The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In response to remarks by Dr. Walter Johannes Stein, who had described the anthroposophical impulse as a world affair, Rudolf Steiner said [according to notes by Lilly Kolisko (in “Eugen Kolisko. Ein Lebensbild,” manuscript print for members, Gerabronn 1961, S. 87/88). There is no official shorthand transcript of these farewell words.]: “It is certainly beautiful and corresponds to a natural enthusiasm, which must arise from anthroposophy in everyone who loves it, when dear friends now close this meeting in an enthusiastic way,” and then continued:

But the enthusiasm that has entered the hearts of those gathered here today corresponds, especially today, as always in the anthroposophical movement, to a world impulse that should also be looked at concretely.

Just a few days ago, I was asked, by an Oriental, what the significance of it is in earthly karma that some peoples seem to be called to make others dependent on them. You understand that in today's world, which is by no means yet very objective, it is not exactly easy to give an answer to such a question, because such answers are really quite poorly understood. But I was able to answer that things sometimes appear differently on the inside than they seem on the outside, and that even if it is true that in world-historical development one people sometimes becomes physically dependent on another, the spiritual opposite is often hidden behind this physical dependence. The physically oppressed nation sometimes becomes the spiritual conqueror over the conqueror in a very mysterious way. This was only meant as a suggestive answer. It did not refer to Europe, at least not to continental Europe, but to wider circles of the earth.

But the thoughts that can be inspired by it do have something to do with the horizons in which Central European people live. You see, my dear friends, although much of what surrounds us today in such a depressing, terribly terrible way, and which will become even more terrible, does not yet belong to the most painful things in a deeper sense, nevertheless much of it is extraordinarily painful. It does not yet belong to the most painful. Something does belong to the most painful, which was already present in the “Appeal to the German People” at the time, even if only in a hinting way. It belongs to the most painful that in a strong sense, especially in Central Europe, the Central European past is in many ways being denied and forgotten in a spiritual sense in the present. But today the situation is such that this Central European will, despite the physical misery, is awaiting a kind of resurrection. What is in the background really arouses very significant feelings. Much of what seems to be buried in the intellectual life of Central Europe awaits a certain future. In the not too distant future, people all over the world will long for what is often denied here today, even by many people with an older, Central European mindset. People all over the world will long for Central European spirituality.

And here, my dear friends, I come to what I would still like to hint at with these few words at this point. You see, many bad things may be caused by the fact that some things are overlooked in the spiritual today, many things are overlooked. But one thing must not happen, for that would be the most terrible thing: that when the world cries out for the resurrection of Central European spiritual life, and it will do so in the relatively near future, for its own salvation, there should be no people in Central Europe who could themselves be the ones to occupy the important spiritual positions, if they cannot understand this call.

If one must say that the world outside of Central Europe is today waiting for a spirituality, then it would be very bad if one had to experience that Central European humanity does not wait for this spirituality. For that would be the greatest loss for the world. It would be one of the most terrible catastrophes the earth could experience if the call goes out to Central Europe — regardless of what the world may look like — and the call goes out: We need this spiritual life — and Europe would carelessly ignore this call because it cannot appreciate this Central European spiritual life. Let us remember today that it could perhaps be the mission of the Central European in the very near future to understand from the nature of Central European spirituality what the world will want to receive from Central Europe, for it would be terrible if there were then no one in Central Europe who would have an understanding of giving.

You will understand that only a short and in a sense superficial sketch of a pneumatosophy can be given in the four lectures at our disposal. Obviously, much can only be suggested, some of which, in fact, really calls for elaboration to confirm it. In some cases it will even be difficult to understand the context between the subject matter and what is here termed pneumatosophy. Yesterday, for example, we showed how one transcends the realm of merely psychic phenomena and enters regions that, in view of their whole nature, must be counted among the super-sensible worlds. We recognized this from the simple fact that the province of the soul in respect to such matters ends at a definite frontier, and that even shrewd psychologists, when studying and classifying the realm of the soul, are brought up short at that point.

Now, anthroposophists as such are familiar from another angle with concepts we encountered there, such as imagination, inspiration and intuition; so you will have to take for granted that all this, as set forth, for example, in my Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, can be understood and justified when one goes far enough in showing the threads that lead from the ordinary soul life—the life of visualizations, emotions and reasoning—to imagination, inspiration and intuition. It is natural that in making this transition we should focus our attention principally upon the psycho-spiritual elements that are present in our own soul and spirit, that we should, so to speak, first of all seek enlightenment concerning our own souls and spirits.

In the course of these lectures we pointed out that in Western civilization, right up to our own time, people have had difficulty in recognizing a fact that to us appears fundamental: that man's spirit passes through repeated earth lives, and at the end of the second lecture we cited one who was thoroughly representative in the struggle with such difficulties, Frohschammer. Wrestling with problems of the first rank, he laments, “What would be the consequence if man's permanent element, his spirit, were compelled to immerse itself again and again in a corporeality, in a sort of purgatory, a prison, a dungeon?” “Should one,” asks Frohschammer, “look upon everything connected with the relations of love and the contrast of sexes as a provision for imprisoning the human soul for the period between birth and death?” In view of such an honest objection to the doctrine of repeated earth lives, it behooves us to ask ourselves whether Frohschammer possibly established a certain standpoint in the case, and whether there might not perhaps be another as well.

What we must grant in Frohschammer's attitude is his frank enthusiasm for everything beautiful and glorious in the world, in the face of all that he cites to the contrary. The spiritual life of the Occident imbued Frohschammer with this enthusiasm for the beauty and grandeur of the external world. The doctrine of repeated earth lives seems to him to imply that a spiritual-eternal element is assumed by the human individuality, the human spirit—an element that might be well content and blissful in the spiritual world, but which is forced into and embodied in a world in no way commensurate with the lofty sublimity of the human spirit. Were that the meaning of reincarnation, anyone developing a justified enthusiasm for the beauty and grandeur of God's nature, for historical evolution, and for all the latter has brought forth in the way of exalted human passions and impulses, might well resent the imprisonment of the human soul, as did Frohschammer.

Is that really the only point of view available? It must be admitted that among the advocates of the doctrine of repeated earth lives there are to be found even today those who maintain that the spirit descends from exalted heights into earth life. Such people are really not dealing with matters such as spiritual science is capable of bringing to light out of the spiritual worlds, but merely with general, vague ideas about repeated earth lives. We could ask ourselves, “Might not the condition into which we are born be something beautiful and grand? Might we not recognize that man, as he appears in his physical form, is an image of God in the true Biblical sense?” That would suffice to enkindle our enthusiasm, and then we would admit that man had been transferred, not to a dungeon, but to a beautiful field of action, to a beautiful house.

Does our contentment, our feeling at home, really depend upon the house, upon its beauty and grandeur, or upon the concessions we must make? Does it depend upon the house at all? Possibly its very grandeur and beauty might be oppressive and prison-like for an underdeveloped man, chained to it without knowing what to do with it. He might say, “Yes, the house is beautiful, but it annoys me to be locked up in it.” That is what becomes evident through observation based on spiritual science, observation that ascends by way of imagination, inspiration, and intuition to a genuine cognition of what remains continuous in man throughout his various earth lives.

The first thing man has always experienced when arriving in the imaginative world from the world of visualizations—retrogressing, as it were, in the manner often described—is, to be sure, a world of images. All sorts of people have at all times entered this imaginative world. Considered purely in appearance, this imaginative world, which can open up before the soul either through careful concentration and meditation or through special aptitude, still presents at first the rudiments of the external world of the senses. One sees houses, animals, people; various events unroll in pictures; scenes and beings are there in a living world of images. On the other hand, this imaginative world stamps itself as pertaining, in a certain sense, to the super-sensible world through the fact that it is not within one's arbitrary power to decipher the symbolism of the images, that in determining this or that, one is subject to inner laws, that definite experiences express themselves in definite pictures.

Thus a man can be fairly sure that in any case he is developing certain levels of his soul, that in certain stages certain capacities grow, that he attains to living in certain regions of the super-sensible world, when, for example, a cup is offered him, or he is led through a stream, or he is baptized, and so forth. It can also happen that within this imaginative world, and these are less agreeable experiences, he encounters his various passions and impulses that appear to him symbolically either as huge, frightful animals, or as little squirming, wriggling ones. This plane of the spiritual world, attainable by man, can of course be described only approximately. On the whole, even when this world is highly distasteful and appears altogether hideous and the animals symbolizing his passions seem loathsome, this world appears in most cases quite agreeable. As a rule, people disregard the nature of what they experience and are gratified to be able to see at all in the spiritual world.

That is readily understandable because the spiritual world does not weigh heavily, even when it appears ugly. It is fundamentally a world of images, and only when a man lacks the requisite strength, so that it overwhelms him, crushes him, as it were, does it indeed destroy the health of the soul life. What we can call a feeling of moral responsibility, particularly toward the great world events, need not necessarily result from such seeing; the exact opposite can occur. People who have achieved great skill in penetrating this imaginative world may be morally quite casual, for instance, in the matter of a feeling for truth and falsehood. In this world there is strong temptation not to take truth pertaining to the physical world seriously, and that in a way is deplorable. One is prone to lose the ability to distinguish between what is objectively true and false.

To stand firmly in this imaginative world, to be able to learn its true meaning, is a matter of development. As a human being a man can be quite undeveloped and yet see into this imaginative world; he can see many vision-like phenomena of the higher world without rating at all high as a human being. It is all a matter of development. In the course of time development shows that one learns to distinguish certain imaginations exactly as one learns to differentiate in the physical world, only in the physical world this occurs so early in life that we take no account of it. In the physical world we learn to distinguish between an elephant and a tree frog, and as we learn to differentiate, the world begins to take shape. When a man first faces the imaginative world, it is as though he took the tree frog for the same sort of animal as the elephant.

How uniformly important this imaginative world seems! It is only through development that we learn the relative importance of different things, that something outwardly small may be perhaps more important than another thing outwardly bigger. These things of the imaginative world do not seem big or little to us by reason of what they are, but of what we see in them. Let us suppose a person to be haughty and arrogant. His quality of arrogance will appeal to him, and when he passes into the imaginative world this feeling, his delight in arrogance, is transferred to the size of the beings he sees there. Everything in the imaginative world that appears as arrogance, haughtiness, looks gigantic to him, while everything that to a humble man must seem great appears to him small, like the tiny tree frog. The appearance of this world depends entirely upon individual attributes. Perception of the correct relative sizes, the actual intensities and qualities, is a question of development.

The phenomena are entirely objective, but they can be completely distorted and seen in caricature. The essential thing is for man to pass through in a certain way what he himself is, in this higher cognition as well. He must learn to know himself in an imaginative way. That, indeed, is a precarious matter, because a perspective of what the imaginative world offers is wholly determined, rightly or wrongly, by the person's own qualities. What does that mean, that a man must learn to know himself through imaginative cognition? It means that through the agency of the images he meets in the imaginative world, he must see himself as an objective image. Just as in the physical world he has this bell before him as something objective, so he must meet himself in the imaginative world as the reality he is. This he can achieve in a normal way only by actually ascending through meditation from perception of the outer world to life in visualizations, that is, in certain symbolical visualizations that will free him from perception.

A man must live long and often enough in the pure inner life of visualizations to transmute it into something he passes through naturally. Then he will gradually notice something like a split in his personality. Often during the transition stages he will have to make an effort to prevent a certain condition from growing too strong. When this peculiar condition approaches, he faces a visualization in which he lives, in which he is. It seems to him that that is the way he is; that is he. Then occasionally he notices that the remainder of his being, the part of him not freed, becomes like an automaton. He notices a desire to express something automatically, to gesticulate. Unschooled people will sometimes catch themselves making faces, but that sort of thing should really not be allowed to go beyond an initial experiment. Here he must keep himself in hand. Like other objects, his own being must be kept without.

The possibility of attaining to this imagination as one should depends largely upon having previously developed certain psychic attributes, for in connection with this imaginative self-cognition all sorts of illusions arise. Everything in the way of human pride, in fact, every kind of human susceptibility to illusion, lies in ambush. You can see a great variety of things in the imaginative world. For example, you might mistake something that is really purely a matter of the feelings for yourself. It is a common phenomenon that people hold high opinions of themselves, and a person of this sort, in reflecting on the extraordinary creature he has become, is prone to conclude that he must have been something exalted, royal, or the like—Charlemagne, Napoleon, Marie Antoinette, or the reincarnation of some saint. Because such people tend to consider their individuality so important, the individuality they encounter occupying their body in the sense world, they can only assume that in a previous incarnation they were something exalted.

These matters are indeed serious, for they point to the fact that the manner in which a man's own being confronts him imaginatively depends entirely upon his soul. The point is that we alter our own beings if we really get completely away from ourselves, if we work with all our energy to learn to know all our attributes that we can observe in ordinary life, the attributes we believe to be dreadful and possibly objectionable to other people. We must take serious note of these attributes that we carry about with us but really should not possess. We are naturally not concerned here with saying agreeable things but with speaking the truth objectively. We can rest assured that, if we will only go to work objectively, self-criticism will prove to be a full-time task, and only in the last extremity should we engage, as is rather commonly done by humanity, in criticism or judgment of others. He who occupies his mind much with others and criticizes them freely, can be sure that he is far too little concerned with himself to enable him to clear away what must be cleared away if he is to see his own individuality in its true likeness. The reply to the oft-repeated query of why one does not progress, which by rights a man should answer himself, is obvious. He should refrain from all criticism of others except when outer necessity demands it. Above all, he should never forget what this “refrain” implies. It includes, for example, the occasional acceptance of something disagreeable or baneful. Certainly one must accept such things, but anyone who seriously believes in karma knows, naturally, that he brought all that on himself; karma placed the other man where he was in order that he might inflict the injury. A genuine personal reason for taking the world to task never really exists.

A great deal, then, is required to attain to this imagination, this self-cognition. Having achieved it, you will see why Frohschammer's picture of imprisonment is wrong. You come to realize that, while this incarnation in which you find yourself is indeed wonderfully beautiful and glorious, you yourself are not beautiful, you are not so constituted as to be able to take advantage of all that it offers. You say to yourself, “Here I stand in the world, at a certain point of time and space, surrounded by all that is grand and mighty. I have bodily organs to convey all this glorious and mighty magnificence. I have every reason to believe that we live in a paradise, even when ills befall us because it all depends merely upon whether the dome of the sky towers above us, the stars travel their paths, the Sun rises every morning and sets in the glow of evening.” For full satisfaction, however, we are given our outer world and our bodies with their organs, but great indeed is the difference between what we might derive from the world and what we actually do derive. Why do we extract so little from it? Because something is embodied in our corporeality that is diminutive compared with the world, something that allows us to perceive a trifling sector of it. Just compare what your eyes actually see in the world with what you might see!

When we have learned to know ourselves imaginatively, we realize that we are by no means as well adapted to this world as we would be if we could make proper use of our entire organism. We discover that what we are, in the light of imaginative cognition, must be opposed by something else in the world. Here we arrive at an interesting dilemma that must impress our souls if we would really learn to know the world. We find that in view of all that surrounds him in the world, man, as he learns to know himself in the imaginative world, cannot possibly consider himself great and mighty. It is not a case of coming from a higher world and being imprisoned in this earth body, but of being not at all adapted to it, not able to make use of it all. For this reason the imaginative world is opposed by another, a world that corrects what man does badly as a result of his inability to use his body. As opposed to what man is in the imaginative world we have the whole cultural evolution of man, from the beginning of the world to the end.

Why is this the case? We understand now that in the course of the cultural evolution of the earth man must become, through many incarnations, what he will be able to be in some one future incarnation, and for this reason he has the longing to keep returning. In each incarnation he must long for what is impossible of achievement in a single earth life. He must keep returning; then he can eventually become what it is possible to be in one incarnation. Precisely by acquiring the knowledge of and feeling for what he really should be in one life, but what he cannot be for inner—not outer—reasons, he knows what feeling must predominate in the soul when he passes through the portal of death. The predominating feeling must be a longing to return, in order to become, in the next life and in subsequent ones, what he could not become in one incarnation. This longing for ever new earth lives must be the most powerful force. These thoughts can only be touched upon, but they yield the strongest confirmation of reincarnation.

The accuracy of what I have stated is confirmed by something else as well. We can continue our efforts to reach the spiritual world. In a purely technical way we can achieve perception of the higher world by ignoring external perceptions and devoting ourselves to the life of visualizations. There is a still further possibility of giving a definite turn to meditation and concentration, namely, by endeavoring to let our memories unfold with complete inner faithfulness, with absolute inner conscientiousness. This need only be done for a few hours, but seriously. What is one, really, in life? Well, by means of logic and the theory of knowledge we learn that one is an ego, but in ordinary life one is a very doubtful ego. One is exactly what this ego is filled with at the moment. If you are playing cards, you are exactly what the impressions of the card game provide. Your consciousness is actually filled with the impressions of the card game, or whatever it may be. This is the ego to which consciousness can attain. It is attainable, but it is something highly variable, fluctuating.

We really find out what this ego has been by placing our memories before us. Instead of having them behind us, as is usual, we place them before us. That is an important proceeding. In ordinary life we are the result of our memories. Suppose that on a certain day you had experienced nothing but disagreeable things, horrible things. Just think how all that, concentrated, makes you feel in the evening—cross, unresponsive, carping, and so on. Then again, you may have had nothing but gratifying experiences, again concentrated; you are pleasant, smiling, perhaps cordial. So, at one time we are one thing, at another time another. We are exactly what we have behind us as experiences. When we bring all these as memories and place them before ourselves, at the same time going through them once more, we are then behind them. If you do that seriously—not in a routine, mechanical way, if you really relive it all, even for only a few hours, then something enters your soul, if it is sufficiently observing, which one might call a sort of fundamental tone that you yourself seem to be—a bitter, acid-bitter, fundamental tone. If you then go to work on yourself thoroughly, which again really depends on your development, that process will rarely show you to yourself as a sweet being. You will be able to find a bitter fundamental tone in yourself.

That is the truth, whether we like it or not. One who is capable of applying the requisite attention to himself will in this way gradually arrive at what may be called inspirational cognition of himself. The path leads through bitter experiences, but finally one seems like an instrument badly out of tune in the harmony of the spheres, causing a discord there. Through this further self-knowledge we realize still more clearly how little we are able to make of this glorious divine nature, whereas we could make so much of it if we were equal to it. If we repeat such an exercise many times, then, toward the end of our lives, but beginning as early as the thirty-fifth year, the peculiar character of the tone compels us to realize how much there is to improve upon what we were in life, and that we should long for reincarnation in order to be able to correct our shortcomings. That is one of the most important results of inspirational cognition. When a man learns to know his own fundamental tone, he discovers how ill adapted he is to external nature, and how little opportunity he has to find peace and inner harmony. Those who boggle at the idea of reincarnation only show how incapable they are of understanding themselves in their inadequacy, how egotistical they are in having no wish to develop further so beautiful a gift of God.

The second goal, then, that we can reach in our search for self-understanding is inspiration: the understanding of man as the spiritual tone world reveals him. There, when we have learned to know our own tone, so to speak, we discover how ill adapted we are to what lives in the great realm of nature. Another possible approach would start from the lapse into mere morality of what properly pertains to destiny, taking account of how little we are able to arrive at the peace and inner harmony for which we yearn. Those who have achieved the power of self-knowledge will often have occasion to realize how incapable they are of finding the inner calm and confidence that they are bound to crave. Recall this beautiful passage in Goethe's writings. He is seated on a mountain-top that voices the tranquility of earth's lovely nature. Beneath him lies what earth's eldest son, the granite rock, has spread before his eyes, and he senses the greatness of nature's laws—repose in contrast to delirious joy or frantic misery—the swinging pendulum, the inner tone in the nature of man.

When we study the laws of nature, study what still lives in space as natural laws, we come to see that just as the evolution of culture is the counterpart of imaginative man, so the world of natural laws—the true laws of nature out there in space—are the counterpart of inspired man.

Penetrating maya, the world of spiritual activity reveals itself in the laws of nature with that inner quiet consistency that, through our errors, has become restless discordance, and we recognize it as such when we have discovered the inspired man within us. Then this thought can come to us that when we really understand the essence of nature's laws we know, indeed, that the earth passes from one form to another, but that something in the laws of nature gives assurance that in it, man must find the compensation for what he himself ruins. That is because of the inherent verity of the laws of nature, and it applies even when man passes through his various incarnations, that is, when he receives into himself throughout a long cultural evolution what he must so receive because it lies potentially within the scope of one incarnation.

Thus we find a deep connection between all that is spread out in nature as spirit deeds manifested in natural laws, and what we discover within ourselves, through inspiration, to be our deeper self. That is why in all esotericism, in all mysticism, the inner peace and harmony of nature's laws are always held up as the ideal for man's inner law. It was by no means fortuitous that in the ancient Persian initiation one who had attained to the sixth stage was called a Sun hero. His inner law and sureness were such that he could no more deviate from the prescribed path than could the sun from its course through the universe. If the sun could depart from its course for one moment, untold revolutionary destruction would inevitably result in the cosmos. There is a further step that we can take on our way to self-comprehension. We could ascend to the grasp of man in intuitive cognition, but that would lead us into such exalted regions that it would be extraordinarily difficult to clarify the matter, or to designate that world that appears externally as the counterpart of intuitive man.

From all this you will see that the human being is, in fact, able to observe all that he has the possibility of being, that is, what he might be in that glorious exterior structure of the world in which he is “imprisoned,” surely not because this exterior structure is bad, but because he falls so far short of measuring up to it. This shows us that the important thing is a right evaluation of all world contexts, a proper understanding of the basis of that sort of spiritual cognition, including the nature of man, that is presented by anthroposophy. Most of the objections commonly raised arise out of principles that completely misjudge world contexts.

Finally, we must ask, “Why is it necessary for man to be externally embodied at all?” In order to illustrate still further what little remains to be said, I should like to remind you of Dr. Unger's lectures on the position of the ego and the “I am” in the whole inner life of man; also of what you can find on the subject in The Philosophy of Freedom and in Truth and Science. True, a little thought can show us that a significant being hides behind the ego or the “I am,” but what we experience we experience in our consciousness precisely as our ego-consciousness, our self-consciousness. This is interrupted, even when we fall asleep, and if we were able to keep on sleeping, never awaking, we might still have an ego but we could never be aware of it through our own agency. Our awareness of it depends upon the employment of our bodily organization, our corporeality, while awake. We can experience other things outside of our body, but our ego in the first instance only by confronting the outer world. For if man had never descended to earth in order to make use of a body, he would for all eternity have felt himself to be but a component of an angel, as the hand feels itself to be a member of the organism, and he would never have achieved self-consciousness. He might have become aware of any number of grandiose facts in the world, but never could he have arrived at ego-consciousness without being incarnated in a physical body. That is where he had to turn for his ego-consciousness.

You need only study sleep consciousness in order to see that the human being does not work together with his ego in sleep. Ego-consciousness presupposes imprisonment in a body, employment of the instruments of the senses and of the brain. Now, if during a single incarnation man is able only to a slight extent to make use of all that is given him in this incarnation, it should not seem surprising when clairvoyant consciousness tells us that a thorough search in the human ego, in so far as the latter manifests itself in its true form, discloses as its prime impulse, its predominant force, the longing for ever new earth lives, in order to fill and enrich this ego-consciousness more and more, to develop it to an ever higher state.

In so doing we would be echoing something in our theosophy that the theosophists of the eighteenth century so often maintained, something that can be helpful if expanded into pneumatosophy. How did eighteenth century theosophists like Ottinger, Völker, Bengel, and others express from their monotheistic standpoint the activity of spirit and of divine spirits, or of the Divine Spirit, as they called it? They said, “The bodily world, corporeality, is the goal of God's ways.” That is a lovely concept, “the goal of God's ways.” It means that by virtue of its inherent impulses, divinity passed through many spiritual worlds, then descended in order to arrive at a kind of goal from which it turns back to rise again. This goal is the shaping, the crystallizing, of the bodily, corporeal form. Were we to translate this utterance of the eighteenth century theosophists into more emotional phraseology, we could say, “Ardently longing for incarnation in a corporeality is the way the spirit reveals itself to us when we contemplate it in the higher regions, and it ceases to manifest itself in this longing for incarnation only after it has been embodied and has started back. The Divinity manifests itself as ardently desiring embodiment in the flesh, and not until the re-ascent to the spirit has commenced may this ardor abate.”

That wonderful utterance of the eighteenth century theosophists did more to illuminate and clarify the mysteries of man than much that was said in the philosophies of the nineteenth century, and theosophical activity and endeavor fell off completely in the first two thirds of the nineteenth century. In the eighteenth century genuine theosophy of the older kind was to be found in diverse localities but it lacked the knowledge of incarnation because Christian evolution retarded it in the Occident. Concerning divinity, those eighteenth century theosophists knew that “corporeality is the goal of God's ways.” They knew the goal of God's ways, but not that of man. They did not find it in the case of man, otherwise they would have understood from each incarnation, from the entire nature of man, that there must arise the longing for a new embodiment, until such time as everything that fits man to rise to new forms of existence has been extracted from the life on earth.

At the conclusion of these lectures on pneumatosophy I feel more than ever how sketchy and incomplete everything must be left, and what I said in connection with the first two cycles, Anthroposophy and Psychosophy, applies here as well. The intention has been to provide stimulating suggestions. If you will follow up these suggestions, you will find plenty of material for working out what has been offered. You will need to look about in the world and take account of manifold factors. One cannot escape the fact, however, that spiritual science is so comprehensive that, were we to proceed systematically and in the manner commonly aimed at in other sciences, we would not have progressed to the point where our sections actually stand after ten years of work. We would be about as far along as we might be after the first three months.

Let me say at the close of this cycle that spiritual science depends upon souls that are seriously willing to work out independently what has been merely suggested. In such independent work much will crop up out of regions that have not even been mentioned. Everyone proceeding with an independent spirit will find points of contact for this work. Our communion will become ever closer if we keep intensifying the feeling that we receive something in order to be stimulated, so that our innermost self comes more and more to take part in the worlds that are intended to be revealed to mankind through the spiritual current we have come to call anthroposophy.

In this lecture I want to speak of certain facts which belong essentially to the ethical and moral domain and help us to understand the mission of Spiritual Science in our time.

We are all deeply convinced of the great truth of reincarnation, of repeated earthly lives, and we must realise that this repetition has its own good purpose in the Earth's evolution. To the question, ‘Why do we reincarnate?’—occult research gives the answer that our experiences differ in each of the epochs during which we are reborn on the Earth. In incarnations immediately following the Atlantean catastrophe the experiences of the human soul were entirely different from those undergone in later pre-Christian epochs and in our own age.

I need only briefly mention that in the times directly after the Atlantean catastrophe, souls were endowed with a certain elementary clairvoyance in the bodies they then inhabited. This clairvoyance, once a natural faculty in man, was gradually lost, mainly as a result of the conditions prevailing during the Græco-Roman epoch of culture. Since then, man has developed in such a way that great progress has been achieved on the physical plane and during the course of the present post-Atlantean epoch clairvoyance will gradually be reacquired.

We are living in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch of culture, the ancient Indian being the first, the ancient Persian the second, the Babylonian-Chaldean the third, the Græco-Roman the fourth; the sixth and seventh epochs will follow our own. And then another great catastrophe will befall the Earth and humanity, as was the case at the end of the Atlantean epoch.

Occult research is able to indicate the characteristic trend of human evolution in each of these post-Atlantean epochs of civilisation—including the fifth, sixth and seventh. The essential characteristic of our present fifth epoch is the development of intellect, of reason. The main characteristic of the sixth epoch will be that very definite feelings regarding what is moral and what is immoral will arise in the souls of men. Delicate feelings of sympathy will be aroused by compassionate, kindly deeds and feelings of antipathy by malicious actions. Nobody living at the present time can have the faintest conception of the intensity of these feelings.

The sixth epoch will be followed by the seventh, when the moral life will be still further deepened. Whereas in the sixth epoch man will take pleasure in good and noble actions, in the seventh epoch the natural outcome of such pleasure will be a moral impulse, that is to say there will be a firm resolve to do what is moral. There is a great difference between taking pleasure in a moral action and the doing of it. We can therefore say: our own epoch is the epoch of intellectualism; the essential characteristic of the following epoch will be aesthetic pleasure in the good, aesthetic displeasure in the evil; and the seventh will be characterised by an active moral life.

At the present time only the seeds of what will become part of mankind in future epochs are contained in the human soul and it can be said that all these aptitudes or predispositions in man—intellectual aptitudes, predispositions leading to feelings of sympathy or antipathy aroused by certain actions, to moral impulses—all these are related to the higher worlds. Every moral action has a definite connection with the higher worlds. Our intellectual aptitudes have a super-sensible connection with the astral plane. Our sympathies and antipathies for the good or the evil are connected with the sphere of Lower Devachan; and the domain of moral impulses in the soul is connected with Higher Devachan. Hence we can also say: In our present age it is mainly the forces of the astral world that penetrate into and take effect in the human soul; in the sixth epoch it will be the forces of Lower Devachan that penetrate more deeply into the soul; and in the seventh, the forces of Higher Devachan will work with special strength into humanity.

From this it is understandable that in the preceding fourth post-Atlantean epoch (the Græco-Roman) it was the forces of the physical plane that exercised the strongest influence upon the soul of man. That is why Greek culture was able to produce such wonderful sculptures, in which the human form was given such magnificent expression on the physical plane. Conditions in that epoch were therefore especially suitable for men to experience the Christ on the physical plane in a physical body. In our own, fifth epoch which will last until the fourth millennium, souls will gradually become able, from the twentieth century onwards, to experience the Christ Being in an etheric form on the astral plane, just as in the fourth epoch Christ was visible on the physical plane in a physical form.

In order to understand the nature of development in the sixth epoch of culture, it is well to consider what will be the characteristic qualities of the soul in future incarnations. To-day, in our intellectual age, intellectuality and morality are practically separate spheres in the life of soul. It is quite possible nowadays for a man to be very clever and at the same time immoral, or vice versa—to be deeply moral and anything but clever.

In the fourth epoch the future juxtaposition of morality and intellectuality was prophetically foreseen by a certain people, namely the Hebrews. They endeavoured to bring about on artificial harmony between morality and intellectuality, whereas among the Greeks such harmony was more a natural matter of course. To-day we can learn from the Akashic Chronicle how the leaders of the ancient Hebrew people strove to establish this harmony between intellectuality and morality. They wore symbols, of which they had such profound understanding that if they concentrated their gaze upon them and made themselves receptive to their influences, a certain harmony could be established between what was good in a moral sense and what was wise. The priests of the ancient Hebrew people wore these symbols on their breastplate. The symbol for morality was called Urim, the symbol of wisdom, Thummim.¹

If a Hebrew priest wanted to discover whether a certain action was both good and wise, he made himself receptive to the forces of Urim and Thummim; the result was that a certain harmony between morality and intellectuality was induced. Magical effects were produced by means of these symbols and a magical link established with the spiritual world.

Our task now is to achieve in future incarnations through inner development of the soul the effect that in earlier times was produced by means of these symbols.

Let us think once again of the phases of evolution through the fifth, sixth and seventh post-Atlantean culture-epochs in order to grasp how intellectuality, aestheticism and morality will come to expression in men's life of soul.

Whereas in the present fifth epoch, intellectuality can remain unimpaired even if no pleasure is taken in moral actions, in the sixth epoch, it will be quite different. In the sixth epoch, that is, from about the third millennium onwards, immorality will have a paralysing effect upon intellectuality. The mental powers of a man who is intellectual and at the same time immoral will definitely deteriorate and this condition will become more and more pronounced in the future evolution of humanity. A man who has no morals will therefore have no intellectual power for this will depend entirely upon moral actions; and in the seventh epoch, cleverness without morality will be non-existent.

At this point it will be well to consider the nature of moral forces in individual souls in their present incarnations. How is it that in our phase of evolution a human being can become immoral? It is because in his successive incarnations man has descended more and more deeply into the physical world and has therefore been impelled more and more strongly towards the world of the senses.

The more forcefully the impulses belonging to the descending phase of evolution work upon a soul, the more immoral it tends to become. This fact is confirmed by a very interesting finding of occult research. You know that when a man passes through the gate of death, he lays aside his physical and etheric bodies and for a short time has a retrospective view of his past life on earth. A kind of sleep then ensues and after a few months, or perhaps years, he wakens on the astral plane, in Kamaloka. Then follows the life in Kamaloka, when the earthly life is lived over again in backward order, three times as quickly.

At the beginning of life in Kamaloka a very significant experience comes to every individual. In the case of most Europeans or, speaking generally, of men belonging to modern civilisation, this experience takes the following form.—At the beginning of life in Kamaloka a spiritual Individuality shows us everything we have done out of selfish motives in the last life, shows us a kind of register of all our transgressions. The more concretely you picture this experience, the better. At the beginning of the Kamaloka period it is actually as though a figure were presenting us with the register of our physical life. The important fact—for which, naturally, there can be no further proof because it can be confirmed only by occult experience—is that the majority of men belonging to European civilisation recognise Moses in this figure. This fact has always been known to Rosicrucian research since the Middle Ages and in recent years it has been confirmed by very delicate investigations.

You can gather from this that at the beginning of his life in Kamaloka man feels a very great responsibility towards the pre-Christian powers for having allowed himself to be drawn downwards, and it is an actual fact in occult life that it is the Moses-Individuality who demands reckoning for the wrongs committed in our time.

The powers and forces which draw man upwards again to the spiritual world fall into two categories: those which draw him upwards on the path of Wisdom, and those which draw him upwards on the path of Morality. The forces to which intellectual progress is mainly due all proceed from the impulse given by a great Individuality of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch who is known to you all, namely Gautama Buddha. It is a remarkable discovery of spiritual investigation that the most penetrating, most significant, thoughts conceived in our present epoch have proceeded from Gautama Buddha. This is all the more remarkable inasmuch as until the days of Schopenhauer—therefore by no means long ago—the name of Gautama Buddha was almost unknown in the West. This is very understandable, for when Gautama Buddha was born as the son of King Suddhodana, he rose from the rank of Bodhisattva to that of Buddha, and to become a Buddha means that the Individuality concerned does not incarnate again on Earth in a body of flesh. The Bodhisattva-Individuality who became Buddha five or six centuries before the beginning of the Christian era has not since incarnated, nor can he incarnate, in a physical body. But instead he sends down his forces from the higher worlds, from the super-sensible worlds, and inspires all bearers of culture who are not yet permeated by the Christ Impulse. Consciousness of this truth was demonstrated in a beautiful legend written down by John of Damascus in the eighth century and well known throughout Europe in the Middle Ages. It is the legend of Barlaam and Joshaphat, which relates how he who had become the successor of Buddha (Joshaphat is a phonetic variation of ‘Bodhisattva’) received teaching from Barlaam about the Christ Impulse. The legend, which was subsequently forgotten, tells us that the Bodhisattva who succeeded Gautama Buddha was instructed by Barlaam and his soul was fired by the Christian Impulse. This was the second impulse which, in addition to that of Buddha, continues to work in the evolution of humanity. It is the Christ Impulse and is connected with the future ascent of humanity to Morality. Although Buddha's teaching is in a particular sense moral teaching, the Christ Impulse is not teaching but actual power which works as such and to an increasing degree imbues mankind with moral strength. (I Corinthians IV, 20)

In the fourth post-Atlantean epoch the Christ Being who descended from cosmic heights had first to appear in a physical body. In our fifth epoch the intense consolidation of intellectual forces will make it possible for man to behold the Christ as an etheric Figure. This is even now beginning in our century. From the thirties to the forties of this century onwards, individuals will appear who have developed in a way that will enable them to see the etheric Form of Christ, as at the time of Jesus of Nazareth they saw the physical Christ. And during the next three thousand years the number of those able to behold the etheric Christ will steadily increase, until in about three thousand years, reckoning from the present time, there will be a sufficient number of human beings on the Earth who will need no gospels or other such records, because in their own life of soul they will have actual vision of the Christ.

We must therefore clearly understand that in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch men were only capable of beholding the physical Christ; He therefore came in a physical body. In our own epoch and on into the third millennium, they will gradually grow capable of beholding the etheric Christ. He will never come again in a physical body.

If we bear in mind the fact that when a man of the present age who unites himself more and more deeply with the Christ Impulse passes into Kamaloka and is called to account by a figure personifying a moral force—by Moses—we shall understand how a transformation of the Moses-figure can be brought about. For what does Moses show us when he confronts us with the register of our sins and transgressions? He shows us what stands on the debit side of our Karma. For a soul of our epoch it is of great significance that through the inspiration of Buddha the doctrine of Karma can be comprehended, but that the reality of the working of Karma after death is revealed to us by the Old Testament figure of Moses.

As the influences of the super-sensible Christ pervade the souls of men to an ever-increasing extent, the figure of Moses will be transformed after death into that of Christ Jesus. This means that our Karma is linked with Christ, that Christ unites with our Karma.

It is interesting to realise that in the teachings of Buddha, Karma is an abstract matter, having an impersonal character. In the future incarnations of men, as Christ comes into ever closer connection with Karma, it will acquire the quality of being, of potential life.

Our earlier stages of evolution, our lives in the past, may be related to the words: Ex Deo nascimur. If we direct our development in such a way that after death, instead of Moses we meet Christ with whom our Karma is then united, this is expressed in the Rosicrucian Christianity that has existed since the 13th century, by the words: In Christo morimur.

Just as Buddha-hood can be attained only on the physical plane, the qualification for meeting Christ in death can likewise be acquired by the human soul only on the physical plane. A Buddha is first a Bodhisattva, but he rises to the rank of Buddha during a physical incarnation and it is then no longer necessary for him to return to the Earth. Understanding of Christ in the sense just explained can be acquired only on the physical plane. Hence during the next three thousand years men will have to acquire in the physical world the power to behold the super-sensible Christ, and it is the mission of the Anthroposophical Movement to create, first of all, the conditions which make understanding of Christ possible on the physical plane, and then the power to behold Him.

In the age when Christ works in the world of men as the etheric Christ it matters not whether we are living in a physical body or between death and a new birth, if on the physical plane we have acquired the power to behold Him. Let us suppose, for example, that because of his earlier death a man had no opportunity of beholding Christ in his present etheric Form. Nevertheless, if during his life in the physical world such a man had acquired the necessary understanding, vision of the Christ would be possible for him between death and rebirth. A man who keeps aloof from spiritual life and acquires no understanding of Christ will remain without such knowledge until he can acquire it in his next incarnation.

What has just been said will indicate to you that as humanity lives on through the fifth, sixth and seventh epochs of civilisation the Christ Impulse will gain increasing power on the Earth. We have heard that in the sixth epoch, intellectuality will be impaired through immorality. The other aspect is that a man who has paralysed his intellectual faculty as a result of immorality must turn to Christ with all the greater strength in order that Christ may lead him to morality and imbue him with moral strength.

What I have told you has been investigated particularly closely by Rosicrucians since the 13th century but it is a truth that has at all times been known to many occultists.

If it were to be asserted that there could be a second appearance of Christ on Earth in a physical body, according to occultism that would be equivalent to stating that a balance works more efficiently if it is supported at two points instead of at one. In very truth the three years' duration of Christ's life on Earth in the body of Jesus of Nazareth constitutes the fulcrum of Earth evolution; and just as there can be only one point at which the beam of a balance is attached, so too there can be only one fulcrum of Earth evolution.

The teaching of moral development is not the same as the impulse for such development.

Before the Event of Golgotha the Bodhisattva who was the successor of Buddha was present on the Earth in order to prepare for that Event and give teaching to those around him. He incarnated in the personality of Jeshu ben Pandira [See Jeshu ben Pandira, two lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at Leipzig on November 4th and 5th, 1911, and references in his later cycle, The Gospel of St. Matthew.], one century before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Thus we must distinguish between the Jeshu ben Pandira-incarnation of the Bodhisattva who was the successor of Gautama Buddha, and the incarnation at the beginning of our era of Jesus of Nazareth who for three years of his life was permeated by the cosmic Being we call the Christ.

The Bodhisattva who incarnated in Jeshu ben Pandira and in other personalities too, returns again and again, until in about three thousand years from now, he will attain Buddha-hood and as Maitreya Buddha live through his final incarnation. The Christ-Individuality was on the Earth in the body of Jesus of Nazareth for three years only and does not come again in a physical body; in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch He comes in an etheric body, in the sixth epoch in an astral body, and in the seventh in a mighty Cosmic Ego that is like a great Group-Soul of humanity.

When a human being dies, his physical, etheric and astral bodies fall away from him and his ego passes over to the next incarnation. It is exactly the same with the planet Earth. What is physical in our Earth falls away at the end of the Earth-period and human souls in their totality pass over into the Jupiter condition, the next planetary embodiment of the Earth. And just as in the case of an individual human being the ego is the centre of his further evolution, so for the whole of future humanity the Christ-Ego in the astral and etheric bodies of men goes on to ensoul the Jupiter-existence. We therefore see how starting from a physical man -on Earth the Christ gradually evolves as Etheric Christ, as Astral Christ, as Ego-Christ, in order, as Ego-Christ, to be the Spirit of the Earth who then rises to even higher stages together with all mankind.

What are we doing when we teach Spiritual Science to-day? We are teaching what Oriental wisdom so clearly proclaimed when the Bodhisattva who was then the son of King Suddhodana, attained Buddha-hood. In those Oriental teachings was expressed the realisation that it was the task of the next Bodhisattva—who would eventually become a Buddha—to spread over the Earth the knowledge that would reveal Christ to men in the true light. Thus the Bodhisattva who incarnated in Jeshu ben Pandira and again and again in others, became the great Teacher of the Christ Impulse. This is indicated very clearly in the legend of Barlaam and Joshaphat, which tells how Joshaphat (i.e. the Bodhisattva) is instructed by Barlaam, the Christian teacher. The Oriental occult teachings call this Bodhisattva the ‘Bringer of the Good’—Maitreya Buddha. And we know from occult investigations that in this Maitreya Buddha the power of the Word will be present in a degree of which men of the present time can as yet have no conception. It is possible to-day through higher clairvoyant perception of the process of world-evolution to discover how the, Maitreya Buddha will teach after three thousand years have passed. Much of his teaching can also be expressed in symbolic forms. But to-day—because mankind is insufficiently mature—it is not yet possible to utter words such as those that will come from the lips of the Maitreya Buddha.

In the Eightfold Path, Gautama Buddha gave the great intellectual teachings of right speech, right thinking, right action, and so on. The words uttered by the Maitreya Buddha will contain a magic power that will become moral impulses in the men who hear them. And if there should be a gospel telling of the Maitreya Buddha, the writer of it would have to use words differing from those used of Christ in the Gospel of St. John: “And the Word was made Flesh.” The evangelist of the Maitreya Buddha would have to testify: “And the Flesh was made Word.”

The utterances of the Maitreya Buddha will be permeated in a miraculous way with the power of Christ. Occult investigations show us to-day that in a certain respect even the external life of the Maitreya Buddha will be patterned on the life of Christ. In ancient times, when a great Individuality appeared and was to become a Teacher of humanity, signs indicating this showed themselves in the early youth of the child in question, in special talents and qualities of soul. There is however a different kind of development in the course of which a complete change in the personality becomes apparent at a certain point in his life. What happens is that when this human being has reached a certain age, his ego is taken out of his bodily sheaths and a different ego passes into his body. The greatest example of this is Christ Jesus Himself, of whom in his thirtieth year the Christ-Individuality had taken possession. All the incarnations of the Bodhisattva who will become the Maitreya Buddha have shown that in this sense his life will resemble that of Christ.

In none of the incarnations of the Bodhisattva is it known, either in his childhood or youth, that he will become a Bodhisattva. Whenever the Bodhisattva becomes Buddha there is evidence that at the age of 30 or 31, another individuality takes possession of his body. The Bodhisattva will never reveal himself as such in his early youth, but in his thirtieth or thirty-first year he will manifest quite different qualities, because another Being takes possession of his body. Individualities who will take possession of the personality of some human being in this way and will not incarnate as children, are, for example, individualities such as Moses, Abraham, Ezekiel.

So too is it in our present century in the case of the Bodhisattva who later on, in three thousand years time, will become the Maitreya Buddha. It would be so much occult dilettantism to assert that this Being would be recognisable in his early years as the Bodhisattva. It is between his thirtieth and thirty-first years that he first reveals Himself through his own power, without having to be proclaimed by others. He will convince the world through his own power and it would be well to realise that if the Bodhisattva were alleged in some quarters to be revealing himself in a human being under the age of thirty, that very fact would be evidence of the fallacy of such a statement. Claims of the kind have frequently been made. For example, in the 17th century a certain individual proclaimed himself to be an incarnation of the Messiah, of Christ. His name was Sabbati Zewi and hosts of people from all over Europe, from Spain, Italy and France, made pilgrimages to him in Smyrna.

It is certainly true that in our time there is a rooted disinclination to recognise genius in human beings. But on the other hand, mental laziness is very prevalent, with the result that people are only too ready to acknowledge some individual as a great soul, merely on authority. It is important to-day for Anthroposophy to be presented in such a way as to be based to the smallest possible extent on belief in authority.

Much that I have said today can be substantiated only by means of occult investigation. Yet I beg you not to give credence to these things because I say them, but to test them by everything known to you from history—above all by what you can learn from your own experience—and I am absolutely certain that the more closely you examine them, the more confirmation you will find. In this age of intellectualism, I do not appeal to your belief in authority but to your capacity for intelligent examination. The Bodhisattva of the 20th century will not rely upon any herald to announce him as the Maitreya Buddha, but upon the power of his own words; he will stand on his own feet in the world.

What has been said in this lecture may perhaps be summed up as follows.—

In our period of evolution, two streams of spiritual life are at work; one of them is the stream of Wisdom, or the Buddha-stream, containing the most sublime teaching of wisdom, goodness of heart and peace on Earth. To enable this teaching of Buddha to permeate the hearts of all men, the Christ Impulse is indispensable. The second stream is the Christ-stream itself which will lead humanity from intellectuality, by way of aesthetic feeling and insight, to morality. And the greatest Teacher of the Christ Impulse will in all ages be the successor of that Bodhisattva who incarnates again and again and who, in three thousand years from now, will become the Maitreya Buddha. For the statement contained in Oriental chronicles is true: that exactly five thousand years after Gautama Buddha attained Enlightenment under the Bodhi tree, the Maitreya Buddha will incarnate on Earth for the last time.

The succession of Bodhisattvas and Buddhas has no relation as such to the cosmic Being we call Christ; it was a Bodhisattva—not the Christ—who incarnated in the body of Jeshu ben Pandira. Christ incarnated in a physical body once, and once only, for a period of three years. The Bodhisattva appears in every century until his existence as Maitreya Buddha.

The mission of Anthroposophy to-day is to be a synthesis of religions. We can conceive of one form of religion being comprised in Buddhism, another form in Christianity, and as evolution proceeds the more closely do the different religions unite—in the way that Buddha and Christ themselves are united in our hearts.

This vista of the spiritual development of humanity brings home to us the necessity of the impulse of Anthroposophy as a preparation for understanding the progress of culture and happenings in the great process of evolution itself.

• 1. According to the footnote in the German text of this lecture, Urim = Glanz (Radiance or Lustre) and Thummim = Wahrheit (Truth). Most English books of reference give “lights” and “perfections” as the interpretations, while acknowledging uncertainty. The Septuagint translates them as “manifestation” and “truth”. There is no unanimity as to whether the objects in question can be reliably identified, but the biblical references suggest that they were precious stones. Some scholars suppose that they were the twelve stones of the breastplate of the High Priest. What seems to be certain is that on these objects were engraved the names of the twelve tribes and that the High Priest used them as an oracle in order to ascertain the will of God. (See among other biblical references: Exodus 28, 9-30; Leviticus 8, 8.) Robertson Smith wrote in The Old Testament in the Jewish Church: “In ancient times the priestly oracle of Urim and Thummim was a sacred lot; for in I Sam. xiv:41 the true text, as we can still restore it from the LXX., makes Saul pray, If the iniquity be in me or Jonathan, give Urim; but if in Israel, give Thummim. This sacred lot was connected with the ephod, which in the time of the Judges was something very like an idol.” See in the Moffatt translation of the Bible I Sam. xiv. 18-43.
  
  —Note by D.S.O. and M.K.

Animal forms—the physiognomical expression of human passions. The religion of Egypt—a remembrance of Lemurian times. Fish and serpent symbols. The remembrance of Atlantis in Europe. The Light of Christ.

In the last lecture it was shown how a differentiation had arisen in evolution generally, and particularly in human evolution, because human beings, and other beings also, could not await the right point in their evolution; they therefore fell behind and became hardened to a certain degree, while others retained the necessary softness and pliability until the right moment, and were thus able to carry out the changes that were fitting. It was also shown that it was only in the middle of the Atlantean epoch that the true human form appeared. In the previous epoch, and indeed at a very early period, the external form of man was very mobile; not only could he move his limbs as at present, but through inner powers he could elongate or shorten them, etc. To the ordinary consciousness of today it seems a kind of outrage to say such things about past conditions of the earth and of man. Even here among Anthroposophists you may have observed that we endeavour to develop certain truths step by step; we give them forth gradually, in small doses—they are then more easily digested.

Let us turn our attention once more to this early development. Even the Atlantean epoch had a beginning, and it came to an end through mighty water catastrophes of a very complicated kind. The Atlantean epoch lasted for a long, a very long, time. When we go back still further we come to other catastrophes in the course of evolution, these may be called volcanic in nature, when large tracts of land lying south of Asia, east of Africa, and north of Australia were demolished. On these tracts of land humanity had dwelt, and, to borrow a term from natural science, the land was called the Lemurian continent.

At that time humanity had a body much softer and more plastic than it is now; it was a period when man could assume many shapes; if we were to describe them they would seem very grotesque to the consciousness of the present day. We arrive here at a point of time before which no kind of feeling of personality, no feeling of selfhood, had as yet come to man. As he had no consciousness of self, and as the human shape was still very mobile and unfinished, something else happened. The shape which man presented outwardly—and which changed according to his emotions, being one thing at one time and something quite different at another—was in this way a kind of betrayer of his inner being; according as his thoughts and passions were good or bad his external shape assumed a different form. It was impossible at that time to entertain an evil thought and keep it hidden, for the external bodily form immediately expressed it, therefore man appeared in all kinds of shapes.

There were at this time very few of the higher kinds of animals; the earth was peopled by the lower animals and man. And if one were companionable—and such indeed we all were fundamentally—one could find one's fellowman through the expression they gave to this or that thought, or to this or that passion. What really are all such expressions? What are the physiognomical expressions of passions and thoughts? They are the shapes of animals. When we observe the form of animals we see in the higher orders of the animal kingdom nothing but thoughts and passions of all sorts worked into a great piece of tapestry. Everything that moves within the human astral body today, and remains hidden, was such a strong force at that time that it imparted at once to the soft body (which was really only formed out of fire-mist) the shape which was the expression of that passion. A large part of our present higher animals consists of human beings who were so entangled in their passions that they became hardened in these forms and fell behind in evolution. Anyone who looks with really occult perception on his environment can express his feeling approximately as follows: In the course of becoming an ego I have passed through that which I now see in lions and snakes; I lived in all these forms, for in my inner being I experienced the qualities which are expressed in these animal shapes.

Those human beings who were capable of rising, who maintained their inner centre, found a certain balance, so that they have within them only the possibility of these passions, which are, however, of a soul nature only, and take on no external form. This is what man's higher development means. In animals we see our own past, although these have not the same form as that in which they appeared in past ages, for millions of years have passed away since then. Let us suppose that passions such as are now found in lions were made manifest at that time in man's outward form, giving him the semblance of a lion, that this form then hardened, and the genus lion originated. Since that time, however, the genus lion has also passed through further development, and because of this the present lion has no longer the same form as at that time. The present lion is the descendant of a genus that branched off from the human long ages ago. In the various animals we have, in a certain sense, to see our degenerate descendants; this should help us to look with understanding into the world around us.

We must not, however, imagine that all the animal forms we see around us, and which represent certain conditions of hardening, are the result of evil human passions. Passions were necessary; man had to experience them in order that he might absorb from them into his own nature all that was useful; so that when we look back into such periods of the earth's evolution we find in our environment animal shapes that are in a state of material self-metamorphosis.

These are the expressions of passions, and working in them we find those Spiritual beings with whom we have become acquainted in previous lectures. We have to think of the earth as being still of a soft substance, and Spiritual beings working upon this substance, and forming the various animal-like shapes.

Let us now recall how it was said that the Egyptian religion repeated the facts of the third epoch of the earth, preserving the results of it as religious knowledge. The Egyptian form of religion contained as knowledge that which had taken place at one time on earth. You will now wonder no longer that so many animal and animal-headed shapes appeared in Egyptian art. This was a spiritual repetition of what had actually existed on the earth at one time, and was more than a mere simile. In a certain sense it is literally true when we say that the souls who principally incarnated in Egyptian bodies remembered the Lemurian epoch, and that their religion was spiritually a reborn memory of it.

Thus epoch after epoch of the earth is born again within the souls of men in the various religious conceptions through which the world passes. Even at a period later than this the environment of man was absolutely different from what it is now, and, of course, the conditions of consciousness were essentially different.

We must clearly understand that from the Lemurian epoch to the middle of the Atlantean epoch the present human form was only gradually constructed. By the middle of the Atlantean epoch it had reached, in a normal way, to a certain perfection through Jehovah and the Spirits of Form; the totality of what we find in man today was first formed throughout this period, viz., from the Lemurian epoch to the Atlantean epoch. The man of Lemuria, had we been able to see him clairvoyantly, would have presented still further problems, for functions which today are separate were still united in him in a certain way. For example, when the Lemurian evolution was in its prime neither such a breathing system nor such a system of alimentation existed as we have now. Substances were quite different; respiration and nutrition were in a certain sense connected; they performed one common function which was only divided later. Man absorbed a kind of watery, milky substance, and this supplied him at the one time with that which he now acquires separately in the processes of respiration and nutrition.

Another thing was also not as yet separated. We know that in the course of the period with which we are dealing the senses first opened to the outer world. Our present senses did not perceive external objects at that time man was limited to a picture-consciousness; vivid dream pictures rose within him, but there was no external objective consciousness. On the other hand, he received, as the first heralding of outer life—the first inkling of outer sense perception—the capacity to distinguish heat and cold in his environment. This was the very first beginning of sense perception on the earth, for the man of that time still moved within the fluidic element, but he now knew whether he was approaching a warm place or a cold one. This was made possible through an organ which he possessed at that time and which has since become atrophied.

You will have heard that within the human brain there is an organ called the pineal gland; today it is atrophied, but formerly it was open outwardly; it was an organ of force, and sent forth rays. Man moved about in the watery element with a kind of lantern which developed a certain light. This lantern, when the pineal gland was developed, projected from the head, enabling man to distinguish different degrees of warmth. It was the first universal sense organ. Natural science describes it as a degenerated eye. This it never was; it was an organ of warmth, and could in fact perceive not only in its immediate environment, but also at a distance. It had also another duty.

This organ, which closed when the other senses opened, was in certain ancient periods an organ of fertilization, so that sense-perception and fertilization were associated at one time. Through this organ man absorbed into himself from his environment the forces which made him capable of bringing forth his like. At one particular period, when the sun was in a certain position and the moon still one with the earth, the atmosphere of the earth was able to furnish the substance which caused this organ to shine. There actually were periods (and certain fishes which at times develop a light remind us of them) when there was a common fertilization of the human being, who was without sex at that time, and when, because of the sun being in a particular position, he was enabled to bring forth his like. Sense-perception and fertilization, nutrition and breathing, were intimately connected in the primeval past.

The various organs were differentiated gradually, and very gradually man acquired the form he now possesses. Through this he became more and more fitted to be his own master, and to develop what we call ego-consciousness. But all through the period when he moved through the earth's atmosphere guided by his perception of warmth he was under the influence of higher beings. It was principally the forces of the sun (which had already left the earth) working upon the earth's atmosphere that stimulated the organ of self-consciousness. On the other hand, there was another organ which was specially stimulated through the moon-forces (both before and after it withdrew from the earth). This is situated in another part of the brain, and is usually called the pituitary body. Today this organ has no particular duty, formerly it regulated the lower functions, those of nutrition and respiration, which originally were one. With this pituitary body were connected all the inner forces by which man inflated himself and was enabled to assume various shapes—everything by which he could voluntarily alter his form. Those alterations which were less voluntary depended on the other organ, the pineal gland.

From this we see how man has changed, and how, through obtaining a solid, definite shape, he has separated himself from the beings working on him from outside, who had made of him an instinctive being. All this gives us a clearer idea of the processes in human evolution which led at length to that condition when, in the middle of the Atlantean epoch he was sufficiently matured for the outer world to influence him through his sense organs, and he reached a position where he could form an opinion of the outer world. Up till that time judgment had flowed into him from without. What we might call a kind of thinking flowed into him, somewhat as is the case with animals today. We have to bear in mind that humanity progressed irregularly, one portion entered into a condition of hardening earlier, another later, and we have already seen the various kinds of human forms that developed. We saw how certain human beings became stunted in their development by allowing this hardening process to take place too soon, by assuming some particular shape too soon, and how through this different races developed. Only those people, who migrated from their homes in the neighbourhood of Ireland were really mature enough to be receptive of what the earth had to offer to their outward sight; and as they traveled from the West to the East they populated the various countries they passed through in which remnants of those people were found who had gone by other paths. With these they mingled, and from this union the various civilizations originated, while from those who were most backward when migration took place has sprung the European civilizations.

In order to complete our preliminary studies we must first glance into the mighty cosmos and then at the earth itself. We have explained man's evolution in connection with the animals, and shown how he thrust them from him and left them behind at an earlier stage of evolution. There is, of course, a great difference in animals; between the higher and the lower forms there is a certain boundary in development that is of importance.

Remember that as man evolved he gradually thrust aside the animal forms, and that he had only a very fine etheric form at the time when earth and sun were still united. When these separated he thrust from him certain animal forms, and these have remained behind at the stage in evolution which corresponds to the time when the sun was still within the earth. From these entirely different forms have naturally arisen in the course of time, for we are here concerned with a very long after-development. Were we to select a characteristic form which is still to be found today, and which may in some way be compared with those which remained behind when the earth was thrust away by the sun, we must select the form of the fish. This is the form which remained over when the earth was thrown, as it were, on its own resources; it is that which still has within it the last echo of the Sun-Forces. Let us keep this moment before us. There were quite other beings which were more of a plant-like nature, but with these we shall not deal at present.

The beings who represented the first material construction of the human form at the time of the sun's departure have undergone manifold changes, but in fishes is preserved that which reminds us of our separation from the sun; reminds us that at one time we belonged to the sun.

The sun departed from the earth and began to influence it from outside, and it also influenced the earth-man; gradually alternating conditions of consciousness developed—those of waking and sleeping. Gradually the condition developed in which man was more united with his ego and also with his higher principles (his etheric and astral body), and this condition alternated with another in which the astral body withdrew from the physical body. This condition is still preserved today in the alternation between waking and sleeping. Let us for a while study this alternating condition. We all know it, for it belongs to the most elementary teaching of Anthroposophy; we know that when man is awake there is a regular connection between his physical, etheric, and astral bodies, and his ego. When he is asleep the astral body and the ego withdraw from the physical and etheric body.

In the very early epoch with which we have been dealing the ego was not yet present, and in its place part of the etheric body withdrew; this condition may be compared with that of sleep. Now we must clearly understand that when man leaves the physical and etheric body behind on the bed he really bestows on them the value of a plant. Plants have a sleep-consciousness; so has man's physical and etheric body during sleep. But at the present time during sleep the astral body and ego of the normal man have also a kind of vegetable consciousness, for he is not aware of his environment. This was different in olden times, for then when the astral body and ego withdrew the man was dimly conscious of the spiritual world which was around him.

We can now form an idea of another important fact which came to pass through the sun separating from the earth. Before this took place the whole man, as regards his physical, etheric, and astral bodies, was under the influence and the control of the material and spiritual Sun-Forces, but after it depended upon the sun's position; it depended on whether the man in regard to his physical, etheric, and astral bodies came under the sun's influence, and whether it shone on him directly or not. We may now ask: Was there not at this epoch another influence coming from the sun?

Yes; at the time when no physical eye had as yet seen the sun, when the sun did not as yet penetrate the dense atmosphere of the earth, man's etheric and astral body (when outside the physical body) received important influences from the Spiritual Forces proceeding from the sun. He was unable to perceive these influences, for he was not mature enough, but later he became able to do so through receiving a force which enabled him to see that which came to him spiritually from the sun.

What was this event which made man capable of perceiving the forces which dwelt in the sun, those very exalted forces which had to leave the earth and unite themselves with the sun? When did this perception come to him? Gradually these forces streamed into the earth, and the most important point of time, that into which the whole thing resolves itself, was when man received full power to assimilate not only the physical forces, but also the spiritual forces of the sun in full consciousness. This was the moment of Christ's coming to the earth.

One might say therefore: There was a time when man was separated physically from the sun. Among animals the fish directs our thoughts to this time, for it recalls the condition of man before he was obliged to be separated from the sun. Then came the time when the higher forces whose leader is Christ—the great Sun-Spirit—left the earth; after which man gradually matured until able to receive these higher forces in the same way he received the physical Sun-Forces from outside. Inward spiritual power had to appear on earth as a fact, just as earlier the physical sun forces had appeared.

Of what was it the duty of Initiates to remind man when Christ appeared? They had to remind him of his ancient home on the Sun, and the symbol used for this was the symbol of the fish. This is why the fish appears in the catacombs as a true symbol connected with the evolution of humanity, and the disciples of the early centuries, seeing the fish symbol everywhere, received the words of the Initiates which rang in their ears with deep emotion, for spiritually it led them to the inward holiness of the story of Palestine, and at the same time led them forth cosmically into the mighty evolutionary phases of the earth.

Such things as these were studied in the schools of the Initiates, and in outward symbols like that of the fish, which were to be found in many places, we have an expression of these mysteries, just as geologists see in the fossils of plants tokens of a primeval past. But just as the impress of a fossil points to an original reality, so the symbol of the fish is a token of that which was cultivated within the mysteries.

This symbol did not appear suddenly. Long before the coming of Christ the Prophets of the Messiah had directed their pupils to His coming, and everywhere, back to the time of the Druidic Mysteries, the fish symbol played its part.

To proceed: a time came when the moon separated from the earth; previously the earth and the moon had formed one body. Then the threefold formation—sun, moon, and earth—came into being. Mighty were the natural catastrophes which then took place; events were of a very stormy nature. The physical part of man was not then at a very high stage of development, and he left it behind him as an ossified type.

In order to understand this we must keep one thing in mind: when the sun separated from the earth, the earth went back in development, it degenerated; and only after the moon withdrew with the worst constituents did improvement again take place. There was, therefore, for some time an ascending development until the departure of the sun; then a descending one, when everything became worse, more grotesque; then, after the moon withdrew, a re-ascending development again.

From this stage of evolution we have also a form which has degenerated, and which does not by any means appear now as it did then, but it exists; it is the form which belonged to man before the moon withdrew, before he had an ego. The animal form which recalls the lowest stage of earthly devilment, the time when man plunged most deeply into passions and when his astral body was susceptible to the worst external influences, is that of the serpent, a creature in which is preserved the shameful depths of our evolution on this planet, although what we see now has degenerated still further. The symbol of the serpent is also derived from evolution; it has not been thought out, but is rooted in the depth of things.

Fish and snake symbols are derived from the mysteries of our evolution. It is quite natural for a person to experience a feeling of pleasure when he sees the glistening body of a fish in the pure, chaste watery element; it gives him a feeling of peace; just as to those of a pure disposition it gives a feeling of horror to see a creeping snake. Such feelings are by no means meaningless memories of things once passed through. Man likes to see the wonderful living sunny form of a fish in water; he recalls his former innocence when as yet he possessed no ego, but was directed by the best Spirits in evolution; and it is a fact that he remembers the most horrible period in evolution, the time when he was near to falling out of evolution, when a crawling snake approaches him.

One can now understand the unconscious experiences of the human soul which are so puzzling to us, and which appear with such vividness when man is unaffected by culture, when we realize that the feelings we thus experience are connected with cosmic facts. Through this knowledge many things are made clear. Man can certainly overcome his fear of snakes, but this is by culture; but the fundamental feeling of repulsion is in his soul, and it points us back to the ancient times of which I am speaking. They were times when man was physically at the snake stage, when those elemental Beings set to work of whom we said that they prepared man for freedom, prepared him to receive the Christ in His full meaning and grandeur.

We now ask: Who were the elemental Beings who helped man not to sink into the depths? They are those mentioned in the last lecture, those who worked on him when he had descended to the depths, and who led him again to the heights—the Luciferic beings. The Sun-Spirits did not yet work upon him, but those beings did who sacrificed themselves. They moved among the people of the earth in a very remarkable way. Outwardly they had a certain human form, for even the highest spirits have to incarnate in forms which are to be found on earth, so these Beings took upon them the external shape that was man's at that time. They said: In form we are similar to man, but our true home is not on the earth; it is upon the two intermediate planets, Venus and Mercury. The best part of their souls were on these planets, but their outward form, which in fact was a kind of illusion, was on earth.

They gave to man what he needed, namely, guidance and teaching, for the reason that their home was not on earth, which was the first planet to be formed, but upon Venus and Mercury. These beings must be described as the first teachers, the first Initiates of humanity; outwardly they resembled the human beings of that time, but inwardly they possessed lofty and important qualities enabling them to work upon humanity as a whole, and also to work on the more advanced individuals in special schools, which were the first Mystery schools. There were always some of these more advanced individuals who had their home in the stars and who, although connected with the stars, had a human shape and walked among men.

Man himself continued to progress, and now passed on into the middle of the Atlantean epoch; the present human form only began to develop during the first half of that epoch; only then did man begin to feel fully at home in it.

Now, there were some beings in those ancient times who were very low down in the scale of humanity; these became the backward races; there were others who kept themselves plastic; and, again, others who only occasionally inhabited human bodies. What I am now about to describe happened very frequently in the first part of the Atlantean epoch. Imagine a man of that time who for an Atlantean was highly evolved; through certain procedures it frequently happened that such a man was caused to separate his physical body (which was then very plastic) and his etheric and astral bodies from his more spiritual parts, which then withdrew more into the spiritual world so as later to take on another body.

It very frequently happened that, long before the physical, etheric and astral bodies were ready to die, they were willingly vacated by their soul and spirit-principles. These, when they had belonged to especially exalted individuals, were pure and good bodies. Highly spiritual beings then let themselves descend into these bodies; and so it frequently happened during the ancient Atlantean epoch that beings who were otherwise unable to incarnate on earth made use of such advanced bodies in order to descend among men. These were the beings who acted as great teachers in the Atlantean schools of initiation. They worked powerfully with the means available at that time.

When at that time man left his physical body at night he had what may be called a dim clairvoyant consciousness; during the day the outline of objects was still indistinct, and there was no such clearly defined difference between the conditions of sleeping and waking as exists today. It happened, therefore, that the ordinary man beheld such an individual as I have described in an alternating manner—by day he saw him like a man, but at night he saw him quite otherwise, in a spiritual soul-like way, though he knew it was the same being who appeared to him by day in a physical body. These were beings belonging to Venus and Mercury who interposed into human existence and were with man day and night. The remembrance of these beings remained in the souls who incarnated again and again among the peoples of Europe, and they recalled them when they uttered the names Wotan, Thor, etc.

When the inhabitants of ancient Europe spoke of the Gods they were no imaginary figures to them, but memories of forms seen in Atlantis. In the same way, when the Greeks spoke of Zeus, Apollo, and Ares these were forms they had themselves perceived during the Atlantean epoch. Whereas in the Egyptian age memories of ancient Lemuria arose, in the Grecian age memories of the earthly experiences on Atlantis rose within the souls of the people.

We must clearly understand that if everything contained in later religions was a memory of facts connected with the earth at an earlier age some very important event would have to take place when the last of these memories had appeared; this was about the time when the Greeks and Romans recalled the Atlantean epoch. This was also the time when the Christ brought an essentially new Impulse into evolution. We indicated the nature of this Impulse when we spoke about the long intermediate period of evolution in which Luciferic beings were preparing mankind, making him capable of receiving the Christ Impulse, so that the sun should not merely send down its force externally, but that inner forces should also stream into man from it. This period has not nearly come to an end; it is still in its beginning, for with the coming of Christ only the first impulse was given for the inwardly spiritual part of the sun to stream to earth in addition to the physical sunlight. Ever stronger will that light become, which as Spiritual Sunlight, or Christ-light, will irradiate mankind from within as the physical sunlight illuminates him from without.

It will come to pass in the future that man will look upon the sun, not only with his external eyes perceiving its glory, but he will also experience the spiritual side of the sun in his inner being. Only when he is in a position to do this will he fully understand what really dwelt on earth as the Being whom we call Christ Jesus. Only slowly and gradually will man come to an understanding of this; and just as truly as in pre-Christian times he had to understand the pronouncements of those spiritual beings who guided man when he contracted in his descent into the physical world, so by a truly spiritual effort he must henceforth try to understand the Spiritual Power which at one time went forth from the earth with the sun. Man must be able to receive this Power again as an inner spiritual force; he must comprehend this Christ power—this Spiritual power which imparts to him the great impulse for the future.

The object of spiritual science, and of all that can be acquired as spiritual teaching, is to enable us to comprehend this Power of Christ. One cannot say that Anthroposophy is Christianity, but one can say that what has been given to man and to the earth by the Christ Principle will be gradually made comprehensible through the instrumentality of Anthroposophy. When that mighty Impulse is understood it will pour into humanity more and more, for man has need of it in order that, after having contracted and sunk most deeply into matter, he may once more tear himself free and turn again to his spiritual home.

[ 1 ] This course of lectures will take us into the high spiritual regions we shall be led from the earth, where we live, not only into the wide physical spaces of our universe, but also be uplifted to those spiritual worlds, from which this whole physical universe has derived its origin.

Such a course will show us, that the fundamental object of all knowledge and all wisdom is to solve the greatest problem of all — the problem of humanity. In order to make the human being understandable, explanatory facts have to be brought from far away. Above all it is necessary that those who wish to follow this course should be acquainted with the fundamental conceptions of Anthroposophy; although it is true that all Anthroposophists are acquainted with them in a general way. In these lectures we may rise in spirit to very exalted spheres, but we shall always endeavour to bring those facts which lie so far afield near to you and make them as comprehensible as possible.

[ 2 ] When we have to speak of what we call the Spiritual Hierarchies, it means that our souls' gaze must rise to those beings who, in the sphere of our earth, have a higher existence than man. In the visible world we can only progress to beings that represent four degrees of one hierarchy, i.e., the mineral world, the plant world, the animal world and the human world. Above man begins a world of invisible beings, through the knowledge of the super-sensible world, and man is able (as far as it is possible for him) to rise a certain distance towards those beings and powers, which are the continuation in the invisible world of the four grades found within the realm of the earth. The knowledge and investigation which lead us into those regions has not, as you all know, come into existence only at our present time in evolution. There is what we may call a primeval world-wisdom; — all that man can fathom, all that he can know and realise, all that he has gained in ideas and conceptions, all that he has attained through clairvoyant imagination, inspiration, and intuition, — all has been lived before, and known before, by those Beings who are higher than he. He only follows so to say, in their track. To make use of a trivial example: the watchmaker has first the idea, then he makes the watch according to the idea. A watch is made after the maker's ideas which preceded the watch; afterwards everyone can study and observe for himself from what ideas the watch was made, he can follow up the thoughts of the watchmaker. At the present point of evolution it is indeed only this kind of connection that man can have with primeval world-wisdom and with the spiritual beings that stand above him. Spiritual beings had first those imaginations, inspirations, intuitions, those ideas and thoughts according to which the world, as we see it, was formed. Man finds these thoughts and ideas in the world again; when he rises to clairvoyant vision, he finds the imaginations, inspirations, and intuitions, by the help of which he can penetrate into the world of those spiritual beings. We can, therefore, say that before our world came into being there already existed the wisdom of which we are going to speak: it is the Plan of the World.

[ 3 ] How far must we go back, while still remaining within the limits of reality, if we want to come into touch with that primeval world-wisdom? Must we go back to some time or other in the historical past, when some great teacher was teaching? We can certainly learn a great deal if we do; but to come into touch with true primeval world-wisdom we must go back to the time when there was no outwardly visible earth, when no world visible to the outer senses was as yet in existence. It was from out [of] that wisdom itself that the world came forth. But this wisdom, out of which spiritual beings formed our world, was imparted to man later. Man with his thoughts could see behind those thoughts, could realise the thoughts according to which spiritual beings have built the world. After this primeval wisdom, this wisdom of the creators of the world had worked through many forms, it appeared in a form known to many of you: after the great Atlantean period it appeared in those ancient, holy Rishis, the great teachers of India, during our first epoch of civilisation. [ 4 ] With these sublime Rishis the primeval wisdom expressed itself in a form which the man of the present day can but little understand. The human capacities of feeling and thinking have greatly changed since the times when the great teachers of India taught man in the first epoch of civilisation after Atlantis; and if the words which came from the Rishis were simply repeated as they were said, there would be hardly one soul in the whole earth who could hear anything more in them nowadays than just words and again words. One has need of other capabilities of feeling than those at present existing, in order to understand the wisdom which was given to humanity in the first epoch after Atlantis. For all that is found in the best books regarding primeval world-wisdom, is but a faint echo of what this really is which in many ways is but a deceptive, obscured wisdom. However grand and sublime the Vedas appear to us, however beautiful the songs of Zarathustra sound, and however magnificent the language in which the ancient wisdom of Egypt speaks, so that we can never sufficiently admire it; still, all that has been written down gives us but a dim, dull reflection of the wisdom of Hermes, of the grand teaching of Zarathustra, or of the sublime knowledge which the Ancient Rishis proclaimed. This sublime wisdom has been preserved and guarded for humanity; it was always to be found in certain very limited circles of people who watched over what is called the knowledge of the Mysteries. In the Mysteries of India, Persia, Chaldea, Egypt, and in the Christian Mysteries, all the primeval wisdom of humanity has been safely preserved up to our times. Up to a short time ago it was only in those narrow circles, that not book-wisdom, but living wisdom, could be found. For certain reasons which will be made clear in this course of lectures, our time has been chosen for extending to larger masses of people that which has been kept alive by those little groups. The original wisdom of the Rishis, for instance, has never lost life. It permeated, like the fountain of youth, the age which we regard as the beginning of our era. The very holy wisdom which the Rishis gave to man was continued through Zarathustra and his pupils, through the Chaldean and Egyptian teachers. It also flowed in the words of Moses, and it came forth again with. an altogether new impulse, as from the fountain of life, with the appearance of the Christ upon earth. It then became so deep, so intrinsically internal, that it could only gradually flow again into humanity. Thus we see that since the outward declaration of Christianity, the primeval world wisdom has penetrated but slowly and gradually into humanity from most elementary beginnings. [ 5 ] Its messages are there, they are to be found in the Gospels and in other Christian writings which include the wisdom of the holy Rishis, in a new form; like a new birth out of a new fountain. But how could these messages be understood at the beginning of the era for whose purification Christianity had been created? Through the Gospels it was least of all understood; they only attained very gradually to further comprehension and in many ways to a still further obscuration, and to-day the Gospels are, in truth, the most sealed of all books for the larger part of humanity — books which will only be first understood by a future age which will have refreshed itself at the source of the original world-wisdom. But the treasures hidden in the Christian revelation have been preserved, treasures no other than those of the Eastern wisdom, but renewed by means of fresh forces They have been guarded in narrow circles which were the continuation of Mystery Societies, like the Brotherhood of the Holy Grail, and finally in the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross. These treasures of truth have been kept well hidden and have been accessible only to those who through severe trials had prepared themselves for the living wisdom. Thus the treasures of the Eastern and Western wisdom, through all the centuries of evolution from the beginning of our era, were made almost inaccessible to the larger mass of humanity.

[ 1 ] Only a little trickled through here and there to the outer world: the most part remained a secret of the new Mysteries. [ 6 ] Then came a time when some of the contents of primeval wisdom, treasured in narrow circles, was allowed to be given out to larger masses of humanity in a language comprehensible to them. Since the last third of the nineteenth century or thereabouts one can speak of this world wisdom in a more or less unveiled form. It is only because certain things have taken place in the spiritual worlds that the Guardians of the Mysteries received permission to allow some of the ancient wisdom to penetrate to the outer world. All of you, my dear friends, know the course of development of the Anthroposophical Society. You know how the ice in which its development was bound was, so to say, broken by those words of wisdom, revealed in a way which I am not going to enter into now — the stanzas of Dzyan. Those stanzas of Dzyan, of the secret teaching, contain in truth some of the deepest and most important wisdom; they have in them much of that which coming from the teaching of the holy Rishis has flowed through the sanctuaries of the East. They contain also much of what has streamed into Western Europe since the Christian rejuvenation. For the stanzas of Dzyan do not include only the wisdom which had to be kept exclusively for the East, but also a great deal of that which streamed as a clear light through the centuries of our time, through the Middle Ages into the Mystery Schools of the West. Much that is to be found in the stanzas of Dzyan will only be gradually understood in all its depth. It may well be said here that the wisdom of the stanzas of Dzyan is of such a kind that it cannot yet be understood in the widest anthroposophical circles, or fathomed with the exoteric capabilities of the present day.

[ 7 ] After the first ice had been broken in this way, the time came when one could speak more openly from the sources of Western occultism, which is no other than the occultism of the East transplanted and continued in a way that has adapted itself to new circumstances and conditions of physical and spiritual life.

The time has come when one can speak from those ever living sources of occultism which have been faithfully treasured in the Mysteries of the Rosy Cross. There is no wisdom of the East which has not streamed into Western occultism and into the teaching and investigations of the Rosy Cross; in them is to be found absolutely all that the great teachers of the East ever had in their keeping. Nothing, nothing whatever of that which is to be found in the Eastern wisdom is lacking in the wisdom of the West. The only difference — if it can be called a difference — is that Western occultism has to include the whole of the Eastern wisdom and teaching and, without losing anything, to blend it with the light which has been kindled in humanity through the Christ Impulse. When one speaks of Western occultism, of that which has its derivation from the hidden Western Rishis (whom certainly no eye hath seen) it is impossible to say that in it is wanting one single iota, one single shred of the Eastern wisdom. Only it had all to be brought forth again fresh and new from the fountain-head of the Christ Impulse. All the great treasures of wisdom which were first revealed by the holy Rishis regarding superhuman worlds and super-sensible existence, resound in the description we have to give of the spiritual hierarchies and their reflection in the physical world. Just as the geometry of Euclid has not become something different from what it used to be, because one teaches and learns it with new human capabilities, just as little has the wisdom of the holy Rishis changed because we learn and teach it with the new capabilities which have been kindled in us by the Christ Impulse. Therefore much of what we have to say about the spiritual worlds can be called Eastern wisdom. There must not be any misunderstanding in these things — and misunderstandings happen so easily. [ 8 ] Those who will not free themselves of a misconception, in order to come to understanding, can very easily misinterpret what, for instance, was said yesterday at the Easter lecture. They might assert about the so-called truths of Buddha, that I had said that the Buddha had taught and revealed the truths about life and life's pain as follows: ‘birth is pain, illness is pain, old age is pain, death is pain; to be separated from those one loves is pain, not to be united with what one loves is pain, not to have what one desires is pain’ and that I said: ‘Let us look at those who, in the times after Christ, really understood the Christ Impulse; for all the holy truths of the Buddha about the pain of life have no more their full importance; something has been created by the Christ Impulse that is like a cure for the pain of life.’ The Buddha taught: ‘Birth is pain’; but those who understood the Christ would answer that through birth we enter into a life shared with the Christ, and through the Christ's share in it the pain of life will be extinguished. Illness will also be extinguished through the healing power of the Christ Impulse, and there is no more pain in illness for one who understands Christ, and death also has no more pain for him who understands Christ. Yet someone might reply to this ‘Yes, but I could point to the Gospels to show that also there you will find it said that illness is pain, life is pain’: and one might superficially come to the conclusion: ‘We have those modern religious documents, but what they contain can also be found in Buddhism, therefore religions are not making progress, there is no evolution in them. All religions say the same things, but you have spoken of a progress, you expounded to us how, with the help of Christianity, the old truths of Buddhism would not be true any more.’ If anyone were to say this he would be guilty of a very serious misunderstanding. For that was not said: everything indeed was said with the exception of the last sentence. It is very important that this very subtle question should be rightly understood. A fanatic can never understand with precision, but a man who is objective can. [ 9 ] No one who speaks with knowledge of Rosicrucian wisdom will ever expound anything that would be against any of the writings of the great Buddha, or say that anything in them is untrue. Every man who speaks from the sources of Rosicrucian wisdom shares the conviction of Buddha, no one denies it. ‘Yes,’ such a man says, ‘what thou, great Buddha, through thy inner illumination, hast seen of the great truths about pain and life is exactly true, it is true to its last iota.’ Nothing, absolutely nothing will be taken away from it. All of it remains as it was. And it is just because all of it remains as it was, because all is true of what the Buddha said about the pain of life, of illness, of old age and of death, just because of this, the Christ Impulse is such a powerful and important saving help to us, for it is just this which lifts the pain, because it is true that pain would be there, if the world could not be lifted beyond and above it through that great Impulse. Why could the Christ work effectively? Because the Buddha had spoken the truth. Humanity had to be brought down out of the spiritual heights where the primeval world wisdom is active in its purest form; man had to be led to independence, through physical existence with which life's pain and illness are bound up, and the great healing help had to oppose those unavoidable facts in the course of further evolution. Does that man deny the reality of facts who, while declaring that these realities exist, holds at the same time that remedy has been given us by which the facts, about which those truths have been said, can be brought to a salutary development; does he who says this deny any existing reality? Oh! in those heights of existence where we must look for the spheres of the spiritual hierarchies — there Buddhism is not opposed to Christianity, nor Christianity to Buddhism; there the Buddha gives his hand to the Christ, and the Christ to the Buddha. But every misconception regarding human evolution, every misconception as to its ascending development, is a misconception also of that spiritual act in our earthly evolution which is the Act of Christ.

Thus nothing is denied. of the wisdom of the East, the wisdom which has brought down to us the teaching of the holy Rishis, and with it the primeval world-wisdom, which through such long epochs of time has ever been streaming into humanity. But, all through those very long epochs, large masses of humanity could not penetrate to the sources of that wisdom, could only understand it with great difficulty; it was precisely the understanding of it which came with such difficulty. [ 10 ] In ancient Atlantean times, before the great catastrophe, when the masses of humanity were still clairvoyant with the thin ancient clairvoyance, they beheld something quite different when they looked upwards to the spaces of heaven, to the spiritual hierarchies, from what they saw in the times after Atlantis when the larger part of humanity had lost its clairvoyance and so could gaze only with its physical eyes into the physical distances of the heavens. Therefore, in the times before the Atlantean catastrophe, it would have been quite senseless to speak to them of the heavenly bodies spread out in space as they are to-day. The clairvoyant human eye gazed into heavenly distance and saw the spiritual worlds. In those times there would have been no sense in speaking of Mercury or of Neptune or of Saturn, etc., as our astronomy speaks. The way astronomy speaks of the spaces of the world and what they contain is merely a reflection of what is seen by our own physical sight when it looks into depths of the sky. This did not exist for the ancient clairvoyant humanity of Atlantis; when they looked upwards, they did not see physically-limited stars, what the physical eye sees to-day is but the outer physical expression of the spiritual realities which people then beheld. When looking to-day with one's physical eye through a telescope at the place where Jupiter is, one perceives a physical globe surrounded by moons. What was seen by the man of Atlantis when he lifted his clairvoyant gaze to that same point which we look at to-day with our physical eyes? The Atlantean's eyes would have seen as little of what our sight sees to-day, as we should if we looked at a light through a thick autumn fog. The eye of the Atlantean would not have seen the physical star Jupiter, but he would have seen that which is also united with Jupiter to-day, which the man of the present day does not see: the aura of Jupiter, a totality of spiritual beings, of which the physical Jupiter is only the external expression. Thus did the gaze of man, before the Atlantean catastrophe, sweep round the spaces of the world seeing everywhere its spiritual content. He could speak only of the spiritual, for it would have had no meaning to speak of physical stars, when the physical eye was not yet opened as it is to-day. Looking into the spaces of the universe man saw spiritual beings — the spiritual hierarchies. He actually saw beings. [ 11 ] We can compare the changes that took place with further evolution in this way: let us suppose that we are going out into a thick fog; we do not see separate lights, everything is surrounded by aura or fog. The fog lifts and disperses, the separate lights are visible, but their aura becomes invisible ... This is only a physical process which must serve for an example. But the ancient eye saw the aura of Jupiter, it saw spiritual beings in that aura which at certain points of their evolution were united to Jupiter. Humanity then developed further, to the attainment of physical sight. The aura remained: men could no longer see it, but the physical body in the centre became ever clearer and clearer, spiritually it was lost to sight as its corporeal part became visible. But the knowledge of the spiritual, the knowledge of the beings surrounding the star was kept and guarded in the holy Mysteries.

All the holy Rishis speak of that knowledge. In the times when men already saw only in a physical way, the Rishis spoke to them of the spiritual atmospheres, of the spiritual inhabitants of those spheres which are spread out in the spaces of the world.

[ 12 ] Consider what the situation then was. In the centres of knowledge, spiritual beings were spoken of which surround the spheres of the universe. Outside where the physical eye was growing always sharper, physical matter was spoken of more and more. When the Ancient Rishis said the word Mercury (they did not use that word, but we take it as an example), did they mean by it the physical orb of that name? No! — even the ancient Greeks did not use it in that sense; what they meant was the totality of spiritual beings belonging to that planet. Spiritual world and spiritual beings were spoken of when, in the centres of secret knowledge for instance, the word Mercury was pronounced. When the disciples of that sacred knowledge spoke of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn pronouncing these words in their different languages, they expressed the gradations of spiritual beings. When those names are used to-day, only the coarsest part is meant of that which was originally understood by Moon, Mercury, Venus. The principal part is just what is omitted to-day; the ancient teacher of wisdom said the word Moon and with that word he evoked the idea of a great spiritual world. When he, pronouncing the word ‘Moon’, pointed to the place in heaven where the moon was, he felt in his consciousness that it was the lowest stage of the spiritual hierarchies, but the man to whom he was showing it, who was getting ever further from that spiritual sight because humanity was growing more and more physical, saw only the physical moon, and called it ‘Moon.’

One single word for two things which, though they certainly belong to each other, call forth quite different ideas in man. It was the same when the sages of the sacred knowledge pointed to Mercury, Sun, or Mars. [ 13 ] Thus we see that the two currents grew always further apart in humanity, the spiritual one describing something quite different from the material current. In the sacred Mysteries these words — which later became the mere names of physical planets — were always understood as descriptions of spiritual worlds and gradations of spiritual realms. The outer world always understood it materially up to the time of modern Mythology — I use the word purposely — which is called Astronomy. And as Anthroposophy has recognised the full worth of all the other Mythologies, it has also, as you will understand, given full value to that Mythology which is called modern Astronomy, which sees only space and in it, the physical world-spheres as physical orbs. But to him who knows, modern Mythology is only a special phase of all Mythologies. What the ancient inhabitants of Europe said in their myths about gods and stars, what the Romans gave in their Mythologies, and what appeared as the obscured Mythology of the Middle Ages, lead up in a straight line to the wonderful and admirable discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo. A future will come when modern Mythology will be spoken of somewhat in this way: ‘There was a time when people found it right to place a material sun as the middle point of an ellipse and let the planets rotate within it, and spin round themselves on their own axes in different ways; they arranged a world system in that way, as people of earlier times also did. To-day’ — so will that future age think — ‘all that is only legend and fairy tale.’ Yes, that future age will come, although the man of the present who laughs at former Mythologies thinks it impossible that one could ever speak of Copernican Mythology. But this consideration will make clear to us how through the same words something ever more different may be meant. In spite of this the true primeval wisdom has always been cultivated and has always continued; it has however always been less understood exoterically and its spiritual side less seen, the more it has been materially explained.

In the beginning of our era, when there was a rejuvenescence of primeval wisdom, (in order that humanity should not lose all touch with that ancient wisdom), it was said. in sharp, clear words, that when man looks at the outer space of the world and his physical eye sees only what is physical, the space is filled with spirit. It was the most intimate pupil of St. Paul, Dionysius the Areopagite, who said in clear-cut words: ‘There is not only matter out there in space; there is, for the soul which rises consciously into the spaces of universal existence, the spiritual part which stands above man in the evolution of existence.’ And he used words which sounded different from the old ones, for if he had used the old words everybody would have understood them in the material sense. The Rishis spoke of the spiritual hierarchies, they expressed in their language what the Greek and Roman wisdom still described when speaking of the ascending scale of worlds: of the Moon, of Mercury, Mars and Venus, Jupiter and Saturn. Dionysius, the pupil of the Apostle Paul had the same worlds in his mind as the Rishis, he repeated in clear cut words that here one had to do with spiritual realms, and he used words which he could be certain would be understood in their spiritual sense: he spoke of Angels, Archangels, Archai, Powers, Mights, Dominions, Thrones, Cherubim, and Seraphim. For now humanity had completely forgot what it once knew. Had it still been able to understand the connection between what Dionysius and the Rishis had seen, it would have grasped, while hearing on the one side of the Moon, and on the other side of the Mysteries of the Angels, that these were one and the same thing. It would have heard the word Mercury on the one hand and Archangel on the other, and would have known they were the same. The word ‘Archai’ spoken by the one, and ‘Venus’ by the other, were the same. And men. would have understood that with the words ‘Sun’ and ‘Powers’ the same worlds were meant. With the name ‘Mars’ they would have felt that they had to rise to the Mights (Dynamis). When they heard Jupiter mentioned, they would have known that it was the same as when in the school of Dionysius, Dominions were described. Saturn corresponds to ‘Thrones’; [ 14 ] but in wider circles this was not known any more, it could not be known. Thus there was on the one side a science of matter, which became ever more material, and the old names which once signified spiritual forces, were now used in a material sense. And on the other side, there was a spiritual life which spoke of Angels and Archangels, etc. which had lost its connection with the physical designations of these spiritual beings.

Thus we see how the primeval wisdom enters through Dionysius into the school which Paul had inaugurated, and how this new inauguration had to be penetrated by the ancient spirit. It is the task of modern Spiritual Science, or anthroposophy to form once more the bond which must unite the physical to the spiritual, the bond between the earth and the spiritual hierarchies. It is impossible for those who do not know where their ideas about the outer world of the senses come from, to realise the other, the spiritual side of knowledge. [ 15 ] This will be particularly noticeable when we have to deal with those writings which, although they are but a faint echo of the primeval cosmic wisdom, can still be understood in the light of that wisdom.

Let me show you an example of the difficulty there is in understanding writings which come down to us from that primeval wisdom. It is an example out of the Song Celestial, the Bhagavad Gita, where a sentence throws a very significant light on the connection between human life and the hierarchies. It is the following: (8th Chap. beginning with 23rd verse) ‘I will explain unto thee, oh man seeking for truth’ (it is thus generally translated) ‘under what circumstances those who know the Eternal leave the earth through the gate of death, to be later reborn or not. I will tell thee: Behold the fire, behold the day, behold the time of the waning moon, behold the half year when the sun is high — those who die at that time, who die in fire, in the day, in the time of the waxing moon, those enter through the gates of death into Brahma, but those who die in the sign of the smoke, in the night, when the moon is waning, in the half year when the sun stands low, these when they leave the world and pass through the gates of death enter only into the light of the moon, and return again to the world.’ [ 16 ] Here you have, my dear anthroposophical friends, a sentence from the Bhagavad Gita, in which it says that the condition of man's progress and of his reincarnation depends on whether he dies in the sign of the light, by day, with the waxing moon, during the half year when the sun stands high, or whether he dies in the sign of the smoke, by night, when the moon wanes and when the sun is low. It is said that this refers to the material sun. Of those who die in the sign of the fire by day, with the moon waxing, and during that half of the year when the sun is high, it is said that they do not need to return. Those who die in the sign of the smoke, by night, with the moon waning, and when the sun is low, must return into the world. This sentence out of the divine song of the East presents the greatest difficulty to all those who want to explain it within the limits of exoteric life. It can be explained only when it is illuminated by the light of spiritual knowledge, by the light in which it was received and written, the light which streams out of the Mystery schools, which can be increased. which has known its rejuvenescence through Christianity and which shows us how to find the link which binds the names Moon to Angels, Mercury to Archangels, Venus to the Archai and so on. With its help we shall find the key to such sentences as the one we gave as an example. Our course of studies will start from the explanation of this sentence in the Bhagavad Gita, a thing which is impossible in exoteric life; and after we have found the key to it, we shall pass on to further explanations of the spiritual hierarchies.

In the lecture yesterday we heard that man spends the first period of his life between death and a new birth in the Moon sphere, preparing the forces that will eventually take effect in his karma. In the Moon sphere he encounters Beings who were once together with him on the Earth as the great primeval Teachers of humanity. These are the Beings with whom he comes into contact almost immediately after death; he also comes into contact with the Hierarchy of Beings to whom the book Occult Science: An Outline refers as the Angeloi. The Angeloi have never been inhabitants of the Earth in the literal sense; they have never borne earthly bodies, nor even etheric bodies resembling those of men. The etheric bodies of the other Moon Beings of whom I spoke were not altogether dissimilar from those of men, but those Beings did not incarnate in physical bodies.

The Angeloi are the Beings who in the present period of our cosmic evolution guide us from one earthly life to another, and it is from the Moon sphere that they guide us. We have heard how in this same sphere the human being lays the foundations of his karma, gathers into himself the impulses which will bring about its ultimate fulfilment. But whatever has passed with a man through the gate of death as the result of unrighteous deeds, deeds which cannot be tolerated by the spiritual worlds—all this ‘bad’ karma, if I may so express it, must be left behind in the Moon sphere. For as he moves onwards through his life between death and a new birth, a man could not be encumbered with the consequences and effects of his unrighteous deeds. When he passes beyond the Moon sphere his inner life has expanded into a still wider region of the Cosmos, and he enters the Mercury sphere. Here he lives, primarily, in communion with the Beings belonging to the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi. In all these realms, of course, he is in contact with human souls who have also passed through the gate of death. In the Moon sphere, these are the third class of beings among whom he lives—they are disembodied human souls who, like himself, have passed through the gate of death. We shall presently see why the spiritual effects of the bad karma must remain behind in the Moon sphere. For the moment, the fact itself will suffice.

When man enters the Mercury sphere, he undergoes further purification. Even when he has laid aside in the Moon sphere those moral attributes which are unfit for the Cosmos, the spiritual counterparts of his physical weaknesses, of his physical infirmities, still remain with him, as do the tendencies to illness and the effects of the illnesses from which he suffered here on Earth. Surprising as it may seem, it is the case that in the life between death and a new birth, man lays aside his moral failings first and his physical infirmities only later, when he enters the Mercury sphere. In the Mercury sphere his soul is purged of the inner effects of those morbid processes which came to expression in illness during his life on Earth and in his soul he becomes completely healthy. You must remember that man is a single whole. From the occult standpoint it is erroneous to speak of him as a compound of spirit, soul and body. He is not a compound of these three constituents, but when we observe him he is revealed on the one side as body, on the other as spirit, and between body and spirit, as soul. In reality, man is one whole, a self-contained unity. The soul and the spirit too are involved in the conditions which prevail in illness. And when man has laid aside the physical body at death, the effects of the experiences resulting from the disease-processes are, to begin with, still present in his soul. But in the Mercury sphere these effects are obliterated under the influences of the Beings we know as the Archangeloi.

You see, therefore, that having passed stage by stage through the Moon sphere and the Mercury sphere, man becomes a being from whom moral and physical weaknesses have been removed. Then—after the lapse of many decades—he enters the Venus sphere and there, as one who has lived through the spheres of Moon and Mercury, he is ready to pass from the Venus sphere into the Sun sphere where the longest period of life between death and a new birth is spent. The indications I am giving will show you how well-founded were the practices of those ancient Mysteries where men acted out of wisdom which, although it was an instinctive wisdom, was the outcome of wonderful powers of clairvoyance. In those olden times it would have been unthinkable to study medicine, for example, in the way that is customary nowadays. What happens now is that the purely physical symptoms of disease are observed and efforts are made to discover ameliorative measures by dissecting the corpse and observing the changes in evidence there, as compared with those which take place in the normal, living organism—and so forth. Such procedure would have been regarded as futile in the days of the ancient Mystery-wisdom when it was known that illumination leading to the healing of illness must come from the Beings of the Mercury sphere. For it was known that only if illumination proceeds from the whole nexus of cosmic processes can a man be healed fundamentally. The description of the Oracle of the Mercury Mysteries given from a different point of view in the book Occult Science indicates the nature of the practices in these Mysteries which were dedicated primarily to the ancient Art of Healing.

In the lecture yesterday we heard of the great primeval Teachers who were once together with men on Earth; wherever human beings dwelt, these Teachers were among them, peopling the etheric sphere of the Earth as a kind of second race. But in their dim, dreamlike consciousness men were aware that other Beings too came down among them, Beings whose abode has never been on the Earth. What has to be said about these things will of course seem not only paradoxical but sheer nonsense to the modern mind with its devotion to materialistic science. Nevertheless this ‘nonsense’ is the truth. The sages in the ancient Mysteries knew well that illumination on the processes of healing can be given only by the super-sensible Mercury Beings. And so through the sacred rites enacted in these Mysteries, spiritual Beings were able to come down from the Mercury sphere to the altars in the sanctuaries where the priests of the Mysteries conversed with them. The Beings who thus descended to the altars were known in the Mysteries simply as the God Mercury. The influence was the same, although it was not necessarily the same Being who descended on every occasion. Men's attitude to this sacred medicine in olden times was such that they said: the Art of Healing has been imparted by the God Mercury to his priest-healers.

Even to-day it cannot be said that Spiritual Science does not depend upon the help of Beings of the Cosmos who, when the necessary preparation has been made by Initiates, are able to come down to the Earth. Initiates of the Mystery-wisdom belonging to the modern age know well how much depends upon the possibility of conversing with Beings of the Cosmos. But the mentality prevailing to-day is utterly different from that of olden times. A doctor nowadays is one upon whom some University has conferred a medical degree, whereas in days of antiquity a doctor was one who had conversed with the God Mercury. But as time went on this converse took place no longer and only traditions remained of what was once achieved in the Mysteries when the priest-healers had conversed with the God.

In the Venus sphere it is a matter of leading over into the Sun sphere whatever still remains of the human being when his tendencies to unrighteousness and to illness have been eliminated. To understand this we must think of something that is characteristic of man. Here on Earth a man is always one whole, one undivided whole. Only if he is executed for some terrible crime is he no longer a single whole in respect of the physical body. However severe the punishment he may receive for lesser transgressions, he is still one whole. But this is not the case with the soul-and-spiritual counterpart which has passed through the Moon sphere and the Mercury sphere. When as a being still possessed of soul and spirit in the super-sensible world after death, man has cast off the weaknesses due to the wrongdoings and to illnesses, he is in a certain sense no longer whole. For a man is one with his wrongdoings; his sinfulness is part of him. If someone were so utterly villainous as to possess no good qualities at all, his whole being would have to remain in the Moon sphere and he could make no further progress; for to the extent to which we are evil, to that extent we leave our own being behind in the Moon sphere. We are one with, identical with, what is evil in us according to the standards of the spiritual world. Therefore when we arrive in the Venus sphere, we have been mutilated in a certain respect. In the Venus sphere the element of purest Love prevails—purest Love in the spiritual sense; and it is this Cosmic Love that bears what now remains of the human being from the Venus sphere into the Sun existence.

There, in the Sun existence, man has to work in a very real way at the moulding and shaping of his karma. Now if our physicists were ever to reach the Sun they would be astonished, to say the least of it! For everything that men claim to have discovered about the Sun is at variance with the facts. The Sun is supposed to be a kind of globe filled with incandescent gas—but that is far from the truth. Let us take a rather commonplace illustration. If you have some Seltzer water in a glass you will have to look carefully if you want to see the actual water, for what you see are the bubbles in the water. These bubbles are less dense than the water itself and you see what is the less dense. And now, what about the Sun? When you look at the Sun you do not see it because it is a globe of densified, incandescent gas in empty space, as science alleges, but you see it because just at that place there is a condition of utmost rarefication.—And now you must get accustomed to an idea that is far from familiar.-

You look out into space—I am not going to speak now about the nature of space. Here, when you look into the water, there are bubbles everywhere—bubbles which are thinner, less dense than the water. Where the Sun stands in the sky, conditions are less dense even than space. You will say: ‘but space itself is void, it is nullity.’ Nevertheless at the place where the Sun is situated there is actually less than nullity. It should not be difficult, especially in these days, for people to think of something else that is less than nothing. If there were originally five shillings in my pocket and I spend them one by one, in the end I have nothing. But when I get into debt I have less than nothing—which is the plight of a good many people to-day! Very well, then: where there is space, space alone, there is nothing; but where the Sun is there is less than nothing, there is a lacuna in space—and there dwell the spiritual Beings referred to in the book Occult Science as the Exousiai, the Dynamis, the Kyriotetes. There they have their abode, sending their own essence and power through all creation. Among them man spends the greater part of his life between death and a new birth. In association with the Exousiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes, with human souls karmically connected with him who have also passed through the gate of death, and with yet other Beings whose existence is hardly even conjectured, the karma for the next earthly life is worked out and formulated. Conditions in this Sun region are not as they are on Earth. Why do our clever scientists—and clever they certainly are—picture the Sun as a globe of incandescent gas? It is because a certain illusory, materialistic instinct makes them want to detect physical processes in the Sun. But there is nothing physical in the Sun. One may at most speak of physical processes in the Sun's corona, but certainly not in the Sun itself. In the Sun there is nothing like natural law, for it is a world of purest spirit. Materialists would like to insist that the Sun too is under the sway of natural law, but it is not so. The only laws prevailing in the Sun are those which give effect to the karmic consequences of the Good and which operate in restoring the mutilation man has undergone as the result of his ‘bad’ karma when he has been transported by the Love of the Venus Beings into the Sun sphere. When the life of man between death and a new birth is described many will wonder how this very lengthy period is spent. Many things that happen on the Earth command admiration and awe, but the most sublime achievements of earthly civilisation are puny and insignificant in comparison with what is accomplished in a purely spiritual way during this Sun existence, when mighty Powers are all around and within us, working to the end that our karma shall take effect in the next earthly life.

The elaboration of part of man's karma is completed in the Venus sphere, and some part even in the Mercury sphere. Later on we shall hear of a certain well-known historical personality whose destiny in his incarnation in the nineteenth century was due to the fact that his karma was very largely wrought out in the spheres of Venus and Mercury. Souls who begin to give shape to their karma in these spheres often become personalities of outstanding significance in the subsequent incarnation. But in the great majority of cases the main part of the karma for the following earthly life is worked out in the Sun sphere, where the longest period is spent. We will speak in greater detail later on but to-day I will give an outline of how the foundations of karma are laid, stage by stage, in the various spheres. In order not to be confused by other descriptions I have given of the life between death and a new birth, you must be clear that in moving through these spheres man enters into entirely different conditions of cosmic existence. When the time comes for him to enter the Mars sphere, he is still not altogether outside the Sun sphere, for the influences of the Sun are still active in this part of the Cosmos which was once cast off by the Earth. In the Sun sphere, man is concerned only with his moral qualities and with those attributes of his being which have remained healthy; the rest has been laid aside. It persists in him as a kind of incompleteness but this is made good in the Sun sphere. During the first half of existence in the Sun sphere we are engaged in making preparation for the appropriate physical organisation of the next earthly body. During the second half of the Sun existence, in union with the Exousiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes, and with human souls karmically connected with us, we are concerned with the preparation of the moral side of karma, the moral qualities which will then be present in the next life. But this moral part and the spiritual part of karma—for example, specific talents in one direction or another—are then further elaborated in the Mars sphere, in the Jupiter sphere and in the Saturn sphere. And in passing through these spheres we come to know what the ‘physical’ stars are in reality.

To speak of a ‘physical’ star is not really correct. For what is a star? Physicists imagine that combustion of gas or some process of the kind is taking place in the sky. But as I said, if they could actually get there they would be amazed to find no burning gas in the Sun but actually a lacuna, a gap in space, in a condition infinitely more rarefied than any particles of earthly matter could ever be. Everything is Spirit, pure Spirit. Nor are the other stars so many bodies of incandescent, burning gas, but something entirely different. Bordering on this Earth with its physical substances and physical forces, is the universal Cosmic Ether. We are able to perceive the Cosmic Ether because, as we gaze into it, our field of vision is circumscribed and the surrounding ether appears blue. But to believe as materialistic thinkers do, that physical substances are roaming around up there in the Cosmos is just childish fancy. No physical substances are moving around, for at the place where a star is seen, there is something altogether different. The farthest reaches of the etheric would lead out of and beyond space, into the spheres where the Gods have their abode. And now picture to yourselves a certain inner relationship which may exist between one person and another and comes to physical expression. Picture it quite graphically. You are caressed by someone who loves you. You feel the caress but it would be childish to associate it in any way with physical matter. The caress is not matter at all, it is a process, and you experience it inwardly, in your soul. So it is when we look outwards into the spheres of the Ether. The Gods in their love caress the world. But the caress lasts long, because the life of the Gods spans immense reaches of time. In very truth the stars are the expression of love in the Cosmic Ether; there is nothing physical about them. And from the cosmic aspect, to see a star means to feel a caress that has been prompted by love. To gaze at the stars is to become aware of the love proceeding from the divine-spiritual Beings. What we must learn to realise is that the stars are only the signs and tokens of the presence of the Gods in the Universe. Physical science has much to learn on its path from illusion to truth! But men will not achieve self-knowledge nor will they understand their own true being until this physical science has been transformed into a spiritual science of the worlds beyond the Earth. Science in its present form has meaning only for the Earth, for physical matter in the real sense [The difference between physical and mineral matter must be remembered here.] exists only on the Earth. And so when we depart from the Earth at death, we enter more and more into a life of purely spiritual experiences. The reason why our physical life presents an entirely different aspect in these backward-streaming experiences which continue for a third of the length of earthly existence, is that we have been permeated with the essence and substance of the Moon sphere. The preparation of karma is one of the many things that have to be accomplished in the worlds of the stars.

In order that one set of facts may be supported by others, let me explain how such observations are made by one who is versed in modern Initiation Science. For some time now, even in public lectures, I have been describing how when a man develops the faculty of genuine super-sensible perception through the methods indicated in the book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, he looks back over his earthly life, seeing it as a kind of tableau. Everything is present simultaneously, in a mighty panorama of the whole of life since the birth of the ‘I’; but the several epochs are in a certain respect distinct from each other. We survey our experiences from birth until the change of teeth, then again, as one complete series, the experiences occurring between the time of the change of teeth and puberty, then the experiences of the period from puberty until the beginning of the twenties, and so forth. Further concentration and application of the methods for the attainment of spiritual knowledge enable us, as we survey this tableau, to observe, firstly, our life from birth to the seventh year. But later on these pictures are allowed to fade away and we see right through our life; when the consciousness has been emptied of all pictorial impressions and we have achieved Inspiration, we behold the living, weaving activity of the Moon sphere in place of the tableau of early childhood from birth until the seventh year. We behold this living, weaving activity. And so Initiation in the form that is normal and right for this present age brings us knowledge of the secrets of the Moon sphere, when the pictures of our own life up to the seventh year are obliterated in the consciousness of Inspiration and we perceive what now flashes up in their place.

Then, if we observe the tableau of life between the seventh and fourteenth years and again obliterate the pictures in the consciousness of Inspiration, we gaze into the Mercury sphere. Everything has to do with the being of man, for man is an integral part of the whole Universe. If he learns to know himself as he really is, in the innermost core of his being, he learns to know the whole Universe. And now I would ask you to pay attention to the following.—Deepest respect arises in us for the old, instinctive Initiation Science which gave things that have remained in existence to this day, their true and proper names. Designations that are coined nowadays result in nothing but confusion, for modern scholarship is incapable of naming things in accordance with reality. An unprejudiced observation of life will fill us with reverence for the achievements of ancient Initiation Science. Ancient Initiation Science knew by instinct something that is confirmed to-day by statistics, namely, that the illnesses of childhood occur most frequently in the first period of life; it is then that the human being is most prone to illness, and even to death; after puberty this tendency abates, but the healthiest period of all, the period when mortality is at its lowest, is between the ages of seven and fourteen. The wise men of old knew that this is due to the influences of the Mercury sphere and again to-day we may make the same discovery when through modern Initiation Science we penetrate the secrets of existence. Such things fill us with reverence for these sacred traditions of humanity.

By looking back into our experiences from the fourteenth to the twenty-first years and obliterating the pictures in the consciousness of Inspiration, we are led to the secrets of the Venus sphere. Here again the wonderful wisdom of ancient Initiation Science comes into evidence. The human being reaches puberty; love is born. When the pictures of this period of life are illumined by Initiation Science, the secrets of the Venus sphere are disclosed. Everything I am now describing is part of the true self-knowledge which unfolds in this way.

When the pictures of experiences occurring between the twenty-first and forty-second years of life are eliminated in the consciousness of Inspiration, we are led to the Sun sphere. Through deepened self-knowledge the secrets of the Sun sphere can be experienced in this retrospective contemplation of the events of our life between the twenty-first and forty-second years. To acquire knowledge of the Sun existence our vision must cover a period three times longer than that of the periods connected with the other planetary bodies.

I told you that the karma of a certain well-known personality in history had taken shape paramountly in the spheres of Mercury and Venus, and you will now understand how such things are investigated. We look back, firstly, into the period of our own life between the seventh and fourteenth years, and then into the period between the fourteenth and twenty-first years; when the pictures have been eliminated in the consciousness of Inspiration, light is shed upon the secrets of the Mercury sphere and the Venus sphere. Through this illumination we perceive how such an individuality worked together with the Beings of the higher Hierarchies and with other human souls, and how his subsequent earthly incarnation in the nineteenth century took shape.

Now if the elaboration of karma has taken place mainly in the Mars sphere, investigation is more difficult. For if a man attains Initiation before the age of 49, it is not possible for him to look back into the period of life which here comes into question, namely, the period between the forty-second and forty-ninth years. He must have passed his forty-ninth year if he is to be able to eliminate the pictures of this particular set of experiences and penetrate the secrets of the Mars sphere. If Initiation is attained after the age of fifty-six it is possible to look back into the period between the forty-ninth and fifty-sixth years of life, when karma that is connected with the Jupiter sphere takes shape. And now we are at the point where the various sets of events come together in one connected whole.

It is not until the period between the fifty-sixth and sixty-third years can be included in this retrospective vision that we are able to survey the whole range of experiences and to speak out of our own inner knowledge. For then we can gaze into the profoundly significant secrets of the Saturn sphere. Karmas that were wrought out mainly in the Saturn sphere operate in mysterious ways to bring men together again in the world. In order to perceive all these connections in the light of Initiation Science itself—they can of course be explained and so become intelligible—but in order to perceive with independent vision and be able to judge them, we must ourselves have reached the age of sixty-three. A human being appears in some earthly life—thus for example there is a certain great poet of whom I shall speak later—and we find that through his faculties, through his literary creations, he was giving expression to that in his karma which could have been wrought out only in the Saturn sphere.

When we look up to the Sun, to the planetary system—and the same applies to the rest of the starry heavens for they are connected in a very real way with the being of man—we can witness how human karma takes shape in the Cosmos. The Moon, the planets Venus, Jupiter—verily these heavenly bodies are not as physical astronomy describes them. In their constellations, in their mutual relationships, in their radiance, in their whole existence, they are the builders and ¹ shapers of human destinies, they are the cosmic timepiece according to which we live out our karma. As they shine downwards from the heavens their influences have real power. This was known in the days of the ancient Mystery-wisdom but the old Astrology—which was a purely spiritual science, concerned with the spiritual foundations of existence—has come down to posterity in a degraded, amateurish form. Anthroposophy alone can contribute something that will enable us to perceive the spiritual connections as they truly are and to understand how through the great timepiece of destiny, human life on Earth is shaped according to law.

From this point of view let us think of the human being and his karma. Those who with the help of Anthroposophy evolve a healthy conception of the world as against the unsound views prevailing to-day, will unfold not only quite different concepts and ideas but also quite different feelings and perceptions. For you see, if we really understand the destiny of a man, we also learn to understand the secrets of the world of stars, the secrets of the Cosmos. But nowadays people write biographies without the faintest inkling that something is really being profaned by the way in which they write. In times when knowledge was held to be sacred because it issued from the Mysteries, nobody would have written biographies in the way that is customary to-day. Every ancient ‘biography’ contained indications of the influences and secrets of the world of stars. In human destiny we can perceive, firstly, the working of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai; then of still loftier Sun Beings, Exousiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes; then of the Thrones who are concerned mainly with the elaboration of karma in the Mars sphere; then of the Cherubim who elaborate the karma belonging to the Jupiter sphere; and then of the Seraphim who work together with man at the elaboration of karma in the Saturn sphere—Saturn karma. In a man's destiny, in his karma, we behold the working of the higher Hierarchies. This karma, at first, is like a veil, a curtain. If we look behind this veil we gaze at the weaving deeds and influences of Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, Exousiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes, Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim. Every human destiny is like script on a sheet of paper. Just imagine that someone looking at the writing on the paper were to say that he can see signs - K - E - I, and so forth, but he is quite unable to combine these letters into words! As there are some twenty-two to twenty-eight letters (to be exact, about thirty to thirty-four in all) such a man could only conceive that the whole of Goethe's Faust is made up entirely of those thirty-four letters. He cannot read, therefore he sees only the different letters. When someone else finds a great deal more in Faust because he can combine the letters into the words of which this wonderful work is composed, an out-and-out illiterate with no notion of how to read may say with horror: Here is someone who actually thinks that all kinds of things are contained in Faust—but he is an utter fool! Yet the whole of Faust does actually consists of these letters. Similarly, when we observe the karma of a human being in the ordinary way, we see letters only; but the moment we begin to read this karma we behold the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai and their mutual, interrelated deeds. The destiny of an individual human life becomes the richer, the more we get beyond the thirty-four letters and find in them—Faust! And the picture of a human destiny is enriched beyond measure when earthly ignorance is transformed into knowledge of the Cosmic Alphabet, when we realise that the letters of that script are the signs and tokens of the deeds of the Beings of the higher Hierarchies.

To a man who beholds it, the vista of karma as the shape taken by destiny in life is so overwhelming, so sublime and majestic that simply by understanding how karma is related to the spiritual Cosmos he will unfold quite different qualities of feeling and discernment. It will not remain so much theoretical knowledge. What we acquire through Anthroposophy should not be a mere accumulation of theoretical information but should work more and more upon our life of thought and feeling, in that it rids us of the notion that we live an earthworm's existence and makes us aware that we belong to the land of Spirits. Verily, we are citizens not of the Earth alone but of the land of Spirits. The whole existence we have spent between death and a new birth converges in that which, on Earth, is enclosed within our skin. The secrets of worlds are contained in a particular form within this encircling skin.

Self-knowledge is by no means the trivial sentimentality of which there is so much talk nowadays. Human self-knowledge is world-knowledge. And so when friends have given me an opportunity, I have often written down for them the following lines:

If thou would'st know thy Self,
Look out into the Cosmic Spaces.
thou would'st fathom the Cosmic Spaces,
Look inwards, into thine own Self.

Willst Du Dein Selbst erkennen,
Schaue hinaus in die Weltenweiten.
Willst Du die Weltenweiten durchschauen,
Blicke hinein in das eigene Selbst.

The preceding considerations have essentially been concerned with showing how man in this day and age can gain an awareness of his present position in the evolution of mankind on earth. Even in circles that today do not want to know about the knowledge of spiritual worlds, some conception of this consciousness of the relationship of man to the universe is formed. And let us recall something that is much spoken of today in this connection, in this direction. Where all views of the universe are derived from the outer sensory events and the intellectual grasp of these sensory events, it is also said that the whole world consciousness of modern man has changed over the last few centuries. Attention is drawn to the great change that has taken place in this world consciousness of man through the Copernican world view.

We need only look back to the centuries that preceded the Copernican worldview; we need only look back, for example, to the scholastic worldview, which has been mentioned again here recently, and we find that for this worldview, spiritual forces and spiritual beings were present in the world of the stars. We hear how the scholastics spoke of the inhabitants of the stars, who belong to higher hierarchies in the development of their natures.

Thus, the people of this world view have directed their gaze out into the universe, have looked towards the planets of our planetary system, and towards the other stars in the night sky, and they have developed an awareness that not only etheric-material light from the starry worlds penetrates to them, but that, so to speak, when they look at the starry sky, the eyes of spiritual beings, whose outer embodiment can be seen in the stars, fall into their souls. Today, when man looks up at the planets and the other stars, he first of all forms an idea of how material bodies, permeated by ether, are floating freely in space, and how light emanates from these stars. But man does not think at all of the fact that from these stars the glances of spiritual beings of higher hierarchies meet him.

For modern man the Universe has become dead and unspiritual. And in the sphere of earthly existence, the man of ancient times found that which was intimately connected with the spiritual life of the universe. In the spiritual beings of the other stars were creative powers that had something to do with what develops spiritually and soul-wise here in man, spiritually, soul-wise and bodily, we might say. Men have looked up, let us say, to Saturn. They saw in the forces that come down from Saturn to Earth with the rays of light those forces that work within the human being and bring about the power of memory in this human being. They looked up to Jupiter, saw Jupiter connected with spiritual beings of higher hierarchies, who send their effects into man, so that the consequence of these effects in man is the development of the power of imagination. They looked up at Mars: they were of the view that the forces that work into man from the spiritual entities of Mars give man the power of reason.

Thus, a person belonging to an older stage of human development on Earth looked up at the starry sky and saw in the starry sky the origins of that which he perceived in himself spiritually, soulfully and physically. Man felt that he belonged together with beings of higher hierarchies, and man saw the outer revelations of these beings of higher hierarchies in the stars.

With the advent of the Copernican worldview, this world view also fell away. For it will be understood that an earth, which was seen as being under the influence of the immeasurable spiritual forces of the universe, was, one might say, also a gift of the whole universe for man, that man, by living on earth, saw in this earth the confluence of the effects of innumerable entities. Man felt, as it were, as a citizen of the earth, but, in feeling as such, at the same time as a citizen of the universe.

He looked up to the gods, worshiped his gods, but spoke of these gods in such a way that it was in their intentions to determine the course of human development on earth. The earth was explained in terms of its history, the earth as a dwelling place for man was explained from what was understood of the cosmos, what was understood of the universe. The earth was explained from heaven, and the gods were sought for the intentions for what was seen in the orbit of earthly events, and with which man was intimately connected.

What has emerged from the Copernican worldview gives modern man a completely different view of the world. Man increasingly felt that the earth is an insignificant world body flying around the sun. And when he reflected in a modern way on the relationship between this earth and the rest of the universe, he could not help but call this earth a speck of dust in the universe. All the other celestial bodies that his eye could see seemed more important to him than the earth, because external physical size became decisive for him. And in terms of this, the earth can hardly compete with a few celestial bodies.

Thus, for man, the earth became more and more a mere speck in the universe, as it were, and man felt insignificant in the cosmos on this insignificant earth, insignificant in the universe. With his spiritual powers, he was no longer connected to this universe. It must have seemed impossible for him to believe that what happens on this insignificant speck of dust in the universe, called Earth, is connected with the intentions of divine beings in the universe. One would like to say: All that man has seen on earth, because he recognized that heaven is populated by spirits and spiritual forces, all that has been lost to man in modern times. The universe has been desensualized and de-spirited. The earth has shrunk to an insignificant speck of dust in a world that has been de-spirited and de-spirited.

One must understand such a change in the world picture not only from the standpoint of a theoretical explanation of the world, but also from the standpoint of human consciousness itself. Man, who saw himself on an earth influenced by innumerable spiritual beings that had their realization, their intentions in man of the earth, otherwise knew himself, otherwise these views affected man, than the more spiritual space, in which glowing, spatially formed globes stand and move, of which one conceives no other activity than movement in space, than the revelation through light. How different must the human being, who now knew himself to be on one of the smallest of these world bodies, feel in the spiritless, soulless space, than within earlier world pictures. And yet, this conception of the world must have arisen in the course of the evolution of mankind. What an older mankind once knew about the heavens and their inhabitants, the divine spiritual beings, was indeed the inspiration, the imagination of an ancient dream-like clairvoyance, which was something that as such clairvoyance had descended from the universe into man. One must only imagine this correctly. When people in ancient times looked up at Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and saw divine spiritual forces at work in these heavenly bodies, it was because these revelations penetrated from the heavenly bodies themselves into their inner being and were reflected in them, so that through the influences of the universe, of the cosmos, they knew within themselves what was flowing from the cosmos into the earth. And so, through what heaven gave him, the earth became intelligible to him. Man looked up to his gods and knew what being he is on earth. In the modern conception of the world, he does not know any of this.

In the modern world view, the Earth has shrunk to a speck of dust in the universe, and now man stands as a small, insignificant creature on this speck of dust. Now the gods of the stars no longer tell him anything about plants, animals and the other kingdoms of the earth. Now he must direct his senses only to what lives in the mineral, plant, animal, and human kingdoms, what lives in wind and wave, what dwells in clouds, lightning and thunder. Now he can receive no revelations other than those that his senses give him about the things of the earth, and he can then only conclude from the revelations of the things of the earth about what is in the universe, according to the sensual and intellectual revelation.

Man has undergone this significant transformation in the fifth post-Atlantean period, which signifies the development, the unfolding of the consciousness soul. Everything that had previously come to him from the universe, and which then shone again within his soul, had to be squeezed out of him, so that he could stand there and say to himself: I know nothing but that I live on a speck of dust in the universe. This universe gives me nothing that enlightens me about the spiritual and soul life within me. If I want to experience such spiritual and soul life within me, I must extract it from my own being. I must renounce the idea that the revealing powers come to me from the vastness of the universe. I must fill my soul through my own efforts and activity, and perhaps hope that something in what wells up out of my soul is alive, which, conversely, gives me an insight into the universe from the human point of view.

In the past, man had the opportunity to gain insight into himself as a human being through what the universe revealed to him. He was able to see himself as the son of heaven because the heavens told him what he was as such a son of heaven. Now man had more or less become the earth's hermit, who in the solitude of his life on the dust-grain of the universe must gather strength in order, so to speak, to develop in solitude that which can be developed in him, and to wait to see whether that which reveals itself within is something that can shed light on the universe.

And for a long time, for centuries, what was revealed within was not about the universe. Man described the mineral kingdom according to spatial-temporal forces. He then described the workings of this mineral kingdom in geognosy, in geology. He described the outer sensory processes, how they take place, how plants sprout out of the mineral ground of the earth. He also described the sensory processes that take place in the inner being of the animal and the physical human being itself. He looked around everywhere on earth, inquiring what his senses told him about this earthly existence. Above all, they told him nothing about his own soul, about his own spirit. It was precisely out of this cosmic mood, if one grasped it properly, out of this mood, which can be expressed in the words: I, a human being, am an earth hermit on a speck of dust in the universe — it was precisely out of this mood that the impulse had to come to develop the truly human in free inner unfolding.

And a great, all-embracing question had to arise: Is it really true that in the whole range of what my senses can see, feel, hear, etc., here on earth, what can be combined by the intellect from them, is it really true that there is nothing in this range that gives me more than these senses can tell me? Man has developed a science. But this science, however interesting it may be, says nothing about man. It aims at abstract, dead concepts, which then culminate in natural laws. But all this leaves man indifferent. Man cannot possibly be merely the confluence of these abstract concepts, I would say, this receptacle for all natural laws! For these laws of nature have nothing spiritual, nothing of the soul about them, although they are conceived out of the human spirit.

You see, the person who felt this mood at a time of great significance for the development of world views was the young Goethe. And the expression of what he felt is what he wrote in the first form that he gave to his “Faust”.

Let us recall how Goethe, in the very first form he gave to his “Faust”, really presents this Faust, still remembering what it is that man should seek in the universe, how he would like to feel as a spirit and soul within spirits and souls, but how he feels rejected by the soulless and unspiritual world. How he then reaches for the old revelation of the mystical, the magical, opens an old book in which he finds descriptions of how the higher hierarchical beings live in the stars and their movements, a book that speaks of how heavenly forces ascend and descend and pass golden buckets to each other.

Such a view had existed, but in the times in which Goethe places Faust, such a view no longer captivates people. And Faust turns away, as Goethe himself turned away from the old explanation of the universe, which sought a spiritual and soul element in the whole universe, and he opens the book of the Earth Spirit. And then we read the remarkable words with which the Earth Spirit speaks:

In the flood of life, in the storm of action,
I surge up and down,
I weave to and fro!
Birth and grave,
An eternal sea,
A changing weaving,
A glowing life,
So at the whirling loom of time I labor,
And work the living garment of the Godhead.

But that there is something not quite right in the encounter between this Earth Spirit and Faust is clearly shown by Goethe in that Faust falls under the effect of this Earth Spirit, and that he is then exposed to the influences of Mephistopheles.

If you look at the monumental, succinct words of the Earth Spirit from the point of view of a concrete world view and are unbiased enough to make an assessment that was actually close to Goethe's own feelings, in that he did not stop at the Earth Spirit scene when writing Faust , but continued, if one considers all this, then one must fall into a kind of heresy in the face of much of what has been said and printed about “Faust,” but which certainly does not reflect the real opinion, the real view of Goethe. After all, what has not been said in connection with “Faust”!

You keep looking back to the words that Faust speaks to Gretchen, who is around sixteen years old, later in the course of the Faust epic: “the all-embracing, all-sustaining... Feeling is everything, name is sound and smoke,” and one feels so tremendously philosophical when quoting all that the expression is supposed to mean for one's own soul concepts, and now also quoting what Faust gives as instruction to a teenage girl. It is a schoolgirl instruction. It is actually compromising that one can cite this schoolgirl instruction from people who want to be clever as the quintessence of what one puts into words as a world view. This does indeed result, even if it is heretical, in an unbiased consideration.

But something similar also applies to the lapidary, monumental words spoken by the Earth Spirit: “In the floods of life, in the storm of action” and so on. They are beautiful, these words, but very general; we find something of a mystical pantheism of a sensually nebulous kind in them. I would say that it does not feel cloudy to us when we have this before us:

In the flood of life, in the storm of action
I surge up and down,
I weave to and fro!
Birth and death,
An eternal sea,
A changing weaving,
A glowing life,
So at the whirling loom of time I labor,
And fashion the living robe of divinity.

Nothing happens that does not give us the ability to look concretely into the universe, into the cosmos.

Goethe certainly felt this, especially later, because he didn't stop there, he wrote the Prologue to Heaven. And if we take the prologue in heaven: “The sun resounds in the old way, in the spheres of the brothers' song” and so on, then it is much more reminiscent of the heavenly powers that float up and down and pass the golden buckets than of the somewhat nebulous tides and weaves of the earth spirit. Goethe returned from – well, one cannot say the 'divinization of the earth spirit', but something similar. Later, as a more mature person, Goethe no longer regarded this earth spirit as the one to which he wanted to turn solely and exclusively in the form of Faust, but he took up again the spirit of the great world, the spirit of the universe. And even if the words spoken by the Earth Spirit in the first version of Faust are beautiful, succinct and monumental, these words spoken by the Earth Spirit are also distantly related to the “All-embracing, All-sustaining One” and the teachings of the sixteen-year-old schoolgirl. only distant kinship – these words spoken by the Earth Spirit also have a distant kinship with the “All-embracing, All-sustaining One”, with the instruction of the sixteen-year-old schoolgirl. Why shouldn't they be beautiful for that reason? Of course, when instructing schoolgirls, one must take particular care to say things beautifully! Why shouldn't they be beautiful?

But of course we have to be clear about the fact that Goethe, as a mature man, did not see in nebulous pantheism that which gives man a real world-consciousness.

But there is something else at the root of it. Goethe, with his concrete way of looking at the things of the world – at least to a certain degree – would not have been able to draw his Faust in the way he did if he had portrayed him as a representative of humanity for the 12th century of Western civilization. He would have had to take on a different form, but he would never have been able to draw this form as he drew his Faust. Faust should not have put aside the book of Nostradamus and turned from the spirit of the great world to the earth spirit, because at that time there was an awareness that man, when he understands himself correctly, understands himself as a son of heaven, and the spirits of heaven have something to say to him about his own nature. But Faust is the representative of humanity who belongs to the 16th century, thus already to the fifth post-Atlantic period, the period that approaches the view: I live as the earth hermit on a speck of dust in the universe. It would no longer have been honest of the young Goethe to have Faust look up to the spirit of the great world. As a representative of humanity, this could not be the case with Faust, because in his consciousness, the human being no longer had any connection with the heavenly powers that rise and descend and pass the golden buckets to each other, that is, with the entities of the higher hierarchies. That was darkened, that was no longer there for human consciousness. So Faust could only turn to that with which he could be connected as an earthen hermit: He turned to the genius of the earth.

That Faust turns to the genius of the earth is something, I would say, radically grandiose, which occurs in Goethe: for this is the turn that human consciousness has taken in this age, away from the darkening powers of heaven to the genius of the earth, to whom the spirit itself has pointed, which has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha. For this genius, who has passed through the mystery of Golgotha, has connected himself with the earth. By connecting himself with the evolution of humanity on earth, he has now given man the power, in the time when he can no longer look up to the spirits of heaven, to look to the spirits of the earth, and the spirits of the earth now speak in man. Formerly it was the stars in their motion that revealed the words of heaven to the human soul that could interpret and recognize these words of heaven. Now man had to look at his connection with the earth, that is, ask himself whether the genius of the earth speaks in him.

But only nebulous words, mystically pantheistic words, can Goethe in his age wrest from the genius of the earth. It is right, it is magnificent that Faust turns to the genius of the earth, but I would like to say that it is quite magnificent that Goethe does not yet let this genius of the earth express anything that can already satisfy. That the Genius of the Earth first stammers and stutters, I might say, the secrets of the world into mystic pantheistic formulas, instead of pronouncing them in a sharply defined manner, shows that Goethe has placed his Faust in the age in which he saw his Faust and himself.

But one must feel one's way towards this relationship between Faust and the Earth Genius, so beautifully portrayed by Goethe, so that the Earth Genius will gradually become more and more understandable to man, so that he will reveal himself more and more clearly to man when man allows the activity of his own soul, the activity of his own spirit, to reveal what is in the heavens. Formerly the heavens revealed to man what he needed to know for the earth; now man turns to the earth, because the earth is, after all, a creature of the heavens. And if one gets to know the genius or genii that have taken up their residences on earth, then one nevertheless gets to know things about the heavens.

That was also the procedure adopted, for example, in my book 'Occult Science: An Outline of Its Methods'. There, everything within the human being was questioned and asked to speak. There, much was actually drawn from the spirit of the earth. But the spirit of the earth speaks about the Saturn age, the Sun age, the Moon age of the earth, the Jupiter age, the Venus age. The spirit of the earth speaks to us of what it has retained in its memory of the universe. Once upon a time, people turned their gaze out into the vastness of the heavens to gain insights about the earth. Now, they look down into the human soul, listen to what the spirit of the earth has to say about human nature from the memory of the world, and through their understanding of the genius of the earth, they gain macrocosmic knowledge. Today, of course, if one attaches the right importance to spiritual science, to spiritual knowledge, one would no longer present Faust's conversation with the Earth Spirit as Goethe did, although in his time it was ingenious to present it in this way.

Today, the earth spirit should not speak in those general, abstract words that can be said to express anything from a floating water wave to a spirit of the earth. Only that is mystically dark, because this floating wave of water is now sitting at a loom and weaving! I know, of course, that many people feel extraordinarily well when such vagueness stirs in them through the soul; but one does not thereby attain the inner human conscious stabilization that one needs as a modern person. There is always something of a reverie or even of intoxication about it: “All-embracing, All-sustaining,” “in the tides of life, in the storm of action,” one is always a little beside oneself, not quite in oneself. It certainly gives people a sense of well-being when they can be a little beside themselves; some people prefer to be completely beside themselves and let all kinds of ghosts give them insights into the world.

By this I would just like to suggest that we cannot do otherwise in modern times than to turn to the genius of the earth that lives in ourselves! The fact of the matter is this: if we simply take what the scientific ideas of modern times give us, as it is, as it is laid down in external civilization today, then it remains abstract, leaving human consciousness cold. But when one begins to wrestle with these concepts, to wrestle even with Haeckel's abstractions, then something very concrete, something that can be experienced directly, comes out of this wrestling: Then the great realization comes over us that although we initially receive the indifferent scientific ideas, this form is only a mask. We must first realize that the genius of the earth is telling us what we receive. We must first listen with the whole ear of the soul to what we initially hear with the abstract mind. And in this way we learn to understand the genius of the earth in a concrete way by listening.

In this way we approach the way in which man, in the age of consciousness soul development, must attain world consciousness. These things must be grasped by the human being in a way that is felt. Then, with feeling, I would say with his heart's blood, he approaches the anthroposophical world feeling. And this, not just individual ideas about the world, but this world feeling, must be acquired by the modern human being if he wants to feel and think in the right way, in accordance with the suggestions that I have made here recently.

Tomorrow, my dear friends, I will continue these reflections. Today, I would first like to say a few words to you about the state of the negotiations in Stuttgart. These negotiations are connected with what you have noticed as a kind of crisis within the Anthroposophical Society.

At this moment, the Anthroposophical Society must decide in its leading personalities whether it has viability or not. You have also heard various things here about the living conditions of the Anthroposophical Society. I would just like to say a few words about this today: this anthroposophical movement started in Central Europe. But it is of interest to the broadest international circles. And anthroposophy itself has gone through the three phases I spoke to you about last time. The Anthroposophical Society has not fully kept pace with the development of anthroposophy, and today there is an abyss between the work of the Anthroposophical Society and the reality of anthroposophy as it can be found today. This abyss must be bridged. And since the anthroposophical movement originated in Central Europe, it is a matter of fact that conditions must first be put in order in Central Europe. Then, when they are in order in Central Europe, we must immediately think about the order of the international anthroposophical societies, which will then have their center here or elsewhere. But the vagueness in which the Anthroposophical Society finds itself today must first be resolved. For this reason, the first step was to work on the consolidation of the Anthroposophical Society in Stuttgart.

Now the negotiations were extremely difficult. This crisis arose for the reasons I mentioned here on January 6, and the situation is as follows: on December 10, I gave a kind of mandate to one of the members of the Central Council, Mr. Uehli. I said at the time: It has been noticeable for a long time that the Anthroposophical Society needs consolidation, and I can only hope for success if the Central Board in Stuttgart, supplemented by leading personalities in Stuttgart, tells me the next time I am in Stuttgart how they would like to begin the consolidation; otherwise, if the Central Board does not come up with ideas about the consolidation, I would have to approach each individual member myself. Only this alternative is possible. —

You can see from this, my dear friends, that what was presented as a necessity for the consolidation of the Society was said on December 10; so it has nothing to do with the fire. After the fire, after this terrible catastrophe that has shattered our hearts, it must be said: if reconstruction is to happen, a strong Anthroposophical Society is needed; because without it, reconstruction would not be possible.

So it is imperative that a consolidation, an inner strengthening, a clear will of the Anthroposophical Society comes about.

This has involved very difficult negotiations in recent weeks, initially in Stuttgart. I said: They have to happen first, then they will be able to be on international ground. Well, I would have to tell you a book, a very thick book, if I wanted to tell you everything that has been negotiated in these weeks. But basically it was inconclusive until yesterday. And the day before yesterday I suggested that, now things have turned out this way, a kind of committee should deal with drafting a circular letter in which the great questions affecting the Anthroposophical Society and movement today be brought to the attention of the members; that such a circular letter call for the calling of a meeting of delegates in Stuttgart, initially for the German and Austrian branches, so that work can be done on this consolidation [see $. 268].

This committee, whose effectiveness is initially intended only until the delegates' meeting, which is to take place at the end of February, on February 25, 26 and 27, is a provisional one. Until this delegates' meeting, it is to have the leading position in the Central European Anthroposophical Society. The representatives on the committee are Dr. Unger, a member of the old Central Executive Council, and Mr. Leinhas, representing the “Kommenden Tages”; then, as a result of the circumstances, there are a number of prominent Stuttgart citizens: Dr. Rittelmeyer, Mr. von Grone, Mr. Wolfgang Wachsmuth, Dr. Palmer, Dr. Kolisko; from elsewhere, Mr. Werbeck from Hamburg and, representing the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Press, Miss Mücke. This committee has been entrusted with the preparatory work for the consolidation. After all the other efforts failed, a draft of the appeal to the assembly of delegates was produced yesterday. It is to be finalized and sent out at the beginning of next week and is to include the real issues facing the Anthroposophical Society today. So that is what I have to announce for the time being.

The negotiations were indeed accompanied by widespread dissatisfaction. After we had finished the negotiations on the draft appeal yesterday morning, I was able to speak to the members of our academic youth movement who were particularly concerned; so I hope that during the days I am now here in Dornach, the young will negotiate with the old in an appropriate way. The day before yesterday I expressed it in this way: I said, “I hope that now, taking into account the new committee, the young will be accepted by the old among the young.”

Something like this had to take place, because everywhere people are demanding a new, fresh element of life. That must come. Youth is knocking at the gates. It has every right to do so; it must be understood. But age cannot be ignored; it must be allowed to work; the foundations of the Anthroposophical Society have come out of it. A modus operandi must be found as quickly as possible that will lead to a strong Anthroposophical Society, otherwise we will not be able to continue our work.

I wanted to share this with you today so that you are informed about these matters. The old Central Executive Council has ceased to exist, and this committee will now manage affairs until the end of February.

Yesterday we had to speak of the path pursued by man between death and a new birth; and the whole gist of my remarks will have shown you that every night during sleep we must return to the starting-point of our earth-life.

We can indeed gain insight into these significant matters if we realize that on sinking into slumber we do not stand still at the date reached in the course of our earthly existence (as was already explained in the previous lectures), but that we actually go back to our starting-point. Every time, during sleep, we are carried back to our childhood, and even to the state before our childhood, before our arrival on earth. Hence, while we are asleep, our ego and our astral body return to the spiritual world, to the world of our origin which we left in order to become earth men.

At this point of our discourse, it becomes necessary to let pass before our soul in greater detail what the human being undergoes while asleep; undergoes unconsciously, but, nonetheless, most vividly.

The duration of our sleep does not really matter. Although it is difficult for our ordinary consciousness to conceive of the fact that time and space conditions are utterly different in the spiritual world, we must learn to form conceptions of such a kind.

I have already said that the human being, when suddenly awakened after he has fallen asleep and hence lost consciousness, experiences during that brief moment whatever he would have experienced, had his sleep continued for a long time. In measuring the length of our sleep according to its physical duration, we take into account only our physical body and our etheric body. Utterly different time-conditions prevail for that which is undergone by our ego and astral body. Hence the things that I shall presently explain to you are valid for either a long or a short sleep.

When the human personality enters the realm of sleep with his soul, the first state experienced by him—all this takes place in the unconscious, yet with great vividness—engenders a feeling in him of dwelling, as it were, in a general world ether. (In speaking of feeling, I mean an unconscious feeling. It is impossible to express these matters otherwise than by terms used in ordinary conscious life.) The person feels himself, as it were, disseminated into the whole cosmos. We cease to have the definite perceptions, which formerly connected us with all the things surrounding us in our earthly existence. At first, we take part in the general weaving and surging of the cosmos. And this is accompanied by the feeling that our souls have their being in a bottomless element. Hence the soul, while existing in this bottomless element, has an ardent desire for divine support. Thus we experience every evening, when falling asleep, the religious need of having the whole world permeated by an all-encompassing divine-spiritual element. This is our real experience when falling asleep.

Our whole constitution as human beings enables us to transfer this desire for the divine into our waking life. Day in and day out, we are indebted to our nightly experiences for renewing our religious needs.

Thus only a contemplation of our entire being enables us to gain insight into the various life-experiences undergone by us. Fundamentally, we live very thoughtlessly if we take into account only the conscious life passed between morning and evening; for many night experiences are interwoven with this. The human being does not always realize whence he derives his living religious need. He derives it from the general experiences undergone by him every night just after having fallen asleep—and also, although perhaps less intensively, during an afternoon nap.

Then, in our sleep, another stage sets in—all this, as was said before, being passed through unconsciously, but nonetheless vividly. Now it does not seem to the sleeper that his soul is, as it were, disseminated into the general cosmos, but it seems as if the single parts of his entity were divided. Were our experiences to become conscious, we would feel as though we were being disjointed. And, from the bottom of our soul, an unconscious fear rises up. Every night, while asleep, we experience the fear of being divided up into the whole universe.

Now you might say: What does all this matter, as long as we know nothing about it? Well, it matters a great deal. I should like to explain, by means of a comparison, how much it matters.

Suppose that we become frightened in ordinary daily life. We turn pale. The emotion of fear is consciously felt by the soul. A definite change in our organism makes us turn pale. The blood streams back into the body's interior. This is an objective process. We can describe the emotion of fear in connection with an objective process taking place, in daily conscious life, within the physical body. What we experience in our soul is, as it were, a mirrored image reflecting this streaming away of the blood from the body's surface to its inner parts. Thus an objective process corresponds, in the waking state, to the emotion of fear. When we are asleep, a similar objective process, wholly independent of our consciousness, occurs in our astral body.

Anyone able to form imaginative and inspired conceptions will experience this objective process in the astral body as an emotion of fear. The objective element in fear, however, is actually experienced by man every night, because he feels himself being divided into parts inside his soul. And how is he being divided? Every night he is divided among the universe of stars. One part of his soul substance is striving towards Mercury, another part towards Jupiter, and so forth. Yet this process can only be correctly characterized by saying: During ordinary sleep, we do not actually penetrate the worlds of stars, as is the case on the path between death and a new birth. What we really undergo every night is not an actual division among the stars, but only among the counterparts of the stars which we carry within us during our entire earth life. While asleep, we are divided among the counterparts of Mercury, Venus, Moon, Sun, and so forth. Thus we are concerned here not with the original stars themselves, but with their counterparts in us.

This emotion of fear, experienced by us relatively soon after falling asleep, can be removed only from that human being who feels a genuine kinship to the Christ. At this point, we become aware how much the human being needs this kinship with the Christ. In speaking of this kinship, it is necessary to envisage man's evolution on earth. Mankind's evolution on earth can be comprehended only by someone having real insight into the significant turning point brought to human evolution by the Mystery of Golgotha. It is a fact that the human beings before the Mystery of Golgotha were different with regard to soul and spirit from the human beings after the Mystery of Golgotha had occurred on earth. This must be taken into account, if man's soul is to be viewed in its true light.

When the human beings who lived before the Mystery of Golgotha—and these human beings were actually we ourselves in a former life—fell asleep and experienced the fear of which I have just spoken, then the counterpart of the Christ in the world of stars existed for the human beings of that time as much as did the counterparts of the other heavenly bodies. And as the Christ approached the sleeping human being, He came as a helper to dissipate fear, to destroy fear. People of earlier ages, still gifted with instinctive clairvoyance, remembered after awaking, in a dream-like consciousness, that the Christ had been with them in their sleep. Only they did not call Him the Christ. They called Him the Sun-spirit. Yet these people, who lived before the Mystery of Golgotha, avowed from their innermost depth that the great Sun-spirit was also the great guide and helper of the human being, who approached him every night in sleep and relieved him of the fear of being disseminated into the universe. The Christ appeared as a spirit strengthening mankind and consolidating its inner life.

Who binds together man's forces during his life? asked the followers of ancient religions. It is the great Sun-spirit, who firmly binds together man's single elements and combines them into one personality. And this avowal was uttered by the followers of ancient religions, because their consciousness was pervaded by the memory that the Christ approached man every night.

We do not need to be amazed at these things. In those ancient times when the human being was still capable of instinctive clairvoyance, he could look back at significant moments of his life into the period passed through by him before his soul and spirit descended to earth and was clothed in a physical body. Thus it seemed quite natural to the human being that he could look upward into a pre-earthly existence.

But is it not a fact that—as we explained before—every period of sleep carries us back into pre-earthly existence, into an existence preceding the stage before we became a truly conscious child? This question must be answered in the affirmative. And just as human beings knew that they had been together, in their pre-earthly existence, with the exalted Sun-spirit who had given them the strength to pass through death as immortal beings, so they also consciously remembered after every sleep that the exalted Sun-spirit had stood at their side, helping them to become real human beings, integrated personalities.

The human soul, while acquainting itself with the world of planets, passes through this stage during sleep. It is as if the soul were first dispersed among the counterparts of the planets, and then united and held together by the Christ.

Consider that this whole soul-experience during sleep has changed, with regard to the human being, since the Mystery of Golgotha. For the Mystery of Golgotha has originated the unfolding of a vigorous human ego-consciousness. This ego-consciousness, pervading human culture only gradually after the Mystery of Golgotha, became especially apparent after the first third of the fifteenth century. And the same vigorous ego-consciousness, which enables the human being to place himself as a free, fully self-conscious being into the sense world, this same consciousness—as though trying to maintain equilibrium—also darkens his retrospect into pre-earthly existence; darkens his conscious memory of the helping Christ, Who stood at his side during sleep.

It is remarkable that, since the Mystery of Golgotha, human evolution has taken the following course: On the one hand, man acquired a vigorous ego-consciousness in his waking state; on the other hand, utter darkness gradually overlaid that which had formerly radiated out of sleep-consciousness. Therefore human beings are obliged, since the Mystery of Golgotha, to establish a conscious relationship to Christ Jesus while they are awake. They must acquire, in a conscious way, a comprehension of what the Mystery of Golgotha really signifies: That, by means of the Mystery of Golgotha, the exalted Sun-spirit, Christ, descended to earth, became a human being in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, passed through earth-life and death, and, after death, still taught His disciples who were permitted to behold Him in His etheric body after death.

Those personalities who acquire, in the time following the Mystery of Golgotha, a waking consciousness of their kinship with the Christ, and gain a living conception of what took place through the Mystery of Golgotha: to these the possibility will be given of being helped by the Christ impulse, as it is carried from their waking state into their sleep.

This shows us how differently human sleep was constituted before and after the Mystery of Golgotha. Before the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ invariably appeared as Helper while the human being slept. Man could remember even after awaking that the Christ had been with him during his sleep. After the Mystery of Golgotha, however, he would be utterly bereft of the Christ's help, if he were not to establish a conscious relation with the Christ during the day while awake and carry its echo, its after-effect, into his sleep. Only in this way can the Christ help him to maintain his personality while asleep.

What the human being had received unconsciously from the wide heavenly reaches before the Mystery of Golgotha: the help of the Christ, the human soul must now acquire gradually by establishing a conscious relation with the Mystery of Golgotha. This inner soul-responsibility has been laid upon the human being since the Mystery of Golgotha. Thus we are unable to study the nature of human sleep, unless we are able to envisage the immense transformation undergone by human sleep since the Mystery of Golgotha.

When we enter the realm of sleep, our whole world becomes different from that experienced in the waking state. How do we live as physical men while awake? We are confined, through our physical body, by natural laws. The laws working outside in nature are also working within us. That which we recognize as moral responsibilities and impulses, as moral world order, stands like an abstract world amidst the laws of nature. And because present-day natural science takes into account only the waking world, it is completely ignorant of the moral world.

Thus natural science tells us—although hypothetically, yet in conformity with its principles—that the Kant-Laplace primeval fog marked the starting-point of world evolution; and that this world evolution will be terminated through a state of heat which will kill all living things and bury them, as it were, in a huge cosmic cemetery. (These conceptions have been modified, but still prevail among natural scientists.) Natural science, in describing the evolution of the cosmos, begins and ends with a physical state. Here the moral world order appears as a stranger. The human being, however, would not be aware of his dignity, would not even experience himself as a human being, unless he experienced himself as a moral being. But what moral impulses could be found in the Kant-Laplace primeval fog? Here were nothing but physical laws. Will there be moral impulses when the earth shall perish from heat? Then, also, nothing but physical laws will prevail. Thus speaks natural science. And out of the natural process germinate all living things, and out of living things the human soul-element. The human being forms certain conceptions: One should act in a certain way; or one should not act in that way. He experiences a moral world order. But this cannot be nurtured by natural law. To the waking human being, the moral world order appears like a merely abstract world amidst the rigid, massive world of natural laws.

It is entirely different when imaginative, inspirative, and intuitive consciousness passes through that which the human being, between falling asleep and awaking, experiences in his ego and astral body. Here the moral world order appears real, whereas the natural order below appears like something abstract, something dream-like. Although it is difficult to conceive of these things, they are nonetheless true. The whole world has been turned upside down. To the sleeper acquiring clairvoyance in his sleep, the moral world order would seem something real, something secure; and the physical world order of natural laws would seem to sink below, not rise above, the moral world order. And if the sleeper possessed consciousness, he would not place the Kant-Laplace theory at the starting-point of world evolution, and the death through heat at its end. At the starting-point, he would recognize the world of spiritual hierarchies—all the spirit and soul beings who lead man into existence. At the end of world evolution, he would again recognize the spirit and soul beings who extend to man who has passed through the course of evolution a welcome to enter their community. And below, as an illusion, the abstract physical world order would have its welling and streaming existence. If you were gifted with clairvoyance in the very midst between falling asleep and awaking, you would view all the natural laws of which you have learned during the day as a mirage of dreams, dreamed by the earth. And it would be the moral world order which would give you a firm ground. And this moral world order could be experienced by us if we worked our way—after having received the help of the Christ—into the peace of the fixed stars in the firmament, seen by us again, during nightly sleep, in the form of their counterparts. Soaring upward to the fixed stars, to their counterparts, we look down into the physical realm of natural law.

This is the wholly divergent form of the experiences undergone by the human being between falling asleep and awaking, and leading his soul every night into the image of the cosmos. And just as the human being is led at a certain moment between death and a new birth, as I explained yesterday, by the moon forces into earthly existence and is beset by a sort of longing for earthly existence, so is he beset by the longing, after experiencing heavenly existence in his sleep, to immerse himself again into his physical body and etheric body.

While we get accustomed to earth-life after our birth, we live in a sort of sleep and dream state. If we, disregarding our dreams, look back in the morning, after being awake for an hour, to the moment of awaking, our consciousness is halted abruptly and we see behind us the darkness of slumber. It is similar when we look back into our childhood. In our fourth or the fifth year, sometimes earlier, sometimes later, our consciousness comes to a stop. Beyond the last stage that we can still remember lies something which is as deeply immersed in the darkness of the sleep and dream life of early childhood as is the life of the human soul immersed every night in the darkness of sleep. Yet the child is not wholly asleep, but is wrapt in a sort of waking dream. During this waking dream occur the three important phases of human life which I indicated yesterday. As they occur in the sequence characterized by me, we can see in them echoes and after-effects of the life between death and a new birth. First the child learns, out of a life wrapt in dream and sleep, what we call simply learning how to walk.

Something all-encompassing happens when a child learns how to walk, something which appears as a grandiose and overwhelming process to anyone able to perceive how the subtlest parts of the human body are changed at this time. The child, by adapting himself to the relationships of gravity, learns how to attain equilibrium. The child no longer falls down. By unfolding inner forces, he conforms to spatial directions.

What if we had to do all this consciously: overcome the lack of equilibrium that pulled us to the ground, adapt our organism to a firm state of equilibrium with regard to the three spatial directions, and even maintain this state of equilibrium by swinging our legs like pendulums as we learn how to walk? The child, in performing such a grandiose mechanical task, performs it as an echo of what he experienced while dwelling among spirits between death and a new birth. Here we encounter something so comprehensive, so marvelous, that the most eminent engineer, with all his earthly scientific equipment, could not calculate how the child's human forces adapt themselves to the world's spatial connections. What we, as a child, attain unconsciously is the most miraculous unfolding of mathematical-mechanical, physical forces. We call it simply learning how to walk. Yet in this learning how to walk lies an element of utmost grandeur.

Simultaneously, the correct use of arms and hands is attained. And by placing himself, as physical being, within the three spatial directions, the human being receives the foundation for all that is called learning how to talk.

The only thing known to physiology about the connection between man's dynamics of walking and standing and the faculty of speech is the fact that the speech-center of right-handed persons lies in the left portion of the brain. The gestures of the right hand, vigorously executed by means of man's willpower, are led, by some mysterious process, into the interior of the brain whence the faculty of speech is brought to the human being.

More, however, exists than this connection between the right hand and the third convolution at the left, the so-called Broca cerebral convolution. The whole mobility of arms and fingers; the human being's whole ability to move and maintain equilibrium reaches up into the brain, becomes part of the brain, and thence reaches down into the larynx. Language develops out of walking, out of the grasping of objects, out of gestures flowing from the organs of movement.

Anyone viewing these things correctly will know that a child with the tendency to walk on his toes speaks differently from a child walking on his heels; employs different shadings of sound. The organism of speaking develops from the organism of walking and moving. And speech is again a counterpart of that which I described yesterday as the outpouring of revelation upon the human being passing through the stage between death and a new birth. The child, when learning how to speak, does not grasp the words with his thoughts, but alone with his emotions. He lives in the language as if it were an emotional element; and a child of normal development learns conceptual thinking only after acquiring the faculty of speech. A child's thoughts actually develop out of the words. Just as walking and the grasping of objects, the gestures of legs and hands, reach up into the speech organism, so all that lives in the speech organism and is gained through adaptation to the language of the surrounding world, reaches up into the thought-organs. In the third stage, the child learns how to think.

While encompassed by this dream and sleep state, the child passes through three stages: walking, speaking, and thinking. These are the three terrestrial counterparts of that which we experienced between death and a new birth: living contact with the spiritual world, revelation of the spiritual world, and the gathering of the world ether in order to form our etheric body.

The child's development during these three stages can be correctly estimated only by someone observing the adult human being during his sleep. Here we can observe how we, when sleep puts a stop to our thoughts—for our thoughts are silenced by sleep—let our thought-forces be nurtured, between falling asleep and awaking, by those beings known to us as angels, as Angeloi. These beings, approaching us during sleep, nurture our thought-forces while we cannot do so ourselves.

During sleep, the human being also ceases to talk. Only in abnormal cases, which could be explained, does he talk in his sleep. At present, however, we may disregard these things. The normal human being ceases to talk after going to sleep. Would it not be altogether too dreadful, did people keep on chattering while asleep? Hence speech ceases at that time. And what makes us speak is nurtured during the time between falling asleep and awaking by beings belonging to the hierarchy of the Archangeloi.

If we disregard the sleep-walker, who is also in an abnormal condition, human beings are quiet while asleep. They do not walk, they grasp no objects, they do not move. That which pertains to man's waking life as forces which call forth the movements out of his will is nurtured, between going to sleep and awaking, by beings belonging to the hierarchy of the Archai.

By comprehending the manner in which the hierarchical beings above the human kingdom—Angels, Archangels, Archai—approach the ego and astral body, approach the entire human being during sleep, we can also understand how the little child masters the three activities of walking, speaking, and thinking. We recognize how it is the work of the Archai that brings to the little child, as he masters the dynamics of life, as he masters the faculty of walking and handling objects, what the human being has experienced, between death and a new birth, by coming into contact with spirit and soul beings. Now, the counterpart of these experiences comes forth with the learning to walk of the little child. It is the Archai, the primeval powers, who transmit to the child that learns how to walk the counterpart of all the spiritual movements emanating, between death and a new birth, from spirit and soul beings.

And it is the Archangels that transmit what the human being experiences, between death and a new birth, by means of revelation; they are at work when the child masters speech. And the Angels carry down the forces developed by the human being when, out of the whole world ether, he gathered the substance for his etheric body. The angels, bringing down these forces, mold their counterparts within the thought-organs, which are plastically formed in order that the child may learn thinking by means of language.

You must keep in mind that Anthroposophy does more than look at the physical world and say: It is based on something spiritual. This would be much too easy. By such a way of thinking, we could acquire no real conception of the spiritual world. Someone who is determined to repeat in philosophic terms that the physical world rests on a spiritual foundation, would be like a man who when walking across a meadow is told by his companion: Look, this flower is a dandelion, these are daisies, and so forth. The first man, however, might reply: Indeed, I am not interested in these names. Here I see flowers, just flowers in the abstract. Such a person would be like a philosopher who recognizes only the pantheistic-spiritual element, but refuses to discuss the concrete facts, the particular formations of the spiritual.

What we are given by Anthroposophy shows us how the divine spiritual dwells everywhere in life's single formations. We look at the way in which the child passes from the clumsy stage of crawling to that of walking. Looking in admiration and reverence at this grandiose world phenomenon, we see in it the work of the Archai, who are active when the experiences we undergo between death and a new birth are transformed into their earthly shape.

We follow the process through which the child produces speech out of his inner self; we follow the activity of the Archangels; and, when the child begins to think, the activity of the Angels. And all this has a deeply significant, practical side. In our materialistic age, many people have ceased to regard words as something genuinely spiritual. More and more, people use words only for the purpose of naming physical objects in the outer world. Think how many people in the world are unable to form the slightest conception of spiritual things; this is because the words have no spiritual significance for them and are used merely in connection with physical objects.

For many people, speech itself has assumed a materialistic character. It can be used only in connection with physical things. Undeniably, we live within a civilization making language, more and more, into an instrument of materialism. And what will be the consequence?

The consequence will become apparent to us if we look, with regard to language, at the connection between the waking and the sleeping state. While we remain awake during the day, we talk with others. We make the air vibrate. The way in which the air vibrates transmits the soul content which we wish to convey. The soul impulses of our words, however, live in our inner being. Every word corresponds to a soul impulse, which is the more powerful, the more our words are imbued with idealism; the more we are conscious of the spiritual significance contained in our words. Anyone aware of these facts will clearly recognize what lies behind them. Think of a person who uses words in a merely materialistic sense. During the day, he will not differ greatly from others whose words contain an idealistic, spiritual element, who know that words must be given wings by the spirit. At night, however, the human being takes the soul and spirit element of language, together with his ego and astral body, into the spiritual world. He returns again to his spiritual origin.

Those possessing only a materialistic speech cannot establish a connection with the world of the Archangels. Those still possessing an idealistic speech are able to establish this connection with the world of the Archangels.

The tragedy inherent in a civilization whose materialism is expressed even by its language has the consequence that the human being, by letting his language become wholly materialistic, may lose the nightly connection with the world of the Archangels. For the genuine spiritual scientist, there lies indeed something heart-breaking in present-day civilization. People who forget more and more to invest their words with a spiritual content lose their rightful connection with the spiritual world; with the Archangels. And this terrifying fact can be perceived only by someone envisaging the true nature of the sleeping state.

It is impossible to become a real anthroposophist without rising above mere theory. We may remain perfectly indifferent while developing theories on June bugs, earth worms, and cells. Such theories shall certainly break nobody's heart. For the way in which June bugs and earthworms grow out of a cell is not apt to break our heart. But if we acquire anthroposophical knowledge in all its fullness, we look into the depths of man's being, of man's evolution, of man's destiny. Thus our heart will ever be interlinked with this knowledge. The sum of this knowledge will be deposited in the life of our feelings, our emotions. Hence we partake of the whole world's feelings, and also of the whole world's volition.

The essence of Anthroposophy consists in the fact that it grasps not only the human intellect but the whole human being. Thereby it illuminates, with the forces of feeling and sentiment, the destinies of culture and civilization, as well as the destinies of single persons.

We cannot take part genuinely in human experiences on earth, unless looking also at the other side, the spiritual side, as it is unveiled to us through our knowledge of the sleeping state that leads us back into the spiritual world. Thus spiritual science can be truly at one with human life, understood in its spiritual and ultimately its social, religious, and ethical significance.

This spiritual science is to become real science which leads to wisdom. Such life giving science is greatly needed by mankind, lest it fall into deeper and deeper decline, instead of making a new beginning.

If we look back on the descriptions given yesterday, we shall be aware that man, living through successive times after death—and we have to use the word “time” in relation to physical conditions—comes first of all to the realm of the Moon Beings, and then passes on to that of the Sun Beings. The Moon Beings still belong to earthly-existence in a certain sense and the experiences a man goes through under their influence in the soul-world are indeed cosmic memories of earthly existence. He has experiences also of his own earthly life, though now in a backwards direction, and these are united with the judgments of the Cosmos, as I called them yesterday. These cosmic judgments are made known to men after death through the Moon Beings. We then come under the influence of these Beings, and it is they who cause the judgments to flow into us, in the same way as those that flow into us, here on Earth, from minerals, plants and animals. So we can say: On entering spiritual-cosmic existence after death, a man gains his first glimpse into such cosmic perceptions as still proceed from Beings once connected with the Earth. We have already had occasion to speak of how these Beings, before taking up their abode in the cosmic stronghold of the Moon, were Teachers of human beings in the ancient Mysteries. Hence, what a man once experienced on Earth, in primeval times, he now experiences when journeying through the soul-world, under the influence of those Beings who have been raised—we might perhaps say—to become inhabitants of the Moon. We can truly speak of them in this way if sufficient consideration is given to what was said in my last lecture. These inhabitants of the Moon, under the leadership of the one-time Teachers of mankind, judge quite differently from the way things are judged by people on Earth. For people on Earth, in their life between birth and death, are now approaching a stage completed by the Moon-dwellers in long past ages.

Reckoning by earthly years, we must say that the inhabitants of the Moon, when on Earth, accomplished quite 15,000 years ago what human beings still have to do. More than 15,000 years have passed since these Moon inhabitants acquired the power of making judgments which bring together the naturalistic and the moral.

We on Earth keep our naturalistic judgments separate, and when giving an opinion about a stone or an animal we leave morality aside. We say: “Nature follows only an amoral necessity.” But this is not true of the world as a whole. Even though we may consider that moral judgments are not applicable to individual animals, or to plants, or to minerals above all, in their separate forms of existence, yet the very fact of their creation, of their being in the world at all, is entirely the result of cosmic moral judgment.

Now these Moon-dwellers already judge in terms of cosmic morality. Therefore, when we have passed through the gate of death and are together with them, we must listen to all the Cosmos has to say about what we have thought, wished, felt, willed and done on Earth. Our entire earthly life is exposed to the light of cosmic judgment, and we learn the value our deeds have for the whole great universe.

From these lessons we develop the impulse to complete, to correct, or in some way to set right, during our next life on Earth, whatever we have done either to help or to hinder the evolution of the world. And so, while thus under the influence of the Moon Beings, we take up the impulses for our future destiny—for our karma, as oriental wisdom has always called it. These impulses are thus absorbed while the human being is still under the influence of dwellers in the Moon, who are able to tell him how much his earthly deeds and thoughts are worth for the Cosmos.

The spiritual Beings of the higher world, in whose neighbourhood a man lives while under the influence of the Moon-dwellers, are those grouped together in my Occult Science as the Hierarchy of Angels, Archangels, Archai. Of the ranks of Beings whose realm a man enters after death, they are the first who do not have to live through a phase of earthly embodiment. On their side, they stand in close connection with the Beings of the still higher Hierarchies. But it is with this Hierarchy of Angels, Archangels and Archai that a man is essentially concerned during his Moon existence after death, while the higher Hierarchies are still beyond his ken.

The judgments of the Angels are especially important for the deeds of individual men, and it is thus from the Angels that a man learns the value his deeds have in the Cosmos as a whole. From the Archangels he learns more about the value of what he has done in connection with the language he speaks, with the people to whom he belongs, and from this source also come impulses which work into his further destiny, his karma. From the Archai he learns what value his actions during a given period on Earth will have for the time when he has to descend once more from spiritual heights into earthly existence.

By means of all that a man can achieve in this way if—and I beg you to bear the following in mind—he has rightly prepared himself for life after death through the impulses he is able to receive on Earth, and particularly (as we shall see later) through his attitude towards the great leaders of mankind, he can then find the way over from the sphere of the Moon-dwellers to the sphere of the Sun-dwellers.

The inhabitants of the Moon we already know as those Beings who once dwelt on Earth and were in close connection with it. In a very, very much earlier age this was true also of the inhabitants of the Sun; they, too, participated in earthly affairs.

On coming to the realm of the Moon-dwellers it is quite clear to a man that he is meeting Beings who once dwelt with him on Earth. And when he enters the realm of the Sun Beings, something like a powerful cosmic memory of a primeval age comes over him—an age which in Occult Science you will find described from another point of view. He is taken possession of by something like a memory of an infinitely ancient time, when the Sun, with its inhabitants, was still one with the Earth. After death, therefore, we make our way through the spiritual Cosmos by growing into, as it were, two spiritual cosmic regions where we meet those Beings with whom, at one time, when we lived on Earth as quite different beings, we were closely associated.

So it is that by going through these experiences between death and a new birth we look back in grand, mighty memories on the evolution of the Earth in the Cosmos. Whereas a man, while here on Earth, goes through only part of human evolution, between death and rebirth he goes through part of cosmic evolution, part of the evolution of the universe. Those Beings who inhabit the Sun are such that in far distant times they had already risen above the experiences possible for earthly beings, and above those possible for the Beings of the Moon.

On reaching the realm of the Sun Beings, a man enters a sphere of the highest wisdom, where he can live only if on Earth he has prepared himself sufficiently for it.

Now I said yesterday that on passing from the soul-world into the land of spirit, or, as we must express it to-day, from the sphere of the Moon-dwellers to that of the Sun-dwellers, a man proceeds more slowly in his journeyings through the Cosmos. Whereas the circling of the Moon takes about a third of his earthly lifetime, the next rounds, the circling of Mars, of Jupiter, and of Saturn—I mentioned yesterday how these rounds are not completed—takes a more leisurely course, twelve times slower than the circling of the Moon.

If now we reckon up the actual time, we arrive at the following result. We must start from the original plan decreed for human beings by the Cosmos. Then we find that a man goes through the Moon period in a third of the time he has spent on Earth. If we allow for the fact that at the beginning of life more time is spent in sleep, and add on the time given to sleep in later life, we find that a man needs approximately thirty years to accomplish the first cycle, that of the Moon. Each of the following cycles takes twelve times as long, or 36o years for each cycle. If we follow a man in his further journeying through the worlds, we find him going through three cycles. He does not reach Saturn, but has to go through the cycles in the way originally decided. He then has to go backwards through the three again. Thus he completes three cycles in an outward direction and, on returning towards his next earthly life, another three backwards, making six in all. We then have the time originally intended for man. I shall still have to speak of how things are different for human beings to-day; but according to the original cosmic decrees, the time was 2,160 years.

What do these 2,160 years signify? You have only to recall that the position of the Sun at the vernal equinox moves forward year by year. In recent centuries it has advanced from the Ram to the Fishes, and approximately in 25,920 years—or close on 26,000 years—the Sun travels round the whole zodiacal circle, and the twelfth part of this is 2,160 years. In 2,160 years the Sun progresses from one sign of the Zodiac to the next. It was originally decreed that a man should return to Earth when the Sun had thus moved on.

When we consider the inner reasons for this number, and compare it with what from I said from another point of view in Occult Science, those who have read the book will remember that the time taken by the Sun to pass from one sign of the Zodiac to the next was given there as the original length of the interval between a man's incarnations. If we look at this from two sides—more outwardly, from the cosmic aspect, as in Occult Science, and then from the side of man's inner life that we are dealing with to-day—the two numbers are identical. Such things should be noticed; and it will be found that whenever in Spiritual Science a correct judgment is made from one point of view, and then another correct judgment from a quite different point of view, the two judgments are inwardly in agreement.

Anyone judging Spiritual Science from the ordinary standpoint of to-day will quite possibly ask: “What is there to support this Spiritual Science of yours? Our natural science rests upon observation, experiment; that is the firm ground from which we start.” But one might just as well say: “As earthly man I stand on firm ground, and a rock, too, has solid ground beneath it—like everything else on Earth. As for you astronomers—it is really fantastic for you to tell us that the Earth is floating freely in celestial space. If you want to be reasonable, you must say that the Earth, like any great mass of rock, is somewhere resting on firm ground.” That is virtually the same as accusing Anthroposophy of having no firm ground to stand on. Naturally, people would appear foolish, even to themselves, were they to say that the Earth has something to rest on, but they do not see how foolish it is not to realise that Spiritual Science, which is carried by its own inner resources, just as the heavenly bodies move by their own impulses, cannot rest on the ground of experiment and explanation. Were they only to be consistent in their judgments, they would see how, in the Spiritual Science intended here, every step is made with the utmost exactitude, and full accountability is taken for every statement concerning the world and the beings of the world.

Thus, after death, a man enters a world which he at first experiences in common with souls who, like himself, have entered the spiritual worlds through the gate of death after an earthly life. A man thus grows familiar with the sphere of disembodied human beings and continues with them the earthly relations experienced spiritually at night.

But we have also seen how a man finds himself in the company of other spiritual Beings, the inhabitants of the Moon who were once dwelling with him on the Earth, and how, afterwards, he ascends to the community on the Sun. These Sun-dwellers also were once inhabitants of the Earth together with human beings, though in times far more remote. Here a man's first meeting is with the Beings who constitute the second Hierarchy, described in my Occult Science as Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes. These are the Beings with whom he has to work in order that he may be able to manifest in his next earthly life the cosmically elaborated karma derived from his earlier lives on Earth.

Having passed through the realm of the Moon-dwellers, a man knows—not with earthly thoughts but with cosmic ones—what in a cosmic sense he has done wrong; he realises the worth for cosmic evolution as a whole of all he has done, thought and felt. But he cannot prepare his new earthly life with cosmic thoughts alone. Therefore in the Moon-sphere he comes to know what he is destined to be in his next earthly existence, though the actual preparations for it cannot be made at that stage. For this, he has to rise to the sphere of the Sun, where live the Beings who, no longer having to concern themselves with earthly existence, are occupied with the affairs of our whole planetary system.

So a man's experience of the Cosmos embraces two spiritual regions, together with the spiritual Beings dwelling in them. It embraces the soul-world of the Moon-dwellers, and the more extensive population of the spirit region. Whereas the Moon-dwellers, because they were closely connected with the Earth in comparatively recent times, have united their interests with the peoples of the Earth, and while the Moon is in a sense only a cosmic colony, occupied with and orientated towards earthly affairs, the Sun-sphere, whose dwellers live under the leadership of the Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes, is a cosmic whole, concerned with the affairs of the entire planetary system—Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, Venus and so on, including the Earth and the Moon.

On coming into this vast sphere of the Sun, where our interests are substantially widened, we are able to work with the Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes on preparing the spirit-germ of a physical body which can then be born for us from human parents. No parents could ever produce a suitable physical body were it not prepared during long periods through work carried out in co-operation with the highest, most sublime spiritual Beings in the spiritual Cosmos. Our essential work there—a work far greater and more comprehensive than anything achieved during our little life on Earth—is to concern ourselves, together with Beings of a higher degree, with all that takes place among these Beings as spiritual events, just as here there are natural events; with all that takes place in them as art of the spirit, just as here we have the art of nature. All this finally enables us to bring together what has thus been worked upon into a great, spiritual, archetypal picture which is the spirit-germ—as it were the fore-shadowing—of what will later be born on Earth as our physical body.

When a man, having completed the three circles, starts on the return journey, his interest in earthly affairs revives. Then—still many years before birth—he looks down on the successive generations in earthly evolution, at the end of which will stand his father and his mother. As soon as he makes this complete change of direction in the Cosmos, he begins to focus his attention upon the Earth. He watches many preceding generations of his ancestry, one after another, until, centuries later, his parents are born. To them he can send down the potent, far-reaching spirit-germ, diminished in size, of his future physical body, so that this spirit-germ can be united with the physical embryo in the body of the mother.

The spirit-germ is at first majestic and great, like the Cosmos itself. While a man is making his return journey to the physical world, and watching the generations through which his parents descend, and while from the spiritual world he is actively concerned with this sequence of generations, the germ becomes smaller and smaller—until at last it arrives back in the Mars-sphere, the actual sphere of the Sun, and then, passing quickly through the Moon-sphere, it descends to its next life on Earth.

Some time before the man himself descends as a being of soul, he sends down in advance this spirit-germ, so that what he has prepared for his physical body enters the physical world before him. On completing his work for the new earthly life, he is able to enter into a different relation with the cosmos—a relation indeed to the whole cosmic ether. And, as the final act in his descent, he draws from spiritual worlds, out of the whole world-ether, the forces to form his etheric body.

When a man has already sent down the spirit-germ for his physical body—that is, when the spirit-germ has at last descended to the parents at the end of its long journey down from the spiritual world—the man himself, still in the spiritual world, gathers ether around him there, and for a short time becomes a being of Ego, astral body and ether, the ether having been drawn together from the world-ether. It is not until after conception, during the third or fourth week of the embryonic period, that the human being unites himself with the organism that has been formed by combining the spirit-germ with the physical germ, and bestows upon it the etheric body drawn from the world-ether. Man then becomes a being composed of physical body, an etheric body drawn together in the last moments of his cosmic existence, and the astral body and Ego which have gone through the life between death and rebirth.

Thus, after experiencing the purely spiritual, a man descends to yet another existence in the physical world.

From what has been said you will have gathered that while passing through life in the world between death and a new birth, we experience in memory past ages of the Earth's evolution—the evolution of worlds, one might call it. The world-memories thus lived through become a man's deeds, for he does something with these memories, in cooperation with the higher Beings of whom I have already spoken and will speak further. What he carries out, while active in memory and remembering in activity, gives a significant perspective into the past of the Earth and of the world.

The experiences he goes through while in connection with the inhabitants of the Moon conjures up in his soul a time during which he passed through earlier lives on Earth in a similar relation to them as now. He surveys a series of earthly lives resembling those of the present. He then looks further back to a time when, even while on Earth, he was more closely connected with the present dwellers on the Moon; to a time from which he is separated by what geologists call the Ice Age. He looks back to a phase in earthly evolution you will find described in my books as the Atlantean age. But he penetrates still further back to what is called the age of Lemuria, when man is still to be found on Earth, though under quite different conditions. He was not yet so closely bound to the Earth that he trod it with his feet; he lived more as an etheric being in the environment of the Earth, in its atmosphere. This he could do because at that time the atmosphere consisted mainly of a watery solution that has now been distributed between seas and continents, together with solutions of other substances that have since become the solid earth of to-day. Hence he lived more in the Earth's circumference during the age—here again names are unimportant—called the Lemurian, which corresponds to what natural scientists call, with some justification, the oldest period of the Earth.

We then look back to an age when man was still associated with the Sun Beings, with the inhabitants of the Sun, before in the course of cosmic evolution the Sun separated from the Earth. This does not mean looking back to an age when, as described in Occult Science, the Earth itself went through its Sun period—the second age in the evolution of the Earth—but to the recapitulation in earthly existence of that cosmic age. But this recapitulation does come into view. And so a man's knowledge, when supplemented by what he is able to experience between death and a new birth, becomes cosmological knowledge. Earth-evolution advances through repeated stages, in conjunction with the results of human deeds carried out together with higher Beings. The Earth's past, in its connection with the whole planetary system—Sun, Moon, and all the planets dependent on them—becomes apparent in the deeds of men. Out of it a man shapes the part of the future for which he is responsible—his next earthly life. At the same time, however, he is involved in the preparation of future worlds, the Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan existences, for into each of these in turn the Earth existence will eventually be transformed.

If we look deeply into such matters, we can understand how ancient cosmic times were part of the world-evolution of the Earth. We look back indeed into an age when the Moon-dwellers of to-day provided the instructors of mankind. Then, together with the latest great instructors, they withdrew into the cosmic stronghold of the Moon.

Over and over again on Earth, however, men were born with the capacity to remain throughout their karmic life in close connection with the experiences of those who now dwell on the Moon. Born again and again in the course of world-evolution, they were like ambassadors of the great community within the Moon. They appeared among the people of the Earth during the first, second and third postAtlantean culture-epochs and in the East they developed a lofty civilisation. These ambassadors of the Moon were called Bodhisattvas. They dwelt on Earth as men, but in them lived on the spiritual teaching that had been given directly by the great Moon teachers on Earth.

Now there are often times in the universe when the inhabitants of the Moon, because they are more nearly connected with the inhabitants of the Sun than with those of the Earth, develop a particularly intimate relation with these Sun-dwellers, so that, indirectly, through the Moon ambassadors—called in the East the Bodhisattvas—the wisdom of the Sun was able to reach men on Earth in the older oriental civilisations. Because of the progress made in the evolution of the Earth, it then became necessary that earthly civilisation should no longer be nourished, as it were, by the Moon Beings only. The whole evolution of the Earth would have had to take a course different from the one prescribed by cosmic wisdom, if only the Moon ambassadors had figured in it. For this reason there came about the great, momentous event we call the Mystery of Golgotha.

Whereas in more ancient times it was the Moon ambassadors who, to a certain extent, brought the Sun wisdom to Earth, it was the Leader of the Sun Beings Himself, foremost in the ranks of Sun Spirits, who, through the Mystery of Golgotha, came down to Earth into the body of the man Jesus. Through this, quite different conditions arose for the evolution of the Earth. The wisdom of the Sun-dwellers was brought into it as impulse by Christ Jesus; and under this impulse the further course of Earth-evolution must therefore proceed.

At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, so much Moon wisdom was still spread over the whole Earth that as Gnosis, as Pistis Sophia—which was old Moon wisdom—it was able to understand the nature of the Christ. Gnosis was essentially an endeavour to grasp His whole spiritual significance. But Gnosis has been entirely rooted out. In the phase of evolution which led to a temporary lack of understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, the first act was the rooting out of the Gnosis—down, almost, to the very writings of its opponents.

Imagine that nothing were left of our present Anthroposophy except what its opponents have written about it, and this will give you some idea of what people know of Gnosis from external sources. Their knowledge is limited to the opinions of its opponents, perhaps to some acquaintance with the Pistis Sophia and so on, which they don't understand. That is all they know of the Gnosis, which is indeed a gift of the Moon, out of the past, to the first centuries of Christianity—particularly the first four centuries, for after that it was no longer understood. It was what could be said out of the old Moon wisdom, out of the Moon Logos, to the Sun Logos who had come to Earth—said, that is, to the Christ. Anyone aware of this can really understand the Gnosis, which has been greatly misjudged, and of which such strange things are said to-day.

It is not possible, however, for matters to remain thus, for the evolution of the Earth must continue. We have to progress from the old wisdom of the Moon to a new Sun wisdom, for which we must learn to have an immediate understanding. To-morrow I shall have to describe how it was essentially the old Moon wisdom—after it had come virtually to an end—which still spoke to human beings through a form of Yoga breathing, through a changed breathing process. It was a striving after the old wisdom of the Moon.

This Yoga cult is no longer suitable for Western people; they must attain to Imagination. For civilisation in general, that is the necessary next step—the endeavour to come to Imagination. But there are all sorts of obstacles, and this means that the evolution of human civilisation can advance only if a new impulse from the spirit is accepted. This depends on intimate human destinies. When Bodhisattvas appeared, they never found people generally hostile. Those ancient times may often appear to us outwardly as gruesome and terrible, but it was always possible to meet with good will when bringing impulses from the spiritual worlds. Hence the Bodhisattvas found men ready to receive the old Moon Logos—the reflection, that is, of the Sun Logos. But it will never again be possible to speak to mankind in that old way.

The old Moon wisdom, the old Moon Logos, however, cannot cease—like everything else, it has to progress. But it will have to be understood through the Sun Word, which, having lost its last legacy in the Gnosis, must be re-discovered. It will be impossible to speak to people in the true language of the Sun until they bring good will to meet it. Until they do so, they will wait in vain for the coming of a successor to the Bodhisattvas of old, for that depends upon whether human beings welcome him with understanding.

To-day there is a deep rift between the humanity of the East and the humanity of the West. And those who do not go deeply enough into these matters cannot see how East and West are divided, and how the East is waiting for the new Bodhisattva to bring them in his own way something of which the West has only the vaguest idea. The nationalistic struggles of to-day have not yet been sufficiently overcome throughout the Earth by the universal consciousness which must flow essentially from the Christ impulse. Men will never discover how to rise to this common humanity, this genuine Christ impulse, and will never be able to understand what a potential Bodhisattva would have to say, until they have developed enough spiritual longing in them to create a bridge for a world-wide understanding between East and West.

I am touching here on a theme we must go further into tomorrow—a theme that will show how different the present time is from the days when man waited expectantly for the coming of a Bodhisattva. Now, before the Bodhisattva can speak to men, he has himself to wait until they are ready to understand the words he will use, for men have now entered the epoch of freedom.

This entry into the epoch of freedom, in relation to our present theme, will be a subject for tomorrow. But all that mankind has to go through, in order to find the innermost impulse in the spiritual world above, is connected with many apparently insignificant cultural systems and symptoms of our civilisation.

Forgive me for intermingling the great with the trivial, but trivial symptoms can sometimes throw light on the great. A few days ago I said that in this region, where Imaginations take so firm a hold on the spirit, we get the disturbance of motor-cars. I added that I was not saying anything against motor-cars, for in Anthroposophy we cannot express reactionary views, and when necessary I am obviously very fond of travelling by car myself. One must take the world as it is. But anything one-sided must always be balanced by its opposite. Thus there is no harm in motoring—provided we take it, and everything of that kind, with a heart attuned to the spiritual world. Then, if other things besides cars come to disturb us, we shall be able to press on by dint of our own strength and freedom, for freedom had to come, and it must lead us back to the Bodhisattva.

Human beings will be able to help themselves, where things are concerned that do us good service mechanically. It can truly be said that men will be able to help themselves in face of what comes upon them in the way of cars, typewriters, and so on.

With gramophones, however, it is different—forgive me for concluding on such an apparently trivial note. With gramophones, art is being thrust down into a machine. When people develop a passion for such a thing—which is really a mechanising of what comes down to us as a shadow of the spiritual—when they show enthusiasm for the kind of thing represented by gramophones, then in this connection they no longer have the power to help themselves. At this point the Gods have to help.

Now the Gods are merciful, and to-day our hope for the future progress of human civilisation must be that the Gods in their mercy will themselves come to the rescue where—as in the case of the gramophone—men's taste has gone astray.

I have often referred to the fact that since about the first third of the fifteenth century, human evolution has entered upon a special epoch. It can be said that the age which began approximately in the eighth century B.C. and continued into the first third of the fifteenth century was the age of Græco-Latin culture and that the most recent phase of time in which we are still living today, began at the point I have indicated. Today we will consider the tasks of present-day humanity in connection with this fact.

We know—particularly from the lectures given here lately—that between birth and death man bears in his physical, psychical and spiritual development on Earth the heritage of what he has experienced in pre-earthly existence. And recently we heard in what sense social and moral life is the heritage of that condition between death and rebirth when man lives in intimate communion with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies. From this communion—it is experienced, as I have described, in rhythmic alternation with another condition—man brings with him the power of love, and this power of love is the foundation of morality on Earth. The other condition is the one in which man withdraws into himself, when, as it were, he lifts himself out of this communion with the Beings of the Hierarchies. And as the heritage of this condition he brings with him to Earth the power of memory, the power of remembrance, which on the one side comes to expression in his egoism, but on the other side predisposes him for freedom, for everything that makes for inner strength and independence.

Until the Graeco-Latin epoch, the faculties that enabled man to shape his civilization from within were in a certain respect still a heritage of pre-earthly existence.

If we go back to still earlier times in the evolution of humanity, to the Old Indian, the Old Persian and the Egyptian epochs, we find evidence everywhere of knowledge, of ideas, which flow as it were out of man's inner being but are also connected with the life between death and rebirth. In the Old Indian epoch man has a clear consciousness that he belongs to the same ‘race’ to which the divine-spiritual Beings of the Hierarchies belong. A man of knowledge in ancient Indian civilization feels himself less a citizen of the Earth than of the world to which these divine-spiritual Beings belong. He feels that he has been sent down to the Earth from the ranks of these divine-spiritual Beings. And he considers that the civilization he spreads over the Earth is there in order that the earthly deeds of man and even the objects and beings of the Earth may conform with the nature of the divine-spiritual Beings to whom he feels himself related.

In the man of ancient Persia this feeling of kinship has already lost some of its former intensity but he too still feels his real home to be what he called the Kingdom of Light, the Kingdom to which he belongs between death and rebirth, and he desires to be a warrior on the side of the spirits of this Kingdom of Light. He wishes to fight against those beings who come from the darkness of the Earth so that the spirits of the Kingdom of Light may not be hampered by these dark beings; he dedicates all his activity to the service of the spirits of the Kingdom of Light. And if we then pass on to the Egyptian and Chaldaean peoples we see how their science is full of knowledge relating to the movements of the stars. The destinies of men are read from what the stars reveal. Before anything is done on Earth, the stars are asked whether it would or would not be justified. This science, according to which all earthly life is regulated, is likewise felt to be a heritage of man's existence between death and rebirth, when his experiences are of a kind that make him one with the movements and laws of the stars, just as here on Earth between birth and death he is one with the beings of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms.

In the fourth post-Atlantean, the Graeco-Latin epoch, beginning in the eighth century B.C. and lasting until the fifteenth century A.D., men already feel themselves to be true citizens of the Earth. They feel that in their world of ideas between birth and death there are no longer very distinct echoes of experiences in pre-earthly existence. They strive to be at home on the Earth. And yet, if we penetrate deeply into the spirit of Greek and even of early Roman civilization we can say something like the following. The men who are founding science in that age are intent upon learning to know all that goes on in the three kingdoms of Nature upon Earth, but to know it in such a way that this knowledge also has some relation to extra-terrestrial existence. Among the Greeks there is a strong feeling that through the knowledge applied by man on the Earth and in the light of which he regulates his earthly deeds, he should at the same time have a dim remembrance of the divine-spiritual world. The Greek knows that he can gain his knowledge only from observation of the earthly world; but he has a clear feeling that what he perceives in the minerals, in the plants, in the animals, stars, mountains, rivers, and so forth, must be a reflection of the Divine-Spiritual which he can experience in a world other than the world of the senses.

This is the case because in that epoch man still feels that with the best part of his being he belongs to a supersensible world. This supersensible world has, to be sure, become darkened for human observation—that is how man puts it to himself—but during earthly existence too he must strive to illumine it. True, in the Graeco-Latin epoch men can no longer regulate the ordinary deeds of humanity in accordance with the courses of the stars, since their mastery of the science of the stars is not on a par with that of the Chaldaean and the Egyptians; but at all events they still endeavor, rather gropingly, through studying expressions of the will of the divine-spiritual Beings, to bring something of the Divine-Spiritual into the earthly world.

In places of the Oracles and in Temples, men sought to ascertain the will of the Gods from priestesses and prophetesses, as you know from history. And we see how these endeavors to ascertain the will of the divine-spiritual Beings with whom man himself is one during pre-earthly existence, were also customary in other regions of Europe at the time when Graeco-Roman culture was in its prime in the South. In the Germanic regions of Middle Europe, for example, priestesses and prophetesses were highly venerated; pilgrimages were made to them and in ecstatic states of consciousness, the will of the Gods was made known to men so that their deeds on Earth might be in conformity with this will. We can see quite clearly how up to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—although the urge is by then less intense—man strives to formulate the knowledge he seeks in such a way that it contains within it the will of the divine-spiritual world. Through these centuries of the Middle Ages, right up to the twelfth and thirteenth, we can find places which at that time were still considered sacred and later became our laboratories—we can find places where the so-called alchemists were investigating the forces of substances and of Nature-processes; we can peruse writings which still give a faint picture of the kind of thinking that was applied in those old centres of research and we shall everywhere discover evidence of the striving to bring the substances themselves into such combinations or mutual interaction that the Divine-Spiritual can work in the phial, in the retort.

In Goethe's Faust there is an echo of this attitude of soul, in the scene where Wagner is working in his laboratory to produce Homunculus. It is really not until the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Western civilization that the desire arises in man to lay the foundations of a science in complete independence, without bringing his ideas into any direct connection with a divine-spiritual will by which the world is ruled. A purely human form of knowledge arises for the first time during this period; it is knowledge that is emancipated from the divine-spiritual will. And it is this purely human knowledge, emancipated from the divine will of which the science of Galileo and Copernicus is composed. It is science through which the universe is presented to man in the abstract picture current today, the picture of a vault—as Giordano Bruno was the first to envisage—with the stars circling in it as purely material bodies, or even in a condition of rest taking their share in cosmic happenings. This picture of the universe makes us imagine that a vast mechanism works in upon the Earth from cosmic space. And even in the investigation of earthly things people confine themselves fundamentally to what can be calculated and measured and so be part of an abstract mechanism. This, however, is a world of conceptions and ideas which man can spin out of himself with the help of external observation and experiment, where the physical substances alone are believed to affect each other, the Nature-processes to become manifest and where the Divine-Spiritual is no longer sought in the world of Nature.

There is a vast difference between this conceptual world and the kind of thought that preceded it in human evolution. It is only since the first third of the fifteenth century that man's concepts and ideas have become purely human. And it is the spatial with which man has mainly concerned himself since this period began.

If you go back still farther to the times of the Old Indian, the Old Persian, the Egypto-Chaldaean culture, everywhere you will find that world-conceptions refer to World Ages. They point back to an ancient epoch when mankind still had intercourse with the Gods, to a Golden Age. They point back to another epoch when man still experienced on Earth at least the sun-reflection of the Divine—a Silver Age, and so on. Time and the course of Time play a conspicuous role in the world-pictures of early evolutionary phases. Likewise, when you consider the Greek epoch, and indeed the world-picture that was current at the same time in the more Northerly and Middle European regions, you will find that everywhere the idea of Time plays an essential part. The Greek points back to that primeval Age when cosmic happenings are the outcome of interaction between Uranus and Gaia. He points to the next Age, to Chronos and Rhea, then to the Age when Zeus and the other Gods known in Greek Mythology rule the Cosmos and the Earth. And it is the same in Germanic Mythology. Time plays the most essential role in all these world-pictures.

A much less important part is played by Space. The spatial element is still obscure in the Norse and Germanic world-pictures with the World Ash, the Giant Ymir and so forth. That something is taking place in Time is quite clear, but the idea of Space is only dimly dawning; it is a factor of no great significance. It is not until the age of Galileo, of Copernicus, of Giordano Bruno, that Space actually begins to play its great role in the picture of the universe. Even in the Ptolemaic system which admittedly is concerned with Space, Time is a more essential factor than it is in the world-picture familiar to us since the fifteenth century, in which Time actually plays a secondary part. The present distribution of the stars in cosmic space is taken as the starting-point and through calculation conclusions are reached as to what the world-picture was like in earlier times. But the conception of Space, the spatial world-picture, becomes of chief importance. And the result is that all human judgments are based on the principle of Space. Modern man has elaborated this element of Space in his external world-picture, elaborated it too in all his thinking. And today this thinking in terms of Space has reached its zenith.

Think how difficult it is for a man of the present day to follow an exposition purely of Time. He is happy if Space is brought in at least to the extent of drawing something on the blackboard. But if the feeling of Space is conveyed by means of photographs, then the modern man is verily in his element! “Illustration”—and by this he means expression in terms of Space—is what man of today strives to achieve in every exposition. Time, inasmuch as it is in perpetual flow, has become something that causes him discomfort. He still attaches value to it in music; but even there the tendency towards the spatial is quite evident.

We need only consider something that has become a definite feature of modern life and this mania of modern man to cleave to the spatial is at once apparent. In the cinema he is utterly indifferent to the element of Time in the picture. He is content with the merest fraction of the Time element and is entirely given up to the element of Space.

This orientation of the soul to the spatial is very characteristic of the present time and whoever observes modern culture and civilization with open eyes will find it everywhere.

On the other hand, in anthroposophical Spiritual Science we are striving, as you know, to get away from the spatial. To be sure, we meet the desire for it in that we too try to give tangible form to the spiritual, and that is justifiable in order to strengthen the faculty of ideation. Only we must always be conscious that this is purely a means of illustration and that what is essential is to strive, at least to strive, to transcend the spatial.

Space ‘devotees’ among us often cause difficulties by making diagrams of the consecutive epochs of Time, writing “First Epoch with Sub-Epochs,” and so on. Then follow a great many captions and what is sequential in Time is dragged into a spatial picture.

Our aim, however, is to transcend the spatial. We are striving to penetrate into the temporal and also into the super-temporal, into the element that leads beyond what is physically perceptible. The physically perceptible exists in its crudest form in the world of Space and there thought is led in a certain direction. I have often spoken of the real intentions of anthroposophical Spiritual Science. It certainly does not belittle, let alone reject, the mode of thinking engendered in the age of Galileo, Copernicus, Giordano Bruno. The validity of this mode of thinking in which, as you know, Space is the essential element, is fully recognized by anthroposophical Spiritual Science. Therefore it ought to be able to shed light into every domain of scientific thought. It must not adopt an amateurish attitude to these domains of scientific thought but must shed light into them by its way of looking at things.

But over and over again it must be stressed that anthroposophical Spiritual Science is endeavoring to guide back again to the Divine-Spiritual this purely human knowledge that is based almost entirely on the element of Space and is emancipated from the Divine-Spiritual. We do not hark back to ancient conditions but we desire to guide the modern attitude of soul into the spiritual, away from its preoccupation with what is purely spatial and material. In other words, we want to learn to talk about spiritual things, as people in the Galileo-Copernican age grew accustomed to talk about substances, about forces. With its methods of study and observation, this Spiritual Science is to be a match for the kind of knowledge that has been developing in connection with the things and processes of the material world since the first third of the fifteenth century. Its aim is the attainment of spiritual knowledge that is related to this Nature-knowledge, although since the former is concerned with the supersensible, the contrast is very apparent.

Inwardly considered, what is it that we are seeking to achieve? If we transfer ourselves in thought into the position of the divine-spiritual Beings in whose ranks we live between death and rebirth, and discern how they direct their gaze downwards, and through the various means I have described observe the course of events on Earth, then we find that these Beings looked down to the Earth in the earlier ages of human evolution—in the Old Indian, Old Persian, Old Chaldaean-Egyptian epochs—and beheld what men were doing, what views they held of Nature and of their own social life. And then—if I may put it so—the Gods were able to say to themselves concerning the deeds and thoughts of men: Their deeds and their thoughts are a result of their memory of, or are an echo of, what they experienced among us in our world.—In the case of the Chaldaeans or Egyptians it was still quite evident that the primary wish of men below on the Earth was to carry out what the Gods above had thought or were thinking. When the Gods looked down to the Earth they beheld happenings that were in keeping with their intentions; and it was the same when they looked into the thoughts of men—as Gods are able to do. Since the first third of the fifteenth century this has changed. Since then, the divine-spiritual Beings have looked down to the Earth, and especially when they look down at the present time, they find that things everywhere are fundamentally alien to them, that men are doing things on the Earth which they themselves have planned in accordance with the phenomena and processes of earthly existence. And to the Gods with whom men live between death and rebirth, this is an entirely alien attitude.

When an alchemist in his laboratory was endeavoring to ascertain the divine-spiritual will through the combination and separation of the Elements, a God would have beheld something akin to his own nature in what the alchemist was doing. If a God were to look into a modern laboratory, the methods and procedure adopted there would be intensely alien to him. It can be said with absolute truth that since the first third of the fifteenth century, the Gods have felt as if the whole human race had fallen away from them in a certain respect, as if men down on the Earth were engaged in self-made trivialities, in things which the Gods are unable to understand,—certainly not the Gods who still guided the hands and minds of men in their scientific pursuits in Graeco-Latin times. These divine-spiritual Beings have no active interest in what is done in modern laboratories, let alone in modern hospitals. I was obliged on a previous occasion to say that when the Gods look down through windows, as I called them, what interests them least of all on Earth is the kind of work carried out by professors. What goes to the very heart of one who has genuine insight into modern Initiation Science is that he is obliged to say to himself: In recent times we men have become estranged from the Gods; we must seek again for bridges to connect us with the divine-spiritual world.—And it is this that quickens the impulse for anthroposophical Spiritual Science. Its desire is to transform the scientific ideas and concepts that are unintelligible to the Gods in such a way that they are spiritualized and are thus able to provide a bridge to the Divine-Spiritual.

It should be realized that light, for example, is something in which divinity is present. This was strongly felt in ancient Persian culture, but today when, for example, attempts are made to indicate by all sorts of lines how the rays from a lens are broken, this is a language that the Gods do not understand; it means nothing at all to them. All these things must be approached by an attitude of soul that enables the bridge to the Divine to be found once again. To realize this means a great deepening of insight into the kind of task that is incumbent upon the present age in the matter of transforming and metamorphosing our unspiritual ideas.

A cosmic truth of deep significance underlies these things. The conception of Space is an entirely human conception. The Gods with whom man lives together in the most important period of his life between death and a new birth have a vivid conception of Time but no conception of Space such as man acquires on Earth. This conception of Space is entirely human. Man really enters into Space for the first time when he descends from the divine-spiritual world into the physical world of the Earth. True, as seen from here, every thing appears in spatial perspective. But thinking in dimensions, if I may put it so, is something that belongs entirely to the Earth.

In Western civilization this conception of Space has become ingrained in man since the fifteenth century. But when through the spiritualizing of purely spatial knowledge, bridges to the divine world have been found again, then what man has gained from the science of Space—in the very period when he has emancipated his thought most drastically from the divine world, i.e. since the fifteenth century—all the spatial knowledge he has gained will become important for the divine-spiritual world as well. And man can conquer a new portion of the universe for the Gods if he will but bring the spirit again into the conception of Space.

You see, what I have described in the book Occult Science—the periods of Old Saturn, Old Sun, Old Moon, Earth and the future periods of Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan—is only present to the Gods in the sequence of Time. Here on Earth, however, it all lives itself out in terms of Space. We are living today in the Earth period proper but in happenings on the Earth there still linger the echoes of the periods of Old Moon, Old Sun and Old Saturn.

If you will steep yourselves in the description of the Old Saturn period given in Occult Science, you will say: The Saturn period is past but the effects of its warmth are still present in our earthly existence. Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth are within one another; they exist simultaneously. The Gods see them in the sequence of Time. Although in earlier ages, even during Chaldaean times they were seen in their succession, now we see them within one another, spatially within one another. Indeed this leads very much farther and if we study these things in detail, we shall discover what really lies behind them.

Imagine that you stretch out your left hand. The Divine lives in everything terrestrial. In your muscles, in your nerves, lives the Divine. Now with the fingers of your left hand you touch the fingers of your right hand—this can only be done in Space. The fact that you feel your right hand with your left, your left hand with your right—this is something which the divine-spiritual Beings do not follow. They follow the left hand and right hand up to the point of contact, but the feeling that arises between the two is an experience which the faculties possessed by the Gods do not make possible; it is something that arises only in Space. Just as little as the Gods behold Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth simultaneously but only in succession, in Time, so they have none of the purely spatial experiences known to man. When you look with your left and right eyes and have the lines of vision from right and from left, the activity of the Gods is present in the vision from the right eye and again in the vision from the left eye, but in the meeting of the two lines of vision lies the purely human element. Thus we experience as men, because we have been placed into the world of Space, something that is experienced in a state of emancipation from the activity of the Gods.

You need only extend this imagery of the right and left hands to other domains in the life of earthly man, and you will find a great many human experiences that fall right away from the Gods' field of vision. It is really only since the first third of the fifteenth century that man has brought ideas of a purely human kind into these domains. Hence human thinking has become less and less intelligible to the Gods when they look down to the Earth. And with this in mind we must turn our attention to that most important event in the last third of the nineteenth century which may be characterized by saying that the rulership of the Spiritual Being known as Gabriel was succeeded by the rulership of that other Spiritual Being known as Michael.

In the last third of the nineteenth century the Spiritual Being we call Michael became the Ruler, as it were, of everything of a spiritual character in human events on the Earth. Whereas Gabriel is a Being orientated more to the passive qualities of man, Michael is the active Being, the Being who as it were pulses through our breath, our veins, our nerves, to the end that we may actively develop all that belongs to our full humanity in connection with the Cosmos. What stands before us as a challenge of Michael is that we become active in our very thoughts, working out our view of the world through our own inner activity. We only belong to the Michael Age when we do not sit down inactively and desire to let enlightenment from within and from without come to us, but when we co-operate actively in what the world offers us in the way of experiences and opportunities for observation. If a man carries out some experiment, it does not fundamentally involve activity; there is not necessarily any activity on his part; it is just an event like any other event in Nature, except that it is directed by human intelligence. But all happenings in Nature have also been directed by intelligence! How is man's mental life nowadays affected by experiments? There is no active participation, for he simply looks on and tries to eliminate activity as much as possible; he wants to let the experiment tell him everything and regards as fanciful anything that is the outcome of his own inner activity. It is precisely in their scientific ideas that men are least of all in the Michael Age.

But humanity must enter into the Michael Age. If we put the question to ourselves: What does it actually mean in the whole cosmic setting that Gabriel should have passed on the sceptre to Michael?—then we must answer: It means that of all the Beings who spiritually guide humanity, Michael is the Spirit who is the first to draw near to what men here on Earth are doing as the result of this emancipation of knowledge since the first third of the fifteenth century. Gabriel stands in utter perplexity before the ideas and notions of a cultured man of the modern age. Michael, who is closely connected with the forces of the Sun, can at least instil his activity into such thoughts of man as can be impulses for his free deeds. Michael can work, for instance, into what I have called in Occult Science, free, pure thinking, which must be the true impulse for the individual will of man acting in freedom in the new age. And with the deeds of man which spring from the impulse of love, Michael has his own particular relationship.

Hence he is the messenger whom the Gods have sent down so that he may receive what is now being led over from knowledge emancipated from spirit into spiritualized knowledge. The science which as anthroposophical Spiritual Science again spiritualizes spatial thinking, lifts it again into the supersensible—this Spiritual Science works from below upwards, stretches out its hands as it were from below upwards to grasp the hands of Michael stretching down from above. It is then that the bridge can be created between man and the Gods. Michael has become the Regent of this Age because he is to receive what the Gods wish to receive from what man can add to the Time-concept through the Space-concept—for this augments the knowledge possessed by the Gods.

The Gods picture Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, in the succession of Time. If man rightly develops the latest phase of his life of thought, he sees this in terms of Space. The Gods can picture the outstretching of the left and of the right hand, but the actual contact is a purely human matter. The Gods can live in the line of vision of the left eye, in the line of vision of the right eye. Man envisages in terms of Space how the vision of the left eye meets that of the right eye. Michael directs his gaze down upon the Earth. He is able, by entering into connection with what men develop in pure thought and objectify in pure will, to take cognisance of what is acquired by the citizens of Earth, by men, as the fruit of thinking in terms of Space, and to carry it up into divine worlds.

If men were merely to develop Space-knowledge and not spiritualize it, if they were to stop short at Anthropology and were not willing to advance to Anthroposophy, then the Michael Age would go by. Michael would retire from his rulership and would bring this message to the Gods: Humanity desires to separate itself from the Gods.—If Michael is to bring back the right message to the world of the Gods, he must speak to this effect: During my Age, men have raised to the Supersensible what they have already developed in the way of thinking purely in terms of Space; and we can therefore accept men again, for they have united their thought with ours.—If human evolution proceeds in the right way, Michael will not have to say to the Gods: Men have become accustomed to stare at everything spatially; they have learnt to despise what lives only in Time.—If human beings are resolved to achieve their earthly goal, Michael will say: Men have made efforts to bring Time and the Supersensible again into the Spatial; therefore those who are not content merely to stare at the Spatial, who are not content to accept everything in such a material form as was customary at the beginning of the twentieth century, can be regarded as having linked their lives directly to the life of the Gods.—

If we genuinely pursue Anthroposophy in the light of Initiation Science, it means that we concern ourselves with cosmic affairs, with affairs which humanity has to work out in harmony with the world of the Gods. And in the present age very much is at stake; it is a matter of whether we shall or shall not sow the seed for true communion in the future with the divine-spiritual world.

When you realize the tremendous significance of this issue, you will be able to measure the earnestness and inner steadfastness needed by the soul if Anthroposophy is to be the content of its life of thought.