The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I have sought out of the esoteric aspect of the Easter thought to speak to you about how, when the course of Nature is permeated by spirit, it must come about that an autumn festival is added to the festivals of the year. This should be a kind of Michael festival, placed in relation to the fall equinox approximately in the same way as Christmas is to the winter solstice, Easter to the spring equinox, and St. John's to the summer solstice.

I should like to try to bring closer to you the Easter thought appropriate to the present age, particularly in its feeling content, so that tomorrow I can lay before you the whole significance of such a contemplation.

When we celebrate the Easter festival today, if we look about us into the consciousness of contemporary humanity and are honest with ourselves, we shall have to admit that the Easter thought is actually very little true for the greater part of humanity! On what does the truth of the Easter thought depend? The truth depends on a man's being able to link with this thought a mental image showing the Christ Being as having gone through death, having conquered Death, and then when He had undergone death and the succeeding Resurrection, having thereafter so united Himself with mankind that He could still give revelations to those who had formerly been His disciples, to the Apostles. But the Resurrection thought has more and more faded away, whereas when Christianity was in its inception it had been so living that Paul's words could sound across the ages from this epoch: “And if the Christ be not risen, then is... your faith vain!”

Paul has here linked Christianity directly with the Easter thought, that is with the thought of the Resurrection. People who have received the education of the present day call the Resurrection a miracle, and as miracle it is excluded from the realm of what is or can be reality. So that for all those who can no longer penetrate to the Resurrection thought, the Easter festival merely reflects an ancient custom, as do the rest of the Christian festivals. In the course of the years we have mentioned this from the most varied points of view.

It will first be necessary for mankind to reacquire a knowledge of the spiritual world as such in order to understand events which do not belong to the realm of sense reality; and what is connected with the Resurrection thought must be regarded as such an event. Then it will be possible for the Easter thought to become truly living again, which it cannot be for a humanity that relegates the Resurrection to the realm of unreal miracles.

The Easter thought arose in those epochs of mankind in which there were still remnants of the ancient primitive human knowledge of the spiritual world. We know that at the beginning of human earth-evolution, man had a certain instinctive clairvoyance by means of which he could gain glimpses of the spiritual world which led him to view this world as of equal validity with the physical sense world. This original instinctive clairvoyance is lost for earthly humanity. But in the first three centuries of the Christian era, the last remnants of it at least still existed. Hence in these centuries a certain understanding of the Easter thought based upon ancient human insight could still take root.

Such an understanding became blunted in the fourth century, when preparation began for what has come to full expression since the first third of the fifteenth century; namely, man's life in abstract, dead thoughts, which we have often mentioned. In these abstract, dead thoughts, in which natural science attains greatness, the Easter thought soon died. Today the time has come when it must again awaken as a living thought. But in order to awaken, it must pass over out of the state of death into a state of livingness.

That which is living is characterized by the fact that it puts forth something other than itself out of itself. In the early Christian centuries, when the Easter thought was spreading throughout Christendom, the “Gemuets”¹ of men were still sensitive enough to experience inwardly something very powerful when they pictured the grave of Christ and, rising out of the grave, that Being Who was now united with mankind. The Gemuets could experience with great inner force what appeared before their souls in this powerful image. And this inner experience was a reality in the human soul life.

Only that is a reality in the human soul life which this soul really lays hold of, just as the senses ordinarily lay hold of the outer sense world. The people of the early centuries felt that they were changed by beholding the event of the Death and the Resurrection of Christ. They felt that by this sight their souls were transformed, just as a man feels that he is changed by physical events in the course of his life on earth.

The human being is transformed at about the seventh year by the change of teeth, and again at about the fourteenth or fifteenth year by the onset of puberty. These are bodily transformations. In the contemplation of the Easter thought the early Christians felt themselves transformed in their inner soul life. They felt themselves thereby lifted out of one stage of human existence and transported into another.

In the course of time the Easter thought has lost this force, this power, and it can regain it only when the Resurrection, which cannot be understood according to natural laws, regains reality through spiritual science, a science which comprehends the spiritual. But what is spiritually conceived attains reality, not when this spiritual is conceived merely in abstract thoughts but only when it is also grasped in lively connection with the world appearing before the senses.

Anyone who wants to cling to the spiritual only in its abstraction, who says, for example, that we should not pull down the spiritual into the physical sense world, should at the same time maintain that the Divine Being is degraded when He is represented as having created the world. The Divine is comprehended in its greatness and power, not when we place it outside and beyond the sensible, but when we ascribe to it the power to work in this sensible world, to permeate this sensible world creatively. It is a debasing of the Divine to want to set it up yonder in abstract heights, in a “cloud-cuckoo-land.” And we will never live in spiritual realities if we conceive the spiritual only in its abstractness, if we cannot bring it into connection with the whole course of the world as this comes to meet us.

And this cosmic course, as far as our earthly life is concerned, meets us first of all in the fact that this earthly life comprises a certain number of years, and that these years present the return of certain events in a regular rhythm, as I indicated yesterday. After a year we return to approximately the same conditions of weather, of sun-position, and so forth. The course of the year thus enters into our earthly life in a rhythmical way.

We saw yesterday that this course of the year represents an in-and-out-breathing by the Earth itself of soul-spiritual elements. If we picture to ourselves once more the four high points of this Earth breathing-process, as we allowed them to come before our souls, we must say to ourselves: The time of the Christmas festival represents the time when the Earth holds its breath within it. The soul-spiritual part of the Earth is completely absorbed. Deep in the bosom of the Earth there rests all that the Earth unfolded during summer in order to let it be stimulated by the cosmos. All that opened up to the cosmos and was yielded up to its forces during the summertime has now been completely drawn in by the Earth, to rest in her deeps at Christmas time. Man of course does not dwell in the earthly depths; physically he lives on the surface of the Earth. Soul-spiritually also, he does not dwell in the depths of the Earth, for he lives actually in the Earth's periphery; he lives in the atmosphere that surrounds the Earth.

Therefore esoteric wisdom has always recognized the essential being of the Earth at the time of the winter solstice, at Christmas time, as something concealed at first, as something which cannot be penetrated by the ordinary forces of human knowledge, something which belongs in the sphere of the esoteric mysteries. And in all ancient times when something comparable to our present Christmas festival existed, it was recognized that what goes on in connection with the Earth at Christmas time could be grasped only by initiation into mystery-knowledge, by the initiation still known in Greece as the Chthonian Mysteries. By means of this initiation, man forsook in a certain way the periphery of the Earth in which he lived with his ordinary consciousness, to immerse himself in something into which he could not submerge physically. He immersed himself in the soul-spiritual element, and thus he learned to know what the Earth becomes during midwinter, when she draws her soul-spiritual element into herself.

And then a man came to know through this Mystery initiation, that at the time of the winter solstice the Earth is especially receptive to permeation by the Moon forces. This was regarded as the secret—if I may express myself in the modern sense—as the Christmas secret of the ancient mysteries: that just at Christmas time one comes to know how the Earth, by being permeated and saturated by her spirit-soul-being, becomes especially receptive in her inner being to the activity of the Moon forces.

In certain ancient times, for example, no one was entrusted with a knowledge of healing science unless he was initiated in the Winter Mysteries, and understood how the Earth, through the holding of her breath, becomes especially susceptible inwardly to the activity of the Moon forces, how at this time she permeates especially the plants with healing forces, how at this time she makes the plant world, and to a certain extent also the world of the lower animals into something entirely different.

The Christmas initiation was felt as a descent into the depths of the earthly world. But something else was connected with this Christmas initiation; namely, something that was felt in a certain sense to be a danger for the human being. A man said to himself: “When anyone really observes his consciousness in connection with what lives in the Earth as Moon forces at Christmastime, he comes into a state of consciousness in which he must be inwardly very strong, must have inwardly fortified himself, in order to withstand the attack from all sides of the Ahrimanic powers, who live in the Earth precisely because of its having taken in the Moon activity.” And only in the strength which a man had himself developed in his soul-spiritual being, in the strength to break the opposition of these forces, did he see what makes it possible to endure his earth existence over the long run.

But then some time after the celebration of these Christmas Mysteries, the teachers of the Mysteries gathered their pupils together, and as a sort of revelation, said to them the following: “Certainly, through initiation one can, in full consciousness, behold what is at work within the Earth at the time of the winter solstice. But with the oncoming of spring, when the plant world starts to grow, something rises up out of the depths of the Earth which permeates all that is growing and sprouting, permeates also man himself; namely, what the Ahrimanic powers bring about. At a time when man was still endowed with divine forces, as he was at the Earth's beginning, then through this primordial divine heritage men could still resist the attack of the Ahrimanic powers which broke over mankind in this way during the time of the winter moon. But (so the initiates told their pupils) a time will come when mankind will be rendered insensible to the spiritual through the agency of the Moon forces which the Earth takes up in the wintertime. With the growing and sprouting in the spring, a kind of intoxication with regard to the spiritual will come over mankind, depriving men of any consciousness that anything spiritual exists. Then, should mankind not find it possible to resist these intoxicating forces, the humanity of the Earth will go into decline and not be able to develop further with the Earth to future higher stages of earth evolution.”

The initiates painted in gloomy colors the age which had to break in for humanity in the fifteenth century, when mankind will excel to be sure in abstract, dead thoughts, but when man can again acquire spiritual capacities only by gaining new strength to overcome the intoxicating forces that rise out of the Earth. This he can do by developing the particular spiritual force now accessible to mankind.

When we form such visualizations, we transpose ourselves, so to speak, into the connection that exists between the course of the year in nature and what lives in the spirit. We bring together what is otherwise abstract, merely thought-out, with what is the natural sensible course as it confronts us, for example, in the seasons.

The polar opposite of this Christmas Mystery is the St. John's Mystery, at the time of the summer solstice. Then the Earth has completely exhaled. The spirit-soul element of the Earth is then utterly surrendered to the super-earthly powers, to the cosmic powers. Then the spirit-soul element of the Earth takes in all that is extraterrestrial. Just as the ancient initiates had said of the Christmas Mystery, so they said also of the St. John's Mystery (we use modern forms of expression, but there were appropriate forms in the ancient Mysteries also)—the initiates said that it was necessary to attain initiation in order to penetrate the secrets of the St. John's Mystery, that is, the secrets of the heavens. For man belongs to the periphery of the Earth; he belongs neither within the Earth, nor as earthly man does he belong to the heavens. Hence he must be initiated into the secrets of the sub-earthly in order to come to know the secrets of the super-earthly.

In a certain way, the Easter Mystery and the Michael or Autumn Mystery were seen as holding the balance between the super-earthly and the sub-earthly. And the Michael Mystery, as we have said, will first attain its proper significance in the time that is still future to our own.

The Easter Mystery in its full magnitude entered into the evolution of mankind through the Mystery of Golgotha. And this Easter Mystery was understood, as I have already said, because remnants of the ancient clairvoyance still existed. At that time people could still raise themselves up in their Gemuets or feeling souls to the resurrected Christ. The Easter Mystery was therefore woven into that ritual which was not an initiation ritual, but a ritual for mankind in general; it was woven into the ritual of the celebration of the Mass.

But with the retreat of primitive clairvoyance, the understanding of the Easter Mystery was lost. People begin to discuss a matter only when they no longer understand it. All the discussion that began after the first Christian centuries about how the Easter thought is to be understood derive from the fact that people could no longer comprehend it in a direct elementary way.

Now we have often been able to apply to the Easter thought what anthroposophical spiritual science gives to us. What is essential here is that this anthroposophical spiritual research points again to forms of life which are not exhausted between birth and death in the sense world; that it places what can be spiritually investigated over against what can be sensibly investigated; that it makes comprehensible how the Christ could converse with His disciples, even after the physical body was turned to dust. In the light of spiritual research, the Resurrection thought becomes alive again. But this Resurrection thought will be fully understood only if it is linked to what I might call its counter-pole. What then does the Resurrection thought really portray? The Christ Being descended from spiritual heights, entered into the body of Jesus and lived on Earth in this body, thereby bringing into the earthly sphere forces in themselves super-terrestrial. And these super-earthly forces which the Christ Being brought into the earthly sphere were from the time of the Mystery of Golgotha on, united with the forces of mankind's evolution. Since then that which the men of ancient times could behold only outside in cosmic space is to be feelingly perceived within the evolution of earthly humanity. Following the Resurrection, the Christ united Himself with mankind, and since then He lives, not only in the super-earthly heights, but also within the earth-existence; He lives in evolution, in the stream of mankind's evolution.

Above all, this event must be regarded not from the earthly point of view alone, but also from the super-earthly viewpoint. We can say that we should not view the Christ only in the way He comes to Earth out of heavenly worlds and becomes man, in the way He is given to men, but we should view this Christ Event also from the standpoint that the Christ actually departs from the spiritual world when He descends to the Earth.

Human beings saw the Christ arise in their realm. The Gods saw the Christ forsake the heavenly world and plunge down among mankind. For men the Christ appeared; for certain spiritual beings He vanished. Only when He passed through the Resurrection did He appear again to certain extraterrestrial spiritual beings, now shining out to them from the Earth like a star, a star which radiates out from the Earth into the spiritual world. Spiritual beings mark the Mystery of Golgotha by saying: “A star began to shine out from the Earth into the spiritual realm.” And it was felt to be of immense importance for the spiritual world that the Christ had submerged into a human body, and had gone through death in this body. For by partaking in death in a human body He was enabled immediately after this death to undertake something which His former divine companions could by no means have accomplished.

These former divine companions confronted, as an inimical world, what even in earlier times was called “hell.” But the efficacy of these spiritual beings stopped short at the gates of hell. These spiritual beings worked upon man. The forces of man extend even into hell. This signifies nothing other than man's subconscious projection into the Ahrimanic forces in the wintertime and also into the ascent of these Ahrimanic forces in the spring. The divine spiritual beings felt this as a world opposed to them. They saw it rise up out of the Earth and felt it to be an exceedingly problematic world. But they themselves had only a roundabout connection with it through man. They could only observe it in a certain way. But because the Christ had descended to the Earth, had Himself become man, He could descend into the realm of these Ahrimanic powers and overcome them. This is expressed in the Creed as “the Descent into Hell.”

This Descent into Hell provides the opposite pole to the Resurrection. This is what Christ has done for mankind: By descending from the divine heights and taking on the form of man, He became able actually to descend into the realm to whose dangers man is exposed, into which the other Gods, who had not been exposed to human death could not descend. In His way the Christ gained the victory over death. And therewith entered, I might say, as the opposite pole of the Descent into Hell, the ascent into the spiritual world, in spite of the fact that the Christ remained on Earth. For Christ had so united Himself with mankind that he had descended to that to which mankind is exposed. During the winter and spring seasons, He could win for man that which works out of extraterrestrial regions into the Earth again from St. John's to autumn. Thus in the Easter thought we see united in a certain way the Descent into the region of Hell, and through this descent the winning of the heavenly region for the further evolution of mankind.

All this belongs to a right conception of the Easter thought. But what would this Easter thought be if it could not become living! It was possible in ancient times to connect the right feeling awareness with the thought of the winter solstice only because they had on the other hand the St. John's thought. Schematically drawn: If one had the earthly with its deeply concealed winter nature (orange), then its counterpart was what in summer lay in the super-earthly periphery (orange). Both were to be reached only through initiation, yet they were connected by what was in the atmosphere surrounding the Earth, in the Earth's periphery (green), Christmas calls for St. John's. St. John's calls for Christmas. Man would rigidify under the influence of the Ahrimanic powers if he could not be exposed to the loosening Luciferic powers, who again give wings to thought, so that it need not remain rigid but can thaw again under the influence of the light.

At first humanity in its evolution had only the one pole, the Easter pole, and this Easter pole became paralyzed. The Easter festival lost its inner vitality. It will regain its inner life only when man can think about this festival in such a way that he can say to himself: “Through what is symbolically expressed in the Descent into Hell—which in reality can be understood as the Resurrection—a counterweight was given against something which had to come; namely, the paralyzing of all spiritual vision, its dying away in the earthly life. Prophetically, Christ Jesus wanted to prepare for what had to come; namely, the circumstance that man during his life on Earth between birth and death would have to forget the super-earthly, the spiritual, that he would in a certain way die to the spiritual. Opposed to this dying away of man in earthly life stands the Easter thought of the victory of super-earthly life over the earthly.”

On the one side is this: Man descends from his pre-earthly life; but in the period that dawned in the first half of the fifteenth century, he will in his earthly life more and more forget his super-earthly origin; as to his soul-being he will die away, as it were, in the earthly life. That stands on the one side.

On the other stands this: There was a spiritual, heavenly Being, Who by His deed, working out of the heavens into the Earth, set forth the counter-image. That spiritual Being descended into a human body, and in the Resurrection has, through His own being, placed the super-earthly spiritual among the men of Earth. In remembrance of this we have the Easter festival, which puts before mankind the picture of the burial of Christ Jesus and the Resurrection of Christ Jesus.

He was laid in the grave and thereafter He arose—this is the Easter thought, as it stands in cosmic records... “Look upon thyself, O Man; thou descendest out of the super-earthly worlds; thou art threatened by the danger that thy soul will die away in the earthly life. Therefore the Christ appears, Who sets before thine eyes how that from which thou also didst arise, how that super-earthly spiritual conquers death. There stands before thee in mighty images such as could be placed before mankind: the entombment of Christ Jesus, the Resurrection of Christ Jesus. He was laid in the grave. He rose from the grave and appeared to those who could behold Him.”

But with the paralyzed soul forces of man today, this image can no longer become living. Where could it become alive? In a traditional faith man can still look upon what the Easter festival gives him: Upon the sublime picture of the burial and the Resurrection. But out of the inner force of his soul, he can no longer, of himself, find anything to connect with this Easter thought, with the thought of the entombment and the Resurrection. It is out of spiritual knowledge that he must again unite something with it.

And this something is another thought, to which there can be no alternative. It is, however, possible for a human being to let spiritual knowledge approach him so that he may understand this “other.” Let us place this “other” before ourselves, so as to inscribe it deeply within our souls. Easter thought: He has been laid in the grave; He is risen. Now let us place before ourselves the other thought which must come over mankind: He is risen and can confidently be laid in the grave. Easter thought: He has been laid in the grave; He is risen. Michaelmas thought: He is risen and can confidently be laid in the grave.

The first thought, the Easter thought, pertains to the Christ; the second thought pertains to the human being. It pertains to the man who directly comprehends the power of the Easter thought, comprehends how when spiritual knowledge enters into the earthly life of the present, in which his soul-spiritual is dying away, his soul can resurrect, so that he becomes living between birth and death, so that in the earthly life he becomes inwardly alive.

The human being must through spiritual knowledge comprehend this inner resurrection, this inner awakening; then will he confidently be laid in the grave. Then he may be laid in the grave, through which he otherwise would fall prey to those Ahrimanic powers who work within the earth realm at the time of the winter solstice.

And the festival which contains this thought: “He is risen and can confidently be laid in the grave”—this festival must fall in the time when the leaves are beginning to turn yellow and fall from the trees, when the fruits have ripened, when the Sun has received that power which brings to maturity what in the spring was budding and sprouting, full of the forces of growth, but which also brings withering and the inclination to seek again the inner part of the Earth; when what is developing on the Earth begins to be a symbol of the grave.

If we place the Easter festival at the time when life begins to bud and to sprout, when the forces of growth attain their highest point, then the other festival, which contains: “He is risen and can confidently be laid in the grave,” we must place at the time when Earth nature begins to wither, when the mood of the grave is spreading abroad in Earth nature, when the symbol of the grave can appear before the soul of man. Then the Michael thought begins to stir in man, that thought which is not, like the Easter thought in the earliest centuries of Christianity, directed toward a kind of inner perceiving (Anschauung).²

In the first centuries of Christianity, this feeling perception was directed to the Christ laid in the grave and risen. In this perception the soul was made strong, was filled with its strongest forces. In the festival-thought at the time of the fall equinox, the soul must feel its strength when appeal is made not to its perceiving, but to its will. “Take into thyself the Michael thought which confers the Ahrimanic powers, that thought which makes thee strong to gain here on Earth knowledge of the spirit, so that thou canst overcome the powers of Death.”—As the Easter thought is directed to the perception, this thought is directed to the will-powers: to take up the Michael force, which means to take the force of spiritual knowledge into the will-forces. And so the Easter thought can become living, can be brought directly to the human soul and spirit, when now the Michael thought, the thought of the Michael festival in the autumn, is felt to be the counter-pole of the Easter thought—just as the St. John's thought was perceived to be the counter-pole of the Christmas thought. As the Christmas thought by its inner livingness, has brought forth the St. John's thought after a half-year, so must the Easter thought bring forth the Michael thought. Mankind must attain an esoteric maturity, so as to think, not merely abstractly, but to be able again to think so concretely that men can again become festival-creating. Then it will be possible again to unite something spiritual with the cycle of sense phenomena.

All our thoughts are so abstract! But no matter how remarkable they are, how intelligent, if they remain abstract, life will not be able to penetrate them. When today men reflect that Easter might be set abstractly on any day, no longer according to the constellations of the stars, when today all higher knowledge is darkened, when man no longer sees any relation between insight into the soul-spiritual and the natural-physical forces, the force must once more awaken in man which will be able to unite something spiritual directly with the sense phenomena of the world.

Wherein then did the spiritual strength of man consist, making him able to create festivals in the course of the year, in accordance with the yearly phenomena? It consisted in the primal spiritual force. Today men can continue to celebrate festivals according to the ancient traditional custom, but they must gain once more the esoteric force out of themselves to “speak” something into Nature that accords with natural events. It must become possible to grasp the Michael thought as the blossom of the Easter thought. While the Easter thought stems from physical blossoming, it will become possible to place the blossom of the Easter thought—the Michael thought—into the course of the year as the outcome of physical withering.

People must learn once more to “think” the spiritual “together with” the course of nature. It is not admissible today for a person merely to indulge in esoteric speculations; it is necessary today to be able once again to do the esoteric. But people will be able to do this only when they can conceive their thoughts so concretely, so livingly that they don't withdraw from everything that is going on around them when they think, but rather that they think with the course of events: “think together with” the fading of the leaves, with the ripening of the fruits, in a Michaelic way, just as at Easter one knows how to think with the sprouting, springing, blossoming plants and flowers.

When it is understood how to think with the course of the year, then forces will intermingle with the thoughts that will let men again hold a dialogue with the divine spiritual powers revealing themselves from the stars. Men have drawn down from the stars the power to establish festivals which have an inner human validity. Festivals must be founded out of inner esoteric force. Then from the dialogue with the fading, ripening plants, with the dying Earth, by finding the right inward festival mood, men will also again be able to hold converse with the Gods and link human existence with divine existence.

• 1. The Gemüt, or feeling soul, together with the intellectual soul forms the centermost of the three soul elements in Rudolf Steiner's picture of man. This soul element was predominant in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, in which the event of Golgotha took place.
• 2. It is assumed that Anschauung here is intended to describe the way man's Gemuet could inwardly experience the Entombment and Resurrection, as was indicated earlier. This would be perceptively, feelingly, rather than through logic.

We should not underestimate the significance it once held for mankind to focus the whole attention during the year on a festival-time. Although in our time the celebration of religious festivals is largely a matter of habit, it was not always so. There were times when people united their consciousness with the course of the year; when, let us say, at the beginning of the year, they felt themselves standing within the course of time in such a way that they said to themselves: “There is such and such a degree of cold or warmth now; there are certain relationships among the other weather conditions, certain relationships also between the growth or non-growth in plants or animals.”—People experienced along with Nature the gradual changes and metamorphoses she went through. But they shared this experience with Nature in such a way—when their consciousness was united with the natural phenomena—that they oriented this consciousness toward a specific festival. Let us say, at the beginning of the year, through the various feeling perceptions associated with the passing of winter, the consciousness was directed toward the Easter time, or in the fall, with the fading away of life, toward Christmas. Then men's souls were filled with feelings which found expression in the way they related themselves to what the festivals meant to them.

Thus people partook in the course of the year, and this participation meant for the most part permeating with spirit not only what they saw and heard around them but what they experienced with their whole human being. They experienced the course of the year as an organic life process, just as in the human being when he is a child we relate the utterances of the childish soul with the awkward movements of a child, or its imperfect way of speaking. As we connect specific soul-experiences with the change of teeth, other soul experiences with the later bodily changes, so men once saw the ruling and weaving of the spiritual in the successive changes of outer nature, in growth and decline, or in a waxing followed by a waning.

Now all this cannot help affecting the whole way man feels himself as earthly man in the universe. Thus we can say that in that period at the beginning of our reckoning of time, when the remembrance of the Event of Golgotha began to be celebrated which later became the Easter festival—in that period in which the Easter festival was livingly felt and perceived, when man still took part in the turning of the year as I have just described it—then it was in essence so, that people felt their own lives surrendered, given over to the outer spiritual-physical world. Their feeling told them that in order to make their lives complete, they had need of the vision of the Entombment and the Resurrection, of that sublime image of the Mystery of Golgotha.

But it is from filling the consciousness in such a way that inspirations arise for men. People are not always conscious of these inspirations, but it is a secret of human evolution that from these religious attitudes toward the phenomena of the world, inspirations for the whole of life proceed.

First of all, we must understand clearly that during a certain epoch, during the Middle Ages, the people who oriented the spiritual life were priests, and those priests were concerned above all with the ordering of the festivals. They set the tone for the celebration of the festivals. The priesthood was that group of men who presented the festivals before the rest of mankind, before the laity, and who gave the festivals their content. In so doing the priests themselves felt this content very deeply; and the entire soul-condition that resulted from the inspiring effect of the festivals was expressed in the rest of the soul-life.

The Middle Ages would not have produced what is called Scholasticism—the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus and the other Scholastics—if this philosophy, this world conception, with all its social consequences, had not been inspired by the most important thought of the Church, by the Easter thought. In the vision of the descending Christ, Who lives for a time in man on Earth and then goes through the Resurrection, that soul impulse was given which led to the particular relation between faith and science, between knowledge and revelation which was agreed upon by the Scholastics. That out of man himself, only knowledge of the sensible world can be acquired, whereas everything connected with the super-sensible world has to be gained through revelation—this was determined basically by the way the Easter thought followed upon the Christmas thought.

And if, in turn, the idea-world of natural science today is totally the product of Scholasticism, as I have often explained to you, we must then say: “Although the natural science of the present is not aware of it, its knowledge is essentially a direct imprint of the Easter thought which prevailed in the early Middle Ages and then became paralyzed in the later Middle Ages and in modern times.” Notice the way natural science applies in its ideas what is so popular today and indeed dominates our culture: it devotes its ideas entirely to dead nature; it considers itself incapable of rising above dead nature. This is a result of that inspiration which was stimulated by viewing the Laying in the Grave.

As long as people were able to add the Resurrection to the Entombment as something to which they looked up, they then added also the revelation concerning the super-sensible to mere outer sense-knowledge. But as it became more and more common to view the Resurrection as an inexplicable and therefore unjustifiable miracle, revelation—that is, the super-sensible world—came to be repudiated. The present-day natural scientific view is inspired solely by the conception of Good Friday and lacks any conception of Easter Sunday.

We need to recognize this inner connection: The inspired element is always that which is experienced within all the festival moods in relation to Nature. We must come to know the connection between this inspiring element and all that comes to expression in human life. When we once gain an insight into the intimate connection that exists between this living-oneself-into the course of the year and what men think, feel, and will, then we shall also recognize how significant it would be if we were to succeed, for example, in making the Michael festival in autumn a reality; if we were really to succeed, out of spiritual foundations, out of esoteric foundations, in making the autumn Michael festival something that would pass over into men's consciousness and again work inspiringly.

If the Easter thought were to receive its coloration through the fact that to the Easter thought “He has been laid in the grave and is arisen” the other thought is added, the human thought, “He is arisen and may be laid in the grave without perishing”—If this Michael thought could become living, what tremendous significance just such an event could have for men's whole perceiving (Empfindung), and feeling and willing—and how this could “live itself into” the whole social structure of mankind!

My dear friends, all that people are hoping for from a renewal of the social life will not come about from all the discussions and all the institutions based on what is externally sensible. It will be able to come about only when a mighty inspiration-thought goes through mankind, when an inspiration-thought takes hold of mankind through which the moral-spiritual element will once again be felt and perceived along with the natural-sensible element.

People today are like earthworms, I might say, looking for sunlight under the ground, while to find the sunlight they need to come forth above the surface of the earth. Nothing in reality will be accomplished by all of today's organizations and plans for reform; something can be achieved only by the mighty impact of a thought-impulse drawn out of the spirit. For it must be clear to us that the Easter thought itself can only attain its new “nuance” through being complemented by the Michael thought.

Let us consider this Michael thought somewhat more closely. If we look at the Easter thought, we have to consider that Easter occurs at the time of the bursting and sprouting life of spring. At this time the Earth is breathing out her soul-forces, in order that these soul-forces may be permeated again by the astral element surrounding the Earth, the extra-earthly, cosmic element. The Earth is breathing out her soul. What does this mean?

It means that certain elemental beings which are just as much in the periphery of the Earth as the air is or as the forces of growth are—that these unite their own being with the out-breathed Earth soul in those regions in which it is spring. These beings float and merge with the out-breathed Earth soul. They become dis-individualized; they lose their individuality and rise in the general earthly soul element. We see countless elemental beings in spring just around Easter time in the final stage of the individual life which was theirs during the winter. We see them merging into the general earth soul element and rising like a sort of cloud (red, yellow, with green). I might say that during the wintertime these elemental beings are within the soul element of the Earth, where they had become individualized; before this Easter time they had a certain individuality, flying and floating about as individual beings. During Easter time we see them come together in a general cloud (red), and form a common mass within the Earth soul (green). But by so doing these elemental beings lose their consciousness to a certain degree and enter into a sort of sleeping condition. Certain animals sleep in the winter; these elemental beings sleep in summer. This sleep is deepest during St. John's time, when they are completely asleep. Then they begin once more to individualize, and when the Earth breathes in again at Michaelmas, at the end of September, we can see them already as separate beings again.

Man needs these elemental beings... This is not in his consciousness, but man needs them nonetheless, in order to unite them with himself, so that he can prepare his future. And man could unite these elemental beings with himself, if at a certain festival time—it would have to be at the end of September—he could perceive with a special inner soul-filled liveliness how Nature herself changes toward the autumn; if he could perceive how the animal and plant life recedes, how certain animals begin to seek their shelters against the winter; how the plant leaves get their autumn coloring; how all Nature fades and withers.

It is true that spring is fair, and it is a fine capacity of the human soul to perceive the beauty of the spring, the growing, sprouting, burgeoning life. But to be able to perceive also when the leaves fade and take on their fall coloring, when the animals creep away—to be able to feel how in the sensible which is dying away, the gleaming, shining, soul-spiritual element arises—to be able to perceive how with the yellowing of the leaves there is a descent of the springing and sprouting life, but how the sensible becomes yellow in order that the spiritual can live in the yellowing as such—to be able to perceive how in the falling of the leaves the ascent of the spirit takes place, how the spiritual is the counter-manifestation of the fading sense-perceptible; this should as a perceptive feeling for the spirit—ensoul the human being in autumn! Then he would prepare himself in the right way precisely for Christmastide.

Man should become permeated, out of anthroposophical spiritual science, by the truth that it is precisely the spiritual life of man on Earth which depends on the declining physical life. Whenever we think, the physical matter in our nerves is destroyed; the thought struggles up out of the matter as it perishes. To feel the becoming of the thought in one's self, the gleaming up of the idea in the human soul, in the whole human organism of man to be akin to the yellowing leaves, the withering foliage, the drying and shriveling of the plant world in Nature; to feel the kinship of man's spiritual “being-ness” with Nature's spiritual “being-ness”—this can give man that impulse which strengthens his will, that impulse which points man to the permeation of his will with spirituality.

In so doing, however, in permeating his will with spirituality, the human being becomes an associate of the Michael activity on earth. And when man lives with Nature in this way as autumn approaches and brings this living-with-Nature to expression in an appropriate festival content, then he will be able truly to perceive the completing (Erganzung) of the Easter mood. But by means of this, something else will become clear to him.—You see, what man thinks, feels, and wills today is really inspired by the Easter mood, which is actually one-sided. This Easter mood is essentially a result of the sprouting, burgeoning life, which causes everything to merge as in a pantheistic unity. Man is surrendered to the unity of Nature, and to the unity of the world generally. This is also the structure of our spiritual life today. Man wants everything to revert to a unity, to a monon; he is either a devotee of universal spirit or universal nature; and he is accordingly either a spiritualistic Monist or a materialistic Monist. Everything is included in an indefinite unity. This is essentially the spring mood.

But when we look into the autumn mood, with the rising and becoming free of the spiritual, and the dropping away and withering of the sensible (red), then we have a view of the spiritual as such, and the sensible as such.

The sprouting plant in the spring has the spiritual within its sprouting and growing; the spiritual is mingled with the sensible; we have essentially a unity. The withering plant lets the leaf fall, and the spirit rises; we have the spirit, the invisible, super-sensible spirit, and the material falling out of it. I would say that it is just as if we had in a container, first, a uniform fluid in which something is dissolved, and then by some process we should cause this to separate from the fluid and fall to the bottom as sediment. We have now separated the two which were united, which had formed a unity.

The spring tends to weave everything together, to blend everything into a vague, undifferentiated unity. The view of the autumn, if we only look at it in the right way, if we contrast it in the right way with the view of the spring, calls attention to the way the spiritual works on the one side and the physical-material on the other. The Easter thought loses nothing of value if the Michaelmas thought is added to it. We have on the one side the Easter thought, where everything appears—I might say—as a pantheistic mixture, a unity. Then we have what is differentiated; but the differentiation does not occur in any irregular, chaotic fashion. We have regularity throughout.

Think of the cyclic course: joining together, intermingling, unifying; an intermediate state when the differentiating takes place; the complete differentiation; then again the merging of what was differentiated within the uniform, and so forth. There you see always besides these two conditions yet a third: you see the rhythm between the differentiated and the undifferentiated, in a certain way, between the in-breathing of what was differentiated-out and the out-breathing again, an intermediate condition. You see a rhythm: a physical-material, a spiritual, a working-in-each-other of the physical-material and the spiritual: a soul element.

But the important thing is this: not to stop with the common human fancy that everything must be led back to a unity; thereby everything, whether the unity is a spiritual or a material one, is led back to the indefiniteness of the cosmic night. In the night all cows are gray; in spiritual Monism all ideas are gray; in material Monism they are likewise gray. These are only distinctions of perceiving; they are of no concern for a higher view. What matters is this: that we as human beings can so unite ourselves with the cosmic course that we are in a position to follow the living transition from the unity into the trinity, the return from trinity into unity. When, by complementing the Easter thought with the Michael thought in this way we have become able to perceive rightly the primordial trinity in all existence, then we shall take it into our whole attitude of soul. Then we shall be in a position to understand that actually all life depends upon the activity and the interworking of primordial trinities. And when we have the Michael festival inspiring such a view in the same way that the one-sided Easter festival inspired the view now existing, then we shall have an inspiration, a Nature/Spirit impulse, to introduce threefoldness, the impulse of threefoldness into all the observing and forming of life. And it depends finally and only upon the introduction of this impulse, whether the destructive forces in human evolution can be transformed once more into ascending forces.

One might say that when we spoke of the threefold impulse it was in a certain sense a test of whether the Michael thought is already strong enough so that it can be felt how such an impulse flows directly out of the forces that shape the time. It was a test of the human soul, of whether the Michael thought is strong enough as yet in a large number of people. Well, the test yielded a negative result. The Michael thought is not strong enough in even a small number of people for it to be perceived truly in all its time-shaping power and forcefulness. And it will indeed hardly be possible, for the sake of new forces of ascent, to unite human souls with the original formative cosmic forces in the way that is necessary, unless such an inspiring force as can permeate a Michael festival—unless, that is to say, a new formative impulse—can come forth from the depths of the esoteric life.

If instead of the passive members of the Anthroposophical Society, even only a few active members could be found, then it would become possible to set up further deliberations to consider such a thought. It is essential to the Anthroposophical Society that while stimuli within the Society should of course be carried out, the members should actually attach primary value, I might say, to participating in what is coming to pass. They may perhaps focus the contemplative forces of their souls on what is taking place, but the activity of their own souls does not become united with what is passing through the time as an impulse. Hence, with the present state of the Anthroposophical Movement, there can of course be no question of considering as part of its activity anything like what has just now been spoken of as an esoteric impulse. But it must be understood how mankind's evolution really moves, that the great sustaining forces of humanity's world-evolution come not from what is propounded in superficial words, but from entirely different quarters.

This has always been known in ancient times from primeval elementary clairvoyance. In ancient times it was not the custom for the young people to learn, for example, that there are so and so many chemical elements; then another is discovered and there are then 75, then 76; another is discovered and there are 77. One cannot anticipate how many may still be discovered. Accidentally, one is added to 75, to 76, and so on. In what is adduced here as number, there is no inner reality. And so it is everywhere. Who is interested today in anything that would bring to revelation, let us say, that a systematic threefoldness or trinity prevails in plants! Order after order is discovered, species after species; and they are counted just as though one were counting a chance pile of sticks or stones. But the working of number in the world rests on a real quality of being, and this quality must be fathomed. Only think how short a time lies behind us since knowledge of substance was led back to the trinity of the salty, the mercurial, and the phosphoric; how in this a trinity of archetypal forces was seen; how everything that appeared as individual had to be fitted into one or another of the three archetypal forces.

And it is different again when we look back into still earlier times in which it was easier for people to come to something like this because of the very situation of their culture; for the Oriental cultures lay nearer to the Torrid Zone, where such things were more readily accessible to the ancient elementary clairvoyance. Today, however, it is possible to come to these things in the Temperate Zone through free, exact clairvoyance.... Yet people want to go back to the ancient cultures! In those days people did not distinguish spring, summer, autumn, winter. To distinguish spring, summer, autumn, winter leads us to a mere succession because it contains the “four.” It would have been quite impossible for the ancient Indian culture, for example, to think of something like the course of the year as ruled by the four, because this contains nothing of the archetypal forms underlying all activity.

When I wrote my book, Theosophy, it was impossible simply to list in succession physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego, although we can summarize it this way once the matter is before us, once it is inwardly understood. I had therefore to arrange them according to the number three: physical body, ether body, astral body, forming the first trinity. Then comes the trinity interwoven with it: sentient soul, intellectual soul, consciousness soul; then the trinity interwoven with this: spirit self, life spirit, spirit man—three times three interwoven with one another in such a way as to become seven.

Only when we look at the present stage of mankind's evolution does the four appear, which is really a secondary number. If we want to see the inwardly active principle, if we want to see the formative process, we must see forming and shaping as associated with threefoldness, with trinity.

Hence, the ancient Indian view was of a year divided into a hot season, which would approximate our months of April, May, June, July; a wet season, comprising approximately our months, August, September, October, November; and a cold season, which would include our months, December, January, February, March. The boundaries do not need to be rigidly fixed according to the months but are only approximate; they can be thought of as shifting. But the course of the year was thought of according to the principle of the “three.”

And thus man's whole state of soul would be imbued with the predisposition to observe this primal trinity in all weaving and working, and hence to interweave it also into all human creating and shaping. We can even say that it is only possible to have true ideas of the free spiritual life, the life of rights, the social-economic life, when we perceive in the depths this triple pulse of cosmic activity, which must also permeate human activity.

Any reference to this sort of thing today is regarded as some sort of superstition, whereas it is considered great wisdom simply to count “one” and again “one,” “two,” “three,” and so on. But Nature does not take such a course. If we look, however, only at a realm in which everything is woven together, as is the case with Nature in springtime—which of course we must look at if we want to observe the interweaving of things—then we can never restore the pulse of three.

But when anyone follows the whole course of the year, when he sees how the “three” is organized, how the spiritual and the physical-material life are present as a duality, and the rhythmic interweaving of the two as the third, then he perceives this three-in-one, one-in-three, and learns to know how the human being can place himself in this cosmic activity: three to one, one to three.

It would become the whole disposition of the human soul to permeate the cosmos, to unite itself with cosmic worlds, if once the Michael thought could awaken as a festival thought in such a way that we were to place a Michael festival in the second half of September alongside the Easter festival; if to the thought of the resurrection of the God after death could be added the thought, produced by the Michael force, of the resurrection of man from death, so that man through the Resurrection of Christ would find the force to die in Christ. This means, taking the risen Christ into one's soul during earthly life, so as to be able to die in Him—that is, to be able to die, not at death but when one is living.

Such an inner consciousness as this would result from the inspiring element that would come from a Michael service. We can realize full well how far removed from any such idea is our materialistic time, which is also a time grown narrow-minded and pedantic. Of course, nothing can be expected of us, so long as it remains dead and abstract. But if with the same enthusiasm with which festivals were once introduced in the world when people had the force to form festivals,—if such a thing happens again, then it will work inspiringly. Indeed it will work inspiringly for our whole spiritual and our whole social life. Then that which we need will be present in life: not abstract spirit on one hand and spirit-void nature on the other, but Nature permeated with spirit, and spirit forming and shaping naturally. For these are one, and they will once again weave religion, science, and art into oneness, because they will understand how to conceive the trinity in religion, science, and art in the sense of the Michael thought, so that these three can then be united in the right way in the Easter thought, in the anthroposophical shaping and forming. This can work religiously, artistically, cognitionally, and can also differentiate religiously, cognitionally. Then the anthroposophical impulse would consist in perceiving in the Easter season the unity of science, religion, and art; and then at Michaelmas perceiving how the three—who have one mother, the Easter mother—how the three become “sisters” and stand side by side, but mutually complement one another. Then the Michael thought which should become living as a festival in the course of the year, would be able to work inspiringly on all domains of human life.

With such things as these, which belong to the truly esoteric, we should permeate ourselves, at least in our cognition, to begin with. If then the time could come when there are actively working personalities, such a thing could actually become an impulse which singly and alone would be able, in the present condition of humanity, to replace the descending forces with ascending ones.

I have frequently referred recently to the connection the course of the year has with various aspects of human life, and during the Easter days I pointed especially to the connection with the celebration of festivals. Today I should like to go back to very ancient times and say more on this subject, just in relation to the ancient Mysteries. This can perhaps deepen in one way or another what we have spoken of before.

To the people of very ancient periods on Earth, the festivals that took place during the year formed a very significant part of their lives. We know that in those ancient times the human consciousness worked in an entirely different way from that of later times. We might ascribe a somewhat dreamy nature to this old form of consciousness. And indeed it was out of this dream condition that those insights arose in the human soul, in the human consciousness, which then took on the form of myths and in fact became mythology.

Through this dreamy, or we can also say instinctively clairvoyant consciousness people saw more deeply into the spiritual environment. But precisely through this more intensive kind of participation, not just in the sensible workings of Nature, as is the case today, but also in the spiritual events, people were all the more involved with the phenomena connected with the cycle of the year, with the differing aspects of Nature in spring and in autumn. I have pointed to this just in recent days.

Today I want to share something entirely different with you in this regard, and that is, how the festival of Midsummer, which has become our St. John's festival, and the Midwinter festival, which has become our Christmas, were celebrated in connection with the old Mystery teachings. To begin with, we must be quite clear that the humanity of the ancient times of which we are speaking did not have a full ego-consciousness, as we do today. In the dreamlike consciousness, a full ego-consciousness was lacking; and when this is the case, people do not perceive precisely that which present-day humanity is so proud of. Thus the people of that period did not perceive what existed in dead nature, in the mineral nature.

Let us keep this firmly in mind, my dear friends: It was not a consciousness that flowed along in abstract thoughts, but it lived in pictures; yet it was dreamlike. These people entered into, for example, the sprouting, burgeoning plant-life and plant-nature in spring far more than is the case today. Again, they felt the shedding of the leaves, their drying up in autumn, the whole dying away of the plant world; felt deeply also the changes the animal world lived through during the course of the year; felt the whole human environment to be different when the air was filled with butterflies fluttering and beetles humming. They felt their own human weaving in a certain way as being alongside the weaving and being of the plants and animal existence. But they not only had no interest, they had no proper consciousness for the mineral realm, for the dead world outside them. This is one side of the earlier human consciousness.

The other side is this: that no interest existed among this ancient humanity for the form of man in general. It is very difficult today to imagine what the human perception was in this regard, that people in general took no particular interest in the human figure as a space-form. They had, however, an intense interest in what pertains to race. And the farther back we go into ancient cultures, the less do we find people with the common consciousness interested in the human form. On the other hand, they were interested in the color of the skin, in the racial temperament. This is what people noticed. On the one side man was not interested in the dead mineral world, nor, on the other, in the human form. There was an interest, as we have said, in what pertains to race, rather than in the universally human, including the outer form of man.

The great teachers of the Mysteries simply accepted this as a fact. How they thought about it, I will show you graphically in a drawing. They said to themselves: “The people have a dreamlike consciousness by means of which they perceive very clearly the plant life in their environment.”—In their dream-pictures these people indeed lived with the plant life; but their dream consciousness did not extend to the comprehension of the mineral world. So the Mystery teachers said to themselves: “The human consciousness reaches on the one side to the plant life [see drawing], which is dreamily experienced, but not to the mineral; this lies outside human consciousness. And on the other side, men feel within them what still binds them with the animal world, that is, what pertains to race, what is typical of the animal. [See drawing]. On the other hand, what makes man really man, his upright form, the space form of his being, lies outside of human consciousness.”

Thus, the specifically human lay outside the interest of these people of ancient times. We can characterize the human by thinking of it, in the sense of this ancient humanity, as enclosed within this space [shaded portion in drawing], while the mineral and the specifically human lay outside the realm of knowledge generally accessible to those people who carried on their lives outside the Mysteries.

But what I have just said applies only in general. With his own forces, with what man experienced in his own being, he could not penetrate beyond this space [see drawing], to the mineral on the one side, to the human on the other. But there were ceremonies originating in the Mysteries which brought to man in the course of the year something approximating the human ego-consciousness on the one side and the perception of the general mineral kingdom on the other.

Strange as it may sound to people of the present time, it is nevertheless true that the priests of the ancient Mysteries arranged festivals by whose unusual effects man was lifted out above the plant-like to the mineral, and thereby at a certain time of year experienced a lighting up of his ego. It was as if the ego shone into the dream-consciousness. You know that even in a person's dreams today, one's own ego, which is then seen, often constitutes an element of the dream.

And so at the time of the St. John's festival, through the ceremonies that were arranged for those among the people who wanted to take part in them, ego-consciousness shone in just at the height of summer. And at this time of midsummer people could perceive the mineral realm at least to the extent necessary to help them attain a kind of ego-consciousness, whereby the ego appeared as something that entered into dreams from outside. In order to bring this about, the participants in the oldest midsummer festivals—those of the summer solstice which have become our St. John's festival—the participants were led to unfold a musical-poetic element in round dances having a strong rhythmic quality and accompanied by song. Certain presentations and performances were filled with distinctive musical recitative accompanied by primitive instruments. Such a festival was completely immersed in the musical-poetic element. What man had in his dream-consciousness he poured out into the cosmos, as it were, in the form of music, in song and dance.

Modern man can have no true appreciation of what was accomplished by way of music and song during those intense and widespread folk festivals of ancient times, which took place under the guidance of men who in turn had received their guidance from the Mysteries. For what music and poetry have come to be since then is far removed from the simple, primitive, elemental form of music and poetry which was unfolded in those times at the height of summer under the guidance of the Mysteries. For everything the people did in performing their round-dances, accompanied by singing and primitive poetic recitations, had the single goal of bringing about a soul mood in which there occurred what I have just called the shining of the ego into the human spirit.

But if those ancient people had been asked how they came to form such songs and such dances, by means of which there could arise what I have described, they would have given an answer highly paradoxical to modern man. They would have said, for example: “Much of it has been given to us by tradition, for those who went before us have also done these things.” But in certain ancient times they would have said: “One can learn these things also today without having any tradition, if one simply develops further what manifests itself. One can still learn today how to make use of instruments, how to form dances, how to master the singing voice”—and now comes the paradox in what these ancient people would have said. They would have said: “It is learned from the songbirds.”—For they understood in a deep way the whole import of the songbirds' singing.

My dear friends, mankind has long ago forgotten why the songbirds sing. It is true that men have preserved the art of song, the art of poetry, but in the age of intellectualism in which the intellect has dominated everything, they have forgotten the connection of singing with the whole universe. Even someone who is musically inspired, who sets the art of music high above the commonplace, even such a man, speaking out of this later intellectualistic age, says: “I sing as the bird sings who dwells in the branches. The song that issues from my throat is my reward, and an ample reward it is.” Indeed, my dear friends, the man of a certain period says this. The bird, however, would never say such a thing. He would never say: “The song that issues from my throat is my reward.” And just as little would the pupils of the ancient Mystery schools have said it. For when at a certain time of year the larks and the nightingales sing, what is thereby formed streams out into the cosmos, not through the air, but through the etheric element; it vibrates outward in the cosmos up to a certain boundary... then it vibrates back again to Earth, to be received by the animal realm—only now the divine-spiritual essence of the cosmos has united with it.

And thus it is that the nightingales and the larks send forth their voices into the universe (red) and that what they thus send forth comes back to them etherically (yellow), for the time during which they do not sing;

but in the meantime it has been filled with the content of the divine-spiritual. The larks send their voices out over the cosmos, and the divine spiritual, which takes part in the forming, in the whole configuration of the animal kingdom, streams back to the Earth on the waves of what had streamed out in the songs of the larks and the nightingales.

Therefore if anyone speaks, not from the standpoint of the intellectualistic age, but out of the truly all-encompassing human consciousness, he really cannot say: “I sing as the bird sings who dwells in the branches. The song that issues from my throat is my reward, and an ample reward it is.” Rather, he would have to say: “I sing as the bird sings who dwells in the branches. And the song which streams forth from his throat into the cosmic expanses returns to the Earth as a blessing, fructifying the earthly life with divine spiritual impulses which then work on in the bird world and which can only work in the bird world because they find their way in on the waves of what has been ‘sung out’ to them into the cosmos.”

Now of course not all creatures are nightingales and larks; also of course not all of them send out song; but something similar even though it is not so beautiful, goes out into the cosmos from the whole animal world. In those ancient times this was understood, and therefore the pupils of the Mystery-pupils were instructed in such singing and dancing as they could then perform at the St. John's festival, if I may call it by the modern name. Human beings sent this out into the cosmos, of course not now in animal form, but in humanized form, as a further development of what the animals send out into cosmic space.—And there is something else yet that belonged to those festivals: not only the dancing, the music, the song, but afterward, the listening. First, there was the active performance in the festivals; then the people were directed to listen to what came back to them. For through their dances, their singing, and all that was poetic in their performances, they had sent forth the great questions to the divine spiritual of the cosmos. Their performance streamed up, as it were, into cosmic spaces as the water of the earth rises, forming clouds above and dropping down again as rain. Thus, the effects of the human festival performances arose and came back again—of course not as rain, but as something which manifested itself to man as ego-power. And the people had a sensitive feeling for that particular transformation which took place in the air and warmth around the Earth, just about the time of the St. John's festival. Of course the man of the present intellectualistic age disregards anything like this. He has something else to do than people of olden times. In these times, as also in others, he has to go to five o'clock teas, to coffee parties; he has to attend the theater, and so on; he simply has something else to do which is not dependent on the time of year. In the doing of all this, man forgets that delicate transformation which takes place in the Earth's atmospheric environment.

But these people of olden times did feel how different the air and warmth become around St. John's time, at the height of summer, how these take on something of the plant nature. Just consider what kind of a perception that was—this sensitive feeling for all that goes on in the plant world. Let us suppose that this is the Earth, and everywhere plants are coming out of the Earth.

The people then had a subtle feeling awareness of what is developing there in the plant, of what lives in the plant. They had in the spring a general feeling of nature, of which an after-echo is still retained in our language. You will find in Goethe's Faust the expression “es gruenelt” (It is beginning to get green). Who notices nowadays when it is growing green, when the greenness rising up out of the Earth in the spring, wells and wafts through the air? Who notices when it grows green and when it blossoms? Well, of course people see it today; the red and the yellow of the flowers please them; but they do not notice that the air becomes quite different when the flowers bloom, and again when the fruit is formed. Such living participation in the plant world no longer exists in our intellectualistic age, but it did exist for the people of ancient times.

Hence they were aware of it in their perceptive feeling when the “greening,” blooming and fruiting came toward them—not now out of the Earth, but out of the surrounding atmosphere; when air and warmth themselves streamed down from above like something akin to plant nature (shaded in drawing). And when air and warmth became thus plant-like, the consciousness of those people was transported into that sphere in which the “I” then descended, as answer to what they had sent out into the cosmos in the form of music and poetry.

Thus the festivals had a wonderful, intimate, human content. This was a question to the divine-spiritual universe. Men received the answer because—just as we perceive the fruiting, the blossoming, the greening of the Earth today—they felt something plant-like streaming down from above out of the otherwise merely mineral air. In this way there entered into the dream of existence, into the ancient dreamy consciousness also the dream of the ego.

And when the St. John's festival was past and July and August came again, the people had the feeling “We have an ego, but this ego remains up there in heaven and speaks to us only at St. John's time. Then we become aware that we are connected with heaven. It has taken our ego into its protection. It shows it to us when it opens the great window of heaven at St. John's time. But we must ask about it. We must ask as we carry out the festival performances at St. John's time, as in these performances we find our way into the unbelievably close and intimate musical and poetic ceremonies.”—Thus these ancient festivals already established a communication, a union, between the earthly and the heavenly.

You see this whole festival was immersed in the musical, in the musical-poetic. I might say that in the simple settlements of very ancient peoples, suddenly, for a few days at the height of summer, everything became poetic—although it had been thoroughly prepared beforehand by the Mysteries. The whole social life was plunged into this musical-poetic element. The people believed that they needed this for life during the course of the year, just as they needed daily food and drink; that they needed to enter into this mood of dancing, music and poetry, in order to establish their communication with the divine-spiritual powers of the cosmos. A relic of this festival remained in a later age, when a poet said, for example; “Sing, O Muse, of the wrath of Achilles, the son of Peleus,” because he still remembered that once upon a time the great question was put before the deity, and the deity was expected to give answer to the question of men.

Just as these festivals at St. John's time were carefully prepared in order to pose the great question to the cosmos so that the cosmos might assure man at this time that he has an ego, which the heavens have taken into their protection, so likewise was prepared the festival at the time of the winter solstice, in the depths of winter, which has now become our Christmas festival. But while at St. John's time everything was steeped in the musical-poetic, in the dance element, now in the depths of winter everything was first prepared in such a way that the people knew they must become still and quiet, that they must enter into a more contemplative element. And then there was brought forth—in these ancient times of which outer history provides no record, of which we can only know through spiritual science—all that during the summer had been in the forming and shaping and imaging elements which reached a climax in the festivals in music and dance. During that time these ancient people, who in a certain way went out of themselves in order to unite with the ego in the heavens, were not involved in learning anything. Besides the festival, they were occupied in doing what was necessary for their subsistence. Instruction waited for the winter months, and this reached its culmination, its festival expression, at the time of the winter solstice, in the depth of winter, at Christmas time.

Then began the preparation of the people, again under the guidance of pupils of the Mysteries, for various spiritual celebrations which were not performed during the summer. It is difficult to describe in modern terms what the people did from our September/October to our Christmas time, because everything was so very different from what is done now. But they were guided in what we would perhaps call riddle-solving, in answering questions that were put in a veiled form so that people had to discover a meaning in what was given in signs. Let us say that the Mystery-pupils gave to those who were learning in this way some kind of symbolic image, which they were to interpret. Or they gave what we would call a riddle to be solved, or some kind of incantation. What the magic saying contained, they were to apply to Nature, and thus divine its meaning.

But especially there was careful preparation for what later took on the most varied forms among the different peoples; for example, for what was known in northern countries at a later time as the throwing of the runic wands so that they formed shapes which were then deciphered. People devoted themselves to these activities in the depth of winter; but above all, those things were cultivated that then led to a certain art of modeling, in a primitive form of course.

Among these ancient forms of consciousness was a most singular one, paradoxical as it sounds to modern people, and it was as follows: With the coming of October, an urge for some sort of activity began to stir in people's limbs. In the summer a man had to accommodate the movements of his limbs to what the fields demanded of him; he had to put his hands to the plough; he had to adapt himself to the outer world. When the harvest had been gathered in, however, and his limbs were rested, then a need stirred in them for some other form of activity, and his limbs took on a longing to knead. Then people derived a special satisfaction from all kinds of plastic, moulding activity. We might say that just as an intensive urge had arisen at the time of the St. John's festival for dancing and music, so toward Christmas time an intensive urge arose to knead, to mould, to create, using any kind of pliant substance available in nature. People had an especially sensitive feeling, for example, for the way water begins to freeze. This gave them the specific impulse to push it in one direction and another, so that the ice-forms appearing in the water took on certain shapes. Indeed people went so far as to keep their hands in the water while the shapes developed and their hands grew numb! In this way, when the water froze under the waves their hands cast up, it assumed the most remarkable artistic shapes, which of course again melted away.

Nothing remains of all this in the age of intellectualism except at most the custom of lead-casting on New Year's Eve, the Feast of St. Sylvester. In this, molten lead is poured into water, and one discovers that it takes on shapes whose meaning is then supposed to be guessed. But that is the last abstract remnant of those wonderful activities that arose from the impelling force in Nature experienced inwardly by the human being, which expressed itself for example as I have related: that a person thrust his hand into water which was in process of freezing, the hand then becoming numb as he tested how the water formed waves, so that the freezing water then “answered” with the most remarkable shapes. In this way the human being found the answers to his questions of the Earth. Through music and poetry at the height of summer, he turned toward the heavens with his questions, and they answered by sending ego-feeling into his dreaming consciousness. In the depth of winter he turned for what he wanted to know not now toward the heavens, but to the earthly, and he tested what kind of forms the earthly element can take on. In doing this he observed that the forms which emerged had a certain similarity to those developed by beetles and butterflies. This was the result of his contemplation. From the plastic, formative element that he drew out of the nature processes of the Earth, there arose in him the intuitive observation that the various animal forms are fashioned entirely out of the earthly element. At Christmas man understood the animal forms. And as he worked, as he exerted his limbs, even jumped into the water and made certain movements, then sprang out and observed how the solidifying water responded, he noticed in the outer world what sort of form he himself had as man. But this was only at Christmas time, not otherwise; at other times he had a perception only of the animal world and of what pertains to race. At Christmas time he advanced to the experience of the human form as well.

Just as in those times of the ancient Mysteries the ego-consciousness was mediated from the heavens, so the feeling for the human form was conveyed out of the Earth. At Christmas time man learned to know the Earth's form-force, its sculptural shaping force; and at St. John's time, at the height of summer he learned to know how the harmonies of the spheres let his ego sound into his dream-consciousness.

And thus at special festival seasons the ancient Mysteries expanded the being of man. On the one side the environment of the Earth extended out into the heavens, so that man might know how the heavens held his “I” in their protection, how his “I” rested there. And at Christmas time the Mystery teachers caused the Earth to give answer to the questioning of man by way of plastic forms, so that man gradually came to have an interest in the human form, in the flowing together of all animal forms into the human form. At midsummer man learned to know himself inwardly, in relation to his ego; in the depth of winter he learned to feel himself outwardly, in relation to his human form. And so it was that what man perceived as his being, how he actually felt himself, was not acquired simply by being man, but by living together with the course of the year; that in order for him to come to ego-consciousness, the heavens opened their windows; that in order for him to come to consciousness of his human form, the Earth in a certain way unfolded her mysteries. Thus the human being was inwardly intimately linked with the course of the year, so intimately linked that he had to say to himself: “I know about what I am as man only when I don't live along stolidly, but when I allow myself to be lifted up to the heavens in summer, when I let myself sink down in winter into the Earth mysteries, into the secrets of the Earth.”

You see from this that at one time the festival seasons with their celebrations were looked upon as an integral part of human life. A man felt that he was not only an earth-being but that his essential being belonged to the whole world, that he was a citizen of the entire cosmos. Indeed he felt himself so little to be an earth-being that he actually had first to be made aware of what he was through the Earth by means of festivals. And these festivals could be celebrated only at certain seasons because at other times the people who experienced the course of the year to some degree would have been quite unable to experience it at all. For all that the people could experience through the festivals was connected with the related seasons.

Mark you, after man has once achieved his freedom in the age of intellectualism, he can certainly not come again to this sharing in the life of the cosmos in the same way that he experienced it in primitive ages. But he can nevertheless come to it even with his modern constitution, if he applies himself once more to the spiritual.

We might say that in the ego consciousness which mankind has had for a long time now, something has been drawn in which could be attained only through the windows of heaven in summer. But just for that reason man must be learning to understand the cosmos, acquire for himself something else which in turn lies beyond the ego. It is natural today for people to speak of the human form in general. Those who have entered into the intellectual age no longer have a strong feeling for the animalistic-racial element. But just as this feeling formerly came over man, I should like to say as a force, as an impulse, which could be sought only out of the Earth, so today, through an understanding of the Earth which cannot be gained by means of geology or mineralogy but only once more in a spiritual way, man must come again to something more than the mere human form.

If we consider the human form we can say: In very ancient times man felt himself within this form in such a way that he felt only the external racial characteristics connected with the blood, but failed to perceive as far as the skin itself (red in drawing); he did not notice what formed his outline.

Today man has come so far that he does notice his outline, his bodily limits. He perceives his contour indeed as the typically human feature of his form (blue). Now, however, man must come out beyond himself; he must learn to know the etheric and astral elements outside himself. This he can do only through the deepening of spiritual science.

Thus we see that our present-day consciousness has been acquired at the cost of losing much of the former connection of our consciousness with the cosmos. But once man has come to experience his freedom and his world of thought, then he must emerge again and experience cosmically.

This is what Anthroposophy intends when it speaks of a renewal of the festivals, even of the creating of festivals like the Michael festival in autumn of which we have recently spoken. We must come once more to an inner understanding of what the cycle of the year can mean to man in this connection; it can then be something even loftier than it was for man long ago, as we have described it.

I should like to carry to a still wider horizon the reflections I have already made here concerning the relationship between man and the cycle of Nature which was formed in ancient times under the influence of the Mysteries, and to go into what was believed in those times with regard to all that one as man received from the cosmos through this cycle of Nature. You may have gathered from yesterday's lecture as well perhaps as from the recollection of much that I could still say about such matters during the past Christmas season, in the Goetheanum which has now been taken from us—you may have gathered that the cycle of the year in its phenomena was perceived, and indeed today can still be perceived, as a result of life, as something which in its external events is just as much the expression of a living being standing behind it as the actions of the human organism are the manifestations of a being, of the human soul itself.

Let us remind ourselves how, in midsummer, the time we know as St. John's, the people became aware under this ancient Mystery-influence of a certain relationship to their ego, an ego which they did not yet consider as exclusively their own, but which they viewed as resting still in the bosom of the divine-spiritual.

These people believed that by means of the ceremonies I have described, they approached their “I” at midsummer, although throughout the rest of the year it was hidden from them. Of course they thought of themselves as dwelling in their beings altogether in the bosom of the divine-spiritual; but they thought that during the other three-quarters of the year nothing was revealed to them of what belonged to them as their ego. Only in this one quarter, which reached its high point at St. John's, did the essential being of their own ego manifest itself to them as through a window opening out of the divine spiritual world.

Now this essence of the individual ego within the divine spiritual world in which it revealed itself was by no means regarded in such a neutral, indifferent—one may even say phlegmatic—way as is the case today. When the “I” is spoken of today, a person is hardly likely to think of it as having any special connection either with this world or any other. Rather, he thinks of his “I” as a kind of point; what he does rays out from it and what he perceives rays in. But the feeling a person has today in regard to his “I” is of an altogether phlegmatic nature. We cannot really say that modern man even feels the “egoity” of his “I”—in spite of the fact that it is his ego; for anyone who wants to be honest cannot really claim that he is fond of his “I.” He is fond of his body; he is fond of his instincts; he may be fond of this or that experience. But the “I” is just a tiny word which is felt as a point in which all that has been indicated is more or less condensed. But in that period in which, after long preparations had been made, the approach to this “I” was undertaken ceremonially, each man was enabled in a certain sense to meet his “I” in the universe. Following this meeting, then, the “I” was perceived to be once more gradually withdrawing and leaving the human being alone with his bodily and soul nature, or as we would say today, with his physical-etheric-astral being. In that period man felt the “I” perceptively as having a real connection with the entire cosmos, with the whole world.

But what was felt above all else with regard to the relationship of this “I” to the world was not something “naturalistic,” to use the modern term; it was not something received as an external phenomenon. Rather, it was something which was deemed to be the very center of the most ancient moral conception of the world. Men did not expect great secrets of Nature to be revealed to them at this season. To be sure, such Nature secrets were spoken of, but man did not direct his attention primarily to them. Rather, he perceived through his feeling that above all he was to absorb into himself as moral impulse what is revealed at this time of midsummer when light and warmth reach their highest point.

This was the season man perceived as the time of divine-moral enlightenment. And what he wanted above all to obtain from the heavens as “answer” to the performances of music, poetry and dancing that were carried on at this season, what he waited for was that there should be revealed out of the heavens in all seriousness what they required of him morally.

And when all the ceremonies had been carried out that I described yesterday as belonging to the celebration of these festivals during the time of the sun's sultry heat—if it sometimes happened that a powerful storm broke forth with thunder and lightning, then just in this outbreak of thunder and lightning men felt the moral admonition of the heavens to earthly humanity.

There are vestiges from this ancient time in conceptions such as that of Zeus as the god of thunder, armed with a thunderbolt. Something similar is linked with the German god, Donar. This we have on one side. On the other side, man perceptively felt Nature, I might say, as warm, luminous, satisfied in itself. And he felt that this warming, luminous Nature as it was during the daytime remained also into the night time. Only he made a distinction, saying to himself: “During the day the air is filled with the warmth-element, with the light-element. In these elements of warmth and light there weave and live spiritual messengers through whom the higher divine beings want to make themselves known to men, want to endow them with moral impulses. But at night, when the higher spiritual beings withdraw, the messengers remain behind and reveal themselves in their own way.”

And thus it was that especially at midsummer people perceived the ruling and weaving of Nature in the summer nights, in the summer evenings. And what they felt then seemed to them to be a kind of summer dream which they experienced in reality; a summer dream through which they came especially near to the divine-spiritual; a summer dream by which they were convinced that every phenomenon of Nature was at the same time the moral utterance of the gods, but that all kinds of elemental beings were also active there who revealed themselves to men in their own way.

All the fanciful embellishment of the midsummer night's dream, of the St. John's night dream, is what remained later of the wondrous forms conjured by human imagination that wove through this midsummer time on the soul-spiritual level. This then, in all particulars, was taken to be a divine-spiritual moral revelation of the cosmos to man.

And so we may say that the conception underlying this was: at midsummer the divine-spiritual world revealed itself through moral impulses which were implanted in man as Enlightenment (see diagram). And what was felt in a quite special way at that time, what then worked upon man, was felt to be something super-human which played into the human order of things.

From his inner participation in the festivities celebrated in that time, man knew that he was lifted up above himself as he then was into the super-human, and that the Deity grasped the hand that man as it were reached toward him at this season. Everything that man believed to be divine-spiritual within him he ascribed to the revelations of this season of St. John's.

When the summer came to an end and autumn approached, when the leaves were withered and the seeds had ripened, when, that is, the full luxurious life of summer had faded and the trees become bare, then, because the insights of the Mysteries had flowed into all these perceptions, man felt: “The divine-spiritual world is withdrawing again from man.” He notices how he is directed back to himself; he is in a certain sense growing out of the spiritual into Nature.

Thus man felt this “living-into” the autumn as a “living-out-from” the spiritual, as a living into Nature. The tree leaves became mineralized; the seeds dried up and mineralized. Everything inclined in a certain way towards the death of Nature's year.

In being thus interwoven with what was becoming mineral on the Earth and around the Earth, man felt that he himself was becoming woven together with Nature. For in that period man still stood closer in his inner experience to what was going on outside. And he also thought, he pondered in his mind about how he experienced his being woven-together with Nature. His whole thinking took on this character. If we want to express in our language today what man felt when autumn came, we should have to say the following—I beg you, however, to realize that I am using present-day words, and that in those days man would not have been able to speak thus, for then everything rested on perceptive feeling and was not characterized through thinking—but if we want to speak in modern terms we shall have to say: With his particular trend of thinking, with his feeling way of perceiving, the human being experienced the transition from summer to autumn in such a way that he found in it a passing from spirit-knowledge to Nature-knowledge (see diagram). Toward autumn man felt that he was no longer in a time of spirit-knowledge but that autumn required of him that he should learn to know Nature. Thus at the autumn equinox we have, instead of moral impulse, knowledge of Nature, coming to know Nature.

The human being began to reflect about Nature. At this time also he began to take into account the fact that he was a creature, a being within the cosmos. In that time it would have been considered folly to present Nature-knowledge in its existing form to man during the summer. The purpose of summer is to bring man into relation with the spiritual in the world. With the arrival of what we today call the Michaelmas season, people said to themselves: “By everything that man perceives about him in the woods, in the trees, in the plants, he is stimulated to pursue nature-knowledge.” It was the season in which men were to occupy themselves above all with acquiring knowledge, with reflection. And indeed it was also the time when outer circumstances of life made this possible. Human life thus proceeded from Enlightenment to Knowledge. It was the right season for knowledge, for ever-increasing cognition.

When the pupils of the Mysteries received their instruction from the teachers, they were given certain mottoes of which we find adaptations in the maxims of the Greek sages. The “seven maxims” of the Seven Wise Men of Greece are, however, not actually those which originated in the primeval Mysteries.

In the very earliest Mysteries there was a saying associated with midsummer: “Receive the Light” (see diagram). By “Light,” spiritual wisdom was meant. It designated that within which the human being's own “I” shone.

For autumn (see diagram), the motto imprinted in the Mysteries as an admonition pointing to what should be carried on by the souls was: “Look around thee.”

Now there approached the next development of the year, and with it, what man felt within himself to be connected of itself with this year. The season of winter approached. We come to midwinter (see diagram), which includes our Christmas time. Just as the human being in midsummer felt himself lifted out above himself to the divine-spiritual existence of the cosmos, so he felt himself in midwinter to be unfolding downward below himself. He felt as if the forces of the Earth were washing around him and carrying him along. He felt as though his will nature, his instincts and impulses were infiltrated and permeated by gravity, by the force of destruction and other forces that are in the Earth. In these ancient times people did not feel winter as we feel it, that it merely gets cold and we have to put on warm boots, for example, in order not to get chilled. Rather, a man of that ancient time felt what was coming up out of the Earth as something that united itself with his own being. In contrast to the sultry, light-filled element, he felt what came up then in winter as a frosty element. We feel the chilliness today, too, because it is connected with the corporeality; but ancient man felt within his soul as a phenomenon accompanying the cold: darkness and gloom. He felt somewhat as if all around him, wherever he went, darkness rose up out of the Earth and enveloped him in a kind of cloud—only up to the middle of his body, to be sure, but this is the way he felt.

And he said to himself—again I have to describe it in more modern words—man said to himself: “During the height of summer I stand face to face with Enlightenment; then the heavenly, the super-terrestrial streams down into the earthly world. But now the earthly is streaming upward.”—Man already perceived and experienced something of the earthly during the autumnal equinox. But what he perceived and felt then of earthly nature was in conformity in a certain sense with his own nature; it was still connected with him. We might say: “At the time of the autumn equinox man felt in his Gemuet, in his realm of feeling, all that had to do with Nature. But now, in winter, he felt as though the Earth were laying claim to him, as if he were ensnared in his will nature by the forces of the Earth. He felt this to be the denial of the moral world order. He felt that together with the blackness that enveloped him like a cloud, forces opposed to the moral world order were ensnaring him. He felt the darkness rise up out of the Earth like a serpent and wind him about. But at the same time he was also aware of something quite different.”

Already during autumn he had felt something stirring within him that we today call intellect. Whereas in summer the intellect evaporates and there enters from outside a wisdom-filled moral element, during autumn the intellect is consolidated. The human being approaches evil but his intellect consolidates. Man felt an actual serpent-like manifestation in midwinter, but at the same time the solidification, the strengthening of shrewdness, of the reflective element, of all that made him sly and cunning and incited him to follow the principle of utility in life. All this he was aware of in this way. And just as in autumn the knowledge of nature gradually emerged, so in midwinter the Temptation of Hell approached the human being, the Temptation on the part of Evil. Thus he was aware of this. So when we write here: “Moral impulse, Knowledge of Nature” (see diagram), here (at midwinter) we must write “Temptation through Evil.”

This was just the time in which man had to develop what in any case was within him by way of Nature: everything associated with the intellect, slyness, cunning, all that was directed toward the utilitarian. This, man was to overcome through Temperance (Besonnenheit).¹ This was the season then in which man had to develop—not an open sense for wisdom, which in accordance with the ancient Mystery wisdom had been required of him during the time of Enlightenment, but something else. Just in that season in which evil revealed itself as we have indicated, man could experience in a fitting way resistance to evil: he was to become self-controlled (besonnen—see preceding footnote). Above all else at the season of change which he passed through in moving on from Enlightenment to Cognition, from Knowledge of Spirit to Knowledge of Nature, he was to progress from Nature knowledge to the contemplation of Evil (see diagram, arrow on left). This is the way it was understood.

And in giving instructions to the pupils of the Mysteries which could become mottoes, the teachers said to them—just as at midsummer they had said: “Receive the Light,” and in autumn “Look around you”—now in midwinter it was said: “Beware of Evil.” And it was expected that through “Temperance,” through this guarding of oneself against evil, men would come to a kind of self-knowledge which would lead them to realize how they had deviated from the moral impulses in the course of the year.

Deviation from the moral impulses through the contemplation of evil, its overcoming through moderation—this was to come to man's consciousness just in the time following midwinter. Hence in this ancient wisdom all sorts of things were undertaken that induced men to atone for what they recognized as deviations from the moral impulses they had received through Enlightenment. With this, we approach spring, the spring equinox (see diagram).

And just as here (see diagram: midsummer, autumn, midwinter) we have Enlightenment, Cognition, Temperance, so for the spring equinox we have what was perceived as the activity of repentance. And in place of Cognition, and correspondingly, Temptation through Evil, there now entered something which we could call the Return—the reversion—to man's higher nature through Repentance. Where we have written here (see diagram: midsummer, autumn, winter): Enlightenment, Cognition, Temperance, here we must write: Return to Human Nature.

If you look back once more to what was in the depths of winter the Temptation by Evil, you will have to say: At that time man felt as though he were lowered into the abysmal deeps of the Earth; he felt himself entrapped by Earth's darkness. Just as during the height of summer man was in a sense torn out of himself, his soul-nature being then lifted up above him, so now, in order not to be ensnared by Evil during the winter, his soul-being made itself inwardly free.

Through this there existed during the depths of winter, I might say a counter-image to what was present during the height of summer. At midsummer the phenomena of Nature spoke in a spiritual way. People sought especially in the thunder and the lightning for what the heavens had to say. They looked at the phenomena of Nature, but what they sought in these phenomena was a spiritual language. Even in small things, they sought at St. John's-tide the spiritual message of the elemental beings, but they looked for it outside themselves. They dreamed in a certain sense outside the human being. During the depths of winter, however, people sank into themselves and dreamed within their own being. To the extent that they tore themselves loose from the entanglement of the Earth, that is, whenever they could free their soul-element, they dreamed within their own being. Of this there has remained what is connected with the visions, with the inner beholding, of the Thirteen Nights following the winter solstice. Everywhere recollections have remained of these ancient times. You can look on the Norwegian Song of Olaf [&Åsteson]² as a later development of what existed quite extensively in ancient times.

Then the springtime drew near. In our time the situation has shifted somewhat; in those days spring was closer to winter, and the whole year was viewed as being divided into three periods. Things were compressed. Nevertheless what I am sharing with you here was taught in its turn. Thus, just as at midsummer they said: “Receive the light;” and in autumn, at Michaelmas: “Look around you;” just as at midwinter, at the time that we celebrate Christmas, they said: “Beware of the Evil,” so for the time of return they had a saying which was then thought to have effect only at this time: “Know thyself”—placing it in exact polarity to the Knowledge of Nature.

“Beware of the Evil” could also be expressed: “Beware, draw back from Earth's darkness.” But this they did not say. Whereas during midsummer men accepted the external natural phenomenon of light as Wisdom, that is, at midsummer they spoke in a certain way in accordance with Nature, they would never have put the motto for winter into the sentence: “Beware of the darkness”—for they expressed rather the moral interpretation: “Beware of Evil.”

Echoes of these festivals have persisted everywhere, so far as they have been understood. Naturally everything was changed when the great Event of Golgotha entered in.

It was in the season of the deepest human temptation, in winter, that the birth of Jesus occurred. The birth of Jesus took place in the very time when man was in the grip of the Earth powers, when he had plunged down, as it were, into the abysses of the Earth. Among the legends associated with the birth of Jesus, you will even find one which says that Jesus came into the world in a cave, thus hinting at something that was perceived as wisdom in the most ancient Mysteries, namely, that there the human being can find what he has to seek in spite of being held fast by the dark element of the Earth, which at the same time holds the reason for his falling prey to Evil.

It is in accord with all of this, too, that the time of Repentance is ascribed to the season when spring is approaching.

The understanding for the midsummer festival has quite naturally disappeared to a still greater extent than that for the other side of the year's course. For the more materialism overtook mankind, the less people felt themselves drawn to anything such as Enlightenment.

And what is of quite special importance to present-day humanity is precisely that time which leads on from Enlightenment, of which man still remains unconscious, toward the season of autumn. Here lies the point where man, who indeed has to enter into knowledge of nature, should grasp in the nature-knowledge a picture, a reflection, of a knowledge of divine spirits. For this there is no better festival of remembrance than Michaelmas.

If this is celebrated in the right way, it must follow that mankind everywhere will take hold of the question: How is spirit knowledge to be found in the glorified nature-knowledge of the present? How can man transform nature-knowledge so that out of what the human being possesses as the fruits of this nature-knowledge, spirit knowledge will arise? In other words, how is that to be overcome which, if it were to run its course on its own, would entrap man in the subhuman?

A turnaround must take place. The Michael festival must take on a particular meaning. This meaning emerges when one can perceive the following: Natural science has led man to recognize one side of world evolution, for example, that out of lower animal organisms higher more perfect ones have evolved in the course of time, right up to man; or, to take another example, that during the development of the embryo in the mother's body the human being passes through the animal forms one after the other. That, however, is only one side. The other side is what comes before our souls when we say to ourselves: “Man had to evolve out of his original divine-human beginning.” If this (see drawing) indicates the original human condition (lighter shading), then man had to evolve out of it to his present state of unfoldment. First, he had gradually to push out of himself the lower animals, then, stage by stage what exists as higher animal forms. He overcame all this, separated it out, thrust it aside (darker shading). In this way he has come to what was originally predestined for him.

It is the same in his embryonic development. The human being rejects, each in its turn, everything that he is not to be. We do not, however, derive the real import of present-day nature-knowledge from this fact. What then is the import of modern nature-knowledge. It lies in the sentence: You behold in what nature-knowledge shows you that which you need to exclude from knowledge of man.

What does this imply? It implies that man must study natural science. Why?—When he looks into a microscope he knows what is not spirit. When he looks through a telescope into the far spaces of the universe, there is revealed to him what spirit is not. When he makes some sort of experiment in the physics or chemistry laboratory, what is not spirit is revealed to him. Everything that is not spirit is manifest to him in its pure form.

In ancient times when men beheld what is today nature, they still saw the spirit shining through it. Today we have to study nature in order to be able to say: “All that is not spirit.” It is all winter wisdom. What pertains to summer wisdom must take a different form. In order that man may be spurred toward the spirit, may get an impulse toward the spirit, he must learn to know the unspiritual, the anti-spiritual. And man must be sensible of things that no one as yet admits today. For example, everyone says today: “If I have some sort of tiny living creature too small to be seen with the naked eye and I put it under a microscope, it will be enlarged for me so that I can see it.”—Then, however, one must conceive: “This size is illusory. I have increased the size of the creature, and I no longer have it. I have a phantom. What I am seeing is not a reality. I have put a lie in place of the truth!”—This is of course madness from the present-day point of view, but it is precisely the truth.

If we will only realize that natural science is needed in order from this counter-image of the truth to receive the impulse toward the truth, then the force will be developed which can be symbolically indicated in the overcoming of the Dragon by Michael.

But something else is connected with this which already stands in the annals in what I might call a spiritual way. It stands there in such a form, however, that when man no longer had any true feeling for what lives in the year's changing seasons, he related the whole thing instead to the human being. What leads to “Enlightenment” was replaced by the concept of “Wisdom” [called “Prudence” in English practice]; then what leads to “Knowledge” was replaced by the concept of “Courage” [“Fortitude”]; “Temperance” stayed the same (see diagram 1); and what corresponded to “Repentance” was replaced by the concept “Justice.”

Here you have the four Platonic concepts of virtue: Wisdom [Prudence], Fortitude, Temperance, Justice. What man had formerly received from the life of the year in its course was now taken into man himself. It will come into consideration just in connection with the Michaelmas festival, however, that there will have to be a festival in honor of human courage, of the human manifestation of the courage of Michael. For what is it that holds man back today from spirit-knowledge?—Lack of soul courage, not to say soul cowardice. Man wants to receive everything passively, wants to set himself down in front of the world as if it were a movie, and wants to let the microscope and the telescope tell him everything. He does not want to temper the instrument of his own spirit, of his own soul, by activity. He does not care to be a follower of Michael. This requires inner courage. This inner courage must have its festival in Michaelmas. Then from the Festival of Courage, from the festival of the inwardly courageous human soul, there will ray out what will give the other festivals of the year also the right content.

We must in fact continue the path further; we must take into human nature what was formerly outside. Man is no longer in such a position that he could develop the knowledge of Nature only in autumn. It is already so that in man today things lie one within the other, for only in this way can he unfold his freedom. Yet it nevertheless holds true that the celebrating of festivals, I might say in a transformed sense, is again becoming necessary.

If the festivals were formerly festivals of giving by the divine to the earthly, if man at the festivals formerly received the gifts of the heavenly powers directly, so today, when man has his capacities within himself, the metamorphosis of the festival-thought consists in the festivals now being festivals of remembrance or admonition.*³ In them man inscribes into his soul what he is to consummate within himself.

And thus again it will be best to have as the most strongly working festival of admonition and remembrance this festival with which autumn begins, the Michaelmas festival, for at the same time all Nature is speaking in meaningful cosmic language. The trees are becoming bare; the leaves are withering. The creatures, which all summer long have fluttered through the air, as butterflies, or have filled the air with their hum, as beetles, begin to withdraw; many animals fall into their winter sleep. Everything becomes paralyzed. Nature, which through her own activity has helped man during spring and summer—Nature, which has worked in man during spring and summer, herself withdraws. Man is referred back to himself. What must now awaken when Nature forsakes him is courage of soul. Once more we are shown how what we can conceive as a Michael festival must be a festival of soul-courage, of soul-strength, of soul-activity.

This is what will gradually give to the festival thought the character of remembrance or admonition, qualities already suggested in a monumental saying by which it was indicated that for all future time what previously had been festivals of gifts will become, or should become, festivals of remembrance. These monumental words, which must be the basis of all festival thoughts, also for those which will arise again,—this monumental saying is: “This do in remembrance of Me.” That is the festival thought which is turned toward the memory-aspect.

Just as the other thought that lies in the Christ-Impulse must work on livingly, must reform itself and not be allowed simply to remain as a dead product toward which we look back, so must this thought also work on further, kindling perceptive feeling and thought, and we must understand that the festivals must continue in spite of the fact that man is changing, but that because of this the festivals also must go through metamorphoses.

• 1. The third of the cardinal or “Platonic” virtues, called in Greek Sophrosyne, in English, Temperance or moderation, in German is Besonnenheit. According to Steiner, Besonnenheit is “enfilling one's impulses with the degree of consciousness possible.” “A man who rules his impulses through reflective thinking, feeling and perceiving is a man who is ‘besonnen.’” (From Das Raetsel des Menschen, 6th August, 1916). See also Spiritual Foundation of Morality by Steiner.
• 2. Because of Rudolf Steiner's lectures referring to “The Dream Song of Olaf &Åsteson” (December 26, 1911 and January 7, 1913), this unique poem of initiation experience has been translated into English.
• 3. Feste der Erinnerungen (a plural form). Erinnerung has two shades of meaning. One is “recollection” or “remembrance”; the other “admonition” or “reminder.” Both elements seem to apply in this passage.

In the short lecture I gave this afternoon before the eurythmy performance, I pointed out how we can see from the relationship that modern humanity has to the festivals of the year how we are entering into materialism. However, one must then grasp the concept of materialism much more deeply than is usually the case. The most dangerous characteristic of the present time is not that people are infected with materialism, but the much more dangerous characteristic is the superficiality of our age.

This superficiality is not only present in relation to spiritual worldviews, but it is also present in relation to materialism itself. It is taken for granted in superficial appearances. This afternoon, for example, I pointed out how, in different times of the year, something like the moods to which people in older times still yielded also came to expression in the festive events of those older times. Various moods were incorporated into the winter solstice festival, the spring festival, the St. John's festival, the Michaelmas festival, those very specific, cult-like or at least cult-like events, which must overcome people when they consciously experience the course of the year.

In this way, the human soul received nourishment, whereas today we only nourish the body. We still take part in the course of the day. When the sun sends forth its morning gold in its own revelation as dawn, we eat our breakfast. When the sun is at its zenith, when it pours its warmth and light particularly lovingly over the human race on earth, we devote ourselves to our midday meal, and so on through five o'clock tea and supper. In these festive events of the day, we join in the course of the day with the sun, by inwardly experiencing this fiery ride of the sun around the world. We experience what the sun performs in its fiery ride around the world by completing hunger and satiation. And so the mood for the human physical organism is there in a very distinct way at certain times of the day. We could call breakfast, lunch, tea and supper the festivals of the day. The human physical organism participates in what takes place in the relationship between the earth and the cosmos.

In a similar way, in older times, when the soul life was felt more intensely from the old instinctive states of clairvoyance, the course of the year was experienced. Certain things even played into the other from one sphere. You only need to remember what remains of these things: Easter eggs, St. Martin's geese and so on. In this way the lower, bodily region plays into the soul region, which must also experience the course of the year in a soul-like way. Now, a materialistic age would still be most likely, I do not want to say for Easter eggs, but for St. Martin's geese and the like, one would also be in favor of the course of the year.

But in olden times these things were not meant with reference to the actual festive mood, but they were attuned to the hunger and satiation of the soul. The human soul needed something different at Christmas time, something different at Easter time, at Midsummer time and at Michaelmas time. And one can really compare what was in the events of the festivities with a kind of consideration for the hunger of the soul precisely in the seasons that occur and with a satiation of the soul in these seasons.

Now we can say: If we look at the course of the sun during the day, we can apply to it that which is good for our body. If we look at the course of the sun during the year, we can apply to it that which is good for our soul.

If festivals are to be revived, then this must naturally happen out of a much more conscious state: out of such an awakening of the soul as is striven for through the anthroposophical world view. We cannot merely restore the old festival seasons historically; we must find them again out of our own soul nature through the newer insights and views of the world. But we distinguish not only between body and soul in man, but also between spirit.

Now it is already difficult for modern man to surrender to certain ideas when speaking of soul. The story becomes blurred and indefinite. Not only that one has experienced how in the 19th century people began to speak of a psychology, a doctrine of the soul without a soul. Fritz Mauthner, the great critic of language, even said: Soul is something so indeterminate that we do not really know any soul, we only know certain thoughts, sensations, feelings that are experienced in us, but we do not know a unified soul in it. We should therefore no longer use the word “soul” at all in the future. We should speak of this indeterminate inner wiggling and no longer say soul, but “soul”. Thus Fritz Mauthner advises that a future Klopstock who writes a “Messiade” should no longer say: “Sing, unsterbliche Seele, der sündigen Menschen Erlösung...”, but rather: “Sing, unsterbliches Geseel, der sündigen Menschen Erlösung...”, if that still makes sense at all within this Geseellehre! So in the future we would not have a psychology, but a soul science.

Now we can really say: the modern man no longer knows anything about the connection between his soul and the course of the sun throughout the year. He has become a materialist in this respect too. He adheres to the feasts of the body, which follow the course of the sun throughout the day. The festivals are celebrated out of traditional custom, but they are not felt to be alive. And we have, in addition to having a body and a soul - or, in the sense of Fritz Mauthner, a Geseel - we also have spirit.

Now, in the course of the world, there are also historical epochs. The human spirit also lives through these historical epochs, which extend beyond the course of a year and span centuries, if it feels them with feeling. In the old days, people experienced them very well. Anyone who is able to enter in the right way, borne by the spirit, in the way that people in older times thought their way into the course of time, knows, as has been said everywhere: At this or that turning point in time, some personality appeared who in turn revealed something spiritual from the heights of the world. And then this spiritual essence has become established, just as sunlight becomes established in the physical world. When such an epoch then entered its twilight, something new emerged.

These historical epochs are related to the development of the spirit of humanity just as the course of the year is related to the development of the soul. Of course, precisely when the development of the spirit must be grasped in a living way, it must be done by learning to understand how changes and metamorphoses occur in the development of humanity through conscious spiritual knowledge. Today, people would rather overlook these metamorphoses altogether. They are somehow outwardly affected by the effects, but inwardly they do not want to deal with the changes that come from the spirit and express themselves in external world events.

One should only look at how a certain way of thinking, feeling and feeling arises in our time among children and young people, which was still foreign to the earlier generation; how great changes occur, which, if one looks at the right elements, are entirely comparable to the development of the year in the development of humanity. Therefore, we should listen to what each age proclaims as its needs, and pay attention when a new age is dawning and demanding something different from people than previous ages have demanded. But for that, people today have only a limited organ.

The great interconnections of life can come to us when we approach the festive mood in the right way from our present consciousness, when, for example, we really let something like the St. John's mood into our soul, and if we try to gain from the St. John's mood that which will help our soul to develop, that which supports our engagement by the cosmos coming to our aid.

Certainly, modern humanity has become more or less indifferent to the things that are connected with the greatness of world development. Today, people no longer have a heart for the insights of the great world connections. The spirit of pettiness has made its way in, I would say the spirit of microscopy and atomization in phenomena that, when you talk about them today as I have to do here, naturally give the impression of the paradoxical.

I would like to point out a particular phenomenon in connection with the St. John's mood. The connection will be somewhat remote, but I would like to point it out. Even if one does not have a very developed sense of the course of the year, what is more natural than to have the impression from the growth of plants, from the growth of trees, that When spring comes, the green sprouts and shoots, and more and more growth, sprouting and blossoming occurs. The whole process of active growth, which gives the impression that the cosmos, with the effects of the sun, is calling upon the earth to open up to the universe, all of this then enters into the time around St. John's Day.

Then the sprouting and budding begins to recede again. We are approaching the time when the earth draws its forces of growth back into itself, when the earth withdraws from the cosmos. How natural it is that from the impression one receives from the course of the year, one forms the idea that the snow cover belongs to winter, that it belongs to winter that the plants, so to speak, creep into the soil of the earth with their being, that it belongs to summer that the plants come out, grow towards the cosmos. What could be more natural than to develop the idea – even if in a deeper sense it is actually correct to have the opposite idea – that the plants are dormant in winter and awake in summer?

I do not want to speak now about this sleeping and waking in terms of right and wrong ideas. I just want to speak about the impressions that one gets, so that people have the idea that summer belongs to the development of vegetation, winter to the withdrawal and creeping away of vegetation. After all, a kind of world feeling develops for the human being. One gets into the feeling of a connection with the warming and illuminating power of the sun when one sees this warming and illuminating power of the sun again in the green and flowering plant cover of the earth, and you get into a feeling as if you were an earth hermit in winter, when the plant cover is not there and the snow coat closes the earth from the cosmos, calling for inner activity. In short, by feeling and sensing in this way, you tear yourself away from your earthly existence with your earthly consciousness, so to speak. You place yourself in the greater context of the universe.

But now comes modern research, which I am not criticizing here – what I am going to say now is not meant as a scolding, but as a praise, even in relation to research itself – now comes modern research and shrugs its shoulders when it comes to the great cosmic connections. Why should one feel uplifted by the divinely illuminating, warming power of the sun when the trees bud, turn green, and the earth is covered with a blanket of plants? Why should one feel a connection with the universe through these plants growing out of the earth? It disturbs one. Cosmic feelings disturb one. It is no longer possible to reconcile having such feelings with one's materialistic consciousness. The plant is a plant, after all. It is as if the plant has a mind of its own when it blossoms only in spring and agrees to bear fruit in summer. How does that happen? You are dealing not only with a plant, but with the whole world! If you are supposed to feel, sense or recognize these things, you are dealing with the whole world, not just with the plant! It's not appropriate! You are already trying not to deal with the substances that are available in powder or crystal form, but with the atomic structures, with the atomic nucleus, with the electromagnetic atmosphere and so on! So you are trying to deal with something that is complete, not with something that points to many things. You should now admit to the plant that you need a sensation that reaches out into the cosmos! It is a terrible thing not to be able to narrow one's field of vision to the mere individual object! We are so accustomed to it: when we look through the microscope, everything around is closed off, there is only the small field of vision; everything happens in such a small, closed way. One must also be able to look at the plant by itself, not in connection with the cosmos!

And lo and behold, at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, researchers achieved something extraordinary in precisely this area. It was certainly already known from individual plants in relation to hot houses, 'green houses and so on, that one can overcome the summer and winter, but on the whole, at this turn of the 19th to the 20th century, not enough had been achieved to overcome the fact that plants do need a certain winter rest. Discussions were held during this time about the situation of tropical plants. Those researchers who no longer wanted to know anything about the connection with the cosmos claimed that tropical plants grow all year round. The others, who still held on to the old conservative view, said: Yes, when you come to the lush green world of the tropics, you only think that because the plants go dormant at different times, some only for up to eight days. So you don't see it when a particular species is dormant. There were extensive discussions about the behavior of tropical plants. In short, there was a sense of tremendous unease about this connection between the plant world and the cosmos.

Now, just at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, the most interesting and ingenious attempts have been made in this direction, and a whole range of plants, not just annuals but also trees, which are much stronger, have actually been successfully weaned from their stubbornness, their cosmic stubbornness. We have succeeded in overcoming the dependency on cosmic conditions by creating certain conditions that make plants that were thought to be annuals become perennial. In the case of the majority of our forest trees growing in temperate climates, we have actually succeeded in creating conditions that cause trees that were thought to have to have this winter time, to lose their leaves in winter and stand there withered, to become evergreen. For that was the premise of certain materialistic explanations. In this respect, an extraordinarily ingenious achievement has been made.

It was discovered that the cosmic can be driven out of the trees if the trees are brought into closed rooms and the soil is properly nourished with nutrient salts, so that the plants, which would otherwise find nothing in the wintertime when the soil is so low in nutrient salts, now also find their nutrient salts there. If you provide sufficient moisture, enough warmth and enough light, the trees will grow.

Only one tree in Central Europe resisted this research drive at the beginning of the 20th century. It was the beech, the copper beech. It was hounded from all sides, and now it was said to be willing to be locked up in closed rooms! It was provided with the necessary nutrients, with the necessary moisture and warmth – but it remained stubborn and continued to demand its winter rest. But she was all alone.

And now, in this 20th century, in 1914, we have to note - I do not want to talk about the outcome of the world war, but about another great historical event - the great, powerful event that Klebs, a researcher who was extraordinarily favored by research in this field, succeeded in exorcising the beech's cosmic stubbornness. He simply succeeded in growing beech trees in closed rooms, providing them with the necessary conditions in closed rooms: the appropriate sunlight, which could be measured. And lo and behold, the beech did not resist; it also yielded to what the researchers wanted.

I am not referring to a phenomenon that I have reason to criticize, because who could not admire such tremendous research effort. Besides, it would of course be madness to want to refute the facts. They are there, they are like that, they are absolutely like that. So it is not a matter of agreement or refutation, but something else.

Why should it not be possible to create hair growth outside of humans and animals if the necessary conditions for hair growth could be found somewhere on neutral ground? Why not? The appropriate conditions just need to be somehow produced. I know that there are some people in our time who would prefer their hair to grow on their heads rather than be produced externally by some kind of cultivation! But we could imagine that this would also succeed. Then we would seemingly no longer need to somehow connect what happens on earth with the cosmos.

Of course, one can have all due respect for research, but one must nevertheless see deeper into these things. Apart from what I developed here some time ago about the nature of the elements, I would like to say the following today. It must be clear that, for example, the following is the case. We know that once upon a time the Earth and the Sun were one body. That was a long, long time ago, in the Saturn era, the Sun era. Then there was a brief repetition of this state during the Earth era. But something remained behind in the earth that belongs there. Today we are bringing it out again. And we are not only bringing it out of the repetition that occurred during our time on earth by heating our rooms with coal, but we are bringing it out by using electricity. For from those times when, according to the old Saturn time, in the solar time, the sun and the earth were one, the foundation was laid for us to have electricity on earth. With electricity, we have a force that has been connected to the earth since ancient times, which is solar power, solar power hidden in the earth.

Why should not the stubborn beech tree, if only we tackle it hard enough, make use of the solar energy flowing in from the cosmos, instead of using the solar luminosity obtained from the earth in the form of electricity!

But it is precisely when we consider these things that we realize how much we need a deepening of our whole knowledge. As long as people could believe that solar energy came only from the cosmos, they came from the immediate present observation of each year to an awareness of their cosmic connection in plant growth. In the present age, when materialistic considerations would sever that part of the Cosmos which can be so easily seen as a cosmic effect, we must, when we look at the apparent autonomy of the plant, have a science that remembers that the cosmic connection between earth and sun existed in older times, but in a different form. We need, precisely, on the one hand, to be restricted as if under a microscope, but on the other hand, we need an all the more intensive breadth of vision, and it is precisely in the details that it becomes clear how we need this breadth of vision.

It is not at all a matter of us on anthroposophical ground revolting in an amateurish way against the progress of research. But since the progress of research, by its very nature, must increasingly lead us to that earthworm nature of which I have often spoken here, so that we have no free view into the distance, we must gain the broader view, the great cosmic We need the counter-pole everywhere. Not antagonism towards research, but we need the spiritual, the spiritual counter-pole. That is the right point of view for us to take. And I would like to say that it is also a St. John's mood when we inscribe this in our minds, when we realize how we must now live in a world-historical St. John's mood, how we must turn our gaze out into the vastness of the cosmos. We need this. We need this especially in our spiritual knowledge. Today, mere talk of the spiritual is not enough; what is needed is a real penetration into the concrete phenomena of the spiritual world. What is brought out of the cosmic development of the Earth, by drawing attention to the development of Saturn, the Sun, the Moon, the Earth, and so on, has enormous implications in terms of knowledge, including knowledge of history.

When, on the one hand, materialistic science, in such brilliant research results as those of Klebs, draws our attention to the fact that even the stubborn beech tree can be made to do without sunlight and light, as it otherwise only does under the influence of sunlight, then this leads us, if we have no spiritual knowledge, to crumbling everything in the world and narrow our field of vision. There is the beech tree in front of us, the electric light promotes its growth, but we know nothing but this, which arises in the narrowest field.

If we are endowed with spiritual insight, we say something different. Then we say to ourselves: If the beech's Klebs withdraws the present sunlight, then it must give it to it in the form of electricity, the ancient sunlight. Then our vision will not be narrowed, but on the contrary, our vision will be expanded into the vastness. Oh well, say the people who do not want to know anything more about the spiritual course of the year, one day is like the other: breakfast, lunch, tea time, supper time; it's good if there is something better at Christmas, but basically it goes on like this day after day throughout the year. We only look at the day, that is, at the outward material of the human being: Oh well, cosmic connections! Let us emancipate ourselves from such a world view! Let us realize that even the wayward beech no longer needs the cosmos. If we lock it in a closed prison, we only need to provide it with electric light of sufficient strength, and it will grow without the sun! — No, it just does not grow without the sun. We just have to know how to seek out the sun in the right way when we do something like that. But then we must also be clear about the fact that it is something different, a different relationship. When we look with a broad view, it turns out that it is something different whether we let the beech thrive in the cosmic sunlight, or whether we give it the light that has become Ahrimanic, originating from ancient times. And we recall what we have often said about the normal developmental process and the Luciferic on the one hand, and the Ahrimanic on the other.

If we have a sufficient insight into this, then we will not lick our fingers out of sheer cleverness that we have now overcome the cosmic obstinacy of the beech, but we will go much further. We will now proceed to the juices of the beech and examine the effect on the human organism, we will examine the effect on the human organism of the beech that we have left to its own devices and of the beech that we have removed its stubbornness with the electric light, and we will perhaps learn something very special about the healing properties of one beech and the other. Then we have to go into the spiritual!

But how do you deal with these things today? You have an admirable interest in research. You sit in a classroom, you are an experimental psychologist, you write down all sorts of words that have to be memorized, you test memory, you experiment on children, and you discover something tremendously interesting. Once you have awakened an interest in something, then of course all things in the world are interesting; it depends only on the subjective point of view. Why should one not be able to make it so that a stamp collection is much more interesting than a botanical collection? Since that can be the case, why should it not be possible for something like that to happen in another area? Why should one not be able to gain some interest from the tortures to which children are subjected when they are experimented on? But everywhere one wonders whether there are not higher obligations, whether it is at all advisable to experiment with children in this way at a certain age. The question arises as to what one is corrupting there. And the even stronger question arises as to what is spoiled in the teachers when, instead of demanding a lively, warm relationship from them, an experimental interest is demanded from the results of experimental psychology. So it really depends on whether, when one puts oneself in the right relationship to the sensory world with such research, one also puts oneself in the right relationship to the supersensible world.

Now, of course, it will be able to roar with joy to certain people who speak of the necessary objectivity of research: So he wants to claim that there are some spirits who find it immoral when the beechwood glue takes its stubbornness in this way! — That doesn't occur to me at all. It doesn't occur to me in my dreams. Everything that is done should be done, but you have to have the counterweight to it. And in an age in which we have emancipated ourselves from cosmic perception regarding the growth of beech trees, there must also be a perception on the other hand, in a civilization that absorbs such things, of how spiritual progress occurs in the evolution of humanity. In an age such as our own, a sense of the times is essential. I do not wish to restrict research, but it must be felt that something else must be set against it. There must be an open heart for the fact that at certain times, these and those things from the spiritual world always reveal themselves. If, on the one hand, materialism becomes overgrown and leads to strong and great results, then those who have an interest in such results should also have an interest in the research results about the spiritual world.

But this lies at the very heart of Christianity. A correct view of Christianity, after the Mystery of Golgotha and in the continuing effect of Christ's earthly existence, sees in the nature of Christ the Christ-power, the Christ-impulse. And that means that when the autumn mood sets in, when everything becomes arid and barren, when the sprouting and budding in the nature of the senses ceases, then one perceives precisely the sprouting and budding of the spirit, when one can feel the glistening and glowing of the spirits in the tree as it sheds its leaves, and these spirits now accompany man through the winter.

But in the same way, we must learn to feel how, in an age that, from a certain point of view, rightly sets about understanding the details, narrowing our view of the details, our view must also fall on the big, the comprehensive. That is the St. John's mood in relation to Christianity. We must understand intuitively that the St. John's mood is the starting point for the event that lies in the words: “He must increase, but I must decrease.”

That means that the impression on man of all that is conquered by sense research must decrease. And precisely by penetrating more and more into the individual senses, the impression of the spiritual must become ever stronger and stronger. The sun of the spirit must shine ever more brightly into the human heart, the more the sun that works in the sense world diminishes.

We must feel the St. John's mood as the entrance into spiritual impulses and as the exit from sensual impulses. We must learn to feel the St. John's mood as something in which it weaves and blows, spiritually and demonically blows from the sensual into the spiritual, from the spiritual into the sensual. And we must learn to shape our spirit lightly through the St. John's mood, so that it does not just stick like pitch to the fixed contours of ideas, but that it finds its way into weaving, blowing, living ideas. We must be able to notice the glowing of the sensual, the dying away of the sensual, the glowing of the spiritual in the dying away of the sensual. We must feel the symbol of the illumination of the St. John's night moth as something that also has its meaning in the dimming of the lighting.

The St. John's night moth glows, the St. John's night moth dims again. But by glowing, it leaves alive in us the life and weaving of the spiritual in the twilight of the senses. And when we see the little spiritual ripples everywhere in nature, just as we see symbolically in the sensual the glowing and damping of the Johanniswürmchen, then we will, when we can do this with full, bright, clear consciousness, find the right Johannis mood for our age. And we need this right Midsummer mood, for we must go through our time in such a way that the spirit learns to become fervently alive, and that we learn to follow meaningfully the fervently alive spiritual.

St. John's mood - towards the future of humanity and the earth! No longer the old mood, which only understands the sprouting and sprouting of the external, which is glad when it can also imprison this sprouting and sprouting, can put under electric light that which otherwise thrived happily in sunlight. We must learn to recognize the flashing and blossoming of the spirit, so that electric light becomes less important to us than it is in the present; but that we may thereby sharpen our view, the Johannic view, for that ancient sunlight that appears to us when we open up the great spiritual horizon, not only the narrow earthly horizon, but the great horizon from Saturn to Vulcan.

If we allow the light that appears to us on this great horizon to have the right effect on us, then all the trivialities of our age will be able to appear to us in this light, and we will move forward and upward. Otherwise, if we do not make up our minds to do so, we will move backward and downward.

Today, it is all about human freedom, about human will. Today, it is all about the independent human decision between forward or backward, between upward or downward.

Also known as: Archangels and the Living Source of Speech Lecture 2 of 13 from the lecture series: The Human Soul in its Connection with Godly-Spiritual Individualities.

If you will remind yourselves of some of the things I have said in recent lectures, you will, I think, be able to call up a picture of the relationship of man's faculty of speech to those Beings in the spiritual world whom we are accustomed to assign to the Hierarchy of the Archangels. You will remember I explained to you the difference it makes to man whether the words he speaks are formed in such a way as to refer only to material things, in which case speech assumes a materialistic character, or whether in his speaking he unfolds a certain idealism, so that every time he utters a word, the feeling is present in him that he belongs to a spiritual world and that the words that ring in his speaking, coming as they do from the soul, must have some relation to Spirits. According as the one or the other is true, so does man come, between falling asleep and awakening, into a wrong or right relation with the Archangels. If he allows idealism to disappear altogether from his speaking, then he gradually loses the connection, which is so essential to him, with the Archangels. I am reminding you of this, because I want to speak to-day more particularly of one aspect of this relationship of human speech with the hierarchy of the Archangels. Speech, like everything else in evolution that has to do with man, as we have had full opportunity of realising in our study of his being, has had its history. What I want to bring forward does not refer to any one language in particular. The periods of time we have to take into view when we are studying some deep-seated change in speech are so long that even primitive languages show the same character as civilised ones in respect of such matters as we shall be considering. To-day therefore we shall not concern ourselves with the differences that exist between the several languages, but rather with those metamorphoses which human language in general has undergone in the course of the evolution of mankind on Earth.

If we consider the relationship man has to-day to language, we find that the words he speaks are nearly all of them signs for things that are round about him. As you will know, we have in the course of our studies alluded to a more intimate relationship between word and object. In our day however there is hardly any feeling left for this; words are very little more than mere outward signs for the objects indicated. Who is there who still feels, when the word Blitz (lightning) is uttered, something of the same experience he has when lightning actually flashes through space? To-day we are inclined to look on the word merely as a combination of sounds that is a sign for the phenomenon of the flash of lightning. It was not always so. If we go no farther back than to the earlier part of the Greek civilisation, we find that man's relation to language was not then one of thought, where the word is for him a sign and a symbol. The man of olden time entered with heart and soul into the sounds of his words and into the whole way the sounds were formed and arranged. And in the case of the languages of Northern Europe we do not even need to go back so far before we come to a time when the word Pflug (plough) gave man the same inner experience as did the activity of ploughing. This has been lost, and the word has become no more than a sign. But it is scarcely more than 1500 years or so since words were still felt in this way in the Northern parts of Europe. The feeling a man had when he was ploughing was similar to the feeling he had when he heard the word which in those days designated the plough. When anyone was listening to or speaking a word, it was not so much his thinking that partook in the experience as his feeling.

If now we go back into more remote ages, we find something different again; the will takes an intense and active part in the forming of words. But in order to study the times when man's relationship to external Nature was pre-eminently one of will, we must take our thoughts right back to Atlantis. For we have to reckon with long epochs of time when we are considering the evolution of language.

Within language lives the Genius of language. Language is not dependent for its evolution on the decision of man. In language lives the Genius of language. And the Genius of Language belongs to the hierarchy of the Archangels. When man speaks—when, that is, an atmosphere is prepared around the Earth within which can live man's utterances articulated into speech, then that atmosphere of speech and language is the element of the Archangels. Hence are the Archangels the Spirits of the different peoples—the Folk Spirits as we call them. You will know of this from the lectures I gave on the Mission of the Folk-Souls.

The evolution of language on Earth has thus a deep and intimate connection with the evolution of the Archangels. We can go so far as to say that in the evolution of speech and language we are beholding the evolution of the Archangels themselves. For even when we are studying something that has to do with the Earth, it is by no means impossible in the course of that very study to come to a knowledge of the evolution of higher spiritual Beings. We need only learn how to relate particular facts and phenomena to particular higher spiritual Beings, and we can arrive at a clear perception of how the continuous evolution of the Archangels is expressed and revealed in the changes that are to be observed in man's faculty of speech.

Now in those far-off times when an element of will came to expression in man's speech—that is, in the later part of the Atlantean evolution—it was not the same Beings of the Hierarchy who lived in his language as in more recent times. The whole relationship moreover was different. In those remote times man was not yet so interested in the feelings aroused in him at the sight, for example, of the blossoming of flowers or by changes in weather. These feelings interested him, it is true, in another connection, but not in respect of the faculty whereby the word welled up from the depths of his soul. Whether danger threatened him from this or that fact in Nature, summoning him to defend himself, or whether something else had a kindly and favourable influence and he would fain bring it into the orbit of his life, or again whether another object of perception were good or bad for his health,—in effect, how his will was aroused to activity, what he was induced to do under the influence of some fact or other,—this was the aspect of experience that interested him, and he formed his words accordingly. So that in those older times we find words that express how man reacts, what he finds himself impelled to do under the influence of the world around him. The most ancient language of all consisted almost entirely of expressions of will. How do we account for this? It was due to the fact that the Archangels came to language by way of Intuition. Read the descriptions I have given in my books of the nature of Intuition, and you will have a picture of the activity exercised by the Archangels in the later part of the Atlantean evolution, when they bestowed upon man the language of will.

Later, these Archangels moved forward in their own evolution. In my little book, “The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind,” I spoke about the evolution of the Leaders and Guides of humanity who live in the spiritual world. To-day we will extend this into a realm to which on that occasion we gave little attention,—the realm of speech and language. The advance made by the Archangels in their relation to language may be described in the following way. In the older faculty of Intuition they were standing within the world of still higher Hierarchies, giving themselves up in devotion to these worlds, so that together with speech they received something of the very being of higher Hierarchies than themselves. So long as it all depended upon Intuition, the Archangels surrendered themselves to the next higher Hierarchy,—Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai. They were within the worlds of this higher Hierarchy, and it was the experience of standing intuitively within this higher Hierarchy that enabled them to put the speech-forming power into human life on Earth.

In the next epoch the Archangels make, as it were, a step forward and then their speech-forming power flows no longer out of Intuition but out of Inspiration. They are not now completely surrendered to the next higher Hierarchy. (What they did still receive through their devotion to this Hierarchy underwent a change; it ceased to be something they could then communicate to man as speech or language). Now they hearken to the Inspirations of the First Hierarchy,—Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim,—and from out of this Inspiration they pour down to Earth the speech-forming power.

If we go back to the earliest times of Post-Atlantean evolution, or even only as far as ancient Egypt and Chaldea, we find in every land that the source from which the Archangels drew, in order to communicate speech to man, is Inspiration. Language itself is metamorphosed. Words become an expression before all else of sympathy and antipathy, of every shade of human feeling. Instead of a language of will, as in former times, we have now a language of feeling. We have come to a stage where this feeling, which is called forth in man by an external process or being is the very same as is experienced when the sounds issuing forth from the depths of his being are uttered by the speech organs and articulated into the word.

We have reached a significant phase in the evolution of mankind. The Hierarchy of the Archangels is at first the receiver of Intuitions; and the language of will, brought down as it were out of these Intuitions, is created by these Beings. The Archangels move on further and become the receivers of Inspiration. And what they receive through the inspiration of Beings of the First Hierarchy, gives rise to the language of feeling.

It was out of an extraordinarily deep perception that the well-known scholar and writer on the history of Art, Hermann Grimm, drew a clear line of division between the Greeks and the Romans. When we learn history at school or at the university, we are, he said, exhorted to take pains to understand what we learn; but as we go back over the evolution of mankind, we can only understand history as far back as Roman times. Cicero and Caesar we can still understand, for up to a point they are similar to the man of the present day,—although it must be said that the understanding generally brought to a study of Caesar is far from being free and natural. If we were not so thoroughly drilled and trained to it, we would never take much interest in Caesar! We would leave it to the pupils in military schools. Generally speaking, however, it is possible to trace a continuous stream back from our own day to Rome. A certain element of pedantry, which has gradually been creeping into man's life and has to-day reached a kind of culmination, first began to show itself in Rome. But, thinks Hermann Grimm, if we are honest with ourselves, we cannot claim to understand Pericles or Alcibiades. We understand them in the same way as we understand characters in fairy tales. As a matter of fact, it is only through a deeper study of Anthroposophy that one can come again to an understanding of the soul life of such figures; as you know, we have sought here again and again to enter into the whole way in which a Greek thinks and forms his ideas. Hermann Grimm is aware of the distance that lies between the inner life of a Greek and the inner life of a man of the present day. To the Roman we can still feel ourselves near; then comes a great gulf. The way the Greeks are described in the schools to-day is really deplorable! They are made out to be just like ourselves. They were not so at all, their whole life of soul was of a different character altogether. We need to look round for quite other methods to describe the Greeks. You could not have more striking evidence of this than when the learned Wilamowitz undertakes to translate the Greek tragedians. The whole affair is simply a disgrace. I need hardly say, there is nothing of the Greek tragedies left in his translations, not a trace! And yet people are immensely pleased, quite enchanted with them. Their dramatis personae simply do not exist in the tragedies themselves.

Hermann Grimm showed a true and sure instinct, when he said that we come into an entirely different world when we come to Greece—to say nothing of the Orient. It is really no more than a ridiculous mockery for modern man to imagine he can understand anything of the true Orient out of Deussen's translations. The first thing necessary is to be able to comprehend the change that has come about since then in the very being of man's soul.

And now when we come to consider our particular sphere, the sphere of speech or language, then we find that the language of feeling still prevailed in Greece among the philosophers up to the time of Plato. The first philosophical pedant is Aristotle, the great and universal spirit.¹ It will surprise you that I give him these two appellations, one after the other, but we do not understand Aristotle unless we see in him the first philosophical pedant and at the same time the universal spirit. He is great in a certain aspect but he is in another aspect the first pedant philosopher, for he made out of words categories of thought. It would never have occurred to the Greek of an older time to take words and force them, as it were, to yield categories of thought; he still felt the words as something that is inspired into man, still felt the presence of higher Spirits in speech and language.

Well on into the Greek epoch and—for the man in the street, as we say—as late as the Mystery of Golgotha, we can still detect in the speech-forming power of man the element of Inspiration, as it lives in the soul of the Archangel. True, the ordinary person lags behind the philosopher in certain respects; but in spiritual matters he is often less behind, and in the matter of the speech-forming faculty, he retains the Inspirations longer. Dates can of course be no more than approximate. In one region of the earth Inspiration lasts a longer, in another a shorter, time. In one region, men still feel how the word pulsates in them as the blood pulsates in the body; they feel it in the power of the breath. In the power of the breath as it enfills and surges through the body, they feel the presence of the Archangel, who is himself subject to Inspiration.

Then we come into a time when it is no longer so that the Archangel is yielding to Inspiration when he communicates to man the power of speech, but to Imagination. And language becomes the language of thought. Man begins to speak more out of thoughts; language approaches the abstract. And behind this lies a fact of great significance.

The Archangels, who belong to the Third Hierarchy, received Intuitions from the Second Hierarchy, and Inspirations from Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones—the First Hierarchy. Whence do they receive Imagination? There is no Hierarchy beyond the First! The Imaginations cannot at any rate come to them from any one of the Hierarchies named in the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite. For he tells of no Hierarchy beyond the first. Certain Archangel Beings were therefore obliged to turn to the past for Imaginations, to find in the past the pictures of the speech-forming power,—for that is what the Imaginations are. What came from an earlier time had to be carried on into the future. There was no longer any immediate and present flow of the speech-forming power. And inasmuch as speech now took its source from an earlier stage, into it crept an Ahrimanic element. This is a fact of incalculable significance. And what the Archangels felt above them came to expression in the world of man in a deadening of speech and language. Language became polished and at the same time paralysed, it no longer retained the livingness it had in earlier days.

Try to understand the significance of this change. Something enters into the life of man that in reality requires a higher hierarchy than the First. If we have a right understanding for this event in human development in all its tremendous significance, we shall come to see that a time had arrived when the Gods had to grow out beyond what is contained in the First Hierarchy. There is one thing that up to that time had not yet been achieved by the Gods, and was already present here on Earth in picture. What the Gods had not yet achieved is the passage through Death. You have often heard me speak of this. The Gods who stand above man in the various Hierarchies knew only of changes from one form of life into another. The actual event of death in life had not, up to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, been an experience of the Gods. Death came as a result of Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences; it came, that is, through the agency of Divine Beings who had either remained behind in evolution or pressed forward too quickly. Death had no place in the life-experience of the higher Hierarchies. It enters into their experience in the moment when the Christ passes through the Mystery of Golgotha—passes, that is, through Death, uniting Himself so deeply with the destiny of Earth Man as to have this also in common with him,—that He passes through Death. The event of Golgotha is accordingly more than an event of the life of Earth, it is an event of the life of the Gods. The actual event that took place in that moment on Earth, and the knowledge of the Event that finds its way into the hearts and minds of men—all this is an image of the infinitely more lofty and sublime and far-reaching Event that took place in the worlds of the Gods themselves. Christ's passing through death on Golgotha is an event whereby the First Hierarchy reached up into a still higher realm. Therefore have I always had to speak to you of the Trinity as standing above the First Hierarchy. In reality It only came there in the course of evolution. Everywhere there is evolution.

And so, if we are speaking of the Hierarchies as described in Dionysius the Areopagite, we have to say that the Archangels lose the possibility of forming Imaginations from above. Consequently Man loses the possibility of continuing to build and fashion his language in a living manner. In the world of the Gods an event takes place of which the Mystery of Golgotha is an earthly reflection. Therefore the Event of Golgotha contains among its many implications also this,—that as men gradually receive into themselves more and more of the Christ Impulse, they receive again through the Christ Impulse the living spring and fountain of language.

We have to-day the various languages that run their course like diverging streams. And if we look at these various languages in a free and unbiassed way, we cannot fail to observe how they carry in them—and more especially, the farther we go Westward—an element of death, how they tend to become mere empty husks. In Asia things have not yet gone so far, but as we go West we find increasingly how the languages show signs of dying.

There is only one way whereby the speech-creating power can be quickened into life,—and that is through men coming to realise the Christ Impulse as a living Impulse. Then the Christ Impulse can become a power in man that can create speech. And among all the facts to be noted if we want to form a true picture of the significance of the Christ Impulse in the whole evolution of mankind, this must also have place, that at the time when man went forward into freedom, he came right out of the Divine and spiritual stream in which he had been steeped hitherto. Had speech remained as it was in the time of ancient Greece, man would not have been able to evolve to freedom. That speech serves the purpose merely of a sign,—this absurdity (for so I must call it) had to come about when the Archangels lost the possibility of forming Imaginations from the present and had to resort to the past. During the time since the Christ first made Himself known to men, during all this time while He has let the Mystery of His Being and His activity be there on record in the Gospels, the knowledge of Christ has not come in its fullness, the knowledge men have had of Him has not been sufficiently spiritual, it has often been merely traditional. But when the word of the Gospel is quickened to life by an understanding of the Christ, an understanding that derives from the Christ Himself as He still works on in the world, continuing to have influence always upon man, then—and only then—will proceed from the Christ Impulse, from the living Christ Impulse, the speech-forming power.

Let us now set down on the blackboard what I have been indicating. Here up above, the Gods grow more and more exalted. Down below an evolution goes on among men. On the one hand they receive more and more of the Christ Impulse, on the other hand they move further and further forward in the direction of freedom.

And when man rises to a higher stage, the higher Hierarchies also reach a higher stage. The Archangels gradually receive more and more of the Christ Impulse, on the other hand they move further and further forward in the direction of freedom. And when man rises to a higher stage, the higher Hierarchies also reach a higher stage. The Archangels gradually receive more and more of the Christ, Who has found His home in the hearts of men on Earth; He enters with His Impulse right into the Imaginations of the Archangels, and these become alive, become quick with immediate present life.

We shall in the future have an altogether different kind of language-forming power. A quite new kind will begin to work. I have spoken of this from other points of view in earlier lectures.

We can describe the evolution that goes on above in the Heavens at the same time as mankind evolves on the Earth below. And we can also describe its copy or reflection on Earth,—the progress from the language of will to the language of feeling and thence to the language of thought or symbol. And we can know that amidst it all Archangels are ascending—or shall we rather say descending—from Intuition to Inspiration and to Imagination. We behold first the evolution of the Archangels and all that takes place in connection therewith among the higher Hierarchies, and when we turn from that to man in his evolution, it is on the evolution of language and of the word that we have to fix our attention. We will consider one particular stream in the whole history of mankind, into which a divine stream was interwoven. It goes back to the origin of all things, the far beginning of all things. “In the Beginning was the Word” where was the word in those distant ages, when mankind had a language of the will? The Word was with God, it had to be sought there by means of Intuition. “The Word was with God ”.

The Archangels had to transpose themselves by means of Intuition into the Being of the Second Hierarchy. The Being that flowed over into Them was the Word. “And a God was the Word”.

In the Beginning was the Word
And the Word was with God
And a God was the Word.

We see how intimate is the connection of that stream in evolution which finds its culmination in the Mystery of Golgotha with the Logos, the Word. And it is all bound up with the great cosmic event of man's “becoming” and the passage of Christ through death. When those great sentences were uttered: “In the Beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and a God was the Word ”—in those days the Word was felt as moving and weaving in the soul of man. With the Advent of the Mystery of Golgotha came a time when Christ was present in a human body—men beheld Him through the Word. The Word had entered into physical man. “ And the Word became flesh ”.

Deep truths, deep facts of evolution, lie hidden in the ancient writings, but earnest and persistent work is needed to find them again. We must first be able to observe in the spiritual world. Above all, we must approach these ancient writings with reverence, knowing that we shall only be able to deepen our understanding of their content by learning to investigate these sublime matters for ourselves. And as we are able to enter into their deeper meaning we enter also into spiritual life itself.

Well indeed would it be for us in this age, had we a Michael civilisation, a culture and a civilisation fired by what I recently called the Michael thought! This Michael thought should be alive, above all, in the autumn time. The festival of autumn should be filled with it. The leaves have withered and are falling from the branches of the trees, the plants are fading away, life is being mineralised. All the fresh young sprouting life that we saw in the earlier part of the year is receiving death into itself, death and decay, and is fast undergoing mineralisation. Now must the Michael power well up from man's inner being; now must man recognise how, just where the physical and material grows weak and faint and tends to die away,—just there the spiritual enters in! The Autumn Festival of Michaelmas at the end of September should become a festival filled with life and impulse. It has to express how man, while he stands right within the decaying processes of Nature, grows correspondingly active in his soul. When the Michael Festival shall have this character, then all human activity will be fructified from it. And how sore is the need to-day for such fructification! Let me give you an instance.

A short while ago, we heard a great deal about a resolve some people had made to study language. Nothing came of it, nothing at all. All manner of facts about language were collected, but the whole effort was completely lacking in spirituality. It was really so. There you had a group of young people, straight from school. At school of course, they had not yet woken up, but now—they are going to “study language”! They begin to plan it all and think how it will be when they have gone on studying for some time; a dazzling picture floats before their eyes of the fruit of all their labours. Actually all the preliminary steps are there; they could quite well have gone on to a recognition of the great miracle that unfolds before us when we look away from the present-day language of thought, through the language of feeling, to the language of will, and behold there the wonderful working and weaving of the Divine Archangels, behold too how their working and weaving stirs even yet in the language corpses of to-day. Were the life of the First Beginnings to flow again in language, what a sublime greatness were there revealed!

You must understand that the Michael thought is not a thing to be taken easily. You cannot simply say: Let us inaugurate a Michael Festival; it will be wonderful, and we shall then be in the very forefront of progress. The Michael thought has relation to the strongest and deepest impulses of the human will. It must reckon with these innermost impulses, and a Michael Festival cannot be other than a festival which gives a tremendous urge to human life, much as in those olden times, when man had the power to create festivals, the institution of the Christmas Festival or of the Easter Festival gave a new urge and impetus to the whole life of man on Earth.

• 1. Pedant’ seems to be, in this connection, the nearest rendering for ‘Philinter.’ (Note by Translator).

Concluding Remarks after The Members' Meeting

Yes, my dear friends, that is what I wanted to take as my starting point today. I want to point out, however, somewhat stimulated by an article that was handed to me today, how unsuitable our present civilization is for such ideas to find their way into it, because, you see, this article asserts some peculiar things. I do not want to go into all the various stupidities that are said about anthroposophy. But I do want to draw your attention to the criticism that is expressed here about a section of my Theosophy. There the gentleman says:

Steiner has the most wonderful things to say about the spiritual world. All things in the physical universe have their images there, which are not only sensory but also spiritual. There is a “spiritual” space in which these spiritual images move, just as chairs and tables move in physical space.

Now, my dear friends, I have already seen that oxen, horses and “Traubs” move in physical space, but that tables and chairs move in physical space is an invention of this Mr. Traub. I suspect, however, that this Mr. Traub, who is a university professor, as indeed he should be, has perhaps interpreted the sentence on page 108 of my Theosophy in the following way:

When a person's spirit is awakened, it perceives these thought-beings just as the physical eye perceives a table or a chair.

Perhaps this sentence inspired him to this lavish fantasy that tables and chairs move in physical space. They do so for the spiritualists, but Professor Traub of the University of Tübingen obviously does not want to be a spiritualist. Who else does this? Yes, the person who saw the hat “twice,” the drunk; tables and chairs move for him as well. So I can only imagine this other alternative.

Another cute story is, for example, that Professor Traub comes up with a very special definition of what science is. And so he spins the cute sentence:

This brings us to the crucial question: ...

What came before actually has nothing to do with it, so Professor Traub says: This brings us to the crucial question – which is actually quite pointless. Professor Traub:

This brings us to the crucial question: Is Theosophy right when it deliberately claims to be a science? This question can only be flatly denied. It is not a science because it also wants to be a spiritual science. That is a contradiction in terms. Science is generally valid by its very nature. It seeks the truth and the truth is for everyone. A science that keeps some of its results secret is not a science.

Now I would like to know how a science could not know something and not keep its results secret; if you know something and knowledge is a science, it makes no difference to the essence of science whether you lock it in a desk or communicate it to someone! But a modern university professor makes a big deal out of something that is completely irrelevant to the essence of science. Basically, the whole article consists of nothing but such trivialities, and from such articles one can indeed summarize a little of what today must be called the terrible muddiness and incompetence of contemporary education, and it is certainly not suitable for enlightening the minds of our youth in any special way. Because when these things are presented to young people with the same common sense with which chairs and tables are made to dance through their own power in space – and the article already suggests that everything else is also in this way, from the same spirit – then truly not much can come of this youth.

Concluding remarks after the member's lecture

Dear friends,

On several occasions at the end of such meetings, I have had to tell you some unpleasant things, and I cannot change that because there are many things that have to be brought to the attention of the Anthroposophical Society. Therefore, I would like to share a few samples with you – I could multiply them – from the camp that rebels against everything that comes from spiritual science.

A brochure has been published that is now being distributed not in the thousands, but in the hundreds of thousands in Germany. This brochure tells a variety of stories about contemporary life and takes the opportunity to lash out at what the anthroposophical spiritual science, with all that it entails, must introduce into contemporary spiritual life, not of its own free will, but out of a recognition of necessity, speaking from the signs of the times. Now, this brochure points out what is to be done from certain quarters in order to set up large collections in Central Europe for the radical-revolutionary parties, for Bolshevism above all. And since Central Europe is very afraid of Bolshevism and Western Europe is even more afraid of it, it is always something with which one can create the right mood today by accusing someone of something along these lines. And that is why you will find the following sentence in this brochure:

We need only recall the collections that Rathenau organized at the Zoologischer Garten station and Councillor of Commerce Hermann Bamberg in his apartment at Landgrafenstraße 12 during the Kapp Putsch. We recently heard that a confidential meeting took place in southern Germany before the last communist uprising in central Germany, in which Rathenau, Rudolf Steiner, Parvus, Oscar Cohn and about 20 rabbis participated.

Furthermore, this brochure states that a widespread organization has formed that has addressed an indictment to the appropriate authorities, to the Chief Reich Prosecutor, regarding the necessity of prosecuting the former German Reich Chancellor Fehrenbach in league with his Foreign Minister Simons. And the discussion of this application of the widespread organization to the Chief Reich Prosecutor is conducted here in such a way that it is said:

The publisher Ludwig Schroeter has also filed a complaint with the public prosecutor's office regarding the latest act of high treason committed by the lawyer and former German Chancellor Fehrenbach, in league with the theosophist and follower of Dr. Rudolf Steiner, former German Foreign Minister Dr. Simons, as they laid Germany's future without reservation into the hands of the President of the United States with dog-like humility, the publisher Ludwig Schroeter has also filed a complaint with the public prosecutor's office, which we will follow.

Today, things have the content of agitation, of action, and they are not to be understood as something that can only be laughed at. Then, a little pearl is added, where it is spoken about Heise's book about Freemasonry. It says:

Karl Heise has done a very diligent job in his book “Die Entente-Freimaurerei und der Weltkrieg” (The Entente-Freemasonry and the World War), which was published in 1919 by Ernst Finckh in Basel. Heise is not a Freemason, but he is quite well informed. He is an enthusiastic admirer of the late Guido List and an ardent supporter of the traitor Dr. Rudolf Steiner of Kraljewic, whose nationality has still not been definitely established. The confusion of the ideas of these two theosophists with the political events makes Heise's book so difficult to understand that it is really only of value to those in the know who can easily separate the wheat from the chaff.

I would like to make it clear that I would not have shared this with you if I did not know that it is a very widespread organization that knows very well how it works through such things and also knows very well why it has these emblems: a wild boar that sticks out its tusks. That is on the title page, on the cover: a wild boar sticking out its tusk, next to it is written: “With God for Germany's resurrection”. The magazine is called “On Outposts”.

Now, my dear friends, I don't want you to think that these things stop at the Swiss borders. Outside, it has already come to the point that there is a reasonably organized defense organization that, as I mentioned eight days ago, brought together 1,400 participants at the Stuttgart Congress. Here, however, it is absolutely impossible to wake the sleeping people in any way. But I will leave it at that.

Announcement before the lecture

My dear friends! It gives me great satisfaction to be able to greet you here again after a long time. This is after a long journey, which went via Stuttgart, Munich, back to Stuttgart, then Frankfurt, Mannheim, Cologne, Elberfeld, Hannover, then Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, Dresden, Breslau. In all these cities one could see that at present there is a deep need in wider circles of humanity to hear something from the spiritual world. It can be said that this need, which has been strongly expressed by the fact that the largest halls in the respective cities were always completely full, that this need stands in great contrast to what is asserted in the official world or also in the journalistic world, as one can see, as an opposition that is admittedly strong today but is becoming increasingly ineffective. The need of today's humanity for knowledge of spiritual life arises from the sense of the hopelessness of what has been brought forth as a worldview from the conditions that must now be considered the right ones for the external knowledge of nature, but which are quite inadequate for the satisfaction of the longings and hopes of the human soul, and especially for the strength that the soul needs to endure in this extraordinarily difficult present, which holds out the prospect of an even more difficult future.

It is absolutely necessary – as the course of such a journey shows – that everything that has been said here about the position of today's so-called spiritual life in relation to the anthroposophical movement be taken into account more and more, and that we should not lose sight of what is necessary in this regard for a moment.

To do this, however, it is necessary within our ranks that we, each of us individually, can first find the right point of view in our hearts and in our souls, also with regard to our feelings. And since I am able to speak to you again today, I would like to start by pointing out something that has been a pleasing fact for me since the time when I started coming here to Dornach again. It is something that I found in the latest issue of the “Goetheanum” that appears here, the review of Professor Chastonay's lecture by our esteemed friend Albert Steffen. This review is such that it can actually, I would say, serve as a prime example of how we should behave in the face of opposition from the most diverse quarters. An essay about this lecture, which hits the nail on the head in every single point it touches, is absolutely essential if one wants to win the right position.

I am mentioning this lecture for the reason, my dear friends, that I would like to link it to the remark that is particularly close to my heart. That is this, that it is now necessary for us first and foremost to get the right assessments within our ranks for what is being achieved. Only when a larger number of our members are able to recognize something significant and exemplary in such a matter; and only when this larger number of our members are able to distinguish such things from what is less in line with our cause, even within our ranks, only then will the spirit of our movement gradually take hold, which we absolutely need. For we need not only an abstract way of talking about things, but we also need an ability to assess what is going on that is attuned to knowledge of the world. We must therefore appreciate what is being done in our ranks in an outstandingly correct way. This is what I have already emphasized on various occasions.

I would like to make it clear that I am not always able to emphasize every single detail; but on special occasions I would like to make it clear that this correct assessment of what is achieved within our ranks – which of course also requires the correct assessment of what is not achieved and what should be achieved – should definitely be given more consideration. If we do not realize what outstanding work is being done within our ranks, our movement will not be able to flourish. So I recommend to every single member that they should check each sentence of this essay to see what I actually mean by this remark in concrete, individual terms.

Correction in the weekly publication “Das Goetheanum”

September 27, 1922

Rejection of Untruths

I have been informed that it is being said in Switzerland that the former President of Württemberg, Mr. Blos, is supposed to claim with certainty that he received me several times. I hereby declare that this is a blatant untruth. I have never visited Mr. Blos, never spoken a word to him, never exchanged any written correspondence with him. I saw him only once from a distance. That was when I attended the lecture given by the then Reich Minister Simons in Stuttgart. At that time, next to me, Councillor of Commerce Molt pointed to a gentleman whom I did not know and said, “That is Blos.” At that time, he had long since ceased to be President of the State. But even then, it came to nothing more than “seeing from a distance”. Whether Mr. Blos himself made the above claim is unknown to me; it is said. And it is linked to his untrue statements, which are not based on anything, and which he had printed in his memoirs. I therefore further declare that I never authorized anyone to talk to Mr. Blos for me or in my name. If someone has done so, it has happened without my knowledge and against my will. I myself only read in the Blos memoirs that someone was supposed to have done this. The things that are being told so often are based on such falsehoods. It is particularly absurd that there is even talk of my wanting to become a minister in Württemberg. I have so far considered it unnecessary to publicly refute the pure fabrications, especially when they are as nonsensical as the one just mentioned. But since people are saying, “Why doesn't the person concerned refute such claims?” I declare, with regard to this too, that it is a blatant untruth. I have never said anything to anyone that could have given rise to such talk. I will not go into other things that are said repeatedly, but which are just as untrue, today. Perhaps that too will happen.

Dornach, September 27, 1922
Rudolf Steiner