The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The upward development of man, and the descent of divine beings into human souls and bodies. The four points of view of the Evangelists in accordance with the Initiation of each. The Baptism in Jordan and the life and death of Christ Jesus as two stages of Initiation. The Resurrection revealing Christ as the Spirit of earthly existence. The Sun-Aura in the Earthly-Aura. The divinity of Man. Human quality of the Gospel of Matthew

Studying the evolution of mankind in accordance with spiritual science, and watching its progress step by step, we are bound to acknowledge that the most important fact of this evolution is that man, because he incarnates again and again in different epochs, advances to ever higher degrees of perfection, and thus gradually reaches the goal where he has developed, in his inner being, certain active powers corresponding to the different stages of planetary development. We see, on one hand, the man who progresses upwards, who keeps his divine goal before him, but who would never be able to evolve to the heights he should attain if beings whose whole path of evolution is different did not come to his assistance. From time to time beings from other spheres enter our earthly evolution and unite with it, so as to raise men to their own exalted realms. Even as regards earlier planetary conditions we may express this in a wide sense by saying: Already during the Saturn stage of evolution, exalted beings—the Thrones—offered up their will-substance so that from it the earliest beginnings of man's physical body might be formed. This is but a general example; but beings whose evolution is far in advance of that of men, have ever bent down to them and united with their evolution, by dwelling for a time within a human soul. Such beings have ‘assumed a human form’ as is often said, or to put it more trivially, have entered a human soul as an inspiring power, so that a human being who has been ensouled in this way by a god might accomplish more in human evolution than he could otherwise have done.

Our age, permeated as it is with materialistic conceptions, levelling everything, does not accept such facts willingly; indeed I might say that it retains only the crudest notion of accepting the descent of beings from higher regions, beings who enter into man and speak to him. Modern people regard such beliefs as the wildest superstition. Rudiments of such beliefs have, however, remained to our day, though people are for the most part unaware that they hold them; they have retained, for instance, a belief in the occasional appearance of persons of ‘genius.’ Men of genius rise high above the great mass of mankind even in the opinion of ordinary individuals, who say of such persons: Other qualities have come to fruition in their souls than are to be found in average humanity. Such ‘geniuses’ are at least still credited. But there are also circles where there is no longer such belief; the materialistic thought of to-day discredits them, it has (no belief in facts concerning the life of the spirit: Belief in genius does, however, continue in wide circles, and if this is not to be an empty belief we must acknowledge that in a genius through whom human evolution has been advanced, a power, other than the ordinary power of men, works through a human agency. Looking to the teaching that knows the true facts concerning men of genius, one realizes that when such men appear who seem as if suddenly possessed by something extraordinarily good, or great, or powerful, that a spiritual power has descended and taken possession of the place from which this being of power must now work, namely, the inner nature of the man himself.

To people who think in accordance with Anthroposophy it should be clear from the beginning that there are two possibilities; the upward evolution of men to spiritual heights, and the descent from above of divine, spiritual beings into human bodies or human souls.

In one part of my Rosicrucian Mystery Play it is pointed out that whenever something important is to take place in human evolution a divine being must unite with a human soul and permeate it. This is a necessity of human evolution.

To understand this in connection with our spiritual evolution on earth, we must recall how in the time of its early beginnings the Earth was united with the Sun, from which it is now separated. Anthroposophists know, of course, that this does not refer merely to a separation of the substance of the Earth from the substance of the Sun, but with the going forth of divine beings who were associated with the Sun or with the other planets.) After this separation of the Sun, certain spiritual beings remained connected with the Earth, while others remained with the Sun, because they had evolved beyond earthly connections, and could not complete their further cosmic evolution on the Earth. Thus we have the fact that one kind of spiritual being remained connected with the Earth, while other spiritual beings sent their active forces down to Earth from the Sun. After the departure of the Sun from the Earth we have, as it were, two spheres of activity, that of the Earth with its beings and that of the Sun with its beings. The Spiritual Beings who served mankind from a higher sphere are those who chose the Sun as their dwelling-place, and from this realm come the beings who have united themselves from time to time with earthly humanity so that they might aid the further evolution—both of Earth and man.

In the myths of various peoples we constantly find reference to such ‘Sun-heroes’ who have descended from spiritual realms to participate in human evolution; and a man who is filled by such a Sun-being is something far more than from outward seeming he would appear to be. The outward appearance of such a man is deceptive—it is Maya; but behind the Maya is the real being who can only be guessed at by those who can penetrate to the profoundest depths of such a nature. In the Mysteries people knew, and still know, of this twofold fact concerning the path of human evolution. People distinguish now, as they distinguished in the past, divine beings who descend to Earth from spiritual spheres, and men who strive upwards from the Earth towards initiation into spiritual mysteries. ‘With what kind of Being then are we concerned in the Christ?

In the last lecture we learnt that in the designation, ‘Christ, the Son of the living God,’ we are concerned with a descending Being. If we wish to describe Him by a word drawn from Oriental philosophy He would be called ‘an Avatar,’ a God who had descended. But we have only to do with such a descending Being from a certain moment; and we must accept what is described by all four Evangelists, by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, as such an appearance. At the moment of the Baptism of John, a Being descended to our Earth from the realms of Sun-existence and united with a human being. Now we have to realize clearly that according to the meaning of the four Evangelists this Sun-Being was greater than any other Avatar, than any other Sun-Being who up to that time had ever come to Earth. They, therefore, take trouble to explain that a specially prepared being had to advance from the side of humanity to meet this great descending Being.

All four Gospels, therefore, tell of the Sun-Being—the ‘Son of the living God’—who came towards men to aid their further progress; but only the Gospels of Matthew and Luke speak of the man who evolved towards this Sun-Being so that he might receive Him into himself. They narrate how the human being for thirty years prepares for the moment when he can receive the Sun-Being into himself. Because the Being we call the Christ is so universal, so all-comprising, it did not suffice that the bodily sheaths that were to receive Him should be prepared in any simple way. A quite specially prepared physical and etheric sheath had to evolve, meet for the reception of this descending Being. Whence these came we have seen in the course of our study of the Matthew Gospel. But out of this same being whose physical and etheric sheath had been prepared in accordance with the teaching of Matthew, out of the forty-two generations of the Hebrew people, there could not spring an astral garment or a bearer of the ego suited to that Sun-Being. For this, special arrangements were necessary, and these were carried out by means of another human being. This being we read of in the Gospel of Luke, where the writer of that Gospel describes the early years of the so-called Nathan Jesus. There we read of how the two became one.

This mystery occurred when the ego-entity, forsaking the body of the twelve-year-old Jesus of whom the writer of the Gospel of Matthew tells, namely, the Zarathustra individuality, passed into the Nathan Jesus of the Gospel of Luke. In this body he continued to dwell, carrying on in it the further development of those qualities acquired through his having assumed the physical and etheric sheaths of the Jesus of the Gospel of Matthew. In this body his higher principles ripened, until in his thirtieth year they were ready for the reception of the mighty Being who descended into them from higher worlds.

When seeking to describe the whole course of these events as related in the Gospel of Matthew we should have to say The writer first directs his attention to answering the question: What kind of physical and etheric body could serve such a Being as the Christ for His life on earth? And because of what the writer had experienced he could answer: In order that a suitable physical and etheric body could be prepared it was necessary that they should pass through forty-two generations of the Hebrew people so that the attributes laid down in Abraham might be fully developed. He could then continue to answer the question further by telling us: Such a physical and etheric body could only provide a fitting instrument if the greatest individuality humanity had so far produced for the comprehension of the Christ—that is the Zarathustra individuality—made use of them up to his twelfth year, at which time he had to leave this body and enter another. This was the body of the Jesus of whom the writer of the Gospel of Luke tells. From this point, the writer of the Gospel of Matthew, turning from that to which he had given his attention at first, deals exclusively with the Jesus of whom we read in the Gospel of Luke, and follows the life of Zarathustra until his thirtieth year. The moment had then come, when the astral body and ego-bearer had been so far evolved by Zarathustra that he could sacrifice them to the mighty Being—the great Sun-spirit—who descended from spiritual spheres and took possession of them. This was the moment of the baptism by John in Jordan.

If we recall once more the time when the earth was separated from the sun, and the beings whose supreme Leader is the Christ withdrew from the earth, we must say There were beings who let their influences spread gradually over the earth, just as the Christ, in the course of time, has allowed His influence to be felt on earth. But we must not forget something else, which is, that the nature of ancient Saturn as regards substantiality was relatively much simpler than that of the planetary bodies that arose later. It consisted of fire or warmth, there was neither air nor water there, neither was there light-ether. This light-ether came with the Sun-evolution. Then, when later this passed over into the Moon-evolution, the watery element appeared as a further densification, on one hand, and sound or tone-ether as a further refinement on the other. Solid substance was added to these during the evolution of the Earth; this condition arose as a further densification; life-ether being added at the same time as a further refinement. We have therefore on the earth—warmth, air or gaseous substance, water or fluid substance, and solids or earthly substance. Opposed to these as finer conditions we have light-ether, tone-ether, and life-ether, this last being the finest etheric condition known to us.

Now with the departure of the Sun from the Earth, not only the material part of the Sun left but the spiritual part left also. It was only later, and by degrees, that this returned to the earth, and it did not return entirely. I spoke of this at Munich when lecturing on the Six Days of Creation, so I will only touch on it here.

Of the higher etheric substances man is only aware of warmth and light-ether. What he perceives as ‘sound’ is but a reflection, a materialization, of the real tone that is in tone-ether. When tone-ether is spoken of we refer to the bearer of what is known as ‘The harmony of the spheres,’ and is only to be heard clairaudiently. The Sun certainly sends its light to the earth, in so far as this is physical, but a higher condition also lives in the Sun. People who know of these things do not speak in empty phrases when with Goethe they say:—

‘The sun-orb sings, in emulation,
Mid brother-spheres, his ancient round:
His path predestined through Creation,
He ends with step of thunder-sound.’

FAUST—Prologue in Heaven.

This refers to sphere-harmony, to that which lives in the sound-ether, and can only be heard by man when he has attained initiation, or when a Sun-being descends in order to hold intercourse with one who has been chosen to become an instrument for the further evolution of others. For such a one the Sun begins to resound, and the sphere-harmonies to be heard.

Above the tone-ether lies the life-ether. Just as the ‘word’ lies within mere tone, as something possessing an inward soul-like content, so associated with the meaning of the life-ether is that which in later Persian times was called ‘Honover.’ The writer of the Gospel of John calls this the ‘Logos,’ which as meaning-filled tone belongs to the Being of the Sun.

Among those blessed ones whose nature did not remain entirely deaf to this ‘resounding Sun,’ we have to reckon Zarathustra, who lived in the early part of our post-Atlantean civilization. It is no myth, but a fact that can be proved documentarily, that Zarathustra received instruction through the ‘Sun-word.’ He had become capable of hearing this. For what was the overwhelmingly majestic teaching given by the original Zarathustra to his pupils?

We might describe it thus: Zarathustra was an instrument through whom the sound, the meaning of the Sun-Word itself spoke. A Persian legend tells how the ‘Sun-Word’ spoke by the mouth of Zarathustra, how the secret or hidden word behind the Sun spoke through him. This legend, in referring to the astral body of the Sun, speaks of ‘Ahura Mazdao,’ but also of the ‘Sun-word,’ translated later into Greek as the ‘Logos.’

When thinking of this ancient Zarathustra, we realize that even so exalted a person could not in those early times have been initiated so as consciously to receive what he could afterwards pass on to others, but that he must have been ensouled by a Higher Being.

Zarathustra could teach of Ahura Mazdao, because the Aura of the Sun enfolded him, because the Spiritual-Being, Ahura Mazdao, resounded in him, because the World-Light—the great Aura—spoke through him. He was, as it were, the external bodily garment of the Sun-god, who thus sent His influence in advance down to man, though not as yet on earth Himself. At that time the Sun-word was more inward.

It might be said—speaking altogether in the sense of Zarathustra—that he taught his disciples: ‘You must understand that behind the physical sunlight there is a Spiritual Light, just as behind physical man there is something astral—his aura—so behind the sun there is the “Great Aura”. You must regard the physical sun as the light-body of a Being who will one day come to earth it is the external bodily form of something known to clairvoyant perception, and has an inner soul-nature within it. Just as the soul expresses itself in sound, so the Sun-word—the Logos—makes itself known by means of the Sun-Aura!’

Zarathustra gave to mankind the promise that one day the Light-being would come down from the spheres of the Great Aura, and that the soul of this Being would be the Sun-word. This is something we find for the first time in Zarathustra; it is the source from which his teaching springs. In it we have to see a prophetic wisdom, which tells of the coming of the Sun-aura and the Sun-word.

This teaching continued to live from epoch to epoch in the mysteries. It was the great consolation and hope of those who within human evolution longed for higher things. And the less exalted Sun-spirits, those associated with the earth, were able ever and again to give more precise teaching concerning the Spirit of the Sun-light, or Sun-aura, for they were really messengers of the Sun-word.

This was one side of the Mystery-tradition that passed down through the ages. The other side was, that men should learn to know, and by practice should be able to evolve upwards to meet, that which was to descend to earth. In pre-Christian times it was not yet possible for men to believe that without something further a feeble individual could evolve to meet the Sun-being, the Leader of the Hosts of the Sun, the Christ. It was not possible for anyone to attain this by any form of initiation. Hence the Gospel of Matthew describes how all the life-giving forces of the Hebrew people were called upon to produce such a man. On the other hand the Gospel of Luke explains how through seventy-seven successive stages the best that human nature could attain to was, as one might say, filtered, in order that a fitting body might evolve to meet the greatest Being Who was to come down to the earth.

In the Mysteries, as was natural, the men who had to be instructed, who had to be worked on, were ordinary feeble men, and were quite unable to grasp what it was that now faced humanity or that might be attained by single individuals. Therefore, those who were to be initiated were graded into different classes, and they approached the secrets of the Mysteries in different ways. Some, for instance, were taught more how men should live in the external world, what they ought to do there in order to fit themselves to become a temple for the descending Sun-being.

There were other pupils of the Mysteries who were instructed more in what was to evolve in the stillness of the soul if it wished to gain an understanding, a feeling for and perception of the Sun-spirit. Is it not natural that there should have been certain pupils whose task it was, so to direct their outer lives, so to be trained from childhood that their bodies became temples for the descending Spirit? This was the case in olden times; it is also the case to a certain extent to-day, but the ordinary materialistic consciousness passes it by.

Suppose the time drew nigh when some great Being was to descend from spiritual realms to give humanity a forward impulse in evolution.

Those who serve the Mysteries have to await such a moment; they have to interpret the signs of the times. In quiet and retirement, and without making any disturbance, they awaited the moment when a God is to come down to Earth to give an upward impulse to humanity. It was their duty also to watch humanity carefully, to see if among men there were any who could be trained and guided to fit them to receive such a Being into themselves. When the descending Being is of exceptional greatness such a man would have to be trained and prepared from earliest childhood that he might be a temple fit to receive Him. This also happens, and is also unnoticed. If the life of these men is described, it is found that they follow certain fundamental rules; even in outer concerns there is a certain resemblance in their lives. When we glance back over the course of human evolution we have to allow that here and there we find individuals whose lives take a similar course—even as regards external biographical facts. This cannot be denied, and has even been remarked on by those carrying out more recent research. Popular but not very profound works have been produced lately showing similarities in the lives of such persons. In the writings of Prof. Jensen (Marburg) you find, for instance, comparisons between the lives of the ancient Babylonian Gilgamesch, Moses, Jesus, and Paul. The tables are beautifully drawn up; he takes certain incidents from the lives of these individuals and compares them, with the result that quite wonderful resemblances are revealed, puzzling to the materialistic mind. The conclusions drawn are natural; it is stated that in these biographies one myth is copied from the others, that the writers of the Life of Jesus copied the biography of Gilgamesch, that the story of the life of Moses is but an old Epic, served up in a new form, and the final conclusion arrived at is: none of them has existed as a physical personality, not Moses, nor Jesus, nor Paul. People have no idea how far these so-called ‘researches’ lead them in respect of materialistic explanations.

Similarity of this kind in the biographies of great individuals rests on nothing more than the fact that in childhood they were already trained to become the bearers of a Divine Being; this causes no astonishment when we understand the deeper lying paths of human and universal evolution. Not only comparisons with Mythology, but all those searchings after similarities in regard to mythical sources is, in fact, fantasy. It leads nowhere. What does it benefit us to prove resemblances in the life of Siegfried to some Greek hero? They do certainly contain similarities. But the appearance of a house is not what matters, but who lives in it! It matters not that such and such things occurred in the life of Siegfried, but who the individuality was that dwelt in him.

Such things can, however, only be established with the help of occult research. What we have to bear in mind is that the lives of men who were to become fitting temples for higher Beings coming to the aid of humanity were guided in a special way, and that their lives show therefore a similar course as regards certain fundamental features.

In the temples of the Mysteries there have always been precepts regarding what had to come about with such men. Similar precepts were preserved by the association of the Essenes concerning Christ Jesus; telling what the nature of those human beings had to be who as the Solomon and the Nathan Jesus evolved upwards towards the great Sun-being, the Christ.

But those seeking initiation were not initiated into everything. There were different classes and degrees of initiates. Thus to some it was shown with special clearness what a man had to undergo who was evolving towards the God, so that he might be worthy to receive the God into himself. To others it was given to know how a God acted when He revealed Himself in a man; or to put it trivially, when he revealed Himself as a ‘genius.’ It is not generally remarked to-day that genius is apt to reveal itself in similar ways when appearing in different people. Nowadays people do not write biographies from out the spirit. If the genius of Goethe were to be described from the aspect of the spirit, a wonderful similarity would be found for instance between his genius and that of Dante, Homer, and Aeschylus. People do not now write biographies, but stick placards and tickets on a person and repeat all kinds of trivialities concerning the person's external life, which interests most people much more. So we are presented with a vast accumulation of ticketed rubbish concerning the life of Goethe, but not a real account of what Goethe actually was. Mankind to-day declares itself to be in some respects, and actually with pride, incapable of describing the evolution of genius in a human personality. There is a desire to-day to bring to light the earliest efforts of our great poets, stressing the fact that in the freshness and originality of their early works something elemental lived which is lost to the man in later life. But the real fact underlying this is that in their arrogance men only wish to understand the young poet, and not to take part in all he goes through in later life. Men pride themselves on the fact that they understand ‘youth,’ they trouble little about the ‘old,’ and have no idea that it is not the old who have become ‘old,’ but that they themselves have remained mere children.

This evil is widely spread. Seeing it is so deeply rooted, we need not wonder at the little understanding there is of the fact that a divine being can enter into a human personality, and that the life-course of such divine beings in any person and in any age must be fundamentally the same.

As there was necessarily much to be learnt as regards these profound relationships, this domain of knowledge was divided into classes. In a certain division of the Mysteries, teaching was given concerning the preparation of a man so that he might rise towards a divine being, whereas in others teaching was given concerning the descent of the inner Light-being, the Logos, the Sun-word, contained in the Aura of the Sun-being. In Christ we see this gradual descent in its most complex form. We need not wonder if more than four men had been needed for the understanding of these mighty facts; four, however, took it as their task. Two of these, the writers of the Gospels of Matthew and of Luke, undertook to relate the nature of the personality who grew towards the descending Sun-being—Matthew telling of this in respect of the physical and etheric bodies, Luke in respect of the astral-body and the bearer of the ego.

Mark on the other hand does not concern himself with that which advanced towards the Sun-being; but tells us of the Sun-Aura, the great body of light, the Spiritual Light whose power and activity streamed through space and was active within the form of Christ Jesus. He therefore begins his Gospel with the Baptism of John, when the Light of the World came down to earth. In the Gospel of John we are told of the soul of this Sun-spirit—of the Logos or Sun-word—its most inward essence. This is why the Gospel of John is the most inward of all the Gospels. The facts are distributed, and the complicated nature of Christ Jesus described from four different sides. All the four Evangelists tell of the Christ in Jesus of Nazareth, but each of them feels constrained to keep to the point from which he makes his start, the point concerning which he first attained clairvoyance so that he might be able to describe this very complicated Being.

It is well that we should review this once more, so that it may really penetrate the soul. Matthew's attention is directed to the birth of the Jesus of the Solomon line he describes the development of the forces of the physical and etheric bodies, and tells how these sheaths were later discarded by Zarathustra, and how he passed on to the Jesus of the Nathan line all he had acquired while in the physical and etheric body of the Solomon Jesus. Matthew has then to trace further what he does not describe at the beginning, the fate of all that which as qualities and consequences had passed over from the Solomon Jesus to the Nathan Jesus. His attention is not so much directed to what was elemental in the nature of the astral body and ego-bearer of the Nathan Jesus, but to that which had been passed on to him from his own, the Solomon Jesus. And as he describes the Sun-being Who came from above, he is mainly concerned with telling of the qualities that could only be possessed by Jesus because he had an etheric and astral body that had been built up by the Solomon Jesus. These qualities could naturally be remarked in the Christ, for they were there, but that part of Christ Jesus which had attracted his attention from the first, he continues to describe most exactly, for this was for him the most important.

The writer of the Gospel of Mark tells from the first of the great descending Sun-spirit; he describes no earthly Being; that which walked the earth in human form provided for him only the means by which the nature of the Spirit that worked within it might be revealed. He draws our attention to the facts that appeal most to him, namely, the way in which the forces of the Sun-spirit worked. Hence many of the things related in the Gospels of Matthew and of Mark are the same, but they are told from different points of view. The first describes more the character of the sheaths, showing especially how qualities which were apparent in later years had already been present in early youth, and describing these so that we see how they worked. The writer of the Gospel of Mark, on the other hand, only makes use of the physical Jesus in order to reveal to us the earthly activities of the Sun-spirit. This he does to the smallest detail. If you wish really to understand the Gospels in these details you must bear in mind that the Evangelists fixed their attention on that which had attracted them from the beginning

Hence the writer of the Gospel of Luke keeps his eyes fixed on what is important to him, namely, the astral body and the bearer of the ego. What Christ Jesus experienced as a physical person does not interest him so much, but rather the feelings and perceptions of the astral body and the ego-bearer. All tenderness and compassion come from the astral body, and Christ Jesus could only be the Being of compassion He was, because He possessed the astral body of the Nathan Jesus. So this writer draws attention from the first to the compassion of Christ Jesus, and all the things He could accomplish, because He bore within Him this special astral body.

The writer of the Gospel of John turns his attention to the most exalted Power working on earth—the inner force of the Sun-Spirit, brought down through the instrumentality of Jesus. Neither does the physical life interest him particularly, but he looks to the Highest, to the pure Sun-Logos; the physical Jesus is for him only the means by which he can trace the relationship of the Sun-Logos to man. That which attracts his attention in the beginning, holds it to the end.

When we look on sleeping humanity we see our external sheaths, our physical and etheric bodies. In these two members live all the forces that have come to us from divine beings who, through mi1licns and millions of years have worked at erecting this temple of the physical body. In this temple we have lived since Lemurian times, and have defiled it ever more and more. It was constructed for us originally during the Saturn, Sun, and Moon ages of evolution. In it divine beings have lived and worked constructively. Looking at our physical body we can say: This is a temple provided for us by the gods; gods who have constructed this temple for us out of solid substance. And in the ether body we have that which contains the finer substances of our being; we are only unable to see these because through the influences of Lucifer and Ahriman we have become incapable of doing so. In this ether body lives also that which appertains to the Sun in it resound the actively formative Sphere-harmonies which the gods perceive behind all purely physical nature. So of the ether body we can say: Exalted Beings live in it, Gods that are closely related to the Sun-Spirits.

In this way we must regard our physical and etheric bodies as the most perfect members of our being. When we have forsaken them in sleep, when they slip from us, they are at once filled with the life and activity of divine beings.

The writer of the Gospel of Matthew keeps the physical body of Christ Jesus before him as his main object through all the Gospel, as it was his main object from the first. The materially physical body, however, no longer existed, this had been given up in its twelfth year; but the divine part—its forces—passed over into the other physical body, that of the Nathan Jesus. The reason why the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth was so perfect was that he had filled it with the forces he derived from the body of the Solomon Jesus.

Let us now try to picture in what way the writer of this Gospel regarded the Jesus dying on the cross. He had always kept his attention fixed on that which it was his special mission to describe, that of which he tells in the beginning; but now the spiritual part forsakes the physical body, and what is godlike departs with it. So the attention of the writer of the Gospel is directed to the separation of the inner being of Christ Jesus from this Divinity in His physical nature. And the ancient cry which was always heard in the Mysteries when the spiritual nature of a man forsook his physical body to gaze into spiritual worlds—‘My God, my God, how hast thou glorified me!’—is altered by Matthew; so that with his attention fixed on the physical body he says, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!’ ‘Thou has gone from me! This is what he exclaims. It is on this ‘forsaking’ that the writer of the Gospel of Matthew fixes his attention at this moment.

The author of the Gospel of Mark, on the other hand, describes the approach of the external forces of the Sun-Aura, and tells how the Sun-Aura, the body of the Sun-Being unites with the etheric body. This etheric body is in the same situation as ours when we sleep. As our external powers go forth from us when we sleep so they went forth from Jesus at His physical death. Hence we find the same cry in the Gospel of Mark.

The writer of the Gospel of Luke also directs his attention at the death of Christ Jesus to that which claimed it in the beginning: to the astral body and ego-bearer. Therefore he does not make use of the same words. His attention is directed mainly to other facts, to facts connected with the astral body, which at this moment attained its climax of compassion and love. Hence he renders the cry as ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!’

This is an expression of tenderness that could only come from such an astral body as the writer of the Gospel of Luke directs our attention to from the first; and the highest development of humility and devotion resulting from this is what claims his attention at the last. Therefore he gives the last words of Christ Jesus as ‘Father, into Thy hands I commend My Spirit!’

John tells us of what, though certainly derived from the earth, was to be realized by man in the ordering of the earth, the meaning of earthly organization as it is contained in the Sun-Word. His attention is, therefore, directed mainly to what, as organization, was accomplished from the Cross on Golgotha. He describes to us how at this moment the Christ establishes a higher Brotherhood than that of blood-relationship. The former brotherhood arose through the blood. Mary was the mother of the child according to the blood. But that which was to unite soul with soul in love was inaugurated by Christ Jesus.

He gave to the disciple whom He loved not his mother according to the blood, but He gave to him his true mother in Spirit. Thus, renewing old bonds which had been lost to humanity, the words heard from the Cross come down to us in a new sense: ‘Behold thy Son!’ and ‘Behold thy Mother!’

That which as organizing quality lay here at the foundation of a new kind of fellowship is contained in the Life-ether, which organizes life, and which streamed into the earth in the Deed of Christ. Thus, behind all that the Evangelists tell us, we have a single act—the Deed of Christ; but each tells of it from the point of view which he took up from the beginning. The reason is that each of the Evangelists was absorbed in what his clairvoyant vision revealed to him and which he was fitted to receive; the rest passed him by. We now realize that this all-comprehensive event, which is described to us from four sides, is not full of contradictions. Once we are able to gather these different points of view into one we learn to understand it just because it is so described. It then also seems quite natural that the confession of Peter, with which we dealt in the last lecture, is only found in the Gospel of Matthew, and not in the others.

Mark describes the Christ as the Sun-Force, as a universal cosmic force at work in the world, which is now to work in a new way. It is the majestic power of the Sun-Aura in its elemental activity of which he tells. Luke, in speaking of the inner nature of Christ Jesus, describes preferably the astral body, the single human individual, man as he lives in himself; for it is in the astral-body that man lives in himself, here in his deepest individuality, here he develops within his inner self. Man does not form fellowships primarily by means of his astral body; the community-building capacity by which he enters into relationship with other men appears in the etheric body. Luke has, therefore, no inclination to tell us of the founding of any fellowship. Neither has the writer of the Gospel of John, who describes to us the ego-being. But Matthew, who describes Christ Jesus as man, has special inducement to speak of those human relationships established by the God Who once and only once dwelt within a human form. He is constrained to lay special stress on the relationships, the fellowships that God, as man, was able to establish among men, a relationship which could be regarded as a ‘Community,’ as an association in which many dwell together. The human aspect of Christ Jesus is what he describes, because this was the aspect to which he turned his attention in the beginning, and he shows how Christ worked as man through the physical and etheric body he had assumed.

When we have gained an inner understanding of this, we find it natural that the expression which has stirred up so much controversy, ‘Thou art Peter, and on this rock will I establish my community’ could only be found in the Gospel of Matthew. When we look at all the discussions of modern theologians of most varied schools concerning these words, we really only find particular and unique reasons for accepting them or rejecting them; nowhere, however, do we find an understanding for their deeper meaning. Those who reject them do so because the external community of the Catholic Church upholds them; for the external organization of this church is founded on them. That they are misused in this sense is no proof that they were originally introduced to support the Catholic Church. Those who reject them do not really know what to bring forward against them, for they do not see the misinterpretations. These gentlemen are in a strange position. Some state that the Gospel of Mark is the original Gospel, that to it was then added those of Matthew and Luke, which, they say, are to some extent copied and enlarged from it, and that it had occurred to the writers of the Gospel of Matthew, and of Luke, to insert these words. They specially state this with regard to the Gospel of Matthew, because they say he wished to support the idea of the community by inserting the words: ‘Thou art Peter, on this rock I will found my community.’

In any case parts of the text are of little help in the rendering of certain passages, because it is impossible to say regarding some ancient texts that this or that is the word actually used; but as regards these words in the Gospel of Matthew it is a fact that they belong to what is most certain in it, for here we have no possible philological reason for doubt. Many sayings may be open to doubt in such complicated communications, but from the standpoint of philology no objections can be brought against these two statements ‘Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God,’ and the other, ‘Thou art Peter, on this rock will I build my community, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.’ No text exists to which objections can be made in respect of these sayings. Perhaps it was hoped that from texts more recently discovered some contradiction of these words might be found, but the passages to which I refer are not found in these texts, portions of which are very much perished.

This at least is the outcome of philological research. Naturally you must rely on what is reported by those who have seen these documents. Of this passage we can state that no other rendering of it is possible, and from the whole nature of the Gospel of Matthew we can well see that this must be so. Christ Jesus is here described as a man. Once we have this key we can understand the Gospel of Matthew and we can also understand the parables told by Christ Jesus to His disciples and to those who were outside his immediate circle.

In the last lecture we showed how man evolves upwards from below until he unfolds the spiritual-soul like a blossom, until he has developed so far that the Christ-impulse comes to meet him.

The five principles of human nature which developed in man during the five epochs of civilization—the ether body, astral body, sentient-soul, rational-soul, and spiritual-soul evolve upwards from below. These can be so used, trained, and developed that they acquire what makes it possible for them—when the time is ripe—to be permeated by the Christ-impulse. In future ages all humanity will be able to develop so that they can participate in the Christ, but they must first develop fittingly these five principles of their being from below. If this is not done, if through succeeding incarnations they do not concern themselves with the development of these principles, then the Christ can come to them; but they cannot unite themselves with Him. They have no oil in their lamps These five. principles may be left without oil. Those who have poured no oil into their lamps are represented very beautifully in the parable of ‘the five foolish Virgins.’ Those who had not attended to their lamps in time could not unite themselves with Christ; but the other five who had put oil in their lamps could in the right hour do so.

All the parables founded on numbers are profoundly illuminating as regards the impulse brought by Christ to men.

Further, He makes it clear to those who regard His teaching outwardly, that many external thing must not be considered merely in a material sense, or in the most obvious way, but rather as symbols for something else. He wishes to point out to them the nature of their own thoughts. He asks for a coin, and showing them the likeness of Caesar imprinted on it, points out that something more is expressed by the coin than is merely contained in the metal, namely, its connection with a certain ruler, with a certain Empire. ‘What in this belongs to Caesar, render to him; it is his, and is contained in his likeness on the coin, not in the metal itself.’ ‘But learn,’ He also wished to teach them, ‘to regard men, and what is in them, in a like manner, for they are the temples of the living God. Look on men as you would look on a coin, learn, that in them you see the image of God; you will then know that they belong to God.’

All these parables have a much deeper meaning than the trivial one generally accepted. We learn this when we know that Christ did not make use of parables as is customary in the literature of the day. In making use of them He directs them to the whole nature of man, obliging people when they think them out to apply them to their whole nature, not to its separate parts. In this way He shows how, if they are to be shown that something is irrational, they must learn to pass with their thoughts from one realm to another.

For example, people have thought out all kinds of Sun-myths in connection with Buddha, Christ, and others. It became at last too much for one person. He said therefore: ‘With these methods of applying Myths and Constellations to any great event, it is possible to do anything. If someone comes and points out that in the life of Christ we have a Sun-myth, in order to show that Christ Jesus never lived, one can also assert by such methods that Napoleon never lived, and can easily prove it. We might say: In the name of Napoleon we have a rendering of “Apollo”, the initial “N” does not represent a negative in Greek but an intensification; hence Napoleon is N'Apollo—a kind of “Super-Apollo”. The resemblance can be carried still further by the individual who sets out to prove the non-existence of Jesus. A resemblance is found by the German Prof. Drews between the names Jesus, Joses, Jason, etc., etc. Marvellous connections can also be discovered between the name of Napoleon's mother, Letitia, and Leto, the mother of Apollo; further, that Apollo—the Sun—had twelve constellations around him; Napoleon had twelve Marshals, who are nothing more than symbolic expressions for the Zodiacal signs surrounding the sun. It is not unimportant that the hero of the Napoleon myth had six brothers and sisters, he making the seventh, just as the planets are seven in number. Behold, therefore, Napoleon did not live!

This is a very clever satire on the symbolic explanations so frequently employed. Men never really learn, otherwise they would have known that according to these methods—which they even employ to-day—it would have been proved long since that Napoleon, for example, never lived. But humanity never learns, for according to the same methods it is proved again to-day that Jesus never lived.

Such things show how necessary it is that we should not approach what the Gospels have to tell concerning the greatest Event in all the world, without preparation. We must realize also that it is exactly here that Anthroposophy ma so easily go wrong. For even our movement is by no means free from playing with all kinds of Symbolism drawn from the world of the stars.

I wished, therefore, especially in this cycle of lectures, where I have spoken of the greatest Event in human evolution as having been revealed in the language of the stars, to point out the true way in which this language is employed when what is referred to is really understood.

With this preparation, let us approach the scene in which the Gospels culminate. I have already referred to the baptism and the history of the life and death of Christ Jesus as two stages of initiation. To this I have only to add that after He had led His disciples to.the point where they could perceive the going forth of the innermost being of a man into the Macrocosm, where they could see beyond death, He accomplished a resurrection before them, but not in the trivial sense in which it is often understood. This took place absolutely as told in the Gospel of Matthew. Let us take the words just as they stand—and as clearly stated also in the Gospel of John—and understand that what Paul says is true when he tells us: Through what he had experienced on the way to Damascus, he had seen the Christ, as the Risen One!

Paul lays special stress on the fact that what was revealed to him was the same as was revealed to the other brethren, to the twelve, and to the five hundred also, at one time. The Christ was seen by him, as others saw him after the resurrection. This is amply indicated in the Gospels, where we read that Mary of Magdala, who had seen the Christ a few days before, seeing Him after the resurrection takes Him to be the gardener, for she finds no resemblance to Him she had known before. If He had really looked as He had a few days before, it would have been impossible for in this case it would have been an abnormal fact.

No one would believe you if you said that you could not recognize someone you had seen a few days before, if he reappeared in the same form a few days later. We have, therefore, to realize clearly that a change had in fact taken place. Reading the Gospels closely we arrive at the necessary conclusion, that through all that had taken place in Palestine, through the Mystery of Golgotha, the eyes of the disciples had been opened, and that they were able to recognize the Christ as He was, as the Spirit penetrating, and working, through the whole world. They recognized Him for what He was, after He had given over His physical body to the earth, and saw that He remained just as powerfully active for the earth as He had been before.

All this is made amply clear to us in the Gospel of Matthew, in words perhaps the most remarkable to be found in any document. We are clearly shown that the writer of this Gospel desires to inform us: Christ appeared once upon a time in a human physical body, but this event is not merely an event, it is an Impulse—an Original Cause. It has results, it has an effect.

The Sun-Word or Sun-aura, of which Zarathustra once spoke as being outside the earth, has through the life of Christ Jesus become united with the earth, and has remained so. Before this, what was later united with the earth was not so united with it.

It is fitting that we Anthroposophists should understand this fact. We then also understand that it was the risen Christ Who revealed Himself to the eyes of the disciples, now become clairvoyant, and showed them how as Spirit He was now interwoven with the earth and could say to them: ‘Go forth and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all things whichsoever I commanded you! and lo! I am with you always, even unto the end of the Earth-age!’

It is the mission of Spiritual Science to help us to understand what was then beginning; that the Aura of the earth has been united with the Sun-Aura, and that it can be seen by those whose spiritual eyes are opened, that this Sun-Aura, in the Earth-Aura, which was visible to Paul, can also be heard when our inward ears are opened to hear the Sun-word as it was heard by Lazarus, he who had been initiated by Christ Jesus Himself.

The purpose of Spiritual Science is to interpret these facts to us. It has also to interpret for us what has taken place with regard to the spiritual evolution of the world. In doing this Spiritual Science actually establishes that which Christ Jesus desired to establish, and does so in the sense of the Gospel of Matthew.

There is one very beautiful saying in the Gospel of Matthew that is generally wrongly translated. The saying: ‘I am not come down to remove peace from earth, but to remove the sword.’ This most beautiful message of peace has unfortunately in the course of time been changed into its very opposite. In order gradually to deliver the earth from that which brings strife and disharmony among men, the Christ-Being had impressed Himself—His own nature—on the spiritual life of the Earth. Spiritual Science will establish peace when, in this sense, she has become so truly Christ-like that she unites all religions. She can then unite not only what is in our immediate neighbourhood, but when the act of the greatest of all Peacemakers is understood, she can establish peace over the whole earth.

It is certainly not in accordance with the greatest Peacemaker that fanatical people should go from one part of the earth to another and impose a narrow Christian teaching on a people whose conditions make such a teaching unsuitable in the form it has taken among another people.

Great mistakes were made when teaching concerning Christ was carried over to the East in our time, and imposed on people here and there.

It has often been pointed out to you as Anthroposophists that the Christ does not belong only to Christians; that in reality the same being was referred to by Zarathustra when he spoke of Ahura Mazdao, and by the seven Indian Rishis when they spoke of Vicva Karman. We live in the West, and we know that it is Christ who is spoken of, when in the East other words are used. We strive to understand the Christ so that this understanding is in accordance with human evolution—with the further progress of humanity. And we clearly realize that neither discernment nor revelation can give us information concerning Christ which turns men from Him, that only those things vouchsafe information to us concerning Him, which consciously bear within them the living content of Christ Himself. And we know when we speak in the right way of Vicva Karman and Ahura Mazdao to those who deny Christ—when we do not force names on them—that they can attain of themselves to an understanding of the Christ. We do not wish to force the Christ on them in name, we realize clearly when we are not only Anthroposophists but Occultists that names mean little, that it is the Being that matters. Were we convinced but for a moment that we could express the being who is in the Christ by any other name we would do so What we are concerned with is the truth, not with our prejudices because of living in one corner of the earth and belonging to one people. It must not be said of us that we understand the Christ through means not fitted to an understanding of Him, because outside His influence, this would be impossible for anyone. Christ can be found also by other nations, but He must be sought by means derived from Himself. People should not reproach Anthroposophists for wishing to study Christianity in forms not derived from Christianity itself. Christ can not be comprehended by Oriental names. He is not understood through them at all; such people look close past Him, thinking perhaps that they have seen Him.

What does it mean when people put forward the objection that we view Christ from a theosophical or oriental standpoint? Have we to deny that the Christ came to us from the East? We have no such wish, but people seek in this way to force us to take the West to the East, and to form a conception of Christ in accordance with the East. This must not and cannot be, not from any aversion, but because Eastern ideas, which have a very ancient origin, cannot reach out to grasp the idea of Christ, and because the Christ can only be absolutely and entirely understood through that line of evolution into which first Abraham and then Moses entered. But the being of Zarathustra passed on into Moses, and we have to seek him there, to where his influence has extended.

Further, we must not seek Zarathustra in the ancient Zarathustrian literature, but where he reincorporated in Jesus of Nazareth! We must consider evolution!

In the same way we must not look for the Buddha as he was six hundred years before our era, but where the writer of the Gospel of Luke tells us he is to be found, where his light streamed from on high, after he had evolved from Bodhisattva to Buddha, and shone down into the astral body of the Jesus of the Gospel of Luke. Here the Buddha is to be found, and here we learn to know him in his further progress.

It can be seen from this how religions absolutely agree, and work together to bring about the advance of humanity. It is not a matter of preaching the tenets of Anthroposophy, but that we place them in a setting of living feeling—that we do not merely talk of tolerance and remain intolerant because we have a prejudice in favour of one religious system or another. We are only tolerant when we measure each with its own standards and understand each for itself.

It is certainly not our fault nor the fault of our special prejudices that many religious systems have apparently co-operated to bring Christianity about. In spiritual realms, where the great spiritual beings have worked, things have progressed in a different way from on Earth, where those who confess these various religions are active. Some of these earthly confessors, for example, summoned a conference in Tibet to establish an orthodox teaching in the name of Buddha at the very time when the actual Buddha had come down to inspire the astral body of the Jesus spoken of in the Gospel of Luke. So it always is. The confessors of a faith hold fast to that which has continued working on earth; meanwhile divine beings have carried the work on further so that mankind may advance. Humanity makes most progress when men try to understand their Gods, when they try to advance with them. Such a thought ought to give us a living feeling, a living understanding, of what we glimpse in the different Gospels.

You have seen that in studying the three Gospels so far dealt with we have to recognize something different in each of them. When to these we shall have added the study of the Gospel of Mark we shall find that it reveals a very intimate knowledge of Cosmology. Ahura Mazdao, who is active in all space, can be described in a right connection in this Gospel, just as the secret concerning the blood, concerning the connection of the individual with the race from which he has sprung is described in the Gospel of Matthew.

Accept what I have ventured to describe in these lectures as one side of the great Christ Event, and realize that far from everything has been said concerning it. The time is perhaps not yet come when all that might be said concerning this Great Mystery can be said, even in small circles such as ours. The best result that can come from the presentations of these facts is that we accept them not only with our understanding and intellect, but that we associate them with the innermost phases of our soul life—with the deepest feelings of our hearts—and there let them live on.

The words of the Gospels are words that, when we receive them into our hearts and really understand them, become powers; powers that fill us and develop a marvellous life-force within us. To-day, when I have to say the final words in connection with this course of lectures on the Gospel of Matthew, I should like to say something I have frequently said before, and which I should like especially to associate with this humanly beautiful document of our Christian records—the Gospel of Matthew.

What strikes us most when reading the Gospel of Matthew which from the very first brings before us the manhood of Christ Jesus?

Though recognizing the great difference between any other earthly man and that man who could receive the Christ, yet in all humility we would say that what strikes us most forcibly is the value of man, what he is worthy of. Then, although our nature is far far removed from that of the nature of Jesus of Nazareth, we may yet venture to say: We bear our human nature within us, and this human nature shows itself to be such that it can receive into it the Son of God, the Son of the living God; so that from this acceptance the promise can spring that the Son of God will from this time forward remain connected with the earth, and that when the earth will have reached its goal all men will be permeated with the substance and nature of Christ, in so far as they have desired to receive this into themselves. We have need of humility if we are to cherish such an ideal. If not so cherished it develops pride and conceit in us; we then think only of what we may become as men, and do not sufficiently keep in mind how little we have so far to show. This ideal must be experienced with humility. When understood in this way it rises before us with such majesty and power, and is so overwhelming in its splendour that we are forced to be humble. Our humility need not overwhelm us, however, for we have the Reality of this ideal before us, and when we understand the Reality, however small our power may be, yet it will bear us ever higher and higher towards our Divine Goal.

The Rosicrucian Mystery Play strikes the entire scale in tones as we need them in ascending progress—firstly in the second scene where Johannes Thomasius stands shattered under the overwhelming impression from the words, ‘O man, know thou thyself;’ secondly, where in the ninth scene, under the impression of the words, ‘O man, feel and experience thou thyself;’ he feels exultingly raised to the wide spaces of Heaven. Keeping this before us, and with help from it, we can understand the majesty and grandeur which meets us in the Jesus of the Gospel of Matthew, revealing as it does our own littleness and demanding our humility, but at the same time pointing to the inner truth and inner reality which lift us out of all that seems like an abyss of our own littleness, compared with what we should be and can become.

If frequently we are conscious of feeling crushed when comparing what we are with the human divine greatness that can be in man, yet if we have but the goodwill we can experience something of the divine Impulse coming from the ‘Son of the living God,’ we can call to mind Christ Jesus, who Himself exhorts us, here where as men we experience the ego of which He is the most exalted Representative, crying to us in clear-cut tones for all the ages to come, ‘O man, experience thyself.’

When we understand the humanity of the Gospel of Matthew in this way—and hence it is the Gospel which lies most near to us—there streams to us from it the courage to live, the power and hope to stand fast, whatever our life-work may be. If we do so, we shall have best understood what it was intended that these words should convey to us.

The yearly celebration of the physical birth of the Being Who entered earth-evolution in order to give that evolution its meaning, has for many people become a matter of habit. But if, conformably with the task of our spiritual-scientific movement, we are not content with celebrating a festival of mere custom—as is so general nowadays—it will be opportune at this grave time to turn our minds to many things that are connected with the physical birth of Christ Jesus.

We have often pictured how in Christ Jesus, so far as human comprehension goes, two Beings merge as it were into one: the Christ Being and the human Jesus Being. In the evolution of Christianity there has been much conflict, much conflict of dogma, about the meaning of the union of Christ with Jesus, in the Being whose physical birth is celebrated at the Christmas Festival. We ourselves, of course, recognise in the Christ a cosmic, super-earthly Being, a Being Who descended from spiritual worlds in order, through His birth in a physical man, to impart meaning to earth-evolution. And in Jesus we recognise the one who, as man, was predestined after thirty years of preparation, to unite the Christ Being with himself, to receive the Christ Being into himself.

Not only has there been much strife, much conflict of dogma, about the nature of the union of Christ with Jesus, but the relationship of Christ to Jesus contains a hint of significant secrets of the earthly evolution of mankind. If, in the endeavour to understand something of the union of Christ with Jesus, we follow events up to the present day and reflect upon what has still to take place in the evolution of humanity before this relationship can be rightly understood, then we touch upon one of the deepest secrets of human knowledge and human life.

At the time when Christ was about to enter the evolution of humanity, it was possible, through faculties that were a heritage from the days of the old clairvoyant wisdom, to form certain conceptions of the sublimity of the Christ Being. And at that time there existed a wisdom of which people often speak nowadays in a way that is almost blasphemous, but of which they are scarcely able to form any true idea. There existed something which up to this day has been completely exterminated from human evolution, rooted out by certain currents running counter to the deeper Christian revelation: this was the Gnosis, a wisdom into which had flowed much of the ancient knowledge revealed to men in atavistic clairvoyance. Every trace of the Gnosis, whether in script or oral tradition, was exterminated root and branch by the dogmatic Christianity of the West—after this Gnosis had striven to find an answer to the question: Who is the Christ?

There can be no question to-day of reverting to the Gnosis—for the Gnosis belongs to an age that is past and over. True, its extermination was caused by malice, ignorance, enmity towards knowledge and wisdom ... but for all that it happened out of an underlying necessity. When anthroposophical spiritual science is accused of wanting to revive the ancient Gnosis, that is only one of the many expressions of ill-will directed towards it to-day. The accusation is, of course, made by people whose ignorance of the Gnosis is on a par with their ignorance of Anthroposophy. There is no question of reviving the Gnosis, but of recognising it as something great and mighty, something that endeavoured, in the time now lying nineteen hundred years behind us, to give an answer to the question: Who is the Christ?

Before the inner eye of the Gnostic lay a glorious vista of spiritual worlds, with the Hierarchies ranged in their order, one above the other. How the Christ had descended through the worlds of the spiritual Hierarchies to enter into the sheaths of a mortal man—all this stood before the soul of the Gnostic. And he tried to envisage how the Christ had come from heights of spirit, how He had been conceived on earth. The best way to get some idea of the knowledge then existing is to reflect that everything produced by the world after the extermination of the Gnosis was paltry in comparison with the grandeur of the Gnostic idea of the Christ. The Mystery-wisdom behind the Gospels is infinitely great—greater by far than anything which later theology has been able to discover from them. To realise how paltry and insignificant compared with the Gnosis is the current conception of the Christ Being, we have but to steep ourselves in the ancient Gnostic idea of Him. Picturing this, one is filled with humility by the grandeur of the conception of the Christ Being entering into a human body from cosmic heights, from far distant cosmic worlds.

This majestic, sublime concept of Christ has fallen into the background, but all the dogmatic definitions handed down to us as Arian or Athanasian principles of faith are meagre in comparison with the Gnostic conception, in which vision of the Christ Being was combined with wisdom relating to the universe.¹ Only the merest fragments of this great Gnostic conception of Christ have survived.

This, then, is one aspect of the relationship of Christ to Jesus: that Christ came into the world at a time when the wisdom capable of understanding Him, yearning to understand Him, had already been rooted out. People who speak of the ancient Gnosis as oriental phantasy that had to be exterminated for the good of Western humanity, have always believed themselves to be good Christians, but the real cause was that the mind of the age lacked the strength to unite earthly with heavenly concepts. One must have a feeling for the tragic if human evolution is to be understood.

How long after the Mystery of Golgotha was the Temple at Jerusalem, the sanctuary of peace, destroyed? The Temple of Solomon was within the precincts of the city of Jerusalem. What the Gnosis contained in the form of wisdom, Solomon's Temple contained in the form of symbolism. Cosmic secrets were presented in symbols and pictures. And it was intended that those who entered the Temple, where the pictures all around them were reflected in their souls, should receive something through which alone they became truly man. The purpose of the Temple of Solomon was to inculcate the meaning of worlds into the souls of those who were permitted to enter it. What the Temple revealed was something that the earth as such did not reveal, namely, all the cosmic secrets that ray into the earth from the cosmic expanse.

If one of the old Initiates possessing real knowledge of the Temple of Solomon had been asked: Why was the Temple of Solomon built?—the answer would have been somewhat as follows: ‘In order that here on the earth there shall be a beacon light for those Powers who accompany the souls seeking their way into earthly bodies.’ Let us try to grasp what this means, realising that these old Initiates of the Temple of Solomon knew that when men were being accompanied into earthly bodies in conformity with all the signs of the stars, then particular souls must be guided to bodies in which the great symbols of Solomon's Temple could be mirrored.

This, in the nature of things, might give rise to arrogance. If the knowledge was not received with humility, with the humility of the Essenes, it led men into Pharisaism! But at all events, this was the situation: The eye of earth looked up to the heavens, beholding the stars; the spiritual eyes of those who were guiding souls from cosmic worlds to the earth gazed downwards and beheld the Temple of Solomon with its symbols. The Temple was like a star whose light enabled them to guide the souls into bodies which would be capable of understanding its meaning. It was the central star of the earth, shining out with special brightness into the spiritual heights.

When Christ Jesus had come to the earth, when the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place, the great secret that was intended to be mirrored in every single human soul was this: "My kingdom is not of this world!" It was then that the external, physical Temple of Solomon lost its significance and its destiny was tragically fulfilled. Moreover at that time there was no living person who would have been capable of apprehending the full compass of the Christ Being from the reflections of the symbols in Solomon's Temple. But the Christ Himself had now entered earth-evolution, had become part of it. That is the all-important fact. The Gnostics were the last survivors of the bearers of that ancient, atavistic earth-wisdom which was comprehensive and powerful enough to make some understanding of the Christ possible.

That, then, is one aspect of the relation of Christ to Jesus. In those days the Christ Being could have been understood through the Gnosis. But according to the world-plan it was not to be—although the Gnosis teemed with wisdom concerning the Christ. And it may truly be said that the path now taken by Christianity through the countries of the South, through Greece, Italy, Spain and so on, led more and more to the obliteration of insight into the essential nature of Christ. And Rome, sinking into decline, was destined to bring about the final extinction of understanding.

In regard to this relation of the Christ to Jesus it is strange that on the one hand we find lighting up in the Gnosis a sublime conception of the Christ which died away as Christianity passed through the Roman system, while on the other hand, when Christianity encountered the peoples from the North, the concept of Jesus came to the fore. In the South, the concept of Christ flickered out. The form in which the concept of Jesus emerged was by no means very sublime, but it gripped men's hearts and feelings in such a way that something wonderfully absorbing stirred in their souls at the thought of how the Child who receives the Christ is born in the Holy Night. Just as in the South the concept of Christ was inadequate, so in the North was man's feeling for Jesus. But for all that it was a feeling that stirred the very depths of the human heart. Yet in itself it is not quite comprehensible. For if we contrast the immeasurable significance of Christ Jesus for the evolution of humanity with all the sentimental trivialities about the ‘dear little Jesus’ contained in many poems and hymns commonly used to move the human heart—for in their egoism men believe that these trivialities kindle emotions capable of storming the heavens—then we have a direct impression that something is striving to make its home but is not fully able to do so, that one element is mingling with another in such a way that the deeper meaning, the far deeper significance, remains in the subconsciousness.

What actually is it that remains in the subconsciousness while the Jesus-thought, the Jesus-feeling, the Jesus-experience, is coming to the surface? The process takes a strange and remarkable course. The understanding for Christ sank into the subconsciousness and there, in the subconsciousness, the understanding for Jesus began to glow. In the subconsciousness—not in the consciousness, which was dim—the consciousness of Christ that was flickering out and the consciousness of Jesus that was beginning to stir were destined to meet and counter-balance each other. Why was it, then, that the peoples who came down from Scandinavia, from the North of present-day Russia, received Christianity without the Christ-idea which, to begin with, was wholly foreign to them? Why was it that they received Christianity with the Jesus-idea? Why was Christmas the festival which above all others spoke to the human heart, awakened in the human heart feelings of holy bliss? Why was it? What was present in this Europe which in truth received from the South a completely distorted Christianity? What was it that kindled in men's hearts the idea which then, in the Christmas Festival, created such a deep, deep fount of experience?

Men had been prepared—but had largely forgotten by what they had been prepared. They had been prepared by the old Northern Mysteries. But they had forgotten the import and meaning of these ancient Mysteries. And we have to go very far back into the past to discover from the source and content of the Northern Mysteries the deep secret of the penetration of the Jesus-feeling into the soul-life of the European peoples.

The principles underlying the Northern Mysteries were quite different from those underlying the Mysteries of Asia Minor and of the South. The experiences underlying the Northern Mysteries were more intimately and directly connected with the existence of the stars, with nature, with earthly fertility, than with the wisdom represented in symbols within a Temple. The Mystery-truths are not the childish trifles presented by certain mystic sects to-day; the Mystery-truths are great and potent impulses in the evolution of mankind. Present-day Anthroposophy can no more revert to the Gnosis than mankind can revert to what the ancient Mysteries of the North, for example, signified for human evolution. And to believe that such Mystery-truths are now being revealed because of some kind of hankering to go back to what was once alive in them, would be a foolish misunderstanding. It is for the sake of deepening self-recollection, self-knowledge, that mankind to-day must be made aware of the content of such Mysteries. For what linked the Northern Mysteries with the whole evolution of the universe, arose from the earth, just as the Gnostic wisdom, inspired from the cosmos, was connected with happenings in the far distances of the universe. How the secret of man, linked as it is with all the secrets of the cosmos, comes into operation when a human being enters physical existence on the earth—it was this that, with greater depth than anywhere else at a certain period of earth-evolution, lay at the root of these ancient Northern Mysteries.

But we have to go very far back—to about three thousand years before Christ, perhaps even earlier—to understand what was alive in the hearts of those in whom, later on, the feeling for Jesus arose. Somewhere in the region of the peninsula of Jutland, in present-day Denmark, was the centre from which, in those ancient times, important impulses went out from the Mysteries. And—let the modern intellect judge of this as it will—these impulses were connected with the fact that in the third millennium before Christ, in certain Northern tribes, he alone was regarded as a worthy citizen of the earth who was born in certain weeks of the winter season. The reason for this was that from those places of the Mysteries on the peninsula of Jutland, among the tribes which at that time called themselves the Ingaevones, or were so called by the Romans—by Tacitus²—the Temple Priest gave the sign for sexual union to take place at a definite time during the first quarter of the year. Any sexual union outside the period ordained by this Mystery-centre was taboo; and in this tribe of the Ingaevones a man who was not born in the period of the darkest nights, at the time of greatest cold, towards our New Year, was regarded as an inferior being. For the impulse went out from that Mystery-centre at the time of the first full moon after the vernal equinox. Only then, among those who might believe themselves united with the spiritual world as became the dignity of man, was sexual union permissible. The characteristic virility—even in its aftermath—marvelled at by Tacitus, writing a century after the Mystery of Golgotha, was due to the fact that the forces which enter into such sexual union were preserved through the whole of the rest of the year.

And so those who belonged to the tribe of the Ingaevones (and in a lesser degree this was also true of the other Germanic tribes) experienced the process of conception with particular intensity at the time of the first full moon after the vernal equinox. They experienced it, not in wide-awake consciousness, but as it were heralded in dream. Yet they were aware of its significance in regard to the connection between the secret of man and the secrets of the heavens. A spiritual being appeared to the woman who was to conceive and in a kind of vision announced to her the human being who, through her, was to come to the earth. There was no clear consciousness, but only semi-consciousness, in the sphere experienced by souls when the entry of a human being into the physical world is taking place; subconsciously men knew that they were under the direction of the Gods, who then received the name of the Wanen, connected with wähnen, that is to say with what takes its course, not in clear, intellectual, waking consciousness, but in cognitive dream-consciousness.

What was once in existence and fitting for its own epoch, is often preserved in later times in symbols. Thus the fact that in those ancient times the holy mystery of the generation of a human being was wrapped in subconsciousness, and led to all births being concentrated in a particular period of the winter season, so that it was regarded as sinful for a man to be born at another time—this was preserved in fragments which passed over to a later consciousness as the Hertha or Erda or Nertus Saga. No erudition, as scholars themselves openly admit, has hitherto been able to interpret these fragments, for actually all that is known externally of the Nertus Saga, with the exception of a few brief notes, comes from Tacitus, who writes as follows about the Nertus or Hertha cult:

"The Reudigni, Aviones, Anglii, Varini, Eudoses, Saurini and Nuitones—Germanic peoples living amidst rivers and woods" (that is, roughly the several tribes who belong to the Ingaevones) " specially revere Nertus, that is, Mother Earth, and they believe that she intervenes in human affairs, makes journeys to the peoples." (Germania 40).

In the ancient cult of the Wanen it became known in dream-consciousness to every woman who was to give a citizen to the earth that the Goddess worshipped later on as Nertus would appear to her. The Divinity was, however, represented not exactly as female, but as male-female. It was not until later, through a corruption, that Nertus became an entirely feminine principle. Just as the Archangel Gabriel drew near to Mary, Nertus on her chariot drew near to the woman who was about to give a citizen to the earth. The woman concerned saw this in the spirit. Later, when the Mystery-impulse in this form had long since died out, echoes of the happening were celebrated in symbolic rites which Tacitus was still able to witness and of which he says the following:—

"On an island of the ocean is a sacred grove and in it there is a consecrated chariot covered with a veil. Only the priest may approach it."—This priest was taken to represent the ‘Initiate’ of the Hertha-Mystery—"He knows when the Goddess appears in the sacred chariot. He becomes aware of the presence of the Goddess in her holy place, and in deep reverence accompanies her chariot drawn by cows. Then there are days of joy and feasting in all the places which the Goddess honours with a visit. Then there are joyous days and wedding feasts. At those times no war is waged, no weapons are handled, the sword is sheathed. Only peace and quiet are at those times known or desired, until the Goddess, tired of her sojourn among mortals, is led back into her shrine by the same priest." (—This was actually the form taken by the vision—

"Then there are joyous days and wedding feasts." In such ancient records the descriptions are accurate and exact, only men do not understand them. "Then there are joyous days and wedding feasts. At those times no war is waged, no weapons are handled, the sword is sheathed." And so it was in very truth at the time which is now our Easter, when human beings believed in their inmost soul that the time of earthly fruitfulness had come for them too; it was then that the souls who were born at the time that is now our Christmas, were conceived. Easter was the time of conception. The experience was regarded as a holy, cosmic mystery, and it was this that was symbolised later on by the Nertus cult. The whole experience was veiled in the subconscious region of the soul, might not rise up into consciousness. This is hinted at in the description of the cult given by Tacitus: "Only peace and quiet are at those times known or desired—until the Goddess, tired of her sojourn among mortals, is led back into her shrine by the same priest. Then the chariot and the veil and even the Goddess herself are bathed in a hidden lake. Slaves perform the cult, slaves who are at once swallowed up as forfeit by the lake, so that all knowledge of these things sinks into the night of unconsciousness. A secret horror and a sacred darkness hold sway over a being who is able to behold only the sacrifice of death."

Everything that comes into the world calls forth a Luciferic and an Ahrimanic counterpart. The event which—as experienced by the Ingaevones—was part of the regular, ordained evolution of mankind was connected with the time of the first full moon after the vernal equinox. But owing to the precession of the equinox, what had remained from olden days as a dream-experience was transferred to a later date and therefore became Ahrimanic. When the experience that had arisen in ancient times in the true Hertha cult was advanced about four weeks, it became Ahrimanic. This meant that the union of the woman with the spiritual world was sought in an irregular way—at the wrong time. Here lies the explanation of the institution of the Walpurgis Night—between the 30th April and the 1st May. It is nothing but an Ahrimanic transposition of time. Luciferic transposition of time goes backward; Ahrimanic transposition of time runs in the opposite direction, being connected with the precession of the equinox. Thus the Ahrimanic, Mephistophelean form of the Hertha cult, the perversion into the diabolic, later became the Walpurgis Night; it is connected with the most ancient Mysteries of which only faint echoes remained.

Much of the content of the ancient Northern Mysteries lived on—if the matter is rightly understood—in the Scandinavian Mysteries. There, instead of Nertus, we find Friggo, a god who, according to the symbolism associated with him—but this can become intelligible only through spiritual science—turns into the very betrayer of what lies at the root of this Mystery.

One more thing must be mentioned in regard to these Mystery-practices. You can see that if the human seed was ripening from the time of the vernal full moon to winter time, one such human being would be the first to be born in the ‘Holy Night.’ Among the Ingaevones the first to be born in the Holy Night—the Holy Night of every third year in the most ancient times—was chosen as their leader when he reached the age of thirty, and he remained leader for three years, for three years only. What happened to him then I may perhaps be able to tell you on another occasion.

Careful investigation reveals that not only are Frigg, Frei, Freiga, merely additional designations for Nertus, as is the Scandinavian ‘Nört,’ but the name ‘Ing’ itself, whence Ingaevones, is another name for Nertus. Those who were connected with the Mystery called themselves "Men belonging to the God or the Goddess Ing"—Ingaevones. Only fragments of what really lived in this Mystery survived in the external world. One such fragment consists of the words of Tacitus already quoted. Another fragment is the well-known Anglo-Saxon rune of a few lines only. These famous lines are known to every philologist of the Germanic languages, but no one understands their meaning. They are approximately as follows:

"Ing was first seen among the East Danes. Later he went towards the East. He walked over the waves, followed by his chariot."

In this Anglo-Saxon rune there is an echo of what lay behind the old Mystery-customs of the Easter conception with a view to the Christmas birth. What happened then in the spiritual world was known best on the Danish peninsula. Hence the rune correctly says: "Ing was first seen among the East Danes."

Then came the time when this ancient knowledge fell more and more into corruption, when it was to be found only in echoes, in symbolism. This was the time in the evolution of humanity when what originated in the warm countries spread abroad. And what comes from the warm countries is something that is not connected—as is the case in the cold countries—with the intimate relation between the seasons and man's own inner experiences. From the warm countries came the impulse which resulted in the distribution of conceptions and births over the whole year; this of course had already happened in the South even in the days of the old, atavistic clairvoyance, although it was still to some extent pervaded by the old principles, the principles which prevailed in the times when in the cold regions the Women held sway and in the South the Temple Mysteries had long since superseded the old Nature-Mysteries. The Southern practice spread towards the North, although an intermixture of the old still remained at the time when the Wanen gods were superseded by the Asen gods. Just as the Wanen are connected with wähnen, so are the Asen connected with the German sein (being)—that is to say, being or existence in the material world which the mind tries to grasp externally. And when the men of the North had entered into an age when individual intelligence began to assert itself, when the Asen had supplanted the Wanen, the old Mystery-customs fell into decay. They passed over into isolated, scattered Mystery-communities of the East. And one Being only—he in whom the whole meaning of the earth was to be made new, he in whom the Christ was to dwell—he alone was destined to unite within himself what had once been the essence and content of the Northern Mysteries.

Hence the origin of the account in St. Luke's Gospel of the appearance of the Archangel Gabriel to Mary, is to be sought in the visions of spiritual realities once reflected in the Nertus-symbol of the ancient Northern Mysteries. The symbol had moved eastward. Spiritual science discloses this to-day and this alone explains the meaning of the Anglo-Saxon rune. For Nertus and Ing are the same. Of Ing it is said: "Ing was first seen among the East Danes. Later he went towards the East. He walked over the waves, followed by his chariot,"—over the waves of the clouds, that is, just as Nertus moved over the waves of the clouds.

What had once been general in the colder regions, here became singular, individual. It occurred as a single, unique event, and we find it again in the descriptions given in the Gospel of St. Luke.

But whatever has once existed in the world and has taken root, whatever is anchored in the heart's understanding, remains a possession of the soul. And when knowledge of Christianity was received in the North from the Roman South, men felt—not in clear consciousness but in the subconsciousness—it had some connection with an ancient Mystery-custom. Hence in the North, men were able to develop a particularly intense feeling for Jesus. The reality that had lived in the old Nertus Mystery had already sunk into the subconsciousness, yet in the subconsciousness it was present, it was sensed and dimly experienced.

When in those long past times in the far North, when the earth was still covered with forests that were the home of the bison and the elk, families came together in their snowcovered huts and under their lantern-lights gathered around the new-born child, they spoke of how with this new life there had been brought to them the new light announced by the heavens in the previous spring. Such was the ancient Christmas. To these people, who were one day to receive the tidings of Christendom, it was said: In the hour that is especially holy, one destined for greatness is born. It is the child who is the first to be born after midnight in the night designated as holy. And although men no longer possessed the ancient knowledge, when the tidings came that such a one had been born in far-off Asia, one in whom lived the Christ Who had come down from the world of the stars to the earth, something of the old feeling came alive in them.

It is incumbent upon the present age to understand such things more and more deeply and thereby grasp in concrete reality the meaning of the evolution of earthly humanity. Truths of mighty, awe-inspiring significance are contained in the Holy Scriptures, not just the trivialities of which we so often hear in religious teachings to-day, but sacred truths which thrill through the very fibres of our being, stirring our hearts to the depths. These are truths which flow through the whole evolution of humanity and resound in the Gospels. And as spiritual science reveals their deep, deep source, the Gospels will one day become a precious treasure, prized at their true worth. Men will know, then, why it is recounted in the Gospel of St. Luke:

"And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria).

And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.

And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David).

To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.

And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.

And she brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for him in the inn."

It was for Him, the first-born among men in whose souls true ego-hood was to awaken, that the holy Mystery-power of ancient days had passed over from the Danish peninsula to the distant East.

"And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid."

Nerta too, moving across the land, had announced to the old Wanen-consciousness, that is to say, in the subconsciousness of atavistic clairvoyance, the arrival of human beings on the earth.

"And the angel said unto them, Fear not; for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

And this shall be a sign unto you: Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying ..."

And now the heavenly Powers proclaimed what the Nerta-Priest in the old Northern Mystery-cult had proclaimed to the woman about to conceive.

"The revelation of the Divine from the Heights takes place at the time when there is peace among men who are of good-will."

As Tacitus narrates: "Then there are joyous days and wedding feasts. At those times no war is waged, no weapons are handled, the sword is sheathed."

The great goal for which man must strive is the attainment of the power to gaze into the course of the evolution of humanity. For the Mystery of Golgotha, too, through which earth-evolution received its deeper meaning, will become fully comprehensible when its place in the whole evolution of humanity is understood. In future times, when, with the disappearance of materialism, man will know, not in abstract theory but as a concretely real experience, that he is of divine origin, the ancient, holy Mystery-truths will again be understood; then the intervening time will be over, a time in which the Christ, it is true, lives on earth, but can be understood only by the awakened consciousness. For the Gnostic conception of Christ faded away; understanding for Jesus developed in connection with the old Nertus cult, but in unconsciousness. In the future, however, humanity will have to bring both the unconscious streams to consciousness, and unite them. And then an ever greater understanding of the Christ will take foothold on earth, an understanding that will unite the Mystery-knowledge with a great and renewed Gnosis.

Those who take the anthroposophical view of the world seriously, and the movement associated with it, will see in what it has to say to mankind no child's play but great and earnest, soul-shaking truths. And our souls must submit to this because it is right that we should be shaken by greatness.

Not only is the earth a mighty living being; the earth is an exalted spirit-being. And just as the greatest human genius could not stand at the height he reaches in later life if he had not first developed through childhood and adolescence, so the Mystery of Golgotha could not have taken place, the Divine would not have been able to unite with earth-evolution, if at the beginning of earthly days the Divine—in a different manner but in a manner still divine—had not descended to the earth. The form taken by the revelation of the Divine from the heavenly heights was not the same in the ancient Nertus cult as it was at a later time, but for all that it was a true revelation.

The knowledge contained in this ancient wisdom was, it is true, atavistic in character, but for all that it was infinitely more exalted than the materialistic view of the world which, in the sphere of knowledge, so brutally reduces humanity to the level of the animal.

In Christianity we have to do with a Fact, not with a theory. The theory is a necessary consequence and of importance for the consciousness that has had to develop in the further course of human evolution. But the essence of Christianity as such, the Mystery of Golgotha, is an accomplished Fact. The impulse entered, to begin with, into subconscious currents, as was still possible in Asia Minor at the time when the union of Christ with the earth took place.

Shepherds, men bearing a similarity with those among whom the Nertus cult flourished, are also described in the Gospel of St. Luke. I can give only very brief indications of these things. If we were able to speak of them at greater length you would find that there are deep foundations for what I have told you to-day. The human being has descended from spiritual heights ... hence the revelation of the Divine from the heavenly heights ... The revelation had to be expressed in this form to those who out of the ancient wisdom knew the destiny of man to be united with the secrets of the stars of heaven. But what must live on earth as the result of Christ's union with a man of earth—that can be understood only very gradually. The message is twofold: ‘Revelation of the Divine from the heights’—‘Peace in the souls on earth who are of good-will.’ Without this second part, Christmas, the Festival of the birth of Christ, has no meaning!

Not only was Christ born for men; men have also crucified Him. Even behind this lies necessity. But it is none the less true that men have crucified the Christ! And it may dawn upon us that the crucifixion on the wooden Cross on Golgotha was not the only crucifixion. A time must come when the second part of the Christmas proclamation becomes reality: ‘Peace to the men on earth who are of good-will.’ For the negative side too is discernible. Men are very far indeed from a true understanding of Christ and of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Does it not cut to the very heart that we ourselves should be living at a time when men's longing for peace is shouted down?³ It seems almost a mockery to celebrate Christmas in days when voices are raised in outcry against the desire for peace. To-day, when the worst has not actually befallen, we can but fervently hope that a change will take place in the souls of men, and a Christian feeling, a will for peace supersede these demonstrations against the desire for it. Otherwise it may not be those who are struggling in Europe to-day, but those coming over from Asia, who will one day wreak vengeance on this rejection of the desire for peace; it may be they who will have to preach Christianity and the Mystery of Golgotha to humanity on the ruins of European spiritual life. And then the indelible record will remain: that at Christmas time, nineteen hundred and sixteen years after the tidings of peace on earth to men of good-will, humanity came to shout down the desire for peace.

May it not succeed! May the good Spirits who are at work in the Christmas impulses protect luckless European humanity from such a fate!

• 1. Arius: "The Son was once created out of nothing by the Divine Will, was the first creature and the creator of the Universe, hence to be called God, though subject to the Father," This was declared heretical by the Council of Nicea in A.D. 325, and replaced by the Athanasian principle of faith. "The Son of God is from eternity, not created, but begotten out of the Being of the Father, and is of like nature to the Father.
  
  Streams of blood were shed in consequence of these doctrines, impenetrable as they are by the human mind (Weber: Lehrbuch der Weltgeschichte, 1875).
• 2. Mannus had three sons, after whom the people nearest the North Sea are called Ingaevones, those of the centre, Hermiones, the remainder Istae. (Germania 2).
• 3. A reference to the agitation against the German proposal in December, 1916 for peace negotiations.

Nowadays, anyone who lectures on the Christ runs into quite a variety of viewpoints. These fall roughly into two main groups, and a speaker must take them into account, especially if he plans to talk on the subject in the sense intended for this evening's lecture. That is, in the same sense in which other questions and other problems have been dealt with here before. I am referring, of course, to the spiritual scientific or anthroposophical viewpoint.

The first group of views is one that bases itself firmly on the premise that Christ is a real force in life. This might be called the religious viewpoint, which all the Christian confessions share in common. We will find on closer study however that no matter how liberal and tolerant it may seem in some respects, it has little use for any but its own view of the Christ. The various proponents of the religious standpoint are simply unwilling to grant that any progress in thinking about Christ is possible.

The other viewpoint is also one held by thoroughly dedicated modern searchers after truth. In accordance with a certain scientific trend, it maintains that a study of the Christ event, of what is reported to have taken place in Palestine at the beginning of the Christian era, if pursued with the same reliable historical methods that are applied to the study of other events, does not bear out the assumptions made about the Christ.

We realize that this way of looking at things has long been gaining favor. We also know that in the course of recent centuries increasing emphasis has been laid on comparing the Gospels, and that the discrepancies people have discovered in them have forced them to conclude that the Gospels could not be taken as historical documents. After a long period of trying to distill a somewhat reliable picture of Christ Jesus from the Gospel accounts, there have come to be many people today, both in Germany and elsewhere, who cannot reconcile speaking of a historical Jesus or of a historical Christ Event with their scientific consciences.

So we find present day positions ranging all the way from a separating out of those facts in the Gospels that can be historically proven, to out-and-out rejection of the historical Christ Jesus. This has given rise to the opinion that, though Christ may still live today for religious-minded people who feel that their faith lifts them to Him, for an ever more rigorously developing science the Christ idea, the concept of Christ, must vanish entirely. Many people are presently convinced that the Christ force will not continue to play any role at all in future, though these same people do not by any means believe that the day will ever come when religion will be lost to humanity.

Certain facts of the time, however, make it seem unlikely that the belief I have referred to will be proven true, for we can note a strange phenomenon. In our day, it is by no means only the religious-minded and people of feeling, for whom the Gospels have shown themselves a source of uplift and of schooling, who speak of something in the nature of a Christ idea. Earnest, educated, truth-loving men are putting their whole souls into pointing to something that can only be identified as Christ. It is characteristic that the modern American freethinker, Ferguson, voicing what many of his contemporaries feel, can say that Christ is again “the pioneer of a new age” who will unite Europe and America and look with profoundest understanding into the soul of every human being—that He is the one and only right man for the present. Ferguson, a person otherwise famed for his free-thinking views, speaks of Christ exactly as though He went about from one man to the next wielding direct influence upon us. Freethinking spirits are thus beginning to feel the Christ Being directly related to modern humanity. Even though little attention is paid to it as yet, we will find that this tendency, this searching for a force that can only be called the Christ, will make sure headway. John Fiske, a man who did his utmost to further Darwinism in America, stated that all religions assert two basic truths. The first is that all things are related. This is a truth proclaimed by every religion, one that no thoughtful person can deny. The second truth is that what we call good and evil derives from forces external to the human spirit.

I quote these men expressly because they are both personalities whose whole thinking and feeling are firmly rooted in the present, but they do not rest satisfied with an external view of things. Instead, they have worked their way through to deeper forces of existence. The forces at work in the world are not just physical and chemical: they are also spiritual in nature.

For one who takes his stand on a spiritual-scientific view of the world, the concept of Christ just characterized appears to be merely a first dawn glimmering, a preparation for something quite different still to come. I hope I will not be misunderstood in speaking as I have of this preparatory, Twentieth Century form of the Christ concept. Spiritual science has to steer clear of any taint of sectarianism and other such attitudes because they simply do not belong to this age. The spiritual scientist takes the same attitude in speaking of what is to come in human evolution as does the natural scientist who predicts an eclipse of the moon or a transit of Venus: he is not assuming a prophetic role. There are forces in life that can be spiritually investigated in exactly the same sense that natural forces operative in the physical world can be investigated.

It will be helpful to gain a perspective on the past history of the Christ idea, which has indeed undergone tremendous changes through the centuries. If we follow it back to its origin, we come upon a strange fact of the early days. We find popular Christianity spreading through the regions ruled by Rome in a way that enables us to say that, while the old Roman culture developed among the upper levels of the population and then grew decadent, we see those on whom life left its mark, those whose lot it was to suffer, slowly and gradually finding their way into popular Christianity. Jesus of Nazareth is increasingly idealized, to the point that he is looked on as divine. The various confessions that made up this popular Christianity tended more to feeling than to thoughts and concepts. But alongside this popular form we find those most enlightened spirits of the time who concerned themselves with Christianity devoting their loftiest ideas, their most significant concepts, to answering the question, “Who, actually, is this Christ?”

Let us single out, from the abundance of answers given by these illumined spirits, one or two for consideration here.

In Gnosticism, a form of thought to which anthroposophy by no means advises returning but simply studies as a phenomenon of past history, we find many different shadings of certain lofty concepts, all centering in an attempt to grasp the Christ idea. In the main, it can be characterized by saying that this Gnosticism, this longing to grasp the Christ idea with the help of the Ioftiest concepts, is a most marvelous form of spiritual development. Of course, those who adopt the modern view that every last facet of humanness gradually evolved from nature's lower orders, from animals, and rose by stages from the most primitive to ever higher animal forms, are bound to consider the Gnostic doctrine a fantastic dream. But Gnostics, too, traced evolution back even further than does the modern natural scientist. They said that we find a period in ancient times in which all animals, even the highest, were present on the earth, and man could have seen them if he too had been there at that time. The Gnostics, however, had in mind a period of evolution in which the human kingdom had not yet appeared, but they did not conclude from this that men developed out of animals, but rather that they descended later from the spiritual world. They maintained that animals. plants and minerals had also descended from the spirit. had materialized out of spiritual realms, so that we have to ascribe a spiritual origin to animals, plants and minerals as well. But there was a period when man had not yet taken on physical form, a time when he was still waiting in the spiritual world for the moment when the earth provided certain other conditions such as would make human life possible here.

This does not mean that man was not in existence at that time. Man did exist: not, however, as a visible entity, but as a spiritual one. He lived in the spiritual environment of the earth, but had not yet descended onto it, for the conditions of that ancient time were not such as would have made human development possible. Thus, the Gnostics assumed that there was a most important moment, later than that of the descent of the other kingdoms when titan descended to the earth. It was the Gnostic conviction that if man had incarnated with the other lesser kingdoms, one all-important facet of his being, that is the capacity we know as free, independent human thinking would not have developed. In short, man would lack his true human ego that works front a central focus outward into the world and develops between birth and death. The animal's development is kept within certain limits, but man is capable of progressing in an entirely different way as a result of education and experience. In order to achieve this, said the Gnostic, man entered into a more intimate connection with the element of matter than he would have done if he had remained an unfree being, dependent, as the other creatures around him were on his endowment at birth. Man plunged more deeply into matter in order to become less dependent on what he brought into existence with him. Gnosticism held that this deeper involvement in matter took place at a certain moment in very early times, that is, the moment the Bible pictures as the Fall, meaning thereby the fall into matter just described. But by no means every impulse inherent in human nature was believed to have joined in that descent; instead, something of a superhuman element remained in the spiritual world. While mankind was experiencing all this, something that was part of man but did not accompany him in his descent because he plunged so deeply into physical embodiment stayed on in spiritual worlds. Thus, there was still present in the world above a part of man that had dwelt there when all humanity still lived as one in realms of spirit.

On the basis of these assumptions the Gnostics then proceeded to study the Christ Event. A certain moment, described in the Bible as the baptism by John, was of special interest to them. They felt that the human being whose development brought him to that baptism was indeed a most extraordinary man, but nevertheless just a human being. After he had been baptized, something occurred that is hard for modern minds to grasp. Perhaps we can think of it in the sense that many a person has had something happen to him at a certain moment about which he could only say that his whole life was changed in consequence. Many people date their lives from such a moment, feeling it to have been one in which they were spiritually reborn. This is something that can happen to any and every human being. If one pictures this experience raised to a unique and ultimate peak, one understands how the Gnostics felt about the baptism by John in the River Jordan. That element of humanness that had been part of man front the earliest beginnings of his race but which had been waiting in the spiritual world, now left that realm and made its way down to earth, to take up its abode in the unique human being, Jesus of Nazareth. For the next three years Jesus of Nazareth was not just a changed human being. He was one in whom that reserved element of humanness, held over from the very beginning of man's earth life, had come to dwell for the eventual fructification of humanity. In other words, Jesus of Nazareth became the bearer of the superhuman being, Christ for the three years of His earthly life. So the Gnostics held that what had hitherto dwelt in the spiritual world had come into a human body, like a seed planted in the earth. Like a planted seed, which must decompose in order to germinate, this spiritual impulse entering the earth had to pass away in order to spring, seed-like, into hundred-arid thousand-fold fruitfulness. This spiritual element had to pass through death exactly as a seed dies. Far from failing to bear, it poured itself into earth's spiritual-evolutionary stream, where it will be found living on in many kinds of fruiting.

So we find in the Gnostic doctrine a pre-history of mankind leading up to the moment of Christ's coming and a post-history following upon the Event of Golgotha. It is history centered in the living action of the Christ impulse as Christ enters into human souls. To the Gnostic, the Christ impulse was history indeed history's whole content and the source of its ongoingness. If this view sounds alien to the contemporary mind, it must be stated that precisely modern natural science, whose ideas are colored by materialism only now at the outset, will press forward ever more vigorously to an understanding and eventual grasping of the reality that underlay the Gnostic concept.

In order to show how close the present is to taking up again what Gnosticism offered, let me just point out the following—something that is of course only an elementary first step. Science has thought for a long time that it stands on a solid footing. Basing itself on a truly impressive Darwinism, it felt impelled to assert that everything human developed out of animal origins, and that the driving force behind that development was the “struggle for survival.” It said that all the various creatures were launched into life together, but fell to fighting, with the not too surprising result that, as time went on, the more perfect species got the better of the less perfect. Man was the final product of this perfecting process. “The survival of the fittest” became the slogan of the Darwinists. Now, however, researchers are finding themselves forced to adopt quite a different concept in their honest searching of facts. They are now saying that as we study man afresh and compare him with the most developed animals, we can by no means assume that he evolved in straight-line descent from these species. Instead, we have to trace him back to a primeval form no longer to be found upon the earth. These researchers now believe that such a primeval form once existed and that while man and animal both evolved front it, they did so in two different directions. Outstanding investigators have brought forth a further fact. They put the question: How could man develop as differently as he has when all the while animals, too, were evolving? Strange to say, they have not hit upon a “fight for survival.” They assume that man and his form were in a specially protected place where he could continue under the same conditions which originally brought forth that form, whereas all other creatures were caught up in a downward trend. Thus, man today is being traced back to an invisible primeval form that developed as it did because it was protected in a realm where man did not have to take part in a struggle to survive. These researchers subscribe to only one remaining fiction. They believe the protecting realm to have been a physically perceptible locality.

Gnosticism, too. assumes just such a primeval form. But instead of picturing it as having existed on the physical plane, it assigns it to the spiritual world, which was, in fact, able to afford it protection.

If one can conceive the idea that man was a late-corner to the earth, one can also conceive the following thought. Tracing the course of history, we find that a hitherto undivided human race split up into various nations and races and that many different confessions came into being, each shaped in accordance with the feeling of a particular group. In earlier times humanity was so constituted that a person could develop only what was implanted in him by virtue of belonging to a certain tribe. The spiritual force, however, the spiritual being that made man human in the first place, enables him to find the human being in his fellow man instead of what heredity has made of him. Man had to have this capacity restored to him. It was an impulse that could be taken up again only when humanity grew ripe for it.

So we encounter lofty and remarkable concepts of evolution in the first Christian centuries. It must be said that what we are witnessing in present-day natural science as the beginning of something that must eventually outgrow the Chrysalis stage, was already anticipated by the Gnostics in the grandiose conceptions reached by them as they thought about these matters. This could happen only because there is such a thing as evolution in man's history.

If we look back to a period that lies still closer to the time of man's descent to earth, we come upon a wholly different kind of soul life. Comparing it with the soul life of the present we must say that the latter is oriented toward a sense-based and brain-conditioned way of experiencing, whereas earlier times brought us a marvelous heritage of knowledge in the form of pictures. The fact that this heritage exists proves what spiritual scientific research also discovers to be true that human souls did not always perceive their surroundings as they do today, but were once clairvoyant. At that time man did not feel himself so involved with his own ego. Instead, he felt that he was part and parcel of everything around him. A dreamlike state of consciousness brought him into profound contact with the world about. Primeval man's way of knowing things was through a dreamlike clairvoyance that revealed their mysteries to him. His was an experience akin to dreaming as we know it today. Thus, it was possible for a humanity recently descended from spiritual heights to experience the secrets of the spiritual world in what may be called a clairvoyant dream-state.

Evolutionary progress meant, however, an ever-deepening descent of man into physical existence, accompanied by an ever further loss of that ancient clairvoyant capacity, though this need not be thought of as a tragedy. For if man had not lost his old clairvoyance he could never have advanced to the stage of free self-awareness that alone provided the basis for conscious personal experience.

The loss of the old clairvoyant insight that once gave access to secrets of the spiritual world came about gradually. Even when mankind had become thoroughly at home in the physical world, clairvoyant knowledge was still kept alive in sanctuaries that preserved the heritage of the ancient Mysteries, the treasure of wisdom that had come down to them through the ages. After the Christ Event had taken place and entered the stream of earth-evolution, the Gnostics still hoarded that age-old treasure of wisdom won by humanity's clairvoyant insight, and they formed their idea of Christ in accordance with it. Their concept may, therefore, be described as a reminiscence of knowledge gleaned in olden times, not as the product of free, conscious selfhood. They simply applied what men of ancient days had known to explain the Christ phenomenon. The period during which Gnosticism flourished coincided with the dimming of clairvoyant insight. This made it impossible for those who followed after. in the Middle Ages, to go on working with the heritage of Gnostic wisdom as a means of understanding Christ.

Instead, something else took the place of Gnosticism. We find people who lived in the centuries after its demise just as eager to grasp the Christ phenomenon, but wanting henceforth to rely on their own human powers of understanding, on a scientific approach. And we see the most enlightened spirits of the Middle Ages turning from Gnosticism to the teachings of Aristotle for the basis of their understanding of the Christ.

They found themselves forced to say that Aristotle's world conception brought them to a standstill at a certain point, that true spiritual understanding of the Christ was out of reach of human knowledge.

In one respect, however, the view of the world held in the Middle Ages rests on one of Aristotle's main ideas. Aristotle would never have thought of going as far as modern materialism has gone. When we look into his idea of the way soul and body work together, we do not find him subscribing to any such belief as that a man's inner life is conditioned by the heredity that comes to him from parents, grandparents, etc. His view was rather that every person born into the world is given a drop out of the ocean of divinity to unite with his body, that a soul-spiritual core always detaches itself front the universal spirit and enters human beings at their birth. But Aristotle, who was distinguished by a quality seldom met with in our day, that is, the habit of drawing the real consequences of his musing and investigating, does not stop at this point. He goes on thinking, and comes to believe that when a soul passes through the gates of death it does so as a now well- established entity, and as such ascends into the spiritual world. Though prior to birth it did not exist as a separate being, after death it lives on in the world of the spirit as an individual.

What kind of after-death experience does this soul now undergo, as Aristotle sees it? None whatever, since it lacks a body to make that possible. Now its sole content is the memory of its life on earth. It lives on in eternity looking back on its earth-life with the good and evil it has done, wholly given up to memory pictures.

Here, in Aristotle, may be found the origin of the doctrine of eternal punishment in hell. lt began in his concept and made its way into Catholic dogma during the Middle Ages. But let me say at once that it was not possible for Aristotle as a man of his time to do other than picture the soul as an unchanging entity doomed to gaze forever at its earthly deeds.

Modern spiritual science, anthroposophy, recognizes, of course, that the soul can do more after death than just look back as though in memory-pictures on its previous earth-life. It knows that the soul does not have to stay forever in that state. Instead, it sees man taking with him into the spiritual world as the finest fruit of his earth experience the possibility of transforming or building further on the good and bad deeds he committed here: nor does he stay forever in the spiritual world. Rather is he born again into a new incarnation and has opportunities to work out some karmic compensation for what he did or failed to do in previous lives. The soul passes through the gates of death taking with it the impulse to seek further incarnations for the sake of working out a balance. Aristotle could not accept such an idea because he had always thought that every birth meant a detaching of spiritual substance to form the soul. But spiritual science bears witness to the fact that our present lives derive from past incarnations.

So Aristotle may be said to have stood in the way of his own insight. He whom wise men of the Middle Ages called “the precursor of Christ in understanding nature,” did not get as far as the reincarnation concept. We see how he stopped short of the mark in regard to the question of immortality and how for him life's fruit was just eternal contemplation. The inevitable outcome of this was that people could not see into the spiritual world or gain any understanding of the nature of the Christ. For the thinking of the Middle Ages, Christ disappeared into the realm of belief which is closed to knowledge. The age-old tradition of Gnosticism was finally lost. Aristotle could not serve spiritual understanding of the Christ. Thus, a line came to be drawn between what can be known and what must remain a matter of belief. One consequence of Aristotelian thought that lived on was the idea of eternal suffering in hell.

It remained for people of more recent times to take the third step in a gradual weakening of faith. They have come to rely more and more on what can be grasped with the physical senses. The effect of this on the Christ concept has been to make Christ an ever less important figure and to render the prevailing idea of Christ more and more materialistic. Where Gnostics once assumed a spiritual principle, and where the Middle Ages in their turn experienced Christ in a mood of purest faith and devotion, the present sees at the beginning of the Christian era not a human being ensouled with a cosmic element but, increasingly, “the simple man of Nazareth,” a man more or less like any other human being. Nobody remembers anything of what the Gnostics had divined. People want to think of Christ in the same materialistic way they think about other historical events. The fact that they regard Him as a mere human being makes it necessary to apply the same methods to the study of His appearance that are generally applied in ordinary historical research.

It might have been recognized that the historical approach to the whole question is the easy way out because what could possibly be easier than to take the Gospels and show how they contradict each other! This reduces things to simplest terms. But then wouldn't the researchers have had to assume that their predecessors were the greatest dunces ever for having failed even to notice such obvious contradictions?

At any rate, the Gospels were certainly not taken as a schooling, a schooling that enables the soul to lift itself to spiritual perception of the Christ. So it is not surprising that history was pressed into service as a yardstick and that a movement has grown up, associated here in Germany with the theologian, Drews, that denies Christ completely. This happened at the very moment when spiritual science entered the contemporary scene.

Spiritual science bears witness to the fact just referred to, that human beings and what they carry within them are not products of a single life, but of many past lives. Man once lived wholly in the spiritual world. Then he left it to descend to earth, but he was to have more than one life in a physical body. When he had digested the fruits of an incarnation during an interval spent in the spiritual world, he descended again into physical embodiment. The law that pertains here has often been the object of our study. It teaches us how deeply involved man is in the whole ongoing process we call history. Life only begins to make real sense when we assume that we have all been living on the earth in order to take what was given us in the beginning, make it our own, and then go on developing with the march of the centuries toward ever greater perfection. A closer study of these matters brings something quite remarkable to light, to be described here as man's mission on the earth.

I must stress again today, as I have so often done before, that the consciousness that man has thus far developed has by no means reached its final form. Man can really take his development in hand: the right spiritual training can lift him to spiritual perception. That is quite within the realm of possibility if he schools his soul in meditation. Just as one can put oneself, by staring intently at a shining object, into a state where one is aware of nothing else (though this is not a recommended practice!), so do we achieve a single-minded, but in this case quite free condition, when we deliberately concentrate all our attention on some soul-spiritual content to the exclusion of all else. Then forces begin to ray out in our souls through which we attain what may be called a body-free condition. Such a person is then really able to say from experience, “I am no longer perceiving with my eyes or thinking with my brain. I am experiencing as a spiritual being, independent of a body, I perceive what lives and has its being in the spiritual world.”

This elevation to the level of spiritual perception can be achieved with proper schooling. The rigorous discipline that leads to it has been described in several of my books.

It is easier to enter the spiritual world if one has trained one's feeling life to avoid all sorts of over-excited and emotional states and reactions. A person who confronts the world with calmness and equanimity keeps unsquandered reserves of feeling alive within him. The spiritual light, which meditation kindles in us, radiates into such reserves. A person full of selfish demands will never make a disciplined spiritual investigator. But those who achieve real empathy with their fellow-men, who know what selfless love is, who are not absorbed exclusively in their own feelings, have a soul-surplus that can be charged with forces garnered from spiritual schooling. The light of clairvoyance is engendered in feeling that keeps itself free of egotism.

When a person has progressed to the point of being able to live in the spiritual world he can gradually learn to clothe his experiences in ordinary concepts. Handed on in that form, any healthy mentality can grasp them. It is no more necessary for everyone to be a spiritual investigator than for each of us individually to make laboratory tests to see whether what science says is true or not. Those charged with communicating the results of spiritual-scientific research do not shy away from commonsense thinkers. Really healthy minds readily see the truth of statements made by the spiritual investigator. The only people who dispute his findings are those who approach them filled with prejudice. This holds true in the case of spiritual science, which is the fruit of clairvoyant research. It enables human beings to gain access to a world of spiritual experience.

The insight that spiritual scientists can presently achieve by means of a heightened consciousness will—to some degree at least, and in certain fields f be attainable by all men in future. It will fall to the lot of Twentieth Century humanity to realize that the soul develops, that it passes through life after life in the course of earth's evolution, and in so doing absorbs from the various cultural epochs what each such epoch has to offer.

If one looks nowadays with a more than ordinarily perceptive eye at the human race all over the earth, one becomes aware that it possesses two human qualities that were simply not present in antiquity. This is a fact susceptible of proof. The two new qualities are commission and conscience, and they will go on developing more and more fully as man submits his soul-life to spiritual schooling. Compassion and conscience were new acquisitions at a certain point in evolution.

Much that is called compassion is not worthy of the term. True compassion is the capacity to forget oneself and enter another's being so completely that one feels his suffering as he feels it. One's own ego is quite forgotten in such fellow-feeling; one lives entirely in the other's experience. Suppose for a moment that nature were so to arrange matters that at the moment when a person freed himself from narrow self-concern he had the same experience morally that comes to him every day when he falls asleep. When he can no longer maintain control of his body and his brain ceases to serve his soul as its instrument and he goes to sleep, consciousness disappears. A person can, of course, also fall unconscious from compassion. But that would be egotistical in the extreme, for then he could not surrender himself wholly to another's feelings. In that sense, falling unconscious would amount to a moral failing, whereas compassion is one of the two means whereby a person breaks free of himself without losing consciousness. Conscience is the other. It speaks to our innermost being; the listener follows the bidding of a voice that penetrates to where his ego lives. He subjects the self to something larger than itself. Compassion and conscience are thus forces that man is presently engaged in developing. Consciousness will build further on the foundation of the forms that compassion and conscience have thus far taken, going on to develop the spiritual vision that was previously attainable only in abnormal states of consciousness. To say this is not to make a prophecy but to state a fact determined by strictly scientific means.

As he realizes what effect compassion and conscience have upon the human soul. Twentieth Century man will have a certain direct experience in a perfectly ordinary state of consciousness. He will understand something that might be put in the following way. We see that at birth man inherits something from his ancestors. Spiritual being though he is, he must incarnate physically in a given family and clothe himself in hereditary qualities. Long before we had such a thing as science, people were familiar with heredity, but they gave it an entirely different name. Their term for it was “original sin.” Anyone who understands what the Old Testament meant by original sin knows that the term conveyed a much fuller meaning than science has as yet ascribed to it because it applies to moral as well as physical qualities. Those in whom compassion and conscience have borne fruit will say, however, that although birth saddles us with predispositions that cannot be thrown off, we are also endowed with something that is not bound up with matter and that enables us to rise above ourselves and enter the spiritual world. There is one realm—the realm of one's own soul—where there will be direct spiritual vision. Human beings will affirm that although they are tied on the one hand to physical matter, on the other the soul harbors a radiant helper capable of lifting us beyond ourselves, it is a feeling that suggests the following comparison. Suppose there were someone who found it hard to believe that air everywhere surrounds us and fills every empty space. All he has to do to convince himself is to create a vacuum and observe how the air rushes into it. Just such an empty space is created in the soul by compassion and conscience, both of which detach us from our ego. Into that vacuum streams the spiritual entity whom we know as the Christ. This gives us personal experience of the fact that we can receive Christ into ourselves. Christ Who is present in the spiritual atmosphere just as air is present in the physical atmosphere and flows into every Space it finds empty.

On this high level, normal consciousness can indeed become spiritual vision, and no one who has this experience will consider it subjective. He will instead recognize that there must be such a possibility. He will realize that there was a time when it was still unknown and a moment when it became possible for the first time. He will be aware that what he is experiencing made its way down to earth from spiritual realms and united with it as the Christ impulse. This Christ impulse will inevitably come to be looked upon by Twentieth Century man as a force that entered earth evolution at a particular moment in time as a real historical event. That will usher in a period when it will no longer make sense to say that Christ is merely an idea. Instead, people will say that the Christ experience can be conceived as taking place only in this or that individual soul, just as philosophers maintain that there could be no such thing as color without eyes to perceive it. But colors do not owe their existence to perceiving eyes; the truth is rather that eyes are created by the light-world. The fact ought therefore to be stated thus: “No eyes without light.” It is equally true that without the historical Christ human beings could not experience Christ or the Christ-power within them. So they will know Christ to be a spiritual being and realize that this Being once actually lived on earth as a fact of history and sacrificed Himself to become one with the earth. They will be able to make their way into the spiritual world and discover Christ there.

Goethe often found just the right way of putting some fact or other, and perhaps we might borrow one of his sayings to express what we have been discussing here; it can serve us as a pointer. Goethe said that the eye was built by light to perceive the light: the eye was conjured forth by light from organs that were originally indeterminate. He goes on to make a further statement that calls attention to the impulse we harbor to discover God within us:

“Were not our eyes profoundly of the sun
How could they behold the light?
Were not our strength from God's own being won.
How could we feel so in Things divine delight.”

Just as the eye is conjured forth by light, so man's power to see God is conjured forth by God Himself as He lives and moves within and all about us. Those whose own Christ-likeness enables them to experience the Christ in beauty of feeling and insight will know that this is possible only because Christ once descended to earth and lived here, an historic figure. Just as the sun's light conjures forth eyes in human bodies so does the historic Christ conjure forth Christ-life in the souls of men.

“Unless the soul of man were Christ-like, how indeed could it experience the Christ? lf Christ had not lived as an historic figure how could man's soul ever come to know that most glorious feeling: feeling for the Christ?” Such will be the tenor of Twentieth Century comment. At the very moment when orthodox science reaches the point of denying Christ any historical reality, spiritual science will say without relying on documents that because man can experience Christ he knows that Christ did indeed live historically as a life-giving force, as the sun in that spiritual realm whence human evolution draws its nutriment.

This Lecture was formerly part of GA 173 but has not been included in the new arrangement in three volumes.

Many people have the custom of celebrating every year the physical birth of that Being Who entered into earthly evolution in order to give meaning to this earthly evolution. In keeping with the task of our spiritual scientific movement, a task of which we must never cease to be aware, and in an effort to avoid falling into a merely routine celebration such as is found in many places today, it will be fitting to bring before our souls in these grave times some aspects of what is connected with the meaning of the physical birth of Christ Jesus.

We have often contemplated with the eyes of our spirit the fact that in Christ Jesus two Beings flow together to form one: the Christ-Being and the human Jesus-Being. This is something that people on earth are capable of experiencing. As Christianity has developed, there has been much conflict, much dogmatic conflict about the significance of the uniting of Christ with Jesus in the body whose physical birth we celebrate in the Christmas festival. Let us start with what we know. In Christ we recognize a cosmic, super-earthly Being, One Who came down from spiritual worlds in order to give meaning to earthly evolution by being born in a physical human being. And in the human being Jesus we recognize one who was destined, in the manner known to us, to unite as a human being with the Christ-Being, to take this Being into himself after thirty years of preparation.

Not only is much argument, much dogmatic conflict connected with the manner in which Christ united with Jesus. There is also, in the relationship of Christ to Jesus, an indication of important mysteries relating to the whole of mankind's evolution on earth. In endeavouring to pursue what has happened so far, so as to understand something about this uniting of Christ with Jesus, and in considering what must still happen in human evolution in order to bring this relationship into a proper focus, we find ourselves touching on one of the greatest mysteries of human knowledge and human life.

As the time approached when human evolution was to take into itself the Christ-Being there came about a possibility, like an inheritance from the ancient days of clairvoyant wisdom, of gaining a picture, an idea of the whole lofty stature of the Christ-Being. There existed at this time a wisdom about which people often speak today in what could be called a sacrilegious way, though they have scarcely any idea of what it represented. It was something which has now been eliminated from human evolution by certain streams which are opposed to more profound Christian revelation. This was Gnosis,¹ a wisdom into which much of the knowledge revealed to mankind by ancient, atavistic clairvoyance had flowed. Every last fragment of Gnosis, both verbal and written, had been rooted out by western dogmatic Christianity, but not until Gnosis had also endeavoured to find an answer to the question: Who is Christ?

Today there is no longer a question of returning to Gnosis for, of course, the light of Gnosis has meanwhile gone out. But the elimination of Gnosis, root and branch, though a consequence of evil, ignorance and hostility towards knowledge and wisdom sprang, nevertheless, in a way from a necessity of earthly evolution. So the accusation that anthroposophical spiritual science intends to warm up ancient Gnosis is nothing more than one of the many malevolent attacks now being made on us. This accusation is made by people who know nothing about Gnosis and, similarly, little about Anthroposophy. We do not want to warm up Gnosis, but we do want to recognize that Gnosis was something powerful, something great, for that time nineteen centuries ago when it endeavoured to give some kind of an answer to the question: Who is Christ?

The eye of the Gnostic—his spiritual eye—saw the spiritual worlds. He thought of the spiritual hierarchies arranged in a wonderful way, rank upon rank. He also saw how Christ strode down through the world of the spiritual hierarchies in order to enter into the enveloping bodies of a mortal human being. All this was revealed to the soul of the Gnostic. And this soul strove to gain a picture of how Christ came down from spiritual heights and was received on earth. You can gain an idea of the scale of these events if you imagine that everything that has come into the world since the elimination of Gnosis has been small and petty in comparison with the mighty Christ-picture of the Gnostics. The Mystery-wisdom that lies behind the Gospels is infinitely great, greater than anything that subsequent theology has been capable of finding in them. In order to understand how small and insignificant is today's customary understanding of the Christ-Being compared with that of Gnosis, you might try to immerse yourselves in the Christ-idea of the ancient Gnostics. When you place this before your soul you will grovel in the dust before the greatness of this picture of the Christ-Being Who came down from spiritual heights, spiritual distances, spiritual breadths into a human body. So, long ago, there was once amongst human beings a lofty concept of Christ. It has receded now. For all those dogmas that came into being subsequently, the creeds of Arius or Athanasius or whatever,² are trifling compared with the Gnostic concept which combined wisdom about the structure of the universe with the view of the Christ-Being. Only remnants of this great Gnostic concept of Christ remain.

This is one aspect of the relationship of Christ to Jesus, namely, that Christ came into the world at a time when the wisdom which could have comprehended Him, which had endeavoured to comprehend Him, had already been stamped out. Yet, all along, those who spoke of Gnosis as an oriental fantasy which had to be stamped out for the good of western man considered themselves good Christians. In truth, it was only the incapacity of that time, its incapacity to link earthly concepts with heavenly concepts. You really need a sense of tragedy if you want to understand human evolution.

How long was it after the event of the Mystery of Golgotha that the Temple of Jerusalem, the place of peace, was destroyed? The city of Jerusalem surrounded the Temple of Solomon. What Gnosis was as wisdom, the Temple of Solomon was as symbol. In the Temple of Solomon were symbolized all the mysteries of the universe. The purpose was that those who entered the Temple of Solomon, where they were surrounded by pictures which were mirrored in their souls, should there absorb something into their souls which only then transformed them into true human beings. The Temple of Solomon was to pour the meaning of the universe into the souls of those who were permitted to enter there. What the Temple of Solomon contained was not directly contained anywhere on the earth, for it contained everything in the way of universal mysteries that shone down into the earth out of the breadths of the cosmos.

Why was the Temple of Solomon built? My dear friends, if you had asked an ancient initiate who knew about the Temple he would have replied: So that there shall be a sign here on earth which may be seen by those powers who accompany the souls who are seeking a way into earthly bodies. Let us grasp this rightly. These ancient initiates of the Temple of Solomon knew, as they accompanied the human beings down through all the signs of the Zodiac into their earthly bodies, that they must guide special souls to those bodies which were capable of mirroring in themselves the symbols of the Temple of Solomon.

Naturally enough, this could become a reason for succumbing to arrogance. If this was not taken in with humility, with the humility of the Essenes, it became a reason for succumbing to the wisdom of the Pharisees! But the truth is as follows: The earthly eye looks up to the heavens and sees the stars. The spiritual eye of those who led souls down to the earth from the breadths of the universe was directed downwards and saw the Temple of Solomon with its symbols. It was for them a star by whose light they could accompany the souls into bodies of a calibre capable of comprehending the meaning of the Temple of Solomon. It was the star at the mid-point of the earth which shone out strongly into spiritual heights.

When Christ Jesus had come to the earth, when the Mystery of Golgotha had taken its course, then this great Mystery of Golgotha was to be mirrored in every single human soul: ‘My kingdom is not of this world!’ So the external, physical Temple of Solomon first of all lost its significance, and its destiny fulfilled itself in a tragic way. Basically, there was no one left at that time who, by mirroring all the symbols of the Temple of Solomon, could really take in the full extent of the Christ-Being. But the Christ-Being Himself had entered into earthly evolution and was now within it. This—as has so often been repeated in our circles—is the fact which matters. The Gnostics were the last stragglers of those bearers of that wisdom which was extensive and intensive enough to understand something of Christ out of man's ancient, atavistic earth-wisdom.

That is one side of the relationship between Christ and Jesus. At that time the Christ-Being could have been comprehended by Gnosis. But this was not part of the plan of evolution, although in what had been Gnosis there had been contained the full wisdom of the Christ. But now it can be said that the path taken by Christianity through the countries of the South—through Greece, Italy, Spain and so on—was suited to extinguishing more and more the knowledge of what Christ really was. Rome in decline, Rome in disintegration was destined to extinguish the understanding of Christ.

It is a remarkable thing that, on the one hand, the relationship of Christ to Jesus worked in such a way that, in Gnosis, a high concept of Christ shines out and then dies away as Christianity passes through the Roman element, and that, on the other hand, when Christianity meets the peoples coming down towards it from the North, the concept of Jesus starts to take shape. The concept of Christ has died away in the South. Then, in the North, the concept of Jesus appears, certainly not in a lofty way, but in a way that speaks to the souls of human beings; something wonderful enters human souls at the thought of how a child is born in a consecrated night, a child who will take the Christ into himself. Just as in the South the concept of Christ was inadequate, so in the North was the feeling for Jesus. Nevertheless, the feeling was such that it deeply moved people's hearts; yet, in itself, it is not fully comprehensible. You have only to compare the greatness and majesty of what Christ Jesus means for human evolution with all the sentimental trifles contained in so many poems and songs about the ‘darling infant Jesus’, which move the hearts of those who, in their egoism, believe that they are experiencing heavenly ecstasies. If you make this comparison you gain an immediate impression of something that wants to enter into life but cannot quite do so, something that combines with that other in such a way that the whole deeper meaning and significance remains in man's subconscious.

Now what is it that remains in man's subconscious while the concept of Jesus, the feeling for Jesus, the experience of Jesus rises to the surface? It is extraordinary how this happened! The understanding of Christ sank down into the subconscious and the understanding of Jesus began to glow in the subconscious. In man's subconscious, not in consciousness, which was powerless, there was to be a meeting and a balancing out of the Christ consciousness which was fading and the Jesus consciousness which was beginning to glow in the subconscious. Why did the peoples who came down from Scandinavia, from what is today northern Russia, not take up in Christianity the Christ idea which, to begin with, remained utterly unknown to them? Why did they take up the Jesus idea in Christianity? Why was it the Christmas festival which, above all, spoke to human hearts, awakening in them infinite feelings of holy tenderness? Why was this? What was there in this Europe which received from the South what was basically an utterly disfigured Christianity? What was there in this Europe that caused that idea to light up in people's hearts, that idea in which the Christmas festival with its deep, deep content of feeling is experienced?

The people had been prepared but, to a certain extent, they had forgotten what had prepared them. They had been prepared out of the ancient northern Mysteries. But they had forgotten the meaning of the ancient northern Mysteries. To discover, out of the inner meaning of the northern Mysteries, that deep secret of how the feeling for Jesus entered into European soul life it is necessary to go very far back indeed.

These northern Mysteries were founded on something utterly different from the foundation of the Mysteries of Asia Minor, the Mysteries of the South. These Mysteries of the North were founded on something that was more intimately bound up with the life of the stars, with nature, with the earth's growth forces, rather than that which was shown in the symbols of a temple. Mystery-truths are not the trifles certain mystic sects play around with today. Mystery-truths are grand and powerful impulses within human evolution. Just as we cannot find our way back today through Anthroposophy to Gnosis, to the ancient Gnostics, neither can mankind return to what the ancient Mysteries of the North once meant for human evolution. It would be a foolish misunderstanding to believe that such Mystery-truths are being revealed now because of a desire to return in some way to what lived in them. For the sake of self-knowledge it is necessary for mankind today to know what lived in such Mysteries. For what in the northern Mysteries involved the whole evolution of the universe was connected with what came from the earth, whereas the Gnostic wisdom inspired by the cosmos was connected with what took place in the far reaches of the universe. The mystery of mankind in its connection to all the mysteries of the cosmos, how it works when man enters on the physical earth into his physical existence, all this, at a certain period of earthly evolution, lay more deeply than anywhere else at the basis of these ancient northern Mysteries.

But it is necessary to go a very long way back, approximately to the third millennium BC or perhaps even further, in order to understand what lived in those souls who later took into themselves the feeling for Jesus. Just about where the peninsula of Jutland is part of Denmark today, there existed a centre from which emanated in those ancient times very important Mystery-impulses. However people may judge this with their modern understanding, I can tell you that these Mystery-impulses were connected with the fact that, in the third millennium BC in this northern region, there lived certain tribes who only considered those people to be proper residents of the earth who were born during certain weeks in winter time. This came about because the temple priests of this secret Mystery Centre on the Jutland peninsula decreed that in certain tribes, the Ingaevones³ as Tacitus called them, the sexual union of human beings must only take place during the first quarter of the year. Every sexual union outside this period decreed by the Mystery centre was taboo; and anyone not born during the season of the darkest nights, in the coldest season towards the new year, was considered by these tribes of the Ingaevones to be an inferior human being. The impulse was sent out by the Mystery centre at the time of the first full moon after the spring equinox. This was the only time when those who felt truly connected with the spiritual worlds were allowed to practise sexual union. The forces which are used up in sexual union were saved for the whole remainder of each year and thus contributed to the growing strength of the people. Therefore, they were able to develop that remarkable power of which even the dying echo so astonished Tacitus—writing a century after the Mystery of Golgotha.

In this way the tribes of the Ingaevones, and the other Germanic tribes to a lesser extent, underwent at the time of the first full moon after the spring equinox a particularly strong experience of the process of conception, not in a state of waking consciousness but through a kind of dream annunciation. They knew what this meant with regard to the connection between the mystery of man and the mysteries of heaven. A spiritual being appeared to the one who was conceiving and announced to her, as through a vision, the human being who was to come to the earth through her. There was no consciousness, only a semiconsciousness in that sphere which human souls experienced during the process of entering into physical, earthly reality. Subconsciously the people knew themselves to be ruled by gods, the Vanir.⁴ They were not fully conscious in their intellect but lived in a ‘knowing dream-consciousness’.

Practices which exist at a certain time, and are fitting for that time, often survive into later times in external symbols. In olden times the holy mystery of birth was shrouded in the subconscious, which in turn meant that all births were crowded together in a certain part of the winter season, and it was regarded as sinful if human beings were born at other times. Later on this was partly preserved, but only fragments passed over into later consciousness, fragments of which the meaning has so far remained undiscovered by any learning. Indeed, it is openly admitted that no scholar has succeeded in discovering any meaning. Fragments remain in the so-called Ertha saga. Except for a few notes, everything now known externally about the Ertha, or Nerthus saga is contained in the writings of Tacitus, who reports about it as follows:⁵

‘The Reudigni, the Aviones, the Anglii, the Varini, the Eudoses, the Suardones, and Nuithones, Germanic tribes who are fenced in by rivers or forests’—these are more or less those tribes who together constitute the Ingaevones—‘venerate Nerthus, Ertha, or Mother Earth and believe that she interposes in human affairs, and visits the nations in her chariot.’

In olden times every woman who was to give the earth a new citizen knew in her dream consciousness, through the religious worship of the Vanir, that the goddess later worshipped as Ertha or Nerthus would appear to her. This godly being was perceived as male-female rather than purely female. Only later did a corruption lead to Nerthus becoming a wholly female principle. Just as the Angel Gabriel came to Mary so, in ancient times, did Nerthus come in her chariot to those who were to give the earth a new citizen. The women who were going to give birth saw this in spirit. Later, when the Mystery-impulse in this form had long faded away, the people still celebrated the dying echo of this event in symbols. This is what Tacitus saw, and described as follows:

‘In an island of the ocean there is a sacred grove, and within it her consecrated chariot, covered over with a garment. Only one priest is permitted to touch it.’

This priest was thought of as the initiate of the Ertha Mystery.

‘He can perceive the presence of the goddess in this sacred recess, and walks by her side with the utmost reverence as she is drawn along by heifers. It is a season of rejoicing, and festivity reigns wherever she deigns to go and be received. They do not go to battle or wear arms; every weapon is under lock; only peace and quiet are known and welcomed at these times, till the goddess, weary of human intercourse, is at length restored by the same priest to her temple.’

This was exactly what the vision was like. Such ancient documents describe things really quite exactly, only people no longer understand them. ‘It is a season of rejoicing and festivity. They do not go to battle or wear arms; every weapon is under lock.’ Thus it was indeed at the season which is now our Easter time. Out of their inner soul life people believed the season of the earth's fruitfulness to have come for them too, and those souls were conceived who were later born in the season which is now our Christmas time. The season of Easter was the time for conception. This was seen as a holy mystery of the cosmos and later it was symbolized in the worship of Nerthus. All of it was shrouded in the subconscious and was not allowed to break through into consciousness. This shimmers through in what Tacitus says about this worship:

‘Only peace and quiet are known and welcomed at these times, till the goddess, weary of human intercourse, is at length restored by the same priest to her temple. Afterwards the chariot, the vestments and the divinity herself are purified in a secret lake. Slaves perform the rite, who are instantly swallowed up by its waters.’ A penalty to ensure that all who know about these matters are submerged in the night of the unconscious. ‘Thus reigns a mysterious terror and a pious ignorance concerning the nature of that which is seen only by men doomed to die.’

Everything that takes place in the world comes to have a luciferic and an ahrimanic counter-image. The practices of the Ingaevones, which fitted properly into human evolution, related to the time of the first full moon after the spring equinox. But owing to the precession of the equinox, what remained in ancient times of what had once been a dream experience took place later and later, and thus became ahrimanic. When the events of true, ancient Ertha worship had gradually moved to a time approximately four weeks later, they had become ahrimanic. It was ahrimanic because the union of the human woman with the spiritual world was sought in an unlawful way, that is, at an unlawful time. This then came to be caught and held in ‘Walpurgis Night’⁶ which falls on the night of 30 April to 1 May. This is purely the consequence of an ahrimanic time-shift. You know that a luciferic time-shift goes backwards; an ahrimanic one is the opposite, so here the equinox is shifted forwards so that the remnant from earlier times manifests later. Thus the ahrimanic, Mephistophelean reverse side of ancient Ertha worship, its reversal into something devilish, later became ‘Walpurgis Night’, which is connected with the most ancient Mysteries of which only this weak echo remains.

Much of these Mysteries lived on in the Scandinavian Mysteries.⁷ There in place of Ertha is Frigg, who in the symbolism of later ages—as spiritual science reveals—actually appears as a traitor to what really lay at the foundation.

Something else also should be mentioned in connection with the customs of these Mysteries. From the time of the spring full moon until the depths of winter the fruit ripened in the mothers' wombs. Then one such human being was the first to be born in the holy night. Among the tribes of the Ingaevones this human being, the first to be born in the holy night, was chosen to become, at the age of thirty, the leader for three years, for only three years. In most ancient times this occurred every third year. What then happened to him I might be able to tell you later on.

Careful research reveals that not only is Frigg, Frea, Frija a kind of secondary name for Nerthus, but that the name Ing, after whom the Ingaevones named themselves, is also a secondary name for Nerthus. Those connected with this Mystery centre called themselves ‘the ones who belong to the god, or goddess, Ing’: Ingaevones. In the external world only fragments remained of what was actually experienced. One of these are the words of Tacitus which I have read to you. Another fragment is the famous Anglo-Saxon rune-song⁸ consisting of only a few lines. Every student of German philology knows it but none understand its meaning:

‘Ing was first seen by the men of the East Danes. Later he went eastwards. Across the waves he strode, and his chariot followed after.’

This Anglo-Saxon rune-song contains an echo of what had happened in the ancient Mystery-custom of conception at Easter with the view to a time of birth at Christmas. What took place in this connection in the spiritual world was known, above all, on the Danish peninsula. That is why the rune song says quite rightly: ‘Ing was first seen by the men of the East Danes.’ Then came times when this ancient knowledge fell more and more into corruption, so that only echoes and symbols remained. Altogether human evolution became more suffused with what came from warmer climes. From warmer countries comes something which is unlike what comes from colder climes, where the season of the year is intimately linked with what human beings experience in their inner being. In warmer climes the seed of man was sown all the year round. Of course this happened also in the colder countries even while the old atavistic clairvoyance still existed, but it was suffused in the ancient principles. It came to the the northern regions when the Vanir were being replaced by the Aesir and when, in the southern regions, the nature Mysteries had long been replaced by the temple Mysteries. It came northwards, of course still mixed with the ancient ways, when the Vanir were being replaced by the Aesir. Just as the Vanir were connected with ‘imagining’, so were the Aesir connected with ‘being’, with being or existing in the material world which external understanding wishes to grasp. When the northern people had entered an age in which individual intelligence was beginning to develop, when the Aesir took the place of the Vanir, the Mystery-custom became corrupted. It migrated to isolated, scattered Mystery-communities in the East. One alone remained. The one in whom the whole meaning of the earth was to be renewed, the one in whom the Christ was to dwell, was chosen to unite within himself what had once been the content of the northern Mysteries.

So in contemplating in the Luke Gospel the story of how the Archangel Gabriel appears to Mary, we may seek its origin in the true visions which occurred in what was later mirrored in the Nerthus Mystery with its symbols. This had migrated over to the East. Spiritual science now reveals it and only spiritual science can find a meaning for the Anglo-Saxon rune song. For Nerthus and Ing are one and the same. And of Ing it is said: ‘Ing was first seen by the men of the East Danes. Later he went eastwards. Across the waves he strode, and his chariot followed after.’ He strode, of course, across the waves of the clouds, just as Nerthus strode across the waves of the clouds. What had been general in the colder regions became singular, a single event. It took place as a single event and as such comes to meet us again in the description in the Luke Gospel.

Now once something is there, once it has become customary and firmly anchored in the soul, then it remains there, it remains firmly in the soul. So when the people of the North received the tidings of Christianity from what had been ancient Rome in the South, these tidings were linked with old Mystery-customs which lived no longer in full consciousness but in the subconscious and were thus only dimly sensed. That is why the feeling for Jesus could be especially strongly developed there. What had lived in the old Nerthus Mystery had sunk down into the subconscious where it was still present, where it was sensed and felt.

In those distant days in the far North, when the earth was still covered in forests in which lived the aurochs and the elk, the families gathered in their snow-covered huts in the lamplight around a newborn child. They spoke of this new life and of how it brought to them the new light which the heavens had announced to them in the days of early spring. This was the ancient Christmas, the consecrated night. When they later received tidings of one who was born in the holiest hour and who was destined for great things it reminded them of another who had been the firstborn after the twelfth hour of the consecrated night. The ancient knowledge was gone, but the ancient feelings lived on when the tidings came of such a one born in distant Asia, one in whom lived the Christ Who had descended to the earth from the starry heavens.

It is our duty in the present time to understand such things more and more so that we may learn to grasp the meaning of earthly mankind's evolution. Holy Writ is filled with what is unimaginably great, not with the kind of triviality so often discussed in religious tracts. It is filled with holy truths which run through the whole of human evolution and thrill us to the marrow, flooding our hearts with wonder. All this resounds in what the gospels contain. Once spiritual science has revealed the profound background to what lives in the gospels, these gospels will become for mankind something inestimably dear and valuable. One day mankind will know why it is said in the Luke gospel:

‘And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed. And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria. And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, (because he was of the house and lineage of David): To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child. And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.’

For Him, the firstborn among those who were to find one another in the soul, the ancient Mystery-forces had migrated to the distant East from the Danish peninsula.

‘And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them; and they were sore afraid.’

In the same way had Ertha, who rode through the countryside in her chariot, brought tidings of the arrival of human beings on earth in a way fitting for the ancient consciousness of the Vanir, that is, for subconscious, atavistic clairvoyance.

‘And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day, in the city of David, a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,’

Saying what the Ertha priest had spoken in the ancient northern Mystery to the woman who was to conceive:

‘The revelation of the divine comes from on high in the time of peace among those who are of good will!’

As Tacitus says: ‘It is a season of rejoicing and festivity. They do not go to battle or wear arms; every weapon is under lock.’

It is to this greatness that human beings must ascend: They must look deeply into the course of human evolution. For even the Mystery of Golgotha, which gave a deeper meaning to the whole of earth evolution, only becomes fully comprehensible when it is shown how it stands within human evolution as a whole. When materialism has disappeared and people want to know, not only in the abstract but also quite concretely about their divine origin, there will once again be an understanding for the holy Mystery-truths of ancient days. Then will the interval of time be over in which Christ, though He lives on the earth, can only be minimally understood in full consciousness. For the understanding of Christ among the Gnostics faded away; and the understanding of Jesus grew only unconsciously in connection with the ancient worship of Nerthus. In the future mankind will have to bring into consciousness and bind together both these unconscious streams. Then an understanding of Christ will gain more and more prominence on the earth, and this will be the link between ancient Mystery-knowledge and a renewed great flourishing of Gnosis.

Those who take seriously the anthroposophical view of the world, and also the Movement connected with it, will see that the things it has to say to mankind are no childish games but great and serious truths. We must allow our souls to be deeply moved, because these things are meant to move us deeply.

The earth is not only a great living creature. It is also a lofty spiritual being. Just as a great human genius cannot evolve to full stature without suitable development through childhood and youth, so the Mystery of Golgotha could not have taken place, the divine could not have united with earth evolution if, in the days of earth's beginning, other divine beings had not descended in a different, though equally divine way. The revelation of the divine on high incorporated in the worship of Nerthus differed from the way it was later understood; but it existed.

The knowledge contained in this ancient wisdom is solely atavistic, yet it is infinitely higher than the materialistic world view which is today making human beings into animals as regards the level of their knowledge.

In Christianity we are concerned with a fact, not with a theory. The theory has to follow after the fact and it is important for the human consciousness that is to develop during the further course of earth evolution. But Christianity as such, the Mystery of Golgotha, exists as a fact, and it was necessary that it should enter at first into the unconscious streams. This was still possible in Asia Minor at the time when Christ united with the earth.

Shepherds, people resembling those among whom the worship of Nerthus lived, are also described in the Luke gospel. I can only sketch all this for you. If only we had more time I could show you how deeply founded are the things I have to tell you today. It is because man came down from spiritual heights that the revelation of the divine came from the heavens. It had to be expressed in this way to those who knew, from ancient wisdom, that the destiny of man is linked with what lives in the stars of the heavens. But what is to live on the earth as a result of the incarnation of Christ into a human being will have to be understood gradually. The tidings are twofold, they are in two parts: ‘The revelation of the divine from on high’ and ‘Peace to earthly souls who are of good will.’ Without this second part, Christmas, the festival of the birth of Christ is meaningless!

Not only was Christ born for mankind; mankind also crucified Him! There is a necessity for this, too, but it is no less true that mankind did crucify Christ. And it may be known that the crucifixion on the wooden cross at Golgotha was not the only crucifixion. A time must come in which the second part of the Christmas words may be understood: ‘Peace to men on earth who are of good will!’ For the negative, too, may be felt and sensed, namely, that mankind today is far removed from a proper understanding of Christ and the Christmas Mystery.

Surely it must cut us to the quick that we live in an age when mankind's longing for peace is shouted down.⁹ It is almost dishonest in these days, when mankind's longing for peace is shouted down in the way it is, to celebrate Christmas at all. Let us hope, since we are not yet confronted with the absolute worst, that a change of soul may take place so that, in place of the shouting-down of the longing for peace, there may come Christian feelings, a will for peace. If it does not, it may not be those who are striving in Europe today but, instead, others who come over from Asia who will one day take revenge for the shouting-down of the longing for peace and bring tidings of Christianity and of the Mystery of Golgotha to the ruins of European culture and spiritual life. Then the record will be indelible: At Christmas in the nineteen hundred and sixteenth year after the annunciation of peace on earth to human souls who are of good will, in the nineteen hundred and sixteenth year after the tidings of Christmas, mankind succeeded in shouting down the longing for peace!

May it not come to this! May the good spirits who work in the Christmas impulses guard Europe's unfortunate population against this!

• 1. See, among others, Rudolf Steiner Christ and the Spiritual World. The Search for the Holy Grail, Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1963, Lecture One.
• 2. At the first Council of Nicaea (325) the Athanasian creed (identity of the Son with the Father) was accepted. Arius denied this identity and stressed the oneness of God the Father. He gained many supporters, especially among the Germanic tribes, and the strife between the two schools of thought dragged on throughout the fourth and fifth centuries, until Arianism lost its influence.
• 3. ‘To Mannus they assign three sons, from whose names, they say, the coast tribes are called Ingaevones; those of the interior, Herminones; all the rest Istaevones.’ Tacitus Germania, 2.
• 4. A literal translation of these two sentences reads as follows: ‘Subconsciously the people knew themselves to be ruled by gods, who were given the name ‘Wanen’ [English: Vanir], which is connected with the word ‘wahnen’ [to fancy, to imagine], that is, with that which runs its course, not in full, intellectual consciousness but in a “knowing, dream consciousness”.’ Trs.
• 5. Tacitus on the Ertha saga, Germania, 40. Translated by A J Church and W J Brodribb.
• 6. The night of 30 April to 1 May when the witches are said to gather on the Brocken in the Harz Mountains.
• 7. See Rudolf Steiner The Mission of the Individual Folk-Souls, Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1970, and also Die Julzeit und die Christfeststimmung, Dornach 1966.
• 8. The so-called song of the runic names. Twenty-second rune. See Wilhelm Grimm Über deutsche Runen (On German Runes), Göttingen 1821.
• 9. On 12 December 1916, via a speech in the Reichstag by Bethmann-Hollweg, the Central Powers offered a suggestion for peace negotiations which was rejected by the Allies. See Lecture Thirteen.

My intention is to give a series of lectures which will enable you to understand the present time and the immediate future in some aspects at least. It should be a coherent whole, but it may sometimes be necessary to go a long way back. There will be a continuous thread through it all, but I would ask you to see the parts always in the context of the whole. I will sometimes go far and wide to collect the material we need to understand the present time, and some of it may seem remote.

When I say ‘the present time’ I mean quite a long period of time, going back several decades and also looking decades ahead. It is important to realize that it will be necessary to present truths based on the science of the Spirit that in many respects go utterly against current and generally accepted beliefs. The world holds opinions that not only differ but often are the direct opposite of the truths that have to be spoken out of anthroposophy. It is only to be expected, therefore, that people will consider these truths to be incredible, warped and downright foolish.

When truths which differed from generally accepted views had to be said in the past, in order to open up a road to the future, the difference between those truths and common opinion was probably never as marked as it inevitably is today. This may not be absolutely the case, but, relatively speaking, it is so, for people are tremendously intolerant in their hearts today and less able to accept views which differ from their own.

In the immediate future, people will feel more strongly than ever before that the new and different views presented to them are fanciful and absurd. Nevertheless, truths that until now were closely guarded by small groups of people, with strict silence demanded of anyone to whom they were made known, must increasingly be made public. It does not matter how public opinion and those who hold it react to these truths; nor do the prejudices and counter-currents matter that are provoked by them.

The reason for this will be discussed later on in these lectures. To begin with, I must speak of some of the ways in which people will react to truths today and in the immediate future. People believe they have long since outgrown the illusions and superstitions of the past, yet in some respects they are entirely given up to illusion. There is a growing tendency to live in illusion concerning some important and essential aspects of the great scheme of things, and this to such an extent that these illusions become powers that rule the world, nations and, indeed, the whole earth. It is important to realize this, for illusory ideas are a major element in the chaos in which we find ourselves today; in fact, they make it a chaos.

Let me tell you of one common illusion which exists today and is closely bound up with the materialistic trends of the age. It is the growing tendency to form utterly wrong opinions about what in the science of the spirit is called the physical plane. And the New Testament words that are fundamental in this respect: ‘My kingdom is not of this world’,¹ are increasingly less understood today. They are misunderstood in so far as the leading personalities of the outer world are caught up in the illusion that their kingdom should be very much of this physical world.

What do I mean to say? Anyone who is able to see the reality, and to see through it, knows that this world on the physical plane can never reach perfection. Yet people who think materialistically have the illusion that perfection can be achieved on the physical plane. This is the source of many other illusions, and particularly and characteristically the socialist illusion of the present age.

People's illusions come in all shades of meaning; they are coloured by party politics and so on. People who take a liberal view of the world and of life have constructed their own ideal of the physical world and believe that if they realize this we shall have paradise on earth. All that the socialists are able to think of is how to arrange things on this physical plane so that everybody can live what they consider to be the good life, the same for everybody, and so on. Their vision of the future on this physical plane is of a wonderful paradise. Do examine the programmes put forward by people who see themselves as belonging to the many different socialist parties and you will see for yourselves.

They are not the only people, of course, who have such views and opinions. Teachers also do, for instance. Today, every educational agitator and writer is absolutely convinced that it is up to him to establish the best possible educational system, the best principles of education one can think of. And in an absolute sense they really are the best, one cannot imagine anything better.

To go against such endeavours must seem sheer madness to people. The way things are today, people simply must consider anyone who does not want things to be the best possible in the world to be evil-minded. One can understand people feeling this way. Yet it is not evil-mindedness that stops us from thinking their way but a clear vision of the truth. It tells us that it is illusory to think such levels of perfection can be achieved in the physical world. And if it is a law that there never can be perfection in the physical world, just as it is a law that the three angles in a triangle add up to 180°, then people will simply have to face such a truth boldly and not shrink from it.

So there you have the kind of illusion which arises from entirely materialistic premises. Many say they believe in the world of the spirit, but with many of them this is mere words, nothing but hot air. In their innermost hearts, in their feelings and unconscious impulses, lives something different—the inclination to think materialistically. However much people may pretend to themselves that they believe in something else, in reality they believe only in the physical world. And since they do not believe in anything more than just the physical world around them, the only ideal they can possibly have is to arrange things in the physical world in such a way that it becomes a paradise; otherwise the whole world would make no sense to them. Until materialists are prepared to say that the world makes no sense at all, they can only live in the illusion that, however imperfect this physical world may be, it will be possible to create conditions that will put an end to imperfection and let perfection take its place.

Everything coming to the fore today in this respect—in general terms, with all kinds of political, social and other agitators making great words about it, or in specific instances, such as in education—is based on illusion because people are unable to see the connections between the physical world and the other spheres of the world. In no way can they gain an idea of what Jesus Christ meant when he said: ‘My kingdom is not of this world’, and why Jesus Christ did not want to bring a kingdom of perfection to realization here in the physical world. There is nothing in the gospels to show that Christ intended to reform this outer kingdom of the physical world and make it into one of perfection. He certainly did not cherish that illusion. But he made up for this lack of desire to establish paradise in the physical world by giving people something which is not of this world: to let impulses enter into their souls which are always alive in the world but are not of this physical world.

Illusions of this kind dominate the human race today in the widest possible sense, and this creates an unhealthy climate. People are free individuals and therefore free to live in illusion. In more down-to-earth contexts their illusions would immediately be seen to be illusions. When we are dealing with physical objects, fools who invent things which merely work in theory are instantly seen to be under an illusion. It is not immediately obvious, however, in the vast field of social and political life.

The following story is one I have told before. When I was a young fellow of 22 or 23, one of my fellow students came to me one day, his head aglow, absolutely fired with enthusiasm, and told me he had just made an important, epoch-making invention. Oh, I said, that is nice; what are you going to do with it? Well, he said, I'll have to go and see Ratinger—our professor of mechanical engineering at the university—and tell him about it. No sooner said than done, and off he went. Ratinger was not free at the moment and so the student came back; he had been given an appointment for later on. So I said to him: Why don't you tell me about it in the meantime? We have some time to spare. Tell me about your invention. It was a very clever thing. He had invented a steam engine that needed just a very small amount of coal to heat it up; after that no more coal would be needed, for a special mechanism kept it going of its own accord. One merely had to start it up. This was certainly epoch-making! You will be wondering why we do not have it today. I got him to explain it all to me and then told him: You know, that is really clever; but if one looks at the whole thing it is no different from wanting to get a railway truck going by getting into it and pushing as hard as you can from inside. Someone standing outside can, of course, get it to move, but anyone inside will not get it to move a millimetre, even if they apply the same amount of energy. This is what it all came down to.

Things can be extremely logical and clever, developed by applying all kinds of technical principles, and they may still be nonsense, having been thought up without taking account of reality. What matters is not to be merely clever, or logical, but to relate to reality. In the end the student never went to see the professor.

When one is dealing with physical matter and mechanics, such a thing will soon be obvious. But in social and political affairs, and with reference to what in its widest sense may be defined as making everyone happy, it will not be immediately obvious. You can easily put forward ideas of exactly this kind; people will be impressed and believe you. Yet it is all a matter of being inside the truck and pushing from there. A time will come when a certain basic characteristic of the present time may actually be labelled with a particular name, a name that will typify a way of thinking which at heart is utterly illusory and unreal. I am very sure that in future people will speak of early twentieth century ‘Wilsonianism’. For Wilson's ideas are typical of those of someone who wants to push a railway truck from inside.

All the basic ideas of ‘Wilsonianism’ which make such an impression today are utterly unreal, though they also have a major influence on people for other reasons. They are powerful for the very reason that they cannot be realized. Any attempt to implement them it would soon show them to be meaningless. But people are able to imagine they could be implemented. If we were able to implement Wilsonian ideas, world philistinism would be realized throughout the world. Woodrow Wilson² really deserves to be made the universal saviour of general philistinism. Of course, philistines would not actually do all that well in a world organized by Wilson, which anyway cannot be realized, but at least they imagine that if Wilson's ideas were to conquer the world we would be able to live according to our ideals.

A time will come when people say: At the beginning of the twentieth century a peculiar ideal arose, which was to make the world into a perfect image of philistine, or bourgeois, ideals. Wilson's ideas will be analysed one day and presented as typical of the early twentieth century.

You see, we have not only small but also big examples of illusory ideas in our time. These illusions and unreal ideas are held not by otherworldly sects, but by groups whose beliefs spread far and wide.

Important and vital genuine truths must now be proclaimed to the world. For the reasons and because of the kind of conditions we have been discussing, they will show little relationship to the general opinions of today. Different conditions have to be created to enable people to grasp the truth. The truths which must inevitably come up are repulsive to many people today; they are thoroughly uncomfortable. The truths people like and ask for are convenient truths, for that is the way people are today.

Some of these uncomfortable truths will have to be presented in the course of these lectures. They need to be made known out of a feeling of responsibility, and above all they must relate not only to the physical plane. They must cut across the illusions people have of the physical plane and offer reality rather than fantasy. The most unrealistic and fantasy-ridden people today are those who consider themselves to be more or less entirely realistic. One makes the strangest discoveries in this respect.

I was recently sent a kind of lexicon listing the names of writers.³ It purports to list the names of all writers who have a connection with Judaism and anything which seeks to bring Judaism to realization in this world. I am one of the writers listed in the book, the reason being that, according to the author of the lexicon, I have many similarities with Ignatius de Loyola who is stated to have founded the Jesuits precisely because of his Judaism. Furthermore, I come from a border region between Germans and Slavs—which is where I happen to have been born, though my family certainly do not come from there—and apparently the fact that I come from there indicates that I am Jewish in origin—I have no idea why. This does not really surprise me, for I think you will agree that even odder things are published today. But the lexicon also includes Hermann Bahr as someone who is promoting Judaism—I was merely leafing through the book. Yet he is an out-and-out Upper Austrian. It is really and truly impossible to think of any way in which he can be connected with Jewish blood or the like. Nevertheless, this literary lexicon quotes a well-known literary historian as saying that Hermann Bahr definitely had Jewish traits.

Well, when I was said to be Jewish on one occasion—these things are not new—I had a photograph of my certificate of baptism made. Hermann Bahr also had to jump through those hoops, because a literary historian had said he was Jewish.⁴ Bahr wanted to establish the truth. The literary historian then said: Well, his grandfather may have been a Jew. But it simply is not possible to find anything in Bahr's family which is not absolutely Upper Austrian German. This was of course an embarrassment for the literary historian, but he would stick to is opinion. He went so far as to say that if Hermann Bahr were actually to present the certificates of baptism for the last twelve generations to show that he did not have a drop of Jewish blood rom anywhere, then he, the historian, would believe in reincarnation if forced to do so. So you see, the reason for believing in reincarnation is a highly peculiar one in the case of this renowned and widely-read literary historian.

There are times today when it is really difficult to take what is said by famous people at all seriously. It is a pity, of course, that it is so difficult to convince the wider public of this. People are rather in the habit of believing in authority, despite the fact that modern people do not believe in authority at all, of course! Such, at least, is their opinion. Yesterday we were able to learn something about the opinions people have of themselves.

Today, when people's basic instincts sometimes take them so far from the truth, it is extremly difficult to accept the truths relating to the region which borders immediately on the physical world. To characterize anything relating to this region one has to appeal to healthy, incorrupt minds, and this presents the greatest difficulties one can imagine. For when it comes to the truths which must now be made known, the whole constitution of the human soul will be affected even if people merely get to know them, let alone gain direct perception of them.

External knowledge about the physical world has a certain effect—let us say on the human head. But truths which go deep, even if only to the depth where they relate to the world immediately next to the physical world, touch the whole human being and not only the head. To proclaim such truths one must be able to depend on a sound, incorrupt mind.

In many spheres of life today a sound, incorrupt mind is almost a rarity, whilst unsound, corrupt minds are far from uncommon. And the way individuals accept truths today strongly reveals the particular nature of their life of instincts and drives, the whole constitution of their souls, and their state of mind. People with corrupt instincts who are unwilling to apply some degree of discipline to their life-styles quickly tend to take an attitude which is completely determined by the base mind, particularly when the truths to be accepted relate to the world bordering on the physical world. This happens only too easily. If people do not take a healthy objective interest in what goes on in the world, if they are essentially only interested in anything that relates to themselves, this will often corrupt their mind and attitudes to such an extent that they do not have the right instincts for occult truths and particularly for truths relating to the world bordering on the physical world.

With respect to the physical world and anything relating to it, and to all the great advances humanity has made, I think I can say that physical nature makes sure this corruption does not go too far in human minds. People are confined within the Limits imposed by physical nature; they cannot get very far with their instincts and have to obey the laws of nature. When we move from the physical world into the one bordering on it, we are no longer on those leading reins; guidance has to take another form and a different, inner certainty is needed. This is only possible, however, if the mind is incorrupt as we go beyond the physical level; otherwise we lose all control in that other region where we are no longer controlled by physical nature, nor by social and traditional prejudices. We are suddenly quite free and cannot bear such freedom. For instance, the physical world has many ways of preventing people from lying: If someone were to say at 6 o'clock in the evening that the sun had just come up, nature would soon demonstrate this to be wrong. It is like this with many things relating to the physical world. If people insist on talking nonsense about things relating to the higher worlds, even if it is only the one immediately next to our own, the physical world will not immediately show them to be wrong. This, then, is the reason why people may lose all control if they rush to escape the discipline which is imposed in the physical world.

Here we have one of the great problems which may arise when truths relating to the non-physical world are presented. Yet the answer always has to be that it is simply necessary to present these truths today. We must not forget that truths relating to the non-physical world cannot be received in the same frame of mind as truths relating to the physical world. To take them in we must slightly loosen the etheric and astral bodies; otherwise we shall only hear words. The state of mind has to be such—and with reference to the phenomena of the subjective inner life it merely is a state of mind—that for any real understanding of the things of the spirit one has to loosen the etheric and astral bodies a little. This loosening should only be a means of gaining understanding of the world of the spirit. It must not become an end in itself; this would be a very serious matter.

Imagine—to take an extreme case—someone comes to an anthroposophical lecture, not in order to gain insight into the realms of the spirit, which would be the right thing, but because he thinks this is truly mystical. As he listened he would let the words flow through him, as it were, because this would slightly loosen the ether body and the astral body. People certainly do come to lectures of this kind, sometimes also to those on pseudospiritual science, and listen in a kind of sleepy ecstasy; they are not really interested in the content, but more in the feeling of voluptuous pleasure which comes when the ether body and the astral body go partly outside the physical body. There may be other situations in life when to be thus ‘given up’, or ‘warm’, is a good thing; it is no good at all when it comes to revealing the truths relating to things of the spirit.

This must be properly understood. If spiritual truths are rightly understood, and if people are in all seriousness following the lines of thought used to develop concepts which may make the world of the spirit accessible to our understanding, their humanity will be enhanced and they will learn the things which have to be known at the present time for the salvation and further development of humanity. People who take these truths into themselves in the right way will also find their drives and instincts ennobled and raised to a higher level. By merely listening to spiritual truths they go through a development that is for the good.

Anyone who is not willing to accept anthroposophical truths in this sense but is perhaps doing so from some kind of purely personal interest—let us say he wants to belong to a society and has not found another one which suits him as well as the Anthroposophical Society does—anyone who comes to this Society with personal interests may indeed find that spiritual truths will first of all activate low instincts, and perhaps even the lowest of the low. It therefore does not come as a surprise that people who really should not be members but nevertheless do come and hear such things, find their lowest instincts brought to life. It is something that cannot be avoided at this time, for these things have to be made public and it is difficult to draw the line. The right way will only be found if those who have the inner justification to be part of such a movement use their wide-awake judgement and take themselves to task. People who in any way bring personal interests to bear, before or after leaving the Society, merely show that they never should have been members. And I think it is not really difficult to distinguish between personal interests and interest in objective understanding.

But it is not surprising that in the situation which has arisen because it is now necessary to make things generally known, it happens again and again that some of the instincts of the lower human nature come to the fore. The potential dangers must be consciously and clearly considered and ways must be found to correct them. If we take the right attitude to these dangers we shall certainly be able to meet them. This is very much a time—it is part of the chaotic situation we are in—when aberrations of this kind are far from uncommon. The tragic situation of today makes tremendous demands on the powers of many people. It is true to say that people who were not in the habit of working hard in the general rather than merely personal interest really have learned to work hard in the last three years. Many people have learned to work and to acquire general interests.

People who rightly belong to our movement will have come to it out of more than personal interest. Nevertheless, the present age does offer enormous opportunities for a kind of lazy outsider attitude. The specific constellation created by the war means that some people have really nothing to occupy them. If they are part of our movement they will also be aware of it. Before the war we had many lecture tours; a whole raft of people would get together and travel from one lecture to the next. Outer interest may have been lacking, but excitement could be found, and if this did not come from outside, people created their own excitements. This has now become difficult. It cannot be done. However, some people have not found a way of occupying themselves usefully. And that is why a lazy outsider attitude is to be found in our ranks exactly at this time, with people whiling away the time by creating all kinds of opposition. Being unable to get the excitement of travelling from lecture cycle to lecture cycle they find other ways of entertaining themselves. This merely shows the true nature of the interest that formerly made them travel from lecture cycle to lecture cycle.

When there is an inner obligation to represent anthroposophical truths before the world, in all seriousness and with dignity, you also know that more than fifty out of an audience of a hundred may well become opponents. That is a law; it is the way it is. If these fifty per cent of such people do not actually become opponents, there will be a reason for this, but it will not be because they are consistent. For reasons which have already been given and others that will be given, this is how matters are. Someone who represents anthroposophical truths is therefore not in the least surprised if there is opposition. We might take up the points that these opponents keep coming up with all the time, things they generally know better than anyone else to be untrue—for they do of course know that they are not true—but it would be much more useful to consider the sources from which such Opposition has Sprung.

All kinds of peculiar things will happen when we do so, and we shall then no longer feel inclined to take up the points that our opponents want us to take up. Instead, we are going to discover their true reasons. This can sometimes be more of an effort than to take up the points the opposition is making. Think of all the years in which lectures have been given here and how it has been necessary over and over again to say the same things I am also saying today, though this is always pointed out. But it is necessary to consider them with profound seriousness and dignity, and to consider them in a way which is fitting for an anthroposophical movement.

Believe me, I have more important things to do, if I am to lead this movement and be fully responsible for it, than to take account of the fact that three or four people, or even more if you will, get together and invent all kinds of gossip. I have more important things to do and never feel the inclination to go into such matters. But unfortunately this is so little understood! Even within this Society, there is more interest in excitement and sensation than genuine scientific interest. From the scientific point of view it is, for instance, interesting to study not only useful but also poisonous plants, but one has to find the right point of view. Very few of those who profess to follow anthroposophical spiritual science have even the least notion of the immense seriousness and importance of what it really should be. Forgive me for saying this. If there were the right seriousness and if the importance of this were really understood, people's attitudes would in many respects be very different from what they are. Of course I am not saying that people should turn their attention elsewhere. Rather the opposite: We should not turn our attention away from the phenomena which go hand in hand with the will to destroy this anthroposophical movement. But we have to find the right approach.

People may, for instance, write volumes in the way in which I have contradicted myself in my written works and with reference to all kinds of other things. One way of countering this would be to say that Luther was shown to have contradicted himself in hundreds of ways, not just a few dozen. His answer was: These asses are talking of contradictions in my works. I wish they would make the effort to try and understand just one of the things that appears to be in contradiction to other things!⁵ So one way would be to point out something like this. But there is no need for this. For when people speak in opposition today it is not because they are interested in finding and revealing contradictions but for quite a different reason.

Someone⁶ offered a manuscript to Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag,⁷ for instance. The publishing house was unable to use it and therefore returned it to the author. From this moment the author, who until then had been running after me wherever I went, became an opponent. The real reason was not that he had found contradictions. If that were the real reason we might use Luther's words. But we cannot do that, for the individual concerned can only be seen in his true colours if we know he is giving vent to his spleen because the publishing house was not able to publish his book. This was the real reason. So if we simply listen to the things people say, we shall have little opportunity for getting at the truth—just as little, perhaps, as the literary historian who would convert to reincarnation if this allowed him to continue in the belief that Hermann Bahr had Jewish connections. Conversion would be necessary if he were to be shown certificates of Christian baptism for Hermann Bahr's ancestors down to the twelfth generation.

Much is said about the courage which people are showing today. To assert the truths humanity needs today, in the sense I have spoken of, will need quite a different kind of courage—inner courage. But the place where this courage should be in the soul is occupied by cowardice, reluctance to take action, and this is tremendously widespread. In many respects it is due to this cowardice that anthroposophical spiritual science finds it so difficult to make its way today. It will make its way. But one should not sit back and accept; one should not think that things will go the right way without human involvement. One thing you will have to get used to—and it will be different from what you have been used to so far—is that I myself will have to be a lot less lenient in some respects than I have been until now. Do not think this is because I have changed my will and intention; you must look for the reasons in the existing situation.

You will have to understand that I cannot let the movement which I have to represent before the world go to the dogs in any old way. Forgive the expression. Higher duties are involved than people may dream of. I cannot be involved in whatever excitements or sensations some group or set may be desiring. Consideration must be given to many general and more important interests and impulses than to the purely personal ambitions which rule one set of people or another. To find the right way of presenting anthroposophy we simply must be able to set aside the purely personal element which for many is about the only thing that interests them today.

And so I must conclude here today with something which I have also been saying in all the other places where I have been speaking these days. There are many members of our anthroposophical science of the spirit who are truly dedicated and who have a clear idea of the seriousness of our work. But again and again there are others who do not belong and who behave in a way that simply would not happen if membership of the Society were limited to those who rightfully belong to it. Things keep coming up among members which are far removed from what is really intended; some of these can only be said to relate to what is really intended if one takes a totally distorted view.

Things are said by groups of people who have to be ignored—for our real interests go far beyond giving one's attention to the ambitions which are alive in those groups—things are said there, and people are beginning to believe them, which have no more to do with our true intentions than a dung beetle has to do with a pendulum clock. It is quite impossible to see how they go together. Yet fantastic stories created out of base instincts that are left to run riot are set in circulation. And this despite the fact that the people who generate them know full well that not a word is true. Such things can be explained in natural science, but we must also draw the logical conclusion and take the necessary actions. In the first place I am going to impose two rules an myself. Anyone who is going to speak of the one rule without the other, will be saying something which is not true. I have made these two rules known in all the places where I have been giving lectures in recent months.

In principle, I shall no longer continue to give private interviews to members of the Anthroposophical Society. For all those private interviews have led to reports which are full of lies. I have better things to do than refute the tales told by people who let their imaginations run riot, and so there is no other way but to discontinue these private interviews. Some individuals have a true esoteric impulse, and I will find other ways of making sure they are able to progress; it will just take while. The measure should not prevent anyone from progressing in esoteric development. But, generally speaking, all private interviews must now stop. This, then, is the first rule. Do not come to me, as people have done in some local groups, and say it is a harsh rule. No, do not come to me, go to those who are responsible.

The second thing is that I release everyone who has ever had a private interview with me from the promise not to talk about it, if they wish to do so. Anyone can tell anything they like about what has happened or been said in those private interviews—that is, in so far as they wish to do so. I am not going to prevent anyone from telling the whole truth about anything ever discussed with me in a private interview.

These two rules go together. The one does not apply without the other. And, as I said, if you think they are harsh, go to those who are responsible. Unless I am less lenient in these matters than I have been until now, the problems I am speaking of will not stop. As I said, I shall find other ways to make sure this does not harm anyone's esoteric development. Ways and means will be found. But, people being as they are today, it is not possible to establish such a science without things going badly astray on occasion, with people always jumping to the wrong conclusions. This is why there will have to be these rules.

People who take a serious and dignified approach to our spiritual-scientific development may find it difficult to understand how such things could come about, but they will accept the two rules as inevitable. From now on, everything will be entirely in the open. For there is nothing there which needs to shun the light! This is what is so shameful about it all: The truth and the whole truth could be told by everybody without leaving the least stain on our movement. But people have grown attached to something which has survived in our work as a continuation of earlier practices: to have individual interviews. 1f talking to individuals had not resulted in lies, the rule would not have been necessary. But everything ever said to any member can be truthfully told. Our movement can only gain from the truth—go and tell as much as you like. The truth will not be affected by the lies which are told; but it must not even appear to be affected, for it is important for humanity that anything presented out of a background of spiritual science is presented in a serious and dignified way.

So let me repeat once more: Without causing any loss to those who are seriously seeking esoteric development, I will generally no longer give private interviews for members. Everyone is free to tell everything they want about the interviews which have been given, but it must be the truth. I release everyone from whatever vow of silence there may be. But it should only be because individuals want to tell others for their own sake; they do not have to do it for my sake. And I have no objection to people spreading it about far and wide that these rules exist and are characteristic of our movement. Then the world will realize the infamous nature of the things that are so often said, especially about our Society.

• 1. John 18:36. The German for ‘kingdom’ in this sense is Reich (Trans.).
• 2. Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), President of the United States 1913–1921. (Wilson propagated ‘open’ diplomacy but refused to permit publication of his discussions at the 1919 Peace Conference in Paris. His Fourteen Points were to be the basis for the armistice in November 1918. Trans.)
• 3. Semi-Kuerschner oder Literarisches Lexikon der Schriftsteller, Dichter, Bankiers, Geldleute, Schauspieler, Kunstler, Musiker, Offiziere, Rechtsanwlte, Revolutionre, Frauenrechtlerinnen, Sozialdemokraten usw. jdischer Rasse und Versippung, die von 1813–1913 in Deutschland ttig oder bekannt waren (Semi-Kuerschner or literary lexicon of authors, poets, bankers, financiers, physicians, actors, artists, musicians, officers, lawyers, revolutionaries, women's rights activists, social democrats, etc., who were Jewish by birth or marriage and were active or known in Germany from 1813–1913), published by Philipp Stayff, Berlin 1913. The passage about Hermann Bahr reads as follows: ‘It is said, and people have assured me over and over again, that Hermann Bahr is not a Jew, but I believe in the adage: ‘Tell me who your friends are’ (Bahr's first wife was Jewish), and would maintain that Bahr is of Jewish origin even if he were to show me the certificates of baptism of his forebears for the last ten generations, and indeed if really pushed into a corner I would rather subscribe to belief in the transmigration of souls.’
• 4. Adolf Barthels in his Kritiker und Kritikaster, Leipzig 1903.
• 5. Martin Luther (1483–1546) religious reformer who led the German Reformation. He translated the Bible into the vernacular to make it accessible to everyone and wrote many works, their vigour still much appreciated today. The actual quote is: ‘How can these asses form an opinion on contradictory elements in our doctrine if they don't understand any aspect of those contradictory elements?’ From Ricarda Huch, Luthers Glaube, 10. Brief (translates as ‘10th letter’).
• 6. Max Seiling (1852–1928), Austrian poet and writer.
• 7. Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag is the publishing house established by Marie von Sivers in 1913 in Berlin for the publication of Rudolf Steiner's works. It moved to Dornach in November 1923.

Today I shall speak more generally, perhaps aphoristically, to prepare the way for Tuesday, when I shall discuss our anthroposophical spiritual science and its significance for the present time and for human evolution. I shall then bring to your notice some things which we should certainly take to heart. On the one hand we will look back on our work, and on the other hand I shall present certain matters which are important for the whole way in which we assess our spiritual scientific movement, as well as the manner in which we relate to it. It seems to me to be appropriate, at this time, to take into our hearts a consideration of this kind.

Let me start today with some remarks on what it is that can give us, as human beings, a sense for our situation in the cosmos. Actually, human beings in this materialistic age feel, you might say, deserted and isolated in the cosmos. If you cut off a person's finger or hand, or amputate his leg, he feels you have taken away something that belongs to his physical, bodily nature; he feels that the missing part belongs to the whole of his bodily nature. In earlier periods of human evolution people felt quite differently about this. Not only did they feel their hand, or arm or leg to be a part of their whole being, but they felt that they were, in turn, a part of a totality. In those days it was possible to speak quite differently about a group-ego. Tribes, families, for generations back, felt themselves to be a totality. We have gone into this frequently. As for their external, physical existence, however, people felt something quite different. They felt in a way as though they stood within the cosmos as a whole, as though they had been formed out of the whole cosmos.

Just as today we feel that our finger, our hand, is one member of our total organism, so in olden times people felt: Up there is the sun; it runs its own course but it is not unrelated to us; we are a part of the region traversed by the sun; we are a part of the universe as it is given certain rhythms by the moon. In short, they felt the universe to be one great organism and that they were within it, just as today our finger might feel that it is part of our body. The fact that this feeling, this perception, is virtually lost to us today has not a little to do with the rise of materialism. Today's science, in particular, disdains to have anything to do with an idea that man might be a part of the cosmos. Science regards a human being as an individual body, of which the separate parts are examined and described anatomically and physiologically. It is no longer customary in science to regard the human being as a member of the total organism of the universe in so far as this is physically visible.

But people's view of things, especially their scientific view, will have to return to the concept of man embedded in the whole cosmos. Human beings will have to sense once again that they stand within the cosmic universe. This will not be possible in the way that was the case in olden times. They will have to achieve it by expanding their science, which today is abstract and directed to the individual, to include certain considerations. They will have to apply certain judgements, of which we shall discuss only one today—which we mentioned several weeks ago. This will show us the direction scientific thinking will have to take—having become far more human than current scientific thinking—if human beings are to find once again an awareness of how they stand within the universe as a whole.

You know that the position of the sun on the ecliptic at the spring equinox moves forward in the Zodiac. You know that this point has always been designated, ever since mankind began to think, according to its position in the Zodiac. So from about the eighth century before the Mystery of Golgotha until about the fifteenth century after the Mystery of Golgotha, the sun at the spring equinox rose in the sign of the Ram, though not always at exactly the same spot. During this period the sun traversed the sign of the Ram. Since then, the sun at the spring equinox has been rising in the sign of the Fishes. Note, please, that astronomy takes no account of the constellations, so you will find that calendars still say that the sun rises in the constellation of the Ram at the beginning of spring, which is in fact not the case. Astronomy has stuck to the earlier cycle. It simply divides the Zodiac into twelve equal parts, each of which is named after one of the signs. You know from our calendar what the situation is.

However, this is immaterial as far as we are concerned. What is important for us is the fact that the position of the sun at the spring equinox moves forward, passing through the whole Zodiac little by little. It traverses the whole Zodiac until it finally returns to the original position, taking approximately 25,920 years. These 25,920 years are termed the Platonic Year, the Cosmic Year. The exact figure varies according to the various methods of calculation. However, we are not concerned with exact figures but with the rhythm this precession entails. You can imagine that a cosmic rhythm must lie in this movement which repeats itself every 25,920 years.

We can say that these 25,920 years are very important for the life of the sun, for during this time the life of the sun passes through one unit, a proper unit. The next 25,920 years are then a repetition. We have a rhythm in which one unit measures 25,920 years.

Having looked at this great Cosmic Year, let us now turn our attention to something small, something intimately connected with life between birth and death, that is, with our life in so far as we are inhabitants of the physical universe. It is indisputable that one of the most important things in this life in the physical body is a single breath, an in-breath and an out-breath, for our very life depends on this breathing in and breathing out. If it were to be interrupted, we should cease to be capable of living. One breath is indeed something very important. A breath brings in the air which enlivens us in a particular way. Within our organism we transform this air into the breath of death, for it would kill us if we were to breathe it in again once we have breathed it out.

On average, a human being takes eighteen breaths a minute. Not all breaths are equal, for those in youth differ from those in old age, but the average is eighteen breaths a minute. Eighteen times a minute we rhythmically renew our life. Multiply this by 60 and you have 1,080 times an hour. Now multiply by 24, and the number of breaths in twenty-four hours comes to 25,920!

You see how a remarkable rhythm underlies the course of our life in one day. Let us take one unit of life to be one breath. This is something very important for us, since the rhythmical repetition of our breathing maintains our life. In one day we are given exactly as many units of life as the years it takes the sun to return to its original position on the ecliptic at the spring equinox. This means that if we imagine one breath to correspond to one microcosmic year, then we complete one microcosmic Platonic Year in one day, an image of the macrocosmic Platonic Year. This is most exceptionally significant, for it shows us that the process of our breathing, something which takes place within us, is based on the same rhythm, on a different time-scale, as the great rhythm of the sun's passage.

It is important for us to consider such a thing in our soul. For if we transform what has been said into a feeling, then this feeling will tell us that we are an image of the macrocosm. To say that the human being is an image of the macrocosm is no mere empty phrase, no idle chatter, for it can be proved down to the last detail. From this you can gain a feeling of the solid foundation on which stand all the laws that come from spiritual science. They are all based on similar intimate knowledge of the inner connections of the cosmos, even though it is not always possible to go into every detail.

Now in considering these things, it must above all be clear to us that the human being is, in some way and to some extent, detached from the cosmos. He stands within the rhythm of the cosmos and yet he is to some extent free. He changes things subtly, so that the rhythms do not exactly match, but it is just this fact of not quite matching which gives him the possibility of freedom. In general, however, he stands within the rhythms of the cosmos.

I had to bring forward these considerations so that what I now want to say might not be misunderstood. Having considered the rhythm of breathing, let us now turn to a larger one, the next in size: the alternation of sleeping and waking. A single breath is the smallest element of life. Now let us look at the alternation between sleeping and waking, which is indeed, to some extent, an analogy to the rhythm of breathing.

As you know, I have often described the taking in of the astral body and ego on waking up, and the letting go of the astral body and ego on going to sleep, as a breathing in and a breathing out in the course of a day and a night. But we can look at this in an even more materialistic sense. When we breathe the air, it goes in and it goes out. We inhale, we exhale. Something material swings back and forth like a pendulum; out, in, out, in. The alternation of sleeping and waking occurs as a very similar rhythm. In the morning, when we wake up and take in our ego and our astral body, our etheric body is displaced, is pushed down from the head and more into the other elements of the organism. And when we go to sleep again, pushing out our astral body and our ego, then our etheric body spreads back into our head and is there just as it is in the whole of the rest of our body. Thus there is an incessant rhythm. When the etheric body is pressed down, we wake up, and it stays down while we remain awake. When we go to sleep it is pushed back up into our head. Up and down it goes in the course of twenty-four hours. The etheric body moves rhythmically during the course of twenty-four hours. Of course there are irregularities, and this is in keeping with the human being's capacity for freedom, his degree of freedom. But, overall, what I have described takes place.

We could say that something breathes in us—though it is not an in-and-out but an up-and-down—something breathes in us during the course of a day which resembles our breathing every eighteenth of a minute. Let us see whether what breathes in this up-and-down of the etheric body also represents a kind of circulation, something which returns to its starting-point. We must fathom the meaning of 25,920 days, for 25,920 such up-and-down movements could be seen as a replication of the Platonic Year. Just as a day corresponds to 25,920 breaths, so 25,920 days ought to correspond to something in human life too. How many years does this come to?

A year has 365¼ days and if we divide 25,920 by 365.25 the answer is: nearly 71. Let us say 71 years, which is the average life-span of the human being. The human being is free, however, and often lives much longer, but you know that the patriarchal life-span is given as 70 years. The span of a human life is 25,920 days, 25,920 great breaths, and so we have another cycle wonderfully depicting the macrocosm in the microcosm. We could say that by living for one day, taking 25,920 breaths, we depict the Platonic Cosmic Year, and by living for 71 years, waking up and going to sleep 25,920 times—a breathing on a larger scale—we once again depict the Platonic Year.

Now let us turn to something which time will not allow us to discuss in detail today, but which I nevertheless want to indicate, something that can be sensed in an occult way. We are surrounded by air. It is the air which gives us the possibility of that closest element of life that takes place in the rhythm of breathing. This rhythm is given to us by the air, which is something belonging to the earth. And what gives us the other rhythm? The earth itself! That rhythm arises because the earth turns on its own axis—speaking in accordance with modern astronomy—and brings about the alternation of day and night. So the air breathes in us when we take a breath. And the earth, by letting us wake up and go to sleep, breathes, pulses in us by turning on its axis and giving us the alternation of day and night. Our life-span can be seen in relation to the earth as one day in the life of an organism which, instead of taking one breath every eighteenth of a minute, takes one breath in one day and night. For such an organism seventy years are one day, and ordinary days and nights are its breaths.

You see how we can feel ourselves to be within a life on a larger scale, a life which takes one breath every twenty-four hours and for which one day takes seventy, seventy-one, years. We can feel ourselves to be within a living being which has much longer rhythms of pulse and breathing. So you see that it is quite correct to speak of the microcosm as being an image of the macrocosm, for every part of the image can be proved mathematically. If we maintain that the air breathes within us, that it breathes itself in us, that the earthly realm breathes in us because we belong to this greater living organism, then we might come to ask: Apart from being related to the air, which is on the earth, and to the whole of the earth with its rhythm of day and night, are we perhaps also related in a certain way to the rising of the sun as a whole, as it progresses during the course of the Platonic Year, returning to the position from which it set out?

These things are of the utmost interest, yet science today takes no more notice of them than of shadows. On one occasion I found myself startlingly confronted by this contrast between today's science and the science which must come in the future. Perhaps I have told you that in the autumn of 1889 I was called by the Goethe and Schiller Archive in Weimar to edit Goethe's natural-scientific works for the extended complete works. I had to examine all the documents left behind by Goethe containing his studies on anatomy, physiology, zoology, botany, mineralogy, geology and also meteorology. He made an enormously thorough study of the weather during the course of a year, recording especially the barometric data, and it is astonishing how many tables he worked out in this connection. Only small parts of this work have been published. A few of the tables are reproduced in my edition, but otherwise little is publicly known. Like temperature charts, he made graphs showing the barometric data at a particular place compared with other places and he recorded his readings every few hours for months on end. In this way he hoped to show how the curves differed in different places.

Graphs showing barometric data are something for which today's science has little use as yet. But Goethe wanted to record these curves which for him represented an analogy with the pulse as we record its fluctuations in temperature charts. He wanted to record a kind of pulse of the earth, the regular, day-to-day earth-pulse. Why? He wanted to prove that the fluctuations in the barometric data during the course of the year are not as irregular as ordinary meteorology supposes but are subject to a certain degree of regularity which is only modified by secondary conditions pertaining at certain times. He wanted to prove that the earth's gravity depicts a breathing out and a breathing in during the course of a year; he wanted to point to the very thing that is expressed in the human being's breathing out and breathing in. He wanted to find the same thing in the barometric data. Science will embark on such projects in the future, when once again the microcosm will be examined in its relationship to the macrocosm.

So you see how Goethe was working towards a form of science which will come about at some time in the future. We also gain an idea of the immense diligence he applied in order to reach the results he achieved. He never simply makes an assertion, as is so often the case with others. When others speak of the pulse of the earth, they often intend this simply as a metaphor, an aperçu. But when Goethe says, in three or four lines, for instance, that the earth breathes, he can back this statement with a large pile of tables. Empirical knowledge is behind whatever he says. Yet most people consider empirical knowledge to be stuff and nonsense. We can learn from Goethe that one must have material with which to back one's assertions. In this way we now have material to back our statement that the earth breathes like a great organism.

Let us now see whether we can speak in a similar way about breathing if we place ourselves within the great Platonic Year of the sun, which has a span of 25,920 years. Without more ado let us now regard these 25,920 years as a single year, and let us see how much a single day amounts to. To do this we must divide by 365¼, and the answer will be a single day. We have already done this sum, and the answer was seventy-one years, the span of a human life. This means that a human life takes one day of the whole Platonic Year. So we could look at the whole Platonic Year with regard to the human life-span as follows: As physical beings we are breathed out by the whole process of the Platonic Year, so that if seventy-one years are seen as a single day, this would be one breath of the being who lives in the rhythm of the Platonic Year.

With regard to an eighteenth of a minute we are a limb of the life of the air, and with regard to a day we are a limb of the life of the earth. With regard to our life-span it is as though we were breathed out and breathed in again in one day of that being who lives in the rhythm of 25,920 years. So we could consider our physical body, which lives out its patriarchal span, to be a single breath of that great being which lives so long that 25,920 years are as one year for it. Our patriarchal life-span is then one day. So looking at a being who lives with our earth and experiences day and night in twenty-four hours, this is one breath for our etheric body. And one breath for our astral body is our actual breath of one-eighteenth of a minute.

Herein you have an analogy for an ancient assertion, for something that was called the ‘days and nights of Brahma’. Think of a spiritual being for whom our seventy-one years are as is a single breath for us. We find we are a single breath for that being. When we enter the world as a tiny baby, that being for whom the Platonic Year is one year breathes us out. It breathes us out into the cosmos, and when we die it breathes us in again; we are breathed out and we are breathed in. Now turn to the earth: It breathes us out and in again in one day. Now turn to the air, which is a part of the earth: It breathes us out and in again in an eighteenth of a minute. Whichever way we look at it, the number 25,920 represents the return to the starting point. This is a regular rhythm; it gives us the feeling of being embedded in the cosmos; it teaches us that the span of a human life, and one day in a human life, are indeed, for greater, more all-embracing beings, the same as is one breath for us. If we can transform this knowledge into feeling, then the expression ‘resting in the world-all’ assumes immense significance.

Such things really do belong in the orbit of scientific research, and nothing other than the attitude of mind of spiritual science will lead to such research into these figures, which are to be found, after all, in any encyclopaedia. One day such research will be carried out and then ordinary science will be able to find a link with anthroposophical spiritual science.

As we have seen, everything is ordered according to numbers. But it is also ordered according to measure. Human science will lend great depths to the Biblical words: Everything in the universe is ordered in accordance with measure and number.

Let us continue. There is something connected with our breathing, a kind of dependant of our breathing, and that is our speech. Organically, speech is connected with breathing. Not only does it emerge from the same organ but it is also connected with the rhythm of breathing, the rhythm of an eighteenth of a minute. Thus we speak, and thus speak those who are with us on the earth. Just as the air surrounds us on the earth, so are we surrounded by human beings whose speaking bears a relationship to the rhythm of breathing. It should follow that the other breathing, the breathing connected with day and night, also has a kind of speaking linked with it. This would be a speaking by beings who belong to the organism of the earth, just as human beings belong to the air.

In olden times, the wisdom imparted to human beings by higher beings came, not via the breathing rhythm of an eighteenth of a minute, but via the rhythm of breathing which has one day as its unit. In those ancient days they could not learn as quickly as we can today; they had to tarry longer for words which were linked to a breathing rhythm of twenty-four hours. In this way ancient knowledge came to man, knowledge which is at the foundation of everything and which can be discovered in various traditions. It was brought by higher beings who are linked to the earth in the way man is linked to the air, and who approach man. Those who today work towards an initiation still notice something of this. For knowledge which comes from the spiritual world comes to us far, far more slowly than does that which is imparted to us on the wings of our ordinary air processes.

That is why it is so important for one striving for initiation to learn to sense within himself the great significance of the transitions of going to sleep and waking up. In going to sleep and in waking up, in this transition, we are most likely to sense how spiritual beings mysteriously speak with us. Later we can then gain some control over this. If you seek entry into the world inhabited by the dead, it is good to be aware that the dead are most likely to speak at the moment of going to sleep and the moment of waking up. The moment of going to sleep is more difficult, because here we usually become immediately unconscious and fail to perceive what the dead have said. But in waking up, if we succeed in becoming fully aware of the moment of waking up, that is when the dead are most likely to communicate with us. But we must seek to gain a firm hold of the moment of waking up. This means that we must endeavour to wake up without immediately entering into the light of day. You know that there is a—shall we say—superstitious rule, that if we want to hold on to a dream we must not look at the window or the light because if we do, we will forget easily. This applies just as much to the delicate observations which flow to us from the spiritual world. We must endeavour to wake up in the dark, in darkness which we wilfully create by not listening to noises, by not opening our eyes, by waking up consciously while not yet going out to meet the day. That is when we best notice the approach of communications from the spiritual world.

You could say that if this is the case we shall receive precious few communications during the course of our lifetime! For just think how difficult it would be if this situation meant that in the course of our lifetime we could only receive as many communications as could come to us during the course of one day. This would be sufficient, no doubt, but we should have no chance of making use of any of them, for think of the time taken up by our childhood, and so on. However, the earth takes part in all this—please bear this in mind—the earth receives these communications into its etheric body. And because they are inscribed on the earth's etheric body, the communications remain available for study. We can also study, in the sun-ether which fills the whole world, the more comprehensive communications given to us by the being whose life element is the Platonic Year. This is described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and other books.

You see how a thread can be spun to link ordinary science with spiritual science, although those who are strangers to spiritual science will hardly find themselves in a position to evaluate what ordinary science gives them in a suitable way. But those who have the attitude of mind of spiritual science will not doubt, when they approach these matters, that a time will come one day when external science and spiritual science will join forces fully.

As I said, I have only spoken to you about a part of all this, namely, the rhythmical process which is built into breathing. There are many other things which, if studied in relation to numbers, show how the microcosm is in harmony with the macrocosm, and human beings can gain a comprehensive sense for this harmony. Such a comprehensive sense for this harmony was given to the pupils of the ancient Mysteries, right up to the fifteenth century. Before any knowledge was imparted to them, their teachers endeavoured to imbue them with a feeling for the way man stands within the cosmos. It is another sign of these materialistic times that knowledge today can be absorbed without any preparation in the feeling life. I pointed this out in the opening words of the first chapter in Christianity as Mystical Fact.

A feeling for the correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm will be especially important when the endeavour is made to reach concrete concepts for what at the moment only exists in abstractions. For instance what is ‘a people, a nation’ in today's abstract materialism? Nothing but so and so many people who speak the same language! For our materialistic age has, of course, no conception of a folk being as a separate individuality, such as we have often described. We speak of a folk being as a separate individuality, a real single individuality. But in the materialists' view a folk being is merely a collection of people who speak the same language. This is an abstraction, for the concept does not refer to a concrete being. So what does it mean to you when discussing a people or a nation to speak, not of an abstraction but of a concrete being?

Well, in Anthroposophy we have the possibility of studying the human being, who is also a concrete being, and who possesses a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and an ego. So can we assume that a folk being is also a concrete being with differentiated parts?

Indeed we can. In addition to man, true occultism studies all the beings who exist, and who are as concrete as man. However, in the case of a folk soul we have to look for different elements, for if they were the same as in man, then a folk soul would be a human being, but it is not; it is a different kind of being. In fact, in the case of folk beings we have to study each folk soul individually in order to arrive at concepts which are real. Generalization would lead us back to abstraction, so each has to be considered individually.

Let us do so. Take the folk soul which today rules the Italian people to the extent that the individual members of a people can be ruled by a folk soul. What can we say about it? In the case of a human being we say that he has a physical body consisting of various salts, various other minerals, five per-cent solids, so much that is liquid, so much that is gaseous, and so on. That is his physical body. A folk soul such as that of the Italian people does not possess a human body, but it does possess something which can be seen as analogous to the physical body. The Italian folk soul does not have a physical body made up of salts or solids or liquids, though this does not mean that other folk souls have no liquid components. However, the Italian folk soul has none; it begins with components which are aeriform. There are no liquid or other components, for the most densely material part of the Italian folk soul is woven out of air. All its other components are even less dense. The human being has earthly substance, whereas the Italian folk soul has, to start with, aeriform substance. And where the human being has liquid substance, the Italian folk soul has warmth. The human being has aeriform substance which he breathes in and out, and the Italian folk soul has light which corresponds to air in the human being. The human being has warmth, and the Italian folk soul has sounds instead, the sounds of the spheres.

This is approximately what corresponds to the physical body, but the ingredients are different. Instead of solid, liquid, gaseous and warmth elements, as in the human being, the Italian folk soul has something similar—though not a physical body in the same sense—consisting of air, warmth, light, sound. From this you can see that if the Italian folk soul wants to ensoul the human beings who belong to it, this can take place via their breathing, since its lowest, densest component is air. And indeed it is so that the communication between the individuals and the Italian folk soul takes place through the breathing process. In the breathing the folk soul spreads down into the human beings. This is an actual, real process. Of course breathing is done through something quite different, but in the actual breathing process the folk soul steals in and influences its people.

In a similar way we could consider what corresponds to our etheric body. This would start with the life ether, and then in place of the light ether there would be what I called in my Theosophy ‘burning desire’; then, corresponding to the sound ether, would be what is there described as ‘mobile sensitivity’, and so on. You can find all the ingredients in Theosophy, but you have to know how to apply them. If you were to take further this study of the correspondence, the communication, between the folk soul and the individual human being; if you were to continue on the basis of what we have said so far, you would find that all the qualities in the character of the Italian people are connected with these things. This can be studied concretely in every detail.

Only examples can be given here. Suppose we wanted to study the Russian folk soul. We would find that the lowest component has nothing material in it, nothing solid, liquid, gaseous, aeriform, not even warmth. The lowest component, what in the Russian folk soul corresponds to the salt, the solid element in the human being, would be found to be the light ether. The sound ether would be what corresponds to the liquid element in the human being; the life ether would correspond to the air in the human being; the ‘burning desire’ to warmth in the human being. Then we could ask how the Russian folk soul communicates with the individual Russian human being. This takes place in that light, streaming down, is reflected in a certain way by the earth. Light exercises certain influences on the earth. It is reflected not only physically, but also out of the vegetation, out of whatever is in the soil. The light does not work directly on the individual Russian. First it works into the earth, not the coarse, physical earth, but the plants and everything that grows and flourishes on the earth. And this light is reflected. In what is reflected back lies the medium through which the Russian folk soul communicates with the individual Russian. That is why the Russians' relationship to their soil, to everything brought forth by the earth, is so much stronger than is the case with other nations. It is because of this extraordinary bearing of the folk soul. And ‘mobile sensitivity’—this is immensely significant—is the first etheric ingredient of the Russian folk soul, corresponding to light in the human being.

Thus we come to the concrete folk being; thus we can study how one spirit speaks to another, when one is a human being and the other a folk soul. This takes place in the subconscious realm. When an Italian breathes, when he maintains his life by breathing—when what he consciously wants is to maintain his life by breathing—then, in his unconscious, the folk soul speaks and whispers to him. He does not hear it, but his astral body perceives it and lives in the exchange that goes on beneath the threshold of consciousness between the folk soul and the individual human being.

And in what streams back out of the Russian soil, fructified by sunlight, are contained the mysterious runes, the whispering runes by which the Russian folk soul speaks to the individual Russian while he paces across the face of his land or senses the life which rays forth from the light. Do not imagine that these things must be taken in a material way. Of course a Russian might live in Switzerland, but in Switzerland, too, there is light which is reflected by the earth. If you are an Italian you will hear your folk soul whispering in your breathing when you are in Switzerland. If you are a Russian you will feel rising up from the soil of Switzerland whatever it is you can hear as a Russian. You must not take these things in a material way. Such things are not tied to locations—though, of course, because the human being is to some extent material, one's own location yields more. The air of Italy, together with the whole climate there, naturally facilitates and promotes the kind of speaking I have described. And the soil of Russia facilitates and promotes that other kind of speaking. But you must not take these things materialistically, for of course a Russian can be a Russian not only in Russia—although it is Russian soil which especially promotes Russian-ness. You see, on the one hand materialism is given its due, but on the other hand we have here something relative, not absolute. For light above the soil of Russia is not only part of the body of the Russian folk soul, but it is also light, as elsewhere. On the other hand the Russian folk soul—I have described all this before—has the rank of an archangel. And archangels are not fettered to one location, they are supra-spatial.

Concrete concepts such as these are what ought to underlie any talk of the relationship of the individual to his people. Yet consider how far mankind is today from even the faintest notion of what is contained in the name of a people. Notwithstanding such considerations, world programmes are scattered abroad and the names of nations cast in every direction. When you take proper account of the fact that a folk-being is a concrete being and that every folk-being differs from every other, you will be able to realize fully just how much of what is flying around in the world today is nothing but empty phrases. What is air for the Italian folk-being is light for the Russian folk-being, and these things lead to quite different kinds of communication between the folk-being and the individual human being. Anthropology is the materialistic, external view; Anthroposophy will have to reveal the true conditions, the actual realities. Since, in their materialism, people today are such a long way from any reality, it is no wonder that things which are included in world programmes are spoken about in such an arbitrary and mendacious manner.

On Tuesday we shall continue to speak about the nature of our anthroposophical spiritual science. In connection with this I also want to refer to a number of things at the present time which can really only be properly understood from the standpoint of spiritual science. The suffering mankind is having to bear today is connected in large measure with the fact that people do not want to find clarity with reference to the things they discuss. Instead they send into the world furious messages which bear no relation to reality. This is once again brought home to us when we come across something like the pamphlet which has been published in Switzerland, Conditions de Paix de l'Allemagne by someone who calls himself ‘Hungaricus’. For those of us whose attitude of mind is that of spiritual science, we need only read this through in order to discover every single defect in present-day materialistic thinking with all its awkward complications. So on Tuesday I shall say a few words about this pamphlet and its method and the kind of thinking it reveals, for it really is so very characteristic of today's awkward and complicated materialistic thinking.

During this Winter we have prepared the ground in various ways in order to understand with greater exactitude than has hitherto been possible man's life between birth and death in the physical world on the one side and on the other between death and rebirth in the spiritual world. And there will be still more to say about this subject in the coming months.

Efforts will be needed to draw together a number of details that will contribute towards a thorough understanding of this subject and throw new light upon many topics we have already studied from a different point of view. Today, then, I will ask you to think, above all, of the course of man's physical life—about which something has also been said in my book The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy—and of how it progresses in cycles: one from birth until about the seventh year, or until the change of teeth; a second cycle from the change of teeth until puberty at about the fourteenth year; then a third cycle, and so on in periods of seven years. Even to ordinary observation it will be clear that this systematic arrangement into periods of seven years is well founded, but on the other hand it will also be evident that in the actual life of the human being other facts of incisive significance cut across these seven-year periods. We ourselves have repeatedly considered a crucial occurrence in a man's life which eludes this division into cyclic periods. It is the point of time back to which a man's memory extends in later life, the moment when he begins to feel and know himself as an ‘I’, when Ego-consciousness dawns in him. This experience does not by any means occur at exactly the same point of time, but in most cases it may be said that Ego-consciousness flashes up in the human being at some point between birth and the seventh year. And something similar can be said to hold good in the later period of a man's life. Although with less abruptness than the sudden flashing-up of Ego-consciousness, there are other occurrences which as it were invalidate the regular seven-year cycle. We shall, however, always discover that whatever comes in this way into the life of man and cuts across the cyclic periods, occurs much more irregularly than the experiences connected with the actual seven-year cycles. You will hardly find two human beings whose memories go back to exactly the same point of time, that is to say who experienced the flashing up of consciousness of ‘I’ at the same age. Nor does the change of teeth occur at precisely the same age in different individuals. But why this is so in the latter case, we shall still have to consider.

When we study the cyclic periods already referred to and mentioned in my little book, Education of the Child, we shall notice that they begin in connection with the most physical, the most external member of man's being and are then concerned with the other, more inward members of his constitution. From birth until the seventh year development is connected primarily with the physical body, then for seven years with the etheric body, then for seven years with the astral body, the sentient soul, and so on. The evolutionary factors pass over more and more decisively from the external to the inner nature of man. That is essentially characteristic of the seven-year periods.

What, then, is there to be said about occurrences which cut across these seven-year periods? The flashing-up of ‘I’-consciousness during the first cycle is an emphatically inner event. For the sake of clarity, here let us consider something that seems to be in contrast with this flashing-up of Ego-consciousness. If we observe human life with discernment we shall find that the cessation of growth may be compared with some happening which cuts across the seven-year cycles of evolution. We will therefore think about the cessation of growth which after all occurs comparatively late in life, and study its implications.

The first seven-year period ends with the change of teeth. The appearance of the second teeth is, as it were, the final act of what may be called the formative principle. The last contribution made by the forces that give the human being his form is when they drive out the second teeth. That is the culmination of the formative process, for the principle which builds up the human form is no longer in action. With the seventh year the formative principle ceases to be active. What comes about later on is only an expansion of what has already been established as form. After the seventh year there is no more remodelling of the brain. All that happens is growth of what is already established as basic form. Therefore we can say that the principle of form unfolds its activity specifically in the first seven years of the life of a human being. The principle of form stems from the Spirits of Form; thus these Spirits of Form are active in the human being during the first seven years of his life. It can therefore be said that when the human being enters into life through birth, his actual form is not complete. What happens is that the Spirits of Form continue their active intervention during the first seven years of life; the human being has then reached the point when his form merely needs to grow. The basis for the form has been established by the seventh year, and the second teeth are what the formative principle still produces out of the human being. The formative principle has now come to its conclusion. Were its activity to continue, the second teeth would inevitably make their appearance later than is now the case.

Here we may ask: When these Spirits of Form have worked on the human being until the seventh year of his life, does everything they do for him come to an end?

The answer is ‘No’, for the human being goes on growing and the basic principles of his form develop still further. If nothing else intervened, growth would be able to continue without interruption. If we think only of the principles of form that are active in the human being until the seventh year there is no more reason in the case of man than in that of other beings why these forms should not continue to grow if nothing were to intervene. But something does intervene. When the human being stops growing, certain principles of form still have an effect upon him. They have already been drawing near to him but now they unite in the fullest sense with his organism, lay hold of it, but in such a way that they now act as a hindrance, and further growth is prevented. The formative principles that are active until the seventh year of life allow the human being a certain elasticity. But at that point other formative principles approach him; their nature is such that they capture and confine what is elastic in the demarcated form, thus preventing any further growth. That is why growth stops at some point. When growth stops, this means that formative forces approaching from outside are at work. Whenever formative principles are active, whenever forms grow larger, provision must be made for the stoppage of growth by the appearance of counter-formative principles which oppose the first category as its polar antithesis. When man's form has developed until about the seventh year of life (indicated in the shaded portion of the diagram) this form can continue to grow.

The formative principles have been at work until the seventh year; these principles work from within. Then different formative principles work in opposition from outside, so that the human being can grow only to the limit indicated by the line b–b. It is really as if until the seventh year of his life the human being were given an elastic garment which he can constantly stretch and enlarge. But at a specific point of time he is given one that is not elastic; he is obliged to put it on, and thenceforth cannot grow beyond its limits.

We can therefore say that in the human being a confrontation takes place between two kinds of formative principles, one working from within and the other from without. The formative principles belonging to the first category come from the Spirits of Form, from those Spirits of Form who have passed through a perfectly normal process of evolution in the Cosmos. The formative principles working from without are not of the same kind. They come from Spirits of Form whose development has been retarded and who have acquired a Luciferic character. They are the factor which works in the purely spiritual domain, whereas the forces working in the material sphere have had a normal development; having evolved through the stages of Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon, they then pass to the Earth in the regular way and shape the human form from within. The ‘irregular’ Spirits of Form take what is presented to them and hold back its further development. Thus the process of growth in the human being is brought to a halt by these backward Spirits of Form. The Beings of the higher Hierarchies have the most varied tasks, among them the one that has been characterised today.

We have now been able to consider many different aspects of the work of the ‘regular’ Hierarchies and also of the work of the backward spiritual Beings belonging to the different Hierarchies. In the book Occult Science—an Outline¹ you can read how the human being reached the stage where through the Spirits of Form he could be endowed with the germinal foundation for the ‘I’, the Ego. We know that man received the germ of his physical body from the Thrones, of his etheric body from the Spirits of Wisdom, of his astral body from the Spirits of Movement, and the germinal foundation for the ‘I’ from the Spirits of Form. Bearing this in mind we can say that man, in his outer stature, has been organised by the regular Spirits of Form into an Ego-bearing being and that this comes into manifestation in the first seven-year cycle of his life. But then the backward Spirits of Form who are the opponents of the regular Spirits of Form, put a stop to his growth. This is actually the antithesis of the first, most deeply inward experience in the human being, namely, the kindling of the consciousness of ‘I’—the Ego. This happens in the early years of life, in the innermost realm of being. The outermost manifestation, the form, is checked at a later age, as a final act. Thus we perceive two evolutionary—but antithetical—processes in the human being. Of the one I have said that it comes from without and moves inward, taking hold of the sentient soul and so on, in the twenty-first year of life. Then there is another evolution proceeding from within outwards until the growth of the physical form is checked. The one evolution, the regular evolution, proceeds from the spiritual to the corporeal, from within outwards and is of interest especially for education. The other evolution—which is a much less regular and also more individual process—proceeds from without inwards and, when the human being has reached a certain age, it comes to expression in the completion of the outermost principle—the physical body.

It is very important that teachers should have knowledge of these two antithetical lines of evolution. Hence in the book The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy it was right to call attention to the first process of evolution which proceeds from within outwards, because it is only there that education is possible. On the other line of evolution—from without inwards—which is the line of individual development, it is impossible to make any actual impression. This is something of which account can be taken but which cannot be halted; neither can much be achieved in the way of education. And to be able to distinguish between where education is possible and where it is not, is of fundamental importance.

Just as the cessation of growth is caused by the backward Spirits of Form, the first actual manifestation of the ‘I’ in the human being during early childhood is the work of the backward Spirits of Will (Thrones). Between these two extremes there are other happenings which are to be attributed to backward Spirits of Wisdom and backward Spirits of Movement.

No adequate characterisation of man's life as a whole, including the existence between death and the new birth, is possible unless we take account of all the factors which have an effect upon him, and recognise that even in everyday life the influences of Luciferic beings take effect in many different ways. This influence is evident in other spheres as well. And as our endeavour in these lectures is to acquire a really fundamental understanding of man's life as a whole, we will not hesitate to think about matters which seem to be somewhat remote.

Attention shall first of all be drawn to a phenomenon from which it is evident that on the physical plane too, between birth and death, man's life has undergone essential changes in the course of evolution. If we realise this, it will, become evident that the life between death and rebirth has also changed. Those who think intellectually, but superficially, about life today may readily believe that, in essentials, things were always the same as they are at present. By no means was it so! And in certain cases we need go back only a few hundred years to find that conditions were very different. Thus at the present time there is something that has a very great influence upon man's life of soul between birth and death but that simply did not exist in its present form only a few centuries ago. It is what we today mean by the expression ‘public opinion’. Even as recently as the thirteenth century it would have been nonsense to speak of public opinion as we do today. A great deal is said nowadays against belief in authority, although in actual fact it exists in a much more oppressive form in our time than it did in these earlier, often despised centuries. In earlier centuries there were, of course, defects, but there was no blind belief in authority such as exists at present. This blindness of belief in authority is usually revealed by the fact that the authority in question cannot be specified. A person today will readily be floored when he is told that science has proved this or that. In earlier centuries, however, people attached more weight to authorities whom they encountered physically. Reference to an intangible ‘something’ is implied when it is said: ‘There is scientific proof of it.’ Such a saying urges belief in authority when confronted with something incomprehensible. Such belief did not exist in earlier centuries. People belonging to our civilisation usually concern themselves very little with matters about which the simplest, most, primitive human being in earlier centuries endeavoured to have some knowledge—matters relating, for example, to health and illness. Why, it is asked today, should anyone need to know about health and illness? The doctors know about these matters and the problems concerned can be left to them. This is also an example of what comes into the category of intangible but sovereign authority. But countless other influences make their way into life; from earliest youth the human being becomes dependent upon them and his trends of judgement and feeling force themselves into our life! These living currents swirling around among human beings are usually referred to as ‘public opinion’—and prompted the saying from philosophers: ‘Public opinions are mostly private errors.’ To realise this, however, is not as important as it is to be aware that public opinions exert tremendous power upon the life of an individual. It would be a complete misconception of history to speak about the influence of public opinion upon the life of an individual living in the thirteenth century. In those days there were single personalities who admittedly exerted a great deal of authority either in affairs of Government or in practical life, and in these spheres it was obeyed. But at this time there was nothing resembling what impersonal public opinion has become today. Anyone who is unwilling to believe this on the basis of the occult facts should study the history of Florence during those centuries and in later times too—when the government of the city passed into the control of the Medici. The tremendous power of individual authorities will then be apparent, but there was no such thing as public opinion. It first arose in an epoch preceding our own by four or five centuries and one can speak of its actual beginning. Such things must be regarded as realities, for a world of swirling thoughts does indeed exist.

What is the origin of this public opinion which we often accept as something that cannot be verified? What is public opinion in reality? You may remember that I have spoken of certain spiritual Beings belonging to the Hierarchy immediately above man—Beings who participate in various ways in the guidance and leadership of humanity. In my little book The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity, you will find a great deal on the subject of spiritual Beings belonging to the higher Hierarchies. Now we know that the mightiest incision in the evolution of humanity was made by the Mystery of Golgotha. In that event there came to pass something that was most wonderfully expressed in the esoteric teaching of St. Paul. Paul spoke in simple language but the actual way in which he spoke was rooted in profound esotericism. It was not possible for him always to give out openly what he, as an Initiate, knew; for in the first place he wanted to speak to a wider circle of people and, secondly, it was not possible in his day to give out everything he knew in the way of which he would have been capable. Nevertheless his very presentation was based upon profound esoteric knowledge. We find, for example, that there is a deeply significant truth in the distinction he makes between the ‘first Adam’ and the ‘higher Adam’—the Christ. According to Paul, the various generations of human beings are to be traced back to Adam, that is to say, the bodies of men descend from Adam. Hence it can be said that the physical increase of humanity over the Earth during the different periods, leads back finally to the physical body of Adam—Adam and Eve, naturally. We can then ask: What lies at the basis of the physical evolution of mankind from Adam onwards? Naturally, the evolution of souls! The physical bodies which have descended from Adam are the habitations of living souls. These souls had descended from cosmic worlds and had brought with them to the Earth a certain spiritual heritage, a spiritual endowment. But in the course of time this spiritual endowment had undergone decline. Individuals who lived, say, six or seven thousand years before the founding of Christianity had within them much stronger, more extensive spiritual forces than those who lived a mere thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha. The spiritual heritage which once came to the Earth with human beings had gradually withered away in the soul. Now the life between death and rebirth is of particular significance for this spiritual heritage. If we go back to the epoch long before the Mystery of Golgotha, we find that after death men had an active, inwardly illumined life of soul; but then this life of soul became dimmer and dimmer, darker and darker. An ever-fading life of soul came with human beings when they passed through death. This was particularly the case among the Greeks although they were the most advanced peoples then on the Earth, and their sages had every reason to say, in view of the stage reached in evolution: ‘Better it is to be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of the Shades.’ We know that this saying was true when applied to the Greeks who lived a fully satisfying life on the physical plane; but as soon as they had passed through the gate of death their life became dim and shadowy.

In the fullest sense it is true that the spiritual life which men had brought with them to the Earth and which manifested after death as a somewhat dim clairvoyant consciousness, had become even dimmer. And especially in the fourth Atlantean epoch, the Graeco-Latin epoch, during which the Mystery of Golgotha took place, the spiritual life had reached the stage of its greatest darkness.

The all-important purpose of the Baptism by John the Baptist was that some of those who sought to be baptised should be made conscious of the conditions just described. The individuals baptised by John were completely submerged in the water. As a result, the etheric body of these individuals was liberated from them and for a short time, while under the water, they became clairvoyant. John was able to reveal to them that there had been such deterioration in the life of soul in the course of time that a human being now possessed very little of the spiritual treasure that he had once been able to take with him through the gate of death and that could give him clairvoyant consciousness. A man whom John baptised in this way became aware that a revitalisation of the life of soul was essential, that something new must radiate into human souls in order that after death there might be a life in the real sense. This new impulse streamed into the souls of men through the Mystery of Golgotha. You need only read my lecture-course entitled From Jesus to Christ and you will realise that a rich and abundant spiritual life streams from the Mystery of Golgotha into the souls of individuals who develop a relationship to that Mystery.

Hence Paul could say: just as the physical bodies of men descend from Adam, so will the content of their souls in greater and greater measure ‘descend’ from the Christ who is the second Adam, the spiritual Adam. It is a profound truth that Paul uttered here, clothed in his simple words. If the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place, men would have become progressively empty in soul and would either have developed a longing only to live outside the physical body or to live on Earth with no other wishes or desires than for a purely physical life, and so would have become more and more materialistic. Because all development is a slow and gradual process there are still some peoples on the Earth who have not yet wholly lost the original spiritual treasure, who still retain some measure of it in spite of having failed to establish any relationship to the Mystery of Golgotha. Individuals belonging to the most advanced peoples, however, can become conscious after death only to the extent to which they have learnt ‘to die in Christ’, as the second line of the Rosicrucian formula expresses it. And so in actual fact the Mystery of Golgotha has acted as illumination in men's souls.

With this clearly in mind we shall understand the gist of a question relating to man's evolution. It is the question: How came it that understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha enabled the content of man's soul to be carried into the sphere of his ‘I’, his Ego? How did this soul-content differ from what existed before the Mystery of Golgotha as an ancient heritage? The difference is that, before the Mystery of Golgotha, in respect of the content of their souls men were far less independent. They were under the direct guidance of the Beings we know as the Angeloi, Archangeloi and so on. Before the Mystery of Golgotha men were under the leadership of the Beings of the nearest higher Hierarchies to a far greater extent than was the case after that event. Indeed the progress of these Beings themselves—Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai—consists in the fact that they have learnt to lead human beings in a way that respects their independence. Men were intended to live on the Earth in a state of greater and greater independence. The leading spiritual Beings of the higher Hierarchies have recognised this and therein consists their progress.

But it is possible for these Spirits too to remain behind in their evolution. Not all the Spirits who participated in the leadership of humanity have acquired through the Mystery of Golgotha the power to guide and lead men while ensuring their freedom. Among these Beings of the higher Hierarchies there are some who remained backward and have become Luciferic spirits. What we call ‘public opinion’ is an example of the way in which some of them are active. Public opinion is not created by human beings alone but also by a certain category of Luciferic spirits of the lowest rank—retarded Angeloi and Archangeloi. These spirits are only beginning their Luciferic career and have not yet risen very high in the ranks of the Luciferic spirits, but they are definitely Luciferic in character. With the eye of seership one can perceive how certain spirits of the higher Hierarchies did not keep pace with evolution after the Mystery of Golgotha, how they adhere rigidly to the old kind of leadership and therefore cannot make any direct approach to men. Those who have kept pace with evolution can make regular and direct contact with men; the other spirits are incapable of this and they manifest their activity in the muddled, turbulent thinking that comes to expression as public opinion. The function of public opinion is intelligible only when it is realised that this is how it has made its way into human life.

Thus we have among us beings who abandon the regular course of evolution and become Luciferic in character. It is important that this should be known. The work of the Luciferic beings of whom we have already spoken and who now have great power, also began on a small scale. Indeed this is true in the case of the whole host of Luciferic beings. Admittedly, on the Old Moon there was no public opinion as we know it but something that can be compared with it—a kind of guidance of men. Some among this host of Luciferic spirits of whom we have spoken are powerful and important beings, for example backward Spirits of Form who surge in upon the human being with such violence that they stop his growth. The others are merely the recruits; nevertheless this is the beginning of the career of the Luciferic spirits, a career which later on will assume a quite different dimension because the spirits become more and more powerful. Public opinion, which under the guidance and direction of certain Luciferic spirits of the lowest order, influences human beings because they absorb it between birth and death, must necessarily have its counterweight during the life between death and rebirth. That is to say, because a human being in his life between birth and death has been caught up into the current of public opinion described, he must experience the counterweight in his life between death and rebirth. Otherwise the following would ensue.

The backward spirits who are responsible for the creation of public opinion have no significance or power whatever in man's life between death and rebirth. They have relinquished all possibility of working in that sphere because they are active here, on the physical plane, in a spiritual way—indeed in a way that is only possible in the form of public opinion. A man can take no iota of anything like public opinion with him into the spiritual world and whatever element of it he might want to accompany him into the life after death would be entirely out of place. It must be said, although it will seem strange to many people, that life in Kamaloka becomes very difficult for one who clings to public opinion or has been caught in the coils of his own judgement very early in life. This applies particularly to persons who believe that within the world of public opinion there can still be independent judgement—which is an utter impossibility. For such people Kamaloka is admittedly difficult. But when the period of Kamaloka is over, public opinion has no weight or significance whatever, and after death it is irrelevant whether people adhered to nuances of it, such as liberal or conservative, radical or reactionary. This has no significance whatever in the different groupings of human beings and moreover exists on Earth solely for the purpose of hindering men from making progress towards illumination of consciousness after death. The beings behind public opinion resolved to forgo the progress made possible by the Mystery of Golgotha. But the Mystery of Golgotha will become of greater and greater importance for the Earth's evolution. We must clearly understand that the future of the Earth's evolution cannot be assured simply by rectifying phenomena such as public opinion and the like which are inevitable in the course of evolution. Men can, however, become better in their own inner nature, therefore the process of evolution must take root more and more deeply in their inner life. In the future, men will be still more exposed to the pressure of public opinion, but inwardly they will have developed greater strength. This is possible only through Spiritual Science. But if man is gradually to become a match for those spirits who are now exerting their influence in public opinion as recruits of the Luciferic beings, this will be possible only if, between death and rebirth too, he undergoes something that strengthens him inwardly, strengthens the principle in him that is independent of life on Earth. Whereas through the influence of public opinion he becomes more and more dependent upon earthly life, in the life between death and rebirth he must receive into his very self something that in the next life on Earth will make him ever freer from the influence of public opinion.

Connected with this is the fact that at the time when public opinion began to assume importance, the Buddha-realm was established in the Mars sphere—as we heard in the lecture at Christmas. Consequently between death and rebirth man passes through this Buddha-realm on Mars. Christian Rosenkreutz had entrusted to Buddha a special mission in the Mars sphere. And what would be futile on Earth, namely the desire to flee from the conditions of terrestrial existence—this is an experience which man must undergo between death and rebirth during his passage through the Mars sphere. Among other things he strips off the incubus of public opinion which takes effect only on Earth. Many, even more overbearing influences will come in the future and it will be more than ever necessary to undergo the experience that is possible for man as a pupil of Buddha in the Mars sphere. Here on Earth, men can now be pupils of the Buddha in the orthodox sense only if they refuse to participate in the progress made by the most advanced people on Earth. But between death and rebirth Buddha unfolds what has developed from the teaching he gave on Earth, which was that man should free himself from the need for further incarnations. This has been developed into a doctrine that is inapplicable to the Earth, where life must progress from incarnation to incarnation. Thus the doctrine preached by Buddha on Earth contained the seed of what man must acquire in the disembodied state of existence. In this advanced form, Buddha's teaching is right for the period between death and rebirth. The Buddha himself appeared in the astral body of the Jesus-Child of St. Luke's Gospel² and Christ Himself leads men between death and rebirth through the Mars sphere, enabling them there to receive the Buddha's advanced teaching. Thus in the Mars sphere men can be emancipated from the tendency to uniformity resulting from the effects of public opinion which are detrimental for their further progress on Earth. Whereas in earlier times Mars was said to be the planet of warlike traits, it is now the Buddha's task gradually to transform these warlike traits in such a way that they become the foundation of the sense for freedom and independence needed in the present age. Whereas nowadays men have the tendency to surrender their sense of freedom and succumb to the fetters of public opinion, on Mars between death and rebirth they will strive to throw off these fetters and not bring them again into the life on Earth when they return to new incarnations.

It seems to me that here we have something that characterises most wonderfully how wisdom holds sway in the world, how everything that progresses or remains backward is manipulated in such a way that the final outcome is harmony in the evolution of worlds. Man cannot achieve progress by keeping as it were to the middle line, although there are many who realise the uselessness of adopting a one-sided standpoint. Admittedly, we come across idealists, materialists and other ‘-ists’ who swear by their own standpoint, but truly great individuals such as Goethe do no such thing. They try to grasp material conditions by means of material thinking. When men of less eminence imagine that they have understood this, they say: truth lies in the middle, between two different standpoints. But that would be the same as if someone in practical life wanted to sit between two chairs! The truth cannot be found by a one-sided adoption of this or that standpoint but by applying the modes of knowledge appropriate either for materialism or idealism, The world does not progress by undeviating adherence to a middle course: a middle course is appropriate when the opposing sides are also present and are recognised as forces. If something has to be weighed, the two scalepans are needed as well as the beam. Thus there must be a counterbalance to public opinion; and this is provided by Buddha's teaching in the Mars sphere—which would not be necessary if public opinion had never existed. Life needs antithesis; life progresses in and through polarity. Somebody might think that as the North and South Poles are antitheses, it would be better if neither existed! They are not, of course, antithetic in the sense implied by a certain Professor of whom it was said that because he had written his books in such haste he could not think about their contents and stated that civilisation could develop only in the middle zone of the Earth because at the North Pole people would freeze through cold and at the South Pole melt through heat! In another connection, of course, North and South Poles are genuine opposites and are necessary because progress is not achieved by adopting a neutral course but by the maintenance and harmonising of opposites. Thus what develops on Earth had to undergo a process that lies below the level of progress. Public opinion is of less value than the judgements which an individual can reach on a path of progress. Public opinion is sub-human and it is this sub-human influence that is counteracted by the Buddha-stream through which man passes between death and rebirth. Both influences are necessary and it is extremely important to bear this in mind in connection with evolution.

It can therefore be said with truth: yes, there are indeed backward spirits, but everything that remains behind on the one side and on the other outstrips the evolutionary process, is manipulated by the wisdom of the Universe in such a way that harmony is the final result. The backward spirits are utilised to constitute the opposite pole to the spirits who have progressed to further stages.

If we look at life in this way it will be clear to us that in the future course of Earth evolution the human being will bring into life more and more qualities which will have greater weight and influence than the purely physical qualities. And it will be increasingly apparent that qualities other than the purely physical will have to be taken into account. Physical qualities will be evident, which—although they become manifest only gradually—can be traced back to infancy; but there will be other qualities to which this does not apply and which show themselves in a marked form only comparatively late in life. A characteristic feature of evolution in the future will be the existence of an increasing number of individuals about whom it will inevitably be asked: What can have happened to that individual at a certain age in his life? He has completely changed; it is as though he has become a different being! Qualities that were completely absent in earlier life, that appear only when a certain age has been reached, will reveal themselves. This will happen in the case of souls who are the most highly developed and in whom a certain break in their life becomes evident. For the fact that an individual was a pupil of Buddha in the life between death and rebirth reveals itself only at a certain age. This would apply to persons of whom it can be said: Up to a particular point in their lives their individual qualities were in evidence; but then entirely new trends appeared and they were able to understand matters altogether different from those for which they had previously shown understanding. These will be individuals who in the future will be the vehicles of true spiritual progress although they may simply be regarded as late developers, manifesting these qualities only late in life. In truth, however, the reason why these individuals display these qualities only in later life is that in previous incarnations on the Earth they had established the causes which enabled them to experience the spiritual life in the Mars sphere with particular intensity and so to acquire qualities which enabled them to bring a new impulse into the evolution of humanity. True spiritual culture will more and more be in the hands of individuals of this kind, who in their youth showed little aptitude for the spiritual standpoint they adopt in later life.

We now see that this is the reason why a certain fact has always been stressed in the Rosicrucian line of thought of which we ourselves have heard in the past, although it could not then be substantiated because our studies were not as advanced as they now are. Representatives of the Rosicrucian principle of Initiation in the West have always emphasised that it is impossible to discover in their childhood those who are to become leading figures, because these are individuals who give evidence of that fundamental change in later life of which I have spoken. When a seer speaks of Buddha today, he knows that Buddha has faithfully adhered to what his teaching promised; he has continued to work for that in human nature which has no direct urge for physical embodiment and therefore does not appear at the beginning of life in a physical body but only when the physical body has undergone a certain development, when a certain stage towards spirituality has been reached. Then, at a later stage of life the gift of the Buddha to man becomes an effective influence.

All this must be borne in mind if we are to understand the whole process of man's development. What it signifies for each individual in his life between birth and death—of this we shall hear later.

• 1. See pp. 180 onwards in the Rudolf Steiner Press 1963 edition.
• 2. See the lecture-course, The Gospel of St. Luke given by Dr. Steiner in Basle, September 1909, particularly lectures four to nine.

These lectures were given by Rudolf Steiner during a period of intense productive activity, involving many journeys. In March and April, 1911, he had given fundamental lectures in Prague and in Italy. In June he gave in Copenhagen the short but pregnant course on “The Spiritual Guidance of Humanity.” In August the first performance was given in Munich of his second Mystery Play, “The Soul's Probation.” In October the course “From Jesus to Christ” was given in Karlsruhe; here he gave the fundamental spiritual concepts for the understanding of the Resurrection of Christ. With the exception of the course on St. Mark's Gospel, which followed in September 1912, the great courses on the Gospels had already been given during the preceding years, from 1908 onwards. Dr. Steiner had lectured also in many places about the renewed experience of the Christ in the twentieth century; in the Karlsruhe course he described in detail the work of Christ as lord of human destiny—a theme taken up again in these Nurnberg lectures.

For some years the most significant figure among the group of students of Rudolf Steiner resident at Nurnberg had been Michael Bauer, the friend and biographer of the poet, Christian Morgenstern. Not long before these lectures were given, Michael Bauer had come to know Dr. Friedrich Rittelmeyer, who had become widely known in Germany as a preacher and pastor, working from Nurnberg. Through Bauer, Rittelmeyer came to Rudolf Steiner himself.

These lectures may well have been among the first by Rudolf Steiner that Rittelmeyer could have heard. Certainly we may find in them an indication of the great mysteries of destiny that worked in these encounters, and which led towards the foundation, eleven years later, of the Christian Community. For example, Rudolf Steiner describes in these lectures the meaning of the altar in early Christianity.

The theme of Faith, Love and Hope appears in a wonderful way in the second Mystery Play. At about this time Rudolf Steiner gave lectures under this title in other places also, for example in Vienna.

A. B.

This evening and tomorrow evening we are going to attempt a coherent study of the being of man, and of his connection with the occult foundations of the present time and the near future.

From various indications I have given here you will have grasped that to-day we are, to some extent, facing a new revelation, a new announcement to mankind. If we keep in mind the recent periods of man's evolution, it may well be that we shall best understand what is approaching if we connect it with two other important revelations. In doing so we shall be considering, it is true, only what has been revealed to mankind in times relatively near to our own.

These three revelations—the one now to come and the two others—may be best understood when compared with the early development of a child. Observing the child rightly, we find that on its first coming into the world it has to be protected and cared for by those around it; it has no means of expressing what is going on within it or of formulating in thought what affects its soul. To begin with, the child cannot speak, cannot think; everything must be done for it by those who have received it in their midst. Then it starts to speak. Those who watch it attentively—this is mentioned in my book, The Education of the Child—will know that first it imitates what it hears; but that in the early days of talking it has no understanding which can be attributed to thinking. What the child says does not arise out of thought, but the other way round. It learns to think by talking; learns gradually to apprehend in clear thought what previously it was prompted to say out of the obscure depths of feeling.

Thus we have three successive periods in the child's development—a first period when it can neither speak nor think, a second when it can speak but not yet think, and a third when it becomes conscious of the thought-content in what it says. With these three stages in the child's development we may compare what mankind has gone through—and has still to go through—since about 1,500 years before the Christian era.

The first revelation of which we can speak, as coming to mankind during the present cycle of time, is the revelation proceeding from Sinai in the form of the Ten Commandments. Anyone going more deeply into the significance of what was revealed to mankind in these commandments will find great cause for wonder. The fact is, however, that men take these spiritual treasures so much for granted that little thought is given to them. But those who reflect upon their significance have to know how remarkable it is that in these Ten Commandments something is given which has spread through the world as law; something which in its fundamental character still holds good to-day and forms the basis of the law in all countries, in so far as, during the last 1,000 years, they have gradually adopted modern civilisation. Something all-embracing, grand, universal, is revealed to mankind as if in these words: There is a primal Being in the spiritual world whose image is here on earth—the Ego. This Being can so infuse His own power into the human ego, so pour Himself into it, that a man is enabled to conform to the norms, the laws, given in the Ten Commandments.

The second revelation came about through the Mystery of Golgotha. What can we say about this Mystery? What can be said was indicated yesterday in the public lecture, “From Jesus to Christ”. It was shown there how we have to trace back all men in their bodily nature to the original human couple on earth. And as we can understand men in their bodily nature only as descending through the generations from this couple, so, in order rightly to understand the greatest gift coming to our ego, we have to trace this fact, that must sink more and more into our ego during earthly existence, back to the Mystery of Golgotha.

It need not here concern us that in this connection the old Hebrew tradition has a different conception from that of present-day science. If we trace back men's blood-relationship, their bodily relation, to that original human couple, Adam and Eve, who once lived on earth as the first physical personalities, the primal forebears of mankind, and if we must therefore say that the blood flowing in men's veins goes back to that human pair, we can ask: Where must we look for the origin of the most precious gift bestowed on our soul, that holiest, most valuable gift, which accomplishes in the soul never-ending marvels and makes itself known to our consciousness as something higher than the ordinary ego within us? For the answer we must turn to what arose from the grave on Golgotha. In every human soul that has experienced an inner awakening there lives on what then arose, just as the blood of Adam and Eve continues to live in the body of every human being.

We have to see a kind of fountainhead, a primal fatherhood, in the risen Christ—the spiritual Adam who enters the souls of those who have experienced an awakening, bringing them, for the first time, to the fullness of their ego, to what gives life to their ego in the right way. Thus, just as the life of Adam's body lives on in the physical bodies of all men, what arose from the grave on Golgotha flows in like manner through the souls of those who find the path to it. That is the second revelation given to mankind; they are enabled to learn what happened through the Mystery of Golgotha.

If in the Ten Commandments men have received guidance from outside, this guidance may be compared to what happens to the child before it can either speak or think. What is done for the child by its environment is achieved by the old Jewish law for all mankind, who until then have, as it were, lacked the power of speaking and thinking. People, however, have now learnt to speak—or, rather, have learnt something that may be compared with a child's learning to speak: they have gained knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha through the Gospels. And the way in which they first understood the Gospels may be compared with how a child learns to speak. Through the Gospels there has come to human souls and human hearts some degree of understanding for the Mystery of Golgotha, which has found its way into human feelings and perceptions, and into the soul-forces arising in us when, for example, we allow the deeply significant, intuitive scenes and pictures drawn from the Gospels by great painters to work upon us. It is the same with traditional pictures—pictures of the adoration of the Child by the Shepherds or by the Wise Men from the East; of the flight into Egypt, and so on. All this leads back in the end to the Gospels; it has reached men's understanding in such a way that they may be said to have learnt to speak, in their fashion, about the Mystery of Golgotha.

In this connection we are now moving towards the third period, which may be compared with how the child learns the thought-content in its own speech and can became conscious of it. We are approaching the revelation which should give us the full content, the thought-content, of the Gospels—all they contain of soul and spirit. For at present the Gospels are no better understood than the child understands what it says before it can think. In the context of world-history people are meant to learn through Spiritual Science, to reflect upon the thoughts in the Gospels; to let the whole deep spiritual content of the Gospels work upon them for the first time. This indeed is connected with a further great event which mankind can feel to be approaching, and which they will experience before the end of this twentieth century. This event can be brought before our souls in somewhat the following way: If once again we enter into the nature of the Mystery of Golgotha, we realise that those elements of the Christ which rose from the grave of Golgotha have remained with the earth, so that they can directly affect every human soul, and can in each soul awaken the ego to a higher stage of existence. Speaking thus of the Mystery of Golgotha we may say: Christ then became the Spirit of the earth and since that time has remained so. In our day, however, a change in relation of the Christ to men is coming, an important change connected with what all of you have come to know something about—the new revelation to men of the Christ.

This revelation can also be characterised in another way. For this indeed we must turn to what happens when a man goes through the gate of death. (This is something that could not be described in books, but must now be spoken of.) When a man has passed through the gate of death, has experienced the backward survey over his previous earthly life and has come to the point when his etheric body is laid aside and the time has come for his Kamaloka, he is first met by two figures. Usually only one is mentioned, but to complete the picture—and this is a reality for every true occultist—we must say that before his Kamaloka the man is confronted by two figures. What I am now telling you holds good, it is true, only for men of the West, and for those who, during the last 1,000 years, have been connected with Western culture. The man after death is confronted by two figures. One of these is Moses—the man knows quite clearly that it is Moses who stands before him, holding out the tables of the law. In the Middle Ages they spoke of Moses “with his stern law”. And in his soul the man is keenly aware of how far in his inmost being he has transgressed against this law. The other figure is “the Cherubim with the flaming sword”, who pronounces judgment on these transgressions. That is an experience a man has after death. Thus, in accordance with our Spiritual Science, it can be said that there is a kind of settlement of the man's karmic account by these two figures—Moses with the stern law and the Cherubim with the flaming sword.

In our time, however, a change is approaching, an important change which can be described in this way. Christ is becoming Lord of Karma for all those who, after death, have experienced what has just been discussed. Christ is entering upon His judgeship. Let us look more closely into this fact. From the world-conception of Spiritual Science we all know that a karmic account is kept of our life; that there is a certain balancing of the deeds standing on the credit side of the account the sensible deeds, the fine deeds, those that are good—and, on the other side, the bad, ugly, lying deeds and thoughts.

Now it is important, on the one hand, that in the further course of a man's earthly life he should himself adjust the balance of this karmic account. But this living out of the result of his good and splendid deeds, or those that are bad, can be done in many different ways. The particular adjustment in our future life is not always determined after the same pattern. Suppose someone has done a bad action; he must compensate for it by doing a good one. This good action, however, can be achieved in two ways, and it may require the same effort on the man's part to do good to a few people only as to benefit a considerable number. To ensure that in future, when we have found our way to Christ, our karmic account will be balanced—inserted in the cosmic order—in such a way that the settlement of it will benefit as many people as possible—that will be the concern of Him who in our time is becoming Lord of Karma—it will be the concern of the Christ.

This taking over by Christ of the judging of a man's deeds is a result of His direct intervention in human destiny. This intervention is not in a physical body, but on behalf of those men on earth who will increasingly acquire the capacity of perceiving Him. There will be people, for instance, who, while carrying out some deed, suddenly become aware—there will be more and more cases of this from now on, during the next 3,000 years—of an urge to refrain from what they are doing, because of a remarkable vision. They will perceive in a dreamlike way what appears to be an action of their own; yet they will not be able to remember having done it.

Those who are not prepared for such a thing to happen in the course of their evolution will look upon it merely as imagination run wild or as a pathological condition of the soul. Those, however, who are sufficiently prepared through the new revelation coming in our time to mankind through spiritual science—through, that is, this third revelation during the latest cycle of mankind—will realise that all this points to the growing of new human faculties enabling men to see into the spiritual world. They will also realise that this picture appearing to their soul is a forewarning of the karmic deed that must be brought about—either in this life on earth or in a later one—to compensate for what they have done.

In short, people will gradually achieve, through their own efforts, the faculty for perceiving in a vision the karmic adjustment, the compensating deed, which must come about in future. From this fact it can be seen that in our time, too, we should say, as did John the Baptist by the Jordan: Change your state of soul, for the time is coming when new faculties will awake in men.

But this form of karmic perception will arise in such a way that here and there the figure of the etheric Christ will be directly visible to some individual—the actual Christ as He is living in the astral world—not in a physical body, but as for the newly awakened faculties of men He will manifest on earth; as counselor and protector of those who need advice, help or solace in the loneliness of their lives.

The time is coming when human beings, when they feel depressed and miserable, for one or other reason, will increasingly find the help of their fellows less important and valuable. This is because the force of individuality, of individual life, will count for more and more, while the power of one man to work helpfully upon the soul of another, which held good in the past, will tend constantly to diminish. In its stead the great Counselor will appear, in etheric form.

The best advice we can be given for the future is, therefore, to make our souls strong and full of energy, so that with increased strength, the further we advance into the future, whether in this incarnation—and certainly this applies to the young people of to-day—or in the next, we may realise that newly-awakened faculties give us knowledge of the great Counselor who is becoming at the same time the judge of a man's karma; knowledge, that is, of Christ in His new form. For those people who have already prepared themselves here for the Christ-event of the 20th century, it will make no difference whether they are in the physical body, when this event becomes a widespread experience, or have passed through the gate of death. Those who have passed through will still have the right understanding of the Christ-event and the right connection with it, but not those who have thoughtlessly passed by this third great forewarning to mankind given through Spiritual Science. For the Christ-event must be prepared for here on earth in the physical body. Those who go through the gate of death without giving even a glance into Spiritual Science during their present incarnation, will have to wait until their next before gaining a right understanding of the Christ-event. It is an actual fact that those who on the physical plane have never heard of the Christ-event are unable to came to an understanding of it between death and rebirth. They, too, must wait until they can prepare for it on their return to the physical plane. When, therefore, their present incarnation ends at death, these men in their essential being remain unconcerned in face of the mighty event referred to—the taking over of the judgeship by Christ and the possibility of His intervening, in an etheric body, directly from the astral world in the evolution of mankind, and His becoming visible in various places.

It is characteristic of human evolution, however, that old attributes of men, not closely connected with spiritual evolution, gradually lose significance. When we consider human evolution since the Atlantean catastrophe we can say: Among the great differentiations prepared during the Atlantean Age, present-day men have become accustomed to those of race. We can still speak, in a certain sense, of an old Indian race, of an old Persian race, of an Egyptian or a Graeco-Latin one, and even of something in our own time corresponding to a fifth race. But the concept of race in relation to human evolution is ceasing to have a right meaning. Something that held good in earlier times will no longer do so in the sixth culture-epoch which is to follow our own—namely, that it is essential to have some spatial centre from which to spread the culture of the epoch. The important thing is the spreading of Spiritual Science among men; without distinction of race, nation, or family. In the sixth culture-epoch those who have accepted Spiritual Science will come out of every race, and will found, throughout the earth, a new culture no longer based on the concept of race—that concept will have lost its significance. In short, what is important in the world of Maya, the external world of space, vanishes away; we must learn to recognise this in the future course of our spiritual-scientific movement.

At the beginning this was not understated. Therefore we see how, when we read Olcott's book, The Buddhist Catechism, which once did good service, we have the impression that races always go on like so many wheels. But for the coming time such concepts are losing their significance. Everything subject to limitations of space will lose significance. Hence anyone who thoroughly understands the meaning of human evolution understands also that the coming appearance of Christ during the next 3,000 years does not entail Christ being restricted to a body bound by space, nor limited to a certain territory. Neither will His appearance be limited by an inability to appear in more than one place at a time. His help will be forthcoming at the same moment here, there, and everywhere. And as a spiritual being is not subject to the laws of space, anyone who can be helped by Christ's direct presence is able to receive that help at one end of the earth just as well as another person at the opposite end. Only those unwilling to recognise the progress of mankind towards spirituality, and what gradually transforms all the most important events into the spiritual—only these persons can declare that what is implied by the Christ-being is limited to a physical body.

We have now described the facts concerning the third revelation and how this revelation is already in process of throwing new light on the Gospels. The Gospels are the language, and, in relation to them, Anthroposophy is the thought-content. As language is related to a child's full consciousness, so are the Gospels related to the new revelation that comes directly from the spiritual world—related, in effect, to what Spiritual Science is to become for mankind. We must be aware that we have in fact a certain task to fulfil, a task of understanding, when we come—first out of the soul's unconscious depths, and then ever more clearly—to discern our connection with Anthroposophy.

We must look upon it, in a sense, as a mark of distinction bestowed by the World-Spirit, as a sign of grace on the part of the creative, guiding Spirit of the world, when to-day our heart urges us towards this new announcement which is added, as a third revelation, to those proclaimed from Sinai and then from the Jordan. To learn to know man in his entire being is the task given in this new announcement—to perceive ever more deeply that what we are principally conscious of is sheathed around by other members of man's being, which are nevertheless important for his life as a whole.

It is necessary for our friends to learn about these matters from the most various points of view. To-day we will begin by first saying a few words about man's inner being. You know that if we start from the actual centre of his being, from his ego, we come next to the sheath to which we give the more or less abstract name of astral body. Further out we find the so-called etheric body, and still further outside, the physical body. From the point of view of real life we can speak about the human sheaths in another way, and to-day we will take directly from life what can, it is true, be learnt only from occult conceptions, but can be understood through unprejudiced observation.

Many of those who, on account of their so-called scientific world-conception, have become arrogant and overbearing, now say: “The ages of faith are long past; they were fit for mankind in their stage of childhood but men heave now progressed to knowledge. To-day people must have knowledge of everything and should no longer merely believe.” Now that may sound all very well, but it does not rest on genuine understanding. We must ask more questions about such matters than merely whether in the present course of human evolution knowledge has been gained through ordinary science. These other questions must be put: Does faith, as such, mean anything for mankind? May it not be part of a man's very nature to believe?

Naturally, it might be quite possible that people should want, for some reason, to dispense with faith, to throw it over. But just as a man is allowed for a time to play fast and loose with his health without any obvious harm, it might very well be—and is actually so—that people come to look upon faith merely as a cherished gift to their fathers in the past, which is just as if for a time they were recklessly to abuse their health, thereby using up the forces they once possessed. When a man looks upon faith in that way, however, he is still—where the life-forces of his soul are concerned—living on the old gift of faith handed down to him through tradition. It is not for man to decide whether to lay aside faith or not; faith is a question of life-giving forces in his soul. The important point is not whether we believe or not, but that the forces expressed in the word ‘faith’ are necessary to the soul. For the soul incapable of faith become withered, dried-up as the desert.

There were once men who, without any knowledge of natural science, were much cleverer than those to-day with a scientific world-conception. They did not say what people imagine they would have said: “I believe what I do not know.” They said: “I believe what I know for certain.” Knowledge is the only foundation of faith. We should know in order to take increasing possession of those forces which are forces of faith in the human soul. In our soul we must have what enables us to look towards a super-sensible world, makes it possible for us to turn all our thoughts and conceptions in that direction.

If we do not possess forces such as are expressed in the word ‘faith’, something in us goes to waste; we wither as do the leaves in autumn. For a while this may not seem to matter—then things begin to go wrong. Were men in reality to lose all faith, they would soon see what it means for evolution. By losing the forces of faith they would be incapacitated for finding their way about in life; their very existence would be undermined by fear, care, and anxiety. To put it briefly, it is through the forces of faith alone that we can receive the life which should well up to invigorate the soul. This is because, imperceptible at first for ordinary consciousness, there lies in the hidden depths of our being something in which our true ego is embedded. This something, which immediately makes itself felt if we fail to bring it fresh life, is the human sheath where the forces of faith are active. We may term it the faith-soul, or—as I prefer—the faith-body. It has hitherto been given the more abstract name of astral body. The most important forces of the astral body are those of faith, so the term astral body and the term faith-body are equally justified.

A second force that is also to be found in the hidden depths of a man's being is the force expressed by the word ‘love’. Love is not only something linking men together; it is also needed by them as individuals. When a man is incapable of developing the force of love he, too, becomes dried-up and withered in his inner being. We have merely to picture to ourselves someone who is actually so great an egoist that he is unable to love. Even where the case is less extreme, it is sad to see people who find it difficult to love, who pass through an incarnation without the living warmth that love alone can generate—love for, at any rate, something on earth.

Such persons are a distressing sight, as in their dull, prosaic way, they go through the world. For love is a living force that stimulates something deep in our being, keeping it awake and alive—an even deeper force than faith. And just as we are cradled in a body of faith, which from another aspect can be called the astral body, so are we cradled also in a body of love, or, as in Spiritual Science we called it, the etheric body, the body of life-forces. For the chief forces working in us from the etheric body, out of the depths of our being, are those expressed in a man's capacity for loving at every stage of his existence. If a man could completely empty his being of the force of love—but that indeed is impossible for the greatest egoist, thanks be to God, for even in egoistical striving there is still some element of love. Take this case, for example: whoever is unable to love anything else can often begin, if he is sufficiently avaricious, by loving money, at least substituting for charitable love another love—albeit one arising from egoism. For were there no love at all in a man, the sheath which should be sustained by love-forces would shrivel, and the man, empty of love, would actually perish; he would really meet with physical death.

This shriveling of the forces of love can also be called a shriveling of the forces belonging to the etheric body; for the etheric body is the same as the body of love. Thus at the very centre of a man's being we have his essential kernel, the ego, surrounded by its sheaths; first the body of faith, and then round it the body of love.

If we go further, we come to another set of forces we all need in life, and if we do not, or cannot, have them at all—well, that is very distinctly to be seen in a man's external nature. For the forces we need emphatically as life-giving forces are those of hope, of confidence in the future. As far as the physical world is concerned, people cannot take a single step in life without hope. They certainly make strange excuses, sometimes, if they are unwilling to acknowledge that human beings need to know something of what happens between death and rebirth. They say: “Why do we need to know that, when we don't know what will happen to us here from one day to another? So why are we supposed to know what takes place between death and a new birth?” But do we actually know nothing about the following day? We may have no knowledge of what is important for the details of our super-sensible life, or, to speak more bluntly, whether or not we shall be physically alive. We do, however, know one thing—that if we are physically alive the next day there will be morning, midday, evening, just as there are to-day. If to-day as a carpenter I have made a table, it will still be there tomorrow; if I am a shoemaker, someone will be able to put on tomorrow what I have made to-day; and if I have sown seeds I know that next year they will come up. We know about the future just as much as we need to know. Life would be impossible in the physical world were not future events to be preceded by hope in this rhythmical way. Would anyone make a table to-day without being sure it would not be destroyed in the night; would anyone sow seeds if he had no idea what would become of them?

It is precisely in physical life that we need hope, for everything is upheld by hope and without it nothing can be done. The forces of hope, therefore, are connected with our last sheath as human beings, with our physical body. What the forces of faith are for our astral body, and the love-forces for the etheric, the forces of hope are for the physical body. Thus a man who is unable to hope, a man always despondent about what he supposes the future may bring, will go through the world with this clearly visible in his physical appearance. Nothing makes for deep wrinkles, those deadening forces in the physical body, sooner than lack of hope.

The inmost kernel of our being may be said to be sheathed in our faith-body or astral body, in our body of love or etheric body, and in our hope-body or physical body; and we comprehend the true significance of our physical body only when we bear in mind that, in reality, it is not sustained by external physical forces of attraction and repulsion—that is a materialistic idea—but has in it what, according to our concepts, we know as forces of hope. Our physical body is built up by hope, not by forces of attraction and repulsion. This very point can show that the new spiritual-scientific revelation gives us the truth.

What then does Spiritual Science give us? By revealing the all-embracing laws of karma and reincarnation, it gives us something which permeates us with spiritual hope, just as does our awareness on the physical plane that the sun will rise tomorrow and that seeds will eventually grow into plants. It shows, if we understand karma, that our physical body, which will perish into dust when we have gone through the gate of death, can through the forces permeating us with hope be re-built for a new life. Spiritual Science fills men with the strongest forces of hope. Were this Spiritual Science, this new revelation for the present time, to be rejected, men naturally would return to earth in future all the same, for life on earth would not cease on account of people's ignorance of its laws. Human beings would incarnate again; but there would be something very strange about these incarnations. Men would gradually become a race with bodies wrinkled and shriveled all over, earthly bodies which would finally be so crippled that people would be entirely incapacitated. To put it briefly, in future incarnations a condition of dying away, of withering up, would assail mankind if their consciousness, and from there the hidden depths of their being right down into the physical body, were not given fresh life through the power of hope.

This power of hope arises through the certainty of knowledge gained from the laws of karma and reincarnation. Already there is a tendency in human beings to produce withering bodies, which in future would become increasingly rickety even in the very bones. Marrow will be brought to the bones, forces of life to the nerves, by this new revelation, whose value will not reside merely in theories but in its life-giving forces—above all in those of hope.

Faith, love, hope, constitute three stages in the essential being of man; they are necessary for health and for life as a whole, for without them we cannot exist. Just as work cannot be done in a dark room until light is obtained, it is equally impossible for a human being to carry on in his fourfold nature if his three sheaths are not permeated, warmed through, and strengthened by faith, love, and hope. For faith, love, hope are the basic forces in our astral body, our etheric body, and our physical body. And from this one instance you can judge how the new revelation makes its entry into the world, permeating the old language with thought-content. Are not these three wonderful words urged upon us in the Gospel revelation, these words of wisdom that ring through the ages—faith, love, hope? But little has been understood of their whole connection with human life, so little that only in certain places has their right sequence been observed.

It is true that faith, love, hope, are sometimes put in this correct order; but the significance of the words is so little appreciated that we often hear faith, hope, love, which is incorrect; for you cannot say astral body, physical body, etheric body, if you would give them their right sequence. That would be putting things higgledy-piggledy, as a child will sometimes do before it understands the thought-content of what is said. It is the same with everything relating to the second revelation. It is permeated throughout with thought; and we have striven to permeate with thought our explanation of the Gospels. For what have they meant for people up to now? They have been something with which to fortify mankind and to fill them with great and powerful perceptions, something to inspire men to enter into the depth of heart and feeling in the Mystery of Golgotha. But now consider the simple fact that people have only just begun to reflect upon the Gospels, and in doing so they have straightway found contradictions upon which Spiritual Science alone can help to throw light. Thus it is only now that they are beginning to let their souls be worked on by the thought-content of what the Gospels give them in language of the super-sensible worlds. In this connection we have pointed out what is so essential and of such consequence for our age: the new appearance of the Christ in an etheric body, for his appearance in a physical body is ruled out by the whole character of our times.

Hence we have indicated that the Christ, in contradistinction as it were to the suffering Christ on Golgotha, is appearing now as Christ triumphant, Christ the Lord of Karma. This has been fore-shadowed by those who have painted Him as the Christ of the Last Judgment. Whether painted or described in words, something is represented which at the appointed time will come to pass.

In truth, this begins in the 20th century and will hold good until the end of the earth. It is in our 20th century that this judgment, this ordering of Karma, begins, and we have seen how infinitely important it is for our age that this revelation should come to men in such a way that even concepts such as faith, love, hope, can be given their true valuation for the first time.

John the Baptist said: Change your mood of soul, the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. That is, take to yourselves the human ego that need no longer abstain from approaching the spiritual world—a saying which points clearly to what is here in question, namely, that with the event of Palestine the time came for the super-sensible to pour light into the ego of man, so that into his ego the heavens are able to descend. Previously, the ego could come to men only by sinking into their unconscious. But those who interpret everything materialistically say: The Christ, reckoning with the weaknesses, errors and prejudices of His contemporaries, even foretold, like the credulous people of His time, that the millennium would be realised or that a great catastrophe would fall upon the earth. Neither of these events, however, came about. There was indeed a catastrophe, but perceptible only to the spirit. The credulous and superstitious, who believe Christ to have foretold how His actual coming would be from the clouds, interpreted His meaning in a materialistic way.

To-day, also, there are people who thus interpret what is to be grasped only in spirit, and when nothing happens in a material sense they judge the matter in just the same way as was done in the case of the millennium. How many indeed we find to-day who, speaking almost pityingly of those events, say that Christ was influenced by the beliefs of His time and looked for the impending approach to earth of the Kingdom of Heaven. That was a weakness on Christ's part, they say, and then it was seen—and remarked upon even by distinguished theologians—that the Kingdom of Heaven has not come down on earth.

It may be that men will meet our new revelation, too, in such a way that after a time, when the enhancement of men's faculties is in full swing, they will say, “Well, nothing has come of all these predictions of yours”, not realising that they just cannot see what is there. Thus do events repeat themselves. Spiritual Science is meant to gather together a large number of people, until fulfilment comes for what has been said by those with a right knowledge of how during this century the new revelation and the new super-sensible facts are appearing in human evolution. They will then continue their course in the same way, becoming ever more significant throughout the next 3,000 years, until important new weighty facts are once more revealed to mankind.

It may seem strange that an anthroposophist should feel called upon to speak about practical training in thought, for there is a widespread opinion that Anthroposophy is highly impractical and has no connection with life. This view can only arise among those who see things superficially, for in reality what we are concerned with here can guide us in the most ordinary affairs of everyday life. It is something that can be transformed at any moment into sensation and feeling, enabling us to meet life with assurance and to acquire a firm position in it.

Many people who call themselves practical imagine that their actions are guided by the most practical principles. But if we inquire more closely, it is found that their so-called “practical thought” is often not thought at all but only the continuing pursuit of traditional opinions and habits. An entirely objective observation of the “practical” man's thought and an examination of what is usually termed “practical thinking” will reveal the fact that it generally contains little that can be called practical. What to them is known as practical thought or thinking consists in following the example of some authority whose ideas are accepted as a standard in the construction of some object. Anyone who thinks differently is considered impractical because this thought does not coincide with traditional ideas.

Whenever anything really practical has been invented, it has been done by a person without practical knowledge of that particular subject. Take, for instance, the modern postage stamp. It would be most natural to assume that it was invented by some practical post office official. It was not. At the beginning of the last century it was a complicated affair to mail a letter. In order to dispatch a letter one had to go to the nearest receiving office where various books had to be referred to and many other formalities complied with. The uniform rate of postage known today is hardly sixty years old, and our present postage stamp that makes this possible was not invented by a practical postal employee at all but by someone completely outside the post office. This was the Englishman, Rowland Hill.

After the uniform system of postage stamps had been devised, the English minister who then had charge of the mails declared in Parliament that one could not assume any simplification of the system would increase the volume of mail as the impractical Hill anticipated. Even if it did, the London post office would be entirely inadequate to handle the increased volume. It never occurred to this highly “practical” individual that the post office must be fitted to the amount of business, not the business to the size of the post office. Indeed, in the shortest possible time this idea, which an “impractical” man had to defend against a “practical” authority, became a fact. Today, stamps are used everywhere as a matter of course for sending letters.

It was similar with the railroads. When in 1837 the first railroad in Germany was to be built, the members of the Bavarian College of Medicine were consulted on the advisability of the project and they voiced the opinion that it would be unwise to build railroads. They added that if this project were to be carried out, then at least a high board fence would have to be erected on both sides of the line to protect the public from possible brain and nervous shock.

When the railroad from Potsdam to Berlin was planned, Postmaster General Stengler said, “I am now dispatching two stage coaches daily to Potsdam and these are never full. If people are determined to throw their money out the window, they can do it much more simply without building a railroad!”

But the real facts of life often sweep aside the “practical,” that is to say, those who believe in their own ability to be practical. We must clearly distinguish between genuine thinking and so-called “practical thinking” that is merely reasoning in traditional ruts of thought.

As a starting point to our consideration I will tell you of an experience I had during my student days. A young colleague once came to me glowing with the joy of one who has just hit upon a really clever idea, and announced that he must go at once to see Professor X (who at the time taught machine construction at the University) for he had just made a great discovery. “I have discovered,” he said, “how, with a small amount of steam power and by simply rearranging the machinery, an enormous amount of work can be done by one machine.” He was in such a rush to see the Professor that that was all he could tell me. He failed to find him, however, so he returned and explained the whole matter to me. It all smacked of perpetual motion, but after all, why shouldn't even that be possible? After I had listened to his explanation I had to tell him that although his plan undoubtedly appeared to be cleverly thought out, it was a case that might be compared in practice with that of a person who, on boarding a railway car, pushes with all his might and then believes when it moves that he has actually started it. “That,” I said to him, “is the thought principle underlying your discovery.” Finally, he saw it himself and did not return to the Professor.

It is thus quite possible to shut ourselves up within a shell fashioned by our own thoughts. In rare cases this can be observed distinctly, but there are many similar examples in life that do not always reach such a striking extreme as the one just cited. He who is able to study human nature more intimately, however, knows that a large number of thought processes are of this kind. He often sees, we might say, people standing in the car pushing it from within and believing that they are making it move. Many of the events of life would take a different course if people did not so often try to solve their problems by thus deluding themselves.

True practice in thinking presupposes a right attitude and proper feeling for thinking. How can a right attitude toward thinking be attained? Anyone who believes that thought is merely an activity that takes place within his head or in his soul cannot have the right feeling for thought. Whoever harbors this idea will be constantly diverted by a false feeling from seeking right habits of thought and from making the necessary demands on his thinking. He who would acquire the right feeling for thought must say to himself, “If I can formulate thoughts about things, and learn to understand them through thinking, then these things themselves must first have contained these thoughts. The things must have been built up according to these thoughts, and only because this is so can I in turn extract these thoughts from the things.”

It can be imagined that this world outside and around us may be regarded in the same way as a watch. The comparison between the human organism and a watch is often used, but those who make it frequently forget the most important point. They forget the watchmaker. The fact must be kept clearly in mind that the wheels have not united and fitted themselves together of their own accord and thus made the watch “go,” but that first there was the watchmaker who put the different parts of the watch together. The watchmaker must never be forgotten. Through thoughts the watch has come into existence. Th thoughts have flowed, as it were, into the watch, into the thing.

The works and phenomena of nature must be viewed in a similar way. In the works of man it is easy to picture this to ourselves, but with the works of nature it is not so easily done. Yet these, too, are the result of spiritual activities and behind them are spiritual beings. Thus, when a man thinks about things he only re-thinks what is already in them. The belief that the world has been created by thought and is still ceaselessly being created in this manner is the belief that can alone fructify the actual inner practice of thought.

It is always the denial of the spiritual in the world that produces the worst kind of malpractice in thought, even in the field of science. Consider, for example, the theory that our planetary system arose from a primordial nebula that began to rotate and then densified into a central body from which rings and globes detached themselves, thus mechanically bringing into existence the entire solar system. He who propounds this theory is committing a grave error of thought.

A simple experiment used to be made in the schools to demonstrate this theory. A drop of oil was made to float in a glass of water. The drop was then pierced with a pin and made to rotate. As a result, tiny globules of oil were thrown off from the central drop creating a miniature planetary system, thus proving to the pupil—so the teacher thought—that this planetary system could come into existence through a purely mechanical process.

Only impractical thought can draw such conclusions from this little experiment, for he who would apply this theory to the cosmos has forgotten one thing that it ordinarily might be well to forget occasionally, and that is himself. He forgets that it is he who has brought this whole thing into rotation. If he had not been there and conducted the whole experiment, the separation of the little globules from the large drop would never have occurred. Had this fact been observed and applied logically to the cosmic system, he then would have been using complete healthy thinking. Similar errors of thought play a great part especially in science. Such things are far more important than one generally believes.

Considering the real practice of thought, it must be realized that thoughts can only be drawn from a world in which they already exist. Just as water can only be taken from a glass that actually contains water, so thoughts can only be extracted from things within which these thoughts are concealed. The world is built by thought, and only for this reason can thought be extracted from it. Were it otherwise, practical thought could not arise. When a person feels the full truth of these words, it will be easy for him to dispense with abstract thought. If he can confidently believe that thoughts are concealed behind the things around him, and that the actual facts of life take their course in obedience to thought if he feels this, he will easily be converted to a practical habit of thinking based on truth and reality.

Let us now look at that practice of thinking that is of special importance to those who stand upon an anthroposophical foundation. The one who is convinced that the world of facts is born of thought will grasp the importance of the development of right thinking.

Let us suppose that someone resolves to fructify his thinking to such a degree that it will always take the right course in life. If he would do this, he must be guided by the following rules and he must understand that these are actual, practical and fundamental principles. If he will try again and again to shape his thinking according to these rules, certain effects will result. His thinking will become practical even though at first it may not seem so. Other additional mental experiences of quite a different kind also will come to the one who applies these fundamental principles.

Let us suppose that somebody tries the following experiment. He begins today by observing, as accurately as possible, something in the outer world that is accessible to him—for instance, the weather. He watches the configuration of the clouds in the evening, the conditions at sunset, etc., and retains in his mind an exact picture of what he has thus observed. He tries to keep the picture before him in all its details for some time and endeavors to preserve as much of it as possible until the next day. At some time the next day he again makes a study of the weather conditions and again endeavors to gain an exact picture of them.

If in this manner he has pictured to himself exactly the sequential order of the weather conditions, he will become distinctly aware that his thinking gradually becomes richer and more intense. For what makes thought impractical is the tendency to ignore details when observing a sequence of events in the world and to retain but a vague, general impression of them. What is of value, what is essential and fructifies thinking, is just this ability to form exact pictures, especially of successive events, so that one can say, “Yesterday it was like that; today it is like this.” Thus, one calls up as graphically as possible an inner image of the two juxtaposed scenes that lie apart in the outer world.

This is, so to speak, nothing else but a certain expression of confidence in the thoughts that underlie reality. The person experimenting ought not to draw any conclusions immediately or to deduce from today's observation what kind of weather he shall have tomorrow. That would corrupt his thinking. Instead, he must confidently feel that the things of outer reality are definitely related to one another and that tomorrow's events are somehow connected with those of today. But he must not speculate on these things. He must first inwardly re-think the sequence of the outer events as exactly as possible in mental pictures, and then place these images side by side, allowing them to melt into one another. This is a definite rule of thought that must be followed by those who wish to develop factual thinking. It is particularly advisable that this principle be practiced on those very things that are not yet understood and the inner connection of which has not yet been penetrated.

Therefore, the experimenter must have the confidence that such events of which he has as yet no understanding—the weather, for instance—and which in the outer world are connected with one another, will bring about connections within him. This must be done in pictures only while abstaining from thinking. He must say to himself, “I do not yet know what the relation is, but I shall let these things grow within me and if I refrain from speculation they will bring something about in me.” It may be easily believed that if he forms exact inner images of succeeding events and at the same time abstains from all thinking something may take place in the invisible members of his nature.

The vehicle of man's thought life is his astral body.¹ As long as the human being is engaged in speculative thinking, this astral body is the slave of the ego. This conscious activity, however, does not occupy the astral body exclusively because the latter is also related in a certain manner to the whole cosmos.

Now, to the extent we abstain from arbitrary thinking and simply form mental pictures of successive events, to that extent do the inner thoughts of the world act within us and imprint themselves, without our being aware of it, on our astral body. To the extent we insert ourselves into the course of the world through observation of the events in the world and receive these images into our thoughts with the greatest possible clarity, allowing them to work within us, to that extent do those members of our organism that are withdrawn from our consciousness become ever more intelligent. If, in the case of inwardly connected events, we have once acquired the faculty of letting the new picture melt into the preceding one in the same way that the transition occurred in nature, it shall be found after a time that our thinking has gained considerable flexibility.

This is the procedure to be followed in matters not yet understood. Things, however, that are understood—events of everyday life, for example—should be treated in a somewhat different manner.

Let us presume that someone, perhaps our neighbor, had done this or that. We think about it and ask ourselves why he did it. We decide he has perhaps done it in preparation for something he intends to do the next day. We do not go any further but clearly picture his act and try to form an image of what he may do, imagining that the next day he will perform such and such an act. Then we wait to see what he really does since he may or may not do what we expected of him. We take note of what does happen and correct our thoughts accordingly. Thus, events of the present are chosen that are followed in thought into the future. Then we wait to see what actually happens.

This can be done either with actions involving people or something else. Whenever something is understood, we try to form a thought picture of what in our opinion will take place. If our opinion proves correct, our thinking is justified and all is well. If, however, something different from our expectation occurs, we review our thoughts and try to discover our mistake. In this way we try to correct our erroneous thinking by calm observation and examination of our errors. An attempt is made to find the reason for things occurring as they did. If we are right, however, we must be especially careful not to boast of our prediction and say, “Oh well, I knew yesterday that this would happen!”

This is again a rule based upon confidence that there is an inner necessity in things and events, that in the facts themselves there slumbers something that moves things. What is thus working within these things from one day to another are thought forces, and we gradually become conscious of them when meditating on things. By such exercises these thought forces are called up into our consciousness and if what has been thus foreseen is fulfilled, we are in tune with them. We have then established an inner relation with the real thought activity of the matter itself. So we train ourselves to think, not arbitrarily, but according to the inner necessity and the inner nature of the things themselves.

But our thinking can also be trained in other directions. An occurrence of today is also linked to what happened yesterday. We might consider a naughty child, for example, and ask ourselves what may have caused this behavior. The events are traced back to the previous day and the unknown cause hypothesized by saying to ourselves, “Since this occurred today, I must believe that it was prepared by this or that event that occurred yesterday or perhaps the day before.”

We then find out what had actually occurred and so discover whether or not our thought was correct. If the true cause has been found, very well. But if our conclusion was wrong, then we should try to correct the mistake, find out how our thought process developed, and how it ran its course in reality.

To practice these principles is the important point. Time must be taken to observe things as though we were inside the things themselves with our thinking. We should submerge ourselves in the things and enter into their inner thought activity. If this is done, we gradually become aware of the fact that we are growing together with things. We no longer feel that they are outside us and we are here inside our shell thinking about them. Instead we come to feel as if our own thinking occurred within the things themselves. When a man has succeeded to a high degree in doing this, many things will become clear to him.

Goethe was such a man. He was a thinker who always lived with his thought within the things themselves. The psychologist Heinroth's book in 1826, Anthropology, characterized Goethe's thought as “objective.” Goethe himself appreciated this characterization. What was meant is that such thinking does not separate itself from things, but remains within them. It moves within the necessity of things. Goethe's thinking was at the same time perception, and his perception was thinking. He had developed this way of thinking to a remarkable degree. More than once it occurred that, when he had planned to do something, he would go to the window and remark to the person who happened to be with him, “In three hours we shall have rain!” And so it would happen. From the little patch of sky he could see from the window he was able to foretell the weather conditions for the next few hours. His true thinking, remaining within the objects, thus enabled him to sense the coming event preparing itself in the preceding one.

Much more can actually be accomplished through practical thinking than is commonly supposed. When a man has made these principles of thinking his own, he will notice that his thinking really becomes practical, that his horizon widens, and that he can grasp the things of the world in quite a different way. Gradually his attitude towards things and people will change completely. An actual process will take place within him that will alter his whole conduct. It is of immense importance that he tries to grow into the things in this way with his thinking, for it is in the most eminent sense a practical undertaking to train one's thinking by such exercises.

There is another exercise that is to be practiced especially by those to whom the right idea usually does not occur at the right time.

Such people should try above all things to stop their thinking from being forever influenced and controlled by the ordinary course of worldly events and whatever else may come with them. As a rule, when a person lies down for half an hour's rest, his thoughts are allowed to play freely in a thousand different directions, or on the other hand he may become absorbed with some trouble in his life. Before he realizes it such things will have crept into his consciousness and claimed his entire attention. If this habit persists, such a person will never experience the occasion when the right idea occurs to him at the right moment.

If he really wants this to happen, he must say to himself whenever he can spare a half hour for rest, “Whenever I can spare the time, I will think about something I myself have chosen and I will bring it into my consciousness arbitrarily of my own free will. For example, I will think of something that occurred two years ago during a walk. I will deliberately recall what occurred then and I will think about it if only for five minutes. During these five minutes I will banish everything else from my mind and will myself choose the subject about which I wish to think.”

He need not even choose so difficult a subject as this one. The point is not at all to change one's mental process through difficult exercises, but to get away from the ordinary routine of life in one's thinking. He must think of something quite apart from what enmeshes him during the ordinary course of the day. If nothing occurs to him to think about, he might open a book at random and occupy his thoughts with whatever first catches his eye. Or he may choose to think of something he saw at a particular time that morning on his way to work and to which he would otherwise have paid no attention. The main point is that it should be something totally different from the ordinary run of daily events, something that otherwise would not have occupied his thoughts.

If such exercises are practiced systematically again and again, it will soon be noticed that ideas come at the right moments, and the right thoughts occur when needed. Through these exercises thinking will become activated and mobile—something of immense importance in practical life.

Let us consider another exercise that is especially helpful in improving one's memory.

One tries at first in the crude way people usually recall past events to remember something that occurred, let us say, yesterday. Such recollections are, as a rule, indistinct and colorless, and most people are satisfied if they can just remember a person's name. But if it is desired to develop one's memory, one can no longer be content with this. This must be clear. The following exercise must be systematically practiced, saying to oneself, “I shall recall exactly the person I saw yesterday, also the street corner where I met him, and what happened to be in his vicinity. I shall draw the whole picture as exactly as possible and shall even imagine the color and cut of his coat and vest.” Most people will find themselves utterly incapable of doing this and will quickly see how much is lacking in their recollections to produce a really lifelike, graphic picture of what they met and experienced only yesterday.

Since this is true in the majority of cases, we must begin with that condition in which many people are unable to recollect their most recent experiences. It is only too true that most people's observations of things and events are usually inaccurate and vague. The results of a test given by a professor in one of the universities demonstrated that out of thirty students who took the test, only two had observed an occurrence correctly; the remaining twenty-eight reported it inaccurately. But a good memory is the child of accurate observation. A reliable memory is attained, let me repeat, by accurate observation and it can also be said that in a certain roundabout way of the soul it is born as the child of exact observation.

But if somebody cannot at first accurately remember his experiences of yesterday, what should he do? First, he should try to remember as accurately as he can what actually occurred. Where recollections fail he should fill in the picture with something incorrect that was not really present. The essential point here is that the picture be complete. Suppose it was forgotten whether or not someone was wearing a brown or a black coat. Then he might be pictured in a brown coat and brown trousers with such and such buttons on his vest and a yellow necktie. One might further imagine a general situation in which there was a yellow wall, a tall man passing on the left, a short one on the right, etc.

All that can be remembered he puts into this picture, and what cannot be remembered is added imaginatively in order to have a completed mental picture. Of course, it is at first incorrect but through the effort to create a complete picture he is induced to observe more accurately. Such exercises must be continued, and although they might be tried and failed fifty times, perhaps the fifty-first time he shall be able to remember accurately what the person he has met looked like, what he wore, and even little details like the buttons on his vest. Then nothing will be overlooked and every detail will imprint itself on his memory. Thus he will have first sharpened his powers of observation by these exercises and in addition, as the fruit of this accurate observation, he will have improved his memory.

He should take special care to retain not only names and main features of what he wishes to remember, but also to retain vivid images covering all the details. If he cannot remember some detail, he must try for the time being to fill in the picture and thus make it a whole. He will then notice that his memory, as though in a roundabout way, slowly becomes reliable. Thus it can be seen how definite direction can be given for making thinking increasingly more practical.

There is still something else that is of particular importance. In thinking about some matters we feel it necessary to come to a conclusion. We consider how this or that should be done and then make up our minds in a certain way. This inclination, although natural, does not lead to practical thinking. All overly hasty thinking does not advance us but sets us back. Patience in these things is absolutely essential.

Suppose, for instance, we desire to carry out some particular plan. There are usually several ways that this might be done. Now we should have the patience first to imagine how things would work[s] out if we were to execute our plan in one way and then we should consider what the results would be of doing it in another. Surely there will always be reasons for preferring one method over another but we should refrain from forming an immediate decision. Instead, an attempt should be made to imagine the two possibilities and then we must say to ourselves, “That will do for the present; I shall now stop thinking about this matter.” No doubt there are people who will become fidgety at this point, and although it is difficult to overcome such a condition, it is extremely useful to do so. It then becomes possible to imagine how the matter might be handled in two ways, and to decide to stop thinking about it for awhile.

Whenever it is possible, action should be deferred until the next day, and the two possibilities considered again at that time. You will find that in the interim[,] conditions have changed and that the next day you will be able to form a different, or at least a more thorough decision than could have been reached the day before. An inner necessity is hidden in things and if we do not act with arbitrary impatience but allow this inner necessity to work in us—and it will—we shall find the next day that it has enriched our thinking, thus making possible a wiser decision. This is exceedingly valuable.

We might, for example, be asked to give our advice on a problem and to make a decision. But let us not thrust forward our decision immediately. We should have the patience to place the various possibilities before ourselves without forming any definite conclusions, and we then should quietly let these possibilities work themselves out within us. Even the popular proverb says that one should sleep over a matter before making a decision.

To sleep over it is not enough, however. It is necessary to consider two or, better still, several possibilities that will continue to work within us when our ego is not consciously occupied with them. Later on, when we return again to the matter in question, it will be found that certain thought forces have been stirred up within us in this manner, and that as a result our thinking has become more factual and practical.

It is certain that what a man seeks can always be found in the world, whether he stands at the carpenter's bench, or follows the plough, or belongs to one of the professions. If he will practice these exercises, he will become a practical thinker in the most ordinary matters of everyday life. If he thus trains himself, he will approach and look at the things of the world in a quite different manner from previously. Although at first these exercises may seem related only to his own innermost life, they are entirely applicable and of the greatest importance precisely for the outer world. They have powerful consequences.

An example will demonstrate how necessary it is to think about things in a really practical manner. Let us imagine that for some reason or other a man climbs a tree. He falls from the tree, strikes the ground, and is picked up dead. Now, the thought most likely to occur to us is that the fall killed him. We would be inclined to say that the fall was the cause and death the effect. In this instance cause and effect seem logically connected. But this assumption may completely confuse the true sequence of facts, for the man may have fallen as a consequence of heart failure. To the observer the external event is exactly the same in both cases. Only when the true causes are known can a correct judgment be formed. In this case it might have been that the man was already dead before he fell and the fall had nothing to do with his death. It is thus possible to invert completely cause and effect. In this instance the error is evident, but often they are not so easily discernible. The frequency with which such errors in thinking occur is amazing. Indeed, it must be said that in the field of science conclusions in which this confusion of cause and effect is permitted are being drawn every day. Most people do not grasp this fact, however, because they are not acquainted with the possibilities of thinking.

Still another example will show you clearly how such errors in thinking arise and how a person who has been practicing exercises like these can no longer make such mistakes. Suppose someone concludes that man as he is today is a descendent of the ape. This means that what he has come to know in the ape—the forces active in this animal have—attained higher perfection and man is the result. Now, to show the meaning of this theory in terms of thought, let us imagine that this person is the only man on earth, and that besides himself there are only those apes present that, according to his theory, can evolve into human beings. He now studies these apes with the utmost accuracy down to the most minute detail and then forms a concept of what lives in them. Excluding himself and without ever having seen another human being let him now try to develop the concept of a man solely from his concept of the ape. He will find this to be quite impossible. His concept “ape” will never transform itself into the concept “man.”

If he had cultivated correct habits of thinking, this man would have said to himself, “My concept of the ape does not change into the concept of man. What I perceive in the ape, therefore, can never become a human being, otherwise my concept would have to change likewise. There must be something else present that I am unable to perceive.” So he would have to imagine an invisible, super-sensible entity behind the physical ape that he would be unable to perceive but that alone would make the ape's transformation into man a possible conception.

We shall not enter into a discussion of the impossibility of this case, but simply point out the erroneous thinking underlying this theory. If this man had thought correctly he would have seen that he could not possibly conceive of such a theory without assuming the existence of something super-sensible. Upon further investigation you will discover that an overwhelmingly large number of people has committed this error of thinking. Errors like these, however, will no longer occur to the one who has trained his thinking as suggested here.

For anyone capable of thinking correctly a large part of modern literature (especially that of the sciences) becomes a source of unpleasant experience. The distorted and misguided thinking expressed in it can cause even physical pain in a man who has to work his way through it. It should be understood, however, that this is not said with any intent to slight the wealth of observation and discovery that has been accumulated by modern natural science and its objective methods of research.

Now let us consider “short-sighted” thinking. Most people are unconscious of the fact that their thinking is not factual, but that it is for the most part only the result of thought habits. The decisions and conclusions therefore of a man whose thought penetrates the world and life will differ greatly from those of one whose ability to think is limited or nil. Consider the case of a materialistic thinker. To convince such a man through reasoning, however logical, sound and good, is not an easy task. It is usually a useless effort to try to convince a person with little knowledge of life through reason. Such a person does not see the reasons that make this or that statement valid and possible if he has formed the habit of seeing nothing but matter in everything and simply adheres to this habit of thinking.

Today it can generally be said that people are not prompted by reasons when making statements but rather by the thinking habits behind these reasons. They have acquired habits of thought that influence all their feelings and sensations, and when reasons are put forth, they are simply the mask of the habitual thinking that screens these feelings and sensations. Not only is the wish often the father of the thought, but it can also be said that all our feelings and mental habits are the parents of our thoughts. He who knows life knows how difficult it is to convince another person by means of logical reasoning. What really decides and convinces lies much deeper in the human soul.

There are good reasons for the existence of the Anthroposophical Movement and for the activities in its various branches. Everyone who has participated in the work of the Movement for any length of time comes to notice that he has acquired a new way of thinking and feeling. For the work in the various branches is not merely confined to finding logical reasons for things. A new and more comprehensive quality of feeling and sensation is also developed.

How some people scoffed a few years ago when they heard their first lectures in spiritual science. Yet today how many things have become self-evident to these same people who previously looked upon these things as impossible absurdities. In working in the Anthroposophical Movement one not only learns to modify one's thinking, one also learns to unfold a wider perspective of soul life.

We must understand that our thoughts derive their coloring from far greater depths than are generally imagined. It is our feelings that frequently impel us to hold certain opinions. The logical reasons that are put forward are often a mere screen or mask for our deeper feelings and habits of thinking.

To bring ourselves to a point at which logical reasons themselves possess a real significance for us, we must have learned to love logic itself. Only when we have learned to love factuality and objectivity will logical reason be decisive for us. We should gradually learn to think objectively, not allowing ourselves to be swayed by our preference for this or that thought. Only then will our vision broaden in the sense that we do not merely follow the mental ruts of others but in such a way that the reality of the things themselves will teach us to think correctly.

True practicality is born of objective thinking, that is, thinking that flows into us from the things themselves. It is only by practicing such exercises as have just been described that we learn to take our thoughts from things. To do these exercises properly we should choose to work with sound and wholesome subjects that are least affected by our culture. These are the objects of nature.

To train our thinking using the things of nature as objects to think about will make really practical thinkers of us. Once we have trained ourselves in the practical use of this fundamental principle, our thinking, we shall be able to handle the most everyday occupations in a practical way. By training the human soul in this way a practical viewpoint is developed in our thinking.

The fruit of the Anthroposophical Movement must be to place really practical thinkers in life. What we have come to believe is not of as much importance as the fact that we should become capable of surveying with understanding the things around us. That spiritual science should penetrate our souls, thereby stimulating us to inner soul activity and expanding our vision, is of far more importance than merely theorizing about what extends beyond the things of the senses into the spiritual. In this, Anthroposophy is truly practical.

• 1. See Theosophy: An Introduction to the Supersensible Knowledge of the World and the Destination of Man for a clarification of this, and other, anthroposophical terminology.

In the process of human evolution a certain definite connection exists between the past and the future. Study of this connection sheds a great deal of light upon questions such as: What devolves upon us as men belonging to a particular epoch?

When we were together here some little time ago, many things were said about the past evolution of humanity, and to-day I will add something about the connection between the past and the immediate future. At the end of the lecture yesterday attention was called to a significant sign, telling us as it were from the heavens that humanity needs a spiritual impetus, something like a new impulse for the age. [Mysteries of Cosmic Existence. Comets and the Moon, Stuttgart, 5th March, 1910. See also footnote near end of present lecture, p. 79.] Understanding of how this impulse must work is possible only when we study the last millennia prior to the founding of Christianity in a certain connection with the millennia after it, with the millennia, that is to say, in which we ourselves are living.

There is a law in accordance with which certain happenings are repeated in the process of man's evolution, and we spoke of them in the last lecture-course given here in Stuttgart. [Universe, Earth and Man. Eleven lectures, 4th–16th August, 1908.] Today I want only to emphasise that when reference is made in Spiritual Science to these systematic repetitions in the course of human evolution it must not he imagined that they can be worked up by the intellect; they must be investigated in detail and confirmed by spiritual research. Attempts to construct new repetitions according to the pattern of others can lead one very far astray. There is, however, one repetition which does, in fact, resemble another, the form it takes being that happenings of crucial importance before the founding of Christianity come to pass again afterwards in a certain way.

The last three millennia prior to the founding of Christianity belong to an epoch in the history of human evolution called the Dark Age, the lesser Dark Age—Kali Yuga. Kali Yuga began in the year 3101 B.C. With it is connected everything we recognise nowadays as the great achievements of humanity, as the fundamental characteristics of present-day culture. Before this Dark Age, before Kali Yuga, all human thinking, all the powers of the human soul, were in a certain respect differently organised. The year 3101 B.C. is an approximate date, for in the process of development qualities of one kind passed over gradually into others; but before that time the last vestiges of ancient clairvoyance were still present. In the course of evolution the sequence of the ages is: Krita Yuga, Treta Yuga, Dvapara Yuga, Kali Yuga. It is the last that is of particular interest to us to-day. The earlier ages take us back to old Atlantis. In very ancient times, vestiges of the ancient clairvoyance still survived and prior to the Dark Age man was directly conscious of the presence of a spiritual world because he was able to gaze into it. But this consciousness of the spiritual world withdrew more and more from man's vision and speaking generally we can say that the development then begins of those faculties of soul which on the one hand confine his power of judgment to the sense-perceptible world, while, on the other, they promote his self-consciousness; all these powers begin to operate in Kali Yuga. And whereas during this age man was not in a position to look into the spiritual worlds, the firm centre we call the knowledge of self-consciousness developed all the more strongly within him. But do not imagine that even now this knowledge of self-consciousness is already highly developed; it has yet to reach many further stages. But it could never have been experienced by man if there had not been this “Dark Age”.

Thus during the three millennia prior to the founding of Christianity man was losing his connection with the spiritual world to an increasing extent and indeed had no direct perception of that connection.

On the occasion of my last visit here we heard how, at the conclusion of the first millennium of Kali Yuga, a kind of substitute was given for vision of the spiritual worlds. This substitute was made possible through the fact that a particular individual—Abraham—was chosen out because the special organisation of his physical brain enabled him to have consciousness of the spiritual world without the old faculties. That is why in Spiritual Science we call the first millennium of Kali Yuga the Abraham-epoch; it was the epoch when man did, it is true, lose the direct vision of the spiritual worlds, but when there unfolded in him something like a consciousness of the Divine which gradually made its way more and more deeply into his ego, with the result that he came to conceive of the Deity as related to human ego-consciousness. In the first millennium of Kali Yuga—which at its conclusion we can call the Abraham-epoch—the Deity is revealed as the World-Ego.

This Abraham-epoch was followed by the Moses-epoch, when the God Jahve, the World-Ego, was no longer revealed in the form of a mysterious guidance of human destinies, as a God of a single people; in the Moses-epoch this Deity was revealed, as we know, in the burning bush, as the God of the Elements. And it was a great advance when, through the teachings of Moses, the World-Ego as the Deity was experienced in such a way that men realised: the Elements of manifested existence, all that is seen with physical eyes—lightning, thunder, and so on—are emanations, deeds of the World-Ego, ultimately of the one World-Ego. We must, however, clearly understand in what way this denoted an advance.

Before the Abraham-epoch and before Kali Yuga, we find that through the direct vision of the spiritual worlds made possible by the remains of the old clairvoyance, men beheld the spiritual, as indeed was the case in all these ancient times. We should have to go infinitely far back to find anything else. Men actually beheld the spiritual during Dvapara Yuga, Treta Yuga, Krita Yuga, beheld it as a multiplicity of Beings. You know that when we rise into the spiritual worlds we find there the Hierarchies of spiritual Beings. They, naturally, are under a unified guidance, but this was beyond the grasp of consciousness in those ancient times. Men beheld the individual members of the Hierarchies, a multiplicity of Divine Beings. To grasp them as a unity was possible only for the Initiates. But now the World-Ego, grasped for the first time by man himself with the physical instrument of the brain—a faculty that had developed in a specially marked way in Abraham—confronted him, and he conceived the World-Ego as manifesting in the different kingdoms of Nature, in the Elements.

A further advance was made in the last millennium before the founding of Christianity, in the Solomon-epoch. Thus the three millennia before the founding of Christianity can be distinguished by calling the first millennium by the name of the individuality who appears and then works on into the second: the Abraham-epoch. From the beginning of Kali Yuga until Abraham men are being prepared to recognise the One God behind the manifestations of Nature. This possibility begins with Abraham. In the Moses-epoch the One God becomes the ruler of the manifestations of Nature and is sought for behind them. All this is then intensified in the Solomon-epoch, and we are led through this last epoch to that point in evolution where the same Divine Being whom the Abraham-epoch and the Moses-epoch, too, beheld in Jahve, where the same Divine Being takes on human form.

In contemplating this subject from the spiritual-scientific point of view it must be firmly realised that in this respect the Gospels are right: Christ may not be distinguished from Jahve otherwise than that the light of the sun reflected by the moon is to be distinguished from the direct light of the sun. Where is the light that floods a bright moonlit night? It is actual sunlight, only it is reflected back to us from the moon. So we can have this sunlight directly by day or rayed back by the moon on bright moonlit nights. What manifests thus in space also manifests in the following way: what was finally to appear in Christ as a Spirit-Sun was revealed beforehand in reflection. Jahve is the reflection which precedes Christ in time. Just as the moonlight reflects the sunlight, so was the Christ Being reflected for Abraham, Moses, Solomon. It was always the same Being. Then He Himself appeared as the Christ-Sun at the time of the founding of Christianity. The preparation for this great event was made in the Abraham-epoch, in the Moses-epoch, in the Solomon-epoch.

A repetition of these three pre-Christian ages takes place in the Christian era, but now in reverse order. The essential and fundamental trend of the Solomon-epoch is repeated in the first thousand years after Christ, in that the spirit of Solomon lives and is active as an impulse in the most outstanding minds of the first Christian millennium. And fundamentally speaking it was the wisdom of Solomon through which men endeavoured to grasp the nature and essence of the Christ Event. Then, following the Solomon-epoch, came the era that can be called the revival of the Moses-epoch ... and in the second millennium after Christ the best minds of this era are permeated by the spirit of Moses. The spirit of Moses does indeed come to life again in a new form. In the pre-Christian age the spirit of Moses had been directed towards the outer world of physical Nature in order to find the Divine World-Ego as Jahve, the World-Ego manifesting in lightning and thunder, in the great revelation from the Elements of laws for men. Whereas the World-Ego streams into Moses from outside, is revealed from outside, in the second millennium after Christ the same Divine Being announces Himself within the soul. The experience which came to Moses as an outer happening when he withdrew from his people in order to receive the Decalogue this significant happening is repeated in the second Christian millennium in the form of a mighty revelation from within man.

Repetitions do not take the same form but what comes later manifests as a kind of polarity. It was from the Elements, from outer Nature, that the God revealed Himself to Moses; in the second millennium after Christ He reveals Himself from the deepest foundations of the human soul. And how could this be presented to us more impressively than in the story of a great, supremely gifted man of whose preaching it was said that he proclaimed mighty truths from the very depths of his soul! It can be taken for granted that this man was steeped through and through in what can be called Christian mysticism. Then, to the place where he is preaching comes a seemingly unimportant layman who at first listens to the sermons but then turns out to be one who need not be considered a layman but can become the instructor of the preacher—Tauler—and induces him, despite his renown, to suspend his sermons for a time because he does not feel inwardly imbued with what is living in the layman. And when Tauler, after having received the inspiration, ascends the pulpit again, the overwhelmingly powerful impression made by his sermon is described symbolically by saying that many of his listeners fell down as if dead—meaning that everything of a lower nature in them was killed.

This was a revelation of the World-Ego from within—working from within with a power as great as that of the revelation from the Elements to Moses in the second millennium before Christ. Thus we see a revival of the Moses-epoch inasmuch as the spirit of Moses illumined and imbued with life the whole of Christian mysticism, from Meister Eckhart down to the later Christian mystics. Verily the spirit of Moses was alive in the souls of the Christian mystics! This was in the second millennium after Christ when there was a revival of the whole character of the Moses-epoch. Just as in the first millennium of the Christian era the repetition of the Solomon-epoch was responsible for bringing to expression the inner content of the Christian mysteries—for example, the Christian teaching concerning the Hierarchies, the detailed wisdom concerning the higher worlds—so was the second Moses-epoch particularly responsible for the essential character of German mysticism: a deep, mystical consciousness of the One God who can be awakened and resurrected within the human soul. And the influence of this Moses-epoch has persisted in all the endeavours made since that time to fathom the nature of the World-Ego, the Undivided Godhead.

But the course of the evolution of humanity is such that from our time onwards a renaissance of the Abraham-epoch will take place as we pass slowly into the third millennium. In pre-Christian times the sequence is: Abraham-epoch, Moses-epoch, Solomon-epoch; in the Christian era the order is reversed: Solomon-epoch, Moses-epoch, Abraham-epoch. We are moving towards the Abraham-epoch, and this will inevitably bring momentous consequences in its train.

Let us recall what was of essential significance in the pre-Christian Abraham-epoch. It was the fact that the old clairvoyance had disappeared, that there had been bestowed upon man a consciousness of the Divine closely bound up with human faculties. Everything that humanity could acquire from this brain-bound consciousness of the Divine had by now been gradually exhausted and there is very little left to be gained through these faculties. But on the other hand, in the new Abraham-epoch exactly the opposite path is taken—the path Which leads humanity away from vision confined to the physical and material, away from intellectual inferences based upon material data. We are moving along the path leading into the regions where men once dwelt in times before the Abraham-epoch. It is the path that will make states of natural clairvoyance possible for man, states in which natural clairvoyant forces will be in active operation.

During Kali Yuga itself, Initiation alone could lead into the spiritual worlds in the right way. Initiation does, of course, lead to higher stages that will be accessible to men only in the very far distant future; but the first signs of a natural faculty of clairvoyance will become evident fairly soon, as the renewal of the Abraham-epoch approaches.

Thus, after men have acquired ego-consciousness, after they have come to know the ego as a firm inner centre, they are led out of themselves again in order to be able to look with an even deeper vision into the spiritual worlds. The ending of Kali Yuga has to do with this also. Having lasted for five thousand years, Kali Yuga ended in A.D. 1899. This was a year of crucial importance for the evolution of humanity. Naturally, it is again an approximate date, for things happen gradually. But just as the year 3101 B.C. can be indicated as a point of time when humanity was led down from the stage of the old clairvoyance to physical vision and intellectuality, so the year 1899 is the time when humanity received an impetus towards the first beginnings of a future clairvoyance. And it is the lot of mankind, already in this twentieth century before the next millennium—indeed for a few individuals in the first half of this century—to develop the first rudiments of a new faculty of clairvoyance that quite certainly will appear if men prove capable of understanding it. It must, however, be realised that there are two possibilities. It belongs to the very essence of the human soul that natural faculties of clairvoyance will arise in the future in a few people during the first half of the twentieth century and in more and more human beings during the next two thousand five hundred years, until finally there will be a sufficient number who, if they so desire, will have the new, natural clairvoyance. A distinction must, of course, be made between cultivated and natural clairvoyance.

But there are two possibilities. The one is that although men have indeed the aptitude for this clairvoyance, materialism may triumph in the next decades and humanity sink in its morass. True, even then there will be individuals here and there who assert that they see in the physical man something like a second man; but if materialistic consciousness gets to the point of declaring Spiritual Science to be sheer craziness and stamping out all consciousness of the spiritual world, then these incipient faculties will not be understood. It will depend upon humanity itself whether what will then take place turns out to be for the good or ill, because what ought to come about might pass unnoticed.

Or the other situation is possible, where Spiritual Science is not trampled underfoot. Then men will understand how to cultivate such faculties not only in the secret schools of Initiation but also to foster them when, towards the middle of this century, they appear like delicate buds of the life of soul in individuals here and there. They will say, as if from a power that has awakened within them: I see as a reality something that is described in Anthroposophy as the second man within the physical man. But still other faculties will appear—for example, a faculty that a man will notice in himself. After he has performed some deed, there will appear before his soul a kind of dream-picture which he will know to be connected in some way with what he has done. And from Spiritual Science he will realise: When an after-image of my deed appears in this way, although it is essentially different from the deed itself, it reveals to me what the karmic effect of my deed will be in the future.

This understanding of karma will develop in certain individuals during the middle of our century. The explanation is that Kali Yuga has run its course and that from epoch to epoch new faculties appear in men. But if no understanding is developed, if this particular faculty is stamped out, if those who speak about faculties of this kind are put away as if they were insane, disaster is inevitable and humanity will sink in the morass of materialism. Everything will depend upon whether understanding is awakened for Spiritual Science, or whether Ahriman will succeed in suppressing its intentions. Then, of course, those who are choking in materialism may say scornfully: They were fine prophets who stated that a second man will be seen beside the physical man! Nothing will be apparent if the faculties for seeing it are crushed out. But even if these faculties do not become evident in the middle of the twentieth century, this will be no proof that the rudiments of them are not within man, but only that the seed of the young buds has been crushed. The faculties that have been described to-day exist and can be developed, provided only that mankind is willing.

This stage of evolution therefore lies immediately ahead of us. We are, as it were, retracing the path of development. In Abraham, consciousness of the Divine was brought down into the brain; in passing into a new Abraham-epoch, consciousness of the Divine will in turn be brought out of the brain, and during the next two thousand five hundred years we shall find more and more human beings who possess knowledge of the great spiritual teachings of the cosmic secrets yielded by the mysteries of Initiation. Just as the spirit of Moses prevailed in the epoch that is now over, so in our time the spirit of Abraham begins to prevail, in order that after men have been led to consciousness of the Divine in the material world, they may now be led out of and beyond it. For it is an eternal cosmic law that each individuality has to perform a particular deed more than once, periodically—twice at all events, the one as the antithesis of the other. What Abraham brought down for men into the physical consciousness he will bear upwards again for them into the spiritual world.

Thus it is obvious that we are living at a vitally important time and that to disseminate Spiritual Science to-day is not a matter of preference but something that is demanded by our age. To prepare mankind for great moments in the process of evolution is among the tasks of spiritual investigation. Spiritual Science exists in order that men may know what it is they are seeing. Anyone who is true to his age cannot but be mindful of the fact that spirit-knowledge must be brought into the world to prevent what is coming from passing by humanity unnoticed.

These things are connected with others. In certain other respects everything is renewed in similar repetitions. A time is approaching when more and more of what existed in pre-Christian centuries will be renewed for humanity, but everything will now be steeped in what men have been able to acquire through the mighty Christ Event. We have heard that the great impulse experienced by Moses through the vision of the burning thorn bush and lightning on Sinai was experienced again inwardly, in its Christianised form. For men such as Tauler and Eckhart knew with all certainty that when there dawned within them the power known to Moses as Jahve, that power was the Christ, no longer the reflected Christ but the Christ Himself, arising from the depth of the heart. What had been experienced by Moses was experienced by the Christian mystics in a Christianised form, in a form changed through the Christ Impulse. And what was experienced in the pre-Christian age of Abraham—that, too, will be experienced in a new and different form. And what will this be? All things, all events that come about normally in the evolution of humanity cast their lights in advance (instead of the trivial saying, “cast their shadows”, I prefer to say, “cast their lights”). Thus in certain respects a light indicative of future happenings was cast in advance by the event of Damascus, the conversion of Saul into Paul.

Let us be clear what this signified for Paul. Up to then he had acquired a thorough knowledge of the Hebraic secret doctrines. From these teachings he knew that some day an Individuality would descend to the earth, representing to humanity the One who conquers death. He knew: an Individuality will appear in the flesh, showing through his life that the spirit triumphs over death so completely that for this Individuality in his earthly incarnation death has no more significance than any other physical happening. Paul knew this. And he knew something else as well from the ancient Hebraic teachings, namely that when the Christ, the Messiah who was to come, had lived in the flesh, when He had resurrected and had won the victory over death, the spiritual sphere of the earth would be transformed and clairvoyance would undergo a change. Whereas before then a clairvoyant would not have seen the Christ Being in the spiritual atmosphere of the earth, but only when he looked upwards to the Sun Spirit, Paul knew that through the Christ Impulse there would take place in earth-existence a change signifying that, having gained the victory over death the Christ would be found by clairvoyant vision in the sphere of the earth. When, therefore, a man was clairvoyant, he would behold the Christ in the earth-sphere as the living spirit of the earth. But that of which Paul, while he was still Saul, could not be convinced was that the One who had lived in Palestine, had died on the Cross and was said by his disciples to have been resurrected, was indeed the One to whom the ancient Hebraic doctrines referred.

The salient point is that Paul had not been convinced by what he had seen physically of the things narrated in the Gospels. Conviction that the Christ was the predicted Messiah first came to him when the light cast in advance revealed itself to him, when as though by Grace from above he became clairvoyant and, finding Christ in the sphere of the earth, was compelled to say to himself: He has been here in very truth and has risen! It was because Paul himself had beheld Christ in the spiritual sphere of the earth that he knew: Now He is here! And from that moment he was convinced regarding Christ Jesus.

The essence of what happened at Damascus, therefore, was that Paul had discovered Christ Jesus clairvoyantly in the sphere of the earth. Thus, if he had not, for example, heard tell of the deeds of Christ in Palestine, if he had not himself actually heard the stories told in the Gospels but had lived somewhat later, he might have experienced the Christ Event of Damascus only later: but even so he would have arrived at the same conviction. For this event revealed to him the reality of Christ's presence! He knew: He who is now revealed in the sphere of the earth is the One of whom the ancient Hebraic secret doctrine tells.

The Christ Event is not confined to one point of time only. In the case of Paul it came very early, in order that through him Christianity might pursue its course.

Now, as long as Kali Yuga lasted—this was until the year 1899—the evolution of humanity had not reached the stage at which Paul's experience could be repeated without more ado; human faculties were not mature enough for that. Hence there was one who experienced it through Grace; and others, too, experienced similar events through Grace. But we are living now in the age when there is to be a revolutionary change: the first rudiments of natural clairvoyance are developing. We are passing into the Abraham-epoch and are being led out into the spiritual world. This means that it will be possible for a certain number of human beings, and more and more in the next two thousand five hundred years, to experience a repetition of the event of Damascus. The great and momentous feature of the coming era will be that many human beings will experience this event. The Christ, now to be found in the spiritual sphere of the earth, will be perceptible to those faculties which, as we have said, will make their appearance. When men become able to see the etheric body, they will learn to see the etheric body of Christ Jesus, as did Paul. This is what is beginning as the characteristic trait of a new age, and between the years 1930-40-45 it will already become evident in the first forerunners of human beings possessed of these faculties. If men are alert they will experience this event of Damascus through direct spiritual vision and therewith clarity and truth concerning the Christ Event. A remarkable parallelism of happenings will come about.

During the next two decades men will be more and more inclined to abandon the texts of the Gospels because they will no longer understand them. Superficial scholars are everywhere at pains to “prove” that the Gospels are not historical records, that there can be no question of any historical Christ. The historical documents will lose their value and the number of people who deny Christ Jesus will steadily increase. Men who may still believe that these events can be substantiated by history are short-sighted. Those who mean well by Christianity will not reject understanding of the spiritual proof of the existence of Christ Jesus, for this spiritual proof will be provided through the cultivation of the faculties which enable men to behold the Christ as a real Presence in His etheric body. Those who place reliance only on documents may call themselves good Christians, but in point of fact they are destroying Christianity; however vociferously they proclaim the knowledge they have gleaned about Christianity from documentary records, they are destroying it because they are rejecting a spiritual teaching through which, in actual vision, the Christ will become a reality for men in our century.

When the Christian era began, men had been descending into the Dark Age for more than three thousand years, had been thrown back upon the faculties of their outer senses. At that time Christ could not have revealed Himself to the faculties necessary for the evolution of humanity in any other way than through physical incarnation. Because man's physical faculties had then reached the peak of their development, Christ was obliged to appear in a physical body. But no progress at all would be possible unless with higher faculties men were able to discover Christ as a reality in the higher worlds. Just as Christ had once to be discovered with purely physical faculties, men will find him with the newly developed faculties in that world where etheric bodies alone are to be seen. There can be no second physical incarnation of Christ. He came once in a physical body of flesh because it was at one period only that human faculties were dependent upon His presence in such a body. But now, with the higher faculties, men will be able to perceive the etheric body of Christ as an even greater reality.

The momentous event in store for us can be called: the Reappearance of Christ Jesus ... a gradual reappearance, to begin with for a few and then for more and more human beings. It is an event that has significance not only for those who will then still be incarnated in bodies of flesh. A number of human beings living to-day will still be in incarnation at the time of the Christ Event ... they will experience it in the way that has been described. Others will have passed through the gate of death. As we once heard in a lecture here, [This reference is to a lecture given 14th November, 1909: The Tasks and Aims of Spiritual Science.] the Event of Golgotha was an event that affected not only the physical world; its influences reached into all the spiritual worlds. Christ's descent into the underworld was an actual fact and the effects of the Christ Event that is to take place in our century will also work—though not in the same form as on earth—into the world in which man lives between death and rebirth.

But there is one essential. The faculties by means of which men will be able, between death and rebirth, to behold the Christ Event, cannot be acquired in that world; they must be acquired on the physical plane and carried from there into the life between death and a new birth. There are faculties which must be acquired on the earth, for we have not been placed on the physical earth for nothing. It is an error to believe that there is no purpose in living on the earth. Faculties have to be acquired there that can be acquired in no other world—they are the faculties for understanding the Christ Event and the events that will follow it. Those human beings who now develop these faculties on the earth through the teachings of Spiritual Science will carry them through the gate of death. It is not through Initiation only, but through a clear-minded acceptance of spiritual-scientific knowledge, that the faculties are acquired which make it possible also to be aware of the Christ Event in the spiritual world between death and a new birth. But those who turn deaf ears to this knowledge must wait until a later incarnation to acquire the faculties that must be acquired here on earth in order that the Christ Event may be experienced in yonder world. Therefore let nobody imagine that the announcement of the Christ Event—an event which the teachings of Spiritual Science alone can make intelligible—will bear no fruit for him if he has already passed through the gate of death. It will indeed bear fruit.

Obviously, therefore, spiritual research prepares the way for a new Christ Event. But those who receive into themselves the essence of the teaching of the spirit as part of their whole life of soul, as a quickening, vital force, must then grow on to a spiritual understanding of these things, realising that through Spiritual Science they must learn to understand our newly dawning age thoroughly and fundamentally. We must come to realise that in the future the most important events must be sought, not on the physical plane but outside and beyond it, just as Christ must be sought in the spiritual world when He appears in His etheric form.

What has here been said will be repeated again and again in the coming decades. But there will be people who misunderstand it and who will say: So Christ is to come again! Because this view will be tinged with the belief that this is a physical return, such people will support all the false Messiahs who will appear. And in the middle of the twentieth century there will be plenty of them, making use of the materialistic beliefs, the materialistic thinking and feeling of men in order to proclaim themselves as Christ. There have always been false Messiahs. For example, in the South of France, before the Crusades, there appeared a false Messiah whom his followers regarded as a kind of Christ incarnate in a physical body. Before then a false Messiah had appeared in Spain, attracting a large number of followers. In North Africa, a man who announced himself as the Christ created a great sensation. In the seventeenth century a man who appeared in Smyrna, alleging himself to be the Christ, drew a vast crowd of followers; his name was Shabbathai Zewi. Pilgrims journeyed to him from Poland, Austria, Spain, Germany, France, from all over Europe and from wide provinces of Africa and Asia.

In past centuries this kind of happening was not so deplorable, for the demand to distinguish the true from the false had not yet been made of humanity. Only now are we living in the age when disaster might befall if men were not equal to the spiritual test. Those will be equal to it who know that human faculties develop to higher stages, that the faculties on account of which it was necessary for Christ to be seen physically were dependent upon a physical manifestation at the time of the founding of Christianity but that no progress would be made if in this present century men were not to find Him again in a higher form. Those who are striving in the sense of Spiritual Science will have to prove that they are the ones able to distinguish the false Messiahs from the One Messiah who does not appear in the flesh, but appears as a spiritual Being to the newly awakened faculties of men.

The time will come when men will again see into the spiritual world and there behold the land whence flow the streams of true spiritual nourishment for everything that happens in the physical world. Again and again we have heard that it was once possible for men to look with clairvoyant vision into the spiritual world. Oriental writings also contain the tradition of an ancient spiritual land [See note 1 at end of lecture.] into which men were once able to gaze and whence they could draw the super-sensible influences that were available for the physical world. Many descriptions of this land, that was once within reach of men's vision but has withdrawn, are full of sadness. This land was indeed once accessible to men and will be so again now that Kali Yuga, the Dark Age, is over. Initiation has always led thither, and it was always possible for those who had achieved Initiation to guide their steps into that mysterious land which is said to have disappeared from the sphere of human experience. Deeply moving are the writings which tell of this ancient land, whither the Initiates repair ever and again in order to bring from there the new streams and impulses for everything that is to be imparted to mankind from century to century. Those who are connected with the spiritual world in this way resort again and again to Shamballa—the name of this mysterious land. It is the deep fount into which clairvoyant vision once reached; it withdrew during Kali Yuga and is spoken of as an ancient fairyland that will come again into the realm of man. Shamballa will be there again when Kali Yuga has run its course. Mankind will rise through normal human faculties into the land of Shamballa, the land whence the Initiates draw strength and wisdom for the missions they are to fulfil. Shamballa is a reality, was a reality, will be a reality again for humanity. And when Shamballa reveals itself again, one of the first visions to come to men will be that of Christ in His etheric form. Into the land declared by Oriental writings to have vanished there is no Leader other than Christ. It is Christ who will lead men to Shamballa.

We must inscribe into our souls what can come to pass for humanity if the omen [See note 2 at the end of this lecture.] referred to in the lecture yesterday is rightly understood. If men realise that they dare not allow themselves to sink more deeply into matter, that their path must be reversed, that a spiritual life must begin, then, at first for a few and in the course of two thousand five hundred years for a greater and greater number of human beings, there will arise the experience of the land of Shamballa—woven of light, shone through with light, teeming with wisdom. Such is the event which for those who have the will to understand, for those who have ears to hear and eyes to see, must be described as denoting the most momentous turning-point in the evolution of humanity at the dawn of the Abraham-epoch in the Christian era. It is the event through which men's understanding of the Christ Impulse will be enhanced and intensified.

Strange as it may seem, wisdom will thereby lose nothing of its value. The more insight men achieve, the greater and mightier will Christ appear to them to be! When once their gaze can penetrate into Shamballa, they will be able to understand much of what is indeed contained in the Gospels but for the recognition of which they will need to experience a kind of event of Damascus. Thus at the time when men are more sceptical of the original records than they have ever been, the new form of belief in Christ Jesus will arise when we grow into the realm where He will first be encountered: the mysterious land of Shamballa.

Halley's Comet. The following passages are from the lecture to which Dr. Steiner is referring: Mysteries of Cosmic Existence. Comets and the Moon. “... Halley's Comet has a quite definite task and everything else that it brings with it is definitely related to this task. Halley's Comet—we are speaking of its spiritual aspect—has the task of impressing human nature as a whole in such a way that human nature and the human being always take a further step in respect of the development of the Ego when the Comet comes near to the Earth. It is the step in development which leads out the Ego to concepts connected with the physical plane. ... When it is said that Halley's Comet may be an omen, that its influence, working alone, might make men superficial and lead out the Ego more and more on to the physical plane, and that precisely in our days this must be resisted—it is not said for the purpose of reviving an old superstition. The resistance can come about only by a spiritual view of the world like that of Anthroposophy taking the place of the trend of evolution brought about by Halley's Comet ...”

See also, Lecture-Course 17, The Christ Impulse and the Development of the Ego-Consciousness. Lecture 5.