The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees! Every year I have had the privilege of speaking here in this city about topics in spiritual science. Our friends in the spiritual science movement here were of the opinion that this should also be done in these fateful days. Now it will seem understandable that these days of ours require a very special kind of consideration, even for those striving in spiritual science. After all, all our feelings and emotions are intimately connected with what is happening in the East and the West in these fateful days. We must look with heartfelt sympathy at those who are faithfully obeying the demands of duty, who are giving their all, body and soul, for what has become so deeply embedded in the course of European and indeed human development. In all our thoughts, in all our reflections, there must be a connection to the great arena in which decisions are not made and judgments are not passed in words, in concepts and ideas, but where decisions are made and judgments are passed through deeds, through life, through blood, through death.

What I would like to consider before you this evening, dear attendees, is said to be so connected with the great events of the times that the question is asked, as it were, from these events themselves: What impulses, what forces, what powers in the course of human development have led, could lead to the fact that the bearers of Central European culture, that the bearers of Central European spiritual life are now enclosed as in a mighty, enlarged fortress on all sides, have to defend themselves on all sides; not only have to defend themselves, but are burdened from all sides with all possible insults, yes, defamations. Perhaps spiritual scientific conceptions, perhaps perceptions that arise from spiritual scientific feeling, are suitable for characterizing, at least in some strokes, the larger connections that have led to our fate-shaking events in the world's development up to our time.

Among the things that the materialistic age has particularly laughed at can be mentioned the idea, the concept of the folk soul, which I tried to present in my book “Theosophy”. For the spiritual scientist, this folk soul is not just an abstract, empty concept, not just an abstract summary of the characteristics of some people. This folk soul is a living, real thing.

For spiritual science – as has often been emphasized here – the concept of reality, and also the concept of personal and individual reality, does not end with the visible. Behind the visible, everywhere, the invisible reigns. If we approach nature spiritually, then, behind what nature reveals to us externally, we find spiritual entities that are effective not only for a superstitious, traditional worldview, but for real spiritual scientific research. Behind all that we ourselves are, behind all that develops in us between birth and death, there reigns that eternal, immortal self, which, however, presents itself to man in forms and entities that he ignores in everyday life. The supersensible self rules in us, passing from birth to birth and from death to death on earth. And in all historical development, invisible, supersensible, but as real as the external beings of the animal and plant world, there are real, personal, individual beings. The spiritual researcher speaks of such real, ruling spiritual beings when he speaks of the soul of a nation. And he tries to grasp the nature of these folk souls on the basis of his knowledge; he tries to penetrate into what these folk souls are, in order to gain an understanding from this penetration of how the folk souls prevail in the folk souls, in the feelings and impulses of the folk souls, and how the folk souls relate to each other through this rule.

First of all, I would like to hint at how the spiritual researcher arrives at speaking of such higher spiritual beings, including in the sense of folk souls, which would be far too involved to explain in detail. In our material life, we relate to the things of the external world, to the things of the mineral, animal and plant kingdoms; we look at what is around us within the horizon of these kingdoms; we form ideas and thoughts about them and absorb them. We know that our soul lives within us, and when we form thoughts, images and ideas, then these thoughts, images and ideas relate to beings outside of us.

What we can draw from the beings, we acquire, so to speak; we then carry this further into ourselves from the mineral, animal and plant world that extends around our senses. We form images, thoughts and ideas about the world that is below us as human beings. Spiritual research shows us – I can only hint at this today with a comparison; listeners who have heard me here often know that this is not just a comparison but a result of spiritual research – spiritual research shows us how we as human souls relate to external reality. Thus, in the invisible, there is a spiritual world above us; and what the things of the mineral, animal and plant worlds are for us, we ourselves are as souls for a spiritual world. We can say comparatively: just as the things of the sensory world become thoughts for us, so we become thoughts, so we become perceptions and ideas for the spiritual world. And the folk soul is one of the beings in the spiritual world that are closest to us. And just as we humans can relate to the external world by simply surrendering ourselves to it with our senses, giving it little thought and rarely rising to the realm of the ideal, so the folk soul can relate to the individual people of a nation by living itself out completely in the individuals, entirely [with its will impulses] – and with the folk soul it depends on will impulses – that it expresses itself entirely in the individuals, that this folk soul rises little into a spiritual realm, but rather submerges more and leads a life in the folk individuals themselves. From a spiritual-scientific point of view, we find such folk souls more among the western peoples of Europe. We find that folk souls there rise little into a spiritual realm; on the other hand, we find that they intervene decisively, tyrannically and dogmatically in the individual soul life of the members of the Western European peoples.

Another thing is conceivable and is actually in the character of the folk souls. This can be compared to when a person is more of a dreamer, when he has little eyes and little sense for the outer world; when things pass by him unnoticed, as it were, and he lives more in his own ideas. The behavior of the individual human soul towards external things can be compared to the Russian folk soul. It hovers, as it were, nebulously over the individual members of the people, does not enter into the individualities of the people; cares little about them; is only loosely connected with them.

Then there are people, and we have a representative person of this kind in the history of the development of Central Europe, who on the one hand lovingly contemplates the outside world with all his senses, but then again does not get stuck in this outside world, but develops a full ideal, spiritual-soul life, and with this spiritual-soul life plunges into what the senses around him offer and reveal. In the most eminent sense, Goethe is a representative of this kind of mind. Goethe, whose way of thinking has been called “a concrete thinking” by an important psychologist of his time, because this remarkable Goethe soul connects lovingly with everything outside through the senses, and at the same time rises so strongly to ideas. Schiller could not quite understand this in a conversation he had with Goethe, so that Goethe had to claim that he saw his ideas with his eyes. His intellectual and spiritual life was so highly developed, as was his life of the senses and outer life. The German national soul is a type of national soul that can be compared with this disposition of the individual human soul. The German national soul has proven itself as such over the centuries and millennia of German development in Central Europe.

This German national soul appears to us, on the one hand, as intimately and intimately concerned with the individual human being. On the other hand, we see how it was able to withdraw into the spiritual realms in order to open up new sources of spiritual life there, and then to go down again to the individual human beings in the German nation. A folk soul that lives in the spiritual and in the individual at the same time, that appears to us in the succession of time as if it were coming down among the people; [it appears as if it were coming down rhythmically], we see it in the decisions in which our ancestors assert themselves as opponents of the Roman development. We see how this folk soul, even then, was permeating the individual human personalities in Central Europe, how it imbued them with strength so that they could oppose in a very specific way what was intruding on them as Romanism. We then find how this folk soul withdraws, then breaks out again, submerging itself in the individual personalities, even producing a supreme one at the time of Walther von der Vogelweide [Wolfram von Eschenbach]. We find, as later when Germany was crushed from left and right, from north and south, during the Thirty Years War, this national soul gathers strength in the unseen, and then in a heyday of German spiritual development at the turn of the eighteenth, nineteenth century, it in turn submerges into the individuals.

If we observe history in its rhythmic course, we see it as alternating between the submergence of the national soul in the individualities and a return to the spiritual. And it is from this return to the spiritual that the rejuvenating forces of German development come.

If we consider the fundamental feature of this familiarity on the one hand and the soaring flight on the other of the German national soul, we understand how, within the development of German culture, what is produced as the highest , what reaches to the heights of art and intellectual life, is rooted in the simplest impulses, in the primitive of the national soul; how it was unthinkable in Germany from time immemorial that Germany's high culture was not at the same time popular culture.

And so, in these fateful times, I would like to invoke two personalities in their last moments, their dying moments, so to speak, and characterize something.

How did that which Schiller was able to be for his people settle into German hearts and minds? What worked in Schiller's mind itself? The rejuvenating powers of the German national soul! He knew himself connected to these deeper powers of the German national soul. Through one of his friends, Heinrich Voß, the son of the translator of Homer, Voß, we are led into Schiller's death chamber, as it were, and get to know Schiller's last days and last moments. There we get to know him, this Schiller, as he, so to speak, already died physically in his last days, but as he, gathering all the powers of his soul, nevertheless took part in what surrounded him. There you can see how the spirit prevailed over the worn-out body, which showed a dried-up heart at the autopsy, but in which there was a warm glow. We see that this worn-out body was maintained solely by the strong soul forces that dwelled in it.

We are told how difficult Schiller's last moments were. It is touching to see how, in these last moments, he still made an effort to say this or that, which he believed he still had to communicate to those around him so that it could be passed on to posterity. We are told how Schiller had his last, his youngest child brought to his bedside, how he looked the child in the eye for a long, long time. How he then turned to the wall. And young Voß recounts that he believed – and rightly so – that Schiller looked at his child as if to say: Yes, it would be necessary for me to be your father for much longer, because I still have so much to tell you.

And it may be said that the entire German nation can imagine that the feelings that turned to the child in these last moments were turned to the entire German nation itself; as if the German nation must feel what Schiller still had to say to it. For in Schiller, the German nation can feel how he was carried in everything by the rejuvenating forces of the German national soul.

Let us recall the words that have been quoted frequently in recent times, which Schiller, so to speak, left as a legacy, and which show how he felt connected to the German people. These words only came to light long after his death. But they show us how Schiller himself felt carried by the forces of the German national spirit.

He who forms and rules the spirit

must ultimately gain mastery, for

finally, at the goal of time, if the

world has a plan, if human

life has any meaning, finally,

custom and reason must triumph,

the brute force of form must succumb

and the slowest nation will overtake

all the fast, fleeting ones.

[...]

Him

– the German –

is destined for the highest,
and just as he is in the center of
Europe's peoples,
he is the core of humanity,
those are the flower and the leaf.

He has been chosen by the world spirit, during
the battle of time
to work on the eternal construction of human education
and to preserve what time brings,
therefore he has appropriated what was previously foreign
and kept it within himself.
Everything that was valuable in other times
and peoples, that arose, developed and faded with the times,
he has preserved,
it is not lost to him, the treasures of
centuries.
Not to shine in the moment and
play his role, but to win the great
process of time. Every people
has its day in history, but
the day of the German is the harvest of
all time.

Thus Schiller knew himself connected with the power of the German national soul.

Now we turn our gaze to another German, to a German who has risen high, one might say, into the often seemingly cold philosophical regions; we turn to Johann Gottlieb Fichte. But Fichte, who in Germany's most difficult times, when Germany was depressed from the west, tried - as he himself put it - to hold his “Discourses to the German Nation” from the innermost “root of the stirrings of life” of his people. He, the philosopher, who perhaps put forward the most vigorously willed thoughts to humanity, he who shaped the sharpest thoughts, he knew himself as being connected to all the primitive sources of the German people, and it was out of this consciousness that he delivered his “Speeches to the German Nation” at that time. But he also felt connected to everything that came from the German people and determined Germany's fate. And again this shows itself to us – we can look at it without sentimentality – it shows itself symbolically in his last moments.

He often deliberated with himself, Fichte, whether he should personally go to war. Then he told himself that he had to work through the power of his mind. His wife worked as a nurse in a military hospital in Berlin. She brought the military hospital fever home with her. She recovered, but Fichte was infected by this fever. And in his last moments – and this was strangely characteristic of this seemingly abstract and at the same time most popular philosopher – in his last days, when his crystal-clear, life-energetic thoughts feverish fantasies, he was outside with the German armies, at Blücher's crossing of the Rhine, he took a faithful part in the fighting, and felt himself in the midst of the battle. Thus, even in the feverish fantasies of the dying philosopher, the strongest German philosophy led to intimate communion with the deeds of his people. His son offered him a medicine. He pushed it away with his hand and said, letting his thoughts wander from the most human philosophy to the way he felt on the battlefields, he said: “I do not need medicine because I feel I will recover.” He recovered to death.

Such examples, esteemed attendees, show us how the forces of the German national soul were at work, where the individual souls that belong to this nation are making the way that they must describe as the most humane, as the one leading to the highest goods of humanity.

And everywhere it is shown how this German national soul does not rule over the individual in a tyrannical way, how it does not pour some kind of collective, dogmatic world view into souls; how it is experienced in the individual souls, how the individual soul feels it as its own power. And how, nevertheless, the highest developments of the supersensible spiritual life are brought into these individual souls. And again and again we see the individual soul seized afresh in all that it has to accomplish on earth, carried down from the spiritual heights by the soul of the nation.

How did this Central European people once receive Christianity! So that it was felt like the most personal impulse. We read the retelling of the Gospel stories [in Heliand, the work of the Saxon monk], we read them as something that arose directly from the most personal spiritual life, but was nevertheless the revelation of a supreme being.

And we move on. We see how later on the individual German soul is seized; so seized is it by that which encompasses the whole soul of the people, that this German soul in German mysticism in the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth century feels God so that this God lives directly in all that the individual can will, feel and love, what the individual soul feels directly within itself as the eternal-living. How the words of Master Eckhart resound in us: “If you love God, then you can do whatever you want, [for then you will only want the eternal and the one, which God also wills. I will not ask God to give himself, I will ask him to make me pure, then he will flow into me of his own accord. God is a pure good in Himself and therefore does not want to dwell anywhere, for He may pour Himself entirely into a pure soul. When it is so pure that it sees through itself, then it need not seek God in the form, but it sees Him in itself and enjoys all creatures in God and God in all creatures, and whatever it does, it does in God and] God does in you.” That is to say, they maintain a familiar dialogue not only with what they are as individuals, but also with what, as the soul of the people, whispers and rests through all the minds of the people.

And think of Angelus Silesius, who lived in the seventeenth century. How he empathizes with the individual soul of the human being with the whole soul of the people. How we read there - I will quote only one saying - how Silesius, the “Cherubic Wayfarer,” has made countless such sayings.

I neither live nor die. God himself dies in me, and what I am to live, he also lives for and for.

This means feeling at one with the spirit that lives and breathes in the world. At the same time, it means carrying within oneself a supreme consciousness of immortality. When a person feels connected in their soul to the divine source of existence, they say: “I neither die nor live. God himself dies in me.” There is the certainty that God does not die; but that it is God who goes with me through death. There I feel so connected with God that through this my immortality is granted. There you see the peculiarity, how intimately the soul of the people lives with the individual mind of the people.

When we look at the human soul from a spiritual scientific point of view, then we see – not by dividing it up in the abstract, but by looking at this soul in a truly scientific way, and this is not what science does today, but it is something that the science of the future will certainly do – we see that we can distinguish three soul elements, three soul expressions in the human soul. Just as one can distinguish the different color shades in the spectrum, so one can and must distinguish quite scientifically in the human soul: the sentient soul, the intellectual or emotional soul, and the consciousness soul. And within each of these there is that which is called the human being's ego, the actual self of the human being. Just as light reigns in the reddish-yellow, greenish, and blue-violet parts of the rainbow, so the power of the self, of the ego of man, reigns through the sentient soul, the mind or emotional soul, and the consciousness soul.

Now the peculiar thing about trying to understand the peoples of Europe from a spiritual scientific point of view is that it shows that the soul of a nation, for example the Italian soul, relates primarily to the individual human being in such a way that the soul of the nation stimulates the sentient soul and works through the sentient soul. In the case of the French nation, the soul of the nation works through the intellectual or mind soul. In the British nation, the folk soul works through the consciousness soul. In the Russian nation, the folk soul hovers over the soul forces, leaving the soul forces in a kind of [anarchic] state. The German folk soul directly stimulates the I. It does not express itself in a particular part of the soul, but by taking hold of the whole soul; hence its rejuvenating power. Hence the possibility for the German, when seized by the power of his folk soul. [At a certain time, it lovingly seized what was offered in Italy, France, and England, but always rejuvenated it, elevating it within itself to an independent existence.] How lovingly did the German spirit of his time take hold of what was offered to humanity by Eckhart and Tauler! But how did it rejuvenate it by stimulating the whole self through the whole spectrum! How did it raise it to the most independent, personal and inward existence! How was he, with his ever-rejuvenating power of the I-seizing folk soul, how was the German in the present able to present that which encompasses the whole human being as the highest representative of humanity. No other nation could have produced a work of literature like Faust, because no other nation is so deeply moved in its immediate self by the national soul, through all the elements of the soul's spectrum. But that is also why this German essence is so little understood and so misunderstood in all directions.

If we look to the West, we see how everything that arises most deeply from the German soul, what is present there in a completely undogmatic way, always stimulating striving, is expressed in a crude way through language; how it is often not understood and is either rejected emotionally or critically. One is tempted to say: the best that the Central European folk soul instills in the people of Central Europe is “understood” in the West, even when it is tried to be understood, in such a way that precisely the immediate invigoration is lost. And this extends even to the contemplation of the figures.

We can learn a lot about the peculiarities of European cultures by considering how much is understood in the West when it is understood through the Western European strength of the national soul. Herman Grimm, the art historian, once said quite rightly [about a book about Goethe by the Englishman Lewes]: “A certain Mr. Lewes in England has written a book about a person who was born in August 1749 in Frankfurt, who died in March 1832 in Weimar, to whom Mr. Lewes attributes [“The Sorrows of Young Werther”, “Clavigo” and so on], such fates, which we know Goethe experienced. To whom he also attributes the writing of Goethe's works. But everything he describes about this man is only coincidentally connected to the man who was born in 1749 and died in 1832. For that which connects Goethe's work with the life of the Central European folk soul has not been transferred, not even in the slightest, into the book that Mr. Lewes has written about a certain Goethe, who is not, however, the creator of Faust for the Central European in reality. One can grasp the external, the coarse, that through which the other appears. But that which lives in the folk soul, animating the individual soul, is lost, one does not see it. This is perhaps a little too radically expressed in Herman Grimm. But it shows what it is about.

And so we must also find that in the way German essence is understood by French essence, there is something that proves to us that the French soul of the people is such that it enters into the soul of the mind, determining the mind's soul, directly tyrannizing the soul of the mind, so that the soul of the people thinks in the individual and radiates through the impulses of the will of the individual. While the German folk soul becomes the confidante of the individual human being.

And if we now look over to the East, to the Russian people. In Russia, much attention has been paid to Kant, to Hegel, Belinsky. But all this shows a very particular peculiarity: the thoughts of Central Europe become strangely ghostly in the East. They are felt and experienced not in the soul-elevating sensation, but like thought ghosts, conceptual ghosts; like what lives in the secular of the national groupings that lives above the individuals.

In saying this, I am expressing something that is just as much a part of the strict body of knowledge as the physical, chemical and biological truths are. Even though it is more difficult to talk about these things because people are indifferent to physical, chemical and biological truths, whereas the truths presented here are related to the fate and nature of man. But we live in a time in which the human soul must rise above that which impairs the human [...] and we live in a time in which such things must be spoken, in which we must gain understanding for the impulses that are going through the world and that have brought about what is now there.

It is rightly said that the two Central European peoples have been surrounded and enclosed in the last decades, as if with iron clamps, the Central European states. But for the spiritual researcher, this encirclement begins much earlier. And the outer, one might say materialistic encirclement, which had its main organizer in Edward VII, this materialistic encirclement is the last [representative] of an ancient encirclement that began in the year 860 of our era. These connections must be borne in mind. In 860, on the one hand, the Normans were standing outside Paris and, on the other hand, the Varangians came down [outside Novgorod and Kiev] and threatened Constantinople, and then, when they pushed into the Slavic area across Russia to Kiev, to Constantinople, on the other hand, parts of the Normans pushed in [into the Romance element], and we have a coiled snake in Central Europe. Those who remained Central Europeans were to be surrounded and encircled. And in the West, we have the nations pushing in and becoming permeated by a folk soul, pushing into the Romance element, which then, from south to northwest, becomes the substance of the folk soul's nature, so that thinking becomes dogmatic, so that on this side everything must be taken dogmatically, so that we see how what is directly human, what arises from the intimate contact of the human soul with the folk soul, is taken dogmatically in the West by the intellect soul, which is permeated by the traditional Romanism. [Thus Central Europe is isolated. This must be taken dogmatically. If the world is not taken in this way, the folk soul, which is permeated with the old Romanism, will not be individualized.]

On the other hand, in the East we see how a folk soul comes into being when the Varangians, who are related to the Normans, merge with the Slavs, are permeated by the Slavs, and are permeated racially by the Byzantines in religious terms. And we see that what arises there remains at the level of the racial personality, as something aloof and unapproachable, which never comes down. Thus in the East one is dealing with that which directly asserts the racial element. Towards the West, with that which is an ancient and renewed feeling, which dogmatizes the individual. They see that one can only understand what human souls produce by doing so.

In the center we see that which is encircled and enclosed from all sides, which always wants to bring forth something new and wants to offer on the altar of human development that which can arise from the intimate connections of the individual souls with the folk soul.

Thus we experience the remarkable phenomenon that to this day, even in our most painful days, what emerges in Central Europe is observed by the West, but in observing it, it must necessarily be misunderstood because it is measured not by human experience but by one's own dogma; by what the soul of the people tyrannically commands from the soul of reason. We are experiencing some very characteristic phenomena in this regard. On the surface, people want to acknowledge that the Germans have achieved a great deal, that they have attained a high level of culture in thought, in philosophy, in poetry, and in other branches of art; but then, when a man has sipped a little and even translates it quite ingeniously into the realm of Western popular culture, as Henri Bergson did, when a man surveys something ingeniously, it is still German conceived in the French manner, German translated into the way of the West. And now he feels compelled – we had to read this around Christmas, how he spoke in the so-called [Academy of Moral and Political Sciences], we had to read it, how he tries to characterize the German character. And this German essence appears to him as if it only wanted to be embodied in cannons and rifles, in what the silly chatter calls “German militarism”; that militarism to which Germany has been forced, not by itself, but by those who surrounded it. One would like to ask such a man what he actually expected Germany to put up against its enemies other than rifles and cannons. Did he perhaps imagine that Novalis or Schiller or Goethe would be recited to the armies of Germany?

The question is: What does the Central European have to defend? What he has to defend can be seen from a consideration of what the German national soul is to the individual German. But such considerations will only become important when they can take hold of and find an echo in the reasonable people of the world within a somewhat broader horizon. Today logic is not exactly what is being whispered throughout the world. We have even had to hear that when there was a manifestation from the German side, the response from the left and right in Europe was: We did not want this war. They did not want it. Yes, from a logical point of view; that is quite correct, from a logical point of view. You can believe it. It is just as right as when a number of people surround the house of another person. He sees that he is locked in his house. He goes out and beats those who surround him. And then they say: We did not want the beating. The logic is exactly the same in both cases. Logic does not whisper today through what is called the “intercourse of nations”, especially through the newspapers. It can be seen everywhere through facts: what the German national soul says to the individual German can be grasped in the West, it can be heard, but it cannot be effective for the reasons just given.

We are experiencing strange phenomena. This power of the German national soul - in enlightened minds, in minds that want to deal with it, something of it has come to light after all. It is not exactly pleasant to speak characteristically about the Central European people in the midst of them. And so I will choose a different approach. I would like to raise the question: Has this German character really always been misunderstood, as it is now, even outside the German-speaking areas? There is a man who certainly belongs to the most important minds of the nineteenth century. And I would like to read to you a passage from a book about Goethe, who appears to him as the representative of the German character, [Emerson]. He says, a man who lives far away from Central Europe, he says about Goethe:

One [quality] in particular, which Goethe shares with his entire nation, makes him stand out in the eyes of both the French and English public.

- [A trait] is mentioned that Goethe shares with his entire nation:

that everything in his work is based solely on inner truth. In England and America, people respect talent, but they are satisfied only when it works for or against a party in line with its convictions. In France, one is delighted to see brilliant ideas, wherever they may lead. In all these countries, however, talented men write within the limits of their gifts. If what they write stimulates the discerning reader and contains nothing that offends against good manners, it is considered sufficient. So many columns, so many pleasantly and usefully spent hours. The German mind has neither the French vivacity nor the Englishman's understanding, honed to practicality, nor, finally, the American adventurousness, but what it does have is a certain probity that never stops at the outward appearance of things, but always comes back to the main question: “Where is this going?” The German public demands of a writer that he stand above things and simply express himself about them. There is intellectual activity, so what is it expressing? What are people's opinions? Where do they come from? Where do they get all these ideas?

The English [...] only see the individual, they do not know how to grasp humanity as a whole according to higher laws.

The Germans think for Europe.

The English do not appreciate the depth of the German genius.

[We see that the rejuvenating effect of the German national soul has not always been recognized.

For this reason, the terms of distinction used in higher conversation are all of German origin. While the English and French, who are mentioned with distinction because of their acumen and erudition, view their studies and their point of view with a certain superficiality and their personal character is not too deeply connected with what they have taken up and with the way they express themselves, is not too deeply connected, Goethe, the head and content of the German nation, not because he has talent, but the truth concentrates its rays in his soul and shines out from it. He is wise in the highest degree, even though his wisdom may often be obscured by his talent. However excellent what he says may be, he has something else in mind that is even better. [...] He has that awe-inspiring independence that springs from contact with the truth.

Thus, one felt what the German could achieve in contact with the truth, that is, in contact with his national soul, where one wanted to feel it.

Now one could say: That was a long time ago. And it has been said. The Germans have changed since then. Instead of poetry, they have made cannons. Now, so that this too can be countered, the saying of another man should be mentioned here, who in his way must have touched - we will soon see why - to the west that which is the German national character.

The source of the stream of

— Germany's —

spiritual and political life lies in the Reformation. But at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, a current unique in world history began to flow in a way that has been as continuous as it has been characteristic since that time. Since the days of ancient Greece, the world has not seen such a spectacle of the closest fusion of the life of the statesman with that of the thinker. The spirit of Germany today is to a large extent practical and material.

And elsewhere the same man says:

Only the influence of true knowledge can dispel the clouds of suspicion and free us from the need to prepare for attacks that no one really has in mind.

Who said that? Well, Lord Haldane said it. You may remember how he said some other things a few months ago! Not so long ago, just a few months before this war broke out, a lecture was given in Manchester by a few Englishmen who were supposed to educate English journalists about the German character. From the newspapers that are now appearing, one can see what fruit this has borne, what use it has been. But we will soon see what was said in Manchester, in England, about the German character.

Woods

- the Englishman –

essay was the forerunner of the even more epoch-making Homeric research of Wolf; and the Greek ideals of art and life became for Goethe and Schiller at Weimar, as in the case of Herder, the ideals of [primeval] song, the instruments on which the German spirit played itself up to a music that was new and yet at the same time, in the deepest sense, its own.

Now come some remarkable words:

The highly favored elite among Descartes' and Newton's countrymen knew the spirit of science unquestioningly; but the passionate urge for knowledge was taught to modern Europe, if at all, mainly by thousands of German researchers.

Spoken in Manchester to enlighten English journalists; that's why they are so enlightened now!

Imagination, feeling, will asserted their right to be heard beside or above reason, and under their transforming pressure the universe became deeper, wider, and more wonderful. The irrational was recognized as a source of illumination; wisdom was sought from the child and the flower; science, philosophy, and poetry drew near each other. In England, this revival of the imagination gave birth to noble poetry, but left science and philosophy almost untouched. One of the keys to understanding the period is the fact that, while in England and France the poetic, philosophical, and scientific movements flowed mostly in separate channels, in Germany they touched or merged completely. Wordsworth sang and Bentham calculated; but Hegel caught the genius of poetry in the net of his logic; and the thought that discovers and explains, and the imagination that creates, worked together in fruitful harmony in the genius of Goethe.

In Faust, at the end of his eventful life, we see a portrayal of present-day Germany, the Germany of restless, bold will and action, and we can understand all the better why the [great] citizen of the world, in whose eyes state and nationality were subordinate and sometimes harmful ideals, nevertheless claims his unassailable place as the highest poet of the German Empire alongside Bismarck, his creator.

And now a very curious thing. The following was also said in the same lecture cycle in Manchester shortly before the outbreak of the war:

On the whole, there is no question that the establishment of the German Reich has contributed to world peace. This explanation will seem strange to those who know nothing but the events of the present and for whom history is nothing more than an ever-changing, dazzling cinematograph. But history should be something more. It is for history to shed light on the tangled web of the present, and in that higher light, things that seem hurtful will take on a natural appearance. For when we look to the past, we find that our ancestors looked at France with far greater fear than the wildest rabble-rousers today fear Germany. And the fear of our ancestors had good reason.

So says an Englishman!

To sum up, it can be shown that the founding of the German Empire was an asset for Europe, and therefore also for Great Britain. Because the events of the years 1866-1871 once and for all put an end to the possibility of waging predatory wars against the previously unprotected center of Europe, and thus removed a temptation to war

- in this he was, however, mistaken -

which in earlier centuries had so often lured France onto the wrong track;

- that has been said, not in Berlin and not in Hanover, but in Manchester. -

they put the German people in a position to develop their previously stunted political abilities, and they helped to build a new European system on a secure foundation that preserved peace for forty years. This blessing resulted from the fact that German unity achieved in one fell swoop what Great Britain, despite all its expenditure of blood and money, had never been able to achieve, namely to secure the balance of power in such a decisive way that a major war became the most dangerous of all ventures.

This was said in Manchester, a year before the war. The matter speaks for itself, we hardly need to add anything.

We see, then, that people have sometimes known what the Central European nation has to contribute to the overall culture of humanity. Yes, sometimes they have even known it quite thoroughly. Here is another example of how thoroughly they have known it. There was a certain man, also over there in the West, who was closer to us than the others we have just spoken of; a certain man whom the world calls a mystic. The man has undoubtedly written very brilliant works. Once he expressed himself about where the deepest thoughts of his soul came from, and he cited three world-historical phenomena. The third is the German poet Novalis. When we hear his poetry, we have the immediate feeling that the rejuvenating power of the folk soul speaks intimately to his soul, so that it can express what the folk soul is telling him. Now, what does this man feel about Novalis? He says:

What people describe on earth, what poets say, a Sophocles, a Shakespeare, what these Desdemona, Ophelia, what Hamlet and so on experience, it all happens between people. But if a spirit from a different plane were to descend to earth, could this spirit of a different plane find something on earth that also interests him, the spirit who is not of the earth?

And the man now finds that what the German poet Novalis expressed could also interest a spirit who descends from another plane as a genius. He finds that Novalis touched on secrets of the human soul, which the soul must often keep silent about, because it can only find the right words in the solemn moments of life to express these secrets, these supersensible secrets of life. So says the man. And we want to write these words very deeply into our souls, for they are beautiful, these words that he says in reference to his experience of Novalis. He says:

On these heights alone are memories that the soul can form, and images that resemble it and are as compelling as itself. There, humanity ruled for a moment, and these dimly lit peaks are perhaps the only lights that announce the spiritual realm to the earth.

- and of those lights, says the man, Novalis has lit many. And he continues –

but in their works, the aforementioned people

- including Novalis -

left the little village of passions and said things that are also of value to those who are not of the earthly community.

Thus one speaks of one of the most German of Germans, Novalis. A man speaks thus, and we could assume that this man, who obviously loves the spiritual, would instruct all those who now speak of the German “barbarians” with the words: For these words, which I have now read, are also from the man of whom I will read something else:

In truth, it is difficult to question one's soul and to hear its weak, childlike voice amidst the useless cries that surround it.

Yes, it can be said that in the midst of the useless shouting that is now speaking of Germany's “barbarism,” such words as those of the man can hardly be heard. But who said all this? Maurice Maeterlinck. Well, you know how Maeterlinck himself has gone among the useless shouters in recent months. We don't need to add anything to that either.

But then, when we hear such voices, we say to ourselves: They are proof that what wells up from the German national soul into the individual German souls is already penetrating across the borders, but it cannot come into effect. And it cannot come into effect properly even where it seems ghostly. I have shown that it has a ghostly effect in the East. Yes, if one asks: What is it that people feel from this participation of the German national soul in German culture, even those who speak of Western European culture in the East? One can often hear something like the words I would like to read to you now. When Herman Grimm speaks of the alleged Goethe of Mr. Lewes in the way I have mentioned, we notice a coarsening in this Mr. Lewes; but how what one wants to absorb but cannot absorb becomes ghostly towards the East is shown to us by words that Mereschkowski spoke about Goethe. He says:

When Goethe speaks of the French Revolution, he suddenly bends to the earth, as a giant might be crushed and shriveled into a dwarf by an evil spell; from a Hellenic demigod he becomes a German burgher and – if the shadow of the Olympian will have mercy on me – a German philistine, a “Herr von Goethe”, a privy councillor of the Duke of Weimar and a decent son of the decent Frankfurt shopkeeper.

Thus Mereschkowski speaks of the poet of Faust. Nor should one be deceived by the words which Mereschkowski says about Goethe in the final sentence of his essay. If one reads the foregoing, which is inspired throughout by the same spirit, one sees that Mereschkowski cannot rise up to Goethe, that he sees him only as a ghost. And much of this kind could be cited. But of course, when one of the leading spirits of the East, about Chekhov, Mereschkowski himself has to say:

No era, no people, as if in the midst of eternity there were only the end of the nineteenth century and in the world only Russia. Infinitely sharp-eyed and bright-eared [for] everything Russian and contemporary, he is almost blind and deaf to the foreign and the past. He saw Russia more clearly than anyone else, but overlooked Europe, overlooked the world.

One can find it understandable, must find it understandable, that Central Europe is currently only a specter for the East, which is transferred up into the national soul hovering over the individual. There is not enough time to prove this in detail, but it could be proven. On the other hand, it can truly be said that what can be called “the rejuvenating power of the German national soul” not only gives us insight into the nature of the German national soul in the past, but also gives us strength, faith and hope for the German national soul in the future.

Indeed, the German knows how to take Goethe somewhat differently than the others. And for this I may cite a saying that Herman Grimm in turn has done about Goethe. This saying has been done in lectures on Goethe, in lectures that speak differently than the one whom Herman Grimm himself has dismissed in the manner indicated, Lewes. Herman Grimm perceives Goethe as a confidant of the German people themselves; but also as an impulse, as a force that works and will continue to work within German culture, just as cosmic changes in the earth must work in relation to physical conditions. Herman Grimm says of Goethe:

Goethe has worked in the spiritual life of Germany as a powerful natural phenomenon would have worked in the physical. Our coal deposits tell of times of tropical warmth when palm trees grew in our country. Our opening caves tell of ice ages when reindeer were native to our country. Over vast periods of time, dramatic upheavals took place on German soil, which in its present state gives such an appearance of eternal immutability. The comparison can be drawn that Goethe's influence on the intellectual atmosphere of Germany was roughly equivalent to a telluric event, which increased our climatic warmth by so many degrees on average. If something like that happened, a different vegetation, a different operation of agriculture and with it a new basis for our entire existence would occur.

This is how Herman Grimm feels Goethe within German intellectual life. Gradually, a different intellectual vegetation, a different intellectual climate, will occur through Goethe, says Herman Grimm.

This same Herman Grimm, in a manner that brought out the whole character of the German spirit, spoke of how the German folk soul has worked in German culture to arrive at views that seek the universal in the particular national spirit. Thus Herman Grimm demonstrated the rejuvenating powers of the German national soul by showing how he himself was attuned to the course of the world spirit at the end of the nineteenth century. For in 1895 the beautiful words were spoken that express the mood of a German who knew himself to be one with the living and breathing German national soul. Herman Grimm said:

The solidarity of the moral convictions of all people today is the church that unites us all. We are seeking more passionately than ever for a visible expression of this community. All truly serious endeavors of the masses have only this one goal. The separation of nations no longer exists here. We feel that no national difference can be maintained in the face of the ethical worldview.

Herman Grimm continues:

We would all sacrifice ourselves for our fatherland,

he says, and then the significant words follow:

But to long for or to hasten the moment when this could happen through war, we are far removed. The assurance that peace is our most sacred desire is not a lie. “Peace on earth and goodwill to men” permeates us.

But the fact that Herman Grimm saw through his time, that he was not a dreamer, that he was able to grasp reality under the guidance of the German soul, is attested by what he now says:

As a totality, men acknowledge themselves as subject to an invisible court enthroned as it were in the clouds, before which they consider it a misfortune not to be allowed to exist, and to whose judicial procedure they seek to adapt their internal dissensions. With anxious eagerness they seek their right here. How the French of today are at pains to present the war against Germany that they are planning as a moral imperative, demanding that other nations, and even the Germans themselves, recognize it.

You see, in 1895 Herman Grimm had a clear view of how things stand. Those who are accustomed to seeing things this way do not let themselves be called out: Who wanted the war!

Among the hundreds and hundreds of testimonies I could present, here is one more. A person who is not particularly fond of Germanic nature writes the following words:

As far as I am concerned, I am in no doubt for a moment that a conflict between the Germanic and Slavic world is imminent, that it will be ignited either by the Orient, especially Turkey, or by the nationality dispute in Austria, perhaps by both, and that Russia will take the lead in it on one side. This power is already preparing for the eventuality; the Russian national press is spewing fire and brimstone against Germany. [...] The German press is already sounding its warning cries. Since the Crimean War, a long time has passed and, it seems, it is now considered appropriate in St. Petersburg to take up the Oriental question again.

Yes, my dear attendees, these words were not spoken just a few months before the war. They were written in 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War. Even those who saw things clearly never realized that the nations pushed into the middle of Europe would be locked up like in a fortress by those who misunderstood and do not understand them on all sides.

It is curious when, in the face of such words, one tries to express the opinion that the Germans wanted this war. I would like to use the few moments remaining to me for this lecture to present something about this “the Germans wanted this war” that may speak volumes to anyone who wants to see clearly.

Let us assume that someone had observed what was going on in the weeks before the outbreak of war - in the spring of 1914, when the press was perhorresziert the political horizon - and he wanted to express that; what would he have had to say in 1914, after the events that took place? He would have had to say something like the following:

[One could see how a press campaign was gradually beginning in St. Petersburg, how strong pressure was being exerted on Austria that, if accepted, would have resulted in Austria and Germany becoming dependent on Russia. And yet one could not have contradicted the Russian friends when they said that there was no reason for a war between Russia and Germany.

Not true, in 1914, in July, it could have been expressed quite well, and it could have been applied to the immediate events of the present. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I have not read you anything that was said in July 1914, but, with some modification, the words that [Bismarck spoke on February 6, 1888 in the Reichstag] to justify the military bill. And now I read his own words, so you can see that I have not only the words, but only the time somewhat rectihziert:

[...] how a kind of press campaign gradually began in St. Petersburg, [through which German politics was attacked], I personally was suspected in my intentions. These attacks increased during the following year until 1879 to strong demands for pressure that we should exert on Austria in matters where we could not readily attack Austrian law. I could not lend my hand to this, because if we estranged ourselves from Austria, then we would necessarily become dependent on Russia if we did not want to be completely isolated in Europe. Would such a dependency have been tolerable? I had believed earlier that it could be, telling myself: We have no conflicting interests; there is no reason why Russia should ever break off friendship with us. At least I had not directly contradicted my Russian colleagues who explained such things to me. The incident at the Congress disappointed me, and showed me that even the complete subordination of our politics (for a certain time) to the Russian politics would not protect us from coming into conflict with Russia against our will and against our aspirations.

However, if things are as they have been presented, if the national soul in the West and in the East must behave in relation to what the strength of the German national soul is, then it will be a mistake to believe that this war was wanted by Central Europe in 1914. For it has been clear for decades how everything has been done to bring about the current events.

Not only the subtle Herman Grimm spoke of the will for peace in Central Europe. It may also be recalled that not only where, like Herman Grimm, as a man ethically on the heights of his time, was in touch with the German national soul, but also where one was politically inspired by the German national soul, one spoke in a similar way.

In 1888, in Berlin, again Bismarck spoke in such a way that no desire for war was expressed. Bismarck said:

With the powerful machine that we are training the German army to be, one does not attack. If I were to stand before you today and tell you - if the circumstances were different from what I am convinced they are: We are seriously threatened by France and Russia; it is foreseeable that we will be attacked; I believe it as a diplomat after military intelligence about this, it is more useful for us to use the advance of the attack as a defense that we are now about to launch; it is more advantageous for us to wage a war of aggression, and so I ask the Reichstag for a loan of one billion or half a billion to wage war against our two neighbors today. Yes, gentlemen, I don't know if you would have the confidence in me to grant it. I hope not!

One day, my dear audience, we will come to feel, not only from reason but also from our instincts, something of the real causes of this war and the driving forces that led to it. One will sense something of the will that concentrated against Central Europe in order to stop the eternally rejuvenating German national soul in its element.

The images that can be gained by surveying the workings and weavings of European national souls in recent decades show how the storm is looming. Can we not say the following: If one wanted to delve into the goings-on and workings of the German national soul as they were in the times before this war broke out, could one not come to the following thoughts? Allow me to read this to you as well. You will see in a moment that I also have a certain idea:

German literature, German religion, German philosophy are books with seven seals for us. What we do know is how many dreadnoughts Germany has and how much its trade has increased. What is really important is not the dreadnought, but the brain of its builder, the courage and talent of its commander. What is really important is not the increase in sales, but the human qualities that prompted it. [...]

Forty years ago, Germany was fighting for its existence, and it is still fighting for it today. It is completely wrong to believe that Germany is already at its peak. It is fighting a quiet but determined fight against powerful rivals whose power and experience was gained generations ago. [...]

Across every border and across the water sit the adversaries, commercial and political, waiting anxiously for the moment when Germany slackens just a little, to pounce and overwhelm, and Germany knows it.

[This is how Mrs. Wylie wrote in her book “Eight Years in Germany,” which was published about two years before the war. It is quite good when such people try to delve into the German national soul.

So, these are the things that are awakened as an echo when one tries to understand what the German seeks in intimate dialogue with his national soul. And what was it that the German always tried to find in his dialogue with his national soul? It was always that which should enable the individual human being, the individual human soul, the individual human spirit to find its way to the spiritual heights of the world, where all things have their source and origin, where the eternal part of the human soul itself also has its source and origin.

Spiritual science, precisely because of its sources, must believe in the rejuvenating powers of the German national soul; believe because it is aware that in the course of world history this German national soul has always ascended to spiritual heights , descended to the human selves in order to convey to them the truth of their eternity. Spiritual science has its roots and its source in German idealism, and we can prove that spiritual science is closely related to this German idealism.

What does spiritual science say, not in the abstract but in concrete terms, about the future of the human soul? That in this body lives an immortal self that goes through births and deaths again and again; that when spiritual initiation is attained, when spiritual knowledge and spiritual reality are attained through research, the soul is grasped outside of the body; that it looks back at this body as if at an external object, so pre-sensing that which the human soul experiences when it has passed through the gate of death. Spiritual science does not speak in general terms that the human soul is eternal, but in such a way that it clearly points to what, after death, looks back on what lived in the body. Spiritual science describes this very specifically. And only today can it do so.

And true spiritual science, as we in Central Europe consider it to be, is aware that it owes the powers of research only to the connection of the German national soul with the German philosophers. If someone who professes spiritual science today wants to use a comparison in the truest sense of the word for something that has passed and must find its future, if someone who is a true believer in spiritual science wanted to say: I think something completely new must be introduced into humanity, something that is still met with many prejudices today; but to me, these prejudices seem like what the soul of the corpse feels when it looks back at the corpse after death.

One might think that only a spiritual researcher could make such a comparison, because only recently has spiritual research been able to confirm that the soul really does this after going through death. I will present such a comparison to you:

Time appears to me like a shadow that stands over its dead, from which an army of diseases has just driven it out, and laments and cannot tear its gaze away from the formerly so beloved shell and desperately tries all means to get back into the dwelling of the plague. The invigorating breezes of the other world, into which the departed spirit has entered, have already taken her up and surround her with a warm breath of love; the secret voices of the sisters already greet her and welcome her; she is already stirring and expanding within herself in all directions, to develop the more glorious form into which it is to grow; but it has as yet no feeling for these breezes or hearing for these voices, or, if it had, it is absorbed in pain over its loss, with which it believes itself to have been lost at the same time.

Today, one really believes that only a spiritual researcher could speak in this way. It is Fichte who spoke in this way in his “Speeches to the German Nation”; addressing the corpse as he would a corpse in what he wants to replace the old German education with a new education.

Thus, whatever can be desired today is rooted in the germs that German idealism sought from the union with the German national soul, from these rejuvenating powers of the German national soul.

And if we want to have confidence that spiritual science can really unfold as a new fruit on the tree of German development, we need only look at what can be seen as the true essence of the German national soul, as the rejuvenating power of the German national soul. The true essence of the German national soul is precisely this ever-rejuvenating power.

And when we look at the fateful events of today, we feel them like a twilight. But we look into the future and want to understand that a horizon warmed and illuminated by the sun must arise from this twilight; that the German national soul will have the strength to rejuvenate German character and German striving. And whatever is undertaken against this German essence, against this German striving, will not be able to rob it of its breath of life, because that which is present as the highest life in the German essence is the ever-rejuvenating powers of the German national soul. If it has produced so many rungs in German culture, it must also produce new fruits. That is our hope, and that is not something vague, that is something well-founded! We look hopefully towards the horizon, which will show us precisely one of the fruits of German development: a spiritual-scientific worldview that will flow through all hearts and souls and will connect spirit and body. When people see the spiritual as a reality, when they know how the spiritual passes through the gate of death, when they look at the spiritual as science today looks at the external physical forces, when they know that nothing is lost, then they will know that the countless spiritual parts that now pass through the gate of death from young bodies cannot be lost. They, these soul-like human faculties, which could have continued to serve the body for decades to come, will not only be felt in the abstract sense as something eternal in the future, as was possible according to ancient knowledge, but they will be felt as something that lives on, that those who have followed the duties of the time through the gate of death or suffering have incorporated into the spiritual stream of existence.

And they will feel a concrete connection when times of peace come again out of this twilight of war. Those who have borne the best fruits of the German character will feel a special connection with all those who have gone through the gates of death.

So it can be said, summarizing what I have tried to express before you today: Yes, this German spirit has not yet fully accomplished what its mission in the world was. It is connected with the rejuvenating power of the German national soul. And if you look at the true nature of the German national soul, then you know: the driving forces are there, the invisible forces of German life are unchanged among us. And to all those who today speak of Germany's weakness or of a weakening or destruction of the German character, to them the one who objectively recognizes what the rejuvenating power of the German national soul whispers to individual Germans, to them he calls out into the world the meaning that he perceives from the work of the German national soul:

The German spirit has not completed

what it is to accomplish in the course of the world.

It lives in the future, hopeful,

It hopes for future deeds full of life;

In the depths of his being, he feels a mighty

secret that is still to take effect as it matures.

How can a mind, uncomprehending,

Wish for its end to come:

As long as life reveals itself to him,

Which holds him in the roots of creation?

From shorthand report unrevised by the lecturer. English translation first printed by Rudolf Steiner Publishing Company, 1941. Second printing Steiner Book Centre, 1986.

The original German text of this lecture can he found in the collected edition of Rudolf Steiner's works under the title: “Der Kreislauf des Menschen innerhalb des Sinnes—, Seelen—und Geisteswelt”, No. 68 in the Bibliographical Survey, 1961. This English edition is presented by permission of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, Switzerland.

It cannot he doubted that the influence of the Bible on Western Culture has been greater than that of any other document. It may truly be said that as a result of the influence of the Bible, the human soul has for thousands of years maintained a hold on the most inward being of man,—a hold which has extended to the life of feeling and also to the life of will. The influence in these two spheres of man's being has been stronger than in his thinking and conceptional life, although it may be said that all spiritual life, be it in the region of religion or of exact science, bears traces of the influence of the Bible. And it is evident to those who look more deeply into things, that the very arguments of men who to-day feel bound to attack the Bible—taking up in some cases the radical standpoint of downright denial—themselves show traces of its influence. There has never been any general recognition, and to-day there is practically none, of the extent of the influence of this document; but it exists nevertheless in actual fact to those who have an unbiased outlook. The attitude adopted towards the Bible by modern thought, feeling and perception, has for some time past changed very considerably from what it used formerly to be. The value of the Bible, the attitude adopted towards it by men who to-day take it seriously has altered essentially in the course of the 19th Century. We must not of course undervalue in any sense the standpoint of many modern thinking men who feel themselves bound to take a firm stand on the ground of Science. There are others who hold fast to the Bible, who derive all their deepest convictions from this most significant record, and who prefer to pay no attention when the value of the Bible is under discussion. The attitude of such people is: ‘Others may think as they like; we find in the teachings of the Bible all that our souls need and we are quite satisfied.’ Such a point of view, however justifiable it may be in individual cases, is, in a certain sense entirely egoistical and by no means without danger for spiritual evolution.

That which in a given epoch has become an universal blessing to men—or, let us say, an universal belief and conviction, has always originated with the few; and it may well be that an ever increasing stream of conviction may flow out to become universal in no very distant future from the few who to-day feel themselves compelled to attack the Bible because of their desire to build up their world-conception conformably with their Science. For this reason to ignore such spiritual and mental currents and to refuse to listen because one is oneself satisfied is not without an element of danger. Anyone who really takes the evolution of mankind seriously ought rather to regard it as a duty to take notice of the objections brought by sincere seekers for Truth, and to see what relation these objections have to the Bible.

I have said that the attitude adopted by men, and especially by leaders of intellectual and spiritual life has changed. To-day we shall do no more than point to this change. Were we to look back into the past we should find civilisations where men, especially when they stood at the summit of their spiritual life, doubted not at all that the very highest wisdom flowed from the Bible; and that those with whom it originated were not just average men who were responsible for human errors in it, but were under lofty inspiration and infused it with wisdom. This was a feeling of reverent recognition among those who stood on the heights of spiritual life. In modern times this has changed.

In the 18th Century there was a French investigator who came to the conclusion that certain contradictions exist in the Old Testament. He noticed that the two Creation stories at the very beginning of the Bible contradict one another, that one story describes the work of the six or seven days including the creation of man, and that then there is a further account with a different beginning, which ascribes quite a different origin to man. This investigator was specially disconcerted by the fact that at the beginning of the Bible two names of the God-head occur, the name of the ‘Elohim’ in the narrative of the six days' creation, and then later the name of Jehova. There is an echo of this in the German Bible. In the German Bible the name of the God-head is translated ‘Lord,’ ‘God,’ and then Jehova is translated by ‘God the Lord’ or in some such way; at all events the difference is apparent. Upon noticing this the investigator suspected that something had given rise to the untenable statement that the Bible was written by a single individual, whether Moses or someone else, and that different accounts must have been welded together. And after much deliberation he came to the conclusion that all the existing accounts corresponding to the different traditions were simply welded together; one account being amalgamated with another and all the contradictions allowed to stand.

After, and as a result of this, there appeared the kind of investigation which might well be called a mutilation of the Bible. To-day there are Bibles in which the various points of detail are traced back to different traditions. In the so-called Rainbow Bible it is stated for instance, how some portion or other that has come to be inserted into the collective statement has its origin in quite a different legendary tradition—hence it is said that the Bible must have been welded together from shreds of tradition. It became more and more general for investigators to proceed along this line in regard to the Old Testament, and then the same thing happened in the case of the New Testament. How could the fact be hidden that when the four Gospels are submitted to literal comparison they do not agree with each other? It is easy to discover contradictions in the Matthew, Luke and John Gospels. And so the investigators said: How can the single Evangelists have written their respective Gospels under lofty inspiration, when the accounts do not agree? The Gospel of St. John—that most profound writing of Christendom—was divested of all worth as an historical document in the minds of some investigators of the 19th Century. Men came more and more to be convinced of the fact that it was nothing but a kind of hymn, written down by someone on the basis of his faith and not an historical tradition at all. They said that what he had written down could in no way lay claim to being a true description of what had actually taken place in Palestine at the beginning of our era. And so the New Testament was torn into shreds. The Old and New Testaments were treated just like any other historical document; it was said that bias and error had crept into them, and that before all things it was necessary to show by purely historical investigation, how the fragments had been gradually pieced together. This is the standpoint which more and more came to be adopted by historical, theological investigation.

On the other side let us turn to those who felt compelled to stand firmly on the ground of the facts of Natural Science,—who said, quite sincerely and honestly as a result of their knowledge: ‘What we are taught by Geology, Biology and the different branches of Natural Science, flatly contradicts what the Bible relates. The Bible story of the development of the earth and living beings through the six days of creation, is of the nature of a legend or a myth of primitive peoples, whereby they tried, in their childlike fashion to make the origin of the earth intelligible to themselves.’ And such men alienated themselves from the New Testament in the same degree as from the Old Testament. Men who feel compelled to hold fast to the facts of Natural Science will have nothing to do with all the wonderful acts performed by the Christ, with the way in which this unique Personality arises at the critical point of our history, and they radically oppose the very principle on which the Bible is based. Thus we see on the one hand the Bible torn to pieces by historical-theological investigation, and on the other hand put aside, discredited by scientific research.

That may serve briefly to characterise the outlook of to-day; but if nobody troubled about this, and simply persisted in the attitude: ‘I believe what is in the Bible’—that would be Egoism. Such men would only be thinking of themselves and it would not occur to them that future generations might hold as an universal conviction that which to-day is only the conviction of a few.

We may now ask: is there perhaps yet a further standpoint other than the two we have indicated? Indeed there is, and it is just this that we want to consider to-day. It is the standpoint of Spiritual Science, or Anthroposophy. We can in the first instance understand this best by means of comparison. The Anthroposophical standpoint with regard to the Bible offers to our modern age something similar to that which was accomplished three or four centuries ago by the mighty achievements of scientific research; Anthroposophy seeks to form a connecting link with what was achieved by such men as Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo.

To-day we build upon the foundations of what was achieved by such personalities as these. When we look back to the relation which in former days existed between men and nature, we find that in the old Schools or Academics, certain books carried just as much weight as the Bible does with many people to-day. Aristotle, the ancient Greek scholar, whose achievements were by no means confined to the sphere of Natural Science, was looked upon by the widest circles both in the early and later Middle Ages as a far-reaching Authority. Wherever men were taught about nature the books of Aristotle were taken as the basis. His writings were fundamental and authoritative not only in spheres where men pursued the study of Nature in a more limited, philosophical sense, but also in spheres of definitely scientific thought. It was not customary in those days to look out at Nature with one's own eyes, and it was not a question of instruments, apparatus and other things of that kind. In the time of Galileo a highly symptomatic incident occurred, and it has been handed down as a kind of anecdote. It was pointed out by a colleague to a man who was a convinced follower of Aristotle, that many of the master's utterances were not correct; for instance that the nerves proceeded from the heart, this being contrary to the real facts. A corpse was placed in front of the man and it was demonstrated to him that this utterance of Aristotle did not agree with the facts. He said: ‘Yes, when I look at that myself it seems a contradiction, but even if Nature does show it to me I still believe Aristotle.’ And there were many such men,—men who had more faith in the teachings and the authority of Aristotle than in their own eyes. To-day men's point of view about Nature and also about Aristotle has changed. In our time it would be considered ridiculous to derive from ancient books the knowledge of nature which men ought to possess. To-day the scientist confronts nature with his instruments and tries to explore her secrets in order that they may become a common good for all men. But circumstances were such that in the time of Galileo, those who were imbued with the teachings of Aristotle to the same degree as this above mentioned follower, did not understand the Greek Master in the very least, Aristotle meant something different, something very much more spiritual, than what we understand to-day by the nerves. And because of this we cannot do real justice to Aristotle—whose vision was in accordance with the age in which he lived—until we look into nature with free and impartial eyes.

That was the great change that took place three or four centuries ago—and we are experiencing such another now in reference to the Spiritual Science and those spiritual facts and processes which are the spiritual foundations of existence.

For centuries the Bible was taken by a very large number of men to be the only book able to give information about all that transcended the tangible, physical world. The Bible was the Authority so far as the spiritual world was concerned, just as Aristotle in the Middle Ages was the authority for the physical world.

How has it come about that to-day we are in a position to do greater justice to Aristotle? It is because we face the physical world from a position of greater independence. And what Anthroposophy has to give to man of modern times, is the possibility of acquiring direct cognition of the invisible world, just as centuries ago the new age began to acquire direct knowledge of the visible world. Spiritual Science states that it is possible for man to look into and perceive the spiritual world; that he need not be dependent upon tradition, but can see for himself. This is what true Spiritual Science has to achieve for modern humanity—it has to convince man that slumbering powers and faculties exist within him; that there are certain great moments in life when these spiritual faculties awaken just as when a blind man is operated upon and is able to see colour and light. To use Goethe's phrase: the spiritual ears and eyes awaken, and then the soul of man can perceive in its environment what is otherwise concealed. The awakening of the faculties slumbering in the soul is possible; it is possible for man to acquire an instrument whereby he call look into spiritual causes, just as with his physical instruments he looks into the physical world. We have all kinds of instruments for the perception of the physical world—and for perception of the spiritual world there is also an instrument—namely, man himself, transformed. From the standpoint of spiritual science the most important thing of all is that the word ‘Evolution’ should be taken in all seriousness,—‘Evolution,’ which is a kind of magic word on many lips. It is not difficult to-day to perceive how the imperfect continually develops and evolves, and this evolution is carefully followed up in external Natural Science. To this conception Anthroposophy would not set up the slightest opposition where it remains in the region of scientific facts. But Anthroposophy takes the word ‘Evolution’ in its full meaning,—and so seriously that it points to those faculties which lie in the soul of man by means of which he can become aware of the Spiritual world. Spiritual beings are the foundation and basis of the physical world, and man only needs organs to be able to perceive them. I must here again lay stress upon the fact that today only a few men are in a position to transform their souls in this way. It requires a highly developed soul whose spiritual eyes are open before investigation of the spiritual world can be undertaken and information as to the events and beings there obtained. But if facts about the higher worlds are made manifest, then all that is necessary for the understanding of what is told by the spiritual investigator is healthy discernment, free from all bias pertaining to the intellect or to human logic. There is no justification for criticising the use of spiritual investigation, because we cannot see for ourselves. How many men are able to form a clear conception of Ernst Haeckel's researches and follow them up? It is exactly the same in regard to research in the region of senselife, where what is illuminated by the understanding passes over into the consciousness, as it is in regard to what the spiritual investigator has to say about the information he has gained in the super-sensible world. That which is known as the super-sensible world through direct perception and human powers of cognition must pass over into the universal consciousness of mankind as a result of the Anthroposophical conception of the world.

On the one hand then, we have the ancient Bible bringing before us in its own way the secrets of the super-sensible worlds and their connection with the sensible worlds, and on the other we have, in Spiritual Science, the direct experiences of the investigator in regard to the super-sensible world. This is surely a point of view similar to that which one finds at the dawn of modern Natural Science.

The question now arises: ‘What has Spiritual Science to say that is able to help us to understand the biblical truths?’ We must here enter into details. We must above all point out that when as a result of the methods laid down by Spiritual Science, man awakens his soul faculties, he sees into the spiritual world and develops what in comparison to objective cognition is an Imaginative Knowledge. What is this Imaginative Knowledge? It has nothing in common with those vague fantasies readily associated with the word ‘Imagination’ nor has it anything whatever to do with somnambulism and things of that nature, but fundamental to it is a strict discipline by means of which a man has to awaken these faculties. Let us proceed from external knowledge in order to make more intelligible what is really meant by ‘Imaginative Knowledge.’ What is characteristic of external objective cognition? There is for example, the perception of a ‘table’; when the table is no longer before us there remains an idea, a concept of it, as a kind of echo. First there is the object, and then the image. Certain systems of philosophy affirm that everything is only image, conception. This is incorrect. Let us take, for example, the conception of red hot steel or iron. The conception will not burn, but when we are faced by the reality the experience is different. The characteristic of objective cognition is that first the object is there and then the image is formed within us. Exactly the opposite process must take place in a man who wishes to penetrate into the higher world. He must first be able to transform his conceptual world in such a way that the conception may precede the perception. This faculty is developed by Meditation and Concentration, that is to say by sinking the soul into the content of certain conceptions which do not correspond to any external reality. Just consider for a moment how much of what lives in the soul is dependent upon the fact of your having been born in a particular town on a particular day. Suppose that you had not been born on that day, and try to imagine what other experiences would then live within your soul, and stream through it from morning to evening. In other words, make it clear to yourself how much of the content of the soul is dependent on your environment, and then let all that has stimulated you from outside, pass away. Then try to think how much would still remain in the soul. All conceptions of the external world which flow into the soul must, day by day, be expelled from it and in their place there must live for a time the content of a conception that has not in any way been stimulated from without and that does not portray any external fact or event.

Spiritual Science—if our search is sincere—gives many such conceptions and I will mention one as an example. I want to show you how the soul may gradually be led up into the higher worlds through certain definite conceptions. Such conceptions may be considered to be like letters of the alphabet. But in Spiritual Science there are not only twenty-two to twenty-seven letters, but many hundreds, by means of which the soul learns to read in the spiritual world. Here is a simple example: suppose we take the well known Rose Cross and in its simplest form, the black cross adorned with seven red roses. Very definite effects are produced if for a quarter of an hour each day the soul gives itself wholly up to the conception of this Rose Cross, excluding everything that acts as an external stimulus. In order to be able to understand what comes to pass in the soul as a result of this, let us consider intellectually the meaning of the Rose Cross. This is not the most important element, but we shall do it to show that it is possible to explain the meaning. I shall give it in the form of an instruction given by teacher to pupil.

The teacher says to the pupil:—‘Look at the plant standing with its root in the ground and growing upwards to the blossom. Compare the greater perfection of man standing before you, organised as he is, with the lesser perfection of the plant. Man has self-consciousness, has within him what we call an Ego, an ‘ I ’. But because he has this higher principle within him he has had to accept in addition all that constitutes his lower nature, the passion of sense. The plant has no self-consciousness; it has no Ego, hence it is not yet burdened with desires, passions or instincts. Its green beauty is there, chaste and pure. Look at the circulation of the chlorophyl fluid in the plant and then in man at the pulsation of the blood. That which, in man constitutes his life of passions and instincts, comes to expression, in the plant, as the blossom. In exchange for this man has won his self-consciousness. Now consider not only present day man, but look in a spiritual sense at a man of the far distant future. He will develop, he will over come, cleanse and purify his desires and passions and will obtain a higher self-consciousness. Thus, spiritually, you can see a man who has once more attained to the purity of the plant-nature. But it is because he has reached a higher stage that his self-consciousness exists in this state of purity. His blood is as pure and chaste as the plant fluids. Take the red roses to be a prototype of what the blood will be at some future time, and in this way you have before you the prototype of higher man. In the Rose Cross you have a most beautiful paraphrase of Goethe's saying:—“The man who is without this dying and becoming is a sad stranger on this dark earth”! Dying and becoming,—what does this mean? It means that in man there exists the possibility of growing out of and beyond himself. That which dies and is overcome is represented by the black cross which is the expression of his desires of senses. The blossoms in their purity are symbolical of the blood. The red roses and the black cross together represent the inner call to grow beyond oneself.’

As I said, this intellectual explanation is not the most important element and it is only given in order that we may be able better to understand these things. In a Meditation of this kind the point is that we shall sink ourselves into the symbol, that it shall stand as a picture before us. And if it is said that a Rose Cross corresponds to nothing real, our answer must be that the whole significance lies not in the experience of something pertaining to the external world through the Rose Cross, but that the effect of this Rose Cross upon the soul and its slumbering faculties is very real. No image pertaining to the external world could have the same effect as this image in all its varied aspects and in its non-reality. If the soul allows this image to work upon it, it makes greater and greater progress, and is finally able to live in a world of conceptions that is at first really illusory; but when it has lived sufficiently long in this conceptual world with patience and energy, it has a significantly true experience. Spiritual realities, spiritual beings which otherwise are invisible emerge from the spiritual environment. And then the soul is able quite clearly to distinguish what is merely conception, illusion, from true and genuine reality.

Of course one must not be a visionary, for that is very dangerous; it is absolutely necessary to maintain reason and a sure foundation for one's experience. If a man dreams in a kind of phantasy, then it is not well with him, when the spiritual world breaks in upon his consciousness. But if he maintains a sense of absolute certainty in his perception of reality, then he knows how the spiritual events will be made manifest, and he ascends into the spiritual world.

You will perhaps have surmised from what I have said, that cognition of the spiritual world is quite different from that of the sense world. The spiritual world cannot be brought into the range of direct perception by means of conceptions having but one meaning, and anyone who thinks it possible to describe what he finds in the spiritual world in the same way as he would describe what he finds in the sense world—simply has no knowledge of the nature of the spiritual world. The spiritual world can only be represented in pictures, and in imagery, which must be regarded merely as such. When the spiritual investigator looks into the spiritual world he sees the spiritual causes behind the physical phenomena, and he sees not only what underlies the present but what underlay the past. One thing above all else is manifest to him; namely, that man as he stands before us to-day as a physical being, was not always a physical being. External Natural Science can only lead us back by way of physical phenomena to what man as a physical being once was, and the spiritual investigator has no objection to that. But what surrounds us physically, has a spiritual origin. Man existed as a spiritual being before he became physical.

When the earth was not yet physical, man existed in the bosom of divine beings. As ice condenses from water, so did physical man condense from spiritual man. Spiritual Science shows that the physical is in perpetual contact with the spiritual. But what underlies the physical can only be expressed in pictures, if one wants to approximate to physical ideas.

What happens when a man has re-attained the spiritual stage of evolution,—what comes before him? In a certain sense the spiritual investigator re-discovers the Bible imagery, as given in the six or seven days of Creation. The pictures as given there actually appear before him. These pictures are not, of course, a description of physical occurrences, but the investigator who looks into the spiritual world, sees in clairvoyant consciousness, in how wonderful a way the writer of Genesis has portrayed in these pictures the formation of man from out of the Spirit. And it is marvelous how, point by point, agreement is established between what is so perceived by the spiritual investigator and the Bible imagery. The spiritual investigator can follow in just as unbiased a way as the Natural Scientist approaches the physical world. He does not derive his wisdom directly from the Bible, but he finds emphatic agreement with Bible imagery.

I will only mention one such point of agreement. When we go back to ancient times, it is seen that behind the evolution of man stand certain spiritual beings who are different from the beings who are there from a definite and later point of time onwards. Many of you will know that man as he is to-day is a fourfold being, consisting of physical body, etheric body, astral body (the vehicle of joy, passions and so forth), and the Ego, the bearer of human self-consciousness. The three lower members, physical body, etheric body and astral body, were in existence long before the Ego, which was incorporated into man last of all. Spiritual beings who are designated in the Bible as the Elohim worked on these three earlier principles. And when the Ego began to be incorporated into this three-fold nature, another being from the spiritual world co-operated in the work of the Elohim. If we penetrate more deeply into the Bible we shall find that this Spiritual Being is given the name of Jehova, and rightly so. And in accordance with the inner principles of evolution itself we see that at a certain point in the narrative a new name is introduced in place of the old name of the God-head. We see too, the circumstances surrounding the origin of man which is described in a two-fold way in the Bible. For in point of fact man as a threefold being was dissolved into the universe: as a three-fold being he came into existence afresh, and then from out of the transformed three-fold man, the Ego developed. So that the cleft that would seem to lie between the first and second chapter of Genesis, and that has been the subject of so many false interpretations, is explained by spiritual investigation. It is only a question of rightly understanding the Bible and that is not very easy to-day. Spiritual Science shows that in the beginning higher Spiritual Beings were present; the descendants of these Beings are men, man has emerged from the bosom of Divine Spiritual Beings. We may speak of man as the descendant of the Gods in the same sense as we speak of the child being the descendant of his parents. From the standpoint of Spiritual Science we must look upon the human being standing before us as an Earth-man, the descendant of divine-spiritual beings.

Does the Bible tell us anything about this? Indeed it does, but we first must learn how to read it. The fourth sentence of the Second Chapter of Genesis runs: ‘These are the generations of the heavens’ ... and so on. This sentence is misleading, for it does not give what is really to be found at this place in the Bible. The text ought really to stand as follows: ‘What follow here and will now be described are the descendants of the Heavens and the Earth as they were brought forth by the divine power.’ And by the words ‘the Heavens and the Earth,’ divine spiritual beings are meant, divine spiritual beings whose descendant is man. The Bible describes exactly what the spiritual investigator rediscovers independently. Many of those who fight against the Bible to-day are directing their attacks against something of which they have no real knowledge. They are tilting against straws. The Anthroposophical view is exactly expressed in this fourth sentence. We might show verse by verse through the Old and New Testaments how man, when he ascends into the spiritual world through his own faculties, rediscovers the results of his investigation in the Bible. It would lead us too far now if we tried to describe the New Testament in a similar way. In my book Christianity as Mystical Fact the Lazarus miracle among others is given in its real form. The manner of treating such subjects to-day makes it impossible for us to get at their real meaning, for modern commentators of the Bible are naturally only able to find what accords with their own personal knowledge. Their knowledge does not transcend sense-cognition, hence the many contradictory interpretations and expositions of the individual Biblical ‘Authorities.’ The only qualified expositor of the Bible is a man who, independently of the Bible, is able to reach the same truths as are there contained. Let us take for sake of example an old book—Euclid's Geometry. Anyone who understands something of Geometry to-day will understand this book. But one would of course only place reliance on someone who had really studied Geometry to-day. When such a man comes to Euclid he will recognise his teachings to be true. In the same sense a man who approaches the Bible with philological knowledge only can never be a real ‘Authority.’ Only a man who is able to create the wisdom from out of his own being can be a real Authority on the Bible.

It may be said then, that the Bible is intelligible to a man who can penetrate into the spiritual world, who can receive its influences into himself. The Bible induces in such a man an absolute certainty that it is written by Initiates and inspired souls; a man who can to-day penetrate into the spiritual world, understands the great Scribes of the Bible. He knows them to have been true Initiates, ‘awakened souls’ who have written down their experiences from the levels of the spiritual worlds; if he knows this, he also knows what is hidden within their words.

I would like here to mention an experience of my own in reference to another matter. When I was engaged on special work in the Goethe Archives in Weimar, I tried to prove something quite externally. You all know Goethe's beautiful prose Hymn to Nature ‘Oh Nature we are encircled and embraced by thee,’ and so on. This hymn depicts in beautiful words that everything given to us by Nature is given in Love, that Love is the crown of Nature. This composition was lost sight of for a time by Goethe himself, and when he was an old man and what remained of his literary work was given over to the Duchess Amelia, it was found. Goethe was questioned about it, and said ‘Yes, I recognise the idea that came to me then.’ The composition was accepted as having been written by Goethe until certain hair-splitters refused to admit that he was the author and attributed it to someone else. My purpose was to investigate the truth about this composition. It had come to my knowledge that at an early period of his life Goethe had with him a young man called Tobler, who had an exceedingly good memory. During their walks together Goethe had elaborated his idea, Tobler had thoroughly assimilated it, and because of his marvelous memory had been able afterwards to write it down very nearly word for word. I tried to show that a great deal of what is to be found in Goethe's conceptions later on is intelligible in the light of this composition. The point is that someone other than Goethe had penned it on paper, but the idea itself in its phrasing and articulation was Goethe's—and that is what I tried to make clear. Later on, when my work was published, a celebrated Goethean scholar came to me and said: ‘We owe you a debt of gratitude for throwing light upon the subject, for now we know that this composition is by Tobler.’ You may well imagine how amused I was! This is how things present themselves to the minds of people who are at pains to prove that in the course of time some particular portion of the Bible was written by one man or another. Some people consider the most important thing to be who finally did the writing, and not which Spirit was the origin and source. But with us the essential thing is to understand how the Bible was able to come into being from the Spirits of those who looked into the Spiritual World and experienced it.

And now let us examine whether there is in the Bible itself, anything that explains this way of looking at things.

The Old Testament lends itself to a great deal of controversy, for the events there have grown dim. But it will be clear to anyone who does not want to wrangle, that the Old Testament faithfully describes the significant process of the penetration of the Ego into the entire nature and being of man. Anyone who from the point of view of Spiritual Science, reads of the call to Moses at the Burning Bush will understand that in reality Moses was then raised into the Spiritual world. When God appeared to Moses in the Burning Bush, Moses asked: ‘Who shall I say to the people hath sent me?’ God said: ‘Tell them that One Who can say “I am” hath sent thee.’ And if we follow up the whole process of the incorporation of the Ego, step by step, then the Bible illuminates what is found in Spiritual Science independently.

But something else is evident as well, namely, that from a Christian point of view the Bible should not be considered from the same point of view as other historical documents. If we consider the figure of Paul we can learn a great deal that can lead us to this realisation. When we study the earliest form in which Christianity was promulgated, from which all its later forms are derived, we shall find that none of the Gospel narratives are given by Paul at all, but that he speaks of something quite different. What gave the impulse to Paul? How did this unique Apostle acquire his understanding of the Christ? Simply and solely as a consequence of the event of Damascus, that is, not as a result of physical but of super-sensible truths. Now what is at the basis of the teaching of Paul? It is the knowledge that the Christ—although he was crucified—lives; the event of Damascus reveals Christ as a Living Being who can appear to men who ascend to him;—it reveals, moreover that there is in very truth a spiritual world. And Paul makes a parallel between Christ's appearance to him and His appearance to others. He says: ‘First He appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve, then to five hundred Brethren at once, to James and then all the Apostles, and last of all to me also as to one born out of due time.’ This reference by Paul to ‘one born out of due time’ is strange. But this very expression is evidence to experienced Initiates that Paul speaks with perfect knowledge of Spiritual Science. He says that he is ‘born out of due time.’ and from this we realise that his illumination is to be traced back to a certain fact. I will just hint at the meaning. He means to explain in these words that because he has been born out of due time he is less entangled in material existence. He traces back his illumination to his knowledge: the Christ lives and is here. He shows that he bases his Christianity upon this super-sensible truth and that it is conviction acquired as the result of direct perception.

The earliest form of Christianity as it spread abroad is based upon super-sensible facts. We could show that what is contained in the John Gospel is based upon super-sensible impressions which the writer of that Gospel gives as his own experience, and realising that originally it was possible for Christianity to win belief on the basis of super-sensible experiences of men who were able to look into the spiritual worlds, we can no longer imagine that it is right to apply to the Bible the same standard as we apply to other external documents.

Anyone who examines the Gospels with the same methods as he employs in the case of other documents, is confronted by something whose inner contents he can never fathom. But a man who penetrates into the experiences of the writers of the Gospels will be led into the spiritual world and to those personalities who have built up their knowledge and their wisdom from out of the spiritual world and have given them to us.

We should realise that those from whom the Gospels proceeded were Initiates, awakened souls, taking into consideration as well that there may be different stages of awakening. Just imagine that different people are describing a landscape from a mountain; one stands at the bottom, another in the middle and another at the summit. Each of these men will describe the landscape differently, according to his point of view. This is how the spiritual investigator looks at the four Gospels. The writers of the four Gospels were Initiates of different degrees. It is understandable that there may be external contradictions, just as there would be in the description of a landscape from a mountain. The deepest of all is the Gospel of John. The writer of the John Gospel was the most deeply initiated into the mysteries of what took place in Palestine at the beginning of our era because he wrote from the summit of the mountain.

Spiritual Science is able to elucidate the Gospels fully, and to prove that the various contradictions in Genesis at the beginning of the Old Testament disappear. Direct perception, then, of the spiritual worlds brings us again to an understanding of the Bible which is a most wonderful document. A man who engages in spiritual investigation will find that there are four standpoints to be distinguished among men who approach the study of the Bible. The first is the standpoint of the naive believer, who has faith in the Bible as it stands and pays no attention to any other consideration; the second is that of ‘clever’ people who stand neither on the ground of historical research, nor of Bible analysis, nor of Natural Science. They say: ‘We cannot recognise the Bible to be an uniform document.’ And when such men realise that Natural Science contradicts the Bible they become ‘Free Thinkers,’ so-called ‘Free Spirits.’ They are in most cases honest, sincere seekers after truth. But then we come to something that transcends the standpoint of the ‘clever’ people. Many Free Thinkers have held the point of view that the Bible is only suitable for a childlike stage of human evolution, and cannot hold its own against Science. But after a time it strikes them that much of what is given in the Bible has a figurative sense; that it is a garment woven around experiences. This is the third standpoint—that of the Symbolist. Here a pure arbitrariness reigns, and the view that the Bible is to be understood symbolically.

The fourth standpoint is that of Spiritual Science. Here there is no longer ambiguity, but in a certain sense literal interpretation of what is said in the Bible. We are brought back again to the Bible in order to understand it in a real sense. An important task of Spiritual Science is to restore the Bible to its real position. It will be a happy day when we hear in modern words what really is to be found in the Bible, different, indeed, from all that is said to-day.

We may pass from sentence to sentence and we shall see that the Bible everywhere contains a message to Initiates from Initiates; awakened souls speak to awakened souls. Spiritual investigation does not in any way alienate us from the Bible. A man who approaches the Bible by spiritual investigation experiences the fact that details become clear to him about which he formally had doubts because he could not understand them. It becomes evident that it was his fault when he was not able to understand. Now, however, he understands what once escaped him, and he gradually works through to a point of view where he says: ‘Now I understand certain things and see their deep content: others, again appear to be incredible. But just as formerly I did not understand what is now clear to me, so later I shall discover that it has a deep import.’ And then such a man will with gratitude accept what hashes up in him, leaving to the future what he cannot yet explain.

The Bible in all its depth will be revealed only in the future, when spiritual investigation, independently of any kind of tradition, penetrates into the spiritual facts, and is able to show mankind what this document really contains. Then it will no longer seem unintelligible, for we shall feel united with what streamed into spiritual culture through those who wrote it down. In our age it is possible for us, through Initiation, again to investigate the spiritual world. Looking back to the past we feel ourselves united with those who have gone before us, for we can show how step by step they communicated what they had received in the spiritual world. We can promise that the Bible will prove itself to be the most profound document of humanity, the deepest source of our civilization. Spiritual Science will be able to restore this knowledge. And, however much bigoted people may say: ‘The Bible does not need such a complicated explanation—it is the very simplicity that is right’—it will be realised some day that the Bible, even when it is not fully understood works upon every heart by virtue of its intrinsic mysteries. It will be realised too that not only is its simplicity within our grasp, but that no wisdom is really adequate for a full understanding of it. The Bible is a most profound document not only for simple folk, but also for the wisest of the wise. Wisdom, therefore, investigated spiritually and independently, will lead back to the Bible. And Spiritual Science, apart from everything else that it has to bring to humanity, will be the means of accomplishing a re-conquest of the Bible.

Report in the “Hannoverscher Courier,” May 19, 1905.

Birth and Death in the Life of the Soul. On Monday evening, the local Theosophical Society held a meeting at the vegetarian restaurant “Freia”, at which Dr. Rudolf Steiner from Berlin gave a lecture on the topic “Birth and Death in the Life of the Soul, a Look at the Theosophical Worldview” in front of a large audience.

The speaker emphasized at the beginning of his remarks that the riddle of birth and death has always occupied all people equally, the simplest as well as the educated. The question of the meaning of life can be broken down into two basic questions, namely: 1. “Does our human life have no other meaning than that between birth and death, or does the human being have something in him that outlasts the body?” 2. “What is the meaning of evil in the world?” These two questions can only be answered in the context of each other. One cannot speak of good and evil actions in animals, since their lives are limited by birth and death, but humans have an awareness of responsibility within themselves and thus also a sense of good and evil in their actions. But it is precisely this circumstance that proves that something higher and eternal dwells in man, something that is independent of the short life between birth and death. The speaker then developed the further course of his lecture on the basis of Plato's ideas about death and life, which essentially aimed to demonstrate the immortality of the human psyche. In doing so, he tied in with the ideas familiar to antiquity, that this immortality is to be conceived not only forward, beyond death, but also backward, beyond birth. The spiritual core in man, he said, is striving for development; however, this is not possible during a single existence, but only during a long series of existential states; the spirit must therefore continually incarnate, that is, create a body as an instrument until its development is complete. Only by recognizing the human being as a creature whose life between birth and death is only one link in a long chain of lives can the seemingly unjust fact be explained that happiness and suffering are so unevenly distributed among individuals; the individual lives are linked by hidden causal connections, and in one life one reaps what one has sown in the previous one. Finally, the speaker emphasized that an understanding of these spiritual truths requires a certain spiritual development, and the purpose of the Theosophical Society is to promote this. The theosophical movement represents a reaction against the materialistic spirit of the age, as indeed all the signs indicate that our one-sided material culture will be followed by a period of predominantly spiritual culture.

In the period from the first to the seventh year of the child, the magic word is imitation; from the seventh to the fourteenth year of the child, the magic word is authority; from the fourteenth to the twenty-first year of the child, the magic word is future ideals.

If we allow our ideals to wither in this phase of life, then premature aging sets in. Such prematurely aged people suppress their ideals for the future. They are not true, they say. That doesn't matter. Ideals are not meant to be true. These ideals work to keep us young in old age.

The last birth, the birth of the self, occurs between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-three. Until now, the person has brought out of themselves what they have brought with them from previous lives. Now he must take in from his environment and process it within himself, so that he has become rich in external experiences by the time he reaches his thirties. Now the ego comes into play, working in the opposite way, to influence the astral body, etheric body and so on. Now the ego comes into play to transform the ideals into external experiences.

It is only from the age of 35 to 40 that his judgment becomes valuable to his environment. Towards the age of 50, memory sometimes diminishes, but one remembers clearly what one experienced in the eighth, tenth, twelfth year of life. This is because the astral body works into the etheric body and now encounters what happened during the period of memory education.

And in the last age, if the right education has taken place in the early years, happiness and blessings will come. If the education has not been properly spiritually active - dolls with corners, etc. - sclerosis, calcification, etc. will occur. All this has a mysterious connection with it, if no lively spiritual activity has taken place in the first childhood.

In the years after the age of 35 or 40, a person only becomes valuable to those around him through judgment. What is done in the years after the age of 50 is valid for all ages, if the person has been able to develop in the right way throughout his life.

The theosophical worldview seeks to deepen our spiritual life, not arbitrarily, but because it wants to serve, to satisfy the deeply felt yearning of our time. That the theosophical worldview is not arbitrary can be seen by comparing it with other spiritual currents.

Today we want to consider a cultural current in art in relation to Theosophy. We want to talk about Richard Wagner. Richard Wagner always emphasized that he wanted to serve an ideal that could permeate people like any other religious ideal.

Goethe longed for an interpreter of art. Richard Wagner endeavored to be such an interpreter throughout his life. One could say: What is not said about Richard Wagner, what is not thought of him! Richard Wagner himself would not have thought that. Nor is it necessary that he should have consciously thought all this so clearly. Just as a plant cannot itself say what a poet might say about it, so Richard Wagner does not need to have said or thought all that is said about him. The botanist cannot place himself above the forces of the plant. He only knows their laws. The plant, on the other hand, can grow according to these laws without knowing them. The same applies to the artist: he implements the laws of art. Richard Wagner himself was of the opinion that truth comes to light in philosophy and that the secrets of the world are revealed in art. He says of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony that in such a creation there is a revelation of another world, much more than through logical thinking.

Richard Wagner always had the feeling that the spiritual world, as the basis of the sensual world, stands behind this sensual world. He sees beings in the devachanic world, as we call it, that are connected to the physical bodies. An extract of this spiritual world is the physical. One must have what Goethe calls spiritual eyes and ears in order to see and perceive this spiritual world.

The Pythagorean spoke of the harmony of the spheres, which is not an arbitrarily chosen, superficial image. Goethe speaks very clearly about this spiritual world of the music of the spheres. For him, what is around us is the material expression of this spiritual world. He says in Faust:

What a roar brings the light! It trumpets, it trombones, the eye blinks and the ear is amazed, the unheard does not listen.

And elsewhere:

The sun sounds in the ancient manner In the song of the spheres, And it completes its prescribed journey With a thunderclap.

A great artist does not just use images like these as pictures.

Richard Wagner said that the individual musical instruments are like individual organs through which the world expresses itself in primal feelings. He had no theosophical view. However, since he was imbued with a theosophical attitude, he always knew that there are deep relationships between people and what stands behind them. Much of this is contained in old legends, for example in the legend of “Poor Henry”. A maiden must sacrifice herself so that the sick Poor Henry can be healed. The sacrifice acts as a force from one to the other. The outer science can find nothing of the magical power that passes from the redeemer to the redeemed.

In the Flying Dutchman, we have before us a man who has become sinful. The sacrifice of Senta, the power that passes from person to person, must have an effect here.

The whole music drama is imbued with this idea. Richard Wagner felt: In the ordinary drama, only the external action takes place, only the purely external expression of inner experiences. In the symphony, on the other hand, we experience the feeling only inwardly, that is, what is missing in the drama. Beethoven sought a balance in the Ninth Symphony, in which the feeling resonated in the word. Wagner's music drama also arose from the same endeavor.

Richard Wagner saw the ideal human behind the ordinary everyday person. He saw this ideal human in myths and legends, which contain in the imagination what man contains in his nature and in his germs. The saga of the Nibelungs is a particularly vivid expression of this. At the time of the ancient Atlantis, people lived under very different conditions than we do today. Year in, year out, Atlantis was covered by dense masses of fog. Rain and sunshine were not distributed as they are today, so that the rainbow could only appear after the great flood, the Deluge, because only then were the conditions for its appearance present. Noah saw the first rainbow. In myths and legends, the memory of the old conditions has been preserved, for example in the name Niflheim – Mistheim. We receive truer knowledge from the myths than from materialistic science. The state of mind at that time was such that the individual ego did not yet exist. In the course of the migration from the west to the east, the human being developed his ego nature. The Atlanteans had a collective consciousness at that time. The Germanic tribes, for example the Cherusci, still had this collective consciousness as well. Legends and myths depicted this in images.

In the transition from the collective self to the individual self, to the single self, the self contracts more and more around the individual human being. This increasingly contracting individual self was depicted as a ring. Truth and wisdom are interwoven with the image of poetry. The human egoistic self is expressed in the ring. The masses of mist flowed together to form rivers where people now live. In the Rhine, the myth sees what has become of the harmonious, collective consciousness of the self. The last stragglers of those endowed with universal consciousness have been drawn into the waves of the Rhine, as it were. Gold is the symbol of power.

With love, the possibility of selfish love also flows into the soul of the self. What is represented by gold, the symbol of power, is what the egoistic self strives for. Alberich kills love in order to take for himself what used to come to every individual from the All-consciousness. In the long-held E-flat major pedal in the prelude to “Rheingold”, we see the drawing in of the self into the human being.

The relationship between people must be regulated by external law. We find this with Wotan. Through his love for his wife, he loses his only eye, even if it is only slightly clairvoyant. For what the giants have done for him, he wants to give up the representative of love, of that which preserves youth, love for selfish power. Wotan still has connections to the All-consciousness. This emerges in Erda, this ancient consciousness, which is a dim but clairvoyant consciousness. She experiences the depths of the natural world clairvoyantly in what lives and weaves in springs and waters:

Her sleeping is dreaming, her dreaming is sensing, her sensing is prevailing knowledge.

This ancient consciousness cannot be expressed better, and all this is also expressed in drama and music. When the I was locked in the ring, it was locked in the skin. People who have the clairvoyant consciousness and the consciousness of today are called initiates. This was always represented in the image of the feminine. Goethe's words:

The Eternal Feminine

Draws us upward

refers to the higher human consciousness that humanity yearns for. Every nation has leaders who correspond to its character. Here, among the Germanic peoples, bravery is the corresponding characteristic. The soul of the warrior rises above the ordinary consciousness. This is symbolized in a female personality, the Valkyrie. Those who do not die on the battlefield die a death on the battlefield. But those who fall in battle are led up by the Valkyries. The feminine leads into the spiritual realm.

The initiate experiences in life what the ordinary person experiences only after death. Siegfried is an initiate. He unites with the Valkyrie already here. The All-consciousness passes over into the I-consciousness. From close marriage gradually arises distant marriage. The mixing of related blood gave the power of vision. This power passes with distant marriage. When distant blood is brought to distant blood, clairvoyance and ruling knowledge perish.

This transition to long-distance marriage can be found in the world of legends, where a member of the blood relationship goes out and marries outside of it. This is characterized in the saga in such a way that it is always associated with suffering and hardship. Siegmund and Sieglinde are characteristic representatives of close marriage. The child of this marriage, Siegfried, must not know any of this. He must grow up, completely on his own. Fricka, the representative of the new order, rebels against the union of Sieglinde and Siegmund.

In his unfinished drama “Der Sieger”, begun in 1856, Richard Wagner incorporated theosophical teachings. Amander, an Indian prince, is loved by a Jandalah maiden. He does not consider her worthy of him and enters a monastery. The maiden remains behind and later realizes that in a previous incarnation she was a king's daughter and that the present prince was a Jandalah, whom she did not want to marry. A balance had now been struck. She too enters a Buddhist monastery. This would have been a purely theosophical drama with reincarnation in it, but Richard Wagner did not yet feel up to it.

The following year he was invited to stay at Villa Wesendonck. From his window he saw spring outside, the first signs of sprouting, the resurrection of nature. He recognized the connections between this cosmic event and the mystery of resurrection. The “Parsifal” was created from this. The symbol at the center of the Parsifal problem is the Holy Grail. There really was a school of the Holy Grail. It still exists today: the realization of the pure ideal.

What the Grail student and the Rosicrucian student go through is to be reflected in a dialogue that did not take place literally in this form, but in spirit. The pupil was shown: Look at the plant. The root goes down into the soil, the sap – the “blood” – goes up, where the fruit attaches itself. It stretches the calyx towards the sunbeam, the holy lance of love. Compare this with man. Unconscious, the plant is not yet permeated by desires. It develops upwards to become human. Then the plant sap becomes blood, permeated with desires, the plant leaf becomes flesh. By incorporating the desires, the human being acquires day-consciousness in contrast to the sleep-consciousness of the plant.

One also spoke of future development: everything is in development. The human being will develop to ever more perfect levels. Richard Wagner also points this out. An organ that is still developing, that is still at the lowest level – every materialist will find what I am about to say terrible, but that does not matter, it is still true – the heart, it is indeed a real crux for materialistic science; it is an involuntary muscle with striated fibers like the voluntary muscles. This already points to a later stage of development. The human larynx will also have a higher development. It will be productive, it will create the image of man: it will become the future organ of reproduction. Later, like the plant now, man will turn his chalice chastely towards the sun, towards the holy lance of love. This was said to the Grail disciple. One can only arrive at this knowledge through spiritual insight, not through speculation. The Grail disciple should feel and relive it.

In “Parsifal” the one who strives for the Grail ideal is portrayed, the Christian initiate. The pure fool, he knows nothing through his own speculation, but he has felt it, he knows through compassion.

In Kundry, Wagner depicts the lower sensuality that passes from incarnation to incarnation. Kundry is Eve, is Herodias. She mocked the Redeemer. But she must not be lost; she must also be redeemed. This happens through the kiss of Parsifal. Klingsor represents black magic, brute force.

In Siegfried, the old initiation is combined with the Christian initiation. Siegfried is vulnerable only in one place: where the Redeemer later carried the cross. The old can only develop into unselfish free love if Christian love is grasped. This is expressed in Richard Wagner's transition from the “Nibelungen” to “Parsifal”, when he moved from the Nibelung saga to the Parzival saga. Richard Wagner himself felt he was a herald.

Wahnfried shall this house be called,
Where my delusion found peace.

That is written on his house. Man must pass through delusion if he wants to ascend to the spiritual world.

If one wants to interpret the secrets of the world, one must turn to art.

The so-called “Traumlied” (Dream Song), which will be performed today, requires a few remarks to be made beforehand.

I already referred to this Dream Song in my Christmas address to you a few days ago. There I was able to say that the establishment of Christmas is by no means an imaginary one, one that has arisen from thought, but that the establishment of Christmas arises during the course of the year from very specific inner processes that can take place in the human soul when this soul comes to clairvoyant visions as the highest fruits of the soul, either through certain powers inherent in the natural course of things or through trained clairvoyance. We can best understand what may actually lie at the root of the human soul by visualizing the following thought.

All the plants, all the sprouting and sprouted growth that sunlight and solar warmth conjure up in spring and allow to flourish throughout the summer, all this, as it were, enters into a winter sleep, into winter darkness, on a kind of winter path at the time when Christmas was moved from the historical consciousness of humanity. The time in which Christmas is celebrated seems to us like sleep, like the darkness of the natural world. It is the opposite with the human soul as it is with the natural world. While the beings of nature descend into darkness and accompany the human soul into this realm of outer eclipse, it becomes, or can become, lighter in the human soul. She can, through the natural course of things, which we have often hinted at as a certain inherited clairvoyance, or through trained clairvoyance, dive straight into the brightest spiritual world, where the secrets of the spirit, hidden behind the outer sensual things, then dawn on her. And just as this descent of the plant world around the time of the winter solstice is subject to a regular law, so too the spiritual blossoming of human beings is subject to such a law, so that it coincides in its luminous brightness with the natural darkness into which the Christmas festival is placed.

It might seem as though such things are only being expressed out of today's schooled clairvoyance, or, as our opponents say, out of mere fantasy. But there will always be a living, fully valid proof of what people and nations experience outwardly. Therefore, it was extremely interesting for me that, after I had spoken about this Christmas clairvoyance within our movement for several years, which introduces us to the meaning of the Christ-being, to the arising of the Christ-being precisely when the human soul is most strongly immersed in clairvoyance , and I once again came to Norway, which is spiritually related to us, for a lecture cycle — that a remarkable vision was brought to me up there, of which, however, anyone who is familiar with such things must immediately say: Yes, it is reminiscent of many similar visions that have always been experienced by Germanic peoples, visions that many people have seen with their clairvoyant vision during the period of the thirteen nights from Christmas Eve to Epiphany, January 6. There the human soul can look into the spiritual world and see the fate of the human soul in the disembodied state, when it goes through Kamaloka and it then becomes clear to it how a relationship is established between the higher spiritual worlds and the deeds of people here on earth. And it is interesting that the person of whom we are told in this dream song and to whom these visions in this Nordic region are attributed through this dream song is a person who bears the name Olaf Åsteson. It is said of him that during these thirteen nights he underwent in a kind of clairvoyant experience what the Nordic man can feel as a vision in his way. He first learned how human deeds continue to unfold after the human being has passed through the gate of death, but he also learned how that which we call the Christ-being , how the office of judge of Jesus, the Christ, enters into the Nordic spiritual order of life after death, as the old world judge, the so-called face of Jehovah, the archangel Michael. So that, in addition to everything else that appears to the clairvoyance of Olaf Åsteson, the penetration of Christianity into the north can be heard, and that everything becomes clairvoyantly clear to him during the period of the Jesus birthday festival in the thirteen nights that he sleeps through.

Which consciousness becomes clear? It is now strange that this is already hinted at in the name, which quite obviously originally meant in the north such a human consciousness, which is inherited from the forefathers, from the ancestors. Olaf is truly himself in those times when the ancient, clairvoyant ancestral consciousness arises again in him. He who has inherited his consciousness, his inner being, from his ancestors: that is contained in the name Olaf. And Äste means love, the love that is passed down in the blood from generation to generation. Olaf is the son of this love, Åsteson, is the consciousness that has been passed down from generation to generation from the old clairvoyant times, is like resurrected ancestry. Olaf, who is born with this clairvoyant consciousness, recognizes the destiny of the human soul, and at the same time sees the intervention of the being we celebrate in Jesus' birthday festival as his entry into earthly existence. And strangely, while such visions have certainly always been experienced, especially in Germanic countries, this dream song seems to have been forgotten. In 1850, the preacher Landstad set out to collect folk songs in Telemarken, a lonely mountain valley where few people lived at the time. And among the many folk songs, he did not know since when, he did not know for how long, the song of Olaf Åsteson was alive in the vernacular – the song of Olaf Åsteson, who in the thirteen nights saw the destiny of the human soul after it had passed through the gate of death, and the coming into the world of Christ Jesus. He did not know when this song of initiation of the human soul came into being, for it was always recited in the vernacular, leaning on a musical mood. The few people in the lonely mountain valley enjoyed it, and there it was read by the preacher Landstad, in that it spoke to him of the secrets that had been uncovered – as if from the folk mind itself – about initiation in ancient times. And so it came to be that Landstad found it in the vernacular. Many people naturally believe that it alludes to Saint Olaf, who introduced Christianity in 1030 AD and whose mother was called Love. This is the case with many things that have both a historical and a spiritual significance.

Furthermore, it is interesting that this dream song has now quickly penetrated a large part of the Nordic people and lives in the hearts of the Norwegian people. There is, after all, a great movement in Norway to bring the old days back to life, and with that to revive the old language, which is very close to the ancient Germanic language, the Nordic language, in contrast to the Danish language, which was introduced later. Now this song is in a language that echoes the oldest language that has been preserved there, and the people who want to revive their antiquity in the first place, to whom this song spoke to the heart, and in the last ten to fifteen years it has not only penetrated into the hearts of the people, but also into the schools. It is sung and recited everywhere, and everywhere you hear, so to speak, where the soul awakens to the old folkways, the dream song of Olaf Åsteson, who in the thirteen nights from Christmas to January 6, so to speak, was naturally initiated into the sacred secrets of humanity. And for this reason, we would like to present this dream song of Olaf Åsteson to you today. Miss von Sivers will recite it. I tried to make a provisional arrangement so that it could be recited in German. Mrs. Lindholm helped me to make the peculiar language in which the song lives and now lives more and more and has become an aria of folk song possible in German. So we will now hear it in this provisional arrangement, which I was able to create in a few days.

The Dream Song

I.

So listen to my song!
I will sing to you
of a nimble youth:

It was of Olaf Åsteson,
Who once so long slept.

Of him I will sing.

II.

He went to rest on Christmas Eve.
A heavy sleep soon fell on him,
And he could not awaken
Before on the thirteenth day
The people went to church.

It was Olaf Åsteson,
Who once slept so long.
Of him I will sing.

He went to rest on Christmas Eve.
He slept for so long!
He could not wake
Before the thirteenth day
The bird spread its wings!

It was Olaf Åsteson,
Who once slept so long.
I will sing of him.

Olaf could not awaken
Before on the thirteenth day
The sun shone over the mountains.
Then he saddled his nimble horse
And rode hastily to the church.

It was Olaf Åsteson,
Who once slept so long.
I will sing of him.

The priest was already standing
At the altar reading the mass,
When at the church door
Olaf sat down to tell
The content of many dreams,
Which in the long sleep
Filled his soul.

It was Olaf Åsteson,
Who once slept so long.
Of him I will sing to you.

And young and old alike
Listened attentively to the words,
Which spoke of his dreams of Olaf.

It was Olaf Åsteson,
Who once slept so long.
Of him I will sing to you.

III.

“I went to rest on Christmas Eve.
A strong sleep soon embraced me;
And I could not awaken
Before on the thirteenth day
The people went to church.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

I was raised up in the clouds
And thrown into the bottom of the sea,
And anyone who wants to follow me
Cannot be overcome by serenity.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

I was raised up to the height of the clouds
Then plunged into gloomy swamps,
Beholding the terrors of hell
And also the light of heaven.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

And I had to travel in the depths of the earth,
Where the streams of the gods rush terribly.
I was unable to see them,
But I could hear the rushing.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

My black horse neighed not,
And my hounds did not bark,
Nor sang the morn's bird,
There was a single miracle everywhere.

The moon shone bright
And far the paths extended.

I must have traveled in the ghost land
er Dornenheide weites Feld,
My scarlet cloak was torn from me
And also the nails of my feet.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

I came to the Gjallarbridge.
In highest wind heights this hangs,
With red gold it is studded
And nails with sharp points it has.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far.

The ghostly snake struck me,
The ghostly dog bit me,
The bull stood in the middle of the road.
These are the three creatures of the bridge.
They are of a terribly evil nature.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched out wide.

The dog is snappy,
And the snake wants to sting,
The bull, he threatens mightily!
They let no one cross the bridge
Who does not want to honor the truth!

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

I crossed the bridge,
Which is narrow and dizzying.
I had to wade through the mire....
They are now behind me!

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

I had to wade through swamps,
They seemed bottomless to my feet.
When I crossed the bridge,
I felt earth in my mouth
Like dead people lying in graves.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched out far and wide.

Then I came to water,
In which the ice masses shone brightly like blue flames
...
And God, he directed my mind
So that I avoided the area.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched far and wide.

I turned my steps to the winter path.
On the right I could see it:
I looked as if into paradise,
Which shone brightly in the distance.

The moon shone brightly
And the paths stretched out wide.

And God's high Mother,
I saw her there in the splendor!
To Brooksvalin to go,
So she called me, announcing,
That souls are judged there!

The moon shone bright
And the paths stretched far and wide.

IV.

"In other worlds I dwelt
Through many a night's length;
And God only can know
How much of soul-afflict I saw —

In Brooksvalin, where souls
To the world's judgment are subject.

I could see a young man
who had murdered a boy:
Now he had to carry him forever
on his own arms!
He stood in the mud so deep

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the judgment of the world.

I also saw an old man,
He wore a cloak of lead;
Thus he was punished for Living in greed on the earth,

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the judgment of the world.

And men appeared,
Who carried fiery substances;
Dishonesty weighs
On their poor souls

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the judgment of the world.

I could also see children
Who had glowing coals beneath their feet;
They did evil to their parents in life,
Which weighed very heavily on their spirits

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the Last Judgment.

And to approach that house,
It was laid upon me,
Where witches were to work
In the blood they had angered in life,

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the Last Judgment.

From the north, in wild hordes,
There came riding evil spirits,
Led by the prince of darkness,

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the Last Judgment.

What came from the north
Seemed evil above all else;
He rode in front, the prince of darkness,
On his black steed.

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the world's judgment.

But from the south came
Other hosts in lofty calm.
Saint Michael rode ahead
At Jesus Christ's side

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the world's judgment.

The souls, laden with sins,
They had to tremble in fear!
The tears ran in streams
As evil deeds follow

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the Last Judgment.

In majesty stood Michael
And weighed the human souls
On his scales of sin,
And standing by in judgment
The Judge of the world, Jesus Christ.

In Brooksvalin, where souls
Are subject to the Last Judgment.

V.

"Blessed is he who in life
Gives shoes to the poor;
He need not walk with bare feet
In the field of thorns.

Then speaks the tongue of the scales,
And world truth
Sounds in the spiritual state.

How blessed is he who in earthly life
Gives bread to the poor!
He cannot be hurt
By the dogs in the other world.

Thus the tongue of Libra speaks,
And world truth
Resounds in the spiritual state.

How blessed is he who in earthly life
Gives grain to the poor!
He cannot be threatened
By the sharp horn of the bull
When he must cross the Gjallar bridge.

Then the tongue of Libra speaks,
And world truth
Sounds in the mind.

How blessed is he who in earthly life
Clothes to the poor gives!
He cannot freeze to death
The ice masses in Brooksvalin.

Then speaks the tongue of Libra,
And world truth
Sounds in the mind.

VI.

And young and old alike
Listened intently to the words,
Which told of the dreams of Olaf. You have slept for so long... Wake up now, O Olaf Åsteson!

It is a time, in which in quick succession as a result of many deaths the connection of the human being with the spiritual world approaches us. It is the world the human being enters when he goes through the gate of death. Under quite special circumstances these quick successive, almost simultaneous deaths face us. These special circumstances are given because numerous earthly people go through the gate of death that could have lived still for decades on earth under the circumstances that one may assume for earthly people. And whenever the human being goes through the gate of death prematurely as it were, extraordinary conditions come also into being.

We know that the human being going through the gate of death leaves behind, hands over as it were what falls off as his physical body from him to the earth element. We know that then the so-called etheric body is considered as the second that, however, also separates from the individuality. Then the individuality, consisting of astral body and ego, passes the spiritual regions between death and new birth. The etheric body, however, keeps on working, detached from the ego and astral body. This etheric body, which now enters the spiritual world next to us, the etheric world, is different with each human being. You may imagine that an etheric body of somebody who passes the gate of death prematurely looks differently as that of somebody who has lived his life till old age. For the etheric body which has to go with an early deceased human being through the gate of death would have the power to supply the physical body with life under normal conditions still for many years, decades. Now a force does not get lost in the spiritual world just as little as in the physical world. This force which supplies, otherwise, the physical body with life continues to exist. So that we can say: if now thousands go through the gate of death, nevertheless, almost every day, etheric bodies enter into the elemental world which are still capable of surviving, which have other forces in themselves than older etheric bodies have. What happens now with these etheric bodies still capable of surviving?

Yesterday, I spoke of the real folk-soul in the public lecture. This folk-soul is a real being. It needs quite particular forces just in our time. It needs such forces also at other times, of course, but particularly in our time. This folk-soul takes up these etheric bodies still capable of surviving. The human being himself goes other ways with his ego and astral body—those ways which prepare him then for his next life on earth. But these etheric bodies separate from the human individualities, they go over into the being, the substance of the folk-souls. After such a destiny-burdened time as we now experience we go towards a time when the folk-soul contains the etheric bodies in itself—like forces living in it—which have been handed over by those who have gone in the battles through the gate of death. A time comes near when the spiritual scientist can know that that is not lost which was sacrificed on the altar of the big events. A time comes near when effective strength emits from the folk-soul into the individual souls, that simultaneously goes out from that which in the first, second, third decades of youth numerous people have taken up here on earth, which they could still have kept for many decades, which they have handed over, however, to the folk-soul. This is in the forces in future the folk-soul drips into the individual souls; that is not lost.

Let us take that really to heart. Imagine how our consciousness of the connection with the spiritual may be enlivened in our feeling life if we keep in mind that we can speak of the folk-soul in future that the fruits of the sacrificial deaths are in it as effective forces. That is particularly important in the next time. In other times this would be different, for the next time; however, it will be significant because of a quite special reason.

We lived in a bad time of materialism. The souls, who could not approach spiritual science, were immersed in a strong aura of materialism. To fight against this aura is the task of the folk-soul in the next time. Forces will flow towards this folk-soul for the fight of materialism by the fact that the etheric bodies of the early dead linger on in this folk-soul, just linger on as forces. These etheric bodies—sacrificed on the altar of human evolution—will be the strongest fighters against materialism.

So we have to make a distinction between that which moves as a single human being through the regions of the spiritual world and remains united with the human individuality, from that which the etheric body delivers on its detour to the general community; which keeps on working in the spiritual general community in the sense cited here, in the substance of the folk-souls.

That may stamp itself especially deeply in our souls if we put two human types concerning this spiritual difference before our souls: the warrior killed on the battlefield who goes, completely devoted to the task of his people, through the gate of death—who as it were at the moment when he enters the battlefield when he only resolves to enter the battlefield must also resolve to face death. Compare this human type with the ascetic. Just if you consider what the forces of the etheric body signify in human life, you get an idea of the difference of the warrior killed on the battlefield and the ascetic. The ascetic works on himself. He tries to work on himself in such a way that he overcomes the physical in himself completely, that he becomes still free from this physical during his lifetime. Since the ascetic works that way, a significant transformation also takes place in his etheric body. He uses up, so to speak, the forces of this etheric body the strongest to incorporate them in his ego and astral body. What makes the ascetic free from the physical, this is of benefit completely for his individuality, and this serves the transformation of his individuality. So that such a human being who becomes an ascetic can serve humankind only on the detour of that which he makes out of himself. He, however, who frees himself from the physical body in early youth, because he has to surrender to the requests of war, hands over the forces of his etheric body to the general community; he incorporates them to the general work. You have to feel this difference, it is a significant difference. It points us again a little bit to that which prevails as a reality in the human life. It is also significant to look just at the path through the gate of death concerning the etheric body.

At the moment when the human being goes through the gate of death, he is still united with his etheric body. We have often described what happens to this. This connection with the etheric body gives the human being the possibility to live in all ideas that the last life aroused in him to merge completely like in a mighty tableau in everything that the last life has given him. But this is a kind of vision that lasts for a relatively short time; it fades away with the liberation of the etheric body from the ego and astral body. Yes, you can say, it immediately begins to fade away after the moment of death. The impressions become weaker and weaker which are still due to the possession of the etheric body. Then that makes itself felt which is authoritative after the physical death. What is authoritative there is properly imagined only to a lower degree by the people who want to get ideas about the life after death. It is even difficult to coin words for those quite different conditions, compared with the conditions we experience in our physical bodies. One thinks simply that the human being after he has gone through the gate of death has only again to get a consciousness for himself. It is not really that way. The human being experiences no lack of consciousness when he passes the gate of death. On the contrary, his soul experiences a superabundance of consciousness. He lives and weaves completely in consciousness, and as well as the strong sunlight dazes the eyes, he is dazed at first by consciousness, he has too much consciousness. First, this consciousness must be dampened, so that he can orientate himself in the life, into which he has entered after death. This lasts for a longer time; more and more moments happen in which the consciousness makes such an orientation possible. The soul becomes conscious for a more or less short time and then it again enters into a condition similar to sleep as you may call it. Then such moments become gradually longer and longer, the soul comes more and more in such conditions, until it is able to orient itself entirely in the spiritual world.

Also this makes difficulties to get clear ideas of the way how the soul perceives his environment after it went through the gate of death. We buried a dear anthroposophical friend in the last week, and on account of the wish of the dead I had the task to make a funeral celebration for her friends at the place where she died. In the time I spoke and directed my words to the dead person, the dead person was as it were like sleeping. Then the heat had an effect, the flames seized the body, and at this moment a moment of consciousness came over the soul, like a moment of orientation. The dead had the whole image of the funeral celebration and the funeral speech before herself, as somebody has something spatial at the same time before himself. Time becomes there really space. You do not see the past as you see the past running in time during life, but you see the past as something spatial before yourself. So that that which had already run off, which had happened a quarter of an hour before, then stood before the soul of the dead like the first lighting up moment of consciousness. Then a state of daze came again in the flooding light of consciousness to go in this condition towards those other conditions in which the soul gradually learns to orientate itself in the spiritual world.

It is important if we want to really get good ideas about the life after death for ourselves that we understand these quite different conceptions of time, that we see how there time is not something of which one can say, it has passed, and one remembers of the matters that happened in time, but the past stands there. Like the desk stands there and this desk does not go along with me when I go over there and look back at it, in the same way that remains after death which happened, which can be just only reminded, stands there; and the dead looks back at it as one looks back in the body at the spatial objects. This is very important to understand. Furthermore, that is of particular importance to understand that we really remain in connection, that our life on earth remains in connection with that what we experience between death and a new birth; at least it remains in close connection up to the point in time I called midnight hour in my last mystery drama.¹

Nevertheless, I would not like to fail to give our friends ideas of these relations to be difficultly described bit by bit. At that which we as earthly people have experienced between birth and death the soul, which has gone to death, looks back—but not, as if that which one has experienced there only would be there, but some conditions of life of the dead play a part in a peculiar way. The condition of life of the dead is not the same as the condition of life between birth and death of living people. The condition is such a one that the human being feels enclosed by his skin and looks out into the world by means of his senses. As soon as one enters as a dead the spiritual world, he/she has flowed out into the whole spiritual world. The soul feels like fulfilling the whole spiritual world bit by bit. What the human being has experienced during his physical earth existence, he feels like something that remains to him—not as a physical body, of course, but as that which constitutes the form, the forces of the physical body. This remains after death, but the soul has it as somebody has the human eye in the physical body. As you have the eye for seeing, you have then yourself, the life on earth, which you have experienced, as a cosmic sense-organ to perceive the world with it. What our eye is now for our body, this is our life on earth for our spiritual life after death.

Our life on earth is implanted to us as it were as an eye, as a sense-organ. You will understand gradually only after longer meditation what significant, actually, is pronounced that our life on earth becomes a sense-organ for our life between death and a new birth. That resembles to the process when the human being falls asleep and leaves the physical and etheric bodies with his ego and astral body. When initiation comes into being and the human being starts beholding in the spiritual world outside his physical and etheric bodies, then he knows: in the spiritual world you perceive like by means of a sense with the spiritual part of your physical body, and you think in the spiritual world with your etheric body. Your etheric body is real like your brain in the spiritual world and your former physical body is a sense-organ. However, you yourself are poured out with all your vital forces over the spiritual worlds. You have spread, you do not feel crowded together to one place because of your skin, and you feel poured out, extended over the spiritual world.

This is a quite different existence. With it is connected that somebody who himself enters the spiritual world, either by death, or by initiation, lives united with the other beings of the spiritual world, with beings of higher hierarchies or with human souls, which live between death and a new birth. However, he lives united with them in such a way that he does not experience them as you meet earthly men outside where you are separated spatially from them. But he experiences them as being contained in a common spiritual space, penetrating each other. What another soul experiences one does not experience by the fact that it says something, like with earthly people, but that one settles in the other soul and witnesses its thoughts. Hence, it is also that you can only be certain to experience that in yourself really what, for example, a dead experiences if you know: you are as it were in the dead, you do not only report something that you hear after the model of something which you experience on earth, but you hear: the dead himself speaks through your being.

I would also like to explain that to you by an example².

Into cosmic distances I will carry
My feeling heart, so that it grows warm
In the fire of the holy forces' working;

Into cosmic thoughts I will weave
My own thinking, so that it grows clear
In the light of the eternal life;

Into depths of soul I will sink
Devoted meditation, so that it grows strong
For the true goals of human activity;

In the peace of God I strive thus
Amidst Life's battles and cares
To prepare myself for the higher Self;

Aspiring for work in joy-filled peace,
Sensing cosmic being in my own being,
to fulfil my human duty;

May I live then in anticipation,
Oriented toward my soul's star
Which gives me my place in spirit realms.

I would like to put this before your souls as a clear example of the mysterious course which the human soul takes just through the point in time which separates the life between birth and death from the life between death and a new birth, where everything that was still external experience to us in the life on earth becomes internal wealth of the soul and lives in us that way. Here one takes on spiritual science still as something external. Immediately after death, however, it appears how it lives in the soul, yes, we say, as well as muscular strength now lives in our physical bodies. You have to feel that once if you want to grasp the internal sense, the internal meaning of that which spiritual science can be for the human soul. Then bit by bit you get a conception—you must have patience—of the quite different relations in the spiritual world. If we form words and concepts of the relations in the sensory world, we can give symbols at most of that what is in the spiritual world. You must work in patience towards concepts and sensations and feelings which express that fairly correctly and truly what the relations of the spiritual world are.

The logic of the life on earth—yes, there is only one logic of the life on earth—is already sometimes rather fragile for the life on earth. I have already stated how one can pass the real facts using the logic of the life on earth. I have often stated the example: assuming a person is walking along a brook. We see him falling into the brook. We rush over and find out that he is already dead. We see a stone where the person has fallen into the brook, and can now form a quite logical, but superficial judgment. We can say: the person has tripped over the stone, has fallen into the brook and drowned. He has died the death of drowning.—But this can be quite wrong. If one examines the matter purely anatomically, it can become apparent that the person had experienced a heart failure; thereby he fell in the water. The heart failure is the cause of his death. With the everyday correct logic we conclude wrongly. Such conclusions—this would be noted, only by the way—are made perpetually in human life and in particular in science. Science is full of such conclusions where cause and effect are mistaken.

But the matter becomes important when questions of human destiny are considered. We have experienced such a stroke of fate in Dornach in autumn, which is instructive in the most important sense. One evening the little, seven-year-old son of our member, Theo Faiss, who was an exceptionally dear, bright child, was reported missing. It was just during an evening lecture. The mother searched for the child, it was not to be found. When the lecture was over, one heard, actually, only that the mother misses her boy, and one could imagine nothing else that the death of the boy were in connection with a removal van, which had toppled over. A member of our society had let send his pieces of furniture in a removal van, and this removal van had toppled over in the evening where the boy stood. It was ten a quarter clock in the evening and we applied everything to lift the carriage. The mobilised military met us to help, to lift this removal van. The removal van was lifted, and one found the boy crushed under the carriage. Now think, in this area a removal van did never go generally before; nor thereafter. The boy was here, one could state this later by all possible things one calls incidents and chances, just in the time—it has concerned only minutes, around a moment—where the removal van toppled over. However, it was strange that first of all those who were here where the carriage had toppled over were only concerned to bring the horses to safety. One had no idea that the removal van had fallen on the little boy.

The child was dead. The materialist view may say: well, the removal van toppled over by chance there at this hour; the child got under it and was crushed. The materialist view will say that, of course. Before the spiritual view this is completely nonsense. For that what is there is the karma of the child, and this karma of the child steered all single circumstances. It has also steered the removal van there just at the hour when the child needed the death because the karma of the child wanted it. The karma of the child had expired. We deal here with the necessity to reverse cause and effect.

By such relations and the view of them one is able to ascend bit by bit to the real view of life which persuades us to reverse that what the external appearance presents to the senses. We must often turn around this. But the matter becomes quite significant when one experiences after that what comes into being by such a fact. The soul of a human being goes through the gate of death. This soul was embodied for seven years in a physical body. Why could the little Theo not have become also seventy, eighty, ninety years, externally considered if the karma had not made it impossible? An etheric body is there which could have supplied life still for decades; an etheric body which was really filled by forces of the eternal, of the good. It was an excellent boy.

You know that then the real individuality, the ego and astral body, go on their way. But the etheric body frees itself, this etheric body, in which all tender, nice forces are woven which have developed in the childhood, in which, however, all forces also live which come from the former incarnations. Now imagine what you have before you facing such an etheric body. The individuality comes from the former incarnations. It embodies itself anew in this incarnation; it implies what comes from previous incarnations. The life of this incarnation is as it were the fruit, realising that what was cause in a life in previous incarnations. Through the whole life these fruits could have enjoyed life to the full. Then everything would have gone into this etheric body what comes from the fruits of the former incarnations. This has not happened. In return everything is in this etheric body what still has causes in the former incarnations. And now the strangest thing is: somebody who tries to explore the aura of our Dornach construction finds this etheric body of the little Theo in the aura of the Dornach construction. There he is, there he hovers over, lives around the Dornach construction. He who has to deal with the Dornach construction or will still deal after that late autumn afternoon in which the little Theo went through the gate of death knows what has been changed in the spiritual aura of the Dornach construction by the fact that that etheric body was incorporated into this aura. This etheric body contains the forces which would else have been used for decades for the supply of a physical human body, and this etheric body is just poured out in this aura of the construction.

So mysterious are the ways that wisdom flooding through the world has to experience with its creatures. There are only correct ideas of the kind how the whole human life runs—to which in the most remarkable sense the life between death and a new birth belongs—if one goes into details of these matters. Because our anthroposophical movement should really be not anything abstract, but something in which we are with our whole being, in which also those are who just belong to us, we are also allowed to speak of such matters. We unite not only like other societies with a certain program, but we want to be with our whole souls in our spiritual-scientific movement. We want to conceive this spiritual-scientific movement as a concrete stream to which everybody belongs who really bears witness to it in a feeling way. We can say: there we speak as somebody just speaks in an enlarged family about the relatives there or there. For that what touches us, so to speak, in an informally familiar way gives us the highest, the most significant, the most important explanations of the spiritual world at the same time.

From such an attitude I would like to mention the death of one of our friends who are just often affected by deaths in the last time. Our infinitely dear friend Fritz Mitscher has recently gone through the gate of death. The necessity arose to me to subsume in words what the own soul felt, while it leant to the soul, which has just gone through the gate of death. Notice the difference between the preceding words which I have read out to you, and the words which I want to read out to you now. The words that I have read out just here are out of the soul of the dead. The words which I will read out to you now are stimulated in my own soul at the sight of the dead Fritz Mitscher, who was still combined with his etheric body. It is the impression which the dead made that is reported now in these words. Perhaps, you know that Fritz Mitscher was already as a young teacher at the most different place, especially in Berlin, active for our Anthroposophical Society. And many of us also know that he was just inclined in such a nice way to combine everything that he could acquire of earthly science and learning with the noblest, nicest anthroposophical consciousness. This also expresses itself after his death when in his whole being was combined what he was, and what shines now again after his death from the soul relieved of the body which still had its etheric body. And it seems to me that this had to be expressed what Fritz Mitscher was after death with the words, which I had to send on to him at the cremation.

A hope, filling us with happiness:
You entered the field
Where, through the power of soul being,
Earth's spirit blossoms
Reveal themselves to investigation.

Your longing was bound from the beginning
To pure truth-loving being;
To create out of spirit-light
Was the earnest life goal
For which you strove without rest.

You nurtured your beautiful gifts
To tread with steady steps
Bright paths of spirit-knowledge
As truth's true servant
Unperturbed by worldly contradiction

You trained your spirit-organs
That, with courage and persistence,
On both sides of the path
Repelled error for you
And made a space for truth for you.

For you, to form your Self
For the revelation of pure light
So the soul's sun-power
Might shine mightily within you
Was your life's concern and joy.

Other cares, other joys
Barely touched your soul,
For knowledge seemed to you to be
The light that gives existence meaning,
Seemed to your life's true value.

A hope, filling us with happiness:
You entered the field
Where, through the power of soul being,
Earth's spirit blossoms
Reveal themselves to investigation.

A loss that pains us deeply,
You disappeared from the field
Where the Spirit's earthly kernels
In the womb of soul being
Ripened your senses for the spheres.

Feel how we lovingly gaze
Into the heights that now
Call you to other works.
Give to the friends left behind
Your power from spirit-realms,

Hear our soul's entreaties
Sent to you in confidence and trust:
For our earthly work here we need
Strong forces from spirit-lands,
For which we thank dead friends.

A hope, filling us with happiness,
A loss that pains us deeply:
Allow us to hope, that you, far-near,
Unlost, light our life
As a soul-star in spirit-realm.

These are the words which were sent to the dead out of the being of the dead. And then some time passed after these words were spoken at the cremation, and out of the being of the dead, not yet out of the well-organised consciousness, but like from the being sounding, there the following words sounded now from the dead in the night after the cremation.

For me, to form my Self
For the revelation of pure light
So the soul's sun-power
Might shine mightily within myself
Was my life's concern and joy.

Other cares, other joys
Barely touched my soul,
For knowledge seemed to me to be
The light that gives existence meaning,
Seemed to my life's true value.

The words sounded back that way. Only after that I myself found out that two stanzas which are in the middle can be converted immediately from “you” to “I” and from “to you” to “to me.” I did not know that before. Since I heard the stanzas as I read them to you first. And now they came back from the being of the dead, spoken by him:

That shows that as well as in the time in which the consciousness does not yet have the shape which the soul has then again after this time through the whole realm between death and new birth, it shows as even in lively transformation, in meaningful transformation the words come from the dead. You have only to feel the spiritual-scientific world view becoming really alive creating the connection between the physical and the spiritual worlds. For it may run like a shiver through our souls when we feel at such an example how the words are called to the dead—and he returns them changed to us. Like we feel on one side that they went to the dead because they resound from him, not only like an echo, but meaningfully changed by him.

These are matters that give us the certainty, the confidence also for our present that the souls living here in earthly bodies are connected with the spiritual powers weaving and prevailing in the world. In this stream of prevailing and weaving spiritual powers the deceased are woven, are in it, because in it they experience their further postmortal destinies.

If we allow the connection of the physical and spiritual worlds to have an effect on our souls, we can contemplate various things. I pointed already once also here to the fact that with this cooperation of the physical and spiritual worlds proceeding in the concrete sense also the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha comes near to us. We know that now we only start contemplating the sense and meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha and Christ Being by spiritual science completely. Up to now the human beings did that by means of reason. And what did result from this reason? If the effectiveness of Christ had depended in the human earth-life on that what the human beings have understood of it, the effectiveness of the Christ Impulse on earth could had been not very strong. The human beings have understood theological squabbling, all kinds of disputes in their reason, that was they understood of Christianity. But Christ has had an effect out of lively power.

I have probably stated also here the example of the battle which Constantine fought against Maxentius, by which the fate of Europe was decided at that time. Thus Christianity was only accepted, actually, and became then the ruling power in Europe. This battle was not won through the art of strategy nor by the armies of Constantine. Maxentius had to defend Rome. By looking up in the Sibylline Books and by a dream, which he had, it was put in his head that he should lead his army out of Rome. Then he would destroy the enemies of Rome. His army was five times stronger than that of Constantine, who approached Rome. Now he really led his army out of Rome, strategically the most inept what he could do. Since according to strategy everything spoke well of letting his army in Rome and letting the hostile armies approach. However, he led his army out of Rome. Also on the side of Constantine who led his armies against Rome these were not warlike-scientific reasons which gave him the strength, but he also had a dream. The dream said to him: if you allow bearing the monogram of Christ in front of your army, you will defeat Rome.—At that time and still for later the whole map of Europe was transformed through the victory of Constantine with his weaker army. Also the spiritual life of Europe has thereby become different. That what people could understand in those days would not have been sufficient to accomplish these achievements. The Christ Impulse had an effect in the subconsciousness of the human beings, in that what lived in the depths of the souls what people only could dream of, what came up to them at most in dream pictures.

We have a later, quite important example of the effectiveness of the Christ Impulse with the Maid of Orleans.³ Who studies history really, not as one often studies history today, but that one tries to recognise the real connections, he can know that again the fate of Europe was absolutely determined for the next centuries through that what the Maid of Orleans did. Neither strategy, nor the wisdom of the politicians, but that what the shepherd girl of Orleans did was vital for the destiny of Europe, especially also for the destiny of France. Now, however, the Christ Impulse worked in the Maid of Orleans, through its Michaelic representative. It worked into the soul of the Maid of Orleans. Her soul was completely infiltrated, inspired by the Christ Impulse. Exactly in the same way as in those days when the battle was decided between Constantine and Maxentius the Christ Impulse worked, without people knowing about it in their upper consciousness. The Christ Impulse also worked there, when the Maid of Orleans sent the French armies against the English armies. The whole continent would have changed, also England if at that time France had not won. Also England would not be that what she has become if she had not been defeated. However, the subconscious forces which came up in dream pictures caused the victory. The abilities of the Maid of Orleans were inspired by them. So that you can say: what the Maid of Orleans did was influenced through a more or less unaware initiation. It is of course an unaware, you may also say, an atavistic initiation. A clean psychic vessel had to be seized just unconsciously, as it was the Maid of Orleans through whom the Christ Impulse could work, by his Michaelic representative—a clean vessel.

Let us look at the matter more exactly. If anybody today goes consciously through an initiation—there are rules for that. The ABC is in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?” There are rules by which one is able to develop gradually. One cannot speak of such a conscious initiation in the case of the Maid of Orleans. But a spirit which is otherwise not united with the human soul had to take its place in this human soul, to permeate this human soul. Especially favourable circumstances had to come into being. A spirit of higher spheres cannot always intervene in the souls who are enabled for it. Especially favourable circumstances must occur, so that a single human being comes in connection with higher worlds without initiation, without conscious work on himself. Especially favourable circumstances exist in the time when as it were the spirit of the earth is particularly awake: in the time from the 25th December to the 6th January. When in summer the sun stands highest, when the physical heat radiates mostly to the earth, then the conditions of initiation are the worst because then the spirit of the earth is sleeping. The spirit of the earth is the most awake in the winter darkness, at the winter solstice.

Hence, it is not only a legend, but corresponds to a truth when it is told in old legends that during the thirteen nights which precede the 6th January certain particularly suitable souls were initiated, so that they could go into the spiritual world, that they could experience there what we call Kamaloka and devachan. We here in Hanover probably remember that the legend of Olaf Åsteson⁴ was once reported who—sleeping for these thirteen nights—went through the whole way which can be the way through Kamaloka and devachan. Olaf Åsteson tells then what he experienced during these thirteen days.

If the external physical darkness of the earth is the strongest, the conditions are the most favourable to lead a soul into in the spiritual world. It would have been the most favourable for souls like the Maid of Orleans, who are initiated for the whole humankind for such an action not by directly conscious exercising but by especially favourable circumstances, if she could have slept during the thirteen nights. Thus she could have been brought into connection with the spiritual world; if she could have accomplished that in a sleeping state. The Maid of Orleans went really through such a sleeping state. For the Maid of Orleans spent these thirteen days up to the 6th January in the body of her mother in a condition in which the human being still sleeps. Since the human being only wakes up for the physical life when he is born and does the first gasp. With the Maid of Orleans the last sleeping nights of the embryo fall in the time of the thirteen nights, because she was born on the 6th January. There you have a deeply significant internally historical connection. There you have the basis of the mission of the Maid of Orleans, who was chosen to receive the initiation as this clean soul before her first gasp during the last thirteen nights of the pregnancy of her mother, in this sleeping state, just under the especially favourable circumstances of the earth-life. The calendar shows it simply to you. Open the calendar: on the 6th January you find the birthday of the Maid of Orleans. The calendar shows you how here a deeply intimate connection exists between the physical world and the processes in the spiritual world. Of course, it was necessary that the soul of the Maid of Orleans was prepared by her preceding incarnations. During the thirteen nights this soul and that what could come from this soul made it possible just at this point of the human development that the spiritual world was able to influence the physical world.

The spiritual world with its ingredients is always there. The spiritual world is always among us. The ways of working in the physical world are manifold, which the spiritual world selects. And our consciousness of the connection with the spiritual world becomes stronger and stronger, the more we express the connections between the physical and spiritual worlds especially deeply in such details, while such connections stand vividly in front of our souls.

On the other side, one must say: also that what happens here in the physical world may prepare a kind of connection with the spiritual world and our physical world. And if anybody who has taken up that as intensely as Fritz Mitscher what flows through our spiritual science, and then went across in the spiritual world in the thirtieth year of his life—on the 26th February his thirtieth birthday would be—and has infiltrated his soul with that what can penetrate as a strength into the soul by our spiritual science, then we have a powerful individuality who will further stay together with us in the spiritual world who is an assistant of the most immense kind. And if you imagine how difficult the striving for spiritual science is just in our time, in this time which is, nevertheless, completely impregnated with materialism. Then one may also say that he who is connected with all the fibers of his life with the spiritual world has the biggest hopes for those who can become spiritual assistants who become spiritual assistants after they have laid down their physical bodies. One does not need to say, of course, that the passage through the gate of death is never allowed to be a personal decision, but that it must be caused only by karma. These spiritual assistants are those who give us consolation and hope if we see how difficult it is, just in the present, to provide for our spiritual-scientific movement because of the manifold inhibitions. However, we know how higher spiritual forces have an effect on earth, so that the current of the spiritual worlds flows into the purposes of the physical earth. Thus the unused forces of the human souls come up to the spiritual worlds to work there just with their forces, combined with other forces. Hence, I said the words to our Fritz Mitscher in my obituary really from the bottom of my heart:

Hear our souls' entreaties
Sent to you in confidence and trust:
For our earthly work here we need
Strong forces from spirit-lands,
For which we thank dead friends.

When we try to advance our spiritual movement to its purpose honestly, then we are aware that in the forces which we apply here on earth also those forces are working which our friends already brought through the gate of death into the spiritual world.

We summarise now all that also for the understanding of the general situation of the world. On one side, the human souls who go now due to the destiny-burdened events through the gate of death carry their etheric bodies to the folk-souls. On the other side, they carry everything that they have summoned up in sacrificial devotion, while they have gone just by these events through the gate of death with their individualities. And all that will be poured out as effectiveness into the coming age. It is the matter of the human beings who then experience peace to produce the connection with that what will be there in the spiritual world. Those who today experience as mothers and fathers, as brothers and sisters or other relatives the death on the battlefield of a human being dear to them can take up the fact in their consciousness that with the etheric body something extremely significant passes over into the general effectiveness of the earthly humankind for the future. Not only that they can know that the individualities go invigorated by death to a later stronger life on earth, but they can also know: that what the warrior after death has handed over to the folk-soul weaves and lives really. Fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers have those who have gone young through the gate of death twice, one must say, now in the folk-soul and also as individuality. This idea will only be of great value when it has completely become feeling, so that one does not only speak of immortality, but that one knows in the feeling: the dead are there, are among us. If this bond is such a strong one that also for our feeling death will be, actually, an untruth. Since the dead can appear even more real than often in the physical embodiment if he can take together everything of his being and if he does no longer have his physical body as an obstacle. Immense currents of consolation, currents of internal strength of self-consolation go out from that what spiritual science can give to the souls in lively consciousness and lively sensations. When this is felt that way, then in particular those who bear witness to spiritual science can look full of consolation into the future. They can feel something like twilight in the turn of an era during these present, destiny-burdened events after which a time of sunny peace will also follow. But important will be in the spiritual effectiveness of this time of sunny peace that what is won through the sacrificial deaths of so many people.

That can be made fruitful here on earth particularly creating a bridge, a connection between the living human beings who are incarnated in physical bodies here on earth and the souls who are above and want to radiate down that which they have taken with them. Here it is where the real understanding of spiritual science knocks on our hearts and asks us to do that what we can do from the consciousness we have gained by spiritual science what we can do feeling, so that the great, destiny-exciting, painful events of the present time, as far as we are concerned, contribute to the fertility and welfare of humankind. Those who know something about spiritual science can know feeling and feel knowing by which means the bridge is built up into the spiritual world: because the souls, who remained on earth, send the thoughts and sensations which can be enkindled by spiritual science. The horizon for that will be a horizon of peace. Above, the souls will be who send down spiritual beams of light. Below, human beings must be who have learnt to send such thoughts and feelings out of their souls from below which are stimulated by spiritual science. If there are really souls who turn their senses conscious of spirit to the spirit land, then the bridge will be built, then the time will have come when just through such painful, destiny-burdened events, as they happen in our time, an intimate bond must be woven between the physical and spiritual worlds, for which we strive by our spiritual science.

So we summarise what should be our knowledge and our task and what should arouse confidence in the words:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the grief of the bereaved,
From the nation's sacrifices
Will grow up the fruits of spirit
If souls aware of spirit turn
Their senses to the spirit land.

• 1. The Soul's Awakening in Four Mystery Dramas, volume 14 of Steiner's Collected Works
• 2. Lina Grosheintz-Rohrer
• 3. Maid of Orleans (1412-1431)
• 4. Cosmic New Year. The Dream Song of Olaf Åsteson. Lecture (Hanover, 1st January 1912) in The Connection Between the Human Being and the Elemental World … volume 158 of Steiner's Collected Works

The question often arises today as to why the teachings of spiritual science must be imparted now, while one hundred and twenty years ago, for instance, one heard nothing of it. Actually, the communication of spiritual truths has always taken place, but in a different form from today. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the teachings penetrated out of small brotherhoods and, for well-considered reasons, were put into writing not by the originators but by other people. Only scanty accounts penetrated out of those early mystery schools. One can still find today, however, one or two books in whose dim pages—dim only on the surface—are quite wonderful things. Such a book, Aurea Catena Homeri, was mentioned by Goethe. What its pages reveal will seem like fantasy or nonsense to modern readers, especially the most “enlightened.” If one approaches this “nonsense” with the tools of spiritual science, however, one will find something quite different. The greatest secrets are disclosed to one who studies its pages carefully. In earlier times, only a few individuals could advance into this occult science, but now there is unlimited opportunity for everyone whose heartfelt longing leads him there. How has this come about and why may these secrets now be brought to the public?

There is almost no historical age that cannot be described as a time of transition. Every age is asserted to be so, with more or less justification. Our present time, however, in which such fundamental events are occurring, can rightly be called an era of transition. To understand the deep foundations of our time, it is necessary to consider some well-known facts. We are approaching an era in which the ascent to higher worlds must take place with clear, clairvoyant consciousness. The old clairvoyance of Atlantis expired in 3101 BC, and then the time came when human beings began to perceive everything around themselves with an understanding bound to the brain. (This date is not to be taken as an absolute but as an approximate date.) The clairvoyant consciousness of humanity had to be darkened for a certain time in order that man should fully master the physical plane. The lesser Kali Yuga, or the Dark Age, now began and lasted 5,000 years; it had run its course by 1899. Now a time is being prepared in which it will become possible for people to unfold delicate clairvoyant faculties even without special training. From 1930 to 1950 there will already be people who will say, “Around that person I can see something like a bright band of light.” Another will see something rising before him like a dream-picture with a strange content. If this person has just performed a deed or action, something will appear to him that will rise like a picture in his soul. This picture will show him what action he must undertake sooner or later to compensate for this deed. It may happen that a person in whom these faculties are found relates them to a friend who will perhaps tell him, “Yes, there have always been human beings who know what you have seen. They call it ‘the etheric body of man,’ and what rises up in you like a dream-picture they call ‘karma.’”

Spiritual science has had to appear so that this age of etheric clairvoyance, which redeems the age of thinking that is controlled by an understanding bound to the brain, should not pass by unrecognized. As the Christ had to have a forerunner, so spiritual science had to appear in order to prepare for this clairvoyant age. Something could certainly happen now that would crush the bud of these delicate faculties of soul. This danger exists when people will not listen to the teachings of spiritual science, when they close themselves to them. Then the persons in whom these faculties appear will be called fantastic and foolish and will be locked up in mental hospitals. Many will themselves believe that they have had hallucinations; others will be afraid to speak about them, dreading to be laughed at or ridiculed. All this can lead to destruction of the new faculties of soul. Clever and enlightened persons in that era—you can put “enlightened” in quotation marks—will then say, “Look here! People lived long ago who declared that in our age there would be individuals with special faculties of soul. Where are these people? We are not aware of them.” Nevertheless, the prophecy of spiritual science will have been fulfilled. Although everything could be stifled by the increasing power of materialism, one can expect from souls today an understanding for that freer and lighter age just beginning.

Everything that happens in the world has an effect on everything else. The microcosm corresponds to the macrocosm. Let us study the events in the world that are connected with us. People are so easily satisfied when they can assert the truth of something. For spiritual science, however, it is of less concern always to emphasize that something is true than that this truth is also important. Much, for instance, is spoken and written about the similarity between human and animal skeletons. That is certainly a fact to which there could be no objection; yet there are truths that are much, much more important. There is, for example, the truth everyone can observe, a fact standing right before our eyes and yet connected with a great cosmic event. This is the truth that man is the only being who walks erect, who has raised himself up. Concerning the oft-mentioned similarity of the human skeleton to that of the ape, the erect gait of the ape has been botched. The ape tried to raise himself up but did not succeed. His erect gait is bungled. The erect gait of man is directly connected with the sun and the earth, with their spiritual working one upon the other. In order for man to walk upright, the sun and earth had to separate from each other. The animal is earthbound, but man has raised himself, and his countenance is turned upward. He walks in a vertical line, and with his erect gait he is a continuation of the earth's radius. That this truth is of importance is something we must feel; we must learn to feel it.

Let us look at another important instance of correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm. In outer form a human being appears as either masculine or feminine. It is important to consider, however, that only in the outer form is one a man or a woman, not in one's inner being (we are speaking now of the outer characteristics in one incarnation). What contrast in the macrocosm corresponds to what appears in us as masculine and feminine? To clarify this, we must cast a glance into world space. There we find material substances that have remained backward; they have not taken on the laws of the sun and earth but have remained at the ancient Moon stage of evolution. Just the opposite is the case with the present moon, which is a body that has precipitated its own evolution. On account of this, it has become too strongly hardened. It had to dry up and freeze because it overshot its normal development. It is a future Jupiter condition that has miscarried, as if in human life a child had the constitution of an old man. The moon has thus missed its strength by going too far, thereby causing its own death.

In general, people will swear to a truth if it comes to them as an abstract principle; in concrete terms, however, this same truth appears to them as illusion. In all theosophical books one finds the remark that the world is an illusion or maya. Every theosophist knows this as truth and often repeats it. To say that the masculine or feminine body is only an illusion contributes something concrete to the abstraction. It is a fact that neither the masculine nor the feminine body, with the exception of the head, is properly developed. The feminine body is not fully developed, whereas the masculine has gone too far in its development. There is no middle position here. The feminine form is untrue in its backwardness, the masculine because it went too far beyond the middle position of development. Great artists have always felt these imperfections. Clothing arose from an exalted feeling for this fact. The ancient robes of priests were supposed to represent what the human body should be. Only sensual people can devote themselves to nudist colonies, because they recognize no higher expression than the body they see before them.

There is thus a lunar body, the moon, which has gone too far in its evolution, and such bodies as have remained at an earlier stage of evolution, namely, the comets. You may ask what all this has to do with man and woman. A comet brings with it the laws of the earlier Moon and therefore renews these ancient laws. It also brings with it the cyanide compounds, as has recently been established by outer science and has been known for a long time to occult science. Just as oxygen and carbon compounds are necessary to us on earth, so the cyanides were essential on the ancient Moon. In 1906 I enlarged on this in Paris, at the annual meeting of the Theosophical Society, in the presence of Colonel Olcutt, our president at that time, and various others. (see Note 2)

Because a woman's body has remained behind in its development, it has preserved a softer, more flexible, less substantial materiality; her brain can more easily be ruled by the spirit. A man, however, having rushed ahead in his development, now has difficulty prevailing over his rigid material and more impermeable brain substance. For this reason, a woman is more receptive to new ideas, her soul takes possession of them, and she can more easily direct her thoughts through the brain. It is harder for a man to set into motion the rigid parts of his brain. It thus stands to reason that there are, for example, more women than men in the Theosophical Society, a fact much deplored on various sides. Perhaps the men who stand in such dread of appearing as women in a later incarnation will find these thoughts somewhat consoling.

We will now apply the law of correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm, between the large and small worlds, to another important matter. Just as in ordinary life we have our humdrum days—waking up, going to bed, waking up again, going about our usual tasks—so it is also in the far reaches of space. There, too, everything goes about its usual course; the rising and setting of the sun are repeated in a regular rhythm. Just as a family's methodical pace is interrupted when a child appears, since a completely new impulse enters earthly existence with a new spiritual being, so the appearance of a new heavenly body, such as a comet, has the same effect in space. All material is the expression of something spiritual, and occult science is able to indicate what lies behind the phenomena. The way in which modern science tries to occupy itself with comets is similar to a fly observing the Sistine Madonna. When it crawls over the Madonna, it certainly sees the colors, sees a spot of red here, a spot of blue there, but beyond this it sees nothing at all. This “fly-science”—the term is naturally used only in reference to what was mentioned above—knows nothing of the inner lawfulness whose outer sign is the comet. Halley's Comet particularly has the tendency to drive humanity still further into materialism. Without Halley's Comet, the books of the Encyclopedists would not have appeared, and there would not have been articles by Moleschott and Büchner after 1835. Today the ominous sign of the comet is appearing again, and if people do not listen to the teachings of spiritual science and do not make use of what is offered through it, spirituality will receive a death-blow. (see Note 4)

There is another significant sign, however, one that makes it possible for humanity to escape the destructive influence of the comet; its forces are even stronger than the comet's. This is the spring sign of Pisces, the Fish, in which we have stood for several centuries; at the time of Christ the vernal equinox was in the constellation of Aries, the Ram. We are thus well into this sign of great spiritual forces that will carry us upward. Through understanding these forces, we will develop the faculties that we will be able to attain in this age of Pisces.

Man rises to true human dignity only when he grasps from the depths the relationships that lie at the foundation of the spiritual. People should not rush so blindly past what the heavenly signs have to show them. Wisdom should inflame and enlighten its association with small and great. You may take as an example of this the wisdom-filled organization of an anthill. There the whole has a meaning; every ant feels itself to be a member of a whole. Human beings, however, regulate their social life according to what each individual considers useful for himself. They run around each other senselessly, without understanding. Human life is really nonsensical in many ways.

Whenever a person takes on an inner discipline, however, he makes himself ripe for what should be brought forward as a third fact: the possibility of looking out into the etheric with newly awakened faculties. There the soul will see what Paul once saw: the Christ in His etheric body. Without books and documents this great event—the second coming of Christ—will take place for those who have made themselves worthy of it. It is the obligation of anthroposophy to announce this. There are already human beings who sense that we have overcome the Dark Age and are approaching a more luminous era. Anthroposophists must walk this path consciously. Anthroposophy must bring its fruits to humanity, so that souls are made capable of uniting themselves with Christ. Whether these souls inhabit a physical body or not makes no difference; He has descended to the dead as well as to the living. The great and sublime event of Christ's appearance in the etheric thus has significance for all the world.