumn Imagination of Michael, the Christmas Imagination of Gabriel. the Easter Imagination of Raphael, and the Midsummer, St. John's Day, Imagination of Uriel. You must really picture to yourselves how from all these Beings, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel, Michael, forces stream out through the cosmos and as formative forces stream again into man. In order to understand this, we must see how man stands within the cosmos in—I might almost call it—a purely material way.

In this connection there is very little understanding, unfortunately, for how things really are. For example, medical textbooks always describe how man breathes in oxygen from the air and how the carbon within him takes up the oxygen; this process is then compared with external combustion, in which all sorts of external substances combine with oxygen. The whole process in the human organism, whereby oxygen is taken up by carbon, is then called combustion.

All this is said because one essential fact is not known—the fact that all external substances and processes become different directly they enter into the human organism. Anyone who speaks of this peculiar combination of oxygen with carbon in man and thinks of it as combustion is talking in just the same way as if someone said: “There is no need for a man to have two living lungs; he could equally well have a pair of stones suspended inside him.” That is more or less how these people talk in speaking of the combustion of oxygen and carbon within the human organism.

Everything that takes place externally in nature is different as soon as it enters a human being. No process within the human organism takes place in the same way as in outer nature. A flame that burns externally is dead fire; that which corresponds to it within the human being is flame living and ensouled: Just as a stove stands towards a lung, so does the external flame stand towards the living activity that goes on in the human organism when carbon unites with oxygen there—a process which, viewed externally, is indeed combustion in chemical terms. All spiritual progress at the present day depends on our being able to grasp these things in the right way. Suppose you take salt with your food, or eat some albumen or anything else, people assume that it remains just the same substance within you as it was outside. That is not true. Whatever enters the human being becomes different immediately. And the forces which make it different proceed in a quite definite way from those Beings whom I have pictured in the four Imaginations.

Let us recall the last picture: how at St. John's tide, Uriel hovers in the heights, weaving his body out of golden light in the golden radiance of the Sun (see Plate V, red.) As I told you, we must picture him with grave, judicial eyes, for his gaze is directed down towards the crystal realm of the earth, and he sees how little are human errors compatible with the abstract but none the less shining beauty of the crystallisation process that goes on below the surface of the earth. That is the reason for his gravely judging gaze, as he looks down and compares human errors with the living activity in the crystals of the earth.

I spoke also of Uriel's gesture as a warning gesture, indicating to men what they ought to do. It calls upon them, if they understand it rightly, to transform their faults into virtues. For up above in the clouds appear the shining pictures of beauty, woven out of the Sun-gold, and they are pictures of all that by dint of virtue humanity has achieved.

Now from the Being who has to be described in this way—and can be described in no other way—there proceed forces which work directly in man, but have also a characteristic further effect. All that I am depicting goes on in high summer. The Uriel-Being, however, is not at rest, but in majestic movement. This must be so, for when it is summer with us, it is winter in the opposite hemisphere, and Uriel is there in the heights. We must picture this clearly, so that if we have the Earth here (see sketch), Uriel appears to us in summer, and then follows a course which brings him after six months to the other side. Then it is winter with us. While Uriel descends (yellow arrow) and while his forces are thus coming to us from a descending line, summer with us passes over into winter, and then Uriel is over the other hemisphere. But the Earth does not hinder his forces from coming to us; they penetrate through the forces which come to us directly from above (red arrows), seeking to permeate us with the Sun-gold of summer, penetrate right through the Earth in winter and permeate us as an ascending stream (red) from the other side.

If we bring before our souls the midsummer working of Uriel through nature into man—for his activity works into the forces of nature—we must picture the forces of Uriel streaming out in the cosmos, raying into the clouds, the rain, the thunder and lightning, and raying also into the growth of plants. In winter, after Uriel has made his way round the Earth, his forces stream up through the Earth and come to rest in our heads. And then these forces, which at other times are outside in nature, have the effect of making us citizens of the cosmos. For they actually cause an image of the cosmos to arise in our heads, illuminating us so that we become possessors of human wisdom.

We speak rightly if we say: Uriel makes his descent as summer passes through autumn into winter. Then in winter he begins to re-ascend, and from this descending and ascending power of Uriel we get the inner forces of our heads. Thus Uriel works in nature at midsummer, and during the winter season he works in the human head, so that in this connection man is truly a microcosm over against the macrocosm.

We understand the human being only if we place him in the world not merely as a being of nature, but as a spiritual being. And just as we can follow the forces of Uriel and see how they stream into man through the course of the year, so must we do with Raphael, who pours his forces into the forces of nature in spring, as I have described. I had to show you how the Easter Imagination is completed through the teaching that Raphael, the great cosmic physician, can give to mankind. For precisely when we allow all that Raphael brings about, working in the springtime forces of nature as Uriel does in summer—when we allow all this to work on us at Easter through the spiritual hearing of Inspiration, then we have the crowning of all the truths of healing for mankind.

But the springtime activity of Raphael travels round the Earth, as Uriel does. In terms of the cosmos Uriel is the spirit of summer; he moves round the Earth and in winter creates the inner forces of the human head. Raphael is the spirit of spring, and in autumn, as he travels round the Earth, he engenders the forces of human breathing. Hence we can say: While during autumn Michael is the cosmic spirit up above, the cosmic Archangel, at Michaelmas Raphael works in human beings—Raphael who is active in the whole human breathing-system, regulating it and giving it his blessing. And we shall form a true picture of autumn only if on the one hand, up above, we have the powerful Michael-Imagination, with the sword forged from meteoric iron, the garment woven out of Sun-gold and shot through with the Earth's silver-sparkling radiance, while Raphael below is working in man, aware of every breath that is drawn, of everything that flows from the lungs into the heart and from the heart through the whole circulation of the blood. Thus man learns to recognise in himself the healing forces which play through the cosmos in the Raphael-time of spring, if in autumn, when the rays of Raphael pass through the Earth, he comes to know how Raphael is active in human breathing.

For this is a great secret: all the healing forces reside originally in the human breathing system. And anyone who understands truly the circuit of the breath, knows the healing forces from the human side. They do not reside in the other systems of the human organism; these other systems have themselves to be healed.

Look back and see what I have said about education: the breathing system comes specially into activity between the ages of seven and fourteen. There are great possibilities of illness during the first seven years of life, and again after fourteen; they are relatively least during the period when the breath pulses through the body with the help of the etheric body. A secret activity of healing resides in the breathing system, and all the secrets of healing are at the same time secrets of breathing. And this is connected with the fact that the workings of Raphael, which are cosmic in spring, permeate the whole mystery of human breathing in autumn.

We have learnt to know Gabriel as the Christmas Archangel. He is then the cosmic Spirit; we have to look up above to find him. During the summer Gabriel carries into man all that is effected by the plastic, formative forces of nourishment. At midsummer they are carried into man by the Gabriel forces, after Gabriel has descended from his cosmic activity during the winter to his human activity in summer, when his forces stream through the Earth and it is winter on the other side.

And when at last we come to Michael, we have him as the cosmic Spirit in autumn. He is then at his highest; he has reached his cosmic culmination. Then he begins his descent; in spring his forces penetrate up through the Earth and live in all that comes to expression in man as movement and the power of will, enabling him to walk and work and take hold of things.

Now bring before you the complete picture. First, the summer picture at the time of St. John: up above, the grave countenance of Uriel, with his judicial look, his warning mien and gesture—and, drawing near to men and permeating them, the mild and loving gaze of Gabriel, Gabriel with his gesture of blessing. So during summer we have the working together of Uriel in the cosmos, Gabriel on the human side.

If we pass on to autumn, we have the—I will not say commanding, but rather the guiding—look of Michael. For if we see it in the right light, Michael's gaze is like a pointing finger, as though wishing not to look into itself, but to look outwards into the world. Michael's gaze is positive, active. And his sword forged out of cosmic iron is held so that at the same time his hand points out to men their way. That is the picture up above.

Below, in autumn, is Raphael, with deeply thoughtful gaze, who brings to mankind the healing forces which he has first—one might say—kindled in the cosmos. Raphael, with deep wisdom in his gaze, leaning on the staff of Mercury, supported by the inner forces of the Earth. Thus we have the working together of Michael in the cosmos, Raphael on Earth.

Now we go on to winter. Gabriel is then the cosmic Angel; Gabriel up above, with his mild and loving look and his gesture of benediction, weaving his garment of snow in the clouds of winter. And below, Uriel, with his grave judgment and warning, at the side of men: the positions are reversed.

And as we come round again to spring, up above we find Raphael, with his deeply thoughtful gaze; with the staff of Mercury which now in the airy heights has become something like a fiery serpent, a serpent of shining fire, no longer resting on the Earth, but as though held forth, using the forces of the air, mingling and combining fire, water and earth, so as to transmute them into healing forces, working and weaving in the cosmos.

And below, quite specially visible, is Michael, coming to meet mankind, with his positive gaze; a gaze that shows the way, as it were, into the world and would gladly draw the eyes of men in the same direction, as he stands close to mankind, the complement of Raphael, in spring.

So there, you see, are the pictures:

Winter: Gabriel above, Uriel below.
Spring: Raphael above, Michael below.
Summer: Uriel above, Gabriel below, with man.
Autumn: Michael above, Raphael below, with man.

Now let us take the words which have come down through the ages like an old magical saying and were used again by Goethe:

Wie alles sich zum Ganzen webt,
Eins in dem andren wirkt und lebt!

How each the Whole its substance gives,
each in the other works and lives

Yes, indeed, Uriel, Gabriel, Raphael and Michael work together, one working in the other, living in the other, and when man is placed in the universe as a being of spirit, soul and body, these forces work magically in him. And how far-reaching is the truth in these words, how far they go! Think what they mean:

Wie alles sich zum Ganzen webt,
Eins in dem andern wirkt und lebt!
Wie Himmelskräfte auf- und niedersteigen

How each the Whole its substance gives,
each in the other works and lives!
See heavenly forces rising and descending,

—rising and descending! And then the lines that follow:

Und sich die goldnen Eimer reichen,
Mit segenduftenden Schwingen
Vom Himmel durch die Erde dringen,
Harmonisch all das All durchlingen!

their golden urns reciprocally lending:
on wings that winnow sweet blessing
from heaven through the earth they're pressing,
to fill the All with harmonies caressing.

Remember how in yesterday's lecture I spoke of it all passing over from plastic form into musical sound, universally resounding harmony.

I cannot tell you what I felt when this stood before my soul and I read again these lines by Goethe: vom Himmel durch die Erde dringen! This durch—it can shake one profoundly, for that is just how it is—it is true! It is staggering to realise that these words ring through the world like a peal of bells and are regarded as poetic licence or something of the sort—or as words that anyone might write in letters or articles. It is not so. These are words which correspond to a cosmic fact. It is really shattering to read these words in the context of Goethe's Faust and to know how true they are.

Now we will go further. We have seen how the heavenly Powers with golden pinions—the Archangels—permeate the universe in harmony, working and living in one another. But that is not all.

Let us look at Gabriel, who draws nutritive forces out of the cosmos and carries them into man at midsummer. These forces are active in the human metabolic system.

Raphael rules in the breathing system. And now Gabriel and Raphael, as they ascend and descend, work together in such a way that Gabriel passes up into the breathing system those forces of his which are otherwise active in human nutrition, and there they become healing forces. Gabriel hands on the nourishment to Raphael, and it then becomes a means of healing. When that which is otherwise only a nutritive process in the human organism is interwoven with the secret of breathing, it becomes a healing force.

We must indeed observe carefully the transformation which external substances undergo in the nutritive system itself: then we come to recognise the significance of the Gabriel forces, the nutritive forces, in man. But these forces are led over into the breathing system. And in working on further there, they become not only a means of quenching hunger and thirst, and not only restorative forces: they turn into forces for the inward correction of illness. The transmuted nutritive forces become healing forces. Anyone who understands nutrition correctly, understands the first stage of healing. If he knows what salt should do in a healthy man, then, if he allows the metamorphosis from the Gabriel-way to the Raphael-way to work on him, he will know how salt can act as a means of healing, in this or that case. The healing forces within us are metamorphoses of the nutritive forces. Raphael receives the golden vessel of nutrition from Gabriel; it is passed on to him.

And now we come to a secret, familiar in early times but entirely lost to-day. Anyone who can read Hippocrates, or, if he cannot read Galen, can still gather something from him, will notice that, in Hippocrates, and even in Galen, those old physicians, there survived something of what is really a great human secret. The forces that prevail in our breathing system are healing forces; they are healing us continually. But when these breathing forces rise into the head, the healing forces become spiritual forces, active in sense-perception and in thinking. Here is the secret that was known at one time; the secret that is almost explicit in Hippocrates and can at least be drawn out of Galen. Thought, perception, the inner spiritual life of man, are a higher metamorphosis of therapy, the healing process; and when the healing element in the breathing system, which lies between the head and the digestive system, is driven further up, as it were, it becomes the material foundation for the spiritual life of man.

So we can say: The thought which flashes through the human head is really a transmutation of the healing impulses that reside in the various substances. Hence if a man sees truly into the heart of this, and has some healing salt-substance, let us say, in his hand, or some remedial plant-substance, he can look at it and say: Here is a beneficent healing force which I can give to man in accordance with his need. But if this substance penetrates into the man and passes beyond the realm of breathing, so that it works in his head, it becomes the material bearer of the power of thought: Raphael then hands on his vessel to Uriel.

Why does a remedy heal? Because it is on the way to the spirit. And if one knows how far on the way to the spirit a remedy is, one knows its healing power. The spirit cannot of itself lay hold directly on the earthly in man; but the lower stage of the spirit is a therapeutic force.

And just as Gabriel passes on to Raphael the nutritive forces, to be transmuted into forces of healing—in other words, he passes on his golden vessel—and just as Raphael passes on his golden vessel to Uriel, whereby the healing forces are made into the forces of thought, so it is Michael who receives from Uriel the thought-forces, and through the power of cosmic iron, out of which his sword is forged, transforms these thought-forces into forces of will, so that in man they become the forces of movement.

Hence we have this second picture: Uriel, Raphael, Gabriel, Michael, ascending and descending; Uriel and Gabriel, let us say, working in one another, but also working with one another, one giving his possession to the other, so that it can work on further in him. We see how the heavenly Powers rise and descend, passing to one another golden vessels—the golden vessels of nourishment, of healing, of the forces of thought and of movement. So these golden vessels move on from one Archangel to another, while at the same time each Archangel works with the other in cosmic harmony.

And again in Faust we find:

Wie Himmelskräfte auf- und niedersteigen
Und sich die goldnen Eimer reichen!

See heavenly forces rising and descending,
their golden urns reciprocally lending:

True indeed, down to the very word “golden,” for these things are woven out of the Sun-gold radiating from Uriel, as I described yesterday.

Goethe had of course read the old saying to which he then gave poetic expression, and it made a tremendous impression on him. But the meaning I have been able to picture for you here—that he did not know. It is just this which staggers one—to find that when out of a certain poetic feeling a spirit such as Goethe's takes hold of something handed down from old traditions, it so incredibly reflects the truth! This is the splendid thing that unites us, if we are cultivating Spiritual Science to-day and these things are revealed to us: when we truly see how Uriel and Raphael and Michael and Gabriel are working together, and how they really do pass on to one another their own particular forces. If we first see this for ourselves and then, having perhaps come across indirectly an ancient saying, through Goethe in this case, we let it work upon us, we see how an old instinctive truth—no matter whether mythical or legendary—was at one time widely current in the world. And then times change, and in our own time we see how the ancient truth has to be raised to a higher level.

O Hippocrates—it is all the same whether we now give the name of Raphael, or Mercury, or Hermes to the one who stood at his side—this Hippocrates lived at a time when twilight was falling over the knowledge of this working together of Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel, and of how the healing forces in the human organism lie between the thoughts and the nutritive forces. This was the source from which an ancient instinctive wisdom drew those wonderful old remedies which in fact are always being renewed. Today they are found among so-called primitive folk, and people cannot imagine how they have been come by. All this is connected with the fact that a primeval wisdom was once possessed by mankind.

But now there must really be a problem left in your minds. It is this. If you take everything I have put before you—how for example the Raphael forces are active in spring and in autumn are carried over by Raphael into the inwardness of the breathing system—you must have been led to suppose that man is entirely bound up with the working of the forces of the cosmos through the course of the year. Originally, indeed, that is how it was. But because man is a being who remembers, so that an outer experience is preserved in memory and after days or years can be relived as an inner experience, so these truths remain entirely valid for the cosmos; but a man does not inwardly experience the Raphael force in his breathing system only in the autumn, but on through the winter, summer and spring. A kind of memory of it, more substantial than ordinary memory, remains.

So while things are arranged in the way I have described, their effects are active in human beings throughout the year. As an experience remains fixed in the memory, so these effects continue all through the year; otherwise man could not be a uniformly developing being all the year round. In physical life, one person forgets more readily, or less readily, than another. But the influence Raphael has implanted in our breathing system during the autumn would disappear by the following autumn when Raphael came again. Until then this nature-memory in the breathing organ remains active, but then it has to be renewed.

So is man placed in the course of nature; he is not excluded from the way the world goes, but planted in the midst of it. But he is placed there in yet another way. It is true that man, standing here on Earth, enclosed within his skin, with his organs embedded in his body, feels himself somewhat isolated in the cosmos, for the connections I have described are indeed full of mystery. But this is not so when man is a being only of spirit and soul—in his pre-earthly existence, for example. Between death and a new birth he lives in a realm of spirit; his soul gazes down not at an individual human body—it chooses this in the course of time—but at the whole Earth, and indeed at the Earth in connection with the whole planetary system, and with all the interwoven activities of Raphael, Uriel, Gabriel, Michael. In that realm, one is looking at oneself from outside.

It is there that the door opens for the entry of souls who are returning from pre-earthly to earthly life. It opens only during the period from the end of December to the beginning of spring, when Gabriel hovers above as cosmic Archangel, while below at man's side is Uriel, carrying cosmic forces into the human head. In the course of these three months the souls who are to be embodied during the whole year come down from the cosmos towards the Earth. They remain waiting there until an opportunity occurs in the Earth's planetary sphere: even the souls who will be born in October, let us say, are already within the Earth sphere, awaiting their birth. Much, very much, depends on whether a soul, after it has entered the Earth sphere and is already in touch with it, has to wait for its earthly embodiment. One soul has a longer wait; another, a shorter one.

The particular secret here is that—just as, for example, the fructifying seed enters the ovum at only one spot—the heavenly seeds enters into the whole yearly being of the Earth only when Gabriel rules above as the cosmic Angel, with his mild, loving look and gesture of benediction, while below is Uriel, with judicial gaze and warning gesture. That is the time when the Earth is impregnated with souls. It is the time when the Earth has its mantle of snow and surrenders to its crystallising forces; then man can be united with the Earth as the thinking earth-body in the cosmos. Then the souls pass out of the cosmos and assemble, as it were, in the Earth sphere. That is the annual impregnation of the Earth's seasonal being.

To all these things we come, if we have insight not only into the physical aspect of the cosmos, but into the activities of those cosmic Beings I have described for you in the four pictures. And if we have arrived at that, we can find in many a poem some indications of the cosmic creative activity, for it is there in the world:

Wie alles sich zum Ganzen webt
Eins in dem andem wirkt und lebt!
Wie Himmelskräfte auf- und niedersteigen
Und sich die goldnen Eimer reichen,
Mit segenduftenden Schwingen
Von Himmel durch die Erde dringen,
Harmonisch all das All durchklingen!

How each the Whole its substance gives,
each in the other works and lives
See heavenly forces rising and descending,
their golden urns reciprocally lending:
on wings that winnow sweet blessing
from heaven through the earth they're pressing,
to fill the All with harmonies caressing.

In these very words we can discern something of that wonderful working together of the four Archangel Beings who, in conjunction with the forces of nature, permeate and animate the bodily nature, the soul and the spirit in man—working in one another, working with one another.

• 1. From the translation of Faust: Part One, by Bayard Taylor, revised and edited by Stuart Atkins. Published by Collier Books, New York, 1962.

It has often been said in our studies, as was evident in the recent lectures on the cycle of the year and the Michael problem, that man in his whole structure, in the conditions of his life, indeed in all that he is, presents a Little World, a Microcosm over against the Macrocosm: that he actually contains within himself all the laws, all the secrets, of the world. You must not, however, suppose that a full understanding of this quite abstract sentence is a simple matter. You must penetrate into the manifold secrets of the world in order to find these secrets again in man.

Today we will consider this subject along certain lines of approach. We will examine first the world, and then man, in order to find how the human being exists as a Little World within the Great World. Naturally, what can be said about the Great World can never be more than fragmentary. It can never present anything complete in itself; for then our studies would have to traverse the whole world!

Let us first turn our attention to that realm which represents what is immediately above man—the birds, which live essentially in the air.

It certainly cannot escape us that the birds which live in the air, creating the conditions of their existence out of the air, are formed differently from the animals which live either on the actual surface of the earth, or below it. When we consider the kingdom of the birds, we shall naturally find, in accordance with the generally accepted views, that in their case, as with other animals, we must speak of head, limb-system, and so on. But this is a thoroughly inartistic way of looking at things. I have often drawn attention to the fact that, if we are really to understand the world, we cannot remain at the stage of mere intellectual comprehension, but that what is intellectual must gradually change into an artistic conception of the world. Then you will certainly not be able to regard the head of a bird—so dwarfed and stunted in its form when compared to the head in other animals—as a head in the true sense. Certainly from the external, intellectual point of view one can say: The bird has a head, a body, and limbs. But just consider how stunted are the legs of a bird in comparison, let us say, with those of a camel or an elephant, and how dwarfed its head when compared with that of a lion or a dog. There is really hardly anything to speak of in a bird's head; there is hardly more to it than what in a dog or an elephant or a cat, is to be found in the front part of the mouth. I could put it in this way: it is the slightly more complicated front part of a mammal's mouth which corresponds to the head of a bird. And the limb-system in a mammal is completely stunted in the case of a bird. Certainly, an inartistic method of observation does speak about the fore-limbs of a bird as being metamorphosed into wings. But all this is thoroughly inartistic, unimaginative observation. If we would really understand nature, really penetrate into the cosmos, we must consider things in a deeper way—and this most especially in regard to their formative and creative forces. The view that the bird, too, simply has a head, a body and limbs can never lead to a true understanding of a bird's etheric body. For if, through imaginative contemplation, we advance from seeing what is physical in the bird to seeing what is etheric, then in the etheric bird there is only a head. When looking at the etheric bird one immediately comprehends that the bird allows of no comparison with the head, body and limbs of other animals, but must be regarded simply and solely as head, as metamorphosed head. So that the actual bird-head presents only the palate and front parts of the head, in fact the mouth; and what extends backwards, all those parts of the skeleton in the bird which appear similar to ribs and spine, all this is to be looked upon as head—certainly metamorphosed and transformed—but nevertheless as head. The whole bird is really head.

This is due to the fact that, to understand the bird, we must go very, very far back in the planetary evolution of the Earth. The bird has a long planetary history behind it, a much longer planetary history than, for example, the camel. The camel is an animal of much later origin than any bird. Those birds which, like the ostrich, have been forced downwards to the Earth, were the latest to come into existence. Those birds which live freely in the air—eagles, vultures—are very ancient creatures of the Earth. In earlier Earth epochs—Moon-epoch, Sun-epoch—they still possessed within them what later developed from within outwards as far as the skin, and later still formed itself into what you now see in the feathers and the horny beak. What is outer in the bird is of later origin, and came about through the fact that the bird developed its head-nature comparatively early; and in the conditions into which it came in later stages of Earth-evolution, all that it could still add to this head-nature was what lies in its plumage. This plumage was given to the birds by the Moon and the Earth, whereas the rest of its nature comes from much earlier epochs.

But all this has yet a much deeper side. Let us look at the bird in the air—the eagle, let us say, in his majestic flight—upon whom, as though by an outer gift of grace, the rays of the sun and their action bestowed his plumage, bestowed his horny beak—let us look at this eagle as he flies in the air. Certain forces work upon him there. The sun does not only possess the physical forces of light and warmth of which we usually speak. When I described the Druid Mysteries to you, I drew your attention to the fact that spiritual forces too emanate from the sun. It is these forces which give to the different species of birds their variegated colours, the special formation of their plumage. When we penetrate with spiritual perception into the nature of the sun's working, we understand why the eagle has his particular plumage and when we deepen our contemplation of this being of the eagle, when we develop an inner, artistic comprehension of nature which contains the spiritual within it, when we can perceive how formative forces work out of the impulses of the sun—strengthened by other impulses of which I shall speak later—when we see how the sun-impulses stream down over the eagle even before he has emerged from the egg, how they conjure forth the plumage, or, to be more exact, how they conjure it into his fleshy form, then we can ask ourselves: What is the significance of all this for man? The significance of this for man is that it is what makes his brain into the bearer of thoughts. And you have the right insight into the Macrocosm, into Great Nature, when you so regard the eagle that you say: The eagle has his plumage, his bright, many-coloured feathers; in these lives the self-same force which lives in you in that you make your brain into the bearer of thoughts. What makes the convolutions of your brain? What makes your brain capable of taking up that inner salt-force which is the basis of thinking? What really enables your brain to make a thinker of you? It is the same force which gives his feathers to the eagle in the air. Thus we feel ourselves related to the eagle through the fact that we think: we feel the human substitute for the eagle's plumage within us. Our thoughts flow out from the brain in the same way as the feathers stream out from the eagle. [* Homer compares the speed of the Phaeacian ships to a bird's wing or a thought. Odyssey VII. 36.]

When we ascend from the physical level to the astral level, we must make this paradoxical statement: on the physical plane the same forces bring about the formation of plumage as on the astral plane bring about the formation of thoughts. To the eagle they give the formation of feathers; that is the physical aspect of the formation of thoughts. To man they give thoughts; that is the astral aspect of the formation of feathers. Such things are sometimes indicated in a wonderful way in the genius of folk-language. If a feather is cut off at the top and what is inside extracted, country people call this the soul. Certainly many people will see in this name soul only an external description. It is not an external description. For those who have insight a feather contains something tremendous: it contains the secret of the formation of thoughts.

And now let us look away from what lives in the air, and, in order to have a representative example, let us consider a mammal such as the lion. We can really only understand the lion when we develop a feeling for the joy, the inner satisfaction the lion has in living together with his surroundings. There is indeed no animal, unless it be related to the lion, which has such wonderful, such mysterious breathing. In all creatures of the animal world the rhythms of breathing must harmonize with the rhythms of circulation; but whereas the rhythms of blood circulation become heavy through the digestive processes which are dependent on them, the rhythms of breathing become light because they strive to rise up to the lightness of the formation of the brain. In the case of the bird, what lives in its breathing actually lives simultaneously in its head. The bird is all head, and it presents its head outwardly, as it were, towards the world. Its thoughts are the forms of its plumage. For to one who has a feeling for the beauty of nature, there is hardly anything more moving than to feel the inner connection between man's thought—when it is really concrete, inwardly teeming with life—and the plumage of a bird. Anyone who is inwardly practised in such things knows quite exactly when he is thinking like a peacock, when he is thinking like an eagle, or when he is thinking like a sparrow. Apart from the fact that the one is astral and the other physical, these things do actually correspond in a wonderful way. And so it may be said that the bird's life in breathing preponderates to such a degree that the other processes—blood-circulation and so on—are almost negligible. All the heaviness of digestion, yes, even the heaviness of blood-circulation, is done away with in the bird's feeling of itself; it is not there.

In the lion a kind of balance exists between breathing and blood-circulation. Certainly in the case of the lion the blood-circulation is weighed down, but not so much, let us say, as in the case of the camel or the ox. There the digestion burdens the blood-circulation to a remarkable degree. In the lion, whose digestive tract apparatus is comparatively short and is so formed that the digestive process is completed as rapidly as possible, digestion does not burden the circulation to any marked degree. On the other hand, it is also the case that in the lion's head the development of the head-nature is such that breathing is held in balance with the rhythm of circulation. The lion, more than any other animal, possesses an inner rhythm of breathing and rhythm of the heartbeat which are inwardly maintained in balance, which are inwardly harmonized. This is why the lion—when we think of what may be called his subjective life—has that particular way of devouring his food with unbridled voracity, why he literally gulps it down. For he is really only happy when he has swallowed it. He is ravenous for nourishment, because it lies in his nature that hunger causes him much more pain than it causes other animals. He is greedy for nourishment but he is not bent on being a fastidious gourmet! Enjoyment of the taste is not what possesses him, for he is an animal which finds its inner satisfaction in the equilibrium between breathing and blood-circulation. Only when the lion's food has passed over into the blood which regulates the heart-beat, and when the heart-beat has come into reciprocal action with the breathing—for it is a source of enjoyment to the lion when he draws in the breath-stream with deep inner satisfaction—only when he feels in himself the result of his feeding, this inner balance between breathing and blood-circulation, does the lion live in his own element. He lives fully as lion when he experiences the deep inner satisfaction of his blood beating upwards, of his breath pulsing downwards. And it is in this reciprocal crossing of two wave-pulsations that the lion really lives.

Picture the lion, how he runs, how he leaps, how he holds his head, even how he looks around him, and you will see that all this leads back to a continual rhythmic interplay between coming out of balance, and again coming into balance. There is perhaps hardly anything that can touch one in so mysterious a way as the remarkable gaze of the lion, from which so much looks out, something of inner mastery, the mastery of opposing forces. This is what looks out from the lion's gaze: the absolute and complete mastery of the heartbeat through the rhythm of the breath.

And again, let those who have a sense for the artistic understanding of forms look at the form of the lion's mouth, revealing as it does how the heart-beat pulses upwards towards the mouth, but is held back by the breath. If you could really picture this reciprocal contact of heart beat and breathing, you would arrive at the form of the lion's mouth.

The lion is all breast-organ. He is the animal in which the rhythmic system is brought to perfect expression both in outer form and in way of living. The lion is so organized that this inter-action of heart beat and breathing is also brought to expression in the reciprocal relationship of heart and lungs.

So we must say: When we look in the human being for what most closely resembles the bird, though naturally metamorphosed, it is the human head; when we look in the human being for what most closely resembles the lion, it is the region of the human breast, where the rhythms meet each other, the rhythms of circulation and breathing.

And now let us turn our attention away from all that belongs in the upper air to the bird-kingdom; away from all that lives in the circulation of the air immediately adjacent to the Earth, as does the lion; let us consider the ox or cow. In other connections I have often spoken of how enchanting it is to contemplate a herd of cattle, replete and satisfied, lying down in a meadow; to observe this process of digestion which here again is expressed in the position of the body, in the expression of the eyes, in every movement. Take an opportunity of observing a cow lying in the meadow, if from here or there some kind of noise disturbs her. It is really wonderful to see how the cow raises her head, how in this lifting there lies the feeling that it is all heaviness, that it is not easy for the cow to lift the head, as though something very special were within it. When we see a cow in the meadow disturbed in this way, we cannot but say to ourselves: This cow is astonished that she must lift her head for anything but grazing. Why do I lift my head now? I am not grazing, and there is no point in lifting my head unless it is to graze. Only look at the way she does it! All this is to be seen in the way the cow lifts her head. But it is not only in the movement of the lifting of the head. (You cannot imagine the lion lifting his head as the cow does.) It lies also in the form of the head. And if we further observe the animal's whole form, we see it is in fact what I may call an extended digestive system! The weight of the digestion burdens the blood-circulation to such a degree that it overwhelms everything to do with head and breathing. The animal is all digestion. It is infinitely wonderful, when looked at spiritually, to turn one's gaze upwards to the bird, and then to look downwards upon the cow.

Of course, to whatever height one might raise the cow, physically she would never be a bird. But if one could pass over what is physical in the cow—first bringing her into the moisture of the air in the immediate vicinity of the earth, and transforming her etheric form into one corresponding to the moisture; and, next, raising her up higher, bringing her as far as the astral, then up in the heights the cow would be a bird. Astrally she would be a bird.

And you see, it is just here that something wonderful approaches us, if we have insight, compelling us to say, What the bird up in the heights has astrally out of its astral body, what works there, as I have said, upon the formation of its plumage, this the cow has embodied in her flesh, in her muscles, in her bones. What is astral in the bird has become physical in the cow. The appearance is of course different in the astrality, but so it is.

On the other hand, if I reverse the process, and allow what belongs to the astrality of a bird to sink down, thereby bringing about the transformation into the etheric and physical, the eagle would become a cow, because what is astral in the eagle is incorporated into the flesh, into the bodily nature of the cow as she lies on the ground engaged in digestion; for it belongs to this digestive process in the cow to develop a wonderful astrality. The cow becomes beautiful in the process of digestion. Seen astrally, something immensely beautiful lies in this digestion. And when it is said by ordinary philistine concepts, indeed by philistine idealism, that the process of digestion is the most lowly, this must be indicted as untruth, when, from a higher vantage-point, one gazes with spiritual sight at this digestive process in the cow. For this is beautiful, this is grand, this is something of an immense spirituality.

The lion does not attain to this spirituality, much less the bird. In the bird the digestive process is something almost entirely physical. One does of course find the etheric body in the digestive system of the bird, but in its digestive processes one finds very little, indeed almost nothing, of astrality. On the other hand, something is present in the digestive processes of the cow which, seen astrally, is quite stupendous, an entire world.

And now, if we wish to look at what is similar in man, again seeking for the correspondence between what is developed in the cow in a one-sided way, the physical embodiment of a certain astrality, we find this in man—harmoniously adjusted to the other parts of his organism, woven, as it were, into his digestive organs and their continuation—in the limb-system. So in truth what I behold high in the upper air in the eagle; what I behold in the realm where the animal rejoices in the air around him as in the case of the lion; and what I behold when the animal is bound up with the sub-terrestrial earth-forces, which project their working into its digestive organs (as occurs when I look away from the heights into the depths, and bring my understanding to bear on the nature and being of the cow) all these three forms I find united into a harmony in man, into reciprocal balance. I find the metamorphosis of the bird in the human head, the metamorphosis of the lion in the human breast, the metamorphosis of the cow in the digestive system and the system of the limbs—though naturally metamorphosed, tremendously transformed.

When today we contemplate these things and realize that man is actually born out of the whole of nature, that he bears the whole of nature within himself as I have shown, that he bears the bird-kingdom, the lion-kingdom, the essential being of the cow within him, then we get the separate component parts of what is expressed in the abstract sentence: Man is a “Little World”. He is indeed a Little World, and the Great World is within him; and all the creatures which live above in the air, and the animals on the face of the earth whose special element is the air which circulates around them, and the animals which have their special element below the surface of the earth, as it were, in the forces of weight—all these work together in man as a harmonious whole. So that man is in truth the synthesis of eagle, lion, and ox or cow.

When one discovers this again through the investigations of a more modern Spiritual Science, one gains that great respect of which I have often spoken for the old, instinctive, clairvoyant insight into the Cosmos. Then, for instance, one gains a great respect for the mighty imagination that man consists of eagle, lion, and cow or ox, which, harmonized in true proportion, together form the human being in his totality.

But before I pass on—this may be tomorrow—to discuss the separate impulses which lie in the forces weaving around the eagle, around the lion, around the cow, I want to speak of another correspondence between man's inner being and what is outside in the Cosmos.

From what we already know we can now take a further step. The human head seeks for what accords with its nature: it must direct its gaze upwards to the bird-kingdom. If one is to understand the human breast—the heart beat, the breathing—as a secret within the secrets of nature, the gaze must be turned to something of the nature of the lion. And man must try to understand his digestive system from the constitution, from the organization, of the ox or cow. But in his head man has the bearer of his thoughts, in the breast the bearer of his feelings, in his digestive system the bearer of his will. So that in his soul-nature, too, man is an image of the thoughts which weave through the world with the birds and find expression in their plumage, and of the world of feeling encircling the earth, which is to be found in the lion in the balanced life of heart beat and breathing and which, though milder in man, does indeed represent the inner quality of courage—the Greek language made use of the word ¹ for the qualities of heart and breast, the inner quality of courage in man. And if man wishes to find his will-impulses which, when he gives them external form, are predominantly connected with the metabolism, he must turn his gaze to the bodily form in the cow.

What today sounds grotesque or paradoxical, what may seem almost insane to an age that has retained absolutely no understanding for the relationships of the world, does nevertheless contain a truth which points back to ancient customs. It is a striking phenomenon that Mahatma Gandhi—who has now been presented to the world, more falsely than truly, by Romain Rolland in a rather unpleasant book—that Mahatma Gandhi, who certainly turns his activity in an outward direction, but at the same time stands within the Indian people, somewhat like a rationalist of the eighteenth century over against the ancient Hindu religion—it is striking that in his rationalized Hinduism Gandhi retains the veneration of the cow. This cannot be set aside, says Mahatma Gandhi, who, as you know, was sentenced by the English to six years' imprisonment for his political activity in India. He still retains veneration for the cow.

Things such as these, which have so tenaciously retained their position in spiritual cultures, can only be understood when one is aware of the inner connections, when one really knows what tremendous secrets lie in the ruminating animal, the cow; and how one can venerate in it a lofty astrality, which has, as it were, become earthly, and only thereby more lowly. Such things enable us to understand the religious veneration which is paid to the cow in Hinduism, and which the whole bevy of rationalistic and intellectualistic concepts which have been brought to bear on this subject will never enable us to understand.

And so we see how will, feeling, thought, can be looked for outside in the Cosmos, and correspondingly in the microcosm, man.

There are, however, all kinds of other forces in the human being, and all kinds of other forces outside in nature too. So now I must ask you to consider for the moment the metamorphoses undergone by the creature which later becomes a butterfly.

You know the butterfly lays its egg. Out of the egg comes the caterpillar. The egg contains everything that is the germinal essence of the later butterfly. The caterpillar emerges from the egg into the light-irradiated air. This is the environment into which the caterpillar comes. You must, therefore, envisage how the caterpillar really lives in this sunlit air.

Here you must consider what happens when you are lying in bed at night and have lit the lamp, and a moth flies towards the lamp, and finds its death in the light. This light works upon the moth in such a way that it subjects itself to a search for death. Here we have an example of the action of light upon the living.

Now the caterpillar—I am only indicating these things shortly today; tomorrow and the next day we shall consider them somewhat more exactly—the caterpillar cannot rise up to the source of light, to the Sun, in order to cast itself into it, but it would like to do so. Its desire to do so is just as strong as the moth's, which casts itself into the flame of your bedside lamp, and there meets its death. The moth casts itself into the flame and finds its death in physical fire. The caterpillar seeks the flame just as eagerly, the flame which comes towards it from the Sun. But it cannot throw itself into the Sun; the passing over into warmth, into light, remains for the caterpillar something spiritual. It is as spiritual activity that the whole action of the Sun works upon the caterpillar. It follows each ray of the Sun, this caterpillar; by day it accompanies the rays of the Sun. just as the moth throws itself at once into the flame, giving over its whole moth-substance to the light, so the caterpillar weaves its caterpillar-substance slowly into the light, pauses at night, weaves by day, and spins and weaves around itself the whole cocoon. And we have in the cocoon, in the threads of the cocoon, what the caterpillar weaves out of its own substance as it spins on in the flooding sunlight. And now the caterpillar, which has become a chrysalis, has woven around itself, out of its own substance, the rays of the Sun, which it has incorporated in itself. The moth is consumed quickly in the physical fire. The caterpillar, sacrificing itself, casts itself into the sunlight, and from moment to moment weaves around itself the threads of the Sun's rays which it follows in their course. If you look at the cocoon of the silkworm you are looking at woven sunlight, only the sunlight is embodied through the substance of the silk-spinning caterpillar itself. Now the space it inhabits is inwardly enclosed. The outer sunlight has in a sense been overcome. That part of the sunlight to which I referred when I described the Druidic Mysteries, [* In a lecture to workmen on 11th September, 1923. See also The Evolution of Consciousness, Lectures 8 and 9 (Rudolf Steiner Press).] as entering into the cromlechs, is now inside the cocoon. The Sun, which previously exerted its physical power, causing the caterpillar to spin its own cocoon, now exerts its power upon what is inside, and from out of this it creates the butterfly, which now emerges. Then the whole circle begins anew. Here you have separated out before you in sequence what is, as it were, compressed in the egg of a bird.

Compare this whole process with what happens when a bird lays its eggs. Inside the bird itself, still through a process of metamorphosis, the chalky egg-shell is formed around the egg. The forces of the sunlight make use of the substance of

the chalk to press together the whole sequence of what here in the butterfly is separated off into egg, caterpillar, cocoon. All these processes are compressed at the place where, in the bird's egg, the hard shell forms itself around them. Through this pressing together of processes which otherwise are separated into different stages, the whole embryonic development in the bird is different. All that up to this point of the third stage is completed within the bird, in the butterfly is separated into egg-formation, caterpillar-formation, chrysalis-formation, cocoon-formation. Here all can be seen outwardly, until the butterfly slips out.

And when one now follows the whole process astrally, what is to be seen then? Well, the bird in its whole formation represents the human head, the organ of thought-formation. What does the butterfly represent, the butterfly which in its embryonic formation is so extraordinarily complicated? We find that the butterfly represents a continuation of the function of the head, it represents the forces of the head spread out, as it were, over the whole human body. Here something happens in the whole human being, corresponding to a process in nature but different from the process of the formation of the bird.

When we take into account its etheric and astral nature, we have in the human head something very similar to egg-formation, only metamorphosed. If we had only the function of the head we should form nothing but momentary thoughts. Our thoughts would not sink down more deeply into us, involve the whole human being, and then rise up again as memories. If I look at the momentary thoughts which I form of the outer world, and then look up to the eagle, I say: In the eagle's plumage I see outside myself embodied thoughts; within me these remain as thoughts, but only momentary thoughts. But if I look at what I bear within me as my memories, I find a more complicated process. Deep in the physical body, though certainly in a spiritual way, a kind of egg-formation is taking place. In the etheric this certainly represents something quite different, something which in its external physical aspect resembles the caterpillar-formation. In the astral body, however, in its inner aspect, it is similar to the chrysalis-formation, the cocoon-formation. And when I have a percept which evokes a thought in me, what loosens, ejects, as it were, that thought and presses it downward is like the butterfly laying an egg. The development is then similar to what takes place in the caterpillar; the life in the etheric body offers itself up to the spiritual light, weaves around the thoughts, as it were, an inner astral cocoon-web, from which the memories slip out. If we see the bird's plumage manifested in momentary thoughts, so we must see the butterfly's wings, shimmering with colour, manifested in our memory-thoughts in a spiritual way.

Thus we look around and feel to what an immense degree nature is related to us. We think and see the world of thoughts in the flying birds. We remember, we have memories, and see the world of memory-pictures, living within us, in the fluttering butterflies shimmering in the sunlight. Yes, man is a Microcosm and contains within himself the secrets of the Great World outside. And it is a fact that what we perceive inwardly—our thoughts, our feelings, our will-impulses, our memory-pictures, when regarded from the other side, from without, in a macrocosmic sense, can all be recognized again in the kingdom of nature.

This is to look at reality. Reality of this kind does not allow itself to be grasped by mere thoughts, for to mere thoughts reality is a matter of indifference; they only hold to logic. But this same logic can prove the most contradictory things in the sphere of reality. To make this apparent, let me close with an illustration which will serve to form a bridge to what we shall consider tomorrow.

A certain tribe of African negroes, the Felatas, have a very beautiful fable, from which much can be learned.

Once upon a time a lion, a wolf and a hyena set out upon a journey. They met an antelope. The antelope was torn to pieces by one of the animals. The three travelers were good friends, so now the question arose as to how to divide the dismembered antelope between them. First the lion spoke to the hyena, saying, “You divide it.” The hyena possessed his logic. He is the animal who deals not with the living but with the dead. His logic is naturally determined by the measure of his courage, or rather of his cowardice. According to whether this courage is more or less, he approaches reality in different ways. The hyena said: “We will divide the antelope into three equal parts—one for the lion, one for the wolf, and one for myself.” Whereupon the lion fell upon the hyena and killed him. Now the hyena was out of the way, and again it was a question of sharing out the antelope. So the lion said to the wolf, “See, my dear wolf, now we must share it out differently. You divide it. How would you share it out?” Then the wolf said, “Yes, we must now apportion it differently; it cannot be shared out evenly as before. As you have rid us of the hyena, you as lion must get the first third; the second third would have been yours in any case, as the hyena said, and the remaining third you must get because you are the wisest and bravest of all the animals.” This is how the wolf apportioned it. Then said the lion, “Who taught you to divide in this way?” To which the wolf replied, “The hyena taught me.” So the lion did not devour the wolf, but, according to the wolf's logic, took the three portions for himself.

Yes, the mathematics, the intellectual element, was the same in the hyena and the wolf. They divided the antelope into three parts. But they applied this intellect, this calculation, to reality in a different way. Thereby destiny, too, was essentially altered. The hyena was devoured because his application of the principle of division to reality had different results from that of the wolf who was not devoured. For the wolf related his hyena-logic—he even said himself that the hyena had taught it to him—to quite another reality. He related it to reality in such a way that the lion no longer felt compelled to devour him too.

You see, hyena-logic in the first case, hyena-logic also in the wolf; but in its application to reality the intellectual logical element resulted in something quite different.

It is thus with all abstractions. You can do everything in the world with abstractions just according to whether you relate them to reality in this or that way. We must, therefore, be able to penetrate with insight into a reality such as the correspondence between man, as Microcosm, and the Macrocosm. We must be able to study the human being not with logic only, but in a sense which can never be achieved unless intellectualism is led over into the artistic element of the world. But if you succeed in bringing about the metamorphosis of intellectualism into artistic comprehension, and are able to develop the artistic into the principle of knowledge, then you find what is within man in a human way, not in a natural way, outside in the Macrocosm, in the Great World. Then you find the relationship of the human being to the Great World in a true and real sense.

• 1. The quality of the “great soul”, cf. Coeur de Lion.

Having considered in the lecture yesterday the nature of the animals of the heights, represented by the eagle, the animals of the middle region, represented by the lion, and the animals of the earth-depths, represented by the ox or cow, we can today turn our attention to man's connection with the universe from that particular aspect which reveals the inner structural relationship of the human being to these representatives of the animal world.

Let us first turn our gaze to the upper regions, about which we said yesterday that when the animal derives its particular forces from them, they do then in fact cause the whole animal to become head-organization. There we see how the bird owes its very being to the sun-irradiated atmosphere. This sun-irradiated atmosphere—everything, that is to say, which can be absorbed by the bird through the fact that it owes the most important part of its being to it—is a necessity to the bird. And I told you yesterday that it is upon this that the actual formation of the plumage depends. The bird has its actual being within. What is brought about in the bird by the outer world is embodied in its plumage. But when the influence of this sun-irradiated air is not impressed on the being from without, as in the case of the eagle, but is activated within, as in the case of the human nervous system, then thoughts arise—momentary thoughts, as I said, thoughts of the immediate present.

When we thus turn our gaze upwards to the heights, and are filled with all that results from such a contemplation, it is to the tranquil atmosphere and to the streaming sunlight that our attention is drawn. We must not, however, think of the sun in isolation. The sun maintains its power through the fact that it comes into connection with the different regions of the universe. Human knowledge has expressed this relationship by connecting the sun activities with the so-called animal circle or zodiac, so that when the sunlight falls to earth from Leo, from Libra or from Scorpio, its significance also signifies something different for the earth according to whether it is strengthened or weakened by the other planets of our planetary system. And here different relationships arise in regard to the different planets; the relationships in regard to the so-called outer planets, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, are different from those in regard to the so-called inner planets, Mercury, Venus and Moon.

If we now consider the organization of the eagle, it is most important first of all to observe how far the Sun-forces become modified, strengthened or weakened, by their interaction with Saturn, Jupiter, Mars. It is not for nothing that legend speaks of the eagle as the bird of Jupiter. In general Jupiter stands as the representative of the outer planets. And if we were to draw a diagram illustrating what is meant here, we would have to draw the sphere which Saturn has in world-space, in the cosmos, as also that of Jupiter and Mars.

Let us draw this, so that we may actually see it, in a diagram: (see next page) the Saturn sphere, the Jupiter sphere, the Mars sphere; then we find the transition to the Sun sphere, giving us in the outermost part of our planetary system the working together of Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn.

And when we see the eagle circling in the air we do in fact utter a reality when we say: These forces which stream through the air from the Sun in such a way that they are composed of the working together of Sun with Mars, Jupiter and Saturn—these forces are those which live in the whole structure, in the very being of the eagle. But at the same time they live in the formation of the human head. And when we place man into the universe in accordance with his true nature—on earth he is only, so to speak, a miniature picture of himself—as regards his head we must place him into the eagle-sphere.

We must, therefore, think of Man in regard to his head as belonging to the eagle-sphere; and therewith we have indicated that element in the human being which is connected with the upward tending forces.

The lion is the representative of those animals which are in the real sense Sun-animals, in which the sun unfolds its own special force. The lion prospers best when the constellations above the sun and the constellations below the sun are so ordered that they exert the least influence upon the sun itself. Then those special characteristics appear which I described to you yesterday, namely that the forces of the sun itself, permeating the air, produce in the lion a breathing system of just such a kind that in its rhythm it is in perfect balance with the rhythm of the blood-circulation, not as regards number but as regards its dynamic. In the lion this balances itself out in a wonderfully beautiful way. The lion regulates his blood-circulation through the breathing, and the blood-circulation continually stimulates the stream of the breath. I told you that this can be seen even in the form, in the very structure of the lion's mouth. In this form itself the wonderful relationship between the rhythm of the blood and the rhythm of the breath is actually expressed. One can see this, too, in the remarkable gaze of the lion, resting in itself, and yet turned boldly outwards.

But what lives in the lion's gaze lives also in the other elements of human nature, the metabolic system, the head system, and the breast or heart system, that is the rhythmic system of Man.

And if we picture the special Sun-activity we must so draw the diagram of the human being that we place his heart, and the lungs connected to it, into the region of this Sun-activity. It is here, in this sphere, that we have the lion-nature in man.

When we turn to the inner planets nearer the earth, we have first the Mercury sphere. This has to do in particular with the finer parts of the digestive organism of man, the region where the foodstuffs are transformed into lymphatic substance, which is then carried into the circulation of the blood.

Progressing further, we come into the region of Venus-activity. This is connected with the somewhat coarser parts of man's digestive system, to that part of the human organism which works primarily from the stomach upon the foodstuffs which have been taken in. We next come into the sphere of the Moon. (I am drawing this in the sequence customary today in astronomy; I could also draw it differently.) There we enter that region where those digestive processes which are connected with the Moon act and re-act upon the human being.

In this way we have placed man into the entire universe. By turning our minds to those cosmic activities which the Sun carries out in conjunction with Mercury, Venus, Moon, we come into the region containing the forces which are taken up by the order of the animals represented for us by the cow, in the sense which I spoke of yesterday. There we have what the Sun cannot do by itself alone, but what the Sun can only do when its own forces are conducted to the earth by means of the planets which are nearest to the earth. When these forces are all at work, when they do not only stream through the air, but penetrate through the earth's surface in various ways, then these forces work up again from the earth depths. And what thus works up from earth depths belongs to the sphere which we see embodied outwardly in the organism of the cow.

The cow is the animal of digestion. It is, moreover, the animal which accomplishes digestion in such a way that there lies in its digestive processes the earthly reflection of something actually super-earthly; its whole digestive process is permeated with an astrality which reflects the entire cosmos in a wonderful light-filled way. There is—as I said yesterday—a whole world in this astral organism of the cow, but everything is heavy, everything is so organized that the weight of the earth works there. You have only to consider that the cow is obliged to consume an eighth of her weight in foodstuffs each day. Man can be satisfied with a fortieth part and remain healthy. Thus the cow needs earth-gravity in order fully to meet the needs of her organism. Her organism is orientated towards this need for the weight of matter. Every day the cow must digest an eighth of her weight. This binds the cow with her material substance to the earth, whereas, through her astrality she is at the same time an image of the heights, of the cosmos.

This is why, as I said yesterday, the cow is an object of so much veneration for those who confess to the Hindu religion. The Hindu says to himself: The cow lives here on the earth; but through this fact she forms in solid physical substance an image of something super-earthly. It is indeed the case that man's nature is organized in a normal way when he can bring into harmony these three cosmic activities manifested in a one-sided way in eagle, lion and cow; when he himself is the confluence of the activities of eagle, lion and cow.

In accordance with the general course of world events, however, we are now living in an age when the evolution of the world is threatened by a certain danger; and this danger will—if I may so express myself—actually take effect in man also in a one-sided way. From the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries up to our own day the facts of human earthly evolution are such that, to an ever increasing degree, the eagle activities wish to make one-sided claims upon the human head, the lion activities upon the human rhythmic system, and the cow activities upon the human metabolism and upon all man's activity on the earth.

This is the stamp of our age, that it is the aim of the cosmic powers to bring about a threefold division of man, and that, each form of these cosmic powers is always striving to suppress the others. The eagle strives to subjugate the lion and the cow and make them of no account, and in like manner with each of the other elements. Just in our present age something particularly alluring is working upon the subconscious in man; alluring because in a certain sense there is also something beautiful about it. In his conscious life man today is unaware of this but, for his sub-consciousness, three calls surge and sound through the world seeking to tempt him with their allurement. And I must say that it is the secret of our present time that, from the sphere of the eagle, there sounds down to man what actually gives the eagle his eagle nature, what gives him his plumage, what hovers around him as astrality. It is the eagle nature itself which becomes audible for the sub-consciousness of man. This is the alluring call:

Learn to know my nature!
I give thee the power
To create a universe
In thine own head.

Thus speaks the eagle. That is the call from above, which today wishes to impose one-sidedness upon man.

And there is a second alluring call. This is the call which comes to us from the middle region, where the forces of the cosmos form the lion-nature, where, through the mingling of sun and air, they bring about that equilibrium between the rhythms of breathing and blood-circulation which constitutes the nature of the lion. What thus vibrates through the air, from the nature of the lion, what wills to make man's own rhythmic system one-sided, this today speaks alluringly to man's sub-consciousness, saying:

Learn to know my nature!
I give thee the power
To embody the universe
In the radiance¹ of the encircling air.

Thus speaks the lion.

These voices, which speak to man's sub-consciousness, have more effect than is supposed. Yes, my dear friends, there are certain human natures on earth organized in such a way that they are particularly liable to absorb their influences. Thus, for instance, all those who populate the west are so organized that they are specially prone to be allured, to be led astray, by the voice of the eagle. Thus American civilization, on account of the special organization of its people, is particularly exposed to the temptation offered by what the eagle speaks. And Central Europe, which is imbued with much of the culture of classical antiquity, which contains so much of what caused Goethe, for instance, to make his journey to Italy, a journey which acted on his life like a liberation—central Europe is particularly exposed to what is uttered by the lion.

Oriental civilization is pre-eminently exposed to what is uttered by the cow. And just as both other animals give utterance in their cosmic representation, so there sounds upwards from earth-depths, like a rumbling, muffled roaring, the call of what lies in the heaviness of the cow. It is actually the case, as I described to you yesterday, that when one sees a herd of cattle replete with grazing, sees them as they lie there in their own peculiar way, their very form revealing that they are given over to earth-gravity, then all this is conditioned by the fact that this bodily form must assimilate daily an eighth of its own weight. And to this must be added that the earth-depths, which, under the influence of Sun, Mercury, Venus and Moon, bring all this about in the digestive system of the cow—that these earth-depths, as if with demonic rumbling power, resound through such a herd with the words:

Learn to know my nature!
I give thee the power
To wrest from the universe
Measure, number and weight.

Thus speaks the cow. And it is the orient which is specially exposed to the allurement of this call. What is meant here, however, is that, though it is the orient which is primarily exposed to this alluring call of the cow on account of the ancient veneration of the cow in Hinduism, yet, if this allurement were actually so to seize hold of mankind that what arises from this call would gain the mastery, then these influences emanating from the orient would produce a civilization, which, spreading over centre and west, would hinder progress and engender decadence. The demonic earth-forces would work in a one-sided way upon earth-civilization. What then would actually happen?

The following would happen. In the course of the last centuries, under the influence of a technology brought about by external science, an external technological life has come about on the earth. Certainly our technical achievement is wonderful in every sphere. But in technology nature forces work in their lifeless form. And the important factors in bringing these lifeless nature forces into play so absolutely and utterly that they would impose a stratum of civilization over the earth—these factors are number, measure and weight.

The scales, the measuring rod—to weigh, to count, to measure—these are the ideal of the modern scientist, of the modern technician, whose entire profession is actually dependent upon external science. We have brought things to such a pass that an important mathematician of our times, in response to the question: What is the guarantee of existence?, gives the following answer. (Philosophers of all ages have tried to answer the question: What is actually real?) This important physicist says: What can be measured is real; what cannot be measured is unreal. The ideal is to regard all being in such a way that it can be brought into the laboratory, and weighed, measured and counted; and from what is weighed, measured and counted, science, or what stands for it, is constructed. All this then streams out into technology. Number, measure and weight have become the standards of the whole of civilization.

Now as long as people only apply themselves with their ordinary understanding to measure, number and weight, things are not particularly bad. People are certainly very clever, but they are still a long way from being as clever as the universe. And this is why things cannot become particularly bad so long as, in comparison with the universe, they go about the measuring, weighing and counting in a dilettante way. But if present-day civilization were to be transformed into initiation, things would be bad indeed, if this attitude of mind remained. And this can happen if the civilization of the west, which stands entirely under the sign of measure, number and weight, were to be flooded by what might well come to pass in the east, namely, that through initiation-science people might fathom what actually lives spiritually in the organism of the cow. For if you penetrate into the organism of the cow, burdened with earthly heaviness, with this eighth of her weight in foodstuffs, with all that can be weighed, measured and counted, you learn what is being organized spiritually in the cow by this earth-heaviness, you learn to understand the whole organism of the cow as it lies in the meadow digesting, and in this process of digestion manifesting wonderful revelations from the astrality of the universe. Then you learn how to form what can be weighed, measured and counted into a system with which you could overcome all other forms of civilization and impose upon the whole earth-globe one civilization, which would do nothing but weigh, count and measure, making everything else disappear. For what would result from initiation into the organization of the cow? That is a question of utmost gravity, a question of immense significance. What would be the result?

Well, the whole way in which people construct machines varies greatly according to the nature of the machine in question; but everything tends towards the gradual development of these still imperfect, primitive machines into a kind of machine which depends upon vibrations, and where the aim is to make the machines effective by means of vibrations or oscillations, by means of movements which run a periodic course. Everything is hastening towards such machines. But if once these machines in their coordinated activity could be constructed in such a way as can be learned from the distribution of foodstuffs in the organization of the cow, then the vibrations which would be conjured up on the earth-globe through the machines, these small earth-vibrations, would so run their course that what is above the earth would sound together with, vibrate together with what is happening on the earth; so that our planetary system in its movements would be compelled to vibrate with our earth-system, just as a string tuned to a certain pitch vibrates in sympathy when another one is struck in the same room.

That is the terrible law of the sounding in unison of vibrations which would be fulfilled if the alluring call of the cow would so decoy the orient that it would then be able to penetrate in an absolutely convincing way into the unspiritual, purely mechanistic civilization of the west and centre; and thereby it would become possible to conjure up on the earth a mechanistic system fitting exactly into the mechanistic system of the universe. Through this everything connected with the working of air, with the forces of the circumference, and everything connected with the working of the stars, would be exterminated from human civilization. What man experiences, for instance, through the cycle of the year, what he experiences through living together with the sprouting, budding life of spring, with the fading, dying life of autumn—all this would lose its import for him. Human civilization would resound with the clattering and rattling of the vibrating machines and with the echo of this clattering and rattling which would stream down upon the earth from the cosmos as a reaction to this mechanisation of the earth.

If you observe a part of what is active at the present time, you will say to yourselves: A part of our present-day civilization is actually on the way to having this terrible element of degeneracy as its goal.

Now turn your thoughts to what would happen if the centre fell a prey to the allurements of what is spoken by the lion. Then, it is true, the danger I have just described would not be present. Then mechanism would gradually disappear from the face of the earth. Civilization would not become mechanistic, but, with a one-sided power, man would be given over to all that lives in wind and weather, in the cycle of the year. Man would be yoked to the year's course, and thereby compelled to live particularly in the interaction of his rhythms of breathing and blood-circulation. He would develop in himself what his involuntary life can give him. He would primarily develop his breast-nature. Through this, however, such human egoism would come over earth civilization that everyone would be intent upon living for himself alone, that no-one would bother about anything save his own immediate wellbeing. It is this temptation to which the civilization of the centre is exposed, such is the existence which could hang like a fate over the civilization of the earth.

And yet again, if the alluring call of the eagle were to seduce the west, so that it would succeed in spreading its way of thinking and attitude of mind over the whole earth, binding itself up in a one-sided way in this kind of thinking and mental attitude, then, in mankind as a whole there would arise the urge to enter into connection with the super-earthly world, as this once was, as it was in the beginning, at the outset of earth-evolution. People would feel the urge to extinguish what man has won for himself in freedom and independence. They would come to live only and entirely in that unconscious will which allows the gods to live in human muscles and nerves. They would revert to primitive conditions, to original, primitive clairvoyance. Man would seek to free himself from the earth by turning back to beginnings.

And I must say that, for exact clairvoyant vision, this is further emphasized through the fact that man is continually approached by what may be called the voice of the grazing cow, which says: “Do not look upwards; all power comes from the earth. Learn to know all that lies in earth-activity. Thou shalt become the lord of the earth. Thou shalt perpetuate the results of thy work on earth.” Yes, if man were to succumb to this alluring call, it would be impossible to avoid the danger of which I have spoken: the mechanizing of earth civilization. For the astrality of this animal of digestion wills to make the present enduring, to make the present eternal. From the lion-organization proceeds not what wills to make the present endure, but rather what would make the present as fleeting as possible, what would make everything a mere sport of the cycle of the year, always repeating itself, what would spend itself in wind and weather, in the play of the sunbeams, in the currents of the air. And civilization, too, would take on this character.

If, with real understanding, one contemplates the eagle as he soars through the air, it appears as though he were bearing upon his plumage the memory of what was there at the very inception of the earth. He has preserved in his plumage the forces which have still worked into the earth from above. It can be said that in every eagle we see the past millennia of the earth; with his physical nature he has not touched the earth, or at the most only for the purpose of seizing his prey, and in no way for the satisfaction of his own life. To fulfil his own life the eagle circles in the air, because he is indifferent to what has developed on the earth, because he has his joy and inspiration from the forces of the air, because he actually despises the life of earth and wishes to live in that same element in which the earth itself lived when it was not yet earth, but when, in the beginning of its evolution, it was still imbuing itself with heavenly forces. The eagle is the proud creature which would not partake in the evolution of the solid earth, which withdrew from the influence of this solidifying process, and wished to remain united only with those forces which were there at the inception of the earth.

Such are the teachings given to us by this threefold representation of the animal kingdom, if we can conceive it as an immense and mighty script, written into the universe for the elucidation of its riddles. For, in very truth, every single thing in the universe is a written character if we could but read it. And especially when we can read their connection do we understand the riddle of the universe.

How full of significance it is to have to realize: What we do when we measure with the compasses or measuring rod, when we weigh with the scales, when we count—this is in fact only a putting together of something which is fragmentary; it becomes a whole when we understand the organization of the cow in its inner spirituality. This means to read in the secrets of the universe. And this reading in the secrets of the universe leads into the understanding of the being of the world and of man. This is modern initiation wisdom. It is this which must be uttered at the present time from out of the depths of spiritual life.

It is difficult indeed today for man to be really man. For, if I may put it so, in face of the three animal types, man conducts himself like the antelope in the fable which I told you yesterday. What wills to be one-sided takes on a particular form. The lion remains lion, but he wishes to have his fellow beasts of prey as metamorphoses of the other animal representatives. Thus for what in truth is eagle he substitutes a fellow beast of prey, the hyena, whose nature it is to live upon what is dead, upon that element of death which is induced in our head, and which continually, at every moment, contributes atomistic particles towards our death. So this fable replaces the eagle with the hyena, the hyena which consumes decay; and in the place of the cow—in line with the degeneration—the lion puts his fellow beast of prey, the wolf. Thus we have in the fable the other threefold animal group, the lion, the hyena, the wolf. And as today the alluring calls stand over against each other, their cosmic symbolism is confronted with its opposite, in that, when the alluring calls resound, the eagle sinks to earth and becomes the hyena, and the cow no longer desires in her holy, humble way to be an image of the cosmos, but becomes the ravening wolf.

And now we can translate the legend with which I ended my lecture yesterday from the negro version into that of modern civilization. Yesterday I had to narrate this legend from what may be called the negro point of view: The lion, the wolf and the hyena went out hunting. They killed an antelope. First the hyena was asked to divide the prey; he apportioned it according to hyena-logic, and said: “A third for everyone: a third for the lion, a third for the wolf, and a third for me.” Whereupon the hyena was consumed. And now the lion said to the wolf, “You divide it.” So the wolf said, “You get the first third because you have killed the hyena, and therefore the hyena's share is also your due. The second third is yours because, according to the verdict of the hyena, you would have had a third in any case, for each of us was to have had a third; and you got the last third as well, because of all the beasts you are the wisest and bravest.” And the lion said to the wolf, “Who taught you to divide in so excellent a way?” The wolf said, “The hyena taught it me.”

The logic is the same in both cases, but in its application to reality something quite different results according to whether the hyena, or the wolf with the hyena's experience, applied the logic. It is in the application of logic to reality that the essential matter lies.

Now we can also translate this fable into what I may call the version of modern civilization and tell the story somewhat differently. But please notice that what I am telling is in terms of the whole development of the great course of culture. Thus, expressed in modern fashion, the story could perhaps run as follows: The antelope is killed. The hyena withdraws and delivers a silent verdict; he does not dare to arouse the growling of the lion. He draws back, delivers a silent verdict, and waits in the background. The lion and the wolf now begin to fight for the body of the antelope. They fight and fight, until they have so severely wounded each other that both die from their wounds. Now comes the hyena, and consumes antelope, wolf and lion, after they have entered into a state of decay. The hyena is the image of what lies in the human intellect, the element in human nature which kills. He is the reverse side, the caricature, of the eagle civilization.

If you feel what I wish to convey by the europeanizing of the old negro fable, you will understand that just at the present time these things should be rightly understood. But they will only be rightly understood when, in opposition to the threefold alluring call—the call of the eagle, and of the lion, and of the cow—man learns what he himself should utter, that utterance which today should be the good shibboleth of man's strength, and thinking, and activity:

I must learn
Thy power, O Cow,
From the language
Which the stars reveal in me.

To comprehend earth-gravity, not as mere weighing, measuring and counting; to understand not merely what lies in the physical organization of the cow, but what is embodied in her; humbly to turn our gaze away from her organization up to the heights—this alone will ensure the spiritualisation of what would otherwise become the mechanistic civilization of the earth.

And the second utterance of the human being must be:

I must learn
Thy power, O Lion,
From the language
Which, through year and day,
Encircling space makes active in me.

Notice the words “reveal”, “make active”.

And the third utterance which man must learn is:

I must learn
Thy power, O Eagle,
From the language
Which earth-born life creates in me.

Thus man must oppose his threefold utterance to the one-sided alluring calls, that threefold utterance whose meaning can bring what is one-sided into harmonious balance. He must learn to look towards the cow, but then, after entering with deep experience into her nature, turn his gaze upwards to what is revealed by the language of the stars. He must learn to direct his gaze upwards to the eagle, but then, after deeply experiencing within himself the eagle's nature, he must look down with the clear gaze that the eagle's nature has bestowed upon him, and behold what springs and sprouts forth from the earth, and what also works from below upwards in the organization of man. And he must learn so to behold the lion that the lion reveals to him what is wafted around him in the wind, what flashes towards him in the lightning, what rumbles around him in the thunder, what wind and weather, in the course of the seasons, bring about in the life of the earth into which man himself is yoked. Thus, when man shall direct his physical gaze upwards with his spiritual gaze downwards, when he shall direct his physical gaze downwards with his spiritual gaze upwards, when he shall direct his physical gaze outwards towards the east with his spiritual gaze in the opposite direction towards the west—thus when man shall allow above and below, forwards and backwards, spiritual gaze and physical gaze to interpenetrate each other, then he will be able to receive and understand the true calls, bringing him strength and not weakness—the calls of the eagle from the heights, of the lion from the circumference, of the cow from below within the earth.

This is what man should learn in regard to his connection with the universe, so that thereby he may become ever more fitted to work for earth-civilization, and to serve, not its decadence, but its upward progress.

Learn to know my nature!
I give thee the power
To create a universe
In thine own head.

Thus speaks the Eagle. (West).

Learn to know my nature!
I give thee the power
To embody the universe
In the radiance of the encircling air.

Thus speaks the Lion. (Centre).

Learn to know my nature!
I give thee the power
To wrest from the universe
Measure, number and weight.

Thus speaks the Cow. (Orient).

I must learn
Thy power, O Cow,
From the language
Which the stars reveal in me.

I must learn
Thy power, O Lion,
From the language
Which, through year and day,
Encircling space makes active in me.

I must learn
Thy power, O Eagle,
From the language
Which earth-born life creates in me.

• 1. German Schein for which there is no exact English equivalent.