The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] As a sort of episode inserted between the lectures now being given, I should like to-day to bring forwards a few things about our building, so that our friends may find in what will be said, a sort of foundation for their own work. We shall have, in the near future, to take strong measures in different directions for the benefit of the cause, so that the Dornach Building, the “Goetheanum”, should be made the centre of the movement for Spiritual Science from the point of view of Anthroposophy for which we intend to work. It would be of great importance if the Goetheanum could also be made known to the outer world, so that those who have not at present an opportunity of seeing it, may become acquainted with it. The very way in which this building is put before the spiritual culture of the present time may, if brought to the consciousness of our contemporaries in the right manner, work in the direction, which we consider is the needful direction for the age. So to-day, when I have said, I wish to provide a foundation for that which others will carry forth into the world, I will once more give you a little of what I have already expounded here in other connections, so that from what is contained in these episodic lectures, a complete conception of the whole may be formed.

[ 2 ] To begin with, it must be stated that the Dornach Building has grown out of the Anthroposophical conception of the world. The Building was able to grow forth from this for the very reason that when this conception is rightly understood, it will itself possess the inner force with which to create its own artistic forms and figures. Once again, I should like to repeat what I have said before in other connections, that if any of the spiritual tendencies of the present, which with their various programmes come before the world to-day, had at any time required a building of their own, some architect or other, and some artist or other would have been approached, who would have built a house in such and such a style, in which the movement it was built for could have been carried on. There would have been an external relation between what went on within it and the building itself, which might be either of the Renaissance period, or of ancient Gothic style.

[ 3 ] There must not be any such merely external relation between the conception of the world which is to be given forth at Dornach and that which encloses its activities. The relation between them is to be an inner one. Every detail connected with the housing of our activities, every detail of form and figure had to proceed from the impulses of this world-conception itself. If you bear this in mind, you will see, that this is connected with the position Spiritual Science or Anthroposophy claims in the whole development of mankind. The life of modern humanity has become simply intellectual; it has become so because for centuries modern humanity has hardly received any other education than that of thought. When forms have to be created, people turn to those already existing to some one or other of the old styles of architecture; just as when they wish to make anything artistic or such-like, they do not turn their minds to the conception of the world, but to something which has been substituted in its place. What actually brought this state of things about? [ 4 ] You see, in everything of note in human culture there have always been two streams flowing together. The presence of those two streams can be traced far back in the historical development of mankind. One of these, which has achieved its greatest intellectual development in the last few centuries, can be traced back to what we may call the Old Testament outlook on the world. We must never lose sight of the fact that one of the essential tenets connected with this was the command: “Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image of the Lord, thy God”. The pictorial representation of that which is of a spiritual nature, was lacking in the one stream of human development. And this still holds good up to the present day in the modern development of this stream.

[ 5 ] Many schools of thought and of philosophy, many different sciences and popular conceptions of the world have been built up, but none of these have, of themselves, succeeded in creating artistic forms. All that has been achieved is the establishment relationship with the inartistic element of the present day conception of the world. Our modern age is not concerned with creating new forms, or with giving shape to what is capable of representation.

[ 6 ] But really there are two entrances into the world of the spirit; it may be entered in the intellectual way in which it is penetrated by the monotheistic religions, in which case the thought element, the intellectual, is principally developed. By this means great progress can be made along the lines followed in our most recent times. Or, on the other hand, the element which is to be found in the imaginative may be cultivated, the element of vision, of life in course of formation. modern humanity has not much living relation with this latter element. It revives bygone styles, old methods of artistic representation, but never identifies itself with them. Indeed, things have gone so far that, on the one hand those who wished to create artistically had an actual fear of every kind of philosophy, for it is quite reasonable to stand in some sort of fear of the modern world-conception, which is imaginative an intellectual. Put on the other side this has been a great disadvantage in another sense to the development of modern humanity. This disadvantage itself is the sign of decadence of recent times.

Some time ago in this very place, I drew attention to the fact that in all the present struggles of humanity there is something of the Jehovah-striving of the Old Testament, that in a sense an endeavor was being made to make each individual people what the Old Helm wanted to make of themselves and that Christianity, as such, has not fully entered the hearts of modern humanity. And so a certain intellectual thinking, an intellectual feeling concerning humanity as a whole, has in a one-sided way grown up round our social life. But man as man, 0r man as a community, can never be understood from a purely intellectual standpoint.

[ 7 ] What man is, that in him which enables him to take his place in social life, can only be understood if we rise to imaginative conception. Anyone who is acquainted with the law to which such things are subject, is aware that even the Fairy Tales, the legends and various mythologies contain more wisdom concerning the real nature of man than does modern science, which does not even possess the means of giving man an explanation as to himself. People are afraid of the inpouring of the spiritual, which can only manifest in our human civilisation in the form of pictures; they dread it. But our civilised life will never be raised until men's hearts are once again filled with a conception of the world not only capable of forming from itself thoughts, but of creating forms and permeating the whole of life. We want to make a beginning, yet in its own way it is intended to show all that can be accomplished by a really creative conception of the world at the present time and more especially what it must do in the future. In a sense you see before you, in a picture, all that is characteristic of the conception of the world which is studied here, when you are confronted with that which is meant to be representative of it, when you see the Goetheanum on its hill, at Dornach.

[ 8 ] If we wish to describe in a few words the special characteristic of this conception of the world, it is this: The realisation that in this age a new spiritual life must be revealed to man. And as we approach the building which is to stand for the spreading of this new spiritual life, we cannot but feel that a new revelation is to he made. Anyone who draws near to it cannot help feeling that something will reveal itself here, something new in the development of humanity. The very shape of the building impresses you with the sense of something new making its way into the development of man. Two cylinders of circular shape, in neither of which is the circle complete, covered with hemispheres equally incomplete, expresses the duality of that which is revealed and of that which comes to meet it. The very predominance of the two domes conveys an impression to the observer, as he draws near, that something is enclosed herein, something enclosed but which intends to make itself known.

[ 9 ] Do not take what I an now saying in a symbolical sense; take it in an artistic sense and you will then develop the right understanding for it. I shall have to speak further about these things, but this evening we will begin by making a survey of the different effects produced by the contours of the building, seen from without. Let us begin by supposing that someone approaches if from the North-East from any point around the hill on which the Goetheanum is erected. He would then see a Building (Picture 1) which could be in no other form. This is the feeling which ought to be experienced, when directly confronting that which stands as the representative of a new world-conception.

[ 10 ] It is first of all necessary to study the different forms. It was in 1908 that the thought first occurred to me to erect a building with twin domes. But much of the original plan had to be altered, for it had originally been intended to put it in a city, in Munich, where it would have been surrounded by houses, where the outer architecture would not have had to be so much considered. When the building had to be remodelled to stand upon its present hill, it became of course necessary to so plant the outer architecture that it might produce the right effect from the different points of view in the neighbourhood. Here let us begin by noticing that the building stands on a sort of platform, not absolutely on the ground.

[ 11 ] We now draw rather nearer to the Building and this is a picture of the principal entrance. Kindly observe you begin by entering the substructure and that, as we shall see, the staircase by which we ascend to the auditorium belongs to the substructure of the Building. Having ascended that, we then enter by the main door into the real Inner Hall. The Building stands rather above the level of the actual surface of the ground. It will be apparent to anyone who approaches the Building, especially when he finds himself opposite the main door, that an attempt has here been made to depart from the usual purely mathematical-geometrical-mechanical structure forms, and to discover organic ones. Of course those people who are quite accustomed to the old conception and who believe that the geometrical-dynamic can alone rightly hold a place in the art of building and in architecture will have many objections to bring against this introducing the forms of architecture into organic forms. All these objections are known. But here we have actually dared to make the attempt. [ 12 ] Then, however, we had to think the whole thought of the Building as of a living organism. No one will understand what I mean by this, unless he himself really makes the endeavour—which very few people will do as yet—to turn his feelings away from all that is symbolical and intellectual, from everything merely mechanical and mathematical, and allows himself to be carried into a really organic-artistic, a feeling way of thinking. This does not imply that the form of an organic being is symbolically expressed in the structural forms, it means that in order to understand an organic being we must realise that a quite special sort of intuitive thought-form is necessary. We shall have to become accustomed to these intuitive forms of thought. And we then ought to be able to find these architectural forms even coming of themselves quite originally and elementally, out of the intuitive thinking.

[ 13 ] I should like to draw your attention to something of which most people in the present day have no suspicion. It may be said that in nature there are organic forms. Structural forms are made, more or less modelled on some such organic forms in nature, structural forms which in a sense are a symbolical expression of the organic forms of nature. But nothing of that kind has been done. There is no direct prototype in nature of structural forms here. And if a man seeks for such in nature, it only shows that he has failed to understand the whole basic thought of what is in question here.

[ 14 ] To be capable of understanding an organism is a very different thing. For when a man really understands a natural organism, he then possesses a kind of thinking which is able to find organic structural forms quite independently of nature. But such forms as these must be discerned in complete independence, they must be created from out of their own form-essence. They will then, if they result from a real living structural thought, bear the nature of the organic. What then is the nature of the organic? Well, take as an example the most complicated organism, man, and then take merely the lobe of his ear; if you have the right intuitive thinking and feeling, you will say that the lobe of the ear, situated where it, is, could be no other than it is; in its place it must be just as it is. It is the right width, the right height, and is properly rounded off, and so on. And this must be so in every single form in this organically conceived Building. Each detail, in that it represents a part of the whole, must make evident in its own form that it is indispensable. The very smallest appendage in the different parts of the Building must be as manifestly indispensable as the lobe of the ear, or an arm or a hand is to the human organism.

[ 15 ] Nothing here has been copied from nature. And if these forms remind anyone of this, that or the other, it only shows that he is not judging of the Building from the standpoint of Art, but that his opinions are inartistic. If the forms in the Building remind one of anything—and what is there that people have not been reminded of—human eyebrows and eyes and so on—that only proves that he is judging of each thing on its own merit, especially; whereas each detail in the Building only has a significance in its connection with the whole and must be so understood.

The next picture shows the same, a little nearer.

[ 16 ] Below we see the entrance; facing us are the cloakrooms; and to the right and left, where the substructure extends in a circular direction, is the well of the staircase. We then go up the stairs and through the main door, by which we enter the inner building. The motive which we encounter in the main entrance is one if those organic motives to which we have been referring. If you take the various motives that are to be found on the different sides of the Building you will find that they are always formed in accordance with the organic principles of metamorphosis, so that the one always grows forth as a development of the other. For instance, look at the motive here, above the principal entrance. If you can feel it in its forms, you will feel the same form again in the motives of the window of the side-terrace, which you can distinctly see here to the South. (Figure 14) The motives of the windows are apparently quite different. But in studying them you will see that they develop out of that one over the principal Entrance in the same way as, according to Goethe's principle of Metamorphosis, the different organs of the blossom develop from the leaf. It is again a metamorphosis of the same motive. We can only develop a living thought of the Building, if we really inwardly and intuitively grasp the principle of metamorphosis.

[ 17 ] In what is attached right and left of the Principal Entrance you can see that the attempt has been made, just as it is in nature itself, to cause one motive to proceed out of another; although there has been no copying of what is organic. In every line and surface you can see that they all proceed from the same principle—like that same principle which causes the cheek to be carried from the temple of the forehead in a human face. The evolving of the cheek from the temple of the forehead might really be taken as a subject of inner study. Only while doing so we must be free from the purely intellectual ideas of the world. We must be able to view the world in forms, without beginning to symbolise. We then shall be able to see how one surface, one form, proceeds out of the other in such a way that they might really have grown forth; and besides that, they really belong to the place where they are. [ 18 ] Now in the whole of this building there is not a single thing that is mere symbol. At the time when our movement still had many people in it who were full of sectarianism and false mysticism—which tendencies indeed I had to fight over and over again—but when there were these tendencies in the different persons who came into our movement from co many different quarters, persons of artistic natures who happened to come among us were often horrified at this tendency to symbolise. These members valued a Rose-Cross, a cross with seven roses, far higher than a really artistic motive. Now in this building we may say that this has been definitely overcome and that what is really creative in a conception of the world has been expressed in forms without any transition though the symbolical.

[ 19 ] I want you to notice that in the forms, (though of course all this is only a beginning) an attempt has been made so to shape the surfaces that they lean towards the corresponding centres of support. (Kräfte-Lagen). For instance, if you go in at the principal entrance of the substructure, you will see the arches. If you study the forms of these arches you will find them so constructed that their lines follow the distribution of weight of the building. Towards the door, where the weight is less, the arch is wider; where the arch curves towards the building it bends inwards, the curve is arrested. Thus the forms of the arches correspond to the distribution of weight. If you can feel the forms in this way, you have grasped a structural thought.

[ 20 ] We now obtain a view of the North side. In the part between the principal entrance and the one wing, you can see the motive of the principal entrance in metamorphosis. There you can study the metamorphosis of the separate forms, which allows for the motive of the side-wall which is to follow. When you go in at the principal entrance the motive meets you, whereas here you pass it by. An organic structural thought should express whether a motive is one that is to meet the eye, or is to he passed by. It is the same motive, in different states of metamorphosis. Similarly that which finishes it above, which overhangs the motive—is only a metamorphosis of that which is the motive of the main portal. it is differently formed, but has only become different in the course of its metamorphosis; it is the motive of the principal entrance.

[ 21 ] Here you have the side-view of the side-terrace. In the motive of these windows, you can study how organic shapes are formed. The motive completing the windows above is precisely the same as that you have just seen over the windows and the motive over the principal entrance, only in an organic growth it is the case that metamorphosis comes about through that which in the one structure is wider and more forceful, becoming contracted and condensed in the other; what in its earlier state as in a more primitive form, extends to more ramifications. It is just in this that metamorphosis consists, and here you can see it carried out. [ 22 ] And I should like to draw attention here to the fact that in the whole building the endeavour has been made to develop structural truth, architectural truth. That is actually very little understood in the world to-day. You can here see the overcoming of the mere Renaissance idea. The setting of windows is not merely decorative, but as you see it arises from below. In the whole building there is not anything to be
found which does not convey its actual purpose.

Nothing in this building lies, whereas in the present-day conception of architecture there is an enormous amount of untruth and deception. In our civilisation there is so much untruth in our forms that it can hardly be wondered at that so much of what men say is untrue too. Here the endeavour has been made that everything shall absolutely and truthfully express what it actually is. This can never be the case in symbolism, which always contains something arbitrary. I want you to take note of this.

[ 23 ] Here we have the facade of the side terrace. You see in metamorphoses that which is above the principal entrance. Of course, you must bear in mind that whatever you see here is nothing but a new beginning. I always say over and over again, to all who will listen, that if I had to construct the building over again, it would be very different. This is just an attempt. But in its different parts you can see what we really intended, how the organic structural thought has been carried out, and how, for instance, the merely mathematical-geometrical-dynamic column formation has been developed into the organic, so that nowhere is the principle, merely of support or of burden in evidence, but everywhere the principle of growth can be seen, the coming forth of one from another. And as we shall see tomorrow, there is a marked effort to carry out this idea in the architecture of the interior.

This is the juncture seen from the side, seen from the corner.

[ 24 ] The model of the building. Here you have the picture of my original model. I wanted first of all to give you a conception of the idea one receives in approaching the building. I wanted to show you the effect it ought to produce when you walk round it. now show you the inner part, in my original model, carried out in wood and wax. This model was the basis of the whole building. You see it here cut in two through the centre. You can thus see under the great cupola.the seven columns which, in succession, encircle and enclose the auditorium. Here in the middle is the place of the Drop-Scene, and here beneath the smaller cupola you see 6 of the 12 columns which encircle that space. As here seen, the building is divided from West to East. In the East will stand the principal Group: the Representative of Humanity, in the midst of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic elements. Concerning the principle by which these columns with their capitals and architraves were constructed, I shall steak tomorrow.

[ 25 ] Here we have the ground-plan of the building, the principal entrance with the staircase on either side, the auditorium, and the space beneath the small cupola, the place in which the Mystery-plays and the Eurythmic-representations and so on, will be given. These two spaces will be divided by the curtain. On the line dividing the two will be the speaking-desk, on both sides of this dividing line are the two side-alleys, for the use of those engaged in the representations, and their dressing-rooms and so on.

[ 26 ] This ground-plan will show you that certain things were indispensable to the building. Whenever I refer to this ground-plan I am always anxious lest the actual structural thought should be misunderstood. I once gave a lecture in Dornach on this ground-plan and its form, drawing a comparison between it and the human form. Some of my listeners jumped to the conclusion that the building was a symbolical image of the human form. That is absolutely not the case; but if a man is able really to understand the human form and how on the one hand it is an instrument for thinking and on the other hand for willing and that both these are held together by the power of feeling; if he understands the whole human structure, the formation of the head, and limbs and the trunk, with the heart system as the centre, he then would also be able to construct other organic forms. And this is one of these other organic forms. On this account when one sees this and the organic form of man together, it is possible to find a certain relation between them. But there is absolutely no question of the one being modelled on the other, for the Building here is in its organic architectural form constructed from out of that which is organically creative in nature and from cosmic activity itself.

You will be able to see the same in the transverse section that I will now show you.

[ 27 ] The small cupola, as connected with the great cupola. This cut through the centre from East to West. The whole Building has but one axis of symmetry and everything is arranged in accordance with that. That necessitates the structural thought being a living one, for the more highly evolved organism develops along a certain axis. Certain lower organic forms alone evolve from the centre; and we may take it, that as a result of the attempt that has been made here, certain more perfect forms of building than the centrally constructed (Zentralbauten) ones, will be developed, because a first beginning has been made to follow the principle of organic growth along an axis.

[ 28 ] Here you have the vestibule into which one enters through the door of the substructure; and this is the stairway by which one ascends to the terrace. You see that, forming part of and attached to the balustrade of the stairs is a remarkable structure. What this actually is can perhaps only be completely grasped by one who is able to look away from everything merely intellectual, in order to see only the artistic. When this form was about to be made, I said to myself: anyone going up these stairs must have some sort of halting-place, to bring about in him the right frame of mind. Now just look at these three directions of space. But it will not suffice to look at them, you must notice how they droop over and bulge out, how weighty they are, bending over with their own weight. If you take the whole form into your feeling, they will be to you,the expression of the mood which it would be desirable for you to have when you ascend these stairs. Anyone who goes up them will have a premonition that here, in this Goetheanum Building, he will find something which will give firmness, security and strength to his life, which will give him something to his balance. One ought to have that feeling here, for simply from that feeling did the form arise. I might say that besides this, one should feel that the form must be what it is, for although it is not slavishly copied from them, it does resemble the three semi-circular canals which form the small auditory bone of the human ear. If this organ of the human ear is injured a man falls, he loses his balance. It is an organ of balance in the human organism, a diminutive organ of balance.

[ 29 ] Now one cannot help feeling that there must be something here to help us to enter the Hall in a properly balanced frame of mind. This is no puzzled-out idea, it has been really felt. If one takes it as a thought-out thing, it will be his own fault, for it shows he has begun by reflecting and digging down and speculating. There should be no question of speculating or puzzling out, but of feeling the heavy pressure of the overhanging weight of feeling the form and in so doing, of arousing the mood that may come over one while mounting these stairs.

[ 30 ] Here is one of those vaulted arches which can only be understood by organic structural thinking. If you stand here in the Building and feel the Building, that is, feel how you come in or out there, and how you go up the stairs, meeting all the weighty pressure of the whole Building, you will then feel this curve is expressed exactly as it should be: while at the same time you will feel what the whole structure means. The attempt has here been made to give over to the organic the work that is generally done by columns or pillars. There is nothing in this but the feeling for form that comes when one intuitively feels the supporting strength, which this particular form must convey. If anyone is reminded of an elephant or a horse's hoof he may be so but, that only shows that he does not consider it from an artistic point of view, but merely an imitative one. What is important here is the being able to feel that weight has to be supported, while that which is to bear it grows into this form, develops into it, and that this arch could curve in any other direction but this. It is not a question of copying anything, but of trying to feel the weight-carrying, weight-bearing forces, and of moulding such forces as are able to bear weight.

[ 31 ] In the ordinary-structural-conception the geometrical-mechanical-dynamic weight-bearing and carrying, is the only feeling one has. But here in every surface and line should he expressed in the structures, the beginning of the feeling for life. If the things I have mentioned do away with all that is merely speculation, you will have understood the subject in the right way.

[ 32 ] To-morrow we will continue and pass from the outer to the inner architecture. I believe that when all that underlies the conception of our Building is made known to the world, and it is shown that here something really new in the way of artistic forms is growing out of the Anthroposophical conception, we shall be able to arouse a feeling for all that is being done not only in this line, but also in regard to the social question.

Rudolf Steiner: Good morning, gentlemen! A number of questions have been handed in, which lead up in quite an interesting way to what we want to discuss today. Someone has asked:

“How did man's cultural development come about?” I will consider this in connection with a second question:

“Why did primitive man have such a strong belief in the spirit?”

It is certainly interesting to investigate how human beings lived in earlier times. As you know, even from a superficial view there are two opposing opinions about this. One is that man was originally at a high level of perfection, from which he has fallen to his present imperfect state. We don't need to take exception to this, or to be concerned with the way different peoples have interpreted this perfection—some talking of paradise, some of other things. But until a short time ago the belief existed that man was originally perfect and gradually degenerated to his present state of imperfection. The other view is the one you've probably come to know as supposedly the only true one, namely, that man was originally imperfect, like some kind of higher animal, and that he gradually evolved to greater and greater perfection. You know how people point to the primitive conditions prevailing among the savage peoples—the so-called savage peoples—in trying to form an idea of what man could have been like when he still resembled an animal. People say: We Europeans and the Americans are highly civilized, while in Africa, Australia, and so on, there still live uncivilized races at their original stage, or at least at a stage very near the original. From these one can study what humanity was like originally.

But, gentlemen, this is making far too simple a picture of human evolution. First of all, it is not true that all civilized peoples imagine man to have been a physically perfect being originally. The people of India are certainly not much in agreement with opinions of our modern materialists, and yet, even so, their conception is that the physical man who went about on the earth in primitive times looked like an animal. Indeed, when the Indians, the wise men of India, speak of man in his original state on earth, they speak of the ape-like Hanuman. So you see, it is not true that even people with a spiritual world view picture primeval man similarly to the way we imagine him in paradise. And in fact, it is not so.

We must rather have a clear knowledge that man is a being who bears within him body, soul, and spirit, with each of these three parts undergoing its own particular evolution. Naturally, if people have no thought of spirit, they can't speak of the evolution of spirit. But once we acknowledge that a human being consists of body, soul, and spirit, we can go on to ask how the body evolves, how the soul evolves, and how the spirit evolves. When we speak of the human body we will have to say: Man's body has gradually been perfected from lower stages. We must also say that the evidence we have for this provides us with living proof. As I have already pointed out, we find original man in the strata of the earth, exhibiting a very animal-like body—not indeed like any present animal but nevertheless animal-like, and this must have developed gradually to its present state of perfection. There is no question, therefore, of spiritual science as pursued here at the Goetheanum coming to loggerheads with natural science, for it simply accepts the truths of natural science.

On the other hand, gentlemen, we must be able to recognize that in the period of time of only three or four thousand years ago, views prevailed from which we can learn a great deal and which we also can't help but admire. When we are guided by genuine knowledge in seriously studying and understanding the writings that appeared in India, Asia, Egypt, and even Greece, we find that the people of those times were far ahead of us. What they knew, however, was acquired in quite a different way from the way we acquire knowledge today.

Today there are many things we know very little about. For instance, from what I have told you in connection with nutrition you will have seen how necessary it is for spiritual science to come to people's aid in the simplest nutritional matters. Natural science is unable to do so. But we have only to read what physicians of old had to say, and rightly understand it, to become aware that actually people up to the time of, for instance, Hippocrates¹² in Greece knew far more than is known by our modern materialistic physicians. We come to respect, deeply respect, the knowledge once possessed. The only thing is, gentlemen, that knowledge was not then imparted in the same form as it is today. Today we express our knowledge in concepts. This was not so with ancient peoples; they clothed their knowledge in poetical imaginations, so that what remained of it is now just taken figuratively as poetry. It was not poetry to those men of old; that was their way of expressing what they knew. Thus we find when we are able to test and thoroughly study the documents still existing, that there can no longer be any question of original humanity being undeveloped spiritually. They may once have gone about in animal-like bodies, but in spirit they were infinitely wiser than we are!

But there is something else to remember. You see, when man went about in primeval times, he acquired great wisdom spiritually. His face was more or less what we would certainly call animal-like, whereas today in man's face his spirit finds expression; now his spirit is, as it were, embodied in the physical substance of his face. This, gentlemen, is a necessity if man is to be free, if he is to be a free being. These clever men of ancient times were very wise; but they possessed wisdom in the way the animal today possesses instinct. They lived in a dazed condition, as if in a cloud. They wrote without guiding their own hand. They spoke with the feeling that it was not they who were speaking but the spirit speaking through them. In those primeval times, therefore, there was no question of man being free.

This is something in the history of culture that constitutes a real step forward for the human race: that man acquired consciousness, that he is a free being. He no longer feels the spirit driving him as instinct drives the animal. He feels the spirit actually within him, and this distinguishes him from the man of former times.

When from this point of view we consider the savages of today, it must strike us that the men of primeval times—called in the question here primitive men—were not like the modern savages, but that the latter have, of course, descended from the former, from the primeval men. You will get a better idea of this evolution if I tell you the following.

In certain regions there are people who have the idea that if they bury some small thing belonging to a sick person—for instance, bury a shirttail of his in the cemetery—that this can have the magical effect of healing him. I have even known such people personally. I knew one person who, at the time the Emperor Frederick¹³ was ill (when he was still Crown Prince—you know all about that), wrote to the Empress (as she was later), asking for the shirttails belonging to her husband. He would bury them in the cemetery and the Emperor would then be cured. You can imagine how this request was received. But the man had simply done what he thought would lead to the Emperor's recovery. He himself told me about it, adding that it would have been much less foolish to let him have that shirttail than to send for the English Doctor Mackenzie, and so on; that had been absurd—they should have given him the shirttail.

Now when this kind of thing comes to the notice of a materialist he says: That's a superstition which has sprung up somewhere. At some time or other someone got it into his head that burying the shirttails of a sick man in the cemetery and saying a little prayer over it would cure the man.

Gentlemen, nothing has ever arisen in that way. No superstition arises by being thought out. It comes about in an entirely different way. There was once a time when people had great reverence for their dead and said to themselves: So long as a man is going about on earth he is a sinful being; beside doing good things he does many bad things. But, they thought, the dead man lives on as soul and spirit, and death makes up for all deficiencies. Thus when they thought of the dead, they thought of what was good, and by thinking of the dead they tried to make themselves better.

Now it is characteristic of human beings to forget easily. Just think how quickly those who have left us—the dead—are forgotten today! In earlier times there were persons who would give their fellowman various signs to make them think of the dead and thus to improve them. Someone in a village would think that if a man was ill, the other villagers should look after him. It was certainly not the custom to collect sick pay; that kind of thing is a modern invention. In those days the villagers all helped one another out of kindness; everyone had to think of those who were ill. The leading man in the village might say: People are egoists, so they have no thought of the sick unless they are encouraged to get out of themselves and have thoughts, for instance, of the dead. So he would tell them they should take—well, perhaps the shirttail of the sick man by which to remember him, and they should bury this in the earth, then they would surely remember him. By thinking of the dead they would remember to take care of someone living. This outer deed was contrived simply to help people's memory.

Later, people forgot the reason for this and it was put down to magic, superstition. This happens with very much that lives on as superstition; it has arisen from something perfectly reasonable. What is perfect never arises from what is imperfect. The assertion that something perfect can come from what is not perfect appears to anyone with insight as if it were said: You're to make a table, but you must make it as clumsy and unfinished as you can to begin with, so that it may in time become a perfect table. But things don't happen that way. We never get a well-made table from one that is ill-made. The table begins by being a good one and becomes battered in the course of time. And that's the way it happens outside in nature too, anywhere in the world. You first have things in a perfect state, then out of them comes the imperfect. It is the same with the human being: his spirit in the beginning, though lacking freedom, was in a certain state of perfection. But his body—it is true—was imperfect. And yet precisely in this lay the body's perfection: it was soft and therefore capable of being formed by the spirit so that cultural progress could be made.

So you see, gentlemen, we are not justified in thinking that human beings were originally like the savages of today. The savages have developed into what they now are—with their superstitions, their magical practices and their unclean appearance-from states originally more perfect. The only superiority we have over them is that, while starting from the same conditions, we did not degenerate as they did. I might therefore say: The evolution of man has taken two paths. It is not true that the savages of today represent the original condition of mankind. Mankind, though to begin with it looked more animal-like, was highly civilized.

Now perhaps you will ask: But were those original animal-like men the descendants of apes or of other animals? That is a natural question. You look at the apes as they are today and say: We are descended from those apes. Ah! but when human beings had their animal form, there were no such animals as our present apes! Men have not descended, therefore, from the apes. On the contrary! Just as the present savages have fallen from the level of the human beings of primeval times, so the apes are beings who have fallen still lower.

On going back further in the evolution of the earth, we find human beings formed in the way I described here recently, out of a soft element-not out of our present animals. Human beings can never evolve out of the apes of today. On the other hand it could easily be possible that if conditions prevailing on earth today continue, conditions in which everything is based on violence and power, and wisdom counts for nothing—well, it could indeed happen that the men who want to found everything on power would gradually take on animal-like bodies again, and that two races would then appear. One race would be those who stand for peace, for the spirit, and for wisdom, while the other would be those who revert to an animal form. It might indeed be said that those who care nothing today for the progress of mankind, for spiritual realities, may be running the risk of degenerating into an ape species.

You see, all manner of strange things are experienced today. Of course, what newspapers report is largely untrue, but sometimes it shows the trend of people's thinking in a remarkable way. During our recent trip to Holland we bought an illustrated paper, and on the last page there was a curious picture: a child, a small child, really a baby—and as its nurse, taking care of it, bringing it up, an ape, an orangutan. There it was, holding the baby quite properly, and it was to be engaged, the paper said,—somewhere in America, of course—as a nursemaid.

Now it is possible that this may not yet be actual fact, but it shows what some people are fancying: they would like to use apes today as nursemaids. And if apes become nursemaids, gentlemen, what an outlook for mankind! Once it is discovered that apes can be employed to look after children—it is, of course, possible to train them to do many things; the child will have to suffer for it, but the ape could be so trained: in certain circumstances it could be trained to look after the physical needs of children—well, then people will carry the idea further and the social question will be on a new level. You will see far-reaching proposals for breeding apes and putting them to work in factories. Apes will be found to be cheaper than men, hence this will be looked upon as the solution of the social problem. If people really succeed in having apes look after their children—well, we'll be deluged by pamphlets on how to solve the social question by breeding apes!

It is indeed conceivable that this might easily happen. Only think: other animals beside apes can be trained to do many things. Dogs, for instance, are very teachable. But the question is whether this will be for the advance or the decline of civilization. Civilization will most definitely decline. It will deteriorate. The children brought up by ape-nurses will quite certainly become ape-like. Then indeed we shall have perfection changing into imperfection. We must realize clearly that it is indeed possible for certain human beings to have an ape-like nature in the future, but that the human race in the past was never such that mankind evolved from the ape. For when man still had an animal form—quite different indeed from that of the ape—the present apes were not yet in existence. The apes themselves are degenerate beings; they have fallen from a higher stage.

When we consider those primitive peoples who may be said to have been rich in spirit but animal-like in body, we find they were still undeveloped in reason, in intelligence—the faculty of which we are so proud. Those men of ancient times were not capable of thinking. Hence, when anyone today who prides himself particularly on his thinking comes across ancient documents, he looks for them to be based on thought—and looks in vain. He says, therefore: This is all very beautiful, but it's simply poetry. But, gentlemen, we can't judge everything by our own standards alone, for then we go astray. That ancient humanity had, above all, great powers of imagination, an imagination that worked like an instinct. When we today use our imagination we often pull ourselves up and think: Imagination has no place in what is real. This is quite right for us today, but the men of primeval times, primitive men, would never have been able to carry on without imagination.

Now it will seem strange to you how this lively imagination possessed by primitive men could have been applied to anything real. But here too we have wrong conceptions. In your history books at school you will have read about the tremendous importance for human evolution that is accorded to the invention of paper. The paper we write on—made of rags—has been in existence for only a few centuries. Before that, people had to write on parchment, which has a different origin. Only at the end of the Middle Ages did someone discover the possibility of making paper from the fibers of plants, fibers worn threadbare after having first been used for clothes. Human beings were late in acquiring the intellect that was needed for making this paper.

But the same thing (except that it is not as white as we like it for our black ink) was discovered long ago. The same stuff as is used for our present paper was discovered not just two or three thousand years ago but many, many thousands of years before our day. By whom, then? Not by human beings at all, but by wasps! Just look at any wasp's nest you find hanging in a tree. Look at the material it consists of—paper! Not white paper, not the kind you write on, for the wasps are not yet in the habit of writing, otherwise they would have made white paper, but such paper as you might use for a package. We do have a drab-colored paper for packages that is just what the wasps use for making their nests. The wasps found out how to make paper thousands and thousands of years ago, long before human beings arrived at it through their intellect.

The difference is that instinct works in animals while in the man of primeval times it was imagination; they would have been incapable of making anything if imagination had not enabled them to do so, for they lacked intelligence. We must therefore conclude that in outward appearance these primeval men were more like animals than are the men of today, but to a certain extent they were possessed by the spirit, the spirit worked in them. It was not they who possessed the spirit through their own powers, they were possessed by it and their souls had great power of imagination. With imagination they made their tools; imagination helped them in all they did, and enabled them to make everything they needed.

We, gentlemen, are terribly proud of all our inventions, but we should consider whether we really have cause to be so; for much of what constitutes the greatness of our culture has actually developed from quite simple ideas. Listen to this, for instance: When you read about the Trojan War, do you realize when it took place?—about 1200 years before the founding of Christianity. Now when we hear about wars like that—which didn't take place in Greece, but far away, over there in Asia—well, hearing the outcome the next day in Greece by telegram, as we would now do: that, gentlemen, didn't happen in those days! Today if we receive a telegram, the Post Office dispatches it to us. Naturally this didn't happen at that time in Greece, for the Greeks had no telegraph. What then could they do? Well, now look, the war was over here in one place; then there was the sea and an island, a mountain and again sea; over there another island, a mountain and then sea; and so on, till you came to Greece—here Asia, sea, and here in the midst, Greece. It was agreed that when the war was ended three fires would be kindled on the mountains. Whoever was posted on the nearest mountain was to give the first signal by running up and lighting three fires. The watch on the next mountain, upon seeing the three fires, lit three fires in his turn; the next watchman again three fires; and in this way the message arrived in Greece in quite a short time. This was their method of sending a telegram. It was done like that. It's a simple way of telegraphing. It worked fast—and before the days of the telegram people had to make do with this.

And how is it today? When you telephone—not telegraph but telephone—I will show you in the simplest possible way what happens. We have a kind of magnet which, it is true, is produced by electricity; and we have something called an armature. When the circuit is closed, this is pulled close; when the circuit is open, the armature is released, and thus it oscillates back and forth. It is connected by a wire with a plate, which vibrates with it and transmits what is generated by the armature—in just the same way as in those olden times the three fires conveyed messages to men. This is rather more complicated, and, of course, electricity has been used in applying it, but it is still the same idea.

When we hear such things we must surely respect what the human beings of those ancient times devised and organized out of their imaginative faculty. And when we read the old documents with this feeling we must surely say: Those men accomplished great things on a purely spiritual level and all out of imagination. To come to a thorough realization of this you need only to consider what people believe today. They believe they know something about the old Germanic gods—Wotan, Loki, for instance. You find pictures of them in human form in books: Wotan with a flowing beard; Loki looking like a devil, with red hair, and so on. It is thought that the men of old, the ancient Germans, had the same ideas about Wotan and Loki. But that is not true. The men of old had rather the following conception: When the wind blows, there is something spiritual in it—which is indeed true—and that is Wotan blowing in the wind. They never imagined that when they went into the woods, they would meet Wotan there in the guise of an ordinary man. To describe a meeting with Wotan they would have spoken of the wind blowing through the woods. This can still be felt in the very word Wotan by anyone who is sensitive to these things. And Loki—they had no image of Loki sitting quietly in a corner staring stupidly; Loki lived in the fire!

Indeed, in various ways the people were always talking about Wotan and Loki. Someone would say, for instance: When you go over the mountain, you may meet Wotan. He will make you either strong or weak, whichever you deserve. That is how people felt, how they understood these things. Today one says that's just superstition. But in those times they didn't understand it to be so. They knew: When you go up there to that corner so difficult to reach, you don't meet a man in a body like any ordinary man. But the very shape of the mountain gives rise to a special whirlwind in that place, and a special kind of air is wafted up to that corner from an abyss. If you withstand this and keep to your path, you may become well or you may become ill. In what way you become well or ill, the people were ready to tell; they were in harmony with nature and would speak not in an intellectual way but out of their imagination. Your modern doctor would try to express himself intellectually: If you have a tendency to tuberculosis, go up to a certain height on the mountain and sit there every day. Continue to do this for some time, for it will be most beneficial. That is the intellectual way of talking. But if you speak imaginatively you say: Wotan is always to be found in that high corner; if you visit him at a certain time every day for a couple of weeks, he will help you.

This is the way people coped with life out of their imagination. They worked in this way, too. Surely at some time or other you have all been far out in the country where threshing is not done by machine but is still being done by hand. You can hear the people threshing in perfect rhythm. They know that when they have to thresh for days at a time, if they go at their work without any order, just each one on his own, they will very soon be overcome by exhaustion. Threshing can't be done that way. If, however, they work rhythmically, all keeping time together, exhaustion is avoided—because their rhythm is then in harmony with the rhythm of their breathing and circulation. It even makes a difference whether they strike their flail on the out-breathing or the in-breathing or whether they do it as they are changing over from one to the other. Now why is this? You can see that it has nothing to do with intellect, for today this old way of threshing is almost unheard of. Everything of that kind is being wiped out. But in the past, all work was done rhythmically and out of imagination. The beginnings of human culture developed out of rhythm.

Now I don't suppose you really think that if you take a chunk of wood and some bits of string and fool about with them in some amateurish fashion, you'll suddenly have a violin. A violin comes about when mind, when spirit, is exerted, when the wood is carefully shaped in a particular way, when the string is put through a special process, and so forth. We have to say then: These primeval people, who were not yet thinking for themselves, could attribute the way machines were originally made only to the spirit that possessed them, that worked in them. Therefore, these people, working not out of the intellect, but out of their imagination, naturally tended to speak of the spirit everywhere.

When today someone constructs a machine by the work of his intellect, he does not say that the spirit helped him—and rightly so. But when a man of those early times who knew nothing about thinking, who had no capacity for, thinking, when that man constructed something, he felt immediately: the spirit is helping me.

It happened therefore that when the Europeans, those “superior” humans, first arrived in America and also later, in the nineteenth century, when they came to the regions where Indians such as belonged to ancient times were still living, these Indians spoke of (it was possible to find out what they were saying) the “Great Spirit” ruling everywhere. These primitive men have always continued to speak in this way of the Being ruling in everything. It was this “Great Spirit” that was venerated particularly by the human beings living in Atlantean times when there was still land between Europe and America; the Indians retained this veneration, and knew nothing as yet of intellect. They then came gradually to know the “superior” men before being exterminated by them. They came to know the Europeans' printed paper on which there were little signs which they took to be small devils. They abhorred the paper and the little signs, for these were intellectual in origin, and a man whose activities arise out of imagination abominates what comes from the intellect.

Now the European with his materialistic civilization knows how to construct a locomotive. The intellectual method by which he constructs his engine could never have been the way the ancient Greeks would have set about it, for the Greeks still lacked intellect. Intellect first came to man in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Greeks would have carried out their construction with the help of their imagination. Since the Greeks ascribed all natural forms to good spirits and all that is not nature, all that is artificially produced, to bad spirits, they would have said: An evil spirit lives in the locomotive. They would certainly have contrived their construction from imagination; nothing else would ever have occurred to them than that they were being aided by the spirit.

Therefore, gentlemen, you see that we have actually to ascribe a lofty spirit to the original, primitive human being; for imagination is of a far more spiritual nature in the human soul than the mere intellect that is prized so highly today.

Former conditions, however, can never come back. We have to go forward—but not with the idea that what exists today in the animal as pure instinct could ever have developed into spirit. We ought not, therefore, to picture primitive men as having been possessed of mere instinct. They knew that it was the spirit working in them. That is why they had, as we say nowadays, such a strong belief in the spirit.

Perhaps this contributes a little to our understanding of how human culture has evolved. Also, we must concede that the people are right who contend that human beings have arisen from animal forms, for so indeed they have—but not from such forms as the present animals, for these forms only came into being later when humanity was already in existence. The early animal-like forms of man which gradually developed in the course of human evolution into his present form, together with the faculties which he already had at that time, came about because man's spiritual entity was originally more perfect than it is today—not in terms of intellect but of imagination. We have to remember always that this original perfection was due to the fact that man was not free; man was, as it were, possessed by the spirit. Only intellect enables man to become free. By means of his intellect man can become free.

You see, anyone who works with his intellect can say: now at a certain hour I'm going to think out such and such a thing. This can't be done by a poet, for even today a poet still works out of his imagination. Goethe was a great poet. Sometimes when someone asked him to write a poem or when he himself felt inclined to do so, he sat himself down to write one at a certain time—and, well, the result was pitiful! That people are not aware of this today comes simply from their inability to distinguish good poetry from bad. Among Goethe's poems there are many bad ones. Imaginative work can be done only when the mood for it is there, and when the mood has seized a poet, he must write the poem down at once. And that's how it was in the case of primeval humans. They were never able to do things out of free will. Free will developed gradually-but not wisdom. Wisdom was originally greater than free will and it must now regain its greatness. That means, we have to come back to the spirit by way of the intellect.

And that, you see, is the task of anthroposophy. It has no wish to do what would please many people, that is, to bring primitive conditions back to humanity-ancient Indian wisdom, for example. It is nonsense when people harp on that. Anthroposophy, on the other hand, sets value on a return to the spirit, but a return to the spirit precisely in full possession of the intellect, with the intellect fully alive. It is important, gentlemen, and must be borne strictly in mind, that we have nothing at all against the intellect; rather, the point is that we have to go forward with it. Originally human beings had spirit without intellect; then the spirit gradually fell away and the intellect increased. Now, by means of the intellect, we have to regain the spirit. Culture is obliged to take this course.

If it does not do so—well, gentlemen, people are always saying that the World War was unlike anything ever experienced before, and it is indeed a fact that men have never before so viciously torn one another to pieces. But if men refuse to take the course of returning to the spirit and bringing their intellect with them, then still greater wars will come upon us, wars that will become more and more savage. Men will really destroy one another as the two rats did that, shut up together in a cage, gnawed at each other till there was nothing left of them but two tails. That is putting it rather brutally, but in fact mankind is on the way to total extermination. It is very important to know this.

• 12. Hippocrates of Cos, 460–377 BC. Greek physician, founder of ancient medicine.
• 13. Emperor Frederick III, 1831–1888. Suffered from a disease of the larynx. It is not known who wrote the request.

A number of questions have been handed in, which can lead in a quite interesting way to what we are going to discuss today. Someone has asked: “What has man's cultural development arisen from?” I am going to consider this in connection with this second question: “Why did primitive man have such a strong belief in the spirit?”

It is certainly interesting to ask how men of former times have lived, and about this, as you know, even looking superficially at the matter, there are two opinions. One opinion is that originally man was at a high level of perfection from which he has fallen to his present imperfect state. We need not have any particular objection to this nor concern ourselves about the various ways the different peoples have interpreted this perfection—some talking of Paradise, others of other things. But until a short time ago the opinion held good that man was originally perfect, degenerating to his present state of imperfection gradually. The other view you have probably come to think of as the only true one, namely that man was originally imperfect, like some kind of higher animal, and evolved gradually to greater perfection. You know how people try to draw upon the primitive condition prevailing among savage peoples—or so-called savage peoples'—in order to get some idea of what man could have been when he still resembled an animal. It is said: We in Europe and the people of America are highly civilized, whereas in Africa, Australia, and so on, there live still uncivilized races at their original stage, or at least at a stage very near the original. From these it is possible to make a study of what people were to begin with.

But, curiously, in this way people are making far too simple a picture of man's evolution. To begin with, it is not at all true that, for example, all civilized peoples imagined that man as a physical being was originally perfect. The Indians are certainly not of the opinion held by modern materialists, but, even so, their conception is that the physical man who used to go about on earth in primitive times looked like an animal. When the Indians, the wise men of India, speak of man in his original earthly state, they talk of the ape-like Hanuman. So you see it is not at all true that people with a spiritual world-conception always imagine that originally men were in some way as people today imagine them to have been, that is, of a paradisian nature, for indeed it is not so. We have, rather, to be clear that man is a being who bears within him body, soul, and spirit, each member going through its own particular evolution. Naturally, when people do not speak of spirit, they cannot speak of the evolution of spirit. But once we admit that man consists of body, soul, and spirit, we can go on to ask in what way the body develops, in what way the soul and in what way the spirit evolve. If we are to speak of man's body then we shall say: Man's body has gradually been perfected from lower stages. We must also say that the evidence we have provides us with actual proof of this. As I have already pointed out, in the strata of the earth we find the original man exhibiting a very animal-like body—not indeed like any animal we have today, but animal-like, and this must have developed gradually to its present state of perfection. There is no question, therefore, of spiritual science as pursued here at the Goetheanum coming to loggerheads with natural science, for the truths of natural science are accepted by it.

On the other hand, we must come once more to recognize that in those times—which may be said to be only about three or four thousand years ago—views we re current from which today we not only can learn a great deal but which we are obliged to admire. When today we have a certain amount of relevant knowledge and study with real understanding the documents that have appeared in India, Asia, Egypt, or even in Greece, we find the people in those times far in advance of us. What they knew, however, was acquired in a quite different way from how we acquire knowledge today.

Today there are many things we know very little about. For example, from what I have shown you in connection with nutrition, you will have seen how necessary it is for spiritual science to come to our aid in the simplest nutritional matters. Physical science is unable to do so. But we have only to read what physicians of old had to say, and rightly understand it, to become aware that in reality people up to the time of Hippocrates in Greece knew far more than is known by our modern materialistic physicians. We grow to respect, deeply respect, the knowledge once possessed. The only thing is that knowledge was not imparted in the same form as it is today. Today we clothe our knowledge in concepts. This was not so in the case of ancient peoples; they clothed their knowledge in poetical imaginations, so that anything of it remaining to us is now just taken figuratively—as poetry. It was not poetry to those men of old, however; it was their way of expressing what they knew. Thus we find that when we are able to test and thoroughly to study the documents still existing, there can no longer be any question of men originally having been undeveloped spiritually. In spirit they are infinitely wiser than we are!

But there is another thing that has to be remembered. When men of primeval times went about he acquired great wisdom spiritually. His face was more or less what we should certainly call animal-like, whereas today in man's face his spirit finds expression, his spirit is as it were incorporated in the physical substance of his face. This, is a necessity if man is to be free, if he is to be a free being. These clever men of yore, the clever men of primeval times, were very wise but they possessed wisdom in the way the animal today possesses instinct. They lived in a dazed condition, as if in a cloud. They wrote without guiding their own hand; they spoke with the feeling that it was not they who were speaking but the spirit speaking through them. In those primeval times, therefore, there was no question of man being free.

This is something in the history of culture which constitutes a real step forward for the human race—this consciousness man has of his freedom. With it he no longer feels the spirit driving him as instinct drives the animal; he feels the spirit actually within him, and this distinguishes him from the man of former times.

When we consider from this point of view the savages of today, it must strike us that the men of primeval times—called in our question here primitive men—were not like the modern savages, but that these have descended from the primeval men. You will get a better idea of this if I tell you the following.

In certain districts there are people who harbour the notion that when they bury in the earth some little thing belonging to a sick person—for example, a corner of his shirt—that this can have the magical effect of healing him. I have even personally known such people. I knew one who, at the time the Emperor Frederick was ill, wrote to the Empress asking for a piece of shirt belonging to her husband. It would be buried in the cemetery and the Emperor Frederick would then be cured! You can imagine how this request was received. But the man had simply done what he thought would lead to the Emperor's recovery. He himself told me about it, adding that it would have been much less foolish to have let him have the piece of shirt than to have sent for the English doctor Mackenzie, and so on. That had been absurd—they should have sent him the piece of shirt.

When this kind of thing comes to the notice of a materialistic thinker, he says: This is a superstition that has arisen somewhere. At one time or other, a man or several men got the notion that burying part of a sick man's shirt and saying a little prayer over it would cure the man.

But nothing has ever arisen in this way. No superstition arises by being thought out; it comes about in quite a different way. There was once a time when people had great reverence for their dead and said to themselves: So long as a man is going about on earth he is a sinful being; besides doing good things, he does many that are bad. But—so they thought—the dead man goes on living in his soul and spirit and in death makes up for all deficiencies. Thus when they thought of the dead they thought of what was good, and by thinking of the dead they tried to make themselves better.

Now it is characteristic of human beings to forget easily. Just think how quickly the dead, those who have left us, are forgotten today. At that time, there were those who wanted to give their fellowman various signs to make them think of the dead, and thus to benefit their own health. Let us say someone in some village had the idea that if a man was ill, the other villagers should look after him. It was not the custom in villages to collect money for the sick, there were no poor-boxes, that kind of thing is a modern invention. At that time the villagers all had to help one another out of kindness; everyone had to think of those who were ill. The leading man in the village said: Because people are egoists they have no thought of the sick if they are not spurred on to get out of themselves and have thoughts, for instance, of the dead. So he told them they should take, perhaps, a corner of the sick man's shirt by which to remember him, and this was to be buried in the earth; through this they would remember the sick man. By thinking of the dead, they would remember to take care of someone. This outward deed was contrived simply to help man's memory. Later, people forgot the reason for all this and it was put down to magic, superstition. This is o in the case of a great deal that lives on as superstition; it has arisen from something perfectly reasonable. What is perfect never arises from what is imperfect. The assertion that something perfect can come from what is not so appears to anyone with insight as if it were said: You are to make a table, but you must make it as clumsy and unfinished as you can to begin with, so that it may in time become a perfect table. But it is not like that; we never get a well-made table from one that is ill-made. The table begins by being a good one and becomes battered in course of time. It is like that, too, outside in nature, anywhere in the world. You must first have things in a perfect state, out of which comes the imperfect. It is the same in the case of the human being whose spirit to begin with, though still lacking freedom, was in a certain state of perfection, but whose body, it is true, was imperfect. On the other hand the perfection of the body lay in its being soft and capable of being so moulded by the spirit that cultural progress could ensue.

So you see we are not justified in thinking that human beings were originally like the savages of today. Savages have developed into what they now are—with their superstitions, their magical practices, and their unclean appearance—from states originally more perfect. The only advantage we have over the savages is that, starting from the same conditions, we have not degenerated as they have. I might therefore say: The evolution of man has taken two different paths. It is not true that the savages of today represent the original condition of mankind. The men who, to begin with, looked more animal-like were highly civilised.

Now when you ask: But are these original, animal-like men the descendants of apes or of other animals? it is a quite natural question. You look at the apes as they are today and say: From these apes, men are descended. That is all very well but when human beings had this animal form, there were no such animals as our present apes! From apes as they are today, therefore, men have not descended. On the contrary, just as our present savages have fallen from the level of the human beings of primeval times, so the apes are beings who have fallen still lower. On going back further in the evolution of the earth we find human beings formed in the way I described here a short while ago, from a soft element and not from any animals as we have them. Human beings have never arisen from the kind of apes we now have. On the other hand, it might easily be possible that if conditions prevailing on earth today, conditions in which everything is based on authority and power—and wisdom counts for nothing—it might indeed happen that the men who thus want to found everything on power gradually take on animal-like bodies again, and that two great races may arise. One race would consist of those who stand for peace, for the spirit and for wisdom, whereas the other would be made up of those who re-assume animal forms. It might indeed be said that those who care nothing today for the progress of mankind may be running the risk of degenerating into apes.

You see, all manner of strange things are experienced today. What newspapers say is, of course, largely untrue, but sometimes in a quite remarkable way it shows the trend of man's thinking. During our recent travels in Holland, we bought an illustrated paper. On the last page of this paper there was a curious picture—a small child, quite a baby and its nurse, looking after it, an ape, an orang-utan. It was holding the child quite properly, and it was said to be installed somewhere in America as children's nurse.

It is possible that this may not be actual fact—as yet, but it shows what many people are hoping for: apes installed as nursemaids. And if apes are employed in this capacity, what an outlook for man! Once it has been discovered that apes can be employed to look after children, that in certain circumstances an ape can be trained to look after the physical needs of children—then people will develop this strange desire and the social question will be on a new level. For you will soon see what far-reaching proposals will be made for teaching apes in this way; they will be sent to work in the factories. Apes will be found to be cheaper than men, hence this will be looked upon as the solution of the social problem. If people really succeed in making apes look after children, we shall be inundated by pamphlets on how to solve the social question by training apes.

It is indeed conceivable that this might happen. Think—other animals besides apes can be trained to do many things; dogs, for instance, are very teachable. But the question is whether this will be for the advance or decline of civilization. Civilization will most definitely decline; it will deteriorate. The children brought up by ape-nurses will quite certainly become apelike. Then indeed we shall have the perfect changing into the imperfect. Thus we must be clear that it is possible for certain human beings to become of an ape-like nature in the future, but that the human race in the past was never such that men developed from the ape-like. For when man still had an animal-form (quite different indeed from that of the ape) the present ape was not yet in existence. They themselves have deteriorated; they have fallen from a higher stage.

When we turn to those primitive peoples who may be said to have been rich in spirit but animal-like in body, we find they were still undeveloped as far as understanding, intelligence, goes. Those men of ancient times were not capable of thinking. Hence, when anyone today who prides himself particularly on his thinking comes across ancient documents, he looks for them to be based on thought and looks in vain. He therefore says: This is all very beautiful but simply poetry. But indeed we cannot judge everything by our own standards alone, for then we go astray. Those men of yore had above all great powers of imagination, imagination that worked like instinct. When today we use our imagination we often pull ourselves up, saying: Imagination has no place in what is real. This is quite right for us today, but the men of primeval times, primitive men, would never have been able to carry on without imagination.

It will seem strange to you how this lively imagination possessed by primitive men could have been applied to anything real. However, here too we have wrong conceptions. In your school history books you will have read about the tremendous importance for man's evolution attached to the invention of a paper made from rag. The paper we use for writing—which is made of rag—has been in existence for only a few centuries. Before that, people had to write on parchment which has a different origin. Only at the end of the Middle Ages did men discover the possibility of making paper from fibre coming from plants—worn threadbare after having first been used for clothes. Human beings were late in acquiring intellect which was needed for making this paper. But the same thing—except that it is not white as we want it for our black ink—was discovered long before. The same stuff that is used now for our paper was discovered not just two or three thousand years ago but very many thousands of years before our day. By whom then? Not by human beings at all, but by wasps! Look at any wasps' nest you find hanging on a tree. Look at the material it consists of—paper! Not, however, white paper, not the kind you write on, for the wasps have not learned to write, otherwise they would have made white paper, but such paper as you might use for a parcel. We have indeed a drab-coloured paper for parcels which is just what the wasps use for making nests. The wasps found out how to make paper thousands of years ago, long before human beings arrived at it by means of their intellect. The difference is that instinct works in animals whereas in the man of primeval times it was imagination; they would have been incapable of making anything had not imagination enabled them to do so, for they lacked intelligence. We must therefore conclude that in outward appearance these primeval men were more like animals than are the men of today, but to a certain extent they were possessed by the spirit, the spirit was working in them. It was not they who possessed it through their own powers, they were possessed by it and their souls had great powers of imagination. With imagination they made their tools; imagination helped them in all they did, enabled them to make everything they needed.

We are terribly proud of all our inventions, but we should consider whether we really have cause to be so; for much of what constitutes the greatness of our culture has actually arisen from quite simple ideas. For example: when you read about the Trojan War—do you realize when the Trojan War took place? About 1200 years before the founding of Christianity. Now when we hear about wars like this which didn't take place in Greece, but far away in Asia, it did not happen in those days that the result was known in Greece the next day by telegram S Naturally at that time this did not happen for the Greeks had no electric telegraph. What then did they do? Look, (drawing) the war was over here, this was sea, here was an island, there a mountain, and there again sea, over here an island, a mountain and then sea, and so on till you came to Greece. It was agreed that when the war was over, three fires should be kindled on the mountain. Whoever was posted on the nearest mountain was first to give the signal by running up and lighting the three fires. On seeing the three fires, the one on the next mountain lit three fires in his turn, and in this way the signal arrived in quite a short time at Greece. This was their method of sending a telegram. The process was a quick one and before the day of the telegram, it had to suffice.

How is it then today? When you telephone, not telegraph, but telephone—I will show you in the simplest way what happens.¹ We have a kind of magnet which, it is true, is produced by electricity; and at this place (drawing) we have something called an armature. When the current is off, this falls in place; when the current is switched on, the plate is released and swings to and fro. It is connected by a wire with the next one which oscillates with it and transmits what is generated by the plate in just the same way as in those olden times the three fires conveyed messages to men. It is rather more complicated but still the same idea, though electricity has been used in applying it.

When we have actual knowledge of it we come to respect what the human beings of those ancient times devised and organized out of their imaginative faculty. When we read the old documents with this respect, we say: These men have accomplished great things purely spiritually and all out of imagination. To come to a thorough realization of this you need turn only to what men believe today. They believe they know something about the old Germanic gods—Wotan, Loki, for example. Pictures of them in human forms have appeared in certain books, Wotan with a flowing beard, Loki looking like a devil, with red hair, and so on. It is thought that the men of old, like the old Germans, had these ideas about Wotan and Loki. But that is not true, those men of old had, rather, the following conception: When the wind blows there is in it something spiritual—which is indeed true—Wotan is blowing in the wind. When they went into a wood, they never imagined they would meet Wotan there in the guise of an ordinary man. Describing a meeting with Wotan, they would have spoken of the wind blowing through the wood. This can still be felt in the very word Wotan by anyone who is sensitive to these things. And Loki—this did not call up a picture of someone sitting quietly in a corner; Loki's life was in the fire!

Indeed in various way, the people were always talking of Wotan and Loki. Suppose someone to be speaking about Wotan, for example: When you go over the mountain you may meet Wotan. Wotan will then make you either strong or weak according to your deserts. You see this is how people felt, hew they understood these matters. Today people say: That is superstition, a superstitious notion. But in those times they did not understand it so. They knew: When you go up there, to that corner so difficult to access, you do not meet a man in a body like any ordinary man. But the very shape of the mountain gives rise to a whirlwind which is met with especially in that place and a special kind of air is wafted up from an abyss. If you withstand this and keep to your path, you may become well or you may become sick. In what way you become well or ill, the people were willing to tell; they were in harmony with nature and would speak—not in an intellectual way but out of imagination. Our modern doctor would try to express himself intellectually—thus: If you have a tendency to tuberculosis, go up and sit at a certain height on a mountain every day, then come down. Go on doing this for some time; it will be most beneficial. This is the intellectual way of talking, but what one says when speaking imaginatively is this: Wotan is always to be found at that corner; it will help you if for a couple of weeks you visit him at a certain time each day.

This is the way in which people came to grips with life out of their imagination, and in this way too they worked. You will all at some time or other have been in a country district where the threshing was not done by machine but by hand—in time, in rhythm. The people know that if they have to thresh for days together and go to work without any rule, just at their own sweet will, they will soon be overcome by exhaustion. Threshing cannot be done in that way. If, however, they thresh in rhythm, if they keep in time together, exhaustion will be avoided, because this rhythm will be in harmony with the rhythm of their breathing and of the circulating blood. It makes a difference whether they beat with their flail on the out-breath or the in-breath, or whether they do it. as the breath is changing over from one to the other. Why is this? It is easy to see that it is nothing to do with the intellect, for today it no longer happens; everything of the kind is being wiped out. But work that was done by the people—for instance, the contrivances they had to tread or anything else in which time had to be kept—all this was done rhythmically.

Now, I don't fancy you can really think that if you take a piece of wood, a few strings and so on, and deal with them in a haphazard fashion, the result will be a violin. A violin results when mind, spirit, is exerted, when the wood is fashioned in a particular way, when the strings are put through a special process, and so on and so forth. This then is what we must say—particularly because people at that time did not yet think for themselves—the way in which machines were originally made could only be ascribed to possession by the spirit, that is to say, the people having the spirit working in them. For this reason, primitive men who did not work with intellect but with imagination were naturally inclined to talk of the spirit. When today someone constructs a machine by means of intellect, he does not say—and rightly does not say—that the spirit has been helping him. But when a man of those early times who was not conscious of thinking, had no capacity for thinking—when he constructed anything, he immediately felt: The spirit was helping me.

When the Europeans, the “superior” men, first arrived in American, and when even later, in the 19th century, they came to the regions where Indians such as belonged to more ancient times were still living, these Indians spoke of the “great Spirit” ruling everywhere. These primitive men in general have gone on speaking in this way of the Being ruling in everything. It was this “great Spirit” who was venerated particularly by the human beings living in Atlantean times when there was still land between Europe and America; the Indians still had this veneration, and knew nothing as yet of intellect. The. Indians then gradually came to know the “superior” men before being exterminated by them. Paper on which there were little signs, printed paper, was held in abhorrence by Indians; they took the little signs to be small devils and abominated them, for these signs were intellectual in origin. The man whose activities arise out of imagination abominates what comes from the intellect.

Now the European with his materialistic civilization knows how an engine is constructed. The intellectual way in which a European constructs his engine could never have been the way the ancient Greeks would have set about it, for the Greeks still lacked intellect. Intellect first came to man in the 15th or 16th century. The Greeks would have done their constructing with the help of their imagination. Since the Greeks ascribed to good spirits all natural forms and to bad spirits all that has no part in nature and is artificially produced, they would have spoken thus: In the engine there lives an evil spirit. They would certainly have done their constructing out of imagination and it would never ha/e occurred to them that in this they were not aided by the spirit.

You see therefore that ultimately we have to ascribe more spirit to the original primitive man; for imagination is of a more spiritual nature in the human soul than the mere intellect so highly prized today.

Old conditions, however, can never come back. Hence we have certainly to go forward, but not with the idea that what today exists in the animal as pure instinct can ever be developed into spirit. We ought not therefore to picture primitive men as having been possessed of mere instinct, for they realized: What is working in us is the spirit. This is why they had such belief in the spirit.

All this contributes a little to our understanding of how human evolution originated. So we must allow right on both sides—on the side of those who imagine human beings to have arisen from animal forms; well, so indeed they have, but not from such animal-forms as we have now, for these came into being later, when human beings were already in existence. But those animal-forms which in the course of human evolution have gradually grown into man's present form, together with the faculties existing at that time, have arisen because the spiritual—not intellectually, it is true, but imaginatively—was more perfect than it is today. At the same time we have always to remember: This original perfection depended upon man, though lacking freedom, being, as it were, possessed by the spirit. Intellect enables man to become free; by means of intellect, he can be freed.

Just consider this. Anyone who works with his intellect may say: At a certain time I am going to think out such and such a thing. This cannot be done by a poet for he still works today with imagination. Now Goethe was a great poet. When, because someone wanted him to write a poem, or he himself felt inclined to do so, he set himself down to write—well, the result was execrable! That people are not aware of this today comes simply from their inability to distinguish good poetry from bad. Among Goethe's poems there are many bad ones. Imaginative work can be done only when the mood is on the poet, and when the mood is on him he must write down the poem at once. You see, that is how it was in the case of primitive men. They were never able to do things out of free will at all. Free will is something that developed gradually, but not wisdom. Wisdom was originally greater than intellect and must re-acquire its greatness. That means our having to come back to the spirit by way of the intellect.

That, you see, is the task of anthroposophy; it has no wish to do what many people would like, that is, to bring back primitive conditions among men—old Indian wisdom, for example. It is nonsense when people harp on that; anthroposophy sets value on a return to the spirit precisely in full possession of the intellect, with intellect fully alive. It must be strictly borne in mind that we have nothing at all against the intellect; we have to go forward with it. To begin with, human beings had spirit without intellect; then the spirit fell away whereas the intellect increased» Now, by means of the intellect, we have to return to the spirit. Culture is obliged to take this course, for if it does not do so—well, people are always saying that the world war was unlike anything seen before and it is a fact that men have never before so torn each other to pieces—but if mankind refuses to take the course of bringing their intellect with them on their return to the spirit, then still greater wars will come upon up, wars that go on becoming more and more savage. Men will exterminate each other like two rats that, shut up together in a cage, gnaw each other till there is nothing left but two tails. That is putting it brutally, but in actual fact men are on the way to mutual extermination, and it is very important to know whither they are going.

• 1. This greatly simplified explanation of a very complicated process was given to the workmen in order to save time.

Continuing the study of man's various illnesses and health that we made a week ago, in the course of this winter we will take up in more and more detail those things with which they are connected. Our studies will then culminate in a generally more exact recognition of human nature than has previously been possible through anthroposophy. Today, because we will need it later, we will have to include a discussion of the nature and meaning of the Ten Commandments of Moses. Then we will have to say something about the deep significance of such concepts as original sin, redemption and so on, and we will see how these concepts gain new meaning in the light of our latest achievements, including those of science. To that end we must first examine more closely the fundamental nature of this remarkable document, which, projecting from out [of] the prehistory of the Israelites, appears to us as one of the most important stones in the building of the temple that was erected as a kind of anteroom of Christianity.

It can become increasingly evident in such a document as the Ten Commandments how little the form in which men know the Bible today corresponds to this document itself. From the details given in the last two lectures on “The Bible and Wisdom,” you will have felt how wrong it would be to say that we are simply finding fault with details in the translation and that there is no need to be so exact. It would be superficial to treat these things in such a way. Recall that we pointed out how the correct translation of the fourth verse of the second chapter of Genesis should actually read, “The following will recount the generations, or what proceeds from heaven and earth,” and that in Genesis the same word is used for “the descendants of heaven and earth” as later on where it reads, “This is the book of the generations—or descendants—of Adam.” The same word is used in both instances. It is of great significance that in the description of man's proceeding out of heaven and earth the same word is used as later where the descendants of Adam are spoken of. Such things are not merely pedantic quibbling that would put right the translation, but rather they touch the nerve not only of the translation but of the understanding of this early document of man as well. We actually speak out of the living sources of our anthroposophic world view when we say that to restore the Bible to man in a true form is one of the most important tasks of this world view, indeed, of anthroposophy itself. Above all, we are here interested in what is generally said regarding the Ten Commandments.

The Ten Commandments are interpreted by the great majority of men today as if they were legal ordinances, that is, like the laws of any modern state. It is conceded, of course, that the laws of the Ten Commandments are more extensive and general, and have a validity independent of their time and place. They are thus held to be more universal, but men are still conscious of them as having the same effect or objective as any modern legislation. So seen, however, they do not contain the actual vital nerve that lives in them. This is borne out by the fact that all translations presently available have unconsciously incorporated an essentially superficial explanation that is not at all in the spirit of their original meaning. When we enter into this spirit, you will see how the interpretation of them forms part of the studies we have just begun, even though it may appear that in discussing them we are creating an inappropriate diversion.

By way of introduction, let us make at least an approximate attempt to render the Ten Commandments into our language, and then try to approach the subject more closely. It will be found that many things in this translation—if we want to call it such—will have to be elaborated, but as we shall soon see, we want above all to touch the vital nerve, the real sense, of them in the idiom of our language. If one translates according to the sense of the text without referring to the dictionary word for word—in such a translation only the worst can result, naturally, for it is the word and soul value that the whole thing had in its own time that is important—if the sense is captured, then these Ten Commandments would run as follows.

First Commandment. I am the eternal divine Whom you experience in yourself. I led you out of the land of Egypt where you could not follow Me in you. Henceforth, you shall not put other gods above Me. You shall not recognize as higher gods those who show you an image of anything that appears above in the heavens, nor that works out of the earth, nor between heaven and earth. You shall not worship anything that is below the divine in yourself, for I am the eternal in you that works into your body and hence affects the coming generations. I am of divine nature working forth. If you do not recognize Me in you, I shall pass away as your divine nature in your children, grandchildren and great grandchildren, and their bodies will become waste. If you recognize Me in you, I shall live on as you to the thousandth generation, and the bodies of your people will prosper.

Second Commandment. You shall not speak in error of Me in you, for everything false about the “I” in you will corrupt your body.

Third Commandment. You shall distinguish work day from Sabbath in order that your existence may become an image of My existence. For what lives in you as “I” created the world in six days and lived within Himself on the seventh day. Thus shall your doing and your son's doing and your daughter's doing and your servants' doing and your beasts' doing and the doing of whatever else is with you be turned for only six days toward the outer; on the seventh day, however, shall your gaze seek Me in you.

Fourth Commandment. Continue to work in the ways of your Father and mother so that the possessions they have earned by the power I have developed in them will remain with you as your property.

Fifth Commandment. Do not slay.

Sixth Commandment. Do not commit adultery.

Seventh Commandment. Do not steal.

Eighth Commandment. Do not disparage the worth of your fellowman by speaking false of him.

Ninth Commandment. Do not look begrudgingly upon what your fellowman holds as possessions.

Tenth Commandment. Do not look begrudgingly upon the wife of your fellowman, nor upon his servants, nor upon the other creatures by which he prospers.

Now let us ask ourselves what these Ten Commandments really show us and we shall see that, not only in the first part but in a seemingly hidden way also in the last part, they show us that the Jewish people were told through Moses that the force that had proclaimed itself in the burning bush to Moses, using the words, “I am the I AM!”—Ehjeh asher Ehjeh—as its name, was to be henceforth with the Jewish people. What is referred to is the fact that the other peoples in the evolution of our earth were not able to recognize the “I am,” the actual original ground of the fourth part of man's being, so intensively and dearly as the Jewish people. The God Who poured a drop of His Being into man so that his fourth member became the bearer of this drop—the ego bearer—this God became known to His people for the first time through Moses.

Therefore we can interpret the Ten Commandments as follows. The Jehovah God had indeed worked in mankind's evolution until that time, but the effect of the work of spiritual beings can only become manifest after it has taken place. Though there was much that was working into the ancient peoples, it was through Moses that it came into being as concept, as idea, and as actual soul force. It was essential that he should make clear to his people how their egohood was going to effect their lives. With these people Jehovah is to be seen as a kind of transition being who pours the drop into the individuality of man but who is at the same time a national God. The individual Jew still felt with a part of himself a connection with the ego of Abraham's incarnation that streamed through the entire Jewish race. This was to change only with the advent of Christianity. But what was to occur on earth through Christ was foretold in the Old Testament—especially through what Moses had to say to his people.

So we see the full power of ego recognition slowly permeating the Jewish people in the account of the Old Testament. The Jewish people were to be made fully conscious of the effect it would have upon man, to feel the ego within himself, to experience God's Name, “I am the I AM!” and its effect upon his innermost soul.

These things are experienced abstractly today. The ego and what is connected with it are spoken of and they remain just words. But when the ego was first given to the Jewish people in the form of the old Jehovah God it was experienced as a new force that entered man and completely changed the structure of his astral, etheric and physical bodies. His people had to be told that the conditions of their lives, of health and sickness, were different before they had an ego that they were aware of than they would be henceforth. That is why it became necessary to tell them that they were no longer to look up merely to heaven or down merely to the earth when they spoke of the gods, but into their own souls. Looking into one's soul with devotion to the truth brings right living—right down into one's health. This consciousness is at the basis of the Ten Commandments—whereas a wrong conception of what entered the human soul as ego causes man to wither in body and soul, destroys him. One need only be objective to observe how these Ten Commandments are not meant to be merely external laws, how they are actually meant to be just what has been discussed, that is, something that is of utmost significance for the health and well-being of the astral, etheric and physical bodies. But where does one read books correctly and accurately these days? One needs only turn a few more pages to find, in a further discussion of the Ten Commandments, what the Jewish people are told about their effect upon the whole person. There it says, “I remove every sickness from out your midst; there will be no miscarriage nor barrenness in your land, and I will let the number of your days become full.”

That means that when the ego has become permeated with the essence of the Ten Commandments, one of the results will be that you cannot die in the prime of life, but rather, through the properly understood ego, something can stream into the three bodies, the astral, etheric and physical, that will cause the number of your days to become full, that allows you to live in good health until old age. This is clearly stated. But it is necessary to penetrate quite deeply into these things, and modern theologians cannot, of course, do this so easily. A popular little book, of a most irritating sort, especially because it can be had for a few pennies, includes in its remarks about the Ten Commandments the sentence, “One can readily see that in the Ten Commandments the basic laws for humanity are laid down. The one half is the Commandments that have to do with God and the other half the Commandments in regard to people.” Not wanting to be too far off the mark, the author adds that the fourth Commandment must still be included with the first half, which concerns God. How he manages to attribute four to one half, and six to the other half is just a small example of how people go about their work these days. Everything else in this book is commensurate with the interesting equation: four equals six.

We are concerning ourselves here with the explanation given to the Jewish people of how the ego must properly indwell the three bodies of man. It is important, above all, that it be said—and we encounter this in the very first Commandment: When you become aware of this ego as a spark of the divine, then you must feel that within your ego there is a spark, an emission of the highest, the most exhalted divinity who is involved with the creation of the earth!

Let us recall what we have been able to say about the history of man's evolution. His physical body was developed on ancient Saturn; gods then worked upon it. Then his ether body was joined with it on the sun. How both bodies were developed further is again the work of divine spiritual beings. Then on the moon the astral body was incorporated—all the work of divine spiritual beings. What made man into man as we now know him was the incorporation on earth of his ego. The highest divinity took part in this. As long as man was unable to be fully conscious of this fourth member of his being, he could have no notion of the highest divinity who helped create him and lives within him. Man must say to himself, “Divine beings have worked upon my physical body, but they are less exhalted than the Divinity who has now bestowed my ego upon me.” The same is true of the etheric and the astral bodies. Thus, the Jewish people, to whom the ego was first prophesied, had to be told, “Make yourselves aware that all about you are peoples who worship gods who, in their present stage of development, can be effective in their astral, etheric and physical bodies, but they cannot function in the ego. This God who works in the ego was indeed always there. He proclaimed his presence through his working and creating, but his name he proclaims to you now.”

Through his acceptance of the other gods man is not a free being, but rather a being that worships the gods of his lower members. When, however, he consciously recognizes the god, a part of whom he carries within his ego, then he is a free being—one who confronts his fellowmen as a free being. Today, man does not stand in the same relation to his astral, etheric and physical bodies as he does to his ego. He is within his ego. He is immediately connected with it. He will only experience his astral body in this way when he has changed it into manas, and his ether body when he has transformed it to buddhi, when by means of his ego, he has evolved it to a divine being. Though the ego was the last to emerge, it is still that within which man lives. When he has a conscious awareness of his egohood, he is aware of that in which he is directly confronted with the divine, whereas the form of his astral, etheric and physical bodies that he currently possesses, were created by gods who came before.

The nations surrounding the Israelites worshiped those divinities who worked upon the lower members of man's being. When they made an image of those lower divinities, it had the form of something that was on the earth, in heaven or between heaven and earth, because everything that man has within himself is to be found in all the rest of nature. If he makes images out of the mineral kingdom, they can only represent for him the gods who worked on the physical body. If he makes images from the plant kingdom, they can represent only the divinities that worked on his ether body because man has his ether body in common with the plant world. Images from the animal world can symbolize for him only those divinities who worked on his astral body. But man is made the crown of earth's creation by what he perceives in his ego. No external image can express it. So it had to be clearly and strongly emphasized to the Jewish nation, “You bear within you what flows into you from the now highest of Gods. It cannot be symbolized with an image from the mineral, plant or animal kingdom, were it ever so sublime; all gods who are served by this means are lower gods than the God who lives in your ego. If you would worship this God in you the others must withdraw; then you have the true, healthy strength of your ego within you.” Thus what we are told right at the start, in the first of the Ten Commandments, is connected with the deepest mysteries of the development of man, “I am the eternal divine Whom you experience in yourself. The power that I put into your ego became the impulse, the force that enabled you to flee from the land of Egypt where you could not follow Me in you.”

Moses, on the instruction of Jehovah, led his people out of Egypt. In order to make this quite clear to us it is especially indicated that Jehovah wanted to make his people a nation of priests. The peoples of the other nations had the free priest-wisemen among them who were apart from themselves. They were the free ones who knew about the great mystery of the ego, who also knew the ego-god of whom there was no image. Thus there were in these lands the few ego conscious priest-wisemen on the one side, and on the other, the great unfree masses who could only listen to what they, under the strictest authority, let flow to them from the mysteries. It was not the single individual who had this direct relationship, but the priest-wiseman, who mediated for him. Therefore, the health and prosperity of the people depended upon these priest-wisemen; their health and prosperity depended on how they organized things and established institutions.

I would have to tell you a great deal to portray for you the deeper meaning of the Egyptian temple sleep and how it affected the health of the people, if I were to describe what emanated from such a cult—the Apis cult, for example—in the way of popular medicines for their general well-being. The direction and guidance of the people depended upon the initiates in these cult centers to provide the elixirs of health. But now that was to change. The Jews were to become a nation of priests. Everyone should feel a spark of the Jehovah God within himself, should have a direct relationship to Him. No longer was the priest to be the sole mediator. That is why the people had to be so instructed. They had to be made aware that the false images, the lowlier images of the highest god are also destructive to health.

Now we arrive at something that will not come easily to the consciousness of present-day man. Quite terrible wrongs are being committed in this connection. Only those who can penetrate into spiritual science know the subtle ways in which health and sickness develop. If you go through the streets of a big city and take into your soul the ugly things that are on display in windows and signs, it has a devastating effect. Materialistic science has no conception of the extent to which the seeds of illness lie in this kind of hideousness. They seek the causes of illness in bacilli, and do not realize in what a round about way illness has its origin in the soul. Only people familiar with spiritual science will know what it means to take various images into himself.

Above all, the first Commandment says that man must henceforth be able to imagine that beyond all that can be spiritually expressed by means of an image there can be an impulse that cannot be made into an image; this connects the ego to the super-sensible.

“Feel this ego strongly within yourself, feel it so that through this ego there weaves and flows a divine essence that is more exhalted than anything that you can portray through an image. Then you will have in such feeling a healthy force that will make your physical body, your ether body and your astral body healthy.”

A strong ego impulse that creates good health was to be given the Jewish nation. If this ego was properly recognized, the astral, etheric and physical bodies would be well-formed and would produce a strong life force in each individual, and this, in turn, would permeate the entire folk.

Since a folk was reckoned as having a thousand generations, the Jehovah God spoke the word saying, “Through a proper inculcating of the ego, man will of himself become a source of radiating health, so that the whole nation will become a healthy people ‘unto the thousandth generation’.” If, however, the ego is not understood in the right way, the body withers, becomes weak and sickly. If the father does not place the ego into his soul in the right way, his body becomes weak and sickly, the ego slowly withdraws itself, the son becomes sicklier, the grandson more sickly and finally there is nothing more than a shell from which the Jehovah God has retreated. That which does not permit the ego to thrive causes the body to gradually wither right up to its fourth member.

So we see that it is the proper functioning of the ego that is set before the people of Moses in the first of the Commandments.

“I am the eternal divine Whom you experience in yourself. I led you out of the land of Egypt where you could not experience Me in you. Henceforth, you shall not put other gods above Me. You shall not recognize as higher gods those who present to you an image of anything that appears above in the heavens, or that works out of the earth, or between heaven and earth. You shall not worship anything that is below the divine in yourself, for I am the eternal in you that works into your body and thus affects the coming generations. I am of divine nature working forth—not ‘I am a zealous God!’; that says nothing here. If you do not recognize Me as your God, I shall pass away as your ego in your children, grandchildren and great grandchildren, and their bodies will become waste. If you recognize Me in you, I shall live on as you unto the thousandth generation, and the bodies of your people will prosper.”

We see that what is meant is not merely an abstraction, but something living and vital that is to work into the very health of the people. The external character of health is traced back to the spiritual, which is at its source, and which is made known to the people, step by step. This is particularly expressed in the second Commandment that says, “You shall not create any false impressions of my name, of what lives in you as ego, for a true impression makes you healthy and strong, whereby you will prosper, whereas a false impression will cause your body to become wasted!” Thus it was inculcated into every member of the Mosaic nation that whenever he uttered the name of God he should let it be as a warning to himself: “I shall acknowledge the name of what has entered into me, as it lives in me, in that it fosters good health.”

“You shall not speak in error of Me in you, for everything false about the ‘I’ in you will corrupt your body.”

Then in the third Commandment there is the strong and specific reference to how man, when he is a working and creating ego, is a true microcosm, just as the Jehovah God created for six days and rested on the seventh, and man in his creating should follow. In the third Commandment it is expressly indicated: “You, man, in that you are a true ego, shall also be an image of your highest God, and in your deeds work as would your God.” It is an admonition to become more and more like the God who revealed himself to Moses in the burning bush.

“You shall distinguish work day from Sabbath in order that your existence may become an image of My existence. For what lives in you as ‘I’ created the world in six days and lived within Himself on the seventh day. Thus shall your doing and your son's doing and your daughters doing and your servants' doing and your beasts' doing and the doing of whatever else is with you be turned for only six days toward the outer; on the seventh day, however, shall your gaze seek Me in you.”

Now the Ten Commandments go more and more into detail. But always in the background is the thought that the evolutionary force is at work as Jehovah. In the fourth Commandment man is led from the super-sensible to the outwardly sensible. Something important is referred to in the fourth Commandment that must be understood. When man emerges as one conscious of his ego, he requires certain outer means to foster his existence. He develops what we refer to as personal property and possessions. If we were to go back to ancient Egypt, we would not yet find this individual property among the masses. We would find that those who presided over property were also the priest-initiates. But now as each individual ego develops, it becomes necessary for man to take hold of what is outside and around him, and provide a proper setting for himself. For that reason it is stated in the fourth Commandment that he who lets the individual ego work in himself acquires possessions, that these possessions remain bound to the power of the ego that lives in the Jewish nation from father to son to grandson, and that the father's property would not have the security of the strong ego power if the son did not continue his father's work with the strength received from his father. It is therefore said: “Let the ego become so strong in you that it continues on, and that the son can inherit, along with his father's property, the means with which to become integrated into the external environment.” That is how consciously the spirit of the conservation of property was inculcated into Moses's people, and it is strongly emphasized in all the following laws that occult powers stand behind everything that happens in the world. While the right of inheritance is received today externally and abstractly, those who have understood the fourth Commandment have been aware that spiritual forces extend themselves through property from generation to generation, live from one generation to the next, that they heighten the ego power, and that the ego force of the single individual thereby derives something that is brought to it from the ego force of the father.

The fourth Commandment is usually translated in the most grotesque possible manner, but its true meaning is as follows. “The strong ego force is to be developed in you that lives beyond you, and this shall be passed on to your son so that what will live on in him through the property of his ancestors will accrue to his ego force.

“Continue to work in the ways of your father and mother so that the possessions they have earned by the power I have developed in them will remain with you as your property.” In addition, it lies at the basis of all the other laws that man's ego power is heightened by the proper application of the ego impulse but that it is destroyed by its improper use.

The fifth Commandment says something that is to be understood in its correct sense only by means of spiritual science. Everything connected with killing, with the extermination of another's life, weakens the self-conscious ego power in man. One can heighten thereby the powers of black magic in man but it is then only the astral forces that are heightened while the ego power is by-passed. What is divine in man is annihilated through every killing. Therefore, this law alludes not only to something abstract, but also to something by which occult power streams to man's ego impulse when he fosters life, making it flourish when he does not destroy life. This is presented as an ideal for the strengthening of the individual ego power.

The same is given in the sixth and seventh Commandments, with somewhat less emphasis, regarding other aspects of life. Through marriage a center for ego strength is created. Whoever destroys marriage thus weakens the strength that should flow into his ego. Likewise does he, who takes something away from another's ego, thereby seeking to increase his own possessions by stealing, etc., weaken his own ego power. Here, too, the guiding thought throughout is that the ego shall not be weakened.

Now it is even indicated in the last three Commandments how man weakens his ego through the false direction of his desires. The life of desire has great significance for ego power. Love heightens the power of the ego; envy and hate cause it to wither. If a man hates his fellowman, if he disparages his worth by speaking falsely of him, he weakens thereby his ego power; he diminishes all that surrounds him of health and vitality. The same is true when he envies another's possessions. The desire for someone else's goods makes his ego power weak. It is the same in the tenth Commandment should a man look with envy at the manner in which another tries to increase his fortune rather than striving after love for the other, whereby he can expand his soul and allow his ego strength to flourish. Only when we have understood the special power of the Jehovah God and hold before us the manner of His revelation to Moses will we comprehend the special nature of the consciousness that should flow into the people. Underlying everything is the fact that it is not abstract laws but healthy and, in the widest sense, healing precepts for body, soul and spirit that are given. He who holds to these Commandments not in an abstract, but in a living way, affects the overall welfare and the entire progress of life. It was not possible at that time to present this without including regulations as to how the Commandments were to be followed. Since the other nations lived in an entirely different way from the Jewish people they did not require such laws with their special significance.

When our scholars today take the Ten Commandments, translate them by dictionary and compare them with the other laws, with the law of Hammurabi, for instance, it signifies that they have no comprehension of the impulse behind the Commandments. It is not the “Do not steal” or “Keep holy this or that holiday” that is important. What is important is the spirit that is streaming through these Ten Commandments and the way in which this spirit is connected with the spirit of this nation out of which Christianity was created. Thus, if one is to understand the Ten Commandments, one would have to feel and experience along with each individual in this nation what he felt as he attained independence. Today is hardly the time in which to feel so concretely what the people of that nation were able to experience. That is why everything in the dictionary is currently being used in translations of them except what the spirit calls for. One can, of course, always read that the people of Moses came from a Bedouin race, and that consequently they could not be given the same laws as a people engaged in agriculture. That is why—so conclude the scholars—the Ten Commandments had to be given later and were then antedated. If the Ten Commandments were what these gentlemen conclude them to be they would be right, but they happen not to understand them. Certainly, the Jews were a kind of Bedouin people, but these Commandments were given them so that they should become capable with their ego strength of moving toward a whole new age. That nations are built out of the spirit is best proved by this. There is hardly a stronger prejudice than that expressed by saying that during Moses's time the Jewish people were still a wandering Bedouin people, but what sense would it have made to give them the Ten Commandments? It made sense to give the Jewish people these laws so that the ego impulse could be impressed into them with the greatest might. They received them because by means of these Commandments their external life was to take on an entirely new form, because an entirely new life was being created, originating in the spirit.

The Ten Commandments have continued to have this effect, and those who understood them in early Christian times spoke of the Laws of Moses in this way. Therefore they came to know that through the Mystery of Golgotha the ego impulse became something different from what it was during the time of Moses. They told themselves that the ego impulse had become infused with the Ten Commandments, and that people became strong by following the Ten Commandments. Now something else is there. Now the form is there that is at the basis of the Mystery of Golgotha. Now the ego can gaze upon what lay hidden through the ages. It can see the greatest that it is capable of attaining—that that makes it powerful and strong through the example of Him who suffered at Golgotha, Who is the greatest archetype of developing man in the future. In this way the Christ took the place, for those who truly understood Christianity, of the impulses that served as a preparation in the Old Testament.

Thus we see that there is, in fact, a deeper interpretation of the Ten Commandments.

Gentlemen, the things we have discussed in the last few reflections are so important for understanding what I will say next that I want to at least briefly summarize these important things again.

We have seen that the human brain essentially consists of small star-shaped formations. But the rays of the stars are very wide. The extensions of these small entities intertwine and interweave, so that the brain is a kind of tissue, formed in the way I have told you.

Such little creatures, as they are in the brain, are also in the blood, with the only difference that the brain cells – as these little creatures are called – cannot live, only during the night, when sleeping, can they live a little. They cannot carry out this life. They cannot move because they are crammed together like sardines. But the blood corpuscles, the white blood corpuscles in the red blood there inside, they can move. They swim around in the whole blood, move their offshoots and only get something out of this life, die a little when the person sleeps. So sleep and wakefulness are connected with this activity or inactivity of the brain cells, and in fact of all the nerve cells and the cells that swim around as white blood cells in the blood, moving around in it.

Now I have also told you that it is precisely in an organ like the liver that one can observe how the human body changes in the course of a lifetime. Last time I told you that if, for example, the liver of an infant does not function properly – it is a kind of cognitive activity, the liver perceives and organizes digestion – so if the liver is disturbed in its perception, so that it actually perceives an incorrect digestion during infancy, this often only shows up in later life, I told you, in forty-five or fifty-year-old people. The human organism can withstand a lot. So even if the liver is already disturbed during infancy, it will endure until the age of forty-five or fifty. Then it shows internal hardening and liver diseases develop, which sometimes occur so late in humans and which are then a consequence of what was spoiled during infancy.

It is therefore best for the infant to be nourished with its mother's milk. Isn't it true that the child comes from the mother's body? So it can be understood that its entire organism, its entire body, is related to the mother. It therefore thrives best when it does not receive anything other than what comes from the mother's body, with which it is related.

However, it does happen that breast milk is not suitable due to its composition. Some human milk is bitter, some too salty. In such cases, it is best to switch to a different diet, provided by a different person.

Now the question may arise: Can't the child be fed on cow's milk right from the start? Well, it must be said that cow's milk is not very good as a food in the very earliest stages of infancy. But one need not think that a terrible sin is being committed against the human organism when one feeds the child with cow's milk that has been diluted in the appropriate way and so on. Because, of course, the milk of different creatures is different, but not so much so that one could not also introduce cow's milk instead of human milk for nutrition.

But if this nutrition is going on, it is going on in such a way that, if the child only drinks milk, nothing needs to be chewed. As a result, certain organs in the body are more active than they will be later when solid food has to be prepared. The milk is essentially so that, I might almost say, it is still alive when the child receives it. It is almost liquid life that the child absorbs.

Now you know that a very important thing for the human organism takes place in the intestines, an extraordinarily important thing. This extraordinarily important thing is that everything that enters the intestines through the stomach must be killed, and when it then enters the lymph vessels and blood through the intestinal walls, it must be revived. That is the most important thing to understand: that a person must first kill the food they take in and then revive it. The external life, taken up directly by the human being, is not usable in the human body. Man must kill everything he takes in through his own activity and then revive it. You just have to know that. Ordinary science does not know this, and therefore it does not know that man has the power of life within him. Just as he has muscles and bones and nerves within him, so he has an invigorating power, a life body within him.

The liver observes the entire digestive process, in which things are killed and then revived, in which what has been killed rises up inwardly in the new life and enters the blood, just as the eye observes external things. And just as in later life the eye can be affected by cataracts, that is, what used to be transparent becomes opaque, and hardens, so can the liver harden. And liver hardening is actually the same in the liver as cataracts are in the eye. Cataracts can also form in the liver. Then, at the end of life, a liver disease develops. At forty-five, fifty years of age, even later, liver disease develops. That is, the liver no longer looks at the inside of the person. It is really like this: with the eye you look at the outside world, with the ear you hear what sounds in the outside world, and with the liver you first look at your own digestion and what follows digestion. The liver is an inner sense organ. And only he who recognizes the liver as an inner sense organ understands what is going on inside a person. So you can compare the liver with the eye. In a sense, a person has a head inside his stomach. Only the head does not look outwards, but inwards. And that is why it is that a person works inside with an activity that he does not bring to consciousness.

But the child feels this activity. In the child it is quite different. The child still looks little to the outside world, and when it looks to the outside world, it does not know its way around. But all the more it looks inwardly in feeling. The child feels very precisely when there is something in the milk that does not belong there, that must be thrown out into the intestines so that it is discharged. And if something is wrong with the milk, the liver takes on the disease for the whole of later life.

Now, you can imagine that the eye, when it looks outwards, belongs to the brain. Simply looking at the outside world would not serve us as humans. We would stare at the outside world, stare all around, but we would not be able to think about the outside world. It would be just like a panorama, and we would sit in front of it with an empty head. We think with our brain, and think about what is outside in the world with our brain.

Yes, but, gentlemen, if the liver is a kind of inner eye that scans all the intestinal activity, then the liver must also have a kind of brain, just as the eye has the brain at its disposal. You see, the liver can indeed see everything that is going on in the stomach, how the entire chyme is mixed with pepsin in the stomach. When the chyme enters the intestine through the so-called pylorus of the stomach, the liver can then see how the chyme moves forward in the intestine, how it secretes more and more usable parts through the walls of the intestine, how the usable parts then pass into the lymph vessels and from these vessels then into the blood. But from there on, the liver can do nothing more. Just as little as the eye can think, so little can the liver do the further activity. There must come to the liver another organ, as to the eye the brain must come.

And just as you have the liver within you, which is constantly observing your digestive activity, so you also have a thinking activity within you, of which you are completely unaware in your ordinary life. This thinking activity – that is, you are not aware of the thinking activity, but you already know about the organ – this thinking activity is added to the liver's perception and comprehension activity just as the brain adds thinking to the eye's perception, and you have it, as strange as it may seem to you, through the kidneys, the renal system.

The kidney system, which otherwise only secretes urine for ordinary consciousness, is not at all such a base organ as one always looks at it, but the kidney, which otherwise just secretes the water, is the organ that belongs to the liver and performs an inner activity, an inner thinking. The kidneys are also connected with the other thinking in the brain, so that if the brain activity is not in order, the activity of the kidneys is also not in order. Let us suppose that we begin to cause the brain to work improperly in childhood. It does not work properly if, for example, we cause the child to study too much - I already hinted at this last time - to let it work with mere memory too much, if we make it learn too much by heart. The child needs to learn things by heart in order to develop a flexible brain, but if we make it learn too much by heart, then the brain has to exert itself so much that it carries out too much activity, which causes hardening in the brain. This causes brain hardening if we make the child learn too much by heart. But if hardening occurs in the brain, it is possible that the brain will not work properly throughout the whole life. It is just too hard.

But the brain is connected to the kidneys. And because the brain is connected to the kidneys, the kidneys no longer work properly either. A person can endure a lot; it only shows up later: the whole body no longer works properly, the kidneys no longer work properly either, and you find sugar in the urine that should actually be processed. But the body has become too weak to use the sugar because the brain is not working properly. It leaves the sugar in the urine. The body is not in order, the person suffers from diabetes.

You see, I want to make this very clear to you, that something depends on the mental activity, for example, on how much learning by heart there is, and that is how the person turns out later. Have you not heard that diabetes is particularly common among rich people? They can take extraordinary care of their children, materially and physically, but they do not know that they should also take care of a proper school teacher who does not make the child learn so much by rote. They think: Well, the state takes care of that, everything is fine, there is no need to worry about it. The child learns too much by rote, and later becomes a diabetic! You cannot make a person healthy through material education alone, through what you teach a person through food. You have to take into account what is in the soul. And you see, you gradually begin to feel that the soul is something important, that the body is not the only thing about a person, because the body can be ruined by the soul. No matter how well we eat as children and no matter how strong we are after eating the food that chemists study in the laboratory, if the soul is not in order, if the soul is not taken into account, the human organism will still break down. Through a true science, not today's purely material science, we gradually learn to tune into what is already present in a person before conception and what continues to be present after death, because we get to know what our soul is. Especially in such matters, we must take this into account.

But now think, where does it come from that people today do not want to know anything about what I have told you? Well, you can approach people with a so-called education today; it is “uneducated” to talk about the liver or even about the kidneys. It is something uneducated. Where does it come from that it is something “uneducated”?

You see, the ancient Jews in Hebrew antiquity – and after all, our Old Testament comes from the Jews – the ancient Jews did not yet regard speaking of the kidney as something so terribly uneducated. For example, the Jews did not say that when a person had tormenting dreams at night – you can read that in the Old Testament; today's Jews are educated enough not to repeat what is in the Old Testament when they are in decent company, but it is in the Old Testament – they did not say that when a person had evil dreams at night: My soul is tormented. Yes, gentlemen, it is easy to say that if you have no conception of the soul; then “soul” is just a word – it means nothing. But the Old Testament, speaking from the wisdom that humanity once had, said when someone had bad dreams at night: “Your kidneys are troubling you.” What was already known in the Old Testament is now being rediscovered through more recent anthroposophical research: kidney activity is not working properly if you have bad dreams.

Then came the Middle Ages, and in the Middle Ages, little by little, what is still valid today gradually emerged. For in the Middle Ages there was a tendency to praise everything that cannot be perceived, that is somehow outside the world. After all, the head is left free in the human being; everything else is covered up. One may only speak of that which is free. Of course, some ladies, especially in the educated world, walk around today leaving so much exposed that one is far from allowed to talk about what is exposed. But anyway, what is then inside the person has become something that, for a certain kind of Christianity in the Middle Ages — in England it was later called Puritanism — one is not allowed to talk about. One is not allowed to talk about it in terms of mere material sensuality. It is not spiritual, one must not speak of it. And so, little by little, they lost their whole spirit. Of course, if one speaks only of the spirit where the head is, one cannot grasp it so easily. But if one grasps it where it is seated in the whole human body, one can grasp it well.

And you see, the kidneys are then what thinks in addition to the perceptive activity of the liver. The liver observes, the kidneys think; and they can think the activity of the heart and can think everything that the liver has not observed. The liver can still observe the entire digestive activity and how the digestive juices enter the blood. But then, when it begins to circulate in the blood, thought is needed. And that is done by the kidneys. So that man actually has something like a second man within him.

Now, gentlemen, you cannot possibly believe that the kidneys you cut out of dead bodies and then place on the dissecting table – or, if they are beef kidneys, you even eat it; you can easily look at it before you eat or cook it – but you will not believe that the piece of meat with all the properties that the anatomist is talking about, that piece of meat thinks! Of course it does not think, but what is inside the kidney of the soul thinks. That is why it is as I told you last time: The material that is in the kidney, for example, let's say in childhood, is completely replaced after seven or eight years. There is a different substance in it. Just as your fingernails are no longer the same after seven or eight years, but you have always cut off the front part, so everything that was in the kidney and liver has been replaced by you.

Yes, you have to ask: if the substance that was in the liver seven years ago is no longer there, and yet the liver can still become ill after decades due to what was neglected in it as an infant, then there is an activity that cannot be seen, because the substance does not reproduce. Life continues from infancy to the age of forty-five. It is not the material that can become diseased – it is excreted – but the invisible activity that is there and that goes on throughout a person's entire life is what continues. There you see how the human body is actually a complicated, an extremely complicated being.

Now I would like to tell you something else. I said: the ancient Jews still knew something about how kidney activity is involved in such dull, dark thinking, as dreams are at night. But at night it is the case that our ideas have gone; then one perceives what the kidneys are thinking. During the day, our heads are full of thoughts that come from outside. Just as when there is a strong light and a weak candlelight, you see the strong light, and the weak candlelight disappears next to it. It is the same with a person when he is awake: his head is full of ideas that come from the outside world, and what is going on down there in the kidneys is just the small light; he does not perceive it. When the head stops thinking, then it still perceives as dreams what the kidneys think and what the liver looks at internally. That is why dreams look the way you sometimes see them.

Imagine there is something wrong with the intestines; the liver sees that. During the day you don't pay attention to it because there are stronger ideas. But at night when falling asleep or waking up, you notice how the liver perceives the intestinal disorder. But the liver is not as smart and neither are the kidneys as smart as the human mind. Because they are not so clever, they cannot immediately say: “These are the intestines that I see.” They create an image out of it, and the person dreams instead of seeing reality. If the liver saw reality, it would see the intestines burning. But it does not see reality, it creates an image out of it. It sees flickering snakes. When a person dreams of flickering snakes, which he does very often, then the liver is looking at the intestines, and that is why they appear to it as snakes. Sometimes the head is just like the liver and the kidneys. If a person sees something, for example, a bent piece of wood nearby and in an area where snakes could be, the head can even mistake this bent piece of wood for a snake when it is five steps away. Thus, the inner vision and thinking of the liver and kidneys considers the winding intestines to be snakes.

Sometimes you dream of a stove that is heated up. You wake up and have heart palpitations. What happened? Yes, the kidney thinks about the stronger heart palpitations, but it imagines it as if it were a stove that is heated up, and you dream of a boiling stove. That is what the kidney thinks about your heart activity.

So there inside the human stomach – although it is again 'not formed', to speak of it – sits a soul being. The soul is a little mouse that slips into the human body somewhere and sits inside. Isn't it true that people used to do that? They thought: where is the seat of the soul? But you don't know anything about the soul if you ask where the soul is located. It is just as much in the 'ear lobe' as in the big toe, only the soul needs organs through which it thinks, imagines and creates images. And in such an activity, which you know very well, it does it through the head, and in the way I have described to you, where the inner being is looked at, it does it through the liver and kidneys. You can see the soul at work in the human body everywhere. And you have to see that.

This, however, requires a science that does not simply cut open dead human bodies, lay them on the dissecting table, cut out organs and look at them materially; it requires that one really makes one's whole inner soul life visible in thinking and in everything a little more active than the people who just look. Of course it is more comfortable to cut open human bodies, to cut out the liver and then write down what you find there. There is no need to exert much mental effort. That's what the eyes are for, and it only takes a little thought to cut the liver in all directions, make small pieces, put them under the microscope, and so on. It's an easy science. But almost all science today is an easy science. We have to activate our inner thinking much more, and above all we must not believe that from the moment we put the person on the dissecting table, cut out his organs and describe them, we can get to know the human being. Because we are just cutting out the liver of a fifty-year-old woman or man and, when we look at it, we don't know what has already happened in the infant. We need a whole science. That is precisely what a real science must strive for. That is the endeavor of anthroposophy, to have a real science. And this real science does not just lead to the physical, but, as I have shown you, to the soul and to the spiritual.

I told you last time that the blue blood vessels, that is, the veins in which the blood flows not as red blood but as blue blood, that is, blood containing carbon dioxide, enter the liver. This is not the case in any of the other organs. In this respect, the liver is a quite extraordinary organ. It takes up blue blood vessels and almost makes the blue blood disappear into itself (see illustration $. 70).

This is something extraordinarily significant and important. So when we imagine the liver, the usual red veins also go into the liver. The blue veins go out of the liver. But in addition, a special blue vein, the portal vein, which contains a lot of carbon dioxide, goes into the liver (see drawing on plate 4). Now, the liver absorbs this and does not let it out again, which then enters the liver as carbonic acid through this special blue blood.

Yes, that's right. When conventional science has cut out the liver, it sees this so-called portal vein, but doesn't think much more about it. But anyone who has been able to arrive at a real science does make comparisons.

Now there are still organs in the human body that have something very similar, and that is the eyes. With the eyes, something is very small, only gently hinted at, but nevertheless, it is also the case with the eye that not all blood, all blue blood, that goes into the eye, goes back again. Veins go in, red veins go in, blue ones go out. But not all the blue blood that enters the eye goes back again, but is distributed just as it is in the liver. Only, in the liver it is strong, in the eye it is very weak.

Isn't that proof that I can compare the liver with the eye? Of course, one can point out everything that is in the human organism. That is how one comes to the conclusion that the liver is an inner eye.

But the eye is directed outwards. It peers outwards and consumes the blue blood it receives in order to look outwards. The liver consumes it inwards. Therefore, it makes the blue blood disappear inside and uses it for something else. Only sometimes, you see, the eye also gets into the habit of using its blue veins a little. That is when a person becomes sad, when he cries; then the bitter-tasting tear fluid wells up in the eyes, in the lacrimal glands. This comes from the little bit of blue blood that remains in the eye. When this is particularly stimulated by sadness, the tears come out as a secretion.

But in the liver, this story is always present! The liver is always sad because the human organism, as it is in life on earth, can make you sad when you look at it from the inside, because it is predisposed to the highest, but it just doesn't look that great. The liver is always sad. That is why it always secretes a bitter substance, bile. What the eye does with tears, the liver does for the whole organism in the secretion of bile. Only – the tear flows outwards and the tears are gone as soon as they are out of the eye; but the bile throughout the human organism does not disappear, because the liver does not look outwards but inwards. Here, the function of looking back is reduced, and the secretion, which can be compared to the secretion of tears, comes to the fore.

Yes, but, gentlemen, if what I am telling you is really true, then it must show up even more clearly in another area. It must be shown that those beings on earth who live more in their inner life, who live more in their inner thinking activity, that the animals do not think less than man, that the animals think more - thus less in their heads than man, they have an imperfect brain. But then they must observe more the liver life and the kidney life, must look more inward with the liver and think more inwardly with the kidneys. This is also the case with animals. There is external proof of this. Our human eyes are so constructed that the blue blood that enters them is actually very little, so little that today's science does not even talk about it. It used to talk about it. But in the case of animals, which live more in their inner being, the eyes do not just look, but the eyes think as well.

If one could say that the eyes are a kind of liver, one could now say that in animals the eye is much more liver than in humans. In humans, the eye has become more perfect and less liver-like. This can be seen in the eye. In the animal, it can be clearly demonstrated that there is not only what is found in humans: a glassy, watery body, then the lens of the eye, again a glassy, watery body – but in certain animals, the blood vessels go into the eye and form such a body in the eye (see drawing). The blood vessels go right into this vitreous humor, forming a body inside it called the fan, the eye fan. In these animals, it is... (gap in the transcript). Why? Because in these animals, the eye is even more liver. And just as the portal vein goes into the liver, so this fan goes into the eye. That is why it is so in animals: When the animal looks at something, the eye is already thinking; in humans, it only looks, and it thinks with the brain. In animals, the brain is small and imperfect. It does not think so much with the brain, but thinks in the eye, and it can think in the eye because it has this sickle-shaped projection, so that it can use the used blood, the carbonic acid blood, in the eye.

I can tell you something that will not really surprise you. You will not assume that the vulture, high up in the air with its damn small brain, would succeed in making the very clever decision to fall down right where the lamb is sitting! If the vulture's brain were important, it could starve to death. But the vulture has a thinking process in his eye that is only a continuation of his kidney thinking, and so he makes his decision and shoots down and catches the lamb. The vulture does not do it by saying to himself: There is a lamb down there, now I have to get into position; now I will fall down just right in that line, I will come across the lamb. — A brain would make this consideration. If there were a man up there, he would think about it; he would just not be able to carry it out. But with the vulture, even the eye thinks. The soul is already in the eye. He is not even aware of this, but he still thinks.

You see, I told you, the old Jew, who understood his Old Testament, knew what it means: God has plagued you by your kidneys in the night. - With that he wanted to express the reality of what appears to the soul as mere dreams. God has tormented you through your kidneys in the night - so he said, because he knew: There is not only a person who looks out through his eyes into the outer world, but there is a person who thinks through his kidneys and looks through his liver into the inner self.

And the ancient Romans knew that too. They knew that there are actually two people: the one who looks out through his eyes, and then the other, who has his liver in his stomach and looks into his own interior. Now it is the case that, with the liver – you can see this from the distribution of the blue veins – if you want to use the expression, you have to say that it actually looks backwards. This is why a person is so unaware of their insides; just as you are unaware of what is behind you, the liver is not consciously aware of what it is actually looking at. The ancient Romans knew this. They just expressed it in such a way that it is not immediately obvious. They imagined: a person has a head at the front, and in the lower body he has another head; but this is only an indistinct head that looks backwards. And then they took the two heads and put them together, forming something like this (see drawing): a head with two faces, one looking backwards and the other forwards. You can still find such statues today if you go to Italy. They are called Janus heads.

You see, the travelers who have the money go through Italy with their Baedeker, also look at these Janus heads, look in the Baedeker – but there is nothing sensible in it. Because, isn't it true, you have to ask yourself: how did these old Roman guys come to develop such a head? They weren't actually so stupid as to believe that if you travel across the sea somewhere, you'll find people with two heads on the ground. But the traveler, who is not educated by his eyes, must imagine something like that when he sees that the Romans have developed a head with two faces, one facing backwards and one facing forwards.

Yes, well, the Romans knew something through a certain natural thinking that all of later humanity did not know, and we will come to that now, come to it independently. So that we can now know again that the Romans were not stupid, but were clever! Janus-head means January. Why did they set it at the beginning of the year? That is also a special secret.

Yes, gentlemen, once you have come so far as to realize that the soul works not only in the head but also in the liver and kidneys, then you can also observe how it differs throughout the year. In summer, the warm season, the liver works very little. The liver and kidneys enter into a kind of sleep-like state of soul, performing only their external bodily functions, because the human being is more dependent on the warmth of the outside world. It begins to be more inactive within. The entire digestive system is quieter in midsummer than in winter; but in winter, this digestive system begins to be very mental and emotional. And when the Christmas season comes, the New Year season, when January comes and begins, the liver and kidneys are most active in the soul.

The Romans knew this too. That is why they called the people with the two faces the January people. When you independently come back to what is actually there, you no longer need to stare at things, but can understand them again. Today, people only stare at them because today's science is no longer there. You see, anthroposophy is really not impractical. It can explain not only everything that is human, but even everything that is historical; for example, it can explain why the Romans made these Janus faces! Actually, I am not saying this out of vanity. In fact, if people are to understand the world, they need to consult an anthroposophist in the guidebook, otherwise they will actually go through the world half asleep, just gawking at everything and unable to reflect.

Yes, gentlemen, as you can see, we are really serious when we say that we have to start with the physical in order to reach the soul. Well, I will continue speaking about the soul next Saturday. Then you can also think about what questions you want to ask. But you will have seen that it is really no laughing matter how one wants to get from the physical to the soul, but that it is a very serious science.

It is already the case that the methods of observation, consideration and judgment that are otherwise customary today, according to the habits of thought that have developed over the last three to four centuries, cannot simply be applied to anthroposophical spiritual science. What is initially pointed to by intellectual concepts is actually only a kind of guideline in anthroposophy, to help us focus our observation of life and the world in the direction that will allow us to see reality, the full reality. Therefore, in the initial concepts of spiritual science, one has little more than a kind of scheme that draws attention to certain observation methods. These schemes are taken from the spiritual science that is to a certain extent complete, so that those who engage with spiritual science do indeed get something that may initially make sense to common sense, but which can only be fully understood when one brings what science and life otherwise give to these schemata.

One receives such a schema relatively early on when one begins to get to know anthroposophical spiritual science. And it is such a schema that guides us to look at the human being in such a way that we take the physical body, etheric body, astral body and I as the basis of this approach. In my book Theosophy, I immediately tried not to provide a mere scheme with these four elements of human nature, but to fill these abstract four concepts with a certain concrete content through the way they are presented there. So that to a certain extent - more can never be done - one realizes how justified it is to consider the human being according to these four categories.

But these things only come to life in a truly objective way when one enters into what is revealed in human life, in man's relationship to the world, and in the world in general, and then what the initially schematically defined concepts fill with a very specific content. From a certain point of view, we will try to do so again today.

We will start with what we call our self, insofar as we consciously experience this self, what this self actually represents. You know that this self as consciousness is interrupted in the course of life by all the states that occur between falling asleep and waking up. With the exception of dreaming, and actually to a certain extent even during dreaming, this sense of self is lost for the time between falling asleep and waking up. We can say: this sense of self is always kindled at the moment of waking up – whereby, of course, kindling is only an expression used in a figurative sense – and it fades away at the moment of falling asleep.

I have often presented this as a finding of soul observation. I made it particularly clear in a lecture I gave at the Philosophers' Congress in Bologna in 1911, where I tried to show how what is experienced as the self should not be separated from the whole range of sensory experiences. We must therefore say: the I is essentially bound – I am always speaking of experience – to the sense perceptions. Right? We are not considering the I as a reality now; on the contrary, we want to point to the I as a reality in the course of these three lectures, today, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. We now want to focus solely on what we call the I-experience in the realm of our lives.

You know how difficult it is to live in abstract ideas, in ideas that are not imbued with the content of sensory experiences. This goes so far that there are many philosophers who claim that such thinking, such imagining, that is free of sensuality, without any sensory perceptions being present at the same time, even if they are only sensory perceptions reflected from within, is not possible at all. But now, when we really observe our soul, it soon becomes clear that our inner experience is not exhausted by sensory perceptions, that we simply penetrate from sensory perceptions to what we call ideas. We only get the pure picture of the presentation when we look clearly at what arises from a complex of sense perceptions, which we have turned away from and which we still imagine afterwards, but now with the help of the same forces that otherwise serve us in remembering. Of course, it cannot be said that the content of the sense perceptions does not enter into these presentations. But the activity that can be observed in the human soul is different when we experience a sensory perception in connection with the outside world or when we merely imagine this sensory perception.

But this life of imagination leads us away to a great extent from what is actually the essence of our ego experience in sensory perception. We cannot say that we have a strong sense of self when we are merely imagining; on the contrary, when we are merely imagining, there is always the tendency for this sense of self to become obscured, which manifests itself in the transition to a dreamy state or even to a kind of drowsy state when we are merely imagining. We delve deeper into our inner being when we merely imagine than when we live in connection with the outer world through sense perception. In this regard, each individual must turn to self-observation. One can observe how there is a tendency to dampen the I when sense perception is dampened. We can then make progress if we link the experience of the senses to the idea of our I in our astral body.

So that we can say: just as life in sensory perception belongs together with the experience of the I, so the experience of the idea belongs together with the astral body. Above all, this damping of the ego is expressed – and this is actually the most significant thing to take into account if one wants to understand what I am actually explaining now – by the fact that, when we perceive with our senses, we have something quite individual. The complex of sensory perceptions that we are currently experiencing cannot be experienced exactly the same way by anyone else. It is something quite individual, and in this quite individual we have at the same time our I-experience. In so far as we ascend to the experience of thinking, we have at the same time the power to arrive at something more general, for example to form abstractions which can then be communicated in the same form to others, and which others can understand in the same way that we do. We ourselves can only understand the individual sensory perceptions that we have throughout our lives; but the images that we attach to them take on a form that is more general , that it can, as it were, be communicated to a larger number of people.

But this already testifies that the I attenuates as we move from sensory experience to imaginative experience. But at the same time we go deeper within ourselves; that is also an immediate experience. Now, as the images, or rather what takes place within us for their formation (which we will leave undetermined for today), as this continues to develop, the images become memories. Images actually initially disappear from our consciousness. From some unknown source – let us leave it undefined for today – facts arise, in the wake of which we can evoke the same ideas.

That is the only thing we can assert. If we stick to the facts, we cannot go along with those psychologists who say that the representations then go down into the subconscious, where they go for a walk without the consciousness knowing anything about it, and when one remembers, they come up again. That is not the fact of the matter. There is initially nothing to suggest that an idea that I formed three years ago continued to exist until today and went for a walk somewhere in the depths of the soul, only to come up again today when I remember it. Rather, the only thing that can be said, if one wants to speak precisely, is this: At that time I formed the ideas; those abilities that followed on from the formation of these ideas are capable, in their further development, of bringing these ideas consciously to the surface again today. That is the only fact. And if people were inclined to look at the facts everywhere, there would certainly be far fewer theories and hypotheses in the world than there are. For precisely with regard to what I am now explaining here, most people believe that what they have once formed as an idea lives somewhere in the indefinite and then comes walking back.

But we also know that the idea that one forms in connection with a sensory experience is precisely temporary, and that, even if this is sometimes concealed, an inner force must be developed that can be experienced when a past experience in the memory becomes an idea again. That which becomes the cause of a memory-image is seated deeper within us than the ordinary image linked to a sensory perception. It is a memory-image grounded in our organization. It is also connected with what we are as a temporal being. We know that images can be remembered in different ways, depending on how far back in time they lie. If we summarize all the facts that come into consideration, we have to say to ourselves: in any case, what has been experienced in a sensory perception has entered the stream of time in which we ourselves live. Certain sensations that we have while a memory emerges tell us how remembering is actually connected to our entire organization. We also know how, in the different stages of life, that is, in the succession of time in our life between birth and death, the power of remembering is greater or lesser.

If we follow all these facts, then we will be able to say that, just as the power of imagination lies in the astral body, the power of remembering lies in the etheric body. So that, if we summarize remembering in the word memory, we can say: Memory is as one with the etheric body as the life of imagination is with the astral body, as sense perception is with the I. In any case, what underlies the imagination is taken up in the course of time of our existence. Just as our growth and development between birth and death is contained in a certain stream of time, so what is experienced as memory, what is experienced as memory, is contained in this same stream and we feel the connection. Now, however, something is added to those things that I have discussed so far, and which can already be found by anyone with some subtle attention in faithful self-observation. That the I is connected with sense perception is a very obvious fact, and the one who does not admit it simply does not want to observe a very obvious fact. That the experience of imagination is connected with the astral body is something that can be discovered through ordinary observation. However, more subtle observation is required if one wants to examine the interconnection of the etheric body and memory. But even here one can still, I would say, manage scientifically, especially if one observes pathological cases, memory disorders and the like, and sees how they are connected with growth and nutritional disorders in particular. And we must consider the nutritional forces as lying in exactly the same direction as the growth forces or the reproductive forces. It is certainly possible to put together a series of observations that still show this connection between memory and the etheric body.

On the other hand, what I have to add now only arises from imaginative observation, and I would say that it can at best be sensed by ordinary observation. But when it has been found through imaginative observation, the whole context in which these things can be placed gives the healthy human mind complete assurance of the matter. We penetrate further and further into our own being, so to speak, starting from the outside and going inwards, if we start from sensory perception and the I, from mental experience and the astral body, from memory experience and the ether body, and then descend into the physical body.

In the physical body, we are indeed dealing with something that is still connected to memory, but not in the same way as the etheric body. To better understand what is present in imaginative observation and what I will characterize in a moment, we can take the result that is present in some pathological disturbances. The person then acquires certain inclinations, I might say tendencies, in their physical body; these do not have to go so far as to cause involuntary movements or spasms, but they could of course go so far as to cause death, but that actually belongs to a different field. When involuntary movements occur, I would like to say, of a more innocent kind, then the person who wants to deal with such things at all can already see that in a certain category of involuntary movements there are after-effects of experiences. If someone shows a tendency to do this or that habitually but involuntarily with his fingers, then one can always point out, if one has only enough examination records, how this or that complex of experiences leads precisely to these things. These must not be movements beyond a certain degree of involuntariness, but, I would say, semi-involuntary movements.

You see, it is the case that what has been experienced is too strongly imprinted in the physical body; it may still be imprinted in the etheric body, but not too strongly in the physical body. If it leaves too strong an impression on the physical body, then the physical body comes under the influence of the memory. It must not do so. Imagination shows us that what works in memory is still movement in the etheric body, is still, as it were, evolving movement in the etheric body. It accumulates in the physical body. It must not completely permeate the physical body; it must be repelled by the physical body.

If I wanted to draw a diagram, it would be like this: Let us assume that we have the physical body here (see drawing, red), we have the etheric body here (orange), we have the astral body here (green), and finally we have the I here (white). Now a sensory experience takes place. This sensory experience is first taken up into the I. An idea is attached to it by becoming rooted in the astral body; the power takes effect, which then makes remembrance possible by becoming rooted as a movement in the etheric body. But now it has to be stored. It must not go further, it must not penetrate the physical body completely, but must be stored here. In the physical body, an image arises, of course at first quite unconsciously, of what lives in the memory. The image is not at all similar to what the experience was, it is a metamorphosis; but an image arises. So that it must be said: just as the memory is connected with the etheric body, so an actual inner image is connected with the physical body. We always have an impregnation, an image, in our physical body when such a movement originates in the etheric body; of course, this image can only be reached through imaginative visualization. There you can see how the physical body actually becomes the carrier of all these images. You may say: But I cannot possibly have the image of a church tower in my physical body! I will first give you an idea of how you can indeed have the image of a church tower in your physical body by picturing the matter for you.

Suppose, for my sake, you have a face in front of you, and you let this face be reflected in some mirror that completely distorts the face (it is drawn). Let us assume that something terrible arises within, something terrible. Now I do not mean that from the external experience, say of a church tower, something terrible arises as an impregnation in the physical body, but in any case, of course, something unlike it must arise. Now think, if you get such a monster here from this beautiful forehead, it is caused by the curvature of the mirror. If you can take into account the curvature of the mirror, then you can reconstruct the face from the caricature in connection with the curvature of the mirror, even if you do not have this face in front of you right now. So, if you understand the nature of the caricaturing mirror through which you receive the caricature, you can reconstruct the beautiful face. So there is no need for something similar to a steeple or a drama to be present inside the person, something that one has experienced or the like, but what arises in connection with the nature of the whole person naturally makes it possible to reconstruct the thing in reconstruct the matter in the same way.

So no objection can be made from the fact that, of course, because the world is large and shaped differently from the human interior, the image cannot be there in the human interior. The image is there, and in a sense the image is the last thing in the human being, where the external experience arrives. The other, imagining, remembering, are transitional moments. What we experience in the outer world must not simply pass through us. We must be an insulator; we must hold it back, and in the end our physical body does that. Our astral body changes it, makes it pale in our imagination; our etheric body takes away all content and contains only the possibility of evoking it again. But what is actually produced in us is pictorially impressed upon us. We live with it. But we must not let it pass through us. Suppose we were to let the image pass right through; it would not be reflected back by the etheric body in an elastic way, so to speak; it would pass through the etheric body, pass through the physical body, and we would always fidget around in the world as the events command us to. It is not easy to describe more complicated things, but if, for example, I saw a person moving from right to left, I would immediately want to dance from left to right, to imitate everything I see. I would want to imitate in myself, in my form, everything that I experience externally. It first arrives in the astral body, which already has a paralyzing effect, then in the resiliently reflecting ether body, then especially in the physical body, which accumulates the whole thing. In this, there is an isolation of what I perceive from the outside. And in this way, what I experience in the outside world works in me.

From knowing that a person consists of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and an ego, we know a scheme; but what matters is that we then fill in the concrete results into this scheme, in this case sense perception, imagination, memory and then the very concrete image. This is what gives content to these schematic concepts. And one must arrive at such content more and more if one wants to advance to an understanding of what is reality in the world. One cannot, for example, say: Yes, one divides the human being into physical body, etheric body, astral body and I, as if there were boundaries! If you are a reasonable person, you do not initially claim that there are other boundaries than those that arise when you take the formation of images, the experience of memory, the experience of imagination and the experience of sensory perception. But you have to have an open mind about the differences between these four types of experience.

That is one way of approaching these things. But now let us approach the subject of human beings and their behavior in the world from a different direction. Suppose we go for a walk. When we walk around – I have already touched on this here in another context – we cannot, in our external observation, distinguish between our walking and the movement of an inanimate object. Whether I observe a stone in its trajectory from the outside, merely in terms of movement, or whether I observe a person running – if both have the same speed, then the same fact is present in the external image. If I disregard everything else and look only at the body in motion, then in the case of both the stone and the person, I am dealing with a change of location. I observe this change of place, this speed. And this is ultimately what we are aware of when we move in everyday life; for we must distinguish between the intention to carry out a movement and the actual movement. When I think about a movement, I can remain completely calm. I can think myself into motion, and if I have some imagination, I can visualize myself moving. The idea that I then have when I really move is no different from the imaginative idea that I have when I am still and just think about moving.

So we have to distinguish very carefully between thinking about our movements and our real movements. But these real movements, we also imagine them only externally, no differently than we imagine motionless objects. We see how we thereby obtain different distances from these or those objects. We perceive our movements quite externally; that is added. And when we speak of movements – I do not want to go into the question of whether this is a hypothetical idea or a more or less well-founded idea, that is a matter for another chapter – but when we have movements, we also have force.

So, first of all, I will stick to the usual facts: where there is movement, there is naturally the development of a certain force. So we can say: The moving human being unfolds a certain force. We cannot speak of more than force, and we must also identify this force that it unfolds with some object, even an inorganic one. So let us consider only the physical body, either as a whole or in its individual parts; in that it moves, it moves like any other inanimate object. So, when we imagine ourselves moving and look at the physical body, we can only speak of force here.

The situation is different when we begin to look inside the being. We must be clear about one thing: while we are moving, inner processes are taking place in us. Substances are being consumed. Something is happening that is connected with the forces of growth, nutrition and reproduction. These are forces that we cannot address in the same way as we address the forces that we perceive in the external movement of an inanimate body. When we observe a plant in its growth, we must be clear about what is present when the plant grows larger and larger – and the same applies to the growth forces of animals and humans – that the unfolding of forces is different from that which underlies it when we have a merely externally observable moving body, be it the externally observable moving of one's own body or a human body in general. What is present when growth processes take place – and I also call growth processes in the broader sense those that take place when we are in motion, for example – what takes place there, we must look for in the etheric, in the etheric body. What we observe in the external movement, in the relationship of the person who is in external movement to this external world, does not cause us to look at the etheric body. At the moment when we observe what is happening internally, we must look at the etheric body. And if we define the concept of growth as broadly as I have just done, we can say that the specific growth force, which also includes nutrition, the use of materials, and so on, this specific force now urges us to move up to the etheric body. We see this growth force in the plant world.

To show you that these things are not merely contrived but can at the same time be corroborated by spiritual scientific observations, I would like to expressly say that what we see in the growing or generally internally changing organism , namely in the plant organism, where it appears purely, is entirely due to the fact that the power which otherwise expresses itself only in external movement comes into a certain relationship with what may truly be called ether. I would also like to convey this to you figuratively.

You are familiar with the often-mentioned fact that a solid body in a liquid loses as much of its weight, receives a lift, as the weight of the displaced water body. Now, the forces that underlie the external movements of physical bodies are, in a sense, rigid. They have an inner rigidity, just as a solid body has a certain weight. When you put a solid object into water, it loses some of its weight. When you combine the forces that normally cause external movement with the forces of the ether, they lose their rigidity; they become internally mobile. Thus a force, which as the moving force of the inorganic is so great and cannot become greater if it is only an external moving force, loses its rigidity when it combines with the ether, it can expand or contract. And as such a force it is then active in growth, and in all internal processes.

This Archimedean principle can be expressed as follows: Every solid body loses in a liquid as much of its weight as is the weight of the displaced liquid body. Every force, so one can continue to say, loses, when it combines with the ether forces, of its rigidity, as much as the ether forces are of their suction forces, as the ether forces bring to it in suction forces. It becomes movement, and with that it becomes what it becomes active as, say, in the plant organism, but also remains active in the animal organism and in the human organism. If we now go further up from the etheric body to the astral body, thus in the outer view from the plant to the animal, what was initially an inwardly mobile force in the growth force is now free – as I have already described in the case of the forces that are released in the seventh year with the change of teeth – inwardly free, so that what is taking place is no longer bound to the forces of the physical body. What expresses itself as free forces are the instinctive forces in animals and in humans. So we penetrate up to the astral body and what is still force below is given to us as instinct. And if we penetrate up to the I, instinct becomes will.

I: sense perceptions will
Astral body: life of imagination instinct
Ether body: memory growth power
Physical body: image power

This relationship of the will to the instincts, which arises in an unbiased observation of ordinary mental life, is in turn suitable for a rational self-examination. From another side, we have filled what is here only a mere scheme with the content of experience.

We can say that when we look at the physical body, from the inside it presents itself to us as that which continually accumulates experiences and images; when viewed from the outside, it is an organization of forces. And it is also correctly observed in the physical body that it actually consists of an interaction of forces with images. If you imagine a painted picture, you would have to imagine it spatially, in such a way that it is not a rigid picture, but an inwardly moving picture, with forces at work at every point. Then you get something of what must be imagined in reality under the physical body.

If you imagine the growth forces from the inside and think of them as imbued on the other side of what underlies memory – but now not as mutually concealing ideas, but precisely as what underlies memory – so ether movements on the one hand, which swell up, accumulate through the inner processing of the absorbed nutrients, which accumulate through the movements of the human being, in conflict with what sinks down from all that has been perceived by the senses and imagination and then vibrates downwards in the ether body to preserve the memory, if you imagine this interaction of above and below, that is, of what vibrates downwards from the imagination and what comes up from below, from the process of nutrition, growth and eating, both interacting: then you get a vivid picture of the ether body. And again, if you think about everything you experience yourself when instincts are at work, where you can clearly understand how blood circulation, breathing, how the whole rhythmic system works works in the instincts, and how these instincts depend on our upbringing, on what we have absorbed: then you have the living interplay of the astral body. And if you finally imagine an interplay between the acts of will, there is kindled everything that you want with what the sense perceptions are, so you have a living picture of what lives into consciousness as the I.

But this is only a rough scheme. We have only had a very small sample of experiences, and they have to be fitted into a scheme. You first have to have the cupboard before you can put the objects in it. Not so, the ordinary psychologist or physiologist, who first observes these things. And if someone happens to have all kinds of linen and clothes but no cupboard, and just piles them up, well, then it will turn into chaos in the course of time! That is our present-day psychology and physiology. You really need a closet. Just as the person who makes the closet should know in a certain way how the closet needs to be organized so that you can really get in what you want to put in, so now what is being organized must what is being organized must still be inexplicit in a certain way, even though it can only be abstract – just as a cupboard is abstract when it is still empty, but not when it is full. If there is an empty cupboard somewhere, it is also inexplicable.

So you see, there are of course an awful lot of points of attack on anthroposophy, depending on where you start. But one can also, and I have tried this in my “Theosophy”, already let it be known that while one is obliged to set up the cabinet first, something concrete is already pressing to do so. But then one must have the patience to ascend to that which brings abundance into the scheme. And this is what must always be said to anthroposophists in particular: one should not create the impression in the world that everything has already been said when such abstract terms as physical body, ether body, astral body and I are used. If one merely says: 'The human being consists of a physical body, ether body, astral body and I', then one has said nothing at all except four words. For there is, of course, a great difference between saying this out of the fullness of knowledge, as a structure that can be used as a guide to build upon, and dogmatizing it and communicating it as dogmas.

That is why it makes such a repulsive impression when it is simply handed down: The human being consists of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and an ego. It all depends on how you say such things. You don't have to go as far as was once said in an anthroposophical lecture: “For the sake of simplicity, we divide the human being into seven parts.” The nonsense is already great if you believe that you can capture something real just by putting it into some kind of scheme. It is there to provide guidelines within which observations can be made.

After I have shown you how certain viable concepts, such as will, memory and so on, can be incorporated into the anthroposophical conceptual scheme, we will move on to a further consideration of the human being tomorrow.

Spiritual science must become an instrument of mutual understanding, whereby we learn to understand each other, as it were, across all of humanity and into the soul. And this learning to understand each other, even into the soul, must permeate us as an anthroposophical attitude, so to speak, and live in us, otherwise the occult truths that flow into humanity through spiritual science will not be easily understood by us either. In this respect, spiritual science can, because it is, so to speak, the key to understanding the innermost, bring about peace and harmony across the earth. How can it do that?

Let us illustrate this with a concrete example. Take, for example, the relationship between two people who have different religious beliefs across the earth, let us say Christianity and Buddhism. What we can say with reference to Christians and Buddhists, who provide us only with classical examples, we could of course also say for the world views of two people living side by side in Europe; for what applies on a large scale will also apply on a small scale through spiritual knowledge. If we take the Christian and the Buddhist as they are in the traditional orthodox creeds, how do they relate to each other? Well, in such a way that the Christian actually believes that the Buddhist can only be saved if he accepts Christianity in the form that he has. And so we see the missionary activities of Christians among Buddhists; they take their particular confession there. And the orthodox Buddhist behaves in a very similar way. Suppose both became anthroposophists. How would a Christian, as an anthroposophical Christian, relate to a Buddhist? Well, let us say that he hears what is one of the most important things in Buddhism and what, basically, is only properly understood by someone who lives within Buddhism itself. Today, there are two ways of learning about the content of the various religious beliefs: from people who study comparative religion and from those who learn about the content of the various religious beliefs in a spiritual-scientific way. If we consider those who practice comparative religion, we must say that they are extraordinarily hardworking and active people who endeavor to cultivate the scholarly comparison of different religious beliefs. But when they compare these religious beliefs, something very special comes to light; then what they are looking for, even if they do not admit it, is actually only the untruthfulness of the various religious beliefs. These people are looking for what is not true, what was accepted by the various religious beliefs in childlike times; that is, they are looking for untruth. The person who studies this as a spiritual scientist seeks the main core in the individual religious beliefs; he seeks what is contained in a single nuance, but still as a perceptional nuance, in this or that religious belief. He seeks, therefore, what is true in the individual religious beliefs, not what is false.

In this respect, things can go strangely. Isn't it true that no one who knows the facts will have anything but the greatest respect for Max Müller, perhaps the greatest scholar of comparative religion or the greatest authority on religious studies. He, too, did not give much more than what one might call: the untruth of the oriental creeds. But he believed that he was giving everything with it. And then H. P. Blavatsky appeared and spoke quite differently. She spoke in such a way that one saw in her: she knows the main core of the oriental creeds.

What did Max Müller say? His judgment is somewhat grotesque and shows that a scholar does not necessarily need to be well-versed in logic. He thought that people follow Blavatsky, who only gives them a completely false representation of oriental religions, while she does not take into account the true representation of them, which, for example, he, Max Müller, gives. And he used the following comparison: Yes, when people are walking down the street and see a real pig grunting, they are not particularly surprised, but when they see a person grunting like a pig, it causes a stir. He wanted to compare what is naturally given in the oriental religious systems, namely his kind of religious comparison, with the pig that grunts naturally – I am not making the comparison! - and wanted to compare what H. P. Blavatsky has given with a person who grunts like that. Well, I won't even talk about the tastelessness of the comparison; because it doesn't seem very logical to me: I would be a little surprised if I met a person who could grunt deceptively. But I would not, really not, use the other comparison of comparative religious studies with the said animal, and it is strange that Max Müller himself used it.

Spiritual science introduces us to the truth of different religions. Take a key point in Buddhism: the Buddhist knows, when he has understood the basic tenet of his faith, that there are bodhisattvas, and he knows that these bodhisattvas, once beginning as an individuality, undergo a more rapid development than the other human individualities and then ascend to the Buddha. Buddha is a general name for all those who, in a human, carnal incarnation, ascend from the bodhisattva to the Buddha. And one of those who are especially honored with the name Buddha is precisely the son of Shuddhodana: Gautama Buddha. And with regard to him, it must be recognized, as with every Buddha, that when he attained the dignity of Buddha at the age of twenty-nine, the incarnation in which this occurred was his last incarnation, and that he would not need to descend again to a carnal incarnation on earth. This is regarded as a truth by Buddhists. A comparative religion scholar would regard it as a childish notion. But the anthroposophist, who familiarizes himself with the secrets of religions in all fields, does not approach the Buddha in this way, but he knows that such a thing is a truth. And so, just like any devout Buddhist, the anthroposophist faces Buddhism and says: Yes, I know that there are such things as bodhisattvas who ascend to the Buddha, who do not need to reincarnate again. That is one of the sentences of your religious community that I recognize, just as you do, and by acknowledging it, I can look up to your Buddha with reverence, just as you do. That is to say, the anthroposophical Christian begins to fully understand what the Buddhist says, and he has the same feelings and perceptions with him, he shares them with him, and they understand each other from the one side at first.

Now let us take the opposite case, where the Buddhist has also become an anthroposophist and is learning to recognize what the Christian, who has raised himself above the narrow-mindedness of the confessional orthodox point of view, knows about Christianity. Let us assume that the Buddhist Buddhist hears what a Christian can say about the Christ Impulse itself. He hears that within Christianity, within Christian esotericism, it has been recognized that at one point in the course of evolution, a being called Lucifer approached man in his development; he then hears that as a result, this human being descended lower than would have been the case had there been no Luciferic influence. And he then hears that it is actually something that we look up to as if it were a matter for the gods when we consider the rebellion and revolt of Lucifer against the progressive powers of the gods. So we are looking into a matter for the gods. And then we hear from the Christian who really understands his Christianity that the settlement of this matter between the advancing gods and Lucifer had to become what we call the Mystery of Golgotha. And why?

Well, in its present form, death and everything associated with death has really come about through the influence of Lucifer. But death is something that can only be found in the physical world. There is no death in a supersensible world, insofar as supersensible worlds are accessible to man with his clairvoyant consciousness. Not even the group souls of animals die; they only transform. There is metamorphosis, but not what is called death. The disintegration, the falling apart of a part of a particular entity, death, only exists in the physical world. Now, as a compensation, it had to be chosen - this can only be hinted at - by supernatural beings to suffer death in order to have a common cause with men, something that could be a compensation for the Luciferian rebellion. To conquer Lucifer, the Divine had to go through death; to do so, it had to descend to earth.

So what happened through the Mystery of Golgotha is a divine matter through which a compensation was created for the Lucifer matter. It is the only divine matter that has taken place before the eyes of men. This unique impulse, which cannot be imagined as anything other than the passing through of the Divine through death on the physical plane and the emanation of the Christ impulse into the spiritual atmosphere of the earth from that point on. This is now regarded by anyone who knows Christianity as the primary essence of that Christianity. In this way, Christianity, understood in a deeper sense, differs from all other religions in that the other religions see the main thing about their origin in some religious founder, in a personality; but that Christianity does not see the essential in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, but sees in this personal founder only the bearer of the Christ impulse, that Christianity sees the essential in a fact. This must be grasped with all possible intensity: in a fact that had to take place as such at some point in the evolution of the earth: in the passing through of the divine through death. That is the special truth of Christianity: that it is not an individuality but a fact, an event, an experience that is placed at the starting point. Of course, it does not matter if someone says to us, “Yes, look, Jesus of Nazareth still has all kinds of passions, all kinds of qualities that a, let us say, according to oriental views, somehow advanced man should no longer have.” That does not matter at all. That is not the point at all. Anyone who allows themselves to be misled by this has no understanding of Christianity, because Christianity is not about Jesus of Nazareth at all, but about the event of Golgotha, about that fact. Let other founders of religions have personal qualities that other peoples like better than those of Jesus of Nazareth! But those who become Buddhists or anthroposophists will realize that in Christianity it is the event of Golgotha that matters, and they will give the Christian back what he has given them. They will say: Just as you yourself admit that there are bodhisattvas who develop as individualities, ascend to the Buddha and then do not need to incarnate again, so we admit that once in the development of man such a passing through of the divine through death has occurred. You admit that there is a shade of truth in our religion, and we admit that there is a shade of truth in yours. — Thus both sides understand each other. They would not understand each other, for example, and discord would be created if Christians came who thought they had become Anthroposophists and said: I don't believe you that a Buddha can no longer appear in a physical body, but I assume that in a certain time the Buddha will appear again in a physical body. - That would be an impossibility for someone who recognizes the essence of Buddhism. It would be impossible to expect the Buddhist to believe that his Buddha could appear in the flesh again. The Buddhist would say: “You do not understand Buddhism.” And it is quite natural and should not be a matter for discussion that just as the person who claims that a Buddha will come again in the flesh does not know Buddhism, so the person who claims that a Christ can come flesh again, who therefore does not realize that it concerns here a unique life of a divine entity on Earth, precisely for the purpose of passing through death on the physical plane, and not something else. So it concerns mutual understanding across the whole Earth, to really grasp each other and thereby establish peace. Discord would be caused if one were to claim to a Buddhist that Buddha would reappear in the flesh; and discord would be caused if one were to claim that the Christ could come again in the flesh. Such things would have to take a deep revenge, for they are impossibilities in view of what really lives in the evolution of mankind. It would be grotesque if anyone were to claim that the Christ had to come again and that people should understand him better now than they did then and should prepare themselves better for him and not kill him: such a person would not know that the killing was crucial and that without it there would be no Christianity at all! The good will to understand really does lead to mutual understanding, and we see how spiritual science can be an instrument for seeking the main core in the individual religious denominations everywhere. If you really want to, you will find it. That is why it is the message of peace for the world. Spiritual science will have to create a cultural soul for the whole world, just as it has given rise to the material cultural body that now extends across the whole earth in industry and commerce. It is precisely by recognizing the diversity that has been given to humanity in the various religious beliefs, and then in turn relating to that which appears to us as the core of truth through spiritual science, that we achieve a kind of synthesis, a unification of the various world views in our time. This should be emphasized with regard to one point.

The aim of the anthroposophically oriented movement that we are pursuing here has never been to present the differences between religious denominations in such a way as to ascribe advantages to one religious denomination and disadvantages to the other. How often has it been said: The spiritual height that was there immediately after the Atlantic catastrophe in the culture of the ancient Indian Rishis has not been reached at all today. It has therefore not been reached by Christianity as it exists today either. We do not indicate advantages and disadvantages, but present the individual religions in their essence. So we also only present when we draw attention to other differences. If we follow the more oriental way of thinking, namely the one that has the most followers, the Buddhist one, you will see one thing: there the main interest of the people is taken up by what is called the passage through the various incarnations. They speak there of a bodhisattva; but a bodhisattva is not one who lives only from the year of birth to the year of death, but one who comes back again and again and then becomes a Buddha; and one speaks of bodhisattvas as if they appeared in various numbers within the development of humanity. One generalizes more, one grasps more the individualities that remain. But how has it been done so far in the Western view? The exact opposite was the case. When people spoke of Socrates, Plato, Raphael, Michelangelo, they were referring to personalities, and here the Western view presents the limited entities as the essential being. This had its good side, because thereby a special education was achieved to chisel out and work out the individual human personalities. This was essentially the case with those views that H. P. Blavatsky, for example, did not understand: the ancient Hebrew and the New Testament views.

One looked, for example, to Elijah. The occult researches about him have something surprising. I need only say that we notice the uniqueness of which makes him a forerunner of what should have happened through the Christ Impulse. He still understands the matter in such a way that the Divine Being is expressed in the National Ego; but he already points out that the most worthy means of recognition lies in the Ego itself. In this respect, Elijah can be seen as a kind of herald of Christianity, and none of the other prophets seems to me to be a herald in the same way as Elijah. There is still a hint of Jehovah in his words, but with him we find Jehovah as close to the human ego as possible. Then we turn our attention to another figure, again as an individual personality, to John the Baptist. We find how he precedes the Christ Impulse, how John the Baptist really presents himself as the one who characterizes the Christ Impulse in words. He says: Change your mind, no longer look to the times of ancient clairvoyance, but seek the Kingdoms of Heaven within your own humanity! — That which the Christ Impulse is in reality: John the Baptist characterizes it. He is a herald of Christianity in a most wonderful way. What lives in the heart of John the Baptist appears to us as a kind of further development, an inner spiritual further development, compared to what lived in Elijah.

We then turn to Raphael and look at him as seemingly a very different figure from John the Baptist; but by looking at Raphael - yes, we just need to immerse ourselves in him a little in a truly human way, and we find in him a herald of Christianity.

Take the following. We turn to a passage from the Acts of the Apostles, the passage where it says: “And Paul came to Athens, and the Athenians gathered around him, and Paul stood before them and said: You women and men of Athens, you have so far worshiped your gods in all kinds of signs; but the Godhead does not live in external signs in reality. You also have an altar, however, on which it says: “To the unknown God!” But I say to you that the unknown God is the one who cannot be indicated by external signs in his true form, but who underlies all that is alive and all that exists. He is the one who lived on earth and was resurrected, the one who, through resurrection, will lead man himself to resurrection.” And further on, the Acts of the Apostles tell us – and we can almost see Paul standing before the Athenians – how some Athenians believed and others did not. Among the former was Dionysius, the Areopagite. Then we look at the painting that hangs in the Camera della Signatura in Rome and was painted by Raphael, and which is called “The School of Athens”. Now let us assume – as was quite natural at the time –

Raphael had before him the passage from the Acts of the Apostles that we have just been discussing. It came to life in him. And now we look at the various Athenians, to whom he gave the faces, and except for the hand movement, we see stepping forward – stepping forward among the Athenians – a figure whom we recognize if we just consider Paul in the Acts of the Apostles.

And so we could go through the most diverse things with Raphael. If we focus on his various Madonnas, we must ask ourselves, however: Isn't one thing strange about Raphael, he is great when he paints the scenes that show the becoming, the growing in the emergence of Christianity, the little Jesus as something that contains the whole of Christianity becoming in the germ. But we do not find Raphael's painting of Judas betraying Christ, nor does he actually paint Christ carrying the cross, because his Christ carrying the cross seems to us to be forced, not at all like Raphael's other works. Instead, we find the Annunciation, the Ascension, that is, the things that point precisely to the emergence of Christianity.

And how did these things speak to people? Yes, they spoke most peculiarly. You know that one of Raphael's most magnificent works is in Dresden: the Sistine Madonna. People who think superficially might think that this is a work of art that was paraded through Germany like a victor. It made no impression on Goethe at all because he had heard how people generally thought about this work. As a young man, Goethe was not yet as sure in his judgment as he was in his old age and was still receptive to what people said. What did the museum officials in Dresden tell him? Well, that the child was ugly in its entirety, that the Madonna had been painted over by an amateur, that the little putti below had been added by some kind of handyman. That was still the attitude towards the Sistine Madonna when Goethe came to Dresden as a young man. But let us see how it is now. Let us consider what Raphael actually has become for people! Raphael worked in Rome at a time when there was much dispute about religious dogmas. The way in which Raphael paints the Christian mysteries is interdenominational. If we take the later great Italian painters, we see the religious mysteries painted in such a way that we recognize: this is the Christianity of the Latin race. Raphael paints in such a way that we are dealing with universal renderings of Christian mysteries that transcend nations. That is why we see how, in a short time, the Sistine Madonna finds its way into the souls even in Protestant areas. And if anthroposophy is to work for the understanding of the Christian mysteries, it will find its way best into those souls in which the feelings live that are won by images like the Sistine Madonna, into those souls that are prepared in this way. And when we say today that Christianity is only at the beginning of its development, that it will only receive its true form through the spiritual key that anthroposophy is able to give, then we know that Raphael stands as a herald for this Christianity.

And again we turn our gaze to yet another figure, taking only what is Western in outlook: we turn to the figure of the German poet Novalis. If we turn to Novalis, we find traces of the purest anthroposophical teaching in every detail; one need only unravel them, so to speak. Thus we see how Novalis is imbued with an anthroposophical Christianity.

We have thus presented four figures as personalities. That was the Western view. Now comes the spiritual-scientific deepening. Through this, people will already experience why, for example, Raphael feels that magnetic attraction to be incarnated into the earth on a Good Friday, in order to outwardly suggest through the birth on Good Friday that he has something to do with the Easter mystery. These things can only be hinted at today; in a few decades people will understand the things that are being asserted in this way, just as they understand scientific facts today: that it is the same individuality that lived in Elijah, John the Baptist, Raphael and Novalis. First they will recognize the personalities, then the individuality as it has passed through them. And now we understand the fourfold heraldry and the ascent in this fourfold heraldry. Now we stand by such a thing quite differently than we used to. Today we already know that the original form of the Stanze in Rome can no longer be seen; they have been spoiled, are no longer as they were painted by Raphael's hand, and only centuries need pass for these things to disappear. Even if the replicas will have a longer life, what created the individuality is dissolved into its atoms. But even if Raphael's physical works are pulverized by the passage of time, we know that the same individuality that created those works was present again in Novalis and brought about, in a different way, what was in him.

Thus we see how today, in addition to what the Western way of looking at things has achieved, the limited vision of personalities is added to individuality; how, in other words, the best that the Western world view has achieved is combined with the best that the Eastern way of looking at things has. This is how time progresses. As humanity progresses and realizes these things, the spiritual world will not remain silent, but will speak to humanity in even the most mundane of phenomena. And so, people will not only have to rise to the spiritual world through a kind of knowledge, but more and more this knowledge will be transformed into a kind of, one might say, experience. But for this to happen, a real spiritual movement is needed today. That such a movement is necessary is evident simply from the fact that people no longer judge even the simplest things in the right way.

Let us single out one detail today. A person who leads a healthy life goes through waking and sleeping in the course of twenty-four hours. We know that when he falls asleep, the physical and etheric bodies remain in bed and the astral and I go out. What then happens to what remains in bed? When the clairvoyant looks back from his astral body at what is happening in the etheric and physical bodies, he sees how a more vegetative life begins, a life that has actually been destroyed by daytime consciousness. Fatigue is compensated for; that is, the etheric body and the physical body now flourish and sprout, and the astral body and the I have been withdrawn. When they submerge again into the physical body and etheric body in the morning, they have to make them tired again; they graze, let wither what has sprouted during the night.

Everything that is in the microcosm is also present in the macrocosm. When we see in spring how the earth lets its greenery shoot out in the plants, how flowers and leaves sprout and how the plants prepare to bear fruit, what do we have there? The one who compares externally will say that the waking up in the morning can be compared to the waking up of nature in spring. But the opposite is true! We have to compare the blossoming in spring with falling asleep. We have to compare the emergence and growth of plants in spring with what happens in the etheric and physical body of a person when they fall asleep. Then, as summer approaches, it becomes more and more alive, as in the human physical and etheric bodies in the middle of the sleep period. And in autumn it becomes as if the human being descends into the physical and etheric body in the morning, in autumn, which causes withering of what has sprouted during spring and summer. One must correctly put together what happens outside and inside; one must not seek external allegories and compare spring with waking up and autumn with falling asleep, but the other way around.

So that we can say: That which is the spirit of the earth goes to sleep in spring and wakes up as earth spirits in autumn and winter. In winter, they are connected to the earth as earth spirits, in order to rise again in spring and summer to the heights of heaven, to the astral heights and to the other side of the earth. When spring comes again, they go back to sleep.

It does not contradict that the earth sleeps once on one half and the other time on the other half. Something similar is also the case with man in a certain respect. The person who follows the processes clairvoyantly sees that in spring it is the same as when a person falls asleep, where the individual spirit withdraws into the astral world; he sees that in spring what we call the earth spirits withdraw into the astral world, and vice versa. Yes, today's humanity – except for those sitting here, who would probably burst out laughing if one were to speak of the falling asleep and waking up of the earth spirits. One believes this humanity; it does everything to prove that it has no idea of the real processes of the world. But it was not always so, not at all, but it was different in the past! There was an old human clairvoyance, and that saw these facts correctly. It was seen that the earth spirits withdraw in spring to go up, so to speak, into cosmic heights. In autumn these spirits descend again. This was recognized in ancient times. It was natural to point out that in the middle of summer there is something like an absence of the actual earth spirit from the earth. Instead, there is an upsurge of the elemental nature spirits, as in a paroxysm, and a lagging behind of what is earthly-bodily on the earth, which thus emerges through the senses. If one wanted to make this clear, one could not do better than to move the Feast of St. John to this time, in order to point out how the sprouting nature spirits and the actual spirits of the earth, which are the I and the astral body of the earth, work.

But what about when winter approaches? Then the earth wakes up, and the astral body and the ego are connected with the earth. That is when we have to move the festivals that primarily relate to the spiritual part of the human being. That is where Christmas has been moved to. And then, when the spirit of the earth moves upwards, which is indicated by Easter, this movement away from the earth, this movement into the astral, was related to the relationship between the sun and the moon.

All these things that we are looking into connect us in a wonderful way with ancient clairvoyance, showing us how, in what has been handed down from ancient times, we have to see something that has to do with ancient human clairvoyance. It is quite natural for the materialistic world view to say that it has only the body to educate, that it says: It is inconvenient for us, especially with regard to cheque transactions and similar things, to have Easter early one year and late the next, and this must be remedied so that trade and industry can get away with it as comfortably as possible. Easter should always be celebrated on the first Sunday in April! — This is only appropriate for the materialistic age, which has no connection with the spiritual world. Just as it is appropriate for materialism to entertain such ideas, it is equally true that a spiritual movement must maintain the connection with humanity's ancient festivals. And we will not hold back in doing what is appropriate for a spiritual worldview, especially with regard to practical activity.

And this should be expressed in what is presented to you in our calendar, which of course appears ridiculous to the outside world, but we do not want to withhold it from them, even if they think we are fools because of it. It is expressed through this calendar that we must maintain the connection with ancient times. In the illustrations for the calendar, which were created by a dear and beloved member of our group, you have a renewal of that which has already become dry and barren: the imaginations that relate to the constellations of the sun and moon and the signs of the zodiac, renewed for the soul of today, given in such a way that you really benefit from it when you look at the sequence of weeks and days. If you ask how you can gain access to such things yourself, then take a look at the Soul Calendar: these meditations are the result of many years of occult research and experience. If you make them effective in the soul, you will see that what is forming in the soul is the connection between the effectiveness of spiritual

worlds in the succession of time. And what we call the Mystery of Golgotha, we have made outwardly, exoterically, so that it does not shock at first glance. We have drawn a circle around it, on which 1912/13 is written, but inwardly the calendar is calculated in such a way that the beginning is marked by the birth of human ego-consciousness, that is, with the Mystery of Golgotha. And besides, the years are counted from Easter to Easter, which is bound to prove rather inconvenient for commercial life, but is necessary for spiritual life.

Thus something is provided that has grown out of our way of thinking and that can be used by everyone, so that by using it they can take a step closer to the spiritual path than can be achieved by any other means.

It will become more and more apparent how the things we undertake within our anthroposophical movement are actually conceived from a unified basic principle and impulse, and how the individual does not owe his existence to a whim, but is placed in such a way that he really fits into our work as a whole as a single building block. For this, of course, it is necessary that more and more individual members also develop an understanding of this collaboration and that we move beyond special interests and special aspirations and focus more on what unites us. Of course, it is understandable that many individual members have special aspirations and special requests, that some would like to bring this or that into the anthroposophical movement. But especially here in this place, where truly selfless cooperation will be necessary if we really want to achieve what we have planned, it must be deeply, deeply rooted in our hearts that we will only have a beneficial effect if we do not assert our special aspirations, but rather what can be integrated into the whole, what is being striven for, as a building block. Otherwise it cannot become a whole. This is so extraordinarily important, and in this respect I believe that the realization of what should have happened there is the basis for studying how the anthroposophical movement should develop.

So today I have tried to present to you some of our anthroposophically oriented views, and we have thus created a kind of substitute for what should have been this time, but could not be because not all the official approvals have been obtained: namely, the laying of the foundation stone of our Johannesbau. But we hope that in the not too distant future we will be able to make up for this. For perhaps in doing so we will also lay the foundation stone for a revival of the anthroposophical movement as we understand it in the West. And if we succeed in doing the right thing in this field, then we will already have provided the proof that we, in all loyalty to the truth, without any inclination towards sensationalism, are making those occult efforts our own which present-day humanity needs for its further development.

The last lectures here were essentially devoted to an examination of the way in which we have to think about the present time consciousness. I then tried for the last time to reach back into earlier periods and to draw attention to the fact that what now lives in the souls has actually been preparing itself within Western civilization for a very long time. Today I would like to highlight some episodes from the immediate present that may draw your attention to how a spiritual life must necessarily arise out of the general consciousness of the times, simply out of the necessity inherent in the development of humanity. We can say: Wherever we observe man, whether in the West of present civilization, in the Middle or in the East, everywhere, on closer examination of the times, it can become clear to us how, without the onset of a spiritual impulse, things simply can no longer go on.

Today, we want to take a look at the last fifty years of Central European spiritual development, so as to prepare for tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, by considering the characteristics of the beginning and the end. I will do this symptomatically. I will characterize some things at the beginning and at the end of these last fifty years.

If we go back to the beginning of the 1870s, we find a wide range of spiritual phenomena that indicate the state of the human soul at the time. I will highlight a few of these spiritual phenomena. In 1872 and 1873, for example, there was a sensational novel that was closely related to the trends of the time. These things are actually forgotten for the younger people in our time, but the novel I mean is one that did indeed capture the imagination in an extraordinarily incisive way fifty years ago. I am talking about Paul Heyse's “Children of the World”. Paul Heyse, who was a famous writer of novellas at the time, wanted to use this novel to depict a number of personalities in their lives, all of whom were already imbued with a certain vague religiosity, but who had at the same time fallen away from some religious denomination or other. So, the children of God, whom, I might say, Paul Heyse saw in the traditional terminology of belonging to some denomination, he wanted to contrast with the children of the world, who belonged to no denomination, who, as they were said at the time, were without religious affiliation, but who nevertheless had a certain tendency towards embracing a religious belief. Now I do not want to talk too much about this novel itself, but I would like to draw attention to how such a work, which thus portrays people who are undenominational, made an impression in those days.

I have often mentioned my old friend and teacher Karl Julius Schröer before. He had the peculiarity of following intellectual phenomena as they made their impact in broader social life. Karl Julius Schröer characterized the effect of Paul Heyse's “Children of the World” by saying that it was extraordinarily strange how this novel was passed around fifty years ago, how it interested everyone, interested in how this novel actually gave people the idea that they had never thought about before: that they had no connection to any positive religious belief and that their religious search did not stop at any particular religious belief. And Schröer made the extraordinarily interesting comment at the time that people who had previously taken part in the religious practices of their church, who had thus gone along with their old religious practices, the customs of their church, out of habit, that such people said that this work actually expresses their innermost convictions. And then Schröer concludes with a sentence that is actually interesting: that in the face of such an apparition, religious disputes appear as an anachronism, as something that no longer fits into the present – he is referring to the present at the beginning of the 1970s – because people have already moved beyond them in their thinking. But as I said, although all this is true, we must still say: the people who are described there have lost all connection with any of the existing faiths, but there is a certain trait in them that allows them to find some kind of religiosity. They just can't find it. They go through the world without any religious affiliation, unable to find a connection to a spiritual world through religious feeling.

If we now look from such a phenomenon, which took place more within the literary-belletristic life, into the lecture halls, we find that it is roughly the same time in which the conviction of an extraordinary number of people within science was expressed by Du Bois-Reymond with the “Limits of Natural Knowledge”, which I have already mentioned frequently. In this famous lecture, which Du Bois-Reymond gave in 1872, it is stated that certain knowledge is only possible if one follows and penetrates the external phenomena of nature through experiment and observation, to a kind of mathematical-mechanical thinking about the structure of the world, to a kind of mechanism, an atomistic mechanism of the world. Science does not go beyond such a comprehension of the world, everything else must be left to faith. But if one had asked the people who spoke in this way at the beginning of the 1970s, such as Du Bois-Reymond in his “Grenzen des Naturerkennens” (The Limits of Natural Knowledge), how people should now seek their way into spiritual worlds in a religious way, no answer would have been forthcoming. There would only have been a comment, very similar to the comments made by the people in Paul Heyse's “Children of the World” who are described as having no religious affiliation.

Now it must be said that all those people who took part in the life that one calls educated, who absorbed something of scientific thought, who adopted something from other schools of thought, who lived in that time, were actually all more or less in a certain frame of mind. Whether they continued to practice their old religions or not depended essentially on old habits, on all kinds of prejudices and the like, and not on a strict and rigorous assertion of what the Zeitbewußtsein would have given to souls. In the last fifty years, people have actually lived in an indefinite, fickle relationship to the spiritual world. But we can also find something similar in other areas. A few years before the publication of Heyses “Children of the World” and Du Bois-Reymonds “Limits of Natural Knowledge”, the famous art writer Herman Grimm published “The Invincible Powers”, which is also a novel. In it, the prejudices and differences between social classes that dominate people in Western civilization are presented as invincible powers. And in an interesting way, this novel contrasts the differences in class and rank within Western civilization with what developed from certain, I would say unhistorical, habits in America as a new life, as a life that did not have to struggle in the same way with class differences and class prejudices. And it is interesting how Herman Grimm, at the end of the 1860s, that is, also about half a century ago, describes how, despite everything, European man, despite all his liberalism, despite all his humanism, does not have the strength to truly overcome class differences. These are insurmountable forces for him.

If you want to go deeper and ask yourself: Why are such things insurmountable forces for the European man? then one cannot get any other answer than this: because thinking, which in the case of the European has assumed a certain passive character, the thinking that I have characterized when, for example, I spoke about Richard Wahle, that thinking extends only to “events” and does not want to go into the primal factors, that therefore does not want to grasp forces but only wants to grasp appearances, because this thinking has dominated precisely the decisive people in the last fifty years. With such thinking, which has no power in itself, which is actually only a thinking, one might say, in powerless thought images, with such thinking one simply cannot overcome what has arisen in reality as class differences and class prejudices. What was needed was a thinking imbued with reality, a thinking permeated by reality. And this thinking permeated by reality, which once created the differences in social standing, which once created everything socially real, this dynamic thinking, in contrast to mere descriptive thinking, has actually been completely lost to people within European civilization over the last fifty years. It was absent from their science, which was therefore based only on observation and experiment; but it was also absent from their lives, so they continued to reproduce what had arisen from old habits based on old class prejudices. They did not think about it any further. Because if they had wanted to think about it, they would have needed active thinking. And when the proletarian class began to consider class differences, then this weak thinking, which contains no dynamism, was completely abandoned. It was said: these class differences do not come from forces that would have been within human thinking, but only from economic, physical forces. A conclusion was simply drawn.

There you have the situation at the starting point of our modern intellectual life fifty years ago. And now I want to present to you a work that was published recently and that is characteristic of our time, namely Werfel's “Mirror Man”. There you have something that has been born out of certain forces of our time, just as the “Children of the World” or the “Invincible Powers” were born out of the time of fifty years ago.

So what is the situation for people like Werfel today? In recent decades, this weak and anemic thinking has been at work. People have somehow sought something of a religious context, of a connection with a spiritual world, but nothing has emerged. But human nature cannot remain one-sided in the long run. It can do so in the development of world history for about fifty years, but then a reaction of human nature begins again. In a certain way, it wants to strive for something more powerful – if we stick with the last fifty years – than the powerless and insipid thinking was. Now, quite a few contemporary works already bear witness to this striving for a more powerful grasp of reality, but Werfel's 'Spiegelmensch' is particularly illustrative of this.

Werfel's “Mirror Man” compels us to speak about the present in this way: for long enough, people have sought their way in an indefinite, weak and impotent manner to something that makes man a full human being in the first place. Now an indefinite inner feeling asserts itself on the paths that have been taken in the last fifty years and which are actually not paths at all, but slippery passageways on which one continually slips. Nothing can really be achieved on these slippery passageways; one must get some iron into one's blood again. From such a striving for the times, something like this “mirror man” has emerged. Let us sketch with just a few lines what is depicted in this “mirror man”. It is not my intention to sin against the artistic by characterizing what is in this mirror man. But that is not the point at all; rather, we will see immediately afterwards that what I am about to say also touches on the artistic.

We see here a half-grown human being who has grown tired of the outer life as it can be led today. He takes leave of this outer life and now actually wants to become human. For he admits to himself that within the ordinary life, as we live it today, both in Asian and European and American civilization, one cannot really become human. You get up in the morning, have breakfast and do something to maintain yourself within the social order, you eat lunch or receive your guests and say things that perhaps need not be said, that ultimately do not aim to achieve much more than to make the lips move, that are not idle; you take your guests for a walk or whatever else you do today. You can't become a person in such company – I'm not quoting verbatim, I'm just characterizing. It is necessary to try a different path if you want to become a person. And so this “hero” – to use the old aesthetic style – tries to become a person by seeking admission to a monastery. But he is told that this is something extraordinarily difficult. I do not want to characterize the details, but only point out what is important to me today. He is therefore informed that it is something extraordinarily difficult and that, above all, he must be clear about the fact that he has to go through three stages of knowledge. In the first stage of knowledge, he would have to become clear about the human being's position in the world, insofar as this position is contained in the human ego itself. So this life in the ego and this striving to overcome the ego as the first level of knowledge. The second view of the world would consist in the fact that, after one begins to shed the ego in a certain sense, one no longer sees the world from one's prejudiced point of view, as one used to do before, when one had not even begun to shed the ego. And the third vision would be where man would truly penetrate into the world and its reality, not as seen by man living in his ego. He is told this. And he is admonished in the appropriate way not to want such an incarnation too urgently. He is made aware of the difficulties. But he does not back down.

So he is initiated in the appropriate way. The initiation takes place – I will mention only the essentials – by being led into solitude for the night, into a room where only a monk watches over him. And there, after he has initially abandoned himself to his thoughts, he falls into a brief sleep, from which he very soon believes he will wake up. And now he finds himself in the room whose one wall has a mirror on it. In this mirror he sees himself, and he is amazed at what is meant. It is meant that when one, after a collection of thoughts and after such a strong decision as this person has made, steps in front of his own reflection, one sees oneself in a different way. So it is actually pointed out that the person is only now beginning to see himself. The mirror image looks so similar to him, but yet again somewhat different. And by doing what must follow from such a surprising experience: by striking the mirror, believing that he has wounded himself, the mirror man steps out of the mirror towards him, that is, that of him which, in a certain respect, is himself and yet again not himself.

Now the person has arrived at the first step of knowledge. He must get used to not only going through the world as a person without ego consciousness, but also to having that which is himself and yet not completely himself, his mirror-person, accompany him. In the company of this mirror-man, who now tempts him to do all kinds of things in the outer world, lies a new encounter with world phenomena, with his own deeds, in that he finds himself precisely in the presence of his own ego.

Now, I do not want to go into the details. The person in question is actually lying in bed, but he goes through what he can go through according to his previous experiences of external world experiences and external actions. These are not always very nice. But how someone describes something like that depends on their own taste. You can see from the way the author describes things how he feels about such a case. People also experience the world according to their tastes. So we are led through the experiences of the world. Just as Mephisto in Faust has something of the driving force, this mirror man is now always the driving force, and he is led from event to event, being made to do many wrongs. Everything appears to him in a new light, because he has looked into the mirror and seen himself. He now sees one thing after another in the world. He sometimes sees things as they appear to him because he is an ego-person, and sometimes as they appear to him after he is already able to see his reflection. He becomes more and more familiar with the phenomena of the world. In the process, he comes out of his ego more and more. The mirror-man, who is rather slight at first, becomes fatter and fatter. This is a polar-parallel phenomenon, which is not uninteresting. And so this person now lives through the world by experiencing in a different way what he could have experienced earlier, now that he has seen his own self. And in the end he has become so entangled in the experiences of the world that he has to become his own judge, condemning himself to death, which is again very characteristic. He finds that he cannot really live in the world.

When he entered the monastery, he realized that it is impossible to live in today's society if you want to become a human being. This has increased to such an extent that now, when he has become his own judge, he condemns himself to death. And now he awakens. In a sense, he awakens from the execution of his own death sentence. He is again in the same room where he was. Now he looks at the mirror again. But by looking now, he notices, for example, that the mirror does not reflect a procession of monks passing by. Earlier, when he looked into the mirror, he saw himself and everything in front of the mirror. But now a procession of monks is passing by and is not reflected. He realizes from this that he is not standing in front of a mirror now, but that the mirror has become a window. He looks through it and sees out into the wide world, sees the landscape. He has attained the third vision. Now he sees the world, whereas at the beginning he saw only what the mirror gave. Because he had the mirror man at his side, he saw what he had seen before in a different way. But now, as it were, he sees through the surface of things - that is how it is presented - out into the free reality. It is, of course, implied that he now also sees out into the spiritual reality.

So we have a trilogy before us: the first is the mirror, the third is, let us say, the window. The mirror has become the window. So there we have the two polar opposite views of the world. At first, everyone sees in the other 'their own reflection', sees only what they already have within themselves in the other, where they are caught up in their own ego, and thus sees only their own reflection everywhere in their neighbor or in anything they see in nature. Finally, after breaking through the mirror, they no longer see the mirror, but through the surface of things into the spiritual. And in between

where the two merge into one another:

1. The mirror
2. One into the other
3. The window

Now, I would like to point out two characteristic features of this drama. The first is this: we see that there is a desire to depict a person in the process of rising to a certain religious connection with another world. That the first part, the mirror, is short, one can forgive, because it is very interesting to see how the person lives into an insight into his own ego, so that this ego becomes so concrete to him that it now accompanies him through his experiences in the world. The middle part is quite detailed, and a great many experiences are described. In order to find these appealing at all, one must have a taste, one could even say sometimes, distaste, for them. But as I said, everyone has to do it according to their own taste. In any case, this part, where one looks into the experiences of the world, is very long. But the third part is quite short, and what is seen out there is actually only hinted at, I would say symbolically, by looking through the window; nothing real comes into view. It is quite short, this third part. That is the one peculiarity I would like to emphasize. But the other peculiarity is this: one must recognize that here is the most beautiful expression of the striving to pour strength and energy into thinking. But one also sees that the modern man, of the kind that Werfel is, cannot do that at first. Why? Yes, it is very peculiar. When I had finished reading this drama – and I read with the greatest interest, I must say, because it is extremely significant for our present spiritual life as represented by individual personalities – I had to say the following to myself: the process is as follows: 1. Der Spiegel; 2. Eins ins andere; 3. Das Fenster. But one could also read the whole thing backwards from front to back. Of course, it would have to be rewritten, but one could also read the whole thing backwards from front to back. Because why? It is entirely possible to understand the matter in such a way that one says to oneself: the way a person initially relates to the world is how things appear to him. He is no different from the things. He has not awakened to his sense of self. He stands before the window, looks out into the world. Now we could say that the old monk, to whom he has now come and to whom he says that he can no longer bear it, that everything is always only inside, what he sees through the window, that he wants to find himself – that the old man now says to him: Yes, there are three views to go through. The first view shows us the world without our finding our ego in it. We lose ourselves to the world. The second view allows us to gain something of the ego, and then, gradually, a multitude of beings comes towards us from the world. The world is brought to life, spiritualized. We used to see it as spiritless, now the world is spiritualized. Everywhere, from every being, from plants, animals, clouds and so on, something spiritual comes towards us. Many spiritual beings come towards us in this second part. In the third part, we wake up. We step in front of the window, we look out. But we see everything anew, because now we see the real world for the first time. The window has been transformed into a mirror, the human being has come to himself. He unites all these mirror beings that have come to meet him in the world of plants, animals, clouds; they are in his only self, which has become cosmic to him. And now, by recognizing himself, he actually sees the cosmos for the first time.

You could easily describe the whole thing backwards, the last part of the trilogy first, then the middle part, then the part with which it started. That is extremely interesting, because it is precisely this that makes this drama particularly characteristic of the present. What is the peculiarity of intellectualism?

Yes, the peculiarity of intellectualism is this: you can start with the idea anywhere and stop anywhere, and you can assert one thing and you can assert another – I have emphasized this many times. In terms of thought, you can prove anything, in terms of thought you can refute anything. Intellectualism, which is nothing more than a system of vapid and feeble thoughts, allows you to start anywhere and go somewhere, but you will stop at a certain point. But you can also start at this latter point and go the other way.

Today, one can be a very clever person and a gross materialist, because materialism can be quite well proven in an intellectual way. And if one is purely intellectual, one can, in the way it happened after our anthroposophical congress in Vienna at a meeting, one can, from the standpoint of today's monism, quite intellectually lead the fight against the spirit. One can prove very well that materialism is right. But one can also want to be a spiritualist and prove this just as well. All these things, as long as one lives only in the intellectual, can be proved quite well, and they have the appearance of tremendous cogency, these intellectualistic discussions.

And so it is in our time. People do not suspect, as they become entangled in spiritualism, materialism, realism, idealism, that they are becoming entangled in the intellectual spirit. They rightly feel: this can be firmly proven. They are the creatures of intellectualism. Because it is indeed true that things can be proved, that is why it is so dismal when one is obliged today to seriously discuss something based on reality, and then 'free discussion' is set up. One person says this, another says that, a third says something else. Basically, if you are just a little bright, you can say: they are all right. Of course, they are all equally wrong. The whole point of the talk is, after all, that one or the other sees what a tremendous swindle of one's own self it is to live in intellectualism, because with intellectualism, everything can be easily proven. The only thing that matters is that one has immersed oneself long enough in some direction or current, in some sect or party or something else, then one can quite rightly say: Yes, that's all clear; the other one who claims the opposite is an idiot. - Certainly, but the other one can just as easily prove that the first one is an idiot and his own claim is correct. Today, with the configuration that intellectual life has attained, this is perfectly possible and is taken for granted. And so it is a matter of course that one can write such a piece today without arriving at a real spiritual insight. The fact that Werfel is not approached proves that nothing significant is seen through the window; the spiritual insight would only begin if something significant were seen through the window. But if you merely describe three steps, and then, after describing how he woke up and looked out, you do not describe what he sees, if you make so many concessions to the general consciousness that you can write such a “Mirror Man” and still say something reasonable in response to something like “Occult Science in Outline” or “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds” or the like: If one has to say that one would not be in one's right mind if one accepted it, and if one can only say: Yes, the person in question has arrived at the window, but I am wary of seeing what one sees when looking out through the window, then one is simply not yet ready to immerse oneself in the real spiritual life, then one is simply completely stuck in intellectualism.

That is why I was allowed to speak in this way. Of course, one would not have the right to give a philosophical critique of a work of art. But I did not give a philosophical critique at all; what I said is just as much an artistic view. Because it happens to you, you read a trilogy, read it with the utmost interest. Afterwards, when you're done, you suddenly feel upside down! It's an uncomfortable feeling, and to get back on your feet again, you would have to rewrite the whole story from back to front. It would take a very long time before you could finally work your way back to your feet, to your footing. Yes, it is quite true that one is also artistically cheated by becoming aware: in there is the spinning wheel of intellectualism, while the work of art must indeed make a beautiful impression. You cannot reverse that. Try to turn Goethe's “Faust” around, to start writing from the back to the front. You cannot! A work of art cannot be turned around. Here in this work you can, because the intellectualism predominates, because it has not penetrated to the real looking. Intellectualism has indeed received the vague, unconscious feeling that there must be juice and strength in the thoughts, but in reality neither juice nor strength has entered, there is nothing in it. There is only a pattern of a more real inner experience in it. And so we see just from something that is really full of spirit, which is extremely significant in terms of what our time can bring forth, where the path must go.

For fifty years it has been the case that people actually feel: they must go in the direction of something spiritual, but they would avoid the real path. So they take something out of all kinds of old traditions, like the three-part path and the like. But it is characteristic that today they take up this three-part path; you can find it in all kinds of books that describe some old atavistic clairvoyant paths.

As long as one refrains from accepting what one sees when looking through the window, this story of “mirror” and “one into the other” and “through the window” can very easily still be part of our spiritual life. It is easy to describe if one only has such general ideas about it. But as long as you stop at that, you still can't get out of intellectualism, which holds the people of the present day captive with a tremendous magic.

I have pointed out this intellectual element in our time in the most diverse forms. I have pointed out how one could get into all kinds of branches in the Theosophical Society, and there were great schemes, races and rounds, whole world systems and all kinds of things were built up in wonderfully intellectual forms - all intellectual! On the other hand, when it was a matter of characterizing the structure of the human being, there was a scheme: physical man: dense physical matter; etheric body: finer matter; astral body: even finer; kama manas: even finer; manas: even finer, ever finer and finer. Yes, but only from the intellectual point of view! This thinning out did not stop at all! But it is just purely intellectual. Just as you can always turn a wheel, you can, if you just stick to the intellectual, let matter become thinner and thinner. And so we had an intellectualized theosophy, and so we have here an intellectualized poetry that even borders on mysticism and that will certainly be admired by a great many of our contemporaries, and rightly so, because one can see from such poetry how the striving of our time is again turning towards something spiritual.

But my judgment is not an unartistic one. When I look at this mirror man who accompanies the hero throughout his entire evolutionary life, this mirror man is something completely different than Mephisto in relation to Faust. There is life in Faust. You know, I once showed how Mephisto is ultimately only the other side of Faust, like Wagner. “You resemble the spirit you comprehend, not me.” You resemble Wagner, you resemble Mephisto, and so on. But there is life in it. But it is not yet life when the self jumps out of the mirror, is initially frail and then becomes fatter and fatter as the person himself grows more and more out of life.

In short, what dominates from beginning to end is the inanimate, the abstract. The abstract can always be turned around. And because nowhere in the artistic work can one feel a full-blooded, intense contemplation, but everywhere one sees only thought-patterns blown up into images, one feels an unartistic quality. And it is strange that in the present day, this is often defended by saying: Anthroposophy, yes, that is only the pursuit of ideas, and that is not artistic. But in Anthroposophy, the aim is to gain insight, only one must really be prepared for this insight. One must look through a window and see something. But here, the actual artistic is called something that has not quite hatched, that is just about to hatch from the egg, but is content to remain in the egg. You know what I mean, that the chicken does not really hatch from the egg to live in the world. It is as if man wants to begin a journey of knowledge, but still avoids the spiritual world in all its concreteness and certainty. I don't want to say how the egg feels when the chicken just can't get out! But isn't it true that it is just the same with such intellectual products that don't really get out.

This is not to say anything against the value of such things. In the sense of the present I actually see something of the very first order in this mirror-man. But from a higher point of view it must be characterized and placed in the spiritual life, in the whole cultural life of the present, as I have tried to sketch it.

The waking state is, of course, what we know most directly, but it is not within this familiar realm that the riddles of existence are actually revealed. If the solution to the riddles of life could be found in the waking state, as it serves us in our ordinary lives and in ordinary science, then these riddles would not actually exist, because they would be constantly being revealed. Man would never come to ask the question. That man asks: What are the deeper reasons for life? That he may not arrive at an exact formulation of this question of the riddle of life, but that from the depths of his soul he has the longing to know something that is not answered by ordinary consciousness , testifies to the fact that something comes up from the depths of the human soul, that is, in a more or less unconscious way, something that belongs to the human being but that must first be sought if it is to come to clear consciousness. And this leads those who observe life less to speculate and develop all kinds of philosophies. Such philosophies then ultimately remain unsatisfactory. But anyone who looks at the phenomena of life with a certain impartiality must realize that in the other state, the state opposite to waking, the state of sleep, something is veiled, and that an understanding of sleep could lead to an understanding of life. We have often discussed such things; but these things must be returned to again and again from the most diverse points of view, for anthroposophy can only be grasped if one tries to grasp it from the most diverse sides.

Now, out of sleep, the dream life surges up first. The dream life proceeds in images. One can very soon notice, when one begins to observe this dream life, that the images do indeed point to something in life, in ordinary conscious life. Even if one can often say that things are dreamed that one has not experienced in this way, I would like to say that the pieces from which the dream is composed, the pieces of images, are of course nevertheless taken from ordinary consciousness. But the drama of the dream, the way in which the dream builds up its tensions, how it can evoke inner feelings of fear, inner feelings of joy, feelings of momentum, is something else. What the course of the dream images means goes even deeper into human nature, and one can see this if one considers the following.

You dream that you are walking along a path and come to a mountain. You enter a mountain cave. At first it is still dark. It gets darker. But an unknown urge causes you to keep going. Anxiety sets in. This all increases until you are finally in a state of fear, let's say, of falling into an inner abyss. You can awaken from this state of fear by continuing to experience this state of fear during awakening.

You can also dream that you are standing somewhere and see a person coming from afar. He comes closer and closer, but he has a terrible expression. And as he gets closer, you realize that he intends to attack you. Your anxiety grows. He comes ever closer. He may transform the initially harmless instrument that he showed you from afar – after all, dreams are transformers – into a terrible murder weapon. Your anxiety increases again to fear, and you now wake up with this fear, which in turn continues into the waking life of the day.

These are two very different images. One time it is a series of images that takes you into the interior of a mountain, the other time it is a series of images that is associated with an approaching enemy. The soul can go through the same thing, even though the two series of images are quite different. What the soul goes through is something quite different from what consciousness experiences when waking up. One could say that it is not the images that are important at all, but rather how the soul undergoes a certain inner drama: how the soul initially has an urge, or how something comes to the soul instead of the urge, but how this then transitions into anxiety, into fear, and then, in a sense, causes the person to shake themselves out of sleep and into ordinary consciousness. What is important is the increasing forces behind the dream, which are not perceived themselves, but which clothe themselves in images. And the two series of images that I have characterized could be multiplied many times over; the same soul content could clothe itself in ten, twenty, a hundred different images. We must therefore say: there is something - if I draw schematically - that takes place in the soul (blue, green. See drawing on page 46). But what takes place in the soul, the human being does not notice; he does not know it. What he does know are images. I draw them schematically on it (yellow). These images are then experienced by the person in his consciousness of the dream. But what matters is the escalation: weak anxiety, stronger anxiety, greatest fear. The dream images are more or less taken from life, because both the mountain and the mountain cave, everything is basically borrowed from life. The enemy that approaches is borrowed from life, his weapon is borrowed from life. The images take their content from life. But that is only the clothing. If, through what I have often characterized as the imaginative consciousness, you have the opportunity to go beyond this clothing, not to form images at all, but to remain here in the soul forces, which are anxiety, fear, and extreme fear, to remain with the imaginative consciousness, if you are able to form images within, then something completely different comes about.

Because when you are asleep, you are initially outside of your etheric body and physical body, with only your ego and your astral body. When you wake up, if you are in a normal state, you enter your etheric body very quickly – you pass through it very quickly – and then immediately enter your physical body. But if you are in some abnormal state and do not enter the physical body immediately, but enter the etheric body before entering the physical body, that is, enter the etheric body first, then these images from life are formed. For in ordinary consciousness, the human being has no perception in sleep itself, and only at the moment when he either penetrates into his body and passes through the etheric body does he receive images, or when he goes out of the physical body while falling asleep but still remains in the etheric body, then he has dream images again. So only in these intermediate states do such dream images form, which are taken from life.

But imaginative consciousness leads to the fact that one can live completely outside of the body in that which stands there as the forces of the soul behind the dream. And then one lives in another reality. Then one lives in the world in which man is from falling asleep to waking up. Man lives from falling asleep to waking up in a world in which he becomes unconscious. You can imagine it as if a person were to submerge in water and lose consciousness, and only regain it when the water carries him out and releases him again. The same thing that happens physically also happens to the soul when a person falls asleep. He submerges into the spiritual world. There he loses consciousness. He leaves his body with his soul and loses consciousness. When he wakes up, he reappears and regains consciousness. But reappearing means entering the body. And if, as I said, one does not immediately enter one's body, but still notices the transition in the etheric body, then the dream images arise. But if one does not get involved in this and need not get involved in getting such dream images, but if one gets images entirely outside of the physical body in the spiritual world itself, then not just any images come out, but images come out that you can find as a description of the evolution of the world in my “Occult Science”. And everything that is presented as I have presented it in my “Occult Science” has this origin, which I am now characterizing for you.

If you ask yourself: What is actually written in this “Occult Science”?, then you will say to yourself: Well, thoughts are in it. You can also think about it. I always emphasize that again, with common sense you can think about all of this. Thoughts are in it, but they are not ordinary thoughts. They are the thoughts that are creatively active in the world outside. Man can live in these thoughts when he stands beyond the threshold that leads into the spiritual world. Man can live in these thoughts that work on the world. It is the first thing he finds when he enters the supersensible world.

These are not dream images, because, as I have explained to you, dream images come about in a completely different way. Instead, they are experiences in the spiritual world. I would like to say: Imagine a person who is asleep. During sleep, the most comprehensive and intense processes take place in the soul. The person is unconscious during sleep and is therefore unaware of them. In the morning he enters his physical body, and immediately he is immersed in it. He uses his eyes, sees colors and light, he uses his ears, hears sounds, and so on, and thus he becomes conscious. But there is this intermediate state: he does not immediately enter the physical body, he enters the etheric body. Then he has a dream or dreams. But imagine if a person became conscious before he even entered his etheric body. He would become conscious while still in the outer ether that fills the whole world. Then he becomes aware of what is described in my “Geheimwissenschaft.”

If, for example, you became conscious in the middle of the night without returning to your physical body, so that the physical body emerged next to you and you saw it – because you could see it then – then you perceived this cosmology, then you perceived what I described in my Secret Science. I may call what I have described: the formative forces of the world, or even world thoughts.

This presents itself in such a way that one can say how one otherwise has individual thoughts in daily life: the earth came into being in such and such a way, used to have a moon existence, a sun existence, a Saturn existence; in short, everything that I have described in my “Occult Science”.

But this way of perceiving in the spiritual world is only one of three. When a person looks at his state of daytime consciousness, he knows that in this state of daytime consciousness he can distinguish between thinking, feeling and willing. But just as the day-consciousness has these three states, thinking, feeling and willing, so also the night-consciousness, which in the case of the ordinary person is unconsciousness, has three states. One does not always sleep in the same state from falling asleep to waking up, just as one does not always wake in the same state. One wakes by thinking, or also by feeling, or also by willing. One can wake in three states, and likewise one can sleep in three states. For the fact that someone who has imaginative consciousness sees the world-forming forces, the formative forces of the world, comes only from the fact that he has acquired a consciousness of them, a knowledge of them. But every person falls asleep in these formative forces of the world, in the thoughts of the world. Just as you submerge when you jump into the water, so when you fall asleep you initially submerge in the formative forces of the world.

But in addition to this life in the formative forces of the world, there are two other states for the sleeping state, just as there are feeling and willing in addition to thinking for waking. When we consider thinking, having thoughts, in sleep this corresponds to life in the formative forces of the world. This means that when you become aware of the lightest state of sleep, then in this lightest state of sleep you live in the formative forces of the world. It is as if you were swimming through the universe from one end to the other, moving through thoughts, but these are forces. This is the lightest sleep, where you move in the thought-forces of the world. But there is a deeper sleep, a sleep from which, if one does not do special soul exercises, one cannot bring anything into one's daily life through dreams. One can only bring something into one's daily life from the lightest sleep through dreams. But then the dreams, as I have described to you, are not decisive as images, because the same dream can take on the most diverse images. But even the lightest sleep can lead to dreams, that is, one can bring something into consciousness, one can at least sense that one has experienced something during sleep. But one can only sense from this lightest sleep that one has experienced something.

Only those who attain an inspired consciousness can know anything of the deeper sleep. Such a one then perceives more than just what I have described in my “Occult Science”. In this “Occult Science” I have, to be sure, described some of what comes through from the inspired consciousness, but let us just realize what can only be described through anthroposophy – what the transition is like in experience from the quiet sleep to the deeper sleep, to the sleep from which the person in ordinary life can bring back no dreams.

When sleep is so quiet that one can bring back dreams in ordinary life, then the person who can look into these worlds sees the surging, weaving thought images, the imaginations of the world that reveal the secrets of the world to him, which reveal to him which world the human being belongs to, except for the one in which he is with his consciousness from the moment he wakes up until he falls asleep. For what I have described in my “Occult Science” is not something that is merely painted on a surface, but is in perpetual motion, in perpetual activity. But from a certain moment on, images begin to appear in this world, which every person experiences in a quiet sleep – they just do not know about it. These images become clear, they increase their splendor, they reveal certain underlying essences. They subside again, these images. Once again, one has nothing in consciousness but a kind of feeling that the images have been dulled. Then the images appear again. But while the images become more active and then fade away, something occurs that can be called the harmony of the spheres, a kind of cosmic music occurs, but a cosmic music that does not merely live in melody and harmony, but that represents the deeds and actions of those beings that inhabit the spiritual world, the deeds of the angels, the archangels, the elemental forces, and so on.

In a sense, you can see the beings moving on the surging sea of images, directing the world from the spirit. It is the world perceived through inspiration, the second world. I can call them the appearances of spiritual world beings. And this world, this world of manifestation of the spiritual beings of the spiritual world, is just as much the second element of sleeping as feeling is the second element of waking. So that during sleep man not only enters into the world which the thoughts of the world present, but within these surging world thoughts the deeds of the beings of the spiritual world are revealed.

But now, in addition to these two states of sleep, there is a third one. Most of the time, people have no idea about this third state of sleep. They usually know that they have a light sleep, and they also know that dreams reveal themselves from this light sleep. That he has a dreamless sleep, he notices. But that there is a third kind of sleep, that is something that people become aware of at most when they feel when waking up: there was something very heavy in them during sleep, it is something that they must first overcome in the first hours when they are awake again. I am quite sure that a number of you are familiar with this state in the morning, when you know that you have not slept in the usual way, but that there was something within you that leaves you with a certain heaviness that you first have to overcome over a longer period of time when you are conscious in the morning. This points to a third kind of sleep, the content of which can only be grasped by intuitive consciousness. And this third kind of sleep has a great significance for the human being.

When a person is in the lightest sleep, he actually experiences much of what he otherwise goes through when awake. He still participates, albeit in a different way, in his breathing. He still participates, if not from the inside, then from the outside, in his blood circulation and in the other bodily processes. When a person is in the second type of sleep, they no longer participate in physical life, but one could say that they participate in a world that is common to their body and soul. Something still passes over from the body into the soul. Something passes over, as light passes into the plant when the plant develops in the light during the day. But when a person is in the third phase of sleep, there is something in him that has become, if I may say so, like a mineral. The salts in his body are particularly strongly deposited. There are strong salt deposits in the physical body during this third phase of sleep. But in return, the human being is connected with his soul to the mineral world within.

Imagine you could do the following experiment: you go to bed, first fall into the light sleep, from which dreams can come out for the ordinary consciousness, then you fall into the deeper sleep, from which no dreams come, but which still leaves the soul of the person in a connection with the physical body. But now you are sleeping in a way that there are strong salt deposits in your body. You cannot have a relationship in your soul to what is going on in your body. But if you had placed a rock crystal on the nightstand next to you, you could be completely inside the rock crystal with your soul. You would slip into the rock crystal and perceive it from within. You cannot do that in the first or second kind of sleep. In the first kind of sleep, the content of which can enter into dreams, if you dream of the rock crystal, you would still experience it as a kind of rock crystal. You would experience something shadowy, but still something rock-crystal-like. If you sank down into the second kind of sleep, you would no longer experience the rock crystal in such a limited way. If you were still able to dream — you usually cannot, but let us assume that you could — then you would experience that the rock crystal becomes indistinct and forms into a kind of sphere or ellipsoid and then withdraws again. But if you could dream, that is, if you could access intuition from the deep sleep, from the third kind of sleep, then you would experience the rock crystal in such a way that you feel as if you are running along these lines inside, then running towards the tip, then running back again: you then experience the rock crystal within. You inhabit it. And so for other minerals. And not only do you experience the form, you also experience the inner forces. In short, the third type of sleep is something that brings the human being completely out of his body and completely into the spiritual world. During this third type of sleep, the human being stands in the third kind of world, in the essence of the spiritual world itself. That is to say, you are surrounded by the essence of the angels, the archangels, all those beings that one otherwise perceives only externally, that is, only in their revelations. You see, if you apply your sense consciousness from waking to sleeping, you see, so to speak, the external revelations of the gods in nature. During sleep, you enter either into the world of images in the lightest sleep, or in the second type of sleep into the world of appearances, into the world of revelations, or else, when you come to the third type of sleep, into the inner being of the divine spiritual entities themselves.

Thus, just as man lives himself out during the day through thinking, feeling and willing, so he lives himself out during sleep, either by flowing into the thoughts of the world, or by the deeds of the divine spiritual beings being revealed to him out of the thoughts of the world, or but these entities themselves take up the human being, so that he, as it were, rests with his soul in them. Just as thinking or imagining is the brightest, clearest, most distinct for the day-consciousness, just as feeling is somewhat duller - because feeling is actually always a kind of dreaming - and how willing, the most dull state of consciousness during the day, is, in a sense, a sleeping, so we have three states of sleep: the sleeping state in which ordinary consciousness experiences dreams and higher consciousness, the seeing, clear-sighted consciousness experiences the thoughts of the world. We have the second kind of sleep, which remains unconscious even for ordinary consciousness, but which appears to the inspired consciousness in such a way that the deeds of the divine-spiritual entities reveal themselves everywhere. We have the third kind of sleep, which presents itself to the intuitive consciousness, in which it lives in the divine-spiritual entities themselves. As I said, this announces itself by, for example, submerging into the interior of minerals. But this third kind of sleep has a special meaning for man.

If you take the second kind of sleep first, then you will find, as I said, the world beings of the angels, the archangels and so on, in the appearing, disappearing, surging images, but you will also find yourself. You find yourself in it as a soul, not as you are now, but as you were before your birth or before conception. You get to know yourself, how you have lived between death and a new birth. That belongs to this second world. And every time we sleep without dreaming, we live in the same world in which we lived before we descended and took on a physical body. But if you were to enter the third stage of sleep and were able to wake up there – the intuitive consciousness wakes up – so if you imagine entering the third stage of sleep and waking up there: then you experience your destiny, your karma. Then you know why you have special abilities in this life, from the nature of your previous lives. Then you will know why you are brought together with these or those personalities in this life. Then you will get to know karma, then you will get to know your destiny. This destiny can only be recognized if one - I am now approaching the matter from a different point of view - is able to penetrate into the interior of minerals. If you are able to see a rock crystal not only from the outside but also from the inside – of course you must not chop it up, because then what you see would always be on the outside, naturally – but you must, as I have described, be inside it; if you can do that, if you can see the crystal from the inside, then you can also understand why you are struck by this or that blow of fate in this life. Take any crystal, take an ordinary salt cube.

You see it from the outside: that is how you see it with ordinary consciousness. In this state, your life remains opaque to you. If you can penetrate into it - the spatial size does not matter - if you can see it from the inside out, then you are in the world in which you can also understand your destiny. But you are in this world every night when you enter the third stage of sleep.

But this third stage of sleep still has something very special. You see, people before the Mystery of Golgotha – and we were all there ourselves in our earlier lives on earth – people in the development of time before the appearance of Christ on earth, they very often came into this third kind of sleep. But even before they sank, I might say, into this third kind of sleep, their angel appeared and brought them back up again. For that is the peculiar thing: one can always get oneself out of the first and second kinds of sleep as a human being, but not out of the third. In the third kind of sleep, a person would have had to die before the appearance of Christ on earth if he had not been brought out by angels or other entities. Since the appearance of the Christ, the power of the Christ, as I have often emphasized, is connected with the earth, and every time a person must awaken from this third kind of sleep, then the power of the Christ, which through the Mystery of Golgotha has united with the earth, must come to his aid. Without the power of the Christ, a person could no longer awaken from this third kind of sleep. He can slip into the crystals, but he cannot get out again without the power of the Christ. For when one looks behind the scenes of existence, one already realizes what significance this Christ impulse has for life on earth. I therefore emphasize it strongly: man could enter the crystals, but he could not get out again.

These things were felt particularly strongly wherever, after the Mystery of Golgotha, after the appearance of Christ on Earth, a strong, ancient, pagan consciousness still existed and yet the Christ Revelation was already there, as for example in Central European regions. There were people known to have died as a result of falling into a deep sleep. They would not have needed to die if the Christ had come to their aid.

So, for example, people felt - I do not want to say anything other than what people felt - with Charlemagne or with Frederick Barbarossa. Despite the fact that Frederick Barbarossa drowned in the physical world, that was how it was felt. But it was felt particularly clearly with Charlemagne. Where did this medieval consciousness believe such a soul went? Into the interior of crystals. That is why it was placed in mountains, where it was supposed to wait until the Christ came and awakened it from its deep sleep. This kind of myth formation is connected with this consciousness. The strong connection with the Christ impulse since the Mystery of Golgotha on Earth, that is what now causes the world of the Angeloi, the Archangeloi and so on, to get man out again, because otherwise he would not be able to be brought out again when he sinks into the third kind of sleep. This, then, is connected with the power of Christ, not with belief in the power of Christ; for whether one belongs to this or that religious denomination, what Christ did on earth is done in the objective sense, and what I am describing here as objective takes place for man quite independently of belief. We will discuss the significance of faith in the next few days. But what I am talking about now is an objective fact that has nothing to do with faith.

But how did this happen? It happened because a different fate has entered the world of the gods than was previously in it, a fate that I would characterize by saying: People here in the physical world are born and die. It is the peculiarity of the divine spiritual beings that belong to the higher hierarchies that they do not die and are not born, but merely transform. The Christ, who lived with the other divine spiritual beings until the time of the Mystery of Calvary, decided to experience death, to descend to Earth, to become a human being, to go through death within human nature, and then to regain consciousness after death through the resurrection.

This is a very significant event in the divine spiritual world, that a God has gone through death in order to be able to do all that we already know or that I have now described again. We can therefore say: there is the significant event in the history of the development of the earth that the God became man and thereby floods his power into such significant phenomena as those that I have now characterized for you. The God who became man has such power in earthly life that He can bring human souls out of the depths of the soul if they have descended there. So that when we speak of Christ we speak of a World Being, of whom we must say: He is the God who became man. What would be His counter-image? His counter-image would be the man who became God. It does not have to be an absolutely good God; but just as Christ descended into the human world and accepted death, that is, first accepted the human body in order to share in the fate of human beings, so we are led to the opposite pole, to the human being who frees himself from death, frees himself from the conditions of the human body and becomes a god within the earthly conditions. He would then cease to be a mortal man, but would walk on the earth, though not under the same conditions as an ordinary mortal man, who goes from birth to death and from death to a new birth, but such a man, having become a god, would be found as a god who had come to earth unlawfully. Just as Christ is a legitimately incarnate god, so we would have to look for his counter-image in the illegitimately god-become human, the no-longer-mortal-but-wandering-about human who has assumed the nature of god in an unlawful manner. And you are aware that just as the Christian tradition points to the rightly incarnated God, to Christ Jesus, so it points to Ahasver, to the man who has become God unlawfully, who has laid aside the mortality of the human nature. Thus we have in Ahasver the polar opposite of Christ Jesus. That is the deeper reason, the deeper meaning of the saga of Ahasver, the saga that speaks of something that must be spoken of because it is a reality: of a being that wanders the earth. This figure of Ahasver is there. He wanders the earth, he wanders from people to people. Among other things, he does not allow the Hebrew faith to die out. This figure is present, this Ahasver figure, the god who has become unlawful.

Man has every reason, if he wants to get to know real history, to turn his attention to such ingredients of this history, to see how the forces and beings play down from the supersensible worlds into the sensual world, how Christ came out of the supersensible worlds into the sensible world, but also how the sensible world in turn plays a role in the supersensible world, and how we also have in Ahasver a real, actual world power, a world being. There has always been an awareness of this wandering of Ahasver, who of course cannot be seen with physical eyes, but only under the condition of a certain clairvoyance. And the legends that point to him have a good, objective basis. One does not understand human life if one looks at it only externally, as described in the history books, if one does not look at the special forms it takes.

For it is true that just as Christ lives in our inner being since the Mystery of Golgotha, and can be perceived in our inner being when we first awaken our inner gaze, so when we look around us at human life, and since the seeing glance arises in us for most people, for those to whom the seeing glance arises, it is the case, then, as it happens unexpectedly to the person who crosses the threshold of consciousness, Ahasverus, the eternal Jew, will appear to us. Man will perhaps not always recognize him, he will mistake him for something else. But it is just as possible that the eternal Jew will appear to man as it is possible that the Christ will shine forth when man looks into his inner being.

These things belong to the secrets of the world which must needs be revealed in our time, when many secrets should be revealed.

Today our guests from further afield who have already arrived make up the majority of those present at this opening performance of eurythmy. There is no need for me to speak particularly about the nature of eurythmy, for our friends know about this from various writings which have appeared in print. But especially since we are gathering once more for an anthroposophical undertaking I should like to introduce this performance with a few words.

In the first instance eurythmy is that art which has originated entirely from the soil of Anthroposophy. Of course it has always been the case that every artistic activity which was to bring something new into civilization originated in super-sensible human endeavour. Whether you look at architecture, sculpture, painting, or the arts of music or poetry, you will always find that the impulses visible in the external course of human evolution are rooted in some way in occult, super-sensible ground, ground we may seek in connection with the Mysteries. Art can only flow into human evolution if it contains within it forces and impulses of a super-sensible kind. But the present-day view of art arises in the main from the entirely materialistic tendency in thinking which has seized hold of Europe and America since the fifteenth century. And though a certain kind of scientific knowledge can flourish in this materialism, anything genuinely artistic cannot. True art can only come forth out of spiritual life.

Therefore it is as a matter of course that a special art has arisen out of the spiritual life of the Anthroposophical Movement. It is necessary to understand that art must be born out of the super-sensible realm through the mediation of the human being. Considering the descending scale stretching from the super-sensible realm down to externally perceptible phenonema, you find the faculty of Intuition at the top, at the point where—if I may put it like this—the human being merges with the spirit. Inspiration has to do with the capacity of the human being to face the super-sensible on his own, hearing it and letting it reveal itself. And when he is able to link what he receives through Inspiration so intensely with his own being that he becomes capable of moulding it, then Imagination comes about.

In speech we have something which makes its appearance in an external picture, though it is an external picture which is extraordinarily similar to Inspiration. We might say that what we bear in our soul when we speak resembles Intuition; and what lies on our tongue, in our palate, comes out between our teeth and settles on our lips when we speak is the sense-perceptible image of Inspiration.

But where is the origin of what we push outwards from our inner soul life in speech? It originates in the mobile shape of our body, or I could say in our bodily structure in movement. Our ability to move our legs as well as our arms and hands and fingers is what gives us as little children our first opportunity to sense our relationship with the outside world. The first experience capable of entering into the consciousness of our soul is what we have in the physical movement of arms, hands and legs. The other movements are more connected with the human being. But the limbs which we stretch out into the space around us are what gives us a sense of the world. And when we stretch out our legs in a stride or a leap, or our arms to grasp something, or our fingers to feel something, then whatever we experience in doing this streams back to us. And as it streams back, it seizes hold of tongue, palate and larynx and becomes speech.

Thus in his organism the human being is through movement an expression of man as a whole. When you begin to understand this you sense that what in speech resembles Inspiration can descend into Imagination. We can call back something that is a gift to our limbs, to our tongue, our larynx and our palate and so on, we can recall it and let it stream back, asking: What kind of feelings, what kind of sensations stream outwards in our organism in order to create the sound Ah? We shall always discover that an Ah arises through something which expresses itself in one way or another in the air, through a particular movement of our organs of speech; or an Eh in optical axes crossing over, and so on. Then we shall be able to take what has streamed out in this way and become a sound or element of speech, and send it back into our whole being, into our human being of limbs, thus receiving in place of what causes speech to resemble Inspiration something else instead, something which can be seen and shaped and which therefore resembles Imagination.

So actually eurythmy came into existence when what works unconsciously in the human being to transform his capacity for movement into speech is subsequently recalled from speech and returned to the capacity for movement. Thus an element which belongs to Inspiration becomes an element belonging to Imagination.

Therefore an understanding of eurythmy is closely linked with discovering through eurythmy how Intuition, Inspiration and Imagination are related. Of course we can only show this in pictures, but the pictures speak clearly.

Consider, dear friends, a poem living in your soul. When you have entirely identified yourself inwardly with this poem and have taken it into yourself to such an extent and so strongly that you no longer need any words but have only feelings and can experience these feelings in your soul, then you are living in Intuition. Then let us assume that you recite or declaim the poem. You endeavour, in the vowel sounds, in the harmonies, in the rhythm, in the movement of the consonants, in tempo, beat and so on, to express in speech through recitation or declamation what lies in those feelings. What you experience when doing this is Inspiration. The element of Inspiration takes what lives purely in the soul, where it is localized in the nervous system, and pushes it down into larynx, palate and so on.

Finally let this sink down into your human limbs, so that in your own creation of form through movement you express what lies in speech; then, in the poem brought into eurythmy, you have the third element, Imagination.

In the picture of the descent of world evolution down to man you have that scale which human beings have to reascend, from Imagination through Inspiration to Intuition. In the poem transformed into eurythmy you have Imagination; in the recitation and declamation you have Inspiration as a picture; and in the entirely inward experience of the poem, in which there is no need to open your mouth because your experience is totally inward and you are utterly identified with it and have become one with it, in this you have Intuition.

In a poem transformed into eurythmy, experienced inwardly and recited, you have before you the three stages, albeit in an external picture. In eurythmy we have to do with an element of art which had from inner necessity to emerge out of the Anthroposophical Movement. What you have to do is bring into consciousness what it means to achieve knowledge of the ascent from Imagination to Inspiration, and to Intuition.

The shorthand report ends here. The eurythmy performance began after a few more words on the actual programme.

The Christmas Foundation Conference was opened on 24 December. It had been preceded during the course of the year by a number of general meetings of the Anthroposophical Society in Switzerland at which the problems needing an early solution were discussed. The discussions had been particularly lively during the conference of delegates from the Swiss branches of 8 December 1923,²⁰ and preparatory meetings had also taken place on 22 April and 10 June. A good many representatives of non-Swiss groups had been present as early on as the general meeting of the Verein des Goetheanum²¹ on 17 June. These non-Swiss representatives had arrived in large numbers for the international meeting of delegates from 20 to 22 July,²² which had been devoted to the problems of rebuilding the Goetheanum and establishing it on a firm financial footing.

Dr Steiner had agreed to be present at these consultations but was not prepared to take the chair. His opinion had been sought quite a number of times, and he had emphasized above all the need for a moral basis. Rudolf Steiner und die Zivilisations-aufgabe der Anthroposophie contains many of the contributions he gave on that occasion. In the minutes of the meeting of 22 April we find the following:

‘Let me add a few words, not as a statement but simply in the realm of feeling, to what has been said so far today.

‘What we would look forward to in the outcome of the recent meeting in Stuttgart,²³ and also of today's meeting—and I hope similar meetings in other countries will follow—is that they should take a definite positive course, so that something positive can genuinely emerge from the will of the meeting. Mention has been made of the way the Anthroposophical Society is organized. But you see it has to be said that what marks the Anthroposophical Society is the very fact that it is not organized in any way at all. Indeed, for the most part the membership has wanted to have nothing to do with any organizing whatever, even on a purely human level. This was manageable to a certain degree up to a particular moment. But in view of the conditions prevailing now it is impossible to carry on in this way. It is necessary now to bring about a situation in which at least the majority of the membership can represent the affairs of the Society in a positive way, or at least start by following them with interest.

‘The other day I was asked what I myself expect from this meeting. I had to point out that it is now necessary for the Anthroposophical Society to set itself a genuine task, so that it can take its place as something, with its own identity, that exists beside the Anthroposophical Movement; the Society as such must set itself a task. Until this task has emerged, the situation we have been speaking about today will never change. On the contrary, it will grow worse and worse. The organization of the opposition exists and is a reality. But for the majority of members the Anthroposophical Society is not a reality because it lacks a positive task which could arise out of a positive decision in the will. This was the reason for calling the meetings in Stuttgart and here. In Stuttgart the delegates meeting could not decide on a task for the Society. Instead it sought a way out in the suggestion that the membership of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany should be divided into two parts in the hope that out of the mutual relationship between these two Societies something might gradually develop of a kind that was not forthcoming from the delegates meeting. Today's meeting should have the great and beautiful aim of showing how the Anthroposophical Society can be set a positive and effective task which can also win the respect of those on the outside. Something great could come about today if those present would not merely sit back and listen to what individuals are putting forward so very well, as has happened so far, but if indeed out of the Society itself, out of the totality of the Society a common will could arise. If it does not, this meeting, too, will have run its course to no purpose and without result.

‘I beg you, my dear friends, not to break up today without a result. Come to the point of setting a task for the Anthroposophical Society which can win a certain degree of respect from other people.’

The Christmas Foundation Conference for the founding of the General Anthroposophical Society was opened at 10 o'clock on the morning of 24 December. Dr Steiner greeted those present and introduced the lecture by Herr Albert Steffen on the history and destiny of the Goetheanum.

• 20. Reports of these meetings will be included in GA 259. See Note 2.
• 21. See Rudolf Steiner Aufbaugedanken und Gesinnungsbildung, Dornach 1942. To be included in the Complete Works in the series ‘Zur Geschichte der anthroposophischen Bewegung und Gesellschaft’ (The History of the Anthroposophical Movement and Society).
• 22. Report to be included in GA 259. See Note 2.
• 23. See Rudolf Steiner Awakening to Community, op cit.