The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Report by Rudolf Steiner in Lucifer-Gnosis no. 34/1907

It was the task of the German Section of the Theosophical Society to organize this year's congress of the “Federation of European Sections”. It is therefore more fitting that here, from within the circle of the organizers, there is less talk of what has been achieved and more of what has been intended and striven for. For the organizers know only too well how little of what was achieved has been achieved, and how much has been achieved that could not be achieved on such an occasion. Therefore, the following should only be understood as a description of the underlying ideas.

Munich was chosen as the venue: the time was the days of Pentecost, May 18, 19, 20 and 21. The questions that the organizers asked themselves in their preparations were: How can the task of the Theosophical movement be expressed within the current spiritual life through such a congress? How can it give a picture of the ideals and aims of the theosophical work? Since the event is naturally limited by the circumstances, it can only provide a limited answer to these questions. It now seems particularly important that the comprehensive character of the theosophical movement be emphasized on such occasions. First of all, the focus of this movement is the cultivation of a worldview based on knowledge of the supernatural. And at such a congress, people come together who, in the spirit of such a worldview, work across all national borders and other human differences on spiritual ideals that are common to all of humanity. Mutual inspiration in the best sense will be the most beautiful fruit of such events. In addition, it will be shown how the theosophical work should really be integrated into the whole of life in our time. For the spiritual foundation of this movement cannot be called upon to express itself only in thoughts and ideas, in theories and so on; rather, as a content of the soul that has emerged in our time, it can have a fertilizing effect on all branches of human activity. Theosophy can only be grasped in the right sense if we set it the ideal of inspiring not only the imagination and the human soul, but the human being as a whole. If we wish to interpret its mission in this sense, we may recall how, for example, the world view of the corresponding time found expression in the buildings and sculptures (e.g. the Sphinx) of the Egyptians. The ideas of the Egyptian worldview were not only thought by the souls; they were made visible in the environment of the human eye. And think of how everything that is known of Greek sculpture and drama is the worldview of the Greek soul, shaped in stone and depicted in poetry. Consider how in medieval painting Christian ideas and feelings were revealed to the eye, how in the Gothic period Christian devotion took form and shape. A true harmony of the soul can only be experienced where the human senses are reflected in form, shape and color and so on as an environment, which the soul knows as its most valuable thoughts, feelings and impulses. Out of such thoughts arises the intention to give a picture of theosophical striving in the external form of the event at a congress. The room in which the meeting takes place can reflect the theosophical feeling and thinking around the visitor. According to our circumstances, we could not do more than sketch out what might be considered an ideal in this regard. We had decorated the assembly hall in such a way that a fresh, stimulating red formed the basic color of all the walls. This color was intended to express the basic mood of the celebration in an external view. It is obvious that some people will object to the use of “red” for this purpose. These objections are justified as long as one relies on an esoteric judgment and experience. They are well known to the esotericist, who nevertheless, in accordance with all occult symbolism, must use the color red for the purpose in question. For him, it is not a matter of what the part of his being feels that is devoted to the immediate sensual environment; but what the higher self experiences in the spiritual realm while the external environment is physically seen in red. And that is the exact opposite of what the ordinary sensation of “red” says. Esoteric knowledge says: “If you want to attune yourself in your innermost being as the gods were attuned when they gave the world the green plant cover, then learn to endure ‘red’ in your surroundings as they had to.” This indicates a reference to the higher human nature in relation to “red” that the genuine [esotericist] has in mind when he presents the two opposing entities of the creative world ground in the occult symbolism in such a way that, downward, the green as a sign of the earthly, upward the “red” as a sign of the heavenly (elohistic) creative powers. Much more could be said about the reasons for opposing this color, and much could be said in refutation of these arguments. However, it may suffice here to make this brief comment: this color was chosen in accordance with occultism.

On the walls (on both sides and at the back wall) were placed the so-called seven apocalyptic seals in a size appropriate for the room. They represent certain experiences of the astral world in pictures. There is a story behind them. At first, some viewers may mistake such pictorial representations for ordinary symbols. But they are much more than that. Anyone who simply wants to interpret what is depicted in them symbolically with the mind has not penetrated the spirit of the matter. One should experience the content of these seven pictures with one's whole soul, with one's undivided mind; one should shape it inwardly in one's soul in terms of form, color and content, so that it lives inwardly in the imagination. For this content corresponds to very specific astral experiences of the clairvoyant. What the clairvoyant wants to express in such images is not at all an arbitrary symbol, or even a straw-thin allegory, but something that is best illustrated by way of comparison. Take a person who is illuminated in a room by a light in such a way that his shadow is visible on a wall. The shadow is in some respects similar to the person casting the shadow. But it is a two-dimensional image of a three-dimensional being. Just as the shadow relates to the person, so what is depicted in the apocalyptic seals relates to certain experiences of the clairvoyant in the astral world. The seals are, of course, in a figurative sense, silhouettes of astral processes. Therefore, they are not arbitrary representations of an individual, but anyone who is familiar with the corresponding supersensible processes will find their silhouettes in the physical world. Such things cannot be invented in their essential content, but are taken from the existing teachings of the secret scientists. A student of these matters may have noticed that some of our seals correspond with what he finds in this or that work, but others do not. The reason for this is that some of the imaginations of occult science have already been communicated in books; but the most important part – and the true part – may only now, in our time, be made public. And part of the theosophical work must consist in handing over to the public some of the material which has hitherto been kept strictly secret by the appointed custodians. This is demanded by the development of the spiritual life of our time by the exponents of occult science.

It is the development of humanity, the expression of which in the astral world must form one of the most essential foundations of occult knowledge, which is expressed in these seven seals. The Christian esotericist will recognize them in a certain way in the descriptions of the “Revelation of St. John”. But the form they presented in our festival hall corresponds to the secret-scientific spiritual current that has been the dominant one in the West since the fourteenth century. The mysteries of existence, as they are reflected in these images, represent ancient wisdom; the clairvoyants of the various epochs of humanity see them from different points of view. Therefore, according to the necessary developmental needs of the times, the forms change somewhat. In the “Revelation of St. John” it is “set in signs” what is to happen “in brief”. Those who know how to read a secret-scientific form of expression properly know that this means nothing other than a reference to the secret-scientific signs for certain imaginations that can be experienced in the astral world and that are related to the nature of man as it reveals itself in time. And the Rosicrucian Seals also represent the same. Only very sketchily, with a few words, shall the infinitely rich content of the seals be interpreted. Basically everything - even the seemingly most insignificant - in these pictures means something important. The first seal represents man's entire evolution in the most general way. In the “Revelation of St. John” this is indicated with the words: “And being turned, I saw seven golden candlesticks; and in the midst of the seven candlesticks one like unto the Son of Man, clothed with a garment down to the foot, and girt about upon his chest with a golden girdle. His head and hair were white like wool, as white as snow, and his eyes were like a flame of fire. His feet were like brass glowing in a furnace, and his voice was like the rushing of many waters. And he had seven stars in his right hand; and out of his mouth came a sharp, two-edged sword; and his face shone like the bright sun.” In general terms, such words point to the most comprehensive secrets of human development. If one wanted to present in detail what each of the deeply significant words contains, one would have to write a thick volume. Our seal depicts such things. Among the physical organs and forms of expression of the human being, some represent, in their present form, the downward stages of development of earlier forms, and have thus already passed their peak. Others, however, represent the initial stages of development and are, as it were, the rudiments of what they are to become in the future. The esotericist must know these secrets of development. The organ of speech represents an organ that will be much higher and more perfect in the future than it is at present. By pronouncing this, one touches on a great secret of existence, which is often also called the “mystery of the creative word”. This gives a hint of the future state of the human speech organ, which will become a spiritual organ of production (procreation) when the human being is spiritualized. In myths and religions, this spiritual production is indicated by the appropriate image of a “sword” coming out of the mouth. In this way, every line and every point in the picture signifies something that is connected with the secret of human development. The fact that such pictures are made does not merely arise from a need for a sensualization of the supersensible processes, but it corresponds to the fact that living into these pictures - if they are the right ones - really means an arousal of forces that lie dormant in the human soul, and through the awakening of which the representations of the supersensible world emerge. It is not right for the supersensible worlds to be described only in schematic terms in theosophy; the true path is to awaken the imagination to the images presented in these seals. (If the occultist does not have such images at hand, he should verbally describe the higher worlds in appropriate images.) - The second seal, with the appropriate accessories, represents one of the first stages of development of humanity on earth. In its primeval times, humanity on earth had not yet developed what is called the individual soul. What was still present at that time, and what is still found in animals today, is the group soul. Anyone who can follow the old human group souls on the astral plane through imaginative clairvoyance will find the four types of group soul represented in the four apocalyptic animals of the second seal: the lion, the bull, the eagle and the man. This touches on the truth of what is often so dryly allegorized in the interpretation of the four animals. The third seal represents the secrets of the so-called harmony of the spheres. Man experiences these secrets in the interval between death and a new birth (in the “spirit land” or what is called “Devachan” in the usual theosophical literature). However, the account is not given as it is experienced in the “spirit realm” itself, but rather as the events of this realm are reflected in the astral world. It must be noted that all seven seals are experiences of the astral world; however, the other worlds can be seen in their reflections in the astral. The angels blowing trumpets in the picture represent the original spiritual beings of the world phenomena; the book with the seven seals indicates that the mysteries of existence are “unsealed” in the experiences illustrated in this picture. The “four horsemen of the Apocalypse” represent the stages of human development through long earth cycles. The fourth seal represents, among other things, two pillars, one rising from the sea and the other from the earth. These pillars hint at the secret of the role played by red (oxygen-rich) blood and blue-red (carbon-rich) blood in human development, and how this blood changes in line with human development from distant primeval times to distant future times. The letters on these pillars point to this developmental secret in a way known only to the initiated. (Old interpretations of the two letters given in public writings or in certain societies remain only a superficial, exoteric interpretation.) The book in the cloud points to a future state of man in which all his knowledge will be internalized. In the Book of Revelation we find the significant words: “And I took a little book out of the angel's hand, and ate it up...”

The sun in the picture points to a cosmic process that will take place at the same time as the marked future stage of humanity; the earth will enter into a completely different relationship with the sun than it currently does in the cosmos. And everything is depicted in the picture so that all the arrangements of the parts, all the details and so on, correspond exactly to specific real processes. The fifth seal represents the further development of man in the future in a cosmos in which the conditions just indicated will have occurred. The future human being, who will have a different relationship to the sun than the present one, is represented by the “woman who gives birth to the sun”; and the power that he will then have over certain forces of the world, which today express themselves in his lower nature, is represented by the “sun woman” standing on the beast with the seven heads and ten horns. The woman has the moon under her feet: this points to a later cosmic relationship between the sun, earth and moon. The sixth seal represents the evolved human being with even greater power over the lower forces of the universe. The way the image expresses this is reminiscent of Christian esotericism: Michael holds the dragon bound. Finally, the seventh seal is that of the “Mystery of the Grail”, as it was in the esoteric current beginning in the fourteenth century. In the picture there is a cube, representing the world of space, from which the world serpent arises from all sides of the cube, insofar as it represents the higher forces living out in the lower: From the mouth of the snake comes the world line (as a spiral), the symbol of the purified and refined world forces; and from this arises the “holy grail,” which is confronted by the “dove.” All of this points - and quite appropriately - to the mystery of the creation of the world, of which the earthly one is a lower reflection. The deepest mysteries lie in the lines and figures and so on of this seal. Between each two seals a column was inserted. These seven columns could not be executed in plastic form; they had to be painted as a substitute. But they are definitely intended as real architectural forms and correspond to the “seven pillars” of the “true Rosicrucian temple”. (Of course, the arrangement in Munich does not quite correspond to that in the “Rosicrucian Temple of Initiation”, because there each such column is duplicated, so that when one walks from the back wall towards the front, one passes through fourteen columns, two of which are always facing each other. This is only a hint for those who know the true facts; for us, only a general idea of the meaning of this column secret should be awakened). The capitals of these columns represent the planetary development of our solar system. Our Earth is, after all, the fourth embodiment in a planetary developmental system, and in the ways it is configured it points to three future embodiments. (More exact details about this can be found in the articles in this journal headed 'From the Akasha Chronicle'. The seven successive embodiments of the Earth are referred to as the Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan states. In the representations commonly used in esoteric studies, the Vulcan state is omitted as being too far in the future, and for reasons that would take us too far afield to discuss here, the Earth's development is divided into a Martian and a Mercury state. (These reasons can also be found in the essays on the “Akasha Chronicle”. These seven embodiments of the earth: Saturn, Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter and Venus are now expressed in esotericism by seven column capitals. The inner life of each of these states of development is depicted in the forms of these capitals. Here, too, the intention is that one should not delve into the forms of the capitals intellectually, but entirely through the feelings, in a truly artistic experience and in the imagination. For every line, every curve, everything about these forms is such that when you immerse yourself in them, you awaken dormant powers in your soul; and these powers lead to ideas about the great mysteries of the world that underlie the cosmic and related human development of the earth. Anyone who might criticize the design of such columns should consider that the Corinthian and Ionic columns, for example, also emerged from the embodiment of the secrets of existence, and that such facts are only unknown to the materialistic way of thinking of our time. From the way the motives of world development are expressed in these column capitals, one can gauge how esotericism is to have a fruitful effect on art. The ancient columns, too, are born out of esotericism. And the architecture of the future will have to present to people what the esoteric worldview of Theosophy can give as a hint today.

In Munich, for example, an attempt has been made to sketch out an interior in the spirit of the Theosophical worldview; of course, only some of the relevant information could be provided, and even that only in general terms, and above all not in the precise order that would be most appropriate. But the aim was only to evoke a sense of what was important. The esoteric symbolism of the room in which we were meeting also included two columns at the front of the hall. What they signify can be seen from the description of the fourth seal, which also contains the two columns. They point to the mystery of blood and contain the “mystery of human development”. The color of the pillars is connected with the blood secret. One is red; the other is a deep blue-red. Esoteric science writes four deeply significant sayings on these two pillars. When the human soul immerses itself in these four sayings in meditation, then entire secrets of the world and of humanity well up from their depths. Many books would have to be written to exhaust the full meaning of these sayings, for not only is every word significant, but so is the symmetry of the words, the way they are distributed among the four sayings, the intensifications that lie within them, and much more, so that only long, patient devotion to the matter can exhaust what lies within. The four sayings of the “Pillar of Wisdom” in English are:

In pure thought you find
the self that can sustain itself.

When you transform thought into image,
you experience creative wisdom.

If you condense feeling into light,
you reveal the forming power.

If you reify will into being,
you create in the world's being.

We tried to express the fundamental mood that we wanted to express in our “inner space” in the program book that was given to visitors. After the significance of the red color in esoteric symbolism has been discussed above, there is no need to say anything more about the red cover of this book. On this cover (in the upper left corner) there is a black cross entwined with red roses in a blue oval field; to the right of it are the letters: E. D. N. - J. C.M. - P. S. S. R. - These are the ten initial letters of the words by which true Rosicrucianism is summarized in a single sentence: “Ex deo nascimur, in Christo morimur, per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.” The cross symbol, entwined with roses, expresses the meaning of Rosicrucianism in an esoteric way. In view of the relationship that our event has established with Rosicrucianism through such things, it seems necessary to point out serious misunderstandings that are brought to it. Here and there, people have tried to form an idea of Rosicrucianism based on historical tradition. Of those who have formed an opinion of it in this way, some at present look upon it with a certain benevolence; but most look upon it as charlatanry, enthusiasm or something of that kind, perhaps worse. It may readily be conceded that If Rosicrucianism were what it appears to be to those who know of it only from historical documents and traditions, it would certainly not be worthy of the attention of any rational man. But at the present time no one knows anything about true Rosicrucianism who has not approached it through the medium of occult science. Outside the circle of occult science there are no authentic records of it, for the name stands for the spiritual current mentioned here, which has set the tone in the Occident since the fourteenth century. Only now may we begin to communicate to the public some of the secrets of Rosicrucianism. In drawing from this source in Munich, we naturally did not want to present it as the only true source of the theosophical movement, but only as one of the paths by which spiritual knowledge can be sought. It cannot be said that we gave preferential treatment to this source, while the theosophical movement should take all forms of religion and paths to truth into equal consideration. But it can never be the task of the theosophical movement to study the diversity of religions as an end in itself; it must reach the unity of religions, their core, through their forms; and we did not want to show what Rosicrucianism is, but through Rosicrucianism we wanted to show the perspective to the one core of truth in all religions. And this is precisely the true mission of the Theosophical movement. In the program book one finds five drawings. They are the motifs of the first five of the seven capitals mentioned above, transposed into vignette form. In these five drawings, too, there is something of what is called “occult writing”. Those who immerse themselves in the line forms and figures with all their soul will inwardly perceive something of what are known as the important states for [the] realization of human development (Saturn, Sun, Moon, Mars and Mercury states).

This should describe the intentions of the conference organizers in preparing the framework within which the festivities were to take place. The venue for the event was the Tonhalle (Kaim-Säle), which seemed particularly suitable for this event.

The description of the proceedings of the congress must be preceded by the expression of the deepest satisfaction felt by all the participants at the presence of Mrs. Besant. The much-admired woman had just returned to Europe after spending two years in her field of activity in India; and Munich was the first place where the European members were able to greet her again and hear her powerful speech. The German committee of the Congress had invited Mrs. Besant to preside over the honorary committee; and so the esteemed leader gave the assembly its consecration and lent it the mood that her whole being communicates to all those around her and to whom the magic of her words reaches.

The visit to the congress was a thoroughly satisfying one. We had the great pleasure of welcoming many members of the other European sections, as well as those of the Indian section. The members of the German section were present in large numbers. The British section was officially represented by its General Secretary, Miss Spink; the French section by its General Secretary, Dr. Th. Pascal; the Dutch section by its General Secretary, Mr. Fricke; the Italian section by its General Secretary, Prof. Dr. Penzig; the Scandinavian section by its General Secretary, A. Knös; and the Hungarian section by its General Secretary, D. Nagy.

The opening of the congress took place on May 18 at 10 o'clock in the morning. It began with a musical introduction. Emanuel Nowotny played the Toccata in F major by Johann Sebastian Bach on the organ. - Thereupon the Secretary General of the German Section had to greet the participants on behalf of the German committee. He greeted Mrs. Besant and emphasized the importance of the fact that the Munich Congress was honored by her visit. After welcoming the representatives of the other sections and the German visitors, the speaker expressed words of love, appreciation and thanks for the founder-president H. S. Olcott, who died in February. The extensive mission of the Theosophical movement in the spiritual life of the present day was also pointed out in this opening address, and the necessity emphasized that the cultivation of spiritual life must form the basis of the Theosophical work. After that, the representatives of the European sections and the other fields of work spoke: from England (Mr. Wedgwood), from France (Dr. “Th. Pascal), from the Netherlands (Mr. Fricke), from Italy (Prof. Penzig), from Scandinavia (Mr. A. Knös ), Hungary (Mr. D. Nagy), Bohemia (Mr. Bedrnicek), Russia (Miss Kamensky, Mrs. Forsch, Miss N. v. Gernet), Bulgaria, Belgium (and others).

As at previous congresses, each speaker spoke in their national language.

Mrs. Besant then took the floor to greet the German section and emphasize the nature of the Theosophical movement, as well as to point out in a few forceful sentences the spiritual life and its fundamental importance for society.

The Saturday afternoon was devoted to lectures and talks by Mr. Alan Leo, Dr. Th. Pascal, Michael Bauer, Mr. James Wedgwood and Miss Kamensky. Mr. Alan Leo read his paper on “Astrology and Personal Fate”. The esoteric nature of astrology was discussed and free will was clearly explained in relation to predetermined fate, showing the way in which planetary forces influence human life. Dr. Th. Pascal presented the results of his long inner research in the theosophical field in a thoughtful essay. It was stimulating to follow the subtle arguments of intimate trains of thought. Michael Bauer spoke about the relationship between nature and man. This very meritorious leader of our Nuremberg branch showed in his warm-hearted and spirited way how the inner essence of nature and man's own inner being are interlinked in their depths. Mr. Wedgwood read his paper on “The Value of the Theosophical Society.” He explained how the study of occultism elevates man to an awareness of his higher destiny by giving him a knowledge of his place in the world process. It depends on the perspectives that occultism gives to the human soul. (No summary of the contents of the individual lectures and papers will be given here, as these will appear in detail in the “Congress Yearbook”. Miss Kamensky read her fascinating paper on “Theosophy in Russia” that same afternoon. Her brief but meaningful remarks showed how many Theosophical ideas are to be found in Russian literary and intellectual life. The work was a prime example of how to seek out those seeds in a nation's intellectual life that only require spiritual light in order to grow into Theosophy in the right way.

The first day of the conference ended with an evening of artistic performances. Johann Sebastian Bach's “Prelude and Fugue in B minor”, performed by Emanuel Nowotny on the organ, opened the evening. After that, Marie von Sivers recited the monologue from the beginning of the second part of Goethe's Faust, “Des Lebens Pulse schlagen frisch lebendig...”, as an example of a poem written for esoteric reasons. The two members, Ms. Alice von Sonklar and Ms. Toni Völker, performed Robert Schumann's “Pictures from the East” on the piano, which seem very suitable for promoting a mystical mood. Miss Gertrud Garmatter then sang two songs by Schubert, “An die Musik” and “Die schöne Müllerin”, in her charmingly sensitive way, and Miss Toni Völker concluded the evening with her beautiful artistic performance on the piano: “Pastorale and Capriccio” by Scarlatti.

On Sunday, May 19, the morning session was opened by the atmospheric Trio in E-flat major by Johannes Brahms (1st movement), played by Miss Johanna Fritsch (violin), Marika v. Gumppenberg (piano) and Mr. Tuckermann (French horn). Mrs. Besant then gave her momentous lecture: “The Place of Phenomena in the Theosophical Society”. She explained the role phenomena played in the early days of the Theosophical Society through H. P. Blavatsky, and how important they were in a time of doubt about higher worlds. She emphasized how the observation of phenomena related to higher worlds can never be dangerous if approached with the same spirit of research that is applied to observations in the physical world. She emphasized how little good it would do for the Theosophical Society if, for fear of the danger posed by psychic powers, it abandoned the pursuit of the goal of “studying those forces in the world and in man that are not accessible to sensory observation” to other societies.

It would be quite impossible to convey the manifold content of this lecture within the framework of a short report. Therefore, as with all earlier and later lectures of the congress, reference must be made to the “Yearbook” of the “Federation of European Sections”, which will appear following this lecture.

The second lecture of the morning was Dr. Rudolf Steiner's lecture on “The Initiation of the Rosicrucian”, in which the method of attaining knowledge of supersensible worlds in the sense of esotericism, which has set the tone in the West since the 14th century, is discussed and at the same time the necessity of these methods for the present period of human development is shown.

On Sunday afternoon (5 p.m.), Edouard Schuré's “Sacred Drama of Eleusis” was performed. The German organizers considered this performance to be an especially important part of the congress. It impressively demonstrated how theosophical ideas and sentiments can be expressed in true, high art. Edouard Schuré is the great French artist and writer who, through his works in so many directions, communicates the theosophical spirit to our contemporaries. Schuré's works “Les Grands Initiés” (“The Great Initiates”) and “Sanctuaires d'Orient” (“The Sanctuaries of the Orient”) are completely theosophical in the noblest sense of the word. And Schuré's theosophical way of looking at things is fully transformed into a vital creative power when he works as an artist. Within him lives that relationship between imagination and fantasy on which the basic secret of all high art is based. Edouard Schuré's truly mystical drama “The Children of Lucifer” is a shining example of how a world view striving towards the heights of knowledge can be fully realized in artistic form. Only a mind of this kind could have undertaken what Schuré did, to resurrect the “sacred drama” of Eleusis in the mind and eye of the modern man. This drama leads us to the door of that ancient time, where knowledge, religion and art still lived in one, where imagination was the faithful witness of truth and the sacred guide to piety; and where the reflection of imagination fell on this imagination in a transfiguring and revealing way. In Edouard Schur there lives a modern artistic soul, in which the light of that mysterious time shines, and so he was able to recreate what the priestly sages showed the audience in the “Drama at Eleusis” in Greece's distant past: the deep mystery of the world, which is reflected in the meaningful events of Eros' seduction of Persephone and her abduction by Pluto; of the pain of Demeter and the advice she to go to Eleusis, to seek advice from the “Goddess of Transformations”, Hekate; of Triptolem's initiation by Demeter as a priest in Eleusis; of Triptolem's daring journey into Pluto's realm to free Persephones; and of the emergence of a “new Dionysos”, who arises from Zeus' fire and the light of Demeter through the sacrifice of Triptolem. The congress organizers attempted to present the drama, which was inspired by Schuré, to the visitors in German. This was made possible by the dedicated work of a number of our members and by the beautiful, loving support of Bernhard Stavenhagen, who created a wonderful musical accompaniment to the Schuré drama. Stavenhagen preceded each of the four acts with a musical introduction that atmospherically prepared the audience for the dramatic action. With true congeniality, this important composer has immersed himself in the basic motifs of the mystery and rendered them musically. This musical performance was received with great enthusiasm by the participants of the congress. The willingness of the members of the German Section to work on this performance can be gauged from the fact that all the roles were played by members. Miss Fräulein v. Sivers played Demeter, Miss Sprengel played Persephone, Miss Garmatter played Eros, Mrs. v. Vacano played Hekate, Mr. Stahl played Pluto; we were delighted to have the collaboration of our member, the excellent actor Mr. Jürgas, who created an impressive figure in the role of Triptolemus; Baroness v. Gumppenberg, Dr. Peipers as Zeus, and Miss Wollisch as Dionysus. These are only the main roles; the choruses that are part of the plot were also composed of members. Special recognition must be given to our esteemed member, Mr. Linde, who took on the laborious task of creating the decorations.

The morning of Monday was introduced by the recitation of Goethe's poems “Song of the Spirits over the Waters” and “Prometheus”, by Richard Jürgas, whom the participants now got to know as an excellent reciter, just as they had been introduced to his acting skills the night before. Then the participants had the great joy of hearing the second lecture by Mrs. Besant, in which she spoke about the relationship of the Masters to the Theosophical Society. Drawing from her rich spiritual experience, she described the relationship of great individuals to spiritual progress and the way such individuals participate in the progress of the Theosophical Society. It is also impossible to give a brief overview of the wide-ranging content of this lecture in just a few words. Here too, we must refer you to the publication of the Yearbook. After this lecture, our member Frau Hempel delighted the participants with an excellent display of her vocal art. This was followed by a lecture by Dr. Carl Ungers, who spoke very interestingly about working methods in the theosophical branches and explained the relationship of the non-clairvoyant theosophist to the messages of the clairvoyants, showing how the writing “Theosophy” by Dr. Rudolf Steiner can provide a basis for shaping this relationship in the right way. Later that morning, Mrs. Elise Wolfram gave her lecture on the occult basis of the Siegfried saga. She showed subtly and vividly how the deeper spiritual development of Europe is expressed in the myth, how Germanic and even older mystery wisdom took shape in Siegfried. The lecturer's subtle interpretations were well suited to allowing the audience to enter into the mysterious life of part of the Nibelungen saga.

In the afternoon, Mrs. v. Gumppenberg read Mr. Arvid Knös's essay, “Absolute and Relative Truths”; then Dr. Rudolf Steiner gave his lecture, “Planetary Development and Human Development”. He described the development of the earth through three of its present forms, and then pointed to the connection between the development of the earth and that of man. He also showed how one could know something about the future of development.

The evening was again devoted to purely artistic performances. The Sonata in G minor by L. van Beethoven was performed by Chr. Döbereiner (cello) and Elfriede Schunk (piano). Afterwards, Gertrud Garmatter's excellent vocal performance could be heard again (two songs: “Weylas Gesang” by Hugo Wolf and “Frühlingslaube” by Franz Schubert). This was followed by solos for viola da gamba with piano, firstly “Adagio” by Handel and secondly “Aria con variazione” composed by A. Kühnel in 1695. Both pieces were performed by Chr. Döbereiner (viola da gamba) and Miss Elfriede Schunk (piano). A brilliant performance on the piano by the Italian member Mr. Kirby concluded the evening.

On Tuesday morning, the program began with: “Adagio from the Violin Concerto” by Max Bruch, op. 26, performed by Johanna Fritsch and Pauline Frieß. After that, Mr. Richard Jürgas recited some poems full of intimate feeling and mystical moods by our dear member Mia Holm. The rest of the morning was taken up with a free discussion on the topic: The necessity of cultivating occultism within society. Mr. Jules Ägoston from Budapest, Bernhard Hubo, Ludwig Deinhard, Dr. [Carl] Unger, Michael Bauer, D. Nagy, Mr. Wedgwood, Miss Severs and Mrs. Elise Wolfram took part in the discussion. The discussion was introduced by Jules Ägoston, who emphasized the necessity of maintaining the spiritualist experiment; following on from this, Bernhard Hubo developed a contrary point of view based on his many years of experience; Ludwig Deinhard discussed the necessity of acquainting theosophical circles with scientific experiments to penetrate the deeper foundations of the soul. It is impossible to report here on the rich and varied addresses of the above-mentioned speakers. Nor is it possible to do so with regard to the stimulating points of view that Mr. Nerei from Budapest gave in the afternoon during the discussion on “educational issues”. Following these points of view, Dr. Rudolf Steiner also spoke about education. — Mrs. Douglas-[Sheild] spoke about the relationship between “Theosophy and Christianity”.

The closing act of the congress took place on Tuesday at nine o'clock in the evening. It began with the spirited and heartfelt Adagio in D major by our dear member and head of the Stuttgart lodge I: Adolf Arenson, which was performed by Mr. Arenson himself (piano), Dr. Carl Unger (cello) and Johanna Fritsch (violin). This was followed by: “Tröstung” by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, performed by Hilde Stockmeyer, “Ave verum” by Mozart performed by Gertrud Garmatter, the recitation of a poem by Mrs. Ripper, solos for violin by J. S. Bach, by Johanna Fritsch and Pauline Frieß, and variations on the chorale “Sei gegrüßet, Jesu gütig>, for organ by J. S. Bach, by Emanuel Nowotny. The Congress then drew to a close with short closing addresses by the representatives of the individual sections: Mr. Wallace spoke for the British section, Mlle Aimée Blech (representing Dr. Pascal, who had to leave earlier due to his state of health) for the French section, Mr. Fricke for the Dutch section, and Prof. Dr. Penzig for the Italian section. Mrs. Besant then addressed some deeply moving words to the participants, and finally Dr. Rudolf Steiner gave the closing address, in which he thanked the participants, especially those from foreign sections, for coming, and also expressed his warmest thanks to all those whose dedicated work had made the congress possible.

And these thanks must be expressed to many, especially Miss Sophie Stinde, who, as secretary of the congress, has done tireless and important work; Countess Pauline Kalckreuth, who has worked tirelessly on all the preparatory work and tasks. We have these two to thank above all that we were able to pursue the intentions described above at all, and that we were able to achieve what has been achieved. Adolf Arenson took care of the musical part of the program. Our dear member Clara Rettich devoted herself selflessly to the task of painting the seven apocalyptic seals according to the occult instructions given to her; in the same way, Karl Stahl took on the task of painting the seven pillars in the perimeter of the hall. It is impossible to mention all the numerous workers individually by name. But it should not go unmentioned that dear members had set up a buffet in an adjoining room and did the necessary work, which greatly enhanced the convivial get-together, through which members were to come together.

Dr. Rudolf Steiner was authorized at his request, and indeed unanimously and out of the enthusiasm of the audience, to express the thanks of the congress to Monsieur Edouard Schure, the poet of the “Drama of Eleusis” and Bernhard Stavenhagen, the composer of the musical part.

The sculptures by our highly talented member, the sculptor Dr. Ernst Wagner, who strives for the highest artistic goals, were an excellent artistic presentation for the congress. The sculptures he provided for our exhibition were set up in the area around the main hall, and, for their inwardness, had an atmospheric background in the red wall of the hall. The following works of art were present: Portrait bust, Woman praying, Portrait bust, Relief for a sepulchral chapel, Bust, Sepulchral relief, King's child, Resolution, Sybille, Relief for a sepulchral niche, Portrait bust, Pain, Christ mask, Mask “Death”, Bronze statuette. Besides these works of art, only the interesting symbolic painting “The Great Babylon” by our member Mr. Haß, which was hung above the boardroom, and a carpet by Ms. Lehmann, which showed a fascinating utilization of mystical ideas in the applied arts, and finally a relief depicting Colonel Olcott by M. Gailland, and a sketch “H. P. Blavatsky” by Julia Wesw-Hoffmann.

The exhibition of a series of artworks and reproductions of such artworks that have a special connection to theosophical thought took place in the adjoining room. Here one could see: etchings by Hans Volkert; reproductions of two pictures by Moreau; reproductions of two pictures by Hermann Schmiechen; a statuette “The Master” by [Heyman]; a picture “Out of Deep Distress” by Stockmeyer; reproductions of various pictures by Watts; three reproductions of works by Lionardo; pictures by Kalckreuth the Elder, by Sophie Stinde (landscapes); by Haß (After the Storm, Fairy Tale. The King's Daughter, The Storm Cloud, Five Fir Tree Studies); a reproduction by the painter Knopf.

The next Federation Congress will take place in Budapest in 1909, two years hence, at the kind invitation of our Hungarian members.

The following events also took place after the congress: a public lecture by Mrs. Besant in Munich on “exertion and destiny” on 27 May; two public lectures by Dr. Rudolf Steiner in Munich on “Bible and Wisdom” on 23 and 24 May; and a “Course in Theosophy” based on the Rosicrucian method by Dr. Rudolf Steiner, which began on Wednesday, May 22 and included 14 lectures (lasting until June 8).

Photographs of the seals and pillars described above were provided by our member Mr. Kuhn, and will soon be available from Miss Marie von Sivers (Berlin W, Motzstraße 17).

It should be noted here that the first two yearbooks of the Federation (containing the communications, lectures and papers of the Amsterdam and London congresses) have been published. Those of the third (Paris) and fourth (Munich) congresses will follow shortly. The content of the books will be discussed in detail in the next issue of this journal; however, the importance of the books for every theosophist should be pointed out here, and their purchase is strongly recommended.

A group photograph of the Munich conference participants in the festival hall has been obtained by our member Otto Rietmann and can be obtained from Mr. Otto Rietmann (photographer in St. Gallen, Switzerland, Rorschacherstraße).

Today it's my duty to speak out of my occult experiences about the progress that we make through our exercises. Someone may do his exercises correctly for years and is also able to create that quiet that's indispensable if thoughts, feelings or visions are to enter our soul as a result of meditation, and may yet have the feeling that he's at the very same place that he was at the beginning. But this is not so. The main thing for an esoteric is for him to pay attention to his soul life, for this is so intimate that one's attentiveness must be very great if one wants to perceive anything.

If after doing our meditation conscientiously and well, we, for instance, wash and dress ourselves, our consciousness is devoted to this activity. Then we may have the feeling that: I did my things quite mechanically now; my thoughts weren't with them. And when we reflect on what our thoughts did, we can get a feeling of a quiet dream, as if it wasn't we who thought—it was as if what passed through our soul had thought in us. When we observe something like this, we increasingly get the feeling that something happens in us to which we can apply the mantric words: It thinks me. If we say or think these words in everyday life whenever we have a quiet moment, we'll find that they help and promote us in our soul life. But we must strictly observe one thing. When we say or think them to ourselves, a feeling of piety will arise in us, and we must connect this feeling with it every time we say the words. It would be wrong if someone didn't say the words at all so as not to say them with the wrong soul mood; instead, one must practice connecting them with the feeling of piety each time. Then we get the feeling that what thinks in us is related to the I, that the sublime beings who gave it to us are thinking in us. This is clarified for exoterics in our third mystery drama in the words: In your thinking world thoughts are living.

A second word that's mantric and that can help us if it's used correctly is It works me. We know that all the hierarchies work in us and through us, that we would be nothing without them, and so it's good to become increasingly clear that we're their work entirely. This is in the mantric words: It works me. We should think and say them with a feeling of holy devotion and shy reverence. In the Bhagavad-Gita, that sacred text, we have a conversation between Krishna and Arjuna that graphically tells us that we should do our duties and yet keep a feeling for the Gods' work alive in our soul. No other sacred text, no Christian one either, points to this in such a way. Krishna says: “You should be a warrior, priest or merchant, depending on which caste you belong to, and do your work conscientiously, for your destiny has placed you in your activity. But you should stand over your work with your I and feel that you're connected with the divine.”

A third word arises from the feeling that we must acquire when we make it clear to ourselves that forces stream into us out of the whole world space, that we get our head from here, our limbs from there, all our organs from various sides, and that they're also directed from there. We express this in the mantric word: It weaves me. We should always say and think this with a feeling of deep thankfulness when we return to our physical body in the morn by saying: I'm returning to something that I didn't weave myself; I couldn't become conscious again if you, Father Spirit, hadn't created my body for this, and I thank you for it in shy reverence.

We can do our meditation in such a way that we get the feeling: I'm not thinking it—it thinks me. Just as we dive into our bodies to become conscious in the morn, so we must dive down into something at death to get a consciousness—and that is the Christ.

That's what the verse tells us: Ex Deo nascimur—in the morning we dive down into the physical body through the Father Spirit; in Christo morumur—at the portal of death we must dive into the Christ-Spirit; Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus—to come to life in the Holy Spirit.

Verse for Wednesday. All esoteric life consists in taking in what we can understand and grasp exoterically with the soul with our hearty feelings. We must get to know the realms of Lucifer and Ahriman so we can protect ourselves against attacks. We must especially watch that we don't take concepts that we formed here in the physical-and that rightly exist for this world—with us into the spiritual when we cross the threshold.

Philosophy is something that some of you aren't very interested in, but you all know that philosophy tries to give men views about the world and life. In philosophy one mainly speaks about two things. Firstly about multiplicity, where everything is led back to the smallest parts, atoms, monads. For instance Leibniz's philosophy is a monadological-spiritual world view, and Haeckel's materialism is an atomistic one. The second thing that is spoken about in philosophy is unity. Spinoza's philosophy belongs here and Hegel's world view can be put here also. But multiplicity and unity are concepts that are only valid on the physical plane and in the elemental world to some extent, but are of no importance for the spiritual world. Anyone who worships unity and takes these concepts into the spiritual, succumbs to Lucifer. One who looks upon multiplicity as the only right thing falls prey to Ahriman. One who becomes conscious in the spiritual—and that's the main requirement for an advanced esoteric, that he's conscious outside of his body during meditation—first sees himself. He has himself before him as the main impression—his physical body and his relation to his physical being. Here in the physical world one feels that one is a unity with respect to one's surroundings that one looks upon as a multiplicity. One sees clouds, trees, mountains or the various kingdoms of nature around one. If we wanted to think that the clouds up there are part of us, like a finger is a part of us, we'd be making a big mistake. In the spirit one becomes aware of oneself as a multiplicity; we see all the forces and beings that work on our physical body in the elemental world as a multiplicity there. We see this like a hundred thousand fools there, like legions. But if we would only see these hundred thousand fools as a multiplicity and wouldn't say: All you little fellows there altogether are only I myself, all you together in your many-fellowedness only form me as a unity—if we wouldn't say this with all force and energy and self-contemplation, we would fall prey to Ahriman. And we shouldn't just tell ourselves that theoretically—which wouldn't be so difficult—but we must really experience this conviction that many are one in spiritual realms. If we did not do that, if we didn't strengthen our soul to have these feelings, and we looked upon these hundred thousand fools as just that, then pieces would fly out of us and we would be torn into multiplicity. Ahrimanic beings would take pieces of our being and disguise themselves with them and delude us with errors and lies.

Some African people only know lions as a multiplicity. They can't think of them as a unity, as a genus. One must grasp the concepts of unity and multiplicity really correctly and must leave ones that are only suitable for the physical plane behind when one crosses the threshold.

We must strengthen our soul through meditation to such an extent that when beings approach it in the spiritual world it immediately knows whether they want to lead it astray. The soul must be able to say: You (elemental beings) are the builders of my physical body. We often find schemata set up in theosophical literature that are somewhat useful. One starts with a unity which then forks and multiplies. Or one starts with many things and goes up to unity. And even if these things aren't quite right it doesn't harm anything too much as long as it stays on the physical plane. But it can become terrible if one wants to cross the threshold with this concept of a schema. The latter can be instructive if it only serves as a symbol, if one remains aware that one can portray the same thing in a hundred ways; if one isn't aware of this one has fallen prey to Ahriman.

Of course feelings and emotions play into all descriptions and explanations. One has to say things to one person in a vivid way, to another in a quite different way that would arouse antipathy in the first one. It has to be like that. But one must never force an esoteric truth on an esoteric by eloquent means, for then Lucifer would be at work. A pupil must be able to take things in freely.

So one has to keep life on the physical plane apart from the one in spiritual worlds. One must not take concepts that are valid in the physical realm with one when one crosses the threshold.

The working of ahrimanic and luciferic beings is necessary for the world order as long as they stay in their proper boundaries. An esoteric must strengthen his soul so that he recognizes the attacks of these beings and can protect himself from them. A man will only gain self-assurance in the spiritual world if he can keep a balance between Lucifer and Ahriman in physical life, if he knows from where everything that he encounters is coming.

An esoteric is supposed to acquire a different feeling from the one an exoteric has through what's given in esoteric classes and through his meditative life. He must let his entire life and actions be illuminated by spirituality so that quarrelling would be an impossibility in our ranks. That's really possible. In exoteric life an esoteric must behave like an exoteric. But his feeling about exoterics must be like adults' about children, quite objective, without arrogance or feelings of superiority. It's often quite painful to see how disputes, ambition and petty rivalries are present among esoterics also. This is just as if a 40 year old man were playing with children and he wanted to hit the bowling ball or pin that mashed his finger or blackened his eye. This way of expressing one's displeasure would be quite natural in a child. As an adult one can play better than children, but one accompanies this with other feelings; one stands above the play, whereas a child is completely engrossed in his play.

Some of our dear friends told me that my book Theosophy is very hard to understand, couldn't it be written in an easier way. I even lifted my pen several times to do this, but don't think that it's easy to write Theosophy in a popular way. But I always put the pen aside again. If one wanted to take in Theosophy without thought difficulties one would give Lucifer points of attack. It's quite good to torture oneself a little with it.

The idea that light is only based on waves is wrong. And it's quite wrong to speak of waves, oscillations and vibrations in connection with spiritual things. Some people like to talk about the good vibrations in an esoteric class, but one shouldn't do that.

Recently much has been said about the dangers that a pupil is exposed to on the way into the spiritual world. Now if someone wanted to say I don't want to go on this path, I don't want to develop myself into a spirit-bearer because it's too dangerous—then that's just as if someone would say: I'd like to live in a house that will soon collapse—I just don't want to know anything about the collapse. Everyone will have to go on this path sooner or later, and so it's necessary to become acquainted with the dangers. Man must go on this path into the spiritual realm because otherwise he'll dry out and atrophy. And here it's an esoteric's task to strengthen his soul to rightly recognize all of the difficulties—Lucifer and Ahriman and the Guardian of the Threshold—and to look them in the face and not fall prey to the hindering forces but to conquer them in order to show mankind the way. In the spirit lay the germ of my body .. In my body lies the spirit's germ ...

Verse for Thursday. My dear sisters and brothers! To protect ourselves against the raids of Lucifer and Ahriman we must know them and learn to distinguish between them. Lucifer is in mystical esoterics such as we find in Meister Eckhart, Ruysbroek, Tauler and Suso. Lucifer is in this pure devotion to the divine, in this pure, noble striving towards the spiritual in a good way, and one can say that he was pious in the souls of these mystics.

But as soon as a personal note flows into this pure striving and this devotion, as soon as a mystic would enjoy this, it would amount to a luciferic infringement. We must watch that nothing like this comes into our striving. It's relatively easy to be wakeful in mystical immersion, but more difficult in visionary perception. Lucifer is in this too. He puts all kinds of illusions before a mystic that are hard to distinguish from real visions. Something subjective gets mixed into all vision, for instance, someone sees certain apparitions, deceptive figures or the like repeatedly. One has to direct one's attention to this. One must be wakeful here also. If one sees eyes or faces or if one imagines them one isn't exposed to error as easily; one thereby gets the strength to ward off Lucifer. It's no reproach to say that bad qualities live in man's subconsciousness; they must be there, it's something that goes with earth life. A man may already have attained a certain degree of holiness, and yet drives are slumbering in his subconsciousness that would horrify him if he saw them. The greatest watchfulness and wakefulness must hold sway here also.

Lucifer is at work in all emotional and visionary things, in mystical immersion, also in all enthusiasm and in artistic activity, in what an artist creates and in what creates in the artist.

Some materialists may only express themselves in material things outwardly. Then if one has the good fortune to look into their souls one finds a deep religious striving, a longing for the divine. Lucifer is the instigator here also.

Ahriman works in everything that has to do with the will. He approaches us in everything that becomes manifest as gesture in words or writing, in everything that appears as mediumistic writing, whether it's acquired or natural, or if one feels compelled to write something. Whereas Lucifer brings about appearances of figures, heads of light, etc., that are created by a medium. If one feels that one is forced to write something one can counteract this by stopping and by not giving in to the inspirations that one thinks that one is feeling or perceiving; one opposes these whisperings with the firm will not to follow them. One acquires undreamed of forces in occult life through this effort of the will.

Ahriman is in what we say, in words that we form and transmit to other men. As soon as the ear hears sounds, the larynx emits sounds and words are put into writing Ahriman comes and hardens the sound, word or writing. That's why it's important to strengthen the soul and to check one's thoughts in the most subtle way.

Swedenborg's visions, dreams and world view are permeated with Ahriman and so is what Kant took from Swedenborg's writings.

People keep on asking: Should I think that what I see, hear or feel there is of importance? Is it true? Certainly one should attach importance to it, certainly it's true, every little thing in occult life is important and is true. The main thing is to know what's behind it. We should pay great attention to everything and watch and be awake. And we should acquire a certain tact so that we don't chatter about such experiences. One should try to find out whether Lucifer or Ahriman is at work in them. Something that can often happen to us is that as we're walking down the street we see someone in a vision and then a few minutes later we actually run into him. When we have this premonition of his coming we may have something to tell him, so we speed up our steps in order not to miss him. But this isn't permissible; we shouldn't use occult abilities for our own advantage in physical life.

If spiritists conjure up Goethe's spirit and thereby want to prove the soul's immortality, since they think that it's the soul as it's living now, then this might not be the case. It could be Goethe's soul as it was in say 1819 and that Lucifer is creating an illusion here. One has to press forward to Goethe's real soul, which has progressed, and then one has a real proof of immortality.

People often approach esoteric exercises with much frivolity. Some start to do them but soon stop due to laziness, half-heartedness, etc. But what breathing is for the body, meditations are for the soul. If one would stop breathing Ahriman would immediately intervene as the master of death. A soul must get to the point where it doesn't have to force itself to do meditations; it shouldn't want to live without them. One shouldn't wish and yearn to press into spiritual worlds before the soul is sufficiently strengthened. Quiet and peacefulness in the soul is the main condition. That's the only way that the soul can become strong enough to find the middle path between Lucifer and Ahriman.

That's very difficult, my dear sisters and brothers. But then we must remember what's said at the beginning of John's Gospel and later in chapter 8:12-14. When we stand in the tumult and chaos of the spiritual world and visions and figures come from all sides and we don't know how to get in or out and are torn this way and that, then we should place

In the beginning was the word

before our souls, or

I am the light of the world. He who follows me will not walk in darkness but will have the light of life.

Then everything will dissipate and we'll be able to see what's right and true. We should repeatedly place the rosicrucian formula

EDN
ICM
PSSR

before us in this sense. And also we will be increasingly able to find the right thing on this difficult path if we think of the simple but profound verse with which our esoteric lessons are closed: In the spirit lay the germ of my body ...

In order to get ahead in our esoteric life we must become more attentive to things that usually escape our everyday consciousness. We must also revise our ideas about what we'll experience. For instance we complain that thoughts storm into our meditation that bother and disturb us. If we would think about it we would see that it's progress that we've become more sensitive, because we notice that these thoughts are stronger than we are. They induce us to use more strength in our meditation, for it's luciferic beings who bring up our own thoughts in us. Luciferic beings are always in us, but they're drowned out by the surging of everyday life. When we walk through a quiet woods at night we'll hear the leaves falling, animals flitting by and distant footsteps, but in a city's bustle such quiet noises will be imperceptible.

That's how things are with our meditation also. The quiet that we create let's us notice what submerges in the everyday hubbub. All kinds of things can enter our consciousness, such as physical pains that we don't feel otherwise. We can concentrate on our body—although this is only a good idea in special cases—and look for all of its pains. One begins somewhat over the head, excludes all other thoughts and concentrates on this one point. Then one goes further down, focuses on one part of the brain, and so on. Here one will notice that one can have pains in various parts of the body. The more egotistical a man is the more distinctly he'll feel pains here and there. But we shouldn't get hypochondriacal or scared about this—we should stay cool. We also have to do this with other things, for strange and surprising things can happen to us, but we have to get to the bottom of them. The relation between members of our being changes through meditation. Even when we do it ever so badly and awkwardly we nevertheless pull the ego, astral body and part of the etheric body out of the physical body, and so we can have strange experiences in our etheric body in the moments after meditation. This body is a faithful preserver of everything we encountered in life, consciously or not. For instance as a child we may have experienced that a dog was run over by a train. Over the years we have overcome the horrible scene. But the etheric body preserved it and through our development 30 or 40 years later we can suddenly perceive the yelping and whimpering out of us, or it can even be the case that the person concerned can make yelping sounds himself and then of course is rather scared about this. This happens when the etheric body is loosened in development, appears suddenly with especially strong force and works on the physical body.

Another example: An esoteric can have pains from an inflammation of the middle ear that lead to visions of a gruesome scene, and he can't explain its origin. This comes about as follows. Pains are seated in the astral body and not in the physical body. We know that the astral body can experience great pain in kamaloca. These pains in the astral body are reflected in the etheric body. The esoteric experiences the vibrations that are generated in the etheric body thereby, but also vibrations of a similar kind that were generated in it during childhood through soul pains, when he experienced the horrible scene. He had forgotten the latter long ago, but the experience emerges from the etheric body through his esoteric training and the outer earache.

Something even stranger is possible. Say we live on the other side of a house's wall with a family that liked to read and tell tall tales. Our physical ear didn't hear them, but our etheric body took them in. And in spiritual development it can happen that we experience them in our etheric body. Such things can scare us if we don't understand them. Say that someone goes to sleep in a public lecture through lack of interest. His ego and astral body are nevertheless there. Then when he wakes up it may happen that the physical body does not want to adapt itself to what the ego and astral body took in. Thereby the person is dissatisfied with himself, reproaches himself severely or even feels pain from his physical body. Or it may happen that someone takes in esoteric teachings with great attentiveness and does his exercises well, but he has to be among people who reject theosophy and esotericism either silently or openly. This has an effect on the esoteric, and it can happen after meditation that voices within him say: “That's all nonsense” or much more terrible things that give him great pain. It's the thoughts of his environment that he may not have heard with physical ears but with which he's obsessed. When we lift out the ego we take all of our good qualities with us and refine them more and more; the bad qualities we push down and they acquire a kind of independent life. Then it may happen that we begin to scold and to use expressions that we're too well trained to use in ordinary life. This then fills us with amazement and horror, and we may tell ourselves: I'm not like that at all, I'm too decent a person for that. But we should, admit that we are like that, for such things only disappear when we finally put them aside. And yet all of these experiences are steps forward, and it's just a matter of knowing their significance. It's especially important to realize that it's our own fault that it's so hard for us to press into spiritual worlds. But when we get up there we meet the one who took our sins upon him through the Mystery of Golgotha. He took our weaknesses upon him; that's a true word in the Bible, as everything in the Bible is true. And one who refuses to have his sins expiated by the Christ hasn't pressed to the depth of this truth, just as little as one who believes in it as a “good Christian” but who thinks that the matter is very simple. World evolution is very complicated and hides riddles in every little thing, and every little thing can become a whole world. The example of otitis media can teach us this. What is experienced there in the etheric body arose like a world out of a small thing.

Inspirations for the material world can also come from higher worlds. A thing that's noted too little, that many people read over when they read the life of Darwin's friend Wallace is that a thought that led to one of the most important discoveries in connection with physical heredity came to him in a feverish dream. That this thought came to him in a condition in which his physical brain was unsuited for thinking should give the materialists who consider thinking to be a function of the brain much to think about. Darwin also travelled a lot in the tropics and it's quite possible that he made some discoveries about physical conditions in a fever.

One will only notice such things when things are found in such abnormal states, as if through inspiration that can be used materialistically, when for instance someone discovers something that can make him rich. Up till then one will consider all such things to be figments of a sick fantasy. Let's continue our meditation with industry, perseverance and energy, for the help of the one who brought his impulse into earth evolution will always come to meet us. This help is always there.

It has often been emphasized that one must distinguish between progress in esoteric development and noticing the progress. Every esoteric gets ahead if he does his esoteric exercises faithfully and regularly, even if he's dissatisfied with the success of the same. Honest endeavour is the important thing. We actually become different men through these exercises. This definitely happens even if we don't notice it. For the forces that loosen the etheric body and pull it out of the physical body are in all of these exercises, whether they're given orally or in books. But it's another matter to also notice these changes. A soul may actually have organs already, but it makes a difference whether it's sleeping or waking in its spiritual surroundings. It requires a strong force and preparation to wake up and become conscious. That's why descriptions are given in these lectures of what a soul experiences on waking up in the spiritual world. Many make it difficult for themselves to become conscious because they keep on thinking that the spirit land is like a second physical world, only finer and more diffuse. This is a big hindrance, because then they don't notice the fine symptoms of awaking. Such prejudices must be eliminated. One who still has them is like a man who goes up in a balloon and thinks that he can get out up there at any time and rest on a mountain top. But one who takes in esoteric explanations rightly can understand how the spiritual world is experienced when the soul awakens. To get to this point one has to ask oneself the question: What is thinking really? What thinks in me? A materialist who denies the existence of the spiritual world says: The body, the brain thinks. But one should ask him: Have you ever perceived thinking with your senses? Of course he hasn't. No one has ever heard or seen or felt thinking as warmth or the like. Therefore it's not corporeal. For what belongs to the body is sense perceptible. And so thinking is super-sensible. So the materialist would either have to accept the spiritual world or he should give up thinking because it's an absurdity—which might even be good. So we're always in the super-sensible world with our thinking, but in such a way that we don't experience it. With man's thinking it's as if someone went out to sea but didn't see himself and his boat. We don't experience it directly, for the thoughts we experience are reflections of thinking in the body. Just as someone facing a mirror sees his reflection, so a thinking soul sees the mirror image of its thinking. The brain is a mirror.

Through esoteric training a man is supposed to experience thinking and not just thoughts. Just as someone standing before a mirror sees the mirror's reflecting surface when he steps to one side, so the soul must learn to look upon the body as a reflecting apparatus. Then the man knows how thoughts come into being, and he experiences himself in the world from which thinking projects into the sense world as thought. All of this can be understood by every healthy intellect. And it's important for a theosophist to make it quite clear to himself to be armed against the objection that theosophy is based on belief, that one must believe in the existence of the super-sensible world. That's not true. Everyone can understand this existence if he uses his thinking properly. One who can't understand it is foolish, even if he's a philosopher. But it's still a big step from this possibility of experiencing thinking and the super-sensible world to a knowing of the latter. This can only be attained if the soul works on itself for a long time, but it is attained.

The first sign of an awakening in the spiritual world is a feeling of expansion, as if one were spreading and flowing out. In the sense world I'm here, the object is over there and it makes an impression on me. Consciousness comes about when we bump into objects through the organs of touching, hearing, seeing. However in the spiritual world the condition of being closed off in oneself ceases. One feels as if one were spread out in other beings. In the physical world we experience everything inside our skin, as for instance the prick of a needle. Not so in the spiritual world. There thinking and feeling flow out. One experiences pleasure and pain in others. For instance if one runs into a deceased person who's in pain, one has to experience the pain with him as long as one is in spiritual contact with him. One's relation to the sense world also becomes quite different through this change. The way in which we ordinarily experience the physical world is conditioned by the fact that the body through which we experience things is sensorial. If we hit our head against a hard object we feel it because the head doesn't yield, that is, because it's hard or similar to the object. But no impression is made if one confronts the sense world with super-sensible experience. Spiritual organs are too soft and flexible, as it were. That's why all physical things seem like empty spaces. A comparison can give one a perception of this. The water in a glass is invisible. The gas pearls in soda water are visible even though the bubbles are much more rarefied than water; they're nothing in comparison with the denser fluid. So the nothing is visible and the something is invisible. For a spiritual gaze that's the way things really are with the physical world. Like these pearls in water, all atoms are holes or empty bubbles in the spiritual world. All physical things are composed of countless numbers of such holes. When we touch things we bump into these holes, this nothing. That's the way things are with man's body also. Seen spiritually, for instance, the brain is a spiritual form. There are countless empty pearls or holes in it, and they make up what a scientist investigates with his instruments. Another thing is that a man feels that all the good, right and true things that he thinks stream out from him. He feels as if they're growing into the future, that they're germ-forming for the future. But the wrong, bad, ugly things that he thinks and feels also grow out like this. He really feels them streaming out of him, and he knows that the bad thoughts streaming from him will later serve as food for the good ones. So they're also necessary. Then he begins to understand why so many bad, wrong and ugly thoughts and feelings assail him during meditation. When he knows that they're necessary forces and food for the future he'll also assess them correctly. He won't have to complain about them if he's strong enough to not let them flow into his willing and action. There is a big secret connected with this. The same forces that underlie our bad thoughts were rayed out by hierarchical beings on old Moon, from angels up to Spirits of Form. Thereby they brought about Moon existence. But Lucifer and Ahriman remained behind and are only raying out these forces now. They now work into physical things that have condensed further, right into man's physical blood, and that's how evil arises. They're not evil in themselves; an esoteric must let them work on him but not let them become physically condensed. Then they remain of value for future good thoughts.

The following formulas are given to promote an experience of these first steps into the spiritual world. Budding esoterics should do the first one in the AM, the second after the day's retrospect and the third once every few days. More advanced esoterics should only do them occasionally, the first and second together and the third maybe only on Sundays.

The 7-line form of the verses arose by itself, that is, the spiritual material reveals itself in such a way that it presses into this form. (The verse in the lesson from March 5th 1914 in Stuttgart, is included here for reference.)

Lines one and two of the third formula give one much to think about. They were revealed like that, although it seems to be grammatically incorrect, since it says floats instead of float. Later it became clear that this is intended. “Shining I and luminous soul” should be thought of as a single entity. Likewise “what was thought, what was known” are treated as one. Thinking and knowing are not one in the physical world, but in the spiritual one they flow together. Something that's thought is either wrong—then it destroys itself—or it's right—then it's also something that's revealed: knowledge.

Formulas like these or the ones in Occult Science, for instance, are not made up or fabricated. The intellect isn't involved in this at all to begin with. A seer gets things revealed to him. They stand there. Only then does he elaborate them with his intellect. The first formula describes the experience where physical things seem to consist of nothing, like bubbles in water. The soul sees that ordinary sensory existence is an illusion, and it tries to gain knowledge of what is truly real.

The second formula describes the experience of the raying out of good and bad thoughts.

The third formula should be used as a test of the progress one has made. When one meditates it one must speak the words inwardly so that everything resounds meaningfully. With these lines one tries to see how far one has gotten; whether for instance one already experiences something from:

What was thought, what was known

Now becomes dense spirit existence.

Of course this must be continued patiently and without flagging week after week. One can also look upon these formulas as a different form of what's always said at the end of these classes. The first one describes how sensorial things become non-existent when one grows into the spiritual world, and spiritual reality is seen to be what we come from: Ex Deo nascimur.

The second formula describes the experience of good and bad thoughts as forces that'll work in the future. This is only possible if the soul is embraced and illumined by spiritual light—Christ—after it has released itself from the physical world: In Christo morimur.

And the third formula describes how real knowledge becomes revealed to the soul that's waking up in the spirit: Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus.

There is a very witty man who has made a remarkable statement about all human philosophizing. He said in a recently published work, which discusses at length the impossibility and futility of all human philosophizing: Man has no more philosophy than an animal and differs from the animal only in that he makes frantic attempts to arrive at a philosophy and must finally admit to himself that he has to resign, must end in not knowing. — There is much in this book, which is otherwise very readable, that basically brings together everything that can be said against philosophy. The person in question has become a professor of philosophy at a university for this reason. I will quote a saying of this man, which deals with the human view of nature. The saying is quite radical. The gentleman in question says that nature is mysterious on all sides, and that if man really feels the mysteriousness of nature on all sides, he cannot help but realize the infinite smallness of his own being. Nature expands immeasurably in its eternity, and we should actually feel that we stand there with our notions and ideas about nature, holding our tongues! I quote, and it can be said that the saying is not entirely inaccurate, that when we look at nature, we as human beings do indeed feel how little what we can grasp in our thoughts, even when we are engaged in the most brilliant natural science, actually corresponds to the great, immeasurable secrets of nature. And if we did not feel that the thought — which nature itself cannot bring forth, but which can only be generated in the human mind — stands face to face with nature, if we did not know that this thought corresponds to a human need, if we did not feel that in the something of our entire human destiny and human development lies in the reign of thought over nature, we need it as the seed needs the plant, we would actually not know, with careful inner self-knowledge, why we reflect on nature. We reflect on nature for our own sake and know that when we are confronted with nature, we are actually quite far from it with our thoughts. So one feels when contemplating nature.

If one feels towards the spiritual life, the supersensible life, then one must say differently. No matter how insignificant, childlike this supersensible life may be when it presents itself in us, one feels an inner necessity to also express what the spirit reveals to one in the soul. And although one must feel the most intense responsibility towards everything one expresses in the spirit, everything one can speak out of the supersensible, everything one can bring to light in the soul, one feels that one must follow this, that one must express it out of an inner necessity, just as one grows as a child or as one learns to speak itself. Thus, one feels oneself to be in a very different position with regard to the sensual and the supersensible.

A third thing is what one can call: reflection or expression about art. When one wants to express oneself about art, one feels neither the sense of being on the sidelines, which one always feels when pondering nature, nor does one feel that sense of necessity that overcomes one when faced with the inner revelations of the supersensible. Rather, when one tries to express oneself about art, one has the feeling that one is actually constantly interfering with the thought one is developing. In terms of artistic enjoyment, thought is actually a real troublemaker. And when it comes to anything related to art, you always want to stop thinking and talking and enjoy the art in silence. If, for whatever reason, you do want to talk about art, you don't want to do it from the perspective of an aesthetics professor or, even worse, an art critic. Not from the point of view of an art critic, because it seems superfluous to lecture on why you liked a particular dish after having eaten a series of dishes. You just want to say what you yourself can experience in art, in terms of joy, edification and so on, just as you feel the need to talk about what you have experienced with a dear friend. Out of a certain abundance of the heart, not out of a critical sense, one wants to talk about art, and one does not want to claim that what one has to say somehow expresses something lawful or universally valid, but basically just a kind of subjective confession. But that seems to me to be a constant feeling when talking about art, that the thought actually bothers you, and this, in turn, seems to me to point to what art is essentially about.

Since we as human beings live primarily in the world of the senses, we can ask: What is the relationship between art and the sensual? — Or, since we as human beings can only perceive the world of the senses exhaustively if we have a relationship to the supernatural, we could also ask: What is the relationship between art and the supernatural? — Well, it seems to me that anyone who develops an elementary feeling for artistic creation must very soon come to the conclusion that art is not capable of representing the sensual as it directly surrounds us, nor is it capable of expressing thought.

In the face of sensuality, anyone with a sense of nature will always have the feeling that if one wants to depict it and create a kind of image of it, one cannot achieve nature as such, that nature is always more beautiful and more perfect than any image. In the face of the spiritual – world-view poetry or the like bears witness to this – one will have the feeling that, if one wants to represent it, one describes something straw-like and superfluous. World-view poetry has a pedantic, scholastic character under all circumstances; the allegorical-symbolic will always actually reject any true artistic feeling.

And so the question of the relationship between art and the sensual and the supersensual can seem like a vital question for art. Therefore, the question arises: Is there anything else, besides the sensual and the supersensual, that has something to do with the essential tasks of artistic creation and enjoyment? This question can only be answered by really delving into the soul process of artistic creation and enjoyment: how it cannot be described by legitimate aesthetics, but can only be experienced. When we face the world in our ordinary, sober, and at first glance inartistic lives, we are dealing, on the one hand, with sensory perception and, on the other, with what is produced in our own soul through sensory perception, with thought. To demand from nature such perception as it offers us, such as the depiction of a human being through art, seems to me, for the reasons given, to be something quite impossible and therefore superfluous. The desire to represent through art what direct perception of nature offers is actually always rooted in certain aberrations of art. On the other hand, however, it seems as if – perhaps this is a little strange, but one does experience it, as I have already indicated in relation to talking about art – in the actual process of artistic creation and enjoyment, one strives to eliminate thought as far as possible, to prevent it from arising in any way. This seems to me to be based on the fact that processes are constantly taking place in the human soul that can either flourish to their end or break off at some point. One can only follow these processes if, through spiritual observation of the soul life, one really descends into the depths of the soul life that, for ordinary consciousness, remain in the subconscious or unconscious.

Those who observe the soul life of a person will find — leaving aside observation of the outer world for the moment — that this soul life, insofar as it develops freely in meditation and inner feeling, always has a tendency that cannot be described other than as follows: What swells and surges in the soul-life as feeling, as restrained impulses of the will, as feelings and the like, that wants to emerge, and it wants — basically also in the healthy soul-life — to form itself into what one can call a kind of vision. In the depths of our soul, we are always striving to shape our surging, flowing soul life into a vision. However, in a healthy soul life, the vision must not be allowed to emerge. It must be replaced, it must be stopped in its tracks as it arises, otherwise a diseased soul life will result. But in every soul there are efforts to shape itself into a vision, and basically we go through life continually stopping visions in the subconscious, by allowing them to fade to the point of thought. Then the outer image helps us. When we face the outer world with our seething soul life, and the outer world with its impressions affects us, then this outer world blunts that which wants to become a vision, and the vision fades to a healthy thought. I said: we actually go through the world constantly striving for visions, only we do not always become properly aware of the corresponding perceptions. But anyone who tries to realize what only quietly echoes between the lines of life in what one experiences daily, anyone who is able to observe this, will see that all kinds of things do emerge. I must say: if, for example, I happened to enter someone's dining room and found a party eating inside, and the plates and bowls were painted red, I would instinctively believe through an elementary sensation: there sits around the table a party of gourmets who want to immerse themselves in the dishes and courses. If, on the other hand, I saw that there were plates and bowls painted blue on the tables, I would believe that these were not gourmets, but that they were eating because they were hungry. Of course, one could feel the same thing somewhat differently; that does not matter. What matters is that one is actually always tempted, by what one encounters in life, to trigger an aesthetic sensation and to bring it in a certain way to a fading vision. It is, of course, entirely possible to succumb to strong illusions in this area. That does no harm. But if it is not true at all that a society that eats out of red bowls must be told that they are gourmets: aesthetically, the matter remains correct. Likewise, one could say: If someone receives me in a red room and constantly lets me speak, and I am a very boring gentleman, then I say: he is lying to me. Because in a red room, I expect a person who has something to say to me, and I feel it is a lie if he always lets me do the talking.

So, actually, as we go through life, we are always inclined to reduce what we experience to a suspended vision that then fades under the external impressions of life. Artistic enjoyment and creation always go one step further. Artistic enjoyment and creation cannot allow what simmers and boils in the soul to emerge subconsciously to the mere thought. That would be something that would simply permeate us with thoughts, but would not lead us to anything artistic. But when we, as artists, or because an artist comes to meet us, are able to give expression to something that wants to come up in the soul, I just want to say a color scheme, and when we feel that this combination of colors gives us something we need, so that the corresponding vision that arises, but which must not become a vision, has an external complement, then we have something decidedly artistic before us. I can imagine that someone would simply use artistic means to express moods and feelings by combining colors that may not correspond to any external object at all – perhaps the less they correspond to it, the better – but which are, so to speak, the counter-image of what wants to come to vision in his soul life. In the somewhat abundant discussions in recent times about all kinds of artistic matters, people have also become more aware of such phenomena and, when someone creates something that has nothing to do with the external, that has the sole task that I have just described, they speak of expressionist art. It is still frowned upon today to assume that what is preparing itself in man as a yearning and striving towards a goal corresponds precisely to a basic trait of humanity: to arrive at a sensualization of that which can only reveal itself spiritually in the soul. However, if one were to express a thought, something that has already come from the stage of vision to the pale thought, through some sensual means, one would be unartistic. If one avoids the thought and directly confronts the sensory form, one has established the connection between the human being and what has been artistically created, whereby the thought is eliminated. And one may say: That is precisely the essential thing, that art represents neither the sensual nor the supersensible, but the sensual-supersensible, something in which the sensual is directly mirrored by a supersensible experience. Neither the sensual nor the supersensible, but only the sensual-supersensible can be realized through art.

On the other hand, one may ask: if it is not acceptable for what we have encountered in sober life as perception to simply be reproduced in art, how is it possible to relate to nature artistically at all? If nature contained nothing but what it presents to our external perception and what this perception inspires in us, then there would be no necessity for art. We can only speak of the necessity of artistic creation if there is more to nature than what appears in the finished natural products for the imagination, for the thought that, in the artistic, must not provide the bridge between personality and external nature. Now, of course, we have to say that nature has within it that immensity, has within it also the intense infinity that we cannot grasp directly through thought. Nature has within it, even in the sensory, the supersensible. We can grasp the basis of the sensory-supersensible of external nature itself by looking at nature in such a way that we try to gain an insight into what is present in it beyond the sensory impression. Now, let me give you an example: When you are standing in front of a person, you can focus your attention on the human form, on the fact that the incarnate reveals itself through the human form, on the fact that the soul manifests itself through the outer form in the physiognomy, in facial expressions; you can follow how life permeates what is external form. Of course you can do that. But even if one wanted to reproduce everything about a person, one could not, as I said, achieve nature, because there is something unartistic about simply wanting to reproduce external natural objects. Anyone who asks whether a work of art should resemble a natural object is, from the outset, certifying that they do not want to see a work of art, but an illustration. But another is at hand. It must be said that when one pursues what is expressed in the human form, what actually appears as form is actually killed by everything else that lives in it – by the hue that comes from direct life, by the soul content. And that is the secret of nature: this nature is so infinite in its details that every detail can be killed by something higher. But if you have the sense for it, you can awaken the dead from its own essence to a new life; you can revive that which is dead in the form of the human being through the higher life, through the spiritual penetration, in the form, so that the form itself now becomes a living being, without it containing life and spiritual content. A sculptor, for example, who works with materials, can give form to what he must take; he comes to realize that nature is so intensely infinite that it contains infinitely more in each of its details than what it represents. When it presents a form to us, it deadens the inner life of the form, the life is enchanted in it, and one can disenchant it. When we encounter something in nature that is colored, it is quite certain that the color itself is deadened by something else in the object. If I take the mere color, I am able to awaken something out of the color itself that has nothing to do with what the color is on the object. I create life out of the color that lies enchanted only in the color when the color appears on the surface of the natural object. In this way it is possible to disenchant enchanted life from everything that nature presents us with. It is possible to release what lies within nature and its intense infinity from this nature everywhere and nowhere to create an imitation of nature, but to disenchant what is found in nature through some higher power.

When talking about these things, one is tempted to speak in paradoxes; but I believe that this does no harm, because one can see from the extreme, radical cases how things actually are in the less radical cases. On the one hand, I can imagine that when the artistic works from within through the held vision and I create a counter-image from forms and lines and colors, these lines and colors can be put together in such a way that they reflect nothing other than the restrained vision. On the other hand, I can say: It seems possible to me that I can create something alive out of something natural, let's say a human being in whom life itself has died, who has become a corpse, purely artistically, by bringing something out of the general universe that can artistically revive the corpse. There is no need for such extreme cases. But the possibility exists, as a borderline case, that when nature has already killed a being, a new creation of even the corpse comes about, in that something is brought up that is now, as something quite different from what man himself is with his soul nature, ensouls this form. I could imagine that a captivating work of art could come about through a new life sprouting in a corpse, which reflects the secrets that exist in relation to man, and which are only hidden because man has his own soul within him until his death. One need not be offended by such a borderline case. It is just that: a borderline case. From this it can be seen that artistic creation can be effective in relation to external nature, because artistic creation and enjoyment actually proceed continually in this way, even if not pushed to the borderline case. Art is a continuous release of mysterious life that cannot exist in nature itself, that must be brought out. I am then confronted with a natural product in human form, which is dead, but I try to awaken the life of this form and, from within the form, despite it being only a dead form, to awaken the whole person again.

Genesis says that man was created by the breath of God, that a human soul was breathed into him. This could lead one to see something else in the air besides the combination of oxygen and nitrogen. It could seduce one to see in the air something that awakens the human soul from it, something soul-like; it could seduce one to believe that this air basically longs to become a soul when inhaled by humans. One could see in the air the counter-image of the human soul, thus more than something merely inanimate: a yearning for the human being. Now it is very difficult to arrive at such a feeling in connection with air, because air and fire inspire little in the way of artistic creation. Nobody would want to paint fire, or lightning, and one would not want to draw air either. So it is not easy to arrive at this feeling in direct contact with air; but it seems to me that one can arrive at a true artistic feeling for this sensation in contact with the world of light and color. In the world of light and color, one can truly have the feeling that every color, or at least the color relationships, have the longing to become either a whole human being or a piece of a human being. In the human being, they find expression either as an inner expression of his being or in the way the light illuminates him and is reflected back. But one can say: If one lives in the light itself, one lives with the longing of the air to shape itself into the human face, for example. One can have the feeling that red and yellow want to achieve something; they want to shape themselves into something human, they have a language that lies within themselves. Then one will not try to simply reproduce the human being in a sober way. The liberation from the model must become an ideal of artistic creation in general. He who has not overcome the model at the moment he begins to create, who does not regard it as something that gives him the instruction to eavesdrop on nature's secrets, will remain dependent on the model and create illustrations. On the other hand, he who has artistic feeling will be tempted to shape the human being or some other being or some natural form out of color. For such a person, the world of color will be able to take on an inner, differentiated life. One will find that red and yellow colors are such that they tempt one to use them wherever one wants something to express itself, to speak through itself. What confronts one in red and yellow will express itself, will, through its own power, produce the ideal of art, excluding thought. It is different when one is confronted with blue, with violet. There one will have much more the feeling that with blue, with violet, one comes close to thought, at least on one side. One will have the feeling that with blue, with violet, one cannot represent something that expresses itself, but rather, something else, more easily. One will be tempted to represent the blue of one's inwardness by showing it in motion. And you will find that it is difficult to create an inner movement of the object by evoking some lines in the red. Rather, lines, shading, I would even say physiognomy, will arise in the red. The red will speak for itself. The blue, when transformed into lines, will betray its inner nature, will lead us more under the surface of the color than lead us out of it. When something expresses itself as color, one has the feeling that the color repels one. The blue leads us under the surface of the color; one believes that in what is expressed through the blue, movement, the development of will, is possible. A purely sensual-supersensible being, that is, a supersensible being that one wants to place in the sensory world, to paint blue and to express its inner mobility through the nuances of the blue, will be able to be fruitful.

In this way, one can disenchant whatever one encounters in nature as a part, whatever is killed in nature by higher life. One can find the sensual and the supersensual in nature itself; one can give life to mere form. One will find that it can never make a truly satisfying impression if one simply reproduces the human form as it is in a sculptural work of art. Many years ago, I once had a strange experience with a friend who became a sculptor. He said to me at the time – we were both quite young –: Yes, you see, you would actually have to produce the right plastic work of art by exactly imitating every single twist of the surface. – I must confess that I was almost furious at this expression, because it seemed to me that in this way the most abominable thing of an artistic performance could come out. Because, in any case, if you want to carve out of stone or wood what has form in man, what is killed by the higher things in life, without this inner life, then you have to bring it to life for yourself, you have to call upon the surface to say what it can never say on the outer man of nature.

For example, one finds that if one bends a surface and then bends it twice more, so that the bend is bent again, one has the simplest archetypal phenomenon of inner life. A surface bent in such a way that the bend is bent again can be used in the most diverse ways, and it will — of course this needs to be further developed — the inner life of the surface will emerge from the surface itself. These things testify to the fact that there is a relationship between outer nature and the human soul, which in truth has the character of the sensual-supersensible. We come to form thoughts precisely through our encounter with outer nature, in that outer nature kills off through a higher power that which otherwise exists as members in nature and keeps a higher spiritual life enchanted. This compels us to grasp this deadened life through the sober thought. If we avoid this pale thought and seek to grasp that which lies enchanted in the parts of nature and to which we ourselves carry out the process of putting it together, of giving it the higher life, then we undergo the process of artistic creation or that of artistic enjoyment. The two are related only in that what is later in the first is earlier in the second, and what is later in the second is earlier in the first. If we follow this approach, which is directed towards the intense infinity of nature and the possibility of demystifying the secrets of nature, in terms of what it represents in the soul life of man, then we have to say that it does not evoke the pale world of thoughts. What is demystified is lighter than what mere thought can grasp. But it does establish a connection between the external object and the human soul, in which thought is excluded, and in which a spiritual relationship between the human being and the object is nevertheless sought.

This can of course be taken further and we arrive at what may still appear quite absurd and terrible to many people today. It can be understood, but what at first seemed terrible to people was always something that they took for granted after they had become accustomed to it for some time. If you look at a person – you only need to look at their skeletal structure – then even with a very superficial observation you will be able to see that the skeleton clearly consists of two very different parts – we will not consider the other one today –: the head skeleton, which is, so to speak, only attached, and the rest of the skeleton. For those who have a sense of form, it now becomes clear – not through some anatomical observation, but through a sensory observation of the head and body skeleton – that one is the metamorphosis of the other, that one can think of the main bones in such a way that wherever there is a hump, it can also grow, and wherever there is an outgrowth, it can recede. By mere transformation, one can actually — by changing the form — make the main skeleton emerge from the rest of the skeleton and, to a high degree, the rest of the skeleton emerge from the main skeleton. So that one can say: the whole human being is enchanted in the head. Even when one is confronted with a skeleton without a head, one will be tempted, if one does not want to get stuck with the sensory perception, to supplement the head to this skeleton in a sensory-supersensory way; one will be tempted to let the vision of the head arise from the skeleton. There are people who cannot imagine this. But it is impossible for a human trunk skeleton to arise in nature without a head skeleton. For those who, in their imagination, do not merely confront nature as an abstraction, but in such a way that they carry the essence of nature in their own perception and cannot perceive the natural object other than as it must be, it is self-evident that the head skeleton will also appear to them out of the body skeleton like a vision. But for him who sees through these things, it is the case that if he has only the head and now completes the whole person out of it as if from a vision, this person is different from when he completes the other the other way round. It is similar and yet different. So that one can also say here: In nature outside, a wholeness is created in man, which consists in the dissection into head and remaining organism; but each individual wants to be a whole man. In a higher whole, life, which is enchanted in each individual as a whole man, is killed. If you exclude the thought that arises when you encounter a human being, then you see yourself forced to recreate from your own inner being that which you take from the human being by analyzing him. And in this way, you rebuild nature, like nature itself. One creates this infinitely intense, significant process of unifying what must first be killed in its members in order to reappear at a higher level. And it will naturally be different if one recreates it in spirit.

I believe that this already evokes a certain horror in the imagination. We have made an attempt in our building in Dornach – one can make attempts in all fields, it can never be a matter of wanting to restrict art by means of any dogmas – in a group that is to be executed in wood – it is important that it is to be executed in wood – it cannot be done in stone – to first reunite in a central figure at a higher level that which is also united in the human being, but united through nature, where in turn the sexual organs are killed by something higher. Every human being is asymmetrical. But what wants something completely different in the left side than in the right, you can feel it: then two people stand before us, the left-handed person and the right-handed person. That which is specialized in the left- and right-handed person is united in nature to a higher unity, in that the self-will of the limbs is slain. In artistic contemplation, which confronts the will of nature, arises, I would say, the complete figure of the left-handed and right-handed man. Both basically want something different, and the artist must — this can remain very much in the subconscious — relive the process that nature carries out on another level by killing the left-handed and right-handed man and balancing them in the whole human being. If one now artistically creates a figure in which the form suggests that the human being is an asymmetrical being, then something else must be added. The sensual-supersensory, perceived, brings one into the necessity of really bringing about what is necessary as other limbs. Therefore, we were compelled to create other figures. We were obliged to compensate for the disintegration and subsequent reassembling of the left- and right-handed man by hinting at the other two opposites. What lives in man as a vision when one imagines the torso of the human body as a visionary complement to the whole human being? One would have alive in the outer form what rises from the trunk to the head as drives, as instincts, what one could call the Luciferic. One will want to shape this Luciferic in a different way than nature has done: For example, one will reshape the shoulder blades into wings; then one will be tempted to bring together what nature constricts, these wings, with the shape of the ear and head. Something different will come out of these sensual-supernatural human limbs than an ordinary natural man, but it will represent a certain side of man that one should not be allowed to represent individually. It would be dreadful if someone were to present something like this as a figure in itself, but together with the human being and in the right composition to the human being, it can be composed in such a way that one imitates the compositional power of nature. Conversely, what wants to become a whole human being in the human head must also be recreated. What wants to become a whole human being in the human head, becomes ossified, hardened, when it is developed into a whole human being. This is what we must continually overcome in ourselves, what we actually overcome by adding to the impulses that we carry in us through our head those that keep this hardening fresh from the rest of the organism. We must overcome what comes from the head with what comes from the blood of the heart organism. The human being's sensible-supersensible nature makes it possible to recreate in separate forms what is hidden in the individual human form and was composed by nature herself at a different level.

What might be called the process of re-creation actually takes place in the human soul; it is a process in the life of the soul, something that is not just an external and abstract imitation of nature, but rather a continuation of nature's evolution in the human being himself. This presupposes that the artist and the person who is artistically gifted actually face nature and themselves in a very complicated way – which remains only in the subconscious, since the thought is eliminated –. That is understandable. It must be said that, emotionally, we are in a complicated process with regard to what is to become artistic. If someone simply wanted to reproduce a beautiful woman by imitating what nature provides, he would inwardly kill this woman. He would depict her dead. She would not come to life in his work, even if he reproduced her very faithfully. You have to be able to transform her into a corpse first, but then, through what is genuine, true humor, recreate her beauty from a completely different element. Without figuratively speaking, figuratively speaking, you have to kill a beautiful woman - you have to beat her up or something like that, first transform her into something dead - you can't paint her properly. Its beauty is present in nature in a completely different way than it must be present in the finished work of art. One must first discover with humor what is to be recreated and what must be killed. One can say: when one sits opposite a serious scholar, the reproduction of this is initially actually a comedy; one might be tempted to laugh at his serious expression. But one is only artistically finished with the serious scholar's countenance when one has humorously revived it with something else. One must make it amiable again and then one can understand it from a completely different perspective.

The aim is therefore to resurrect that which has been killed in nature through one's own subjective life, to disenchant it, to redeem it. If I observe a dashing young farmer walking on the mountain pasture and simply imitate him, I will probably create something very dead; but if I make an effort to, as it were, first kill him and, through certain lines, bring about a harmony between him and the surrounding nature, I will be able to create something artistic. Hodler has attempted such things, and we can see that in the subconscious similar efforts are being made everywhere, which has also led to artistic discussion about what might be called, on the one hand, the creation of the counter-image for the unfinished vision, and on the other hand, the creation of the subjective counter-image through what enchants in nature and is always killed by a higher life. In this way the sensible and the super-sensible approach man from two sides, and through art man can endeavour to bring them to a higher, new existence.

In my earlier lecture on the same theme I endeavoured to connect the thoughts which I have developed here before you to certain thoughts of Goethe's in order to show how the sensible and the super-sensible can be realized through art. I was criticized for this, and I now realize that it worked just as well without the reference to Goethe. People reproach you for many things, especially when you refer to Goethe, because those who think they come particularly close to Goethe when they repeat something of his that they do not understand, and are able to judge those who have made an effort to penetrate into the matter. These things can be understood; it is a natural process in human life, and one must sometimes be quite pleased when what one says is judged in this way. One can even think: if it had received a different, more approving judgment, one would have to say something quite superfluous or foolish. So I will at least present what I could avoid at the end. I do believe that anyone who approaches Goethe with understanding will find in his broad-minded and perceptive view of art, even if it is expressed in a different way, what has been asserted today as the sensual-supernatural element in art. I even borrowed the expression from Goethe. And I believe, although I am quite of the opinion that in a certain sense it is correct that the one to whom art reveals its secrets has a rather pronounced antipathy to art or to enter into an aesthetic-scientific consideration, I believe that art can only be discussed from the standpoint of life, that the most correct way to discuss art is to listen to the artists themselves. However, sometimes one comes to strange experiences. As a rule, artists complain terribly about what other artists produce, and if you enjoy their works, you sometimes do not enjoy what artists say about their works, because they sometimes live in illusions about their own works. But the artist must create out of illusions, and precisely that could be right, giving the right impulse for his artistic creation. Even if I fully admit all this, and even if I understand from a certain point of view that the artist is always quite reserved about anything approaching ingratiation from the side of aesthetic science or other considerations, I still do not believe that it is completely unnecessary to have intuitive ideas about art. I believe that art must always advance with the general progress of the soul's life. I believe that it is precisely through the contemplation of the sensual-supernatural, as it unfolds through the held vision, as it confronts us from the outer nature, when we disenchant what is enchanted in it, that art solves the riddle of nature in a sensual-supernatural way. So that in the end I want to quote this beautiful, worldly saying of Goethe's as a summary of today's reflection: “When nature begins to reveal its manifest secret to someone, that person feels an irresistible longing for its most worthy interpreter, art.”

From time immemorial, people have felt the affinity between artistic imagination and supersensible knowledge, with what can be called seeing consciousness, or, if one is not misunderstood, which would be easy, seership. For the spiritual researcher of the present day, who, starting from the point of view of the present, attempts to penetrate into the spiritual world, this relationship between artistic creation and supersensible knowledge is much more significant than the other, often emphasized relationship between the visionary life, which is fundamentally based on pathological conditions, and that which is really only in the soul, without the help of the body, is vision.

Now we know that poets, artists in general, sometimes feel a very close relationship between the whole nature of their work, between their experience and vision. In particular, artists who seek their way into the supersensible regions through creative work, fairy-tale writers or other artists who seek to embody the supersensible, rightly tell of a truly living experience, of how they have their figures visibly before them, how they stand before them in action, making an objective, concrete impression when they deal with them. As long as such a confrontation with that which is poured into artistic creation does not take away the composure of the soul, as long as it does not turn into compulsive visions over which human will has no power and composure cannot dispose, one can still speak of a kind of borderline event between artistic vision and seership. In the field of spiritual scientific research alone, a very definite boundary can be seen – and that is the important thing – between artistic creation with its source, artistic imagination, on the one hand, and seeing with the eyes closed on the other. Those who are unable to recognize this clear boundary and make it fruitful for their own work will easily end up where many of my artist colleagues have been who were actually afraid of being limited in their work by allowing something of the visionary to enter their consciousness. There are people who are true artistic natures, but who consider it necessary for artistic creation to have impulses well up from the subconscious or unconscious of the soul, but who, like a fire, shy away from the fact that something of a supersensible reality, which confronts clear consciousness, may shine into their unconscious creativity.

In relation to their experience in artistic enjoyment, reception and comprehension, and in relation to the experience of the supersensible worlds through supersensible vision, there is now subjectively an enormous difference in this experience. In the soul in which it finds expression, artistic activity, reception and vision, leaves intact the directing of the personality through the senses to the external world with the help of outer perception and with the help of imagination, which then becomes memory. One need only recall the peculiar nature of all artistic creation and enjoyment, and one will say to oneself: Certainly, in artistic reception and also in artistic creation, there is perception and conception of the external world. It is not present in such a crude way as it is usually present in sensory revelations; there is something spiritual in the way of perceiving and creating, which freely intervenes and rules over perception and imagination and over what lives in the artist as memory and the content of memory. But one could not dispute the justification of naturalism and individualism if one did not know about the connection with perception. Likewise, one can be convinced that in the soul, hidden memories, subconscious things, what is in man as memory, participates in artistic creation and enjoyment. All this is absent in what, in the sense of modern spiritual research, is the content of truly supersensible knowledge. Here we are dealing with a complete detachment of the soul from sensory perception, and also from ordinary thinking and from that which, as memory, is connected with thinking. Yes, that is precisely the great difficulty in convincing contemporaries that there can be something like an inner experience that excludes perception and ordinary thinking and remembering. The natural scientist, in particular, will not admit that this could be the case. He will always claim: “You say that nothing flows into your seeing. I see that you are mistaken: you do not know how hidden content rests in memory and comes up in a sophisticated way. That is because those who object to it do not occupy themselves with the methods by which one attains the ability to see and which show that the impression of the spiritual world can be directly present where nothing is incorporated from reminiscences, from mysterious memories. The training consists precisely in finding the way to free the soul from outer impressions and ideas based on memories. This establishes a firm boundary between artistic creation and the production of supersensible knowledge, since the soul, the human ego in which supersensible knowledge lives, does not actually draw on the organization of the body, which does play a part when it comes to artistic creation.

But because of this state of affairs, the question arises all the more: What is the relationship between the impulses that arise from the subconscious depths of the soul and are woven into artistic creation and enjoyment, and what is born out of the pure spiritual world in the form of direct impressions from supersensible knowledge? — To answer this question, I would like to start from some experiences with art for the seer himself. These experiences with the arts in general are characteristic right from the start. It then becomes evident that anyone who has learned to live in the supersensible life, to gather supersensible knowledge, really is able to exclude for certain periods of time all sense impressions and the memories that follow on from them. These can be excluded, cast out of the soul. When someone who is immersed in supersensible vision also tries to clearly perceive all this when confronted with a work of art, what he is accustomed to perceiving when confronted with an external sensory phenomenon, a completely different experience arises. When confronted with a sensory phenomenon, the seer is always able to exclude sensory perceptions and memories, but not when confronted with a work of art. Even though everything that can be perceived or imagined is of course excluded, the seer is always left with important inner content that he can neither exclude nor wants to exclude. The work of art gives something that turns out to be related to his seership. This raises the question: what is the source of this relationship?

One comes to this realization when one seeks to grasp what is active in man when he sees purely spiritually in supersensible knowledge. Then one comes to realize what inadequate ideas we have about ourselves and our relationship to the external world when we remain in ordinary consciousness. We believe that our thinking, feeling and willing are strictly separated from one another. Psychology does trace these activities back to one another, but not with the right skill. But the one who experiences the actual complexity of the soul life as it presents itself in seership knows that such a distinction between imagining, feeling and willing does not even exist, but in ordinary consciousness and life there is in every imagining a remnant of feeling and willing, in every feeling a remnant of imagining and willing, and in every willing there is also an imagining, even a perceiving in it; there remains in the willing a remnant of perception, which is hidden in it, subconscious. This must be borne in mind if one wishes to understand the process of seeing. For from what has been said, you will gather that in the act of seeing, the faculty of imagining and perceiving is silent, but the faculties of feeling and willing are not. However, it would not be a true vision if the person only developed feeling and willing, as in ordinary consciousness. On the contrary, when man passes over into the seer state, all volition as it is in ordinary life must be silenced. Man enters into the state of complete rest.

What is meant here by the term 'vision' does not imply the fidgety act of placing oneself in the spiritual world, as in dervishry, but the complete silencing of all that expresses itself as volition in ordinary life, as the power of emotional feeling. In that which a person allows to pass from volition into action, something of the emotional feeling still lives on. This feeling, also in relation to the revelation in the will, must remain silent. But the emotional feeling as such does not remain silent, and above all, the impulse of the will does not remain silent. Perception and imagination remain silent, but the impulses of emotional feeling and will are justified, only entering into a state of calm soul condition, and therefore developing their perceiving and imagining character differently than usual. If one were to dwell only in feeling, or in a false mystical inner living out of the will, then one would not enter into the spiritual world. But in the calm state of soul, what are otherwise emotional feelings and impulses of the will are lived out in a spiritual way. Feeling and volition are so lived out that they appear before the human soul as objective spiritual beings endowed with powerful thoughts, while the rest of perception and imagination, which otherwise remained unnoticed in feeling and volition, comes to revelation and becomes capable of placing itself in the spiritual world. Once one has realized this, that as a seer in feeling and willing one lives as otherwise one lives in thinking and perceiving — not in unclear thinking and feeling, not in nebulous mysticism, but as clearly as otherwise in thinking and perceiving — one can enter into a fruitful dialogue with art, although only by realizing how worthless such generalizations are, as they are expressed, for example, by the word art.

Art encompasses very different areas: architecture, sculpture, music, poetry, painting and more. One could say that if one wanted to establish the relationships between the different arts with the experience of the seer, then the diversity of the arts becomes much more meaningful to one than what philosophy would like to summarize under the name of art. By achieving the possibility of experiencing the world's thought content and spirit content with the help of thinking, emotional feeling and willing, one arrives at being able to establish a remarkable relationship with architecture.

I said that in this vision, ordinary perception and thinking cease, but a kind of completely different thinking arises that flows from feeling and willing, a thinking that is actually thinking in forms, that could directly, by thinking, represent forms of the distribution of power in space, proportions in space. This thinking feels akin to what is expressed in architecture and sculpture when they represent true artistic creations. One feels particularly at home with the thinking and perceiving in architecture and sculpture because the shadowy abstract thinking that the present so loves ceases, falls silent, and a representational thinking sets in that can but allow its content to pass over into spatial forms, into moving spatial forms, into stretching, over-arching, bending forms, in which the will flowing in the world is expressed. The seer is compelled not to grasp with the intellect what he wants to cognize from the spiritual world, as is done in the rest of science. One would recognize nothing spiritual there. One is mistaken if one believes that one recognizes in the spiritual, because one cannot penetrate into the spiritual world with ordinary thoughts. He who wants to penetrate into the spiritual world must have something as a thinker, which creates plastic or architectural, but living forms in himself. Through this one comes to the conclusion that the artist enters into an experience of forms in the subconscious. They strive upwards, fill his soul, are transformed into ordinary ideas, which can be partly calculated; they are transformed into that what is then artistically formed. The architect and the sculptor are intermediaries for what the seer experiences as perception and imagination in the spiritual world. What the seer grasps as form for his life of thinking and perceiving creeps into the architect's organization. Down in the depths of the soul, it rises in waves and becomes conscious. This is how the architect and sculptor create their forms. The only difference is that what underlies the architectonic and sculptural work as the essential form-giving element arises from subconscious impulses, and that the seer discovers these impulses as what he needs to grasp the great interrelations of the spiritual world. Just as one otherwise has imagination and perception, so the seer has to develop gifts that point to what permeates and trembles through the great structure of the world. And what he, as a seer, sees through and lives through, that lives in an unconscious way in the architect and sculptor, permeating his work as he creates it.

In a different way, those who have had supernatural experiences and are seeking a connection to poetic and musical creativity can identify with his experiences. The seer gradually comes to feel his inner self quite differently than the ordinary consciousness, which presents and perceives the sensual world around us: He feels within himself in his feeling and willing.

Those who can practise self-observation know that one is only in one's self in feeling and willing. But the seer raises feeling and willing out of himself, and in that feeling and willing provide him with perceptions and perceptions, he comes away from himself in his feeling and willing. But something else occurs. He finds himself again. With the clear consciousness of having stepped out of his body, of perceiving nothing with the help of his body, he finds himself again in the outer world, intuitively passing into what he has perceived in moving forms and shaping into images. He carries his self into the outer world. By doing so, he learns, as it were, to say to himself: Through truly inner experience from experience, I can recognize that I have stepped out of my body, which has always been the mediator of my relationship to the outer world, but I have found myself again by immersing myself in the spiritual world. By becoming an inner experience, the seer finds that he is compelled to receive his will and feeling from the spiritual world again, to receive himself again out of the supersensible world. He must do this by once more receiving a feeling and a will — but a transformed feeling and will that does not take the body for help — a feeling that is intimately related to the experience of music, so related in fact that one could say: It is even more musical than the comprehension of music itself. It is such a feeling that it is as if one's soul were pouring out into sounds, becoming a melody, a vibration, in the presence of a symphony or another work of music.

With poetry, it is the case that one is in one's volition. That is what the poetry wants, which one learns to perceive as true poetry precisely in this way, by finding one's volition there. Feeling in music, volition in true poetry.

In a peculiar situation, in a particularly significant situation, is the relationship between seers and painters. The matter is such that neither the one nor the other occurs, but something else, something even more characteristic. In the presence of real painting the seer has the feeling — and he could be a painter himself, for we shall hear that artistic creation and supersensible insight can exist side by side — the painter comes to meet him from some indefinite region of the world, brings a world of line and color and he approaches the painter from the opposite direction and is obliged to transpose what the painter brings with him, what he has transferred from the external world into his art, as imaginations into what he experiences in the spiritual world. The colors the seer experiences are different from those of the painter, and yet they are the same. They do not interfere with each other. If you want to get an idea of this, take a look at the sensual-moral part of Goethe's theory of colors about the moral effect of colors. It contains the most elementary description, It describes with inner instinct what emotional effects are awakened in the soul by individual colors. It is through this feeling that the seer comes out of the spiritual world, through this feeling that one really experiences every day in the higher world.

One should not think that the seer speaks in the same way as a painter speaks of colors when describing the colored aura. He experiences the feeling that one otherwise experiences with yellow and red, but it is a spiritual experience and should not be confused with physical visions. The worst misunderstanding arises on this point. For the seer, the experience is similar to painting in that one can speak of an encounter with something similar that comes from the opposite direction, where understanding is possible because the same thing comes in from the outside that is created from within. I always assume that it is a matter of artistic creation, with which communication is possible if, before that, not naturalism but art is there. The seer is compelled to imagine what he experiences, to illustrate it, roughly speaking. This happens when he expresses in colors and forms what he experiences: there he encounters the painter. And again, if you were to ask the painter, how do we relate to one another? the painter would have to answer: Something lives in me! As I went through the world with my ordinary eye and saw color and form, and artistically transformed them, I experienced something within me that had previously surged in the depths of my soul; it has come to consciousness and become art. The seer would say to the painter: What lives in the depths of your soul lives in things. By going through the things, you live with the soul in the spirit of things. But in order to retain the strength for painting and to consciously experience what you experienced by going through the things outside, so that what comes to the senses is not extinguished in you, you have to keep the impulses that create painting alive in the subconscious. The point is that the unconscious impulses now rise to consciousness. The seer says: “I walked through the same world, but paid attention to what lives in you. I looked at what arose in your subconscious and brought what was unconscious to your consciousness.

It is precisely with such an understanding that something will confront the human soul as a great and significant problem that may not otherwise always be properly observed. When one becomes familiar with what has just been characterized through inner experience, something comes up that touches life deeply. This is the mystery of the incarnate, this wonderful human flesh color, which is actually a great clairvoyant problem. It reminds one so much that such clairvoyance, as I mean it, is actually not so completely alien and unknown to ordinary life; it is just not heeded. I would like to express the paradoxical but true sentence: every person is clairvoyant, but this is also denied in theory where it cannot be denied in practice. If it were denied in practice, it would destroy all life.

There are oddballs today who think: How come I have to deal with a complete stranger's ego? They want to remain completely within the realm of the naturalistic; they want to remain true naturalists, so they say to themselves: I have memorized the facial oval and other things, and because I have learned from various experiences that a person is hidden in such shapes, I conclude that there will be a human ego behind this nose shape. One finds such arguments today among “clever people”. But that does not correspond to the experience one comes to when one observes life from one's own participation in life. I do not conclude that there is an ego from the shape of the face and so on. I have the consciousness of an ego because the perception of what confronts one as a physical human being is based on something other than the perception of crystals or plants. It is not true that inanimate natural bodies make the same impression as a human being. It is different with animals. What stands before you as a sensual human object cancels itself out, makes itself ideationally transparent, and through real clairvoyance one sees its ego directly every time one stands before a human being. That is the real fact. This clairvoyance consists in nothing more than extending this way of facing the human being with one's own subject to the world, in order to see if there is anything else to see through in the way of the human being.

You cannot get real impressions from clairvoyance without considering what the other person's perception is based on, which is so different because it is based on clairvoyance of the other soul. In this clairvoyance, the complexion plays a special role. For the external observer, it is a finished product, but for the one who sees supernaturally, the experience of looking at the incarnate changes. For him, there is an intermediate state. It comes about by turning one's clairvoyance, which extends to the other areas of the world, to the human form in such a way that the incarnate, which is so calm, oscillates between opposites and the intermediate state. One perceives paleness and a blush that is as if it radiated warmth. In this, that one sees people blushing and turning pale, the middle state is within. Associated with this experience of being in motion is the fact that one knows one is also immersed in the outer being of the person, not only in his soul, in his ego. One plunges into what the person is through his soul in his body, through the incarnate. This is something that leads one to the relationship between artistic perception and supersensible knowledge. For that which becomes so mobile in the perception of the incarnate lies unconsciously in the artistic creation of the incarnate. The artist needs only to be subtly aware of this. Only by being able to experience this will an artist be able to place the fine, living vibration in the center of the incarnate parts.

In this way, painting shows how the sources of artistic imagination and supersensible knowledge collide. In ordinary life, they collide when one does not even notice it, in the realm of language. Nowadays, language is usually viewed in a very intellectual way, even scientifically; but the life of language is present in us in a threefold way. Anyone who approaches language with a seer's eye and has to express what they perceive in the spiritual world must first acquire a feeling for language that could be described as a sense of loss. When people talk to each other, and also when they engage in ordinary science, everything they say is a debasement of language below the level at which language should be. Language as a mere means of communication is debasement. One senses that language actually comes to life in its own essence where poetry flows through it, where what emerges from the human soul flows through language. This is where the spirit of language itself is at work. The poet actually discovers the level of language for the first time, perceiving ordinary language as a neglect of the higher level of language. It is easy to understand how a subtle poet like Morgenstern could come to the conclusion that there is actually a perceptible lower limit to speaking, which is very common, the limit that can be called chattering. He finds that chatter has its basis in ignorance of the meaning and value of the individual word, that the chatterer comes to distort the word from its fixed contours and make it unclear. Morgenstern senses that this is a deep secret of life that is being expressed. He says that language takes revenge on the unclear, on the vague. That is understandable, since he was able to bridge the gap between poetry and seeing, just as he finds their affinity with sound, image, architecture, and so on.

This same affinity underlay the entire work of Goethe, who at one time in his life did not know whether he should become a poet or a sculptor. But the seer experiences what is the content of the spiritual experience for him outside of language. This is something that is difficult to explain because most people think in words, but the seer thinks without words and is then compelled to pour what is wordless in the experience into the already firmly formed language. He has to adapt to the formal relationships of language. He need not feel this as a constraint, for he will discover the secret of creating language. He can make himself understood by stripping away the conceptual aspect of language. It is therefore so important to understand that it is more important how the seer says it than what he says. What he says is conditioned by the ideas that each of us brings in from the outside. He is obliged, in order not to be regarded as a fool, to clothe what he has to say in viable sentences and chains of thought. For the highest realms of the spirit, it is important how the seer says something. The one who came up with the how of expression, who came up with the fact that the seer has to be careful, to say some things briefly, others more broadly, and others not at all, that he is obliged to formulate the sentence from one side in one way, then to add another from the other side. It is the way it is formulated that is important for the higher parts of the spiritual world. Therefore, in order to understand, it is important to listen less to the content, which is of course also important as a revelation of the spiritual world, and more to penetrate through the content to the way in which the content is expressed, in order to see whether the speaker is merely linking sentences and theories, or whether he is speaking from experience. Speaking from the spiritual world becomes visible in the way something is said, not so much in the content, if it is theoretical, but in the way it is expressed. In such communications from the forms of language, the artistic element of language can have an effect on what inspires the seer to rise to the level of the process of language creation, so that he recreates something of what was present when language emerged from the human organism.

What is the reason that what arises in the visionary consciousness is brought into the spirit world through artistic creation, but lives in the artistic imagination in an unconscious and subconscious way? — Artistic creation is, of course, conscious, but the impulses, the driving force, must remain in the unconscious so that artistic creation is uninhibited. Only he can understand what is at stake here who knows that the ordinary consciousness of man is, for certain reasons, destined for something other than for entering into the full world.

On the one hand, our ordinary consciousness proceeds from the observation of nature. But what it delivers to us does not arise from our concepts; they do not penetrate into the realm where, in space, matter haunts, as Dz Bois-Reymond says. And again: what lives in the soul cannot be fulfilled with reality. No matter how deeply mystical the experience, it always hovers over reality. Man comes to the full world neither by seeing nature nor by seeing into the soul. There is an abyss there that usually cannot be bridged. It is consciously bridged in the seeing consciousness, in artistic creation. There, self-knowledge must become something other than what is usually called that. Mystical insight finds that it has achieved enough when it is said: “I have experienced the God, my higher self, within.” Real self-knowledge aims to see how what one otherwise experiences in the mere point of the ego lives creatively in the organism. We are not merely conceiving and perceiving beings in that we have perception and perception; we also continually breathe out and in. While we are facing the world in waking consciousness, we are always breathing out and in, but ordinary consciousness is unaware of what is going on within us. Something wonderful is happening that can only be recognized by the seeing consciousness, when one looks not only at nebulousness, at the abstract I, but at how this I lives, forming in the concrete. The following then takes place.

When breathing out, the cerebral fluid passes into the medullar canal, into a long sack which has many stretchy, tearable points; it pushes downwards, pushing against the veins of the body. What is going on here I describe as an external process. Ordinary consciousness cannot penetrate it, but the soul experiences it subconsciously, this spreading out of what comes from the brain into the veins of the body, and when breathing in, the backflow of the venous blood into the veins of the back through the spinal canal, the penetration of the cerebral fluid into the brain, and what happens there as a play between nerves and sensory organs. Ordinary consciousness is shadowy here, knows nothing about it, but soul and spirit are involved. This process appears chaotic. What pulsates back and forth takes place in musical form in every human being. There is inner music in this process. And the creative element in music is to be raised up into the outer conscious form of the music by what the musician has become accustomed to experiencing as the music of his soul body. In it lives the tone, the subconscious life-giving power of the music in which the human soul weaves. Our psychology is still quite elementary; the things that shed light on the artist's life have yet to be explored in harmony with the faculty of vision. The human experience is a complex one. It is this subconscious knowledge of the soul that is the actual impulse of artistic imagination, in that the musical life plays out between the spinal cord and the brain, where the blood and cerebrospinal fluid rush in, so that the nerve is set into vibration, which rises up towards the brain. If this is brought into connection with the possibility of higher perception, then there is more inner music in it that is enjoyed than in the objective impulse from which the human soul is born, in that the human being enters into physical existence through birth or conception from the spiritual life. The soul enters into existence by learning to play on the instrument of the physical body.

And what happens when all this movement takes place, this vibration of the brain water that comes up? What takes place there in the interaction between nerves and senses? — When the nerve wave strikes the outer senses — not yet the sensory perception, mind you — when the nerve wave simply strikes in the waking state, there lives unconsciously and is drowned out by perception: poetry! Between the senses and the nervous system is a region where man unconsciously creates poetry. The nerve wave rolls into his senses - unconsciously it runs, one can determine this physiologically - this life runs in the senses and is poetry-producing: man lives creating poetry within himself. And the poetic creation is the bringing up of this unconscious life.

I have described this in the breathing process. During exhalation, we must bear in mind that the cerebral fluid in the body presses downwards in the forces that come from the body to meet it, and in the forces through which the human being places himself in the external world. We are constantly standing in a certain static position in the outer world, whether we are standing with legs apart, with arms bent, or whether we are crawling as a child, or whether we transform this static position of crawling into the static position of standing upright: we are in a state of inner equilibrium. The inner forces with which the waves that are exhaled meet us are based on what is formed in sculpture and architecture. The emotional feeling that lives in a person when they move but keep that movement still is expressed in the sculpture. This is an inner experience that is connected to the forms of the body. One recognizes this only when one is accustomed to developing perception and thinking into calm formal ideas. One learns that from the body do not come chaotic forces, but forms that show that the human being is integrated into the cosmos. By looking at more external forces, which the soul experiences subconsciously, one has more to do with plastic imagination. Between the two lies a strange unconscious realm that the soul has down in its depths. As the nerve impulse vibrates between body and brain, it is in contact with the warm blood, which is actually the cold, intellectual part of the human body. In such warmth and spirituality lie unconsciously the sources of artistic creation, which impulsates the painter as he brings his impressions, raised from the subconscious, onto the wall in colors. Man stands unconscious in the spiritual world, which is only opened up through seership.

It was not for nothing that in ancient times the body was seen as a temple for the soul. There was an indication of how architecture is related to the balance of the whole body and the whole cosmos.

Art should express what the artist is only able to put into his work because his soul experiences it in connection with the world, because his body is a microcosmic image of the whole macrocosm. If this is to be brought to consciousness, it can only be done through the gift of second sight. Why does the ordinary aesthetic, built on the model of natural science, prove so barren? The artist cannot do anything with this school aesthetic, which wants to bring the unconscious in human nature to consciousness in the same way as ordinary natural science. What lives in artistic creation brings the vision to consciousness, only the artist must not be afraid of the vision, as so many are. The two areas can live separately side by side in the human personality because they can be so distinct. It is possible for the soul to live outside the body in the spiritual world: then it can observe how that which otherwise remains in the subconscious is crystallized into artistic creation, but also how that which can be artistically experienced by the seer, separate from his seership. Only artistic fertilization can come from this experience and can only benefit the artist, just as artists can also fertilize the seer's vision. The seer who has artistic sense or taste will be saved from allowing spiritual science to be shot through with too much of the philistine. He will describe this spiritual world flexibly, will be able to shape the how of spiritual science, of which I spoke, more appropriately than someone who, without artistic sense, has appropriated entry into the spiritual world. There is no need, as there is for many artists, to develop a fear of seeing. I am speaking of the serious fear, not just the fear of being said to be an anthroposophist. I am speaking of the very common fear in principle that seeing would impair the immediacy of artistic creation. In reality, this impairment does not exist. But we live in an age in which, through the historical necessity of human development, the soul is pushed to transform into consciousness what was naively present in the subconscious. Only those who increasingly transform the unconscious into the free grasp of the conscious understand the times in which we live.

If this demand of the time is not met, humanity will enter a cultural cul-de-sac. Art cannot be recognized by ordinary science, which is why aesthetics is rejected by artists. But a science that seeks to understand is developing a seership that does not take the dew from the flowers of art. The seer is agile enough to grasp art. Therefore, anyone can grasp it as a fact of today's world that a bridge must be built between artistry and seership; they can emphasize this as a necessity, as Christian Morgenstern beautifully emphasized it in words that point to the need for a turnaround. He says: “He who only wants to immerse himself in what can be experienced today from the Divine-Spiritual through feeling, not penetrating through knowledge, is like the illiterate person who sleeps all his life with the primer under his pillow.”

Often one wants to sleep with the primer of world knowledge under one's pillow all one's life, so as not to have one's original elementary creativity weakened by visionary science. Whoever grasps the science of prophecy as it can be understood today, in keeping with the times, will understand that, in the spirit of Morgenstern, one must emerge from illiteracy and build bridges between artistry and seership, and that through this new light will fall on art and new warmth will come through art to seership. So that as the fruit of the right efforts in a healing future, a deeply meaningful impulse can work through visionary light and artistic warmth into the development of humanity in the future.

From time immemorial, people have sensed that there is a certain affinity or at least a relationship between the impulses of artistic imagination, artistic creation and enjoyment, and supersensible knowledge. Whoever encounters artistic individuals will realize that there is a widespread fear among creative artists that artistic work could be disturbed by approaching the conscious experience of the supersensible world, from which artistic imagination receives its impulses, as it is striven for in spiritual-scientific supersensible knowledge. On the other hand, it is well known that certain artistic natures, who approach their artistic production with what appears to shine from the supersensible world, experience something like vision within the activity of their creative imagination. Fairytale writers or other artistic individuals who want to deal more with the phenomena from the supersensible world shining into the world of the senses know how the figures appear before their eyes, but are entirely spiritual, so that they have the feeling that they are in contact with these artistic figures, or that these figures are in contact with each other. Insofar as full consciousness is present, through which one can always tear oneself away from what overcomes one in a visionary way, spiritual science can also speak of vision in such a case. It must be said that there are points of contact between artistic creation, artistic imagination and the seeing consciousness that is able to place itself in the spiritual world in a cognizant way. Nevertheless, especially in the face of a spiritual-scientific view such as the one meant here, one feels the need to emphasize that the artist should not allow his originality to be robbed by what is consciously taken in from the spiritual world. In such a view, one overlooks the essential relationship between artistic imagination and the visionary perception of the spiritual world. For what is meant here by this visionary perception is the kind that develops quite independently through mere soul activity, independently of the physical bodily tool. To what extent it is possible for the soul to place itself in the spiritual world free of the body, I cannot explain today. I would just like to say in advance that what arises in terms of kinship and relationships between genuine artistic creation and enjoyment and true, genuine seership is of more interest to anthroposophical spiritual researchers today than the relationship between seership and visionary states, or abnormal states, which, even if attempts are made to describe them as clairvoyance, are nevertheless only related to physical conditions and do not represent solely mental experiences. But to understand this real relationship between artistic imagination and visionary power, it is necessary to look at what, in the strictest sense of the word, separates the two, and that is a very significant one.

Those who create with artistic imagination will not, as is the case with ordinary sensory perception and reflection on what is perceived, comprehend the external sensory world and reproduce it within themselves: they will change it, idealize it, or whatever else one wants to call it. It does not depend on the direction. Whether one conceives realistically or idealistically, whether one is an impressionist or an expressionist, it does not matter, but in everything artistic there is a transformation of what is otherwise recreated by the human being from reality. But what remains alive in artistic creation is what can be called the perception of the external world. The artist adheres to the perception of the external world. What remains in this artistic creation is the image of the ideas that are based on external perception, and what is connected with it in the ability to remember, in the memory. In the artist, everything he has taken in during his life continues to have an effect in the subconscious, and the better that which settled in the soul as an experience continues to have an effect in the soul, the richer the artistic production will be as the personality is directed towards external sensory impressions, the ability to imagine and remember will live in artistic fantasy. This is not the case with the soul life in the vision-gifted personality that penetrates into the spiritual world through supersensible intuition. The essential point is that one can only penetrate into the spiritual world if one can silence both outer sense perception and the faculty of imagination, which runs into memory. Memory, the faculty of perceiving external sense impressions, must be completely silent during supersensible cognition. It is difficult enough to make our contemporaries understand that it is possible for the human soul to achieve such a degree of arousal of its dormant powers, that soul life can still be present in full vividness when the faculty of imagination and perception are suppressed. Therefore, the endeavor for supersensible knowledge, if it is methodically developed, must not be objected that one is dealing with the arbitrary vision only with something reminiscent of the memory, which surges up from the subconscious. The essential thing is that he who, as a spiritual researcher, wants to penetrate into the supersensible world, should learn the method that makes it possible to shut out the memory faculty so completely that his soul lives only in present impressions, into which nothing is mixed from reminiscences arising from the subconscious, so that the soul, with what it presents and experiences, stands in a world that it consciously attempts to penetrate, so that nothing remains unconscious.

When we consider that much mystical, so-called theosophical striving has a yearning for everything that is vague and nebulous, we can understand how what is meant here by seership can be confused with it, even by those who believe they are followers. But that is not the point, but rather what is meant by this seership.

Here we can see how fundamentally different this kind of vision is from artistic creation. Both are based on different states and moods of the soul; but the one who strives for supersensible knowledge in the sense meant here will have special experiences with art.

First of all, a cardinal experience. One cannot be a spiritual researcher from morning till night. Gazing into the spiritual world is tied to a specific time; one knows the beginning and end of the state in which the soul penetrates into the spiritual world. In this state, the soul is able, through its own power, to completely disregard the impressions of the outer senses, so that nothing remains of all the things that the outer senses see as colors and hear as sounds. It is precisely through this gazing into the nothingness that perception of the spiritual world arises. I would like to say: The seer can extinguish everything that comes to him from the outside world, everything that surges up from ordinary memory into mental consciousness, but he cannot extinguish certain impressions that come to him from works of art that really come from the creative imagination, even if he puts himself into this state. I do not mean to say that the seer in such states has the same impressions of the works of art as the non-seer. He has them in non-seer moments. But in seer moments he has the possibility of completely erasing the sensual and the reminiscent with regard to the outside world, but not with regard to a work of art that he encounters.

These are experiences that specify themselves. It turns out that the seer has certain experiences with the individual arts. It is precisely in the details of the effect that words such as “art” lose their usual meaning. From the point of view of supersensible knowledge, the individual arts become realms in themselves. Architecture becomes something different from music, painting and so on. But to get an overview of what seer-like experience is in relation to art, it is necessary to point out that the question suggests itself: if the seer must suppress the effects of the external world and that which belongs to the memory, what remains for him?

Of the three soul activities mentioned in the science of the soul, only two are ever active in the human soul. Imagination and perception are not present, but feeling and willing are, although in a completely different way than in ordinary life. One should not confuse supersensible knowledge with the nebulous, emotional melting into the spiritual world, which must be called mysticism. It must be clearly understood that supersensible knowledge, although it springs from feeling and willing, is something other than feeling and willing. It must be borne in mind that, for seer-knowledge, feeling and willing must fill the soul so completely that the soul is at rest, and that all the other faculties of the human being are also in complete rest. This must occur in a way that is not otherwise possible for the human being through feeling and willing: Feeling and willing must develop entirely inwardly. In the case of seeing, volitional impulses usually develop in revelations to the outside. Dervish-like states and the like are opposed to the knowledge of the spiritual world.

As feeling and willing develop inwardly, a soul activity full of light and sharply contoured springs up from them. A soul activity sprouts up, the formations of thought are similar. The ordinary thought image is something faded. Something objective, but no less imbued with reality than ordinary thinking, sprouts for the seer out of feeling and willing.

The experiences with art in particular can be used to characterize what the seer experiences in detail in his soul abilities. By trying to put himself in the place of the architect in his architectural forms and proportions, in what the architect encloses in his buildings, he feels a kinship with these architectural proportions and harmonies, with that which develops in him, in the seer, as a completely different thinking than the shadowy thinking of ordinary life. One would like to say: the clairvoyant develops a new thinking that is related to nothing so much as to the forms in which the architect thinks and which he fashions. The thinking that rules in ordinary life has nothing to do with true seership. The thinking that rules in seership includes space in its creative experience. The seer knows that with these forms, which are living thought forms, he enters into the supersensible reality behind the sense world, but that he must develop this thinking that lives out in spatial forms. The seer perceives: In all that lives in the harmony of measure and form, will and emotional feeling are active. He learns to recognize the forces of the world in such measure and number relationships through the designs that live in his thinking. Therefore, he feels related in his thinking to what the architect designs. In a certain sense, a new emotional life awakens in him — not that of ordinary consciousness — and he feels akin to what the architect and sculptor create in forms. For supersensible knowledge, a representational intellectuality is born that thinks in spatial forms that curve and shape themselves through their own life. These are thought-forms through which the soul of the seer plunges into spiritual reality; one feels akin to what lives in the forms of the sculptor. One can characterize the seer's thinking and new perception by considering his experiences with architecture and sculpture.

The seer's experiences with music and poetry are quite different. The seer can only develop a relationship to music if he penetrates even further into the sphere I have just described. It is true that this new spiritual intellectuality initially develops out of the feeling and will that are turned inwards. One is able to penetrate into the spiritual world through the experience that one penetrates only through the soul; the soul does not use the physical organization for this. Then comes the next step: one would only penetrate incompletely into the spiritual world if one did not advance to the next level. This consists not only in developing this spiritual intellectuality, but also in becoming aware of one's being outside of the body in the spiritual reality, just as one is aware here of one's existence in the physical world, of one's feet on the ground, of one's grasping at objects and so on. By beginning to know oneself in the spiritual world and to think and feel as I have just said, one comes to develop a new, deep feeling and volition, but a volition in the spiritual world that is not expressed in the sense world. By experiencing this volition, one can only make certain experiences with music and poetry.

It becomes apparent that what is experienced in music in supersensible knowledge is related in particular to the new emotional feeling that is experienced outside the body. Music is experienced differently in the visionary state than in ordinary consciousness: it is experienced in such a way that one feels united with every single note, every melody, living with the soul in the surging, sounding life. The soul is completely united with the tones, the soul is as if poured out into the surging tones. I may well say that there is hardly any other way to get such a precise, such a pictorial view of Aphrodite rising from the sea foam than by considering the way the human soul lives in the element of the musical and rising from it, when it grasps itself in the visionary.

And just as the creatures of the air flutter around Aphrodite as she rises above the sea, approaching her as manifestations of the living in space, so for the seer the musical is joined by the poetic. As he feels himself with his soul as if set apart from the musical element and yet again as if within it, as if identical with it, the poetic element is added to the musical for the seer. He experiences this in an intense form. What he experiences depends on the degree to which he is trained in seership. It is a peculiar thing about poetry. Through language or other means of poetry, the poet expresses what comes to the visionary faculty from poetry. A dramatic person, for example, whom the poet brings to the stage, whom he lets say a few words, is formed from these few words into the complete image of a human personality. That is why, in all that is unreal in poetry, that which is mere empty phrase, that which does not push out of creative power but is made, things seem so unpleasant to the seer: he sees the grotesque caricature in that which is not poetry but still seeks to create something in empty phrases. While the plastic is transformed into spiritual intellectuality, the poetic is transformed into the plastic and the representational, which he must look at. He looks at what is true, what is formed from the true creative laws by which nature creates, and sharply separates this from what is merely created out of human imagination, because one wants to create poetry, even if one is not connected in fantasy with the creative powers of the universe. Such are the experiences in relation to poetry and music.

Supernatural insight experiences painting in a peculiar way. It stands alone for supernatural insight. And because the seer — to use a trivial comparison — is obliged, as the geometrician is obliged to use lines and a compass, to visualize what he could have in mere conception, to make the conception tangible, the seer is also obliged to translate the experience of the spiritual world, what he experiences without form, into a formed, dense world. This happens when he experiences what he experiences in this way in such a way that he transforms it into inner vision, into imagination, and fills it, if I may say so, with soul-material. He does this in such a way that, so to speak, he creates the counterpart to painting in the inner, creative, visionary state. The painter forms his imagination by applying the inner creative powers to sensual perception, which he experiences as he needs them. He comes in from the outside until he transforms what lives in space in such a way that it works in lines, forms, colors. He brings this to the surface of the painterly perception. The seer comes from the opposite direction. He condenses what is in his visionary activity to the point of emotional coloring; he imbues what is otherwise colorless, as if illustrating inwardly with colors, he develops imaginations. One must only imagine in the right way that what the painter brings from one side comes from the opposite side in what the seer creates from within.

To imagine this, read the elementary principles in the last chapters of Goethe's Theory of Colours about the sensual-moral effect of colors, where he says that each color triggers an emotional state. The seer receives this emotional state last, with which he tinges what would otherwise be colorless and formless. When the seer speaks of aura and the like and cites colors in what he sees, one should be aware that he is tinting what he experiences inwardly with these emotional states. When the seer says what he sees is red, he experiences what one otherwise experiences with the red color; the experience is the same as when seeing red, only spiritually.

It is the same thing that the seer sees and that the artist conjures onto the canvas, but seen from different sides. In this way the seer meets the painter. This meeting is a remarkable and significant experience. It reveals painting to be a special characteristic of supersensible knowledge. This is particularly evident in the case of an appearance that must become a special problem for every soul: the incarnate, the color of human flesh, which actually has something equally mysterious and appealing for those who want to penetrate inwardly into such things, allowing one to see deeply into the relationships of nature and spirit. The seer experiences this incarnate in a special way. I would like to draw attention to one particular aspect.

When speaking of clairvoyance, people think that it refers to something that only a few twisted people have, something that is completely outside of life. It is not so. That which is earnest looking is always present in life. We could not stand in life if we were not all clairvoyant for certain things. It is important that the serious seer does not mean something that is outside of life, but that it is only an enhancement of life in certain ways. When are we clairvoyant in our ordinary life? We are clairvoyant in a case that is so little understood today because, from a materialistic point of view, all kinds of craziness have been formed about the way we grasp a foreign ego when we are confronted with a foreign body. There are already people today who say: You only perceive the soul of another human being through a subconscious conclusion. We see the oval of the face, the other human lines, the color of the face, the shape of the eyes. We have become accustomed to finding ourselves face to face with a person when we see something physical like this, so we draw the analogy that whatever is in such a form also contains a person. — It is not so; that is what supersensible knowledge shows. What appears to us in the human form and coloring is a kind of perception, like the perception of color and form in a crystal. The color, form and surface of a crystal present themselves as themselves. The surface and coloring in a human being cancel each other out, making themselves transparent, ideally speaking. The sensory perception of the other person is spiritually extinguished: we perceive the other soul directly. It is an immediate empathy with the other soul, a mysterious and wonderful process in the soul when we stand face to face with another person in our own humanity. There is a real stepping out of the soul, a stepping over to the other. This is a clairvoyance that is present in life always and everywhere. This kind of clairvoyance is intimately connected with the mystery of the incarnate. The seer becomes aware of this when he rises to the most difficult seerical problem: to perceive the incarnate in a seerical way. For the ordinary view, the incarnate has something resting about it; for the seer, it becomes something moved within itself. The seer does not perceive the incarnate as something finished, he perceives it as an intermediate state between two others. When the seer concentrates on the coloring of the person, he perceives a continuous fluctuation between paleness and a kind of blush, which is a higher blush than the ordinary blush, and which for the seer merges into a kind of radiance of warmth. These are the two borderline states between which the coloring of the person oscillates, with the incarnate lying in the middle. For the seer, this becomes a vibrating back and forth. Through the paleness, the seer understands what the person is like inwardly, in their mind and intellect, and through the blush, one recognizes what the person is like as a being of will and impulse, how they are in relation to the external world. What is in the inner character of the person vibrates to a higher degree.

One should not imagine that the path to seeing things spiritually consists of 'developing' oneself and then seeing all people and all things spiritually. The path into the spiritual world is a multifaceted and complicated one. Coming to understand the inner being of another person is the main problem of the experience of incarnation.

Thus you see that the seer has the most diverse experiences with the arts. What is meant here is still somewhat shaded for us by an appearance that is suitable for pointing out the way in which seership stands in life: the relationship of seership to human language.

Language is actually not a unified thing, but something that exists in three different spheres. First, there is a state of language that can be seen as a tool for communication between people and in science. One may call the seer's experience paradoxical, but it is a real one: the seer perceives this use of language as a means of communication and expression for ordinary intellectual science as a kind of demotion of language, even as a debasement of language to something that language is not in its innermost nature. The seer's perception reaches to a different conception. Language is the instrument through which a people lives in community. What lives in language, in the way it is shaped into different forms, in the way sounds are articulated and so on, is, when viewed correctly, artistic. Language as a means of expression of a people is art, and the way language is created is the collective artistic creation of the people who speak that language.

By using language as a means of everyday communication, we degrade it. Anyone with a sense for what lives in language and is revealed in our subconscious knows that the creative aspect of language is akin to the poetic, to art in general. Anyone with an artistic nature has an unpleasant feeling when language is unnecessarily tuned down to the sphere of ordinary communication. Christian Morgenstern had this feeling. He was not anxious to build a bridge between artistry and seership; he did not believe that artistic originality would be lost through the penetration of the intellectual world; he felt that the poetic in him was akin to the plastic and the architectural. He, who expresses what he feels about language by characterizing chatter as an abuse of language, says: “All chatter is based on uncertainty about the meaning and value of the individual word. For the chatterbox language is something vague. But it gives it back to him in abundance: the (vague, the “swimmer.” One must feel what — in order to feel like him — Morgenstern felt as the language-creative: that where language in prose becomes a means of communication, its degradation to a mere purpose takes place.

Thirdly, the experience of the seer with language characterizes what is experienced in the spiritual world. What is seen there is not seen in words, it is not expressed directly in words. Thus, it is difficult to communicate with the outside world in a seerly way, because most people think theoretically and in terms of content in words and cannot imagine a life of the soul that goes beyond words. Therefore, those who experience the spiritual world perceptively feel a certain compulsion to pour into the already formed language that which they experience. But by silencing what otherwise lives in language — the power of imagination and memory — they can awaken in themselves the creative powers of language itself, those creative powers that were active in the development of humanity when language first arose. The seer must place himself in the state of mind when language first arose, must develop the dual activity of inwardly forming spiritual images that he has seen, and immersing himself in the spirit of speech formation so that he can combine the two. It is therefore important to realize that the words of the seer must be understood differently than words usually are. In communicating, the seer must make use of language, but in such a way that he allows what is creatively active in language to arise again, by responding to the formative forces of language. This makes it important that he shapes the spoken word by emphasizing certain things strongly and others less, saying certain things first and others later, or by adding something illustrative. A special technique is necessary for those who want to express spiritual truths in language, when they want to express what lives within them. Therefore, the seer needs to take into account the “how” of how he expresses himself, not just what he says. It is important that he first forms, it depends on how he says things, especially the things about the spiritual world, not just on what he says. Because this is so little taken into account, and because people remember the words by what they otherwise mean, the seer is so difficult to understand. He has a need — this is all only relative — to develop the ability to create language so that he expresses the supersensible through the way he expresses himself. It will become more and more necessary to realize that the important thing is not the content of what is said, but that through the way the seer expresses himself, one has the vivid impression that he is speaking from the spiritual world. Thus, even in ordinary life, language is already an artistic element. The seer also has a special relationship to language.

Now the question arises: What is the basis for such a relationship between the seer and the artist? How is it that basically the seer cannot detach himself from the impression of a work of art? The reason for this is that in the work of art something akin to supersensible knowledge appears, only in a different guise. It is due to the fact that the inner life of man is much more complicated than modern science is able to imagine.

I would like to present this from a different angle, where, however, apparently scientific language is used, and which points to something that must be developed more and more in order to bridge the gap between, on the one hand, the ordinary observation of reality and, on the other hand, the experience in artistic imagination and supersensible knowledge. I will ask: What is it that enables the creative musician to bring forth from his inner being that which lives in his notes? Here we must realize that what is usually called self-knowledge is still abstract. Even what mystics or nebulous theosophists imagine is something very abstract. If one believes that one experiences the divine in one's soul, then this is something very unclear and nebulous before the real, concrete seership. This becomes clear that on the one hand man has his inner experience, his thoughts, feelings, volitional impulses; he can immerse himself in them, call it mysticism, philosophy, science. If one learns to recognize the living, one knows: All this is too thin, even if one tries to condense it inwardly. Even with intense mysticism, one always flutters above reality, does not come close to true reality, only experiences inner images, experiences the effects of reality, and does not experience reality through ordinary contemplation of nature, which faces material processes.

It is true what Dz Bois-Reymond says: that contemplation of nature can never grasp what haunts space. When the natural scientist speaks of matter that exists in space, it does not yield to what we use to grasp reality. For ordinary consciousness, it remains the case that on the one hand we have the inner life, which does not penetrate to reality, and on the other hand we have external reality, which does not yield to the inner life. There is an abyss in between. This abyss, which one must know, is an obstacle to human knowledge. It can only be overcome by developing supersensible vision in the soul, the kind of vision that I have shown today in its relationship to the artistic.

When this vision develops, one enters into an external relationship with oneself and with material reality, which is present as a body. The body becomes something new, it does not remain the brittle, the one that does not surrender to the inner self. The inner self does not remain the one fluttering above reality, but it impregnates itself, permeates itself in its own corporeality with what has material existence in the body. But all material existence contains spiritual existence.

Let us try to visualize this with the help of musical art. While a person is developing musical or other ideas and perceiving them in ordinary consciousness, complicated states are taking place in his physical interior. He knows nothing about them, but they take place. The clairvoyant consciousness penetrates to this inward, complicated, wonderful physical experience. The cerebral fluid, in which the brain is otherwise embedded, pours out into the spinal cord sac when we breathe out, penetrates down, pushes the blood to the lower abdominal veins, and when we breathe in, everything is pushed up. A wonderful rhythm takes place, which accompanies everything we imagine and perceive. This breathing, this plastic art in its rhythm, pushes in and out in the brain. A process takes place that plays a part in human experience. It is something that goes on in the subconscious and of which the soul is aware. Modern physiology and biology are still almost completely ignorant of these things, but this will become a broad science,

In times that can no longer be ours, spiritual life had to be sought in a different way. But the time for seeking spiritual science in the Oriental-Indian way is past; it can be studied afterwards, but the belief that one must go back to Indian methods is completely mistaken. That is not for our time; it would lead humanity astray. Our methods are much more intellectual, but one may see by studying what ancient India was seeking. A large part of the training for higher knowledge in India consisted of a rhythmically ordered breathing process: they wanted to regulate the breathing process. If you compare what they were seeking with what I have just said, you will find that the yoga student wanted to experience within himself what I have described by inwardly feeling the path of breathing. The Indian experienced this by trying to feel the breathing process as it rose and fell.

Our methods are different. Those who follow this with understanding will find that we are no longer to immerse ourselves in the organism in this physical way, but to try to grasp what flows down through the meditative nature of the intellect and what flows up through the exercises of the will, and in this way to try to oppose ourselves to the current with our soul life and to feel it as it flows up and down.

A certain progress in human development depends on this. This is something of which science and everyday consciousness know nothing, but the soul knows it in its depths. What the soul knows and experiences there can, under special circumstances, be brought up into consciousness. It is brought up when the human being is an artist in relation to music. How does this happen? In the ordinary human condition, which one could also call the bourgeois condition, there is a strong connection between the soul and spirit and the physical and bodily. The soul and spirit are strongly tied to the processes just described. If the equilibrium is a labile one, if the soul and spirit are detached, then one is musical or receptive to it through this construction, which is based on inner destiny. The special artistic gift in other fields also depends on this unstable relationship. Those who have this gift are able to bring up what would otherwise only take place down in the soul — in the depths of the soul we are all musical artists. Those who are in a stable equilibrium cannot bring up what takes place there: they are not artists. Those who are in a labile equilibrium — now, as a scientific philistine, one could speak of degeneration — those who are in a labile equilibrium of soul and body, bring up more of what is playing in the inner rhythm, darker or lighter, and shape it through the tone material. If we look at the flow of nerve impulses from bottom to top towards the brain, we first encounter what we characterize as musical. How the optic nerve spreads out in the eye and connects with blood vessels remains in the subconscious. Something is going on that is extinguished when a person is confronted with the external world. When confronted with the external sensory world, the external impression is extinguished. But what takes place between nerve waves and sensory processes has always been a poet; the poet lives in every human being. And it depends on the state of the soul-body balance whether what takes place remains down there or whether it is brought up and poured into poetry.

Let us again consider the radiating process, the wave that strikes downwards, and strikes against the branching of the blood wave: this expresses the placing of our own equilibrium into the equilibrium of our environment. The subconscious experience is particularly strong here, in which the human being moves from the crawling child into upright balance. This is an enormous subconscious experience. The fact that we have this, which is only caricatured in the ape, and which becomes significant for humanity, that the line through the center of the body coincides with the center of gravity, is an enormous inner experience. There one unconsciously experiences the architectural-sculptural relationship. When the downward nerve wave encounters the blood flow, architecture and sculpture are unconsciously experienced, and it is again brought up and shaped to a greater or lesser extent by unstable or stable conditions.

The painting and what is expressed in it is experienced inwardly where nerve and blood waves meet. The artistic process is conscious, but the impulses are unconscious. The visionary consciously immerses himself in what underlies the artistic imagination as an impulse, as an inner experience, which is not characterized in such an abstract way as it is done today, but so concretely that one can find every single phase in the configuration of one's own body. The ancients sensed correctly that, with regard to architecture, every form and every measure is present in one's own self-insertion into the external world. Ancient architecture originates from a different sensing of these proportions than Gothic architecture, but both originate from a sensing of one's own equilibrium with the conditions of the macrocosm. In this way, one recognizes how man, in his own construction, is an image of the macrocosm. That is why the body has been called the temple of the soul. There is much truth in such expressions. Thus we can say that basically the sources from which the artist draws, who is to be taken seriously and has a relationship to reality, are the same sources from which the seer draws, to whom only that which is to remain an impulse in its effect now appears in consciousness, while when the impulse remains in the subconscious, he brings up what is brought to view by the artist.

From this it can be seen that these areas of human experience are strictly separate. Therefore, there is no reason for the anxiety that believes that the artist's originality will be lost through the gift of second sight. The gift of second sight is developed in the same states that can be separated from artistic creation and experience, but the two cannot affect each other if they are properly experienced. On the contrary.

We are at a time when humanity must become more and more aware and conscious, more and more free. That is why the light of art must be poured out by the artist himself, and in this way a bridge will be built between art and vision, which will not interfere with each other.

It is understandable that the artist feels disturbed when art history develops according to the pattern of modern natural science or the rational aesthetics as it is understood today. A knowledge that penetrates real art with vision does not yet exist today; one day artists will not feel disturbed by it, but fertilized by it.

Anyone who works with a microscope knows how to proceed in order to learn how to see. Just as one first penetrates oneself from within with the ability to work properly with a microscope – in this way, the inner view stimulates the outer view, does not hinder it – so will a time come when true seership impregnates and permeates the elementary productive capacity of the artist.

Sometimes, however, what is meant by vision is misunderstood because one thinks of supersensible science and knowledge too much in terms of ordinary sensory science and knowledge. However, people who approach spiritual science sometimes feel disappointed: they do not find convenient answers to their down-to-earth questions, but they do find other worlds that sometimes have much deeper riddles than those in the world of the senses. Through an introduction to spiritual science, new riddles arise that cannot be solved in theory, but promise to dissolve vividly in the process of life and thus create new riddles. If one lives into this higher liveliness, one remains related to art. Hebbel demands conflicts that must remain unresolved, and he finds Grillparzer philistine when, despite all his beauty, he resolves conflicts in a way that only makes sense to someone smarter than his hero. — This is the ultimate goal of true vision: it does not create cheap answers, but rather worldviews that complement the ones we perceive with our senses. Of course, profound artists have already sensed this. In his recently published book “Stufen” (Stages), Morgenstern expresses the idea that anyone who, like the artist, really wants to get to the spiritual must be willing to absorb and unite with what can already be comprehended today, through supersensible knowledge, of the divine-spiritual. He says: “He who only wants to immerse himself in what can be experienced of the Divine-Spiritual today, not penetrating it with knowledge, is like the illiterate person who sleeps all his life with his primer under his pillow.”

This characterizes the point in our culture we are at. If one is able to respond to what is needed in our time, one will, like Morgenstern, have to come to the conclusion: one must not remain illiterate towards clairvoyant knowledge; as an artist, one must seek connections to clairvoyant knowledge. Just as it is significant when the visionary element sheds light on artistic creation, it is equally significant when artistic taste can inspire what, as a form of visionary philistinism, still has nothing artistic and at best something amusing about it. For the true spiritual expert of the future, the bridge that can be built between artistry and vision is more important than any pathological visionary.

Whoever sees through this knows that it will flourish for the good of present and future humanity if more and more spiritual things and spiritual knowledge are sought. The light of vision must shine in art, so that the warmth and grandeur of art may have a fertilizing effect on the breadth and grandeur of the horizon of vision. This is necessary for art, which wants to immerse itself in true existence, as we need it to be able to master the great tasks that must increasingly approach humanity from indeterminate depths.

It was certainly out of a profound understanding of the world in general but above all out of a deep feeling for art, that Goethe coined the words: “The man to whom nature begins to reveal her open secret feels an irresistible longing for her worthiest exponent—art.” Without sacrificing any of the spirit in Goethe's words we may perhaps complete what he said by adding: “The man to whom art begins to reveal her secret feels an almost invincible antipathy towards her least worthy exponent, the science of aesthetics.” That science is not what I wish to dwell upon today. It seems to me not only true to the spirit of Goethe's words but wholly in sympathy with it if we speak of art and the experiences we can have, and may frequently have had, in connection with art, in the way we like to relate those we had, or still have, with a trusty friend.

When human evolution is in question we speak of “original sin”. Today I don't want to enlarge upon whether the shadow-side of man's life—important as that side is—can be exhausted if we speak of original sin in the singular. But it seems to me that in connection with a perceptive feeling for art and the creations of art it is necessary to speak of two original sins. Certainly one of these is the copying, the reproduction of the physical, that is, of what belongs purely to the world of the senses. The other seems to me to be the wish to express, represent or reveal, through art, the super-physical,. But it becomes very difficult to approach art either perceptively or creatively if both physical and super-physical are rejected. Yet the following seems to me to be in keeping with a sound human feeling: Anyone wishing in art for the physical alone can hardly get beyond a refined form of illustration, imitation which may indeed be raised to the level of art but can never become true art. And it can well be said that it reflects a life of soul run wild when anyone is willing to be satisfied by the merely illustrative element, of copying the physical or what is given in any other way by the sense world alone. It is due, however, to a kind of possession—possession by one's own understanding and reason—when there is a desire for the embodiment of an idea, for the artistic embodiment of what is purely spiritual. Interpreting a world-conception poetically, or through pictorial art, is not compatible with cultured taste; rather does it correspond to a state of barbarism in man's life of feeling Art itself, however, is deeply rooted in life; were this not sort through the whole way in which it arises it would have no justification for existence. For in face of a purely realistic world-conception art must exhibit all manner of unreality and into it must play many of the illusions of life. It is precisely because art is obliged to introduce into life what for a certain understanding is unreal, that, in some way or other, its roots must go deep down into life.

Now it may be said that from a certain boundary of perceptive feeling—from a lower boundary up to one that is higher, which in many people has to be first developed—artistic feeling in life makes its appearance everywhere. Even if not in the form of art itself this feeling arises when, in the ordinary physical existence met with in the world of the senses, what is super-physical and occult somehow makes its presence known. It arises within the super-physical, the result of pure thought, what is feelingly perceived and experienced in spirit—not by means of empty symbols or lifeless allegories but as if it would itself take on life in a physical form—lights up in a form that is perceptible to the senses. That what is ordinarily physical in everyday life has within it the super- physical, as if conjured there by magic—this is perceived by everyone who confines his mood of soul within the two boundaries mentioned.

We can certainly say this: If I am invited by anyone into a room with red walls, I take something for granted about the red walls which has to do with artistic perception. When I am taken into a red room and am face to face with the man who invited me there, I shall have the quite natural feeling that he is about to tell me all kinds of interesting things. If he does not do so I shall feel that my being invited into the red room had something insincere about it and I shall go away dissatisfied. If anyone receives me in a blue room and by his chattering stops me from getting a word in edgeways, the whole situation will make me uncomfortable and I shall complain that in the very colour of his room the man has been lying to me. One is constantly coming across such things in life. On meeting a woman in a red dress we shall feel that she rings untrue if she seems shy; and a woman with curly hair will appear genuine only if rather pert and if she is not pert we shall feel disappointed. It goes without saying that things need not be like that in in life; it is right that life should lead us away from such illusions. But there is a certain limited sphere in our mood of soul in which our feelings tend in this direction.

Naturally, too, these things are not to be taken as universal laws; they may be differently perceived by many people. The fact remains, however, that everyone in life, when confronting the external things of the sense-world, has a feeling that they contain, enchanted within them, what is spiritual—a spiritual situation, a spiritual attitude, a spiritual mood.

It may really appear as if what is seen here to be a demand of our soul, and which so often in our existence affords us bitter disappointment, must call for a special sphere of life to be created for the satisfaction of these particular needs. This special sphere seems to me that of art. Art fashions out of the rest of life precisely what satisfies the tendency lying within the limits of perception mentioned above.

Now it may be that we can fully realise what is experienced in art only by investigating more deeply the processes taking place in the soul, either in artistic creation or in the enjoyment of art. For we need only to have lived a little with art, we need only have made some attempt to get on intimate term with it, to find that the soul-processes in the artist and the lover of art we are about to describe are in a certain sense inverted yet in reality the same. What I am wanting to describe is experienced in advance by the artist; he experiences to begin with a certain process of the soul which then resolves itself into another process; whereas the man who just enjoys works of art experiences first the second process I refer to, and only afterwards the one from which the artist makes his start. Now it seems to me that the difficulty in approaching art psychologically lies in people not going deeply enough into the human soul to grasp what actually evokes the need for art. Perhaps ours is the first age fitted for giving clearer expression to this artistic need. For whatever we may think about a great many of the trends in the art of recent times, whatever we may think about impressionism, expressionism, and so on—the discussion of which often springs from a source that has nothing to do with art—whatever we may think about all this, one thing cannot be denied. We cannot deny that since these trends have prevailed, artistic perceptions, artistic life, out of certain regions of the soul far down in the subconscious and formerly not drawn from thence, have now been brought more to the surface of consciousness. Today there is of necessity more interest in the artistic and art-appreciating processes of man's soul—promoted by all the talk about things such as impressionism and expressionism—than was the case earlier, when the artistic concepts of the scholar were very far from what was actually living in art. In recent times, where the study of art is concerned, concepts, conceptions, have arisen which in a certain respect—at least in comparison with former days—come very near the creations of present-day art.

The life of the soul is really infinitely more profound than is generally supposed. Few people have any idea that, subconsciously and unconsciously, the human being has in the depths of his soul a number of experiences seldom spoken of in ordinary life We have to go deeper down into this life of the soul to discover the mood lying between those two boundaries. Our life of soul swings, as it were, between the various conditions, which all more or less represent two different types. On the one hand there is in man's soul something that seems to surge freely from its depths, something that often torments it, though quite unconsciously. It is something that, when the soul is especially susceptible to the mood mentioned, has a constant urge to discharge itself into consciousness as vision—though this should not take place in the case of a soundly-constituted human being. Our life of soul, when it has a tendency to this mood, is always striving, far more than we recognise, to transform itself in the sense of this vision. A healthy life of soul consists simply in confining the wish for visions to the striving for them, so that they may never actually arise.

This striving after the vision, which in reality exists in the soul of each of us, can be satisfied if we confront the soul with an external impression, an external form—for example, a work of sculpture—containing what is striving to arise but should not succeed in doing so when the soul is sound: the morbid vision. This work of art then, this outer form of what is thus striving to arise, will confine in a beneficial way to the depths of the soul what is actually wanting to become vision. We offer the soul, as it were from outside, the content of the vision, but we offer it a real work of art only if we are able out of our legitimate striving for the vision to divine what form, what plastic impression, we have to offer the soul to compensate for its longing after the visionary. I believe that many of the modern ways of approach which meet us in what is called expressionism get near this truth, and that explanations of them show a groping after what I have just been saying. People do not go far enough, however; they do not look sufficiently deeply into the soul, nor do they come to know that irresistible desire for that is visionary which is actually In the souls of us all. This is however, only the one side, and on becoming familiar with artistic creation and the appreciation of art, we can very well see how there is a source of artistic work which reflects this need of man's soul.

But there is another source of art. The source of which I have just been talking lies in a certain constitution of the human soul, in its desire to have what is visionary as a spontaneous conception. The other source lies in this—that secrets magically conjured within nature herself can be discovered only by allowing oneself, not to make scientific assumptions which are not needed, but to perceive what these deep mysteries really are in the nature that surrounds us.

These deep mysteries in nature around us, when spoken of, may perhaps appear very strange to the consciousness of present-day people. Yet there is something that precisely from our time onwards will make the kind of kind of mysteries to which I refer more and more recognized by the general public. There is in nature something which is not just the growing, sprouting life that delights the healthy souls in nature, there is also what we call death, destruction, what is constantly destroying and overcoming one life by another. Whoever is able to perceive this will also find—to make this excellent example—when confronting the human figure that this figure in its outer realisation in life, is all the time being killed by a higher kind of life. It is the secret of all life that there is ceaseless extermination of lower life by one that is higher. The human form, permeated as it is by the human soul, the human life, is continuously being killed, overcome, by this human life, this human soul. This happens in such a way that the human form may be said to bear something within it which, if left to its own life, would be quite different. It cannot pursue its own life, however, because within it a higher life, a life of another kind, is always deadening it.

On approaching the human form the sculptor, if only unconsciously, discovers this secret through his perception. He finds that this human form is wishing for something that does not come to expression in the human being but is killed by a higher life, the life of the soul. The sculptor conjures forth from the human form what is not existing in the actual man, something missing in the actual man hidden by nature. Goethe perceived something of this kind when he spoke of “open secrets”. We can go further and say: This secret is underlying the wide realms of nature everywhere. Strictly speaking no colour, no line, appear in nature without something lower being overcome by what is higher. The reverse can also be true; the higher can be overcome by the lower. It is always possible, however, to break the spell and to re-discover what has thus actually been overcome—and this is what constitutes artistic creation.

If , on reaching what has been overcome and then freed from enchantment, we know how to experience it in the right way, it becomes artistic perception.

About this same artistic perception I should like to say something more precise.

A great deal in Goethe's work still has to be brought to light, and that often contains truths very important from the point of view of man. Take Goethe's theory of metamorphosis which starts out with how, for example, the petals in a plant are merely transformed leaves, and which is then extended to all forms in nature. When once what lies in this theory is brought fully to light by a more comprehensive development of natural science than was possible in Goethe's day, when through an all-embracing perception nature has been unveiled, Goethe's theory of metamorphosis will be capable of fuller life and of far wider application. I may say that the understanding of this theory of his is still very limited; it is capable of wide extension.

If we keep to the human figure the following may be said by way of illustration: Whoever studies the human skeleton finds, even when studying it quite superficially, that this human skeleton consists of two definite members; this might be carried further but would lead us too far afield for today. The skeleton consists firstly of the head, which to a certain extent merely rests on the remaining skeleton, and secondly of that remaining skeleton. Anyone sensitive to the metamorphosis of form, anyone. who can see how one form passes over into another—in the sense Goethe meant when he said the green leaf passes over into the colourful petal—will be able, on extending this mode of observation, to see that the human head is a whole, the rest of the organism another whole, and that one is the metamorphosis of the other, In a mysterious way the whole of the rest of man may be said—when suitably perceived—to be capable of transformation into a human head. And the human head is something which in a rounded and more developed form contains the entire human organism,. The remarkable thing is, however, that when we are capable of perceiving this when inwardly we are able really to transform the human head into the appearance of man himself, the result in both cases is something quite different, In the one case, when the head is transformed into the whole organism, something appears which shows man as a kind of ossified being, contracted, narrowed, driven throughout. into a sclerotic condition. If we let the rest of the organism work upon us so that it becomes head, we get something in appearance very unlike an ordinary man but reminding us of one only in the forms of the head, Something appears that in its growth shows no tendency to form the bony structure of the shoulder-blades, but aims at becoming wings, at spreading indeed above the shoulders, and from the wings. developing upwards over the head to appear like a kind of hood that is trying to seize hold of the head in such a way that what in the human form constitutes the ear is spread out and joined up with the wings, In short, there appears a kind of spirit-form and this spirit-form rests enhanced within the human form. This it is which, if we develop further the perception of what Goethe foreshadowed in his theory of metamorphosis, throws light into the mysteries of human nature. From this example we can see how nature in all her various spheres has the characteristic of striving—not abstractly but visibly, concretely—to be something absolutely different from what is presented to our senses. When our perceiving is thorough, nowhere do we have the feeling that any form, anything at all in nature lacks the possibility of developing beyond what it is into something quite different. Such an example as this shows particularly well how in nature one life is constantly being overcome, and even killed, by a higher life.

We do not bring to visible expression what is thus perceived as a double man, as this twofold quality in man's growth, only because something higher, something superphysical, so unites these two sides of the human being, so balances them, that we have the ordinary human form, The reason why nature—not now in an outward, spatial way but inwardly and more intensively—seems to us so magical, so mysterious, is because in each of her works she is wanting to offer us more, infinitely mores than she can, and because she puts together her several parts, all that she organises, in such a way that a higher life swallows up the life inferior to it, allowing it only partial development. Whoever directs his perception to this, will everywhere find that this open secret, this magical quality running through the whole of nature is—like the inward striving after the vision, but here working from outside—what stir a man up to take his stand somewhere beyond nature, to choose something special out of the whole, and from there to let shine forth what nature is seeking to do in one of her works—what can become a whole but has not become so in nature herself.

Perhaps I may mention here that in the Anthroposophical Society's building at Dornach, near Basle, an attempt has been made to realise in plastic form all that has just been indicated. We have tried to make a sculptural group in wood to represent what may be called the typical man; but this group represents the typical man in such a way that what otherwise is only tendency, and held in check by higher life, first comes to expression in the whole form only in gesture which is then brought back into a state of rest. The endeavour has been made plastically to awaken this gesture which in the ordinary human being is kept under—not the gesture made by the soul but the one that is killed before it leaves the soul, the one held under by the life of the soul—and then to bring it to rest again. Thus it has been sought first to set the resting surface of the human organism in movement through gesture and then to return it to a state of repose. Through this one came quite naturally to see that something had to be given greater prominence. This something, a potentiality in every man but obviously held under by the higher life, is the asymmetry existing in us all—no-one's right and left sides being formed alike. But when this has been given greater prominence and what is held together in a higher life has been set free, then with a slightly humorous touch it has to be united with another, higher stage; then it is necessary for what approaches us in a natural way from outside to become reconciled. It becomes necessary to atone artistically for the offence against naturalism—for this stressing of asymmetry and for this translating into gesture of various things which have then to be brought to rest again. This inner offence had to be atoned for by our showing, on the other hand, the overcoming brought about when, through metamorphosis, the human head passes over into the sombre, constricted form which, in its turn, is overcome by the representative of man. This form is at the feet of the representative of man and thus can be felt as member, as part of him. The other form we had to create in addition expresses what feeling demands when not the head but the rest of the human form becomes powerful—as indeed it is in life though held in check by higher life—when all that generally remains in a stunted state is too prolific in its growth; what, for example, is characteristic in the shoulder-blades, what unconsciously is in a man's very formation, in him as a certain Luciferic element, an element that strives to get outside man's essential being. If all that lies in the human form, as arising from impulses and desires, takes actual shape—whereas otherwise it is overrun by a higher life, by the life of the understanding, the life of the reason, which develops and comes to realisation in the human head—then this makes it possible for us to free nature from enchantment, to capture from nature its open secret, by ourselves separating again the parts which nature killed by making them into a whole. Thus the onlooker is obliged in his heart to bring about what nature has already done before him. Nature has done all this, she has brought harmony to man in such a way that his various single members are combined in a harmonious whole. By setting free what has been enchanted into nature, we at the same time break nature up into her super-physical forces. Then there is no need to seek through dry allegory, nor in a way that is intellectual and without artistic feeling, for any idea, anything thought out, anything purely superphysical and spiritual, behind the objects of nature. One just asks nature quite simply: How would you develop in your various parts were your growth undisturbed by a higher life? We come to the rescue of something superphysical that has been held in the physical by enchantment and free it from the physical bonds that held it spellbound. We actually come to be naturalistic in a supernatural way.

I believe that in all the various tendencies and endeavours of recent times, still very much in an elementary stage, which call themselves impressionism, I believe we may perceive in all these the longing of our time really to discover and give shape to secrets of this kind, to this kind of physical-superphysical. For a feeling is abroad that what is actually accomplished in art—in artistic creation and in the appreciation of art—must today be raised into fuller consciousness than has been the case in former epochs. What is accomplished, namely, that a suppressed vision is appeased or that nature is confronted by something which repeats her process—this has always been striven for. Actually these are the two sources of all art.

But let us go back to the time of Raphael. In his time the striving naturally took a different form from that of our day, of, for example, Cézanne or Hodler. What in art is represented by these two streams, however, has always been aimed at, though more or less unconsciously. But in former times it would have been looked upon as very primitive had the artist himself been unaware that in his soul something approaches nature, of a spiritual though unconscious kind, which when the artist seeks it in the physical-superphysical removes the spell from what has been enchanted into nature. Thus if we stand before one of Raphael's works we always have the feeling—if we are willing to attempt the interpretation of what otherwise remains in the obscurity of the subconscious without occasion for expression—the feeling that in this work of art we come to an understanding with something, and also indirectly with Raphael himself.

About all this we may have the feeling (as I said, there is no occasion to speak of it even in our own soul) that we have been together with Raphael in a former life on earth, when we learned from him many things that have entered deeply into our soul, and that this centuries-old connection with the soul of Raphael had become entirely subconscious—suddenly, however, springing into life again as we stand in front of his works. We believe we are face to face with something that took place long ago between our soul and that of Raphael.

From the artist of more recent times we get no such feeling, The modern artist leads one spiritually, as it were, into his studio; what there takes place comes very near to the level of consciousness and belongs to the immediate present. Because this longing, this need of the age, prevails, the rising conception that is actually a suppressed vision, seeks in our time satisfaction through art. On the other hand there meets us, though today in a rather elementary form, a breaking- up of what is otherwise union—an imitation of nature's own process.

What infinite significance everything gains that recent painters have attempted in order to study the various colours, to study the light in its variety of shades, and to discover how, ultimately, every effect of light, every shade of colour, aims at becoming more than it can be when forced into a whole where it is killed by a higher life. What have they not attempted in order that, starting from a feeing of this kind, light should be awakened to life, treated in such a way as to set free what, when the light has to serve in bringing about the ordinary processes and happenings in nature, remains enchanted within light. We are only at the very beginnings of all this. From these beginnings, which today are the expression of a legitimate longing, it will probably be possible, however, to experience that something in the realm of art becomes a secret—a secret which is then revealed. When put into words this sounds rather trite but many things that sound so hide secrets; we have to draw near these secrets, especially to perception of them. What I am meaning here answers the question: Why is it impossible to portray fire and air? It is quite clear that in reality fire cannot be painted. No one could have the true perception of the painter who would want to paint the glittering, glowing life that is only to be held fast by the light. It should never enter the head of anyone to want to paint lightning—still less to paint the air!

On the other hand we have to admit that everything contained in light conceals within it what is striving to become like fire, striving to develop in such a way that it says something, gives an impression of something welling up out of the light, out of each single shade of colour—just as human speech wells up from the human organism. Every effect of light wants to tell us something, every effect of light has something to say to some other effect of light nearby. In every effect of light there is a life which is overcome, deadened, by higher conditions. If our perception takes this path we discover what the colour feels, what the colour is saying, and what is being striven for in this age of “plain air” panting. If we discover the secret of colour this perception is widened and we find that, strictly speaking, what I have just been saying is perfectly valid; but not in the same way for all colours because the colours say very different things. Whereas the bright colours, the reds and the yellows, attack us and tell us a great deal, the blue colours take the picture more into the realm of form. Through blue indeed we enter form, enter essentially into the form-creating soul. We have been on the road to such discoveries but often we have stopped short halfway. Many of Signac's pictures seem so little satisfying—though in another respect they can give much satisfaction—because blue is always treated in the same way as, let us say, yellow or red, without any recognition that a patch of blue when next to yellow expresses something quite different in value from yellow beside red. This appears rather trivial to anyone with a feeling for colour, yet in a deeper sense people are only just beginning to discover such secrets. Blue, violet, are colours which take the picture right out of the realm of the expressive into that of the inner perspective. It is quite conceivable that, solely by the use of blue in a picture by the side of the other colours, one can produce a wonderfully intensive perspective without the aid of any drawing. It is possible to go further in this direction. We come then to recognise that a design might be called the work of colour itself., When anyone succeeds in putting movement into his use of colour so that, in a mysterious way, the design follows the guidance of the colour, he will notice that this is particularly the case with blue. It is less so with yellow and red for it is not in their nature to be led in that way to inner movement, to move from one point to another. If we want to have a form inwardly in movement—in flight, for instance—a form which by reason of its inner movement at one time becomes small inwardly, at another big, a form moving in fact within itself, then without having recourse to any rational principle or any, never justifiable, intellectual aesthetics, but proceeding from a quite elementary feeling, we shall find ourselves absolutely obliged to use and bring into movement various shades of blue. We shall notice that in reality a line is able to come into being, the design able to make its appearance, definite form to arise, only when we continue what we began when setting the blue colour into movement. For every time we pass from the realm of painting, of working in colour, to that of outline of form, we carry the physical over into what is essentially superphysical. Passing from the bright colours through the blue and from there somehow inwardly into the picture, we shall have in the bright colours the transition to a physical-superphysical, which may be said to contain a slight superphysical tone: this is because colour always has something to say, because colour has soul that is always superphysical. We shall then find that the further we go into the realm of drawing the more we enter the abstract superphysical, which, however, because it makes its appearance in the physical must take to itself physical form.

Today I can give you only an indication of these things. It is clear, however, that this is the way to understand how in one particular sphere the colour, the sketch, can be so used in creative art that in its application is everything of which I said it is held under the spell of nature, and from this spell we free the super-physical, which is hidden in the physical and deadened by a higher life.

How, if we look at plastic art we shall find that here both for plane surfaces and lines, there are always two interpretations only one of which, however, I shall be speaking about. To begin with, right feeling will not suffer the plastic surface to remain what it is, for example in the ordinary human form; there it is killed by the human soul, by the life of the human being, thus by what is higher. When we have first drawn out, spiritually, the life of the soul in the human form, we have then to seek the life of the surface itself, the soul of the soul of the form itself. We see how this is to be found if we do not bend the surface once only but a second time as well, so that we get a double curve. We notice how in this way we can make the form speak, how, deep in our subconscious, as opposed to what I have shown to be more an analysing tendency, there is also a tendency that is synthetic. The physical nature falls into what is genuinely physical-superphysical, which is overcome only by the higher stages of life. Inside those barriers of the soul of which we have spoken, we have as instinctive urge to free nature from enchantment in this way, in order to see how the physical-superphysical lies hidden in nature in as many different forms as, shall we say, crystals in their rock bed, which because they are in that rocky bed have their surfaces worn down. But a man has within him, often very decidedly so, just when in his subconscious this cleavage, this analysing, this breaking down of nature into the physical-superphysical is very pronounced—he has within him the faculty that may be called aesthetic synthesis, a tendency to synthesize in art.

The strange thing is that anyone with a capacity for rightly observing his fellow men will discover how they always use one of their senses in a very one-sided way. When with the eye we see colours, forms, effects of light, we are giving the eye a most one-sided development. In the eye there is always something resembling the sense of touch; the eye while looking is, at the same time, always feeling. In ordinary life this is suppressed. Because the eye is given this one-sided trend, however, if we are able to perceive such things, we still find the urge in us to experience what is thus suppressed, namely, what the eye develops as a sense of feeling, a sense of self, a sense of movement when we move through space and feel the motion of our limbs. What in the eye is thus suppressed of the other senses, we feel—although it remains quiescent—to be aroused by looking at the other man, What is thus aroused by what we see, what, however, is suppressed by the one-sided trend of the eye, it is this that is given form by the sculptor.

The sculptor actually models forms which the eye indeed sees but sees so dimly that this dim vision remains in the subconscious. The sculptor makes use of that point where the sense of touch is just passing over into the sense of sight. Therefore he must, or will anyway try to, reduce the quiescent form, which to the one-sided eye is only an object, to reduce this form to gesture that is always inciting imitation of itself, and then to bring back this gesture, that has been thus conjured up, into a state of rest. In reality what in one direction has been aroused and in another direction brought again to rest, what when we create or enjoy artistic work is active in us as a process of the soul, is always, from one aspect, like a man's in-breathing and out-breathing in ordinary life. This process drawn up from the human soul has, at times, a grotesque effect, although on the other hand it promotes a feeling of the vastness, the endlessness, of all that has been enchanted into nature. The development of art—we see this in certain attempts made in recent decades and especially in those of today—moves altogether towards penetrating these secrets and more or, less unconsciously putting such things into form. There is no need to talk much about them; they will increasingly find expression through art.

We shall perceive, for example, the following. In the case of certain artists it can indeed be said that more or less consciously or unconsciously they have perceived something of this kind—we understand the recently-deceased Gustave Klimt, for instance, particularly well if we allow such assumptions to hold good for his perceptions and his reason. Some day the following will be perceived. Let us suppose someone were to feel the desire to paint a pretty woman. There must then take shape in his soul some kind of image of her. Anyone, however, who is sensitive can perceive that, the moment he has made this fixed image of her, he has inwardly, spiritually, super-physically deprived her of life. The very moment we decide to paint a portrait of a pretty woman we have spiritually given her over to death, we have taken something away from her. Otherwise, we could look at the woman as she is in life, we would not give shape in our picture to what it is possible to present there artistically. For artistically we have first to kill the woman; then we must be able to bring to bear that light touch of humour in order inwardly to call her back to life.

Now anyone with a naturalistic approach cannot do this; naturalistic art suffers from the inability to adopt this lighter touch. Naturalistic art therefore offers us a great deal that has no life, that kills all that is higher in nature; and it lacks that light touch needed for giving renewed life to what in the first place it has to kill. In the case of many charming women it appears indeed as if they had not only been secretly killed but maltreated beforehand. This deadening process always moves in one direction and is connected with the necessity for creating anew that which, on a higher level of life, overcomes in nature what is striving for existence There is always first a deadening, then through this lighter mood a giving of fresh life. This process must take place both in the soul of the creative artist and in that of the art-lover, Anyone wishing to paint some cheery young mountain-peasant has no need to make a faithful copy of what he sees; he must above all be clear that his artistic conception has killed the young peasant or anyway benumbed him and that he must awaken fresh life in this stiff image by fashioning him in a way that brings him into new connection with the rest of nature. This was attempted by Hodler and. is entirely in sympathy with what artists are longing for today,

These two sources of art can be said to represent very deep needs, subconscious needs, of the human soul. The satisfying of what would become actual vision, but is not permitted to do so in a man of a sound nature, this always develops more or less into the form of art called expressionism—though the name is not of importance. What is created with the purpose of re-uniting what in some form has been broken up onto its physical-superphysical constituents, or has been deprived of its immediate physical life, will lead to impressionism. These two needs of the human soul have ever been the source of art; and by reason of man's general development in recent times, the first of these needs has taken the expressionistic path , the second the impressionistic. In all probability as we hasten towards the future this will increase very much. If our perception is extended, and not just our intellectual consciousness, the art of the future will be perceived as the intensifying particularly of these two trends. These two trends—and this must be constantly emphasized if we are to avoid certain misconceptions—do not represent anything in the least unsound. Men will fall into an unsound condition if, between those two boundaries, the healthy, primitive and natural pull towards the visionary is not satisfied through artistic expression. Or they will do so when what is always going on in the subconscious, namely, the breaking down of nature into what is physical-superphysical in her is not, through the true touch of artistic humour, constantly permeated by a higher life so that they are enabled to recreate in their artistic work what is creatively brought to expression by nature.

I firmly believe that the processes of art lie in many respects extremely deep in the subconscious, yet in certain circumstances it can be important for life to have living, telling conceptions of the artistic process such as have an effect upon the soul that no weak conceptions can exercise, conceptions which flow actually into the feeling. When in accordance with feeling these two sources of art hold sway in the human soul, we shall certainly realise out of what sound perception Goethe spoke when at a certain moment of life (such things always savour of one-sidedness) he felt the pure, genuine, artistic nature of music: “Therefore music represents what is supreme in art, because it has no possibility of imitating anything in nature, being in its own element both content and form.” (As I said, this is one-sided, for every art can reach these heights; but characterizations are always one-sided.) Every art, however, in its inherent element becomes its own content and form, when it does not wrest nature's secrets from her by subtle reasoning but discovers in the way indicated today, the physical-superphysical. I believe that in the soul there often takes place a quite secret process when we become aware of the physical-superphysical in nature. It was Goethe himself who coined the expression “physical-superphysical”; and in spite of his having called the secret “open” it can be discovered only when subconscious forces of the soul are able to sink themselves deeply into nature.

What is visionary comes into being in the soul because the superphysical experience is pressing to discharge itself, is surging up out of the soul. The outward experience that is spiritual experience, not through vision—which in spiritual science is purified till it becomes Imagination—but through Intuition. Through the vision we place what is within us to a certain degree outside, so that the inner becomes in us the outer. In Intuition we go outside ourselves—step out into the world. This stepping out, however, remains an unreality as long as we are unable to set free what is spell-bound in nature and is always wishing to overcome nature by a higher life. If we made our way into what belongs to nature when this is freed from enchantment, we then live in Intuitions. In so far as these Intuitions prevail in art, they are indeed connected with intimate experiences possible for the soul when, outside itself, it is united with external things. This is why Goethe, out of his actual, highly impressionistic art, could say to a friend: “I will tell you something that can explain people's attitude to my work. It can be really understood only by those who have had the same kind of experience as myself, those who have been in a similar situation.” Goethe already possessed this artistic perception. This is apparent poetically in the second part of his Faust, which up to now has met with but little understanding. He was able artistically to perceive that the physical-superphysical is to be sought in the recognition of how each part of nature is striving beyond itself to become a whole, through metamorphosis to become something different; it comprises with this something different, a new product of nature but is then killed by a higher life.

When we thus penetrate into nature we come to true reality in a much higher sense than ordinary consciousness believes. What we here come to is the most conclusive proof that art has no need either to make merely a faithful copy of the physical or to bring to expression the superphysical, the spiritual, alone That would mean erring in two directions, But what art can shape, can express, is the physical in the superphysical, the superphysical in the physical. It is perhaps just this that constitutes man's naturalism in the truest sense of the term—that he recognises the physical-superphysical and can grasp it precisely through his being at the same time a super-naturalist. Thus, real artistic experiences can, I believe, be developed in the soul in such a way that they arouse understanding of art, appreciation of art, and that a man is enabled indeed to train himself to a certain extent to live in art as an artist. In any case a profound study of this kind of the physical-superphysical, and its realisation through art, will make Goethe"s words comprehensible—words arising out of deep perception and wide understanding of the world, words with which I began this lecture and now bring it to a close. These words will give a comprehensive picture of man's relation to art when once we are able to grasp in all its depths the relation of art to what is genuine, superphysical reality. Because human beings can never live without the superphysical, they will through their own needs be brought to realise more and more the truth of what Goethe has said: “The man to whom nature begins to reveal her open secret feels an irresistible longing for her worthiest exponent—art.”