The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In material science it is customary—with the exception of a few circles who in modern times have come to a different explanation—to represent our present solar system as having developed out of a kind of nebula which embraced a space as far as the orbit of Neptune, that is, as far as the orbit of the outermost planet of our solar system. And then, it is supposed, through a condensing process, our sun and the planets moving round it gradually formed. As we have said, there are now a few exponents -who have a somewhat different view; but they too do not bring forward anything essential for us who take a spiritual view. So our sun and the planets circling round it are supposed to have formed themselves into globes. In connection with this a neat little comparison has always been made use of in the schools, and it is still employed to-day, to show by ocular demonstration how a whole planetary system can originate through rotation. Some oily liquid is taken, which, when placed in water takes a globular form. Then a small disc is cut and inserted through the equatorial line of this oily ball so that it is divided into two halves. This is then rotated by means of a pin stuck through the centre of the disc, and one sees at first one drop separate itself and circle as a separate body round the large globe, then a second and a third drop, and finally a large drop remains in the centre around which many smaller ones revolve. “A planetary system in miniature!” says the experimenter. Then he says: Why should not our solar system originate from that primeval nebula in this way, if we can now imitate it in this miniature solar system? Usually this comparison seems to be extremely illuminating and people now understand how once upon a time Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Earth, Venus, Mercury separated from that primeval nebula. But the whole affair, not only the comparison but the whole idea, proceeds from the emptiness of all present-day thinking, for the persons in question, otherwise quite learned men, who put for-ward this illustration in such an illuminating manner, forget only one thing, namely, that they themselves are present and turn the pin. Now self forgetfulness is very good in certain realms of life, but in this case, if the experimenter is forgotten, the most important thing is forgotten, for without him the drop of oil would never rotate at all. The learned person who believes in such a superstition—this superstition is called the Kant-Laplace system—should at least be logical in his thinking, he should at least presume that some sort of being must have sat on a gigantic stool in space at that time and set a gigantic axis in motion. But human thought has gradually become so accustomed to consider only the material, that the contradiction in such a comparison is no longer noticed. As a matter of fact, there is a certain truth in this so-called Kant-Laplace system, although the truth is different from the materialistic explanation of the matter. There is a certain truth in it because to spiritual vision everything contained in our present solar system actually appears as having proceeded from such a primeval nebula; only to him who can really investigate historically it is clear that the good in the Kant-Laplace hypothesis comes from occult traditions. This was forgotten when the word “occultism” became something of which one was afraid, as children are of the chimney-sweep. That which really took place did not happen without the influence of spiritual beings and powers. Matter can do nothing unless spiritual beings are behind it.

It would take us too far to-day if, linking on to what was said yesterday, we were to explain the whole of our solar system. Leaving the planets such as Jupiter, Saturn, etc., out of our present study, let us only keep in mind what is of special importance to human life and human evolution.

At one time there was, in fact, such a nebula; and in this all the parts of our solar system were as if dissolved. But, bound up with this nebula, so that they belonged to it, were all the beings mentioned in the course of our observations yesterday. For example, all the beings who passed through the human stage in the twenty-four Rounds were connected with this cosmic nebula. Other beings too were bound up with it. They all dwelt in this nebula which, if not thought of in connection with these beings, is a fantastic abstraction. In the way the materialistic chemist imagines this nebula, it is impossible; it exists only in thought, there is no reality. In reality, the nebula only exists because it is inhabited by a number of spiritual beings. For when this nebula again became visible, there were connected with it all the beings who once inhabited ancient Saturn, who then passed through the various stages of evolution through Sun and Moon right on up to Earth, when after a long intermediate pause the Earth-nebula arose, so to speak. The other beings also with whom we became acquainted on the Sun, were connected with this nebula. It is the whole choir of these beings, who filled the nebula, who produced the movements. For it is beings who create their field of work.

For example, there were beings who needed a dwelling place quite different from that of man if they were to undergo the evolution suited to them. The men who lived upon the ancient Moon as the ancestors of the present men had only physical body, etheric and astral bodies. With these three members of their being they came out of the so-called pralaya again like a plant from the seed. Thus when the entire system began it was unsuitable for the beings who had brought with them the germs for the present man. Had the speed of development been maintained which our solar system had at the beginning when it came forth from the cosmic twilight, man would have been unable to find the path of his evolution. It would have been as if you were now to be born and then in a very short time become old. If the speed of evolution natal to the Sun had been maintained, man would have grown old quickly; he would be unable to take the slow course through the decades which he now actually does; after a short time he would have white hair, he would be old almost before he was a child.

But this was not to be. There were beings who needed a quicker tempo. These only went through a part of evolution with man, then they took out the heavenly body which now stands as the sun in the heavens and made it their dwelling place. They drew out the substance of the sun together with their own being. For the sun which sends its light to us to-day is inhabited by spiritual beings, just as our earth is. With every sunbeam descending to the earth come the actions of those spiritual beings who in the course of the evolutions of Saturn, Sun and Moon had progressed so far that they were able to participate in the rapid development taking place on the present sun. High, exalted beings were connected with this sun existence at the beginning of our earth development. These separated from the earth; and that which then remained you must imagine as if you had mixed together the present moon and earth in a great cauldron, and this mingled earth and moon circled round the sun for a time.

Thus before we reached the point described yesterday as human incarnation, we have first to recognize the separation of the sun from the earth, that is, the present earth plus the present moon. Upon the sun remained the beings who are the spiritual directors of earthly events. When they came over from the ancient Moon there were seven such beings; in Genesis they are called Elohim, Spirits of Light. For a time they went through their evolution together with the earth, then they drew forth the sun so that they could now work upon the earth from the sun. These Elohim, these Spirits of Light, were seven in number. Six of them united their existence with the actual cosmic sun, and one, known in the Old Testament as Jehovah, separated from them and remained at first united with the earth. He guided and directed the earthly evolution from within, while the others worked upon it from without. That was the position for a time. But after what was pointed out yesterday concerning the ancient Moon, you will understand that with the withdrawal of the sun was connected a condensation of all that emerged as earth plus moon. There came a period in the earth's evolution when not only the substance, but all beings, underwent a coarsening. For example, the beings who later became man, who at that time were very soft and delicate, underwent a coarsening through taking on horrible instincts. A coarsening of all life took place.

Evolution could not remain thus if man were to arise. A coarsening would have taken place, everything would have become more and more dense and the human beings would have stiffened into mummies, they would have become mummified. And there would very soon have been a planet upon which some-thing not exactly beautiful, but human-like mummies, statues would have collected. The earth would have become mummified. A different event had to take place. Through the government of Jehovah, as cosmic spirit, that which you now see as the moon as the burnt-out moon-dross in the heavens, was separated from the whole mass of earth plus moon. Not only were the grossest substances separated but also the grossest beings. Hence only through the withdrawal of the sun it was brought about that man did not proceed too quickly in his evolution, and through the withdrawal of the moon it was brought about that he did not develop towards a condition of drying up, densification, or mummification.

Thus the earth was separated from the whole mass, and now the course of human evolution was guided on the earth under the influence of these two heavenly bodies—that is, of course, of their beings, the six sun Spirits and the moon Spirit, who had separated himself for the salvation of man. And it was so guided that on the whole these two forces were balanced. Through the exit of both the sun-forces and the moon-forces, exactly the right tempo for human development was attained.

Now in order to understand this more clearly, imagine a man as if influenced only by the sun. You know that man goes through his evolution upon the earth in many, many incarnations. Man began with his first incarnation, then took on a new body over and over again, until he goes through his last incarnation. He passes through a series of incarnations, as a result of which he develops slowly and rises from one incarnation to the next. Men trod the surface of our earth as true spiritual infants. Since the separation of sun and moon from our earth they have risen to the present stage. All these souls will return in different bodies up to the end of the earth's evolution. Now if man were influenced by the sun alone he would have to pass through in a single incarnation all that he now goes through in so many. The right tempo comes into the many incarnations through the balancing of the forces between the sun and moon from without.

Modern man was gradually shaped during the period which followed the withdrawal of sun and moon; the first germs of the present-day man were then created. That was at a time when man moved upon this earth in quite a different way from that in which he moves now. You must not imagine that when the moon had just gone forth man moved upon this earth in a fleshly form as he does now. There appear again all the forms which had previously been there, as a repetition; and when the earth was liberated from the sun and moon it looked approximately like the old Moon, even softer. And if a being with eyes organized like those of the present day had looked at the earth he would not yet have been able to see man. On the other hand, certain other beings were there who were not sufficiently mature to await a later time. These had to take bodily form while the stage of evolution was still incomplete; so that some time after the moon's departure from the earth certain forms of the lower animals could already be seen physically condensed. Man had not yet descended, nor yet the higher mammals. Man was still a spirit being. He floated as a spirit round the earth and took into himself the finest substances from the environment of the earth. Then gradually he densified so far that he could descend to where the earth had already become solid and islands had formed.

Thus we see that the first human beings appeared comparatively late in the earth's evolution and at that time they had a very different constitution from the present human being. I cannot describe to you the forms of those men which first crystallized, so to speak, out of the spirit. Although you have already heard much that is difficult to believe, you would be greatly shocked if I were to describe to you the grotesque forms of the bodies in which your souls were then incarnated. You would not be able to bear such a description. However, at a later date, when these things which are only now beginning to come to the consciousness of man through Anthroposophy, when they more and more penetrate men's consciousness, this will have to be made known, and it will have a tremendous result, it will be extremely important to the whole life of man. For only when man learns how his body has developed, how the organs he now possesses have gradually developed out of entirely different forms, will he feel that remarkable relationship existing between the organs in the human body which to-day are apparently far apart. He will then see the correspondence between certain organs, for example, between the appendix and the windpipe, which in their earlier form grew together in those remarkably formed beings. All that to-day is man is the previous form unrolled as it were, the previous form unfolded in the most varied ways. Organs which to-day are separated formerly grew together. They have, however, kept their relationship, and very frequently this relationship is manifested in illnesses. It is seen that when a certain organ is diseased another one is of necessity involved. Hence those who really study medicine will have to make many discoveries, of which the present medical age, which is only a collection of notes, does not dream; then only will physicians really learn something about the true nature of man. All this is merely to point out how entirely different was man's earlier form.

The solid parts have only been built into this human form gradually. There were originally no bones in the human body, even when it had already descended. The bones were developed from soft cartilaginous structures which traversed the human body like cords. These in their turn originated from quite soft substances, and these soft substances from fluid substances, these from airy, the airy from etheric and the etheric from astral which had densified from spiritual substantiality. If you trace it back you will find that everything material has originated from the spiritual. Everything is in archetype in the spiritual world. It was only the Atlantean epoch that the bones, formerly merely indicated, actually developed in man.

We must now more closely examine Lemurian humanity in order the better to understand the writer of the Apocalypse. I need only indicate that following the first period, when the moon had separated from the earth and man descended, he was of a very different nature as regards his will power from what he became later. At that time the will of man worked magically—by his will he could work upon the growth of flowers. When he exerted his will he could make a flower shoot up quickly, a capacity which can only be acquired to-day by an abnormal process of development. Hence at that time the natural surroundings depended upon how the will of man was constituted. If it was good it worked soothingly upon the billowing waters, upon the storm and upon the fiery structures which were then all around, for the earth was to a great extent of a volcanic nature. Man worked soothingly upon all this through a good will and destructively through all evil will. Whole islands could be destroyed by evil will. Thus the human will was in complete correspondence with its environment. The tracts of land upon which man then lived were destroyed essentially by the evil will of man, and only a small part of mankind was saved (we have here to distinguish between race-development and soul-development) who lived on into the epoch which we may describe in so far as words can express clairvoyant perception.

After this catastrophe by fire we come to the Atlantean epoch when the human race developed essentially on a continent which now forms the bed of the Atlantic Ocean, between the present Europe and America. At that time man lived under very different physical conditions. At the beginning of the Atlantean epoch he was a structure which perceived in quite a different way from the present man; we have already indicated this in the first lecture and again later; to-day we shall again point out this different kind of vision of the man of that epoch. He still had a kind of spiritual vision, because the construction of his body was different from what it is now. The etheric body was not yet so firmly bound up with the physical body. The etheric body of the head extended far beyond the physical body. Only towards the last third of the Atlantean epoch did the projecting etheric body draw in and take the form of the present physical human head. Since the form of the ancient Atlantean was so very different from that of present man and his members so differently joined together, his whole life of consciousness, his whole soul life was also different. And here—if we wish to understand the Apocalyptist—we must touch upon a very important, but a very mysterious, chapter.

If you were to enter this ancient Atlantis, you would find that it was surrounded not by such pure air as the present earth but by air saturated with volumes of mist, with water. This air became clearer and more transparent the further Atlantis developed, but the mists were densest where the more advanced Atlantean civilization referred to developed. The thickest mists were there, and from these developed the foundations of the later civilizations. Atlantis was covered far and wide by those mists. A division of rain and sunshine such as we have to-day did not then exist. Hence in ancient Atlantis that which you know as the rainbow could not appear. You might search the whole of Atlantis and you would not find it. Only when the condensation of the water led to flooding, when the great flood spread itself over the earth, could the rainbow originate physically. And this is a point where from Spiritual Science you will gain the greatest respect for the religious records. For when you are told that after the flood, Noah, the representative of those who then saved the human race, sees the rainbow first appear, this is really an historical event. After the flood humanity saw the first rainbow; previously it was not physically possible. Here you will see how profound, how literally true the religious records are. To-day many are distressed when one says that the religious records are literally true. Many quote a saying which is true; it is quoted, however, by lazy people, not as a true statement but from indolence. It is the saying: “The letter killeth but the spirit giveth life.” From this they deduce the right to take no notice at all of what stands in the records, to have no longer the will to recognize what is actually there, for it is the “dead letter” they say. And so they like to let their spirit shine and concoct all sorts of fantasies. These persons may indeed be very clever in their explanations, but that is not the point; the point is that we ought really to see in the records what is contained in them. “The letter killeth but the spirit giveth life” has the same significance in mystical language as the saying of Goethe, “He who has not this, this dying and becoming, is but a sad guest upon the dark earth.” This saying does not mean: “If you wish to lead some one to a higher knowledge you must slay him,” but it means that just through the culture of the physical world man must uplift himself to spirituality. So also the letter is the body of the spirit, and we must first have and understand it, then we may say that we can find the spirit in it. The letter, the understood letter, must then die so that the spirit may be resurrected from it. This saying is not an injunction to fancy anything you please about what is contained in the religious records. When we recognize the true significance of this rainbow as we have represented it, something like deep respect for the religious records invades our soul, and we get an idea of how, through the deepening of the understanding by the teachings of Anthroposophy, man first attains to true and real feelings and advances to a true understanding of the religious records by an act of will.

We will now look back into ancient Atlantis. We have already said that man then lived in a different state of consciousness and that his memory was different from what it is now; but the difference is much more considerable. If we go far back not merely into the later period of Atlantis but to the beginning, we then find the human consciousness very different from that which we possess to-day.

Let us once more consider the present consciousness. During the day a person uses his senses. At night he goes to sleep. On the bed lie the physical body and the etheric body; the astral body and the “I” withdraw. The sphere of consciousness darkens. The man of to-day sees nothing and hears nothing. Then again in the morning when the astral body and the “I” re-enter the physical body and etheric body, physical objects again confront him. How was it in the early Atlantean epoch? Let us take the moment when in the morning man plunged into the physical body and etheric body; at that time he did not have a physical world around him such as we have to-day. All the present objects which are now seen with clear outlines were then seen as if surrounded with an aura, with coloured edges, quite indistinct. In ancient Atlantis the appearance was somewhat similar to what is now seen when in the evening there is a dense fog and you cannot see the street lamps clearly, but surrounded by coloured edges. Thus it was in early Atlantis. All objects were seen indistinctly, not with clear outlines and surfaces as to-day, everything was as if enveloped in coloured mist. Only gradually have clear outlines developed. Had we looked at a rose in the first portion of Atlantis it was as if a cloudy structure arose and in the middle something red. Only gradually did the external colour appear to be laid on the surface; only later did objects obtain sharp outlines.

Hence you see that the physical world surrounding man was quite different in ancient Atlantis. It was also different when at night he rose out of his physical body when—shall we say—he went to sleep. Really it was not sleep in the present sense. However, the entire world of the misty physical formations remained below, and a spiritual world arose. Possessing no sharp outlines man lived within a spiritual world. Spiritual beings were his companions. In the first portion of the Atlantean epoch day and night alternated in such a way that when man plunged into his physical body he had only hazy, indistinct pictures of the physical world; but when at night he left the physical body he was able to live spiritually, although somewhat indistinctly, among spirits; he moved among spirits. And above all, man's entire life of feeling was also different in the Atlantean epoch. At that time when he went out of his physical body and etheric body, he did not feel fatigue and the need for rest. Neither did he find rest. He had to enter into the spiritual world; that was then his sphere of activity. On the other hand, when the morning came, he felt the need for rest and sought out his resting-place, which was his own body. There he lay peacefully. He crept into his own body and rested during the day.

Thus in the first period of Atlantis it was entirely different from what it is now. During the Atlantean epoch, man gradually passed from the very opposite conditions into those of the later period. This came about more and more as the etheric body was driven into the physical body. This occurred during the last third of the Atlantean epoch. Before this event man felt himself as a waking being above in the spiritual world; but as yet he did not say to himself “I,” he did not possess self-consciousness. When he withdrew from the physical body and etheric body in order to go into the brilliance of the night, he felt himself to be a member of the spirituality which was above, he felt himself safely hidden, so to speak, in his group-soul. It always became bright around him during the night; but he felt himself dependent. Just as our finger belongs to our “I,” so man felt that he belonged to the group-souls which are seen spiritually as the four heads of the Lion, Eagle, Bull and Man, described in the Apocalypse of John. Man felt himself transposed into one such group-soul. And only when, snail-like, he was in his bodily shell did he feel that he possessed something of his own. For the circumstance that man became an independent being resulted from his being able to envelop himself in his body. He had, however, to pay for this confinement in his body by the gradual obscuration of the spiritual world, until it completely withdrew. In its place the world which he saw below when he was in the physical body became brighter and clearer. In this way it gradually dawned upon him that he was an “I,” that he had self-consciousness within him. He learned to say “I” to himself.

If we wish to characterize what took place at that time we must imagine man creeping out of his “snail-shell,” as it were, into the spiritual world. There he is among spiritually divine beings. There resounds to him from without the name of what he is. One group heard the word which in the original language was the word for that group; another group heard a different word. Man could not name himself from within; his name sounded into him from without. When he thus crept out of the “snail-shell” of his body he knew what he was, because this knowledge was poured into his soul. Now when in his body he learned to perceive the physical environment, he learned to feel himself as “I,” he learned to feel within himself the divine power which previously was poured into him, he learned to feel God within him. The God nearest to him, who pointed to his “I,” he called Jehovah. This God was the “I”-leader, and man felt the power of this God arising within his “I.”

External events were connected with this. When the first Atlantean thus descended into his physical body and looked out into space, he did not see an actual rainbow; in the place where the sun later emerged, he saw something like a circle formed of colour; the sun did not yet penetrate in power, but acted through the mist; though hindered and held back by the fog, its forces influenced the earth. It appeared very gradually. All that we have described as the awakening of external consciousness was connected with the emergence of the sun from the mist. That which was up above where the other six spirits had their abode, who together with Jehovah had to guide the earth evolution, gradually emerged and shone down upon the earth in deeds.

What had taken place in man? When previously he rose out of his body, when it was night, so to speak, his soul and spirit entered into the inner astral brilliance to which the external sun is not necessary. This brilliance surrounded him. It was the same light which later shone down physically from the sun, from mighty spiritual beings. As he gradually enclosed himself in his physical consciousness, the door of inner vision was closed. Darkness surrounded him when at night he left his physical and etheric bodies and entered the spiritual world. To the extent to which he confined himself, to the same extent arose the external light which represents the deeds of the spiritual beings of the sun; the light of the spiritual beings shone externally upon the earth. Man prepared himself to look upon the external light as something material. The light shone in his then darkened inner being, but the light was not then comprehended by his darkness. This is a world-historical event. Man bought his self-consciousness at that time through spiritual darkening. In this way man grew out of the brilliance connected with the group-souls. But it was only the very first dawning of the individuality. It was a long, long time before he really grew possessed of it. The last portion of the Atlantean epoch passed away and the flood came.

The post-Atlantean epoch began. The ancient Indian civilization passed away. True self-consciousness had not yet developed. Then came the Persian and Babylonian-Egyptian ages. Man gradually matured so as to develop self-consciousness within him. At length came the fourth age. At this stage something of tremendous importance took place for which all that had gone before was the preparation. Imagine yourself now uplifted from the earth to a distant star and gifted with spiritual vision, looking down to the earth from that distant star. You would then see that this earth as physical body is not only physical body, but that an etheric body and an astral body belong to it, just as with man. The earth has all this too. You would see the earth surrounded by its aura and from that star you would be able to follow the development of the earth's aura for thousands of years. You would see this earth surrounded by all sorts of colours; in the centre the physical kernel and around it the aura floating in various forms and colours; and in this spiritual atmosphere of the earth you would see the most varied structures. You would see these colours and forms change in various ways in the course of thousands of years; but there would come a moment, a moment of great importance, when the whole aura assumes a different form and colour. Seen from outside the earth then appears in a new light; and this takes place extremely quickly, so that one has to say: From this moment a fundamental trans-formation of the earth has taken place; its aura has changed completely. When is this? It is the moment when upon Golgotha the blood flowed from the wounds of the Redeemer. This moment is an extremely important one, the most important moment in the whole of the earth's evolution! The moment when the blood flows from the wounds of the Redeemer is the same as that in which the aura of the earth shapes itself anew. An entirely new power enters in, the power which gives the most important impulse to the earth's evolution, for which all that we have considered up to now was only the preparation.

To the chemist the blood of Golgotha is the same as any other blood; but in reality it is quite different. It signifies that the substance of the blood flows down to the earth, and that the spirit corresponding to it fills the aura of the earth with new impulses and new forces which have significance for the future evolution of humanity. From there the forces which change the earth stream forth, from there they stream through man. Only a small part of what flowed in at that moment has been realized up to now. Ever more and more man will learn to understand what the earth has become through that moment of Golgotha, and what man can develop towards in that consciousness which he has gained since Atlantis. What, then, has man gained since Atlantis? Two things: the “I”-consciousness and the faculty of sight in the external world. That which previously was open to him, the spiritual world, has been closed. Truly these earlier men saw what the later myths relate—Woden, Mercury, Jupiter, Zeus. They saw all these beings at night; they were then among them. This door to the spiritual beings has closed. In its place man gained the world now surrounding him. The spirits have withdrawn from him; all that he was able to see at that time has disappeared. Formerly he saw the Divine when he slipped out of the snail-shell of his physical body. He had now to see the Divine within the body if it were to appear before him. This means nothing else than that we must receive the Divine in bodily visible shape because human consciousness has become adapted to physical vision, and for this reason the Divine Itself had to assume bodily physical form. Therefore the Divine appeared once on the earth in a fleshly body. It had to appear in this form because man had advanced to this stage of perception it had to be presented in this way to his perception so that he could understand it. And all the appearances which had previously taken place at other stages of evolution had to be united in that greatest event in the earth's history, which will throw light on the whole future and which we shall now unveil from the Apocalypse; in that event which physically looks as if drops of blood stream down to the earth, but spiritually as if something rises up which changes the aura of the earth. The force which then flowed in will work together with the earth throughout the whole future. The earth-soul, the spirit of the whole earth, was then inoculated with something new. The Christ principle united with the earth at that time and the earth has become the body of this Christ principle. So that the statement is literally true, “He who eats my bread treads me underfoot.” When man eats the bread of the earth he eats the body of the earth and this is the body of the earth-spirit which, as the Christ-Spirit, since the event on Golgotha, is united with the earth. And man walks upon the earth-body, he treads this body underfoot. All can be understood literally if only we are able first of all to comprehend the text in the right way.

To such a man as the writer of John's Gospel, all that he knew, all that he could grasp with spiritual vision, was a summons to understand the greatest event in the earth's evolution. Of all that he was able to stream through spiritual vision he said, “I must use it in order to understand Christ and His work.” It was the intention of the writer of the Apocalypse to use all his occult knowledge in order to explain the Event of Golgotha. Whatever he could learn from occult science was regarded by him as a road to wisdom, helping him to understand this event which he has placed before us in such a wonderful way, and regarding which we shall see what it signified for him.

Even within the limits enjoined upon us by discretion at the present time when one speaks of these matters, one cannot discuss the Mystery of Evil without profound emotion. For here we touch upon one of the deepest mysteries of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, upon something which meets with little understanding today. Man's sensitivity to these things is but little developed as yet. Nonetheless, in all the so-called secret societies of recent times repeated attempts have been made to give certain indications, in the form of symbols, of the Mystery of Evil and the Mystery of Death which is related to it. But since the last third of the nineteenth century these symbolical representations have seldom been treated seriously, even in the Masonic communities, or have been treated in the manner I indicated here two years ago with reference to important events of the present day.^T1

The indications I gave on that occasion were not without a deeper motive, for he who understands these things knows what unplumbed depths of human nature we touch upon here. There is ample evidence that in reality the will to understand these things scarcely exists today. But the will to understand will assuredly come with time and we must ensure by every means at our command that it is awakened. When speaking of these matters one must sometimes give the impression of wanting to criticize certain aspects of the contemporary scene. Even what I said yesterday, for example on the subject of the ideological aspirations of the bourgeoisie since the last third of the nineteenth century can also be regarded as a criticism if taken superficially. Nothing of what is said here is intended as a criticism; I simply wish to characterize, so that we are aware of what forces and impulses have been operative. From a certain point of view it was necessary that these impulses should predominate. One could show that it was a historical necessity that the Bourgeoisie of Europe should remain asleep from the forties to the end of the seventies. Nonetheless the knowledge of this ‘cultural sleep’ ought to have a positive effect; it ought to awaken today certain impulses of cognition and volition which will prepare the ground for the future.

In the present epoch of the Consciousness Soul two mysteries (as I have already indicated, I can only speak of them within certain limits) are of particular importance for the evolution of mankind—the Mystery of Death and the Mystery of Evil. From a certain angle the Mystery of Death which is related to the Mystery of Evil during the present epoch, immediately raises the vital question: what is the meaning of death for human evolution?

I recently said once again that what passes for science today takes the line of least resistance in these questions. For most scientists death is simply cessation of life, irrespective of whether it is the death of a plant, animal or human being. Spiritual science however cannot take the easy road by treating everything alike. Otherwise the death of a man could be equated with the end of a watch, the death of a watch. For man death is something totally different from the socalled death of other beings. We can only understand the phenomenon of death against the background of those forces which are operative in the universe and which, when they lay hold of man, are responsible for his physical death. Certain forces, certain impulses are active in the universe: but for them man could not suffer death. Man is part of the universe; these forces also permeate man and when they are active in man they cause his death. The question now arises; what do these forces which are active in the universe accomplish apart from bringing death to man? It would be a mistake to imagine that their sole purpose is to bring death to man; that is only a secondary effect. It would never occur to anyone to say: the function of a railway engine is to wear down the rails. Yet that is what actually happens; the engine gradually wears down the rails, it cannot do otherwise. But that is not its function—it is designed for a different purpose. If one were to define a locomotive as a machine whose function is to wear down the rails, one would obviously be talking nonsense. Nonetheless there is no denying the fact that there is a connection between the wearing down of the track and the nature of the locomotive. It would be equally mistaken to say that the forces in the universe which bring death to man exist for this sole purpose. This is only a secondary effect. Their real function is to endow man with the capacity to develop the Consciousness Soul. You see how close is the connection between the Mystery of Death and the evolution of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, and how important it is that in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch the Mystery of Death should be revealed to all. For the task of the forces which as a secondary effect bring death to man is to implant in him, in the course of his evolution, not the Consciousness Soul, but the capacity to develop the Consciousness Soul.

This leads not only to an understanding of the Mystery of Death, but also encourages us to think precisely in matters of importance. In many respects modern thinking—and again this is not intended as a criticism, I merely wish to characterize—is, if I may use the familiar expression which is much to the point, simply ‘sloppy’ (schlampig). The thinking current in modern science is almost without exception typical of the kind of thinking that says: the function of the locomotive is to wear down the rails. Most scientific pronouncements today are on this level. Such thinking will prove to be inadequate if we wish to create in the future a state of affairs beneficial to mankind. And in the epoch of the Consciousness Soul this can only be achieved in full consciousness.

I must constantly remind you that this is a truth of profound importance for our time. We frequently hear of people who, drawing upon a seeming fund of wisdom, suggest various social and economic measures, in the belief that it is still possible today to make these recommendations without the help of spiritual science. Only those who think in contemporary terms, in conformity with the needs of the time, realize that all proposals for a future structure of society which are not grounded in spiritual science are a snare and delusion. Only those who are fully aware of this think in conformity with the needs of the time. Those who still listen to the various learned discourses on political economy which are devoid of spiritual content are asleep to the demands of our time.

These forces, which must be described as the forces of death, took possession of man's corporeal nature in earlier times—how, you will find in my book Occult Science. They first penetrated into his soul life at that time. For the remainder of his earth evolution man must assimilate these forces of death, and in the course of the present epoch their influence upon him will be such that he brings to full expression in himself the faculty of the Consciousness Soul.

The method I adopted when enquiring into the Mystery of Death, i.e. into the forces which are active in the universe and bring death to man, is equally valid for indicating the forces of evil. Even the forces of evil are not designed to promote evil actions within the human order—that again is only a secondary effect. If these forces did not exist in the universe man could not develop the Consciousness Soul; he would be unable to receive as he should in the course of his future evolution the forces of the Spirit Self, the Life Spirit and the Spirit Man. He must first pass through the stage of the Consciousness Soul if he wishes to receive after his own fashion the forces of the Spirit Seif, the Life Spirit and the Spirit Man. And to this end he must, in the course of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, i.e. up to the middle of the fourth millennium, fully unite his being with the forces of death. This lies within his power. But he cannot unite his own being with the forces of evil in the same way. The forces of evil in the cosmos are such that only in the Jupiter epoch will he be able to assimilate them as he now assimilates the forces of death. One can say therefore that the forces of evil act upon man with less intensity, they take possession of only a part of his being. In order to understand the nature of these forces of evil we must not look to their external effects, but must look for evil where it reveals its true nature, where it acts as it must of necessity act, because the forces which appear as evil in the universe also play into man. And here we touch upon something that can be spoken of only with deep emotion, something we can only express if we assume at the same time that it will be received with the greatest seriousness. If we wish to enquire into evil in man we must not look for it in the evil actions of society, but in evil tendencies. We must first of all ignore completely the consequences of these tendencies which are manifested more or less in a particular individual and turn our attention to the evil tendencies themselves. The question then arises: in which men are evil tendencies active in our present fifth post-Atlantean epoch, those tendencies which, in their secondary effects, are so clearly manifested in evil actions? Which men are subject to these evil tendencies?

We receive the answer to our question when we attempt to cross what is called the ‘threshold of the Guardian’ and to acquire a real understanding of the being of man. And the answer is this: since the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, evil tendencies are subconsciously present in all men. It is precisely this influx of evil tendencies into men that marks his entrance into the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Expressed somewhat radically one could say with every justification: he who crosses the threshold of the spiritual world discovers that there is not a crime in the calendar to which every man, in so far as he belongs to the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, is not subconsciously prone. Whether in a particular case this tendency leads to an evil action depends upon wholly different circumstances and not upon the tendency itself. If we are to tell mankind the plain unvarnished truth today, we cannot escape unpalatable facts.

The pressing question then arises: what is the purpose of these forces which induce evil tendencies in man, what is the purpose of these forces in the universe when they first infiltrate man's being? They are certainly not present in the universe in order to provoke evil acts in human society. (The reason why they promote evil acts will be discussed later.) These forces of evil do not exist in the universe for the sole purpose of inducing man to commit criminal acts any more than the forces of death exist simply to bring death to man; their function is to awaken in man, when he is called upon to develop the Consciousness Soul, the tendency to open himself to the life of the spirit, as I described yesterday.

Man must assimilate these forces of evil which are operative in the universe. By so doing he implants in his being the seed which enables him to experience consciously the life of the spirit. The purpose of these forces of evil which are perverted by the social order is to enable man to break through to the life of the spirit at the level of the Consciousness Soul. If he did not open himself to these tendencies to evil he would not succeed in developing consciously the impulse to receive from the universe the spirit which henceforth must fertilize the whole sphere of cultural life if it is not to perish. Our best course is to consider first of all what is to become of those forces of which the evil actions of men are a caricature and to ask ourselves what is destined to happen in the course of the evolution of mankind under the influence of these forces which, at the same time, are the source of evil tendencies.

When one speaks of these things one must touch upon the very core of human evolution. At the same time they are related to the calamities that have overtaken mankind at the present time and will still befall it. For those disasters, like flashes of summer lightning, are harbingers of quite other things that are destined to overtake mankind—lightning flashes that today often reveal the reverse of what is destined to happen. These observations are not a reason for pessimism, but rather should serve to arouse us and stimulate us to action.

Perhaps we shall best achieve our purpose if we start from a concrete phenomenon. I spoke yesterday of an important impulse in the epoch of the Consciousness Soul—the development of an active concern on the part of every man for his neighbour. This mutual concern for each other must grow and develop in the course of man's subsequent evolution on earth, especially in four domains. First, as man prepares his future development, he will see his fellow man in a progressively different light. Today, when a little over a fifth of the epoch of the Consciousness Soul has run its course, man still shows little inclination to see his fellow man as he will have to learn to see him in the course of the epoch of the Consciousness Soul, up to the fourth millennium. Men still ignore the most important element in others, they have no real understanding of their neighbour. In this connection they have not taken full advantage of what art has implanted in their souls in the course of their different incarnations. Much can be learned by studying the development of art and on different occasions I have given many an indication of what can be learned from the evolution of art. If one observes the symptoms, as I have urged in these lectures, it is undeniable that in almost every branch of art artistic creation and appreciation are at a low ebb. Everything that has been undertaken in the field of art in recent decades clearly demonstrates that art is passing through a period of decadence. The most important contribution of art to the evolution of mankind is the training it provides for an understanding of future problems.

Every branch of culture, of course, has many ramifications and consequently all kinds of secondary effects, but art by its very nature embodies something that leads to a deeper and more concrete understanding of man. He who makes a thorough study of the artistic forms in painting and sculpture, or of the nature of the inner rhythms in music and poetryand the artists themselves often fail to do this today—he who has a deep inner experience of art is imbued with something which enables him to understand the human being in his picture-nature. In the epoch of the Consciousness Soul mankind must develop the capacity to comprehend man symbolically. You are already familiar with some of the basic principles of this symbolical understanding. When we look at the human head we are reminded of man's earliest beginnings. Just as a dream is seen as a memory of the sensible world and thereby receives its characteristic stamp, so for those who understand reality everything pertaining to the sensible world is an image of the spiritual. We must learn to perceive the spiritual archetype of man through his picture-nature. In future man will become to some extent transparent to his fellow man. The form of his head, his gait, will awaken in us an inner sympathy and understanding of a different nature from what we find in human tendencies today. For we shall only know man as an ego being when we have this conception of his picture-nature, when we can approach him with the fundamental feeling that what the physical eyes perceive of man bears the same relation to the true super-sensible reality of man as the picture painted on canvas bears to the reality which it depicts. We must develop this fundamental feeling in ourselves. We must approach man in such a way that we no longer see him as a combination of bones, muscles, blood, etcetera, but as the image of his eternal, spiritual being. Supposing a man walks past us; we would not recognize him if he did not awaken in us the realization of what he is as an eternal spiritual super-sensible being. This is how we shall see man and this is how we shall be able to see him in the future. When we perceive human forms and movements and all that is associated with them as an image of the eternal, we shall feel warmth or coldness and of necessity will gradually be filled with inner warmth or coldness. As we go through life we shall come to know man very intimately; towards some we shall feel warm, towards others cold. Worst of all will be the situation of those who evoke neither warmth nor coldness. We shall have an inner experience of others in the warmth ether that penetrates our etheric body; this will be the reaction of the enhanced interest that must be developed between men.

A second factor must provoke even more paradoxical emotions in contemporary man who has not the slightest desire to accept these new ideas. But perhaps in the not too far distant future this antipathy will be transformed into sympathy for the right understanding of man. This second phase of future development will bring a totally different understanding between men. In order to achieve this the two millennia from now until the end of the fifth postAtlantean epoch will not suffice; a longer period will be necessary, reaching into the sixth epoch. Then, to the knowledge of the ego will be added a special capacity, the capacity to feel, to sense in our neighbour when we approach him his relationship to the third Hierarchy, to the angels, archangels and archai. And this will be developed through an increasing recognition that man's response to language will be different from that of the present day. The evolution of language has already passed its zenith. In reality language has already become abstract.^T2 At the present time a wave of profound untruthfulness is sweeping over the world in that attempts are being made to create institutions on a linguistic basis. Men no longer have the relationship to language which reveals through language the being of man.

I have quoted on various occasions an example which may serve as a first step towards an understanding of this matter.^T3 I cited it again in a public lecture which I gave in Zürich because it is important to draw the attention of the public to these things. I pointed out in this lecture that a surprise awaits us when we compare the articles of Herman Grimm on the methodology of history (for he was a typical representative of Central European culture) with those of Woodrow Wilson. I carried out this comparative study most conscientiously and showed that it is possible to substitute certain passages of Woodrow Wilson for passages in Hermann Grimm, for the wording is almost identical. Equally one could exchange whole passages of Grimm on historical methodology for those of Wilson on the same subject. And yet there is a radical difference between the two which we perceive when we read them without concern for the content (for the content as such, taken literally, will have increasingly less importance for mankind in the course of their future evolution). The difference is this: in Grimm, everything, even the passages with which one may not agree, are the fruit of personal endeavour; he has wrestled with them sentence by sentence, step by step. In Wilson everything seems to be prompted by his own inner daimon which subconsciously possesses him. What is important is the source, the origin of these writings: in the one case it is directly at the threshold of consciousness, in the other case in the daimonic promptings which find their way from the subconscious into consciousness ... so that one can say: the writings of Wilson are in part the product of possession.

I quote this example in order to show you that it is no longer of significance today that the words should be identical. I always feel extremely sad when friends of our movement bring me articles of some pastor or professor and say: Do look at this, it sounds quite anthroposophical! Now in our present cultural epoch even a professor who dabbles in politics may well write things which, taken literally, of course are in keeping with the realities of our time. It is not the exact words that matter, but the region of the soul whence these things arise. It is important to discover behind the words their spiritual source. All that I have said here does not spring from a desire to lay down definite principles. It is the ‘how’ that matters. It is important that these words should be permeated by that Force which derives directly from the spirit. He who finds a verbal similarity between the articles of the pastor or professor and what I have said here without feeling that my words spring from a spiritual source and are imbued with spiritual substance because they reflect the totality of the anthroposophical Weltanschauung, he who ignores this ‘how,’ fails to understand me if he does not distinguish between modern opinions that smack of Anthroposophy and Anthroposophy itself.

It is of course not very pleasant to point to examples of this kind because the tendency today is often to take the opposite course. But when we speak in earnest, if our words are not intended simply as an anodyne, a kind of cultural soporific, it is a duty, it is a necessity even, not to shrink from selecting such examples, though they may be distasteful to many. For those who are in earnest about the future must be prepared to face the consequences for everyone if they ignore the fact that the world may be fated to have its organization determined by a half-baked American Professor. It is not easy to speak of realities today because many are satisfied with the life of illusion. Nonetheless one speaks of realities in those spheres where it is absolutely necessary, and where it is important, or at least should be important, for man to hear of them.

Men must learn to see through words; they will have to acquire the capacity to grasp the gesture in language. Before this epoch, before this fourth millennium has run its course, men will have learnt to listen to one another differently from the way they do at the present moment; they will find in language an external expression of man's relation to the third Hierarchy, to the angels, archangels and archai, a means whereby he can attain to the super-sensible, to the spirit.

And thus the soul of man will be heard through language and this will lead to a totally different community life. And a large part of the so-called forces of evil must be transformed so that it will be possible by listening to what a man says to hear the soul through the words. Then when the soul is heard through the words people will experience a peculiar sensation of colour and through this sensation of colour arising from language men of all nations will learn to understand one another. A particular sound will evoke the same sensation as the perception of the colour blue or of a blue surface. Another sound will evoke the same sensation as the perception of the colour red. The normal sensation of warmth we feel when we look at a man becomes to some extent colour when we listen to him. And we shall have to experience in ourselves what echoes from human lips to human ears on the wings of sounds. This will be experienced by man in the future.

Thirdly, men will experience inwardly the emotional reactions of others. In this respect language will play an important role—and not only language. When one man confronts another he will experience in his own respiration the emotional configuration of the other. In future time respiration will adapt itself to the affective life of the person who confronts us. In the presence of one man we shall breathe more rapidly, in the presence of another we shall breathe more slowly. According to the changing rhythm of our respiration we shall feel the kind of man with whom we are dealing. Think how the social life of the community will be cemented, how intimate corporate life will become! It will be a long time, no doubt, before this goal is achieved. It will take the whole of the sixth postAtlantean epoch and the early years of the seventh epoch before respiration is adapted to the life of the soul. And in the seventh epoch, a part of what is now the fourth stage of development will be realized. That is, when men belong to a community of their own volition, they will have to ‘digest’ one another, if you will pardon this crude expression. When we are compelled to will this or that in common with another, or will to want it, we shall have inner experiences akin to those which we have in a primitive form today when we consume a certain food. In the sphere of will men will have to ‘digest’ one another, in the sphere of feeling to ‘breathe’ one another; in the sphere of understanding through language they will have to experience one another through sensations of colour. And men will come to know one another as ego-beings when they learn to see each other as they really are.

But all these forces will be more inward, more related to the life of the soul. They will be fully developed only in the course of the Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan epochs. The earth evolution of mankind already demands psychic and spiritual indications of this development. The present age with its strange and calamitous development is the revolt of mankind against what is destined to follow from these developments which I have just described. Because in future all particularist tendencies in society must be abandoned, mankind rebels, and the trivial doctrine of national self determination is noised abroad. What we are witnessing today is a revolt against the divinely ordered course of evolution, a struggle to resist the inevitable. We must be aware of these things if we are to lay a firm foundation for an understanding of the Mystery of Evil. For evil is often a secondary effect of the force that must intervene in human evolution. When a locomotive that has to cover a long distance strikes a bad section of the track, it destroys the rails and comes to a halt. In its evolution mankind is moving towards the goals I have described to you. And it is the task of the Consciousness Soul to recognize that mankind must press forward consciously to these goals. But the present lines are badly laid and it will be some time before better lines are in position, for often people proceed to replace the old lines by others which are not a whit better.

But, as you see, spiritual science has no wish to be pessimistic. It sets out to show man where he really stands in evolution today. But it demands nonetheless that, at least for certain solemn moments of recollection, he can renounce certain current tendencies. And because men find it so difficult to make this sacrifice, because, in spite of everything, everyone immediately reverts to his old routine, it is extremely difficult to speak frankly on these matters today. For we touch upon here—and this is characteristic of our time—problems of the nature of evil which threaten to destroy mankind today and one must constantly exhort men to wake up.

Indeed, many things can only be discussed within certain limits and in consequence much will be omitted entirely or deferred to another occasion. Let us take an example that concerns us closely and do not take it amiss if I present it in the following way. A week ago I was asked to say something on the subject of the symptomatology of Swiss history. I have given the matter most careful thought from every angle. But if I, as a foreigner, were to embark upon the symptomatology of Swiss history from the fifteenth century until the present day in the presence of Swiss nationals here in Dornach, I would find myself in a very strange situation. Let me illustrate the problem from another angle. Suppose that in July of this year (1918) someone in Germany or even in Austria had described the events and personalities as people do today, imagine what an outburst there would have been if he had portrayed five, fifteen or thirty years ago, for example, the conditions in Austria today! I am aware, therefore, that I would cause grave offence if I were to speak of Swiss history as the Swiss will speak of it here in Switzerland twenty years hence. For people cannot do otherwise, given their innate conservatism, than close their ears to what must be said from the standpoint of the future. It is true that in many spheres ordinary people—and after all we must count ourselves amongst them—especially in spheres that touch them closely, are unwilling to hear the truth. They prefer an anodyne. I assure you that I would give offence if I did not temper to some extent the subject on which I have been asked to speak. In the light of further reflection I think it is best to leave matters alone for the present. For judgements which are passed now—and from which one would dissent to some extent—are reminders that, if we wish to portray certain events today, we should do as I did yesterday. When one criticizes the Russian revolution and when one describes the relationship of the bourgeoisie to the broad masses and to the more radical elements of the extreme left, any such criticism is regarded here in Switzerland as relatively harmless, as an edifying Sunday afternoon sermon and is tolerated. And then one can abandon oneself, I will not say to the illusion, but to the pious hope that what I have said will penetrate into a few souls and will prove more efficacious than the normal Sunday afternoon sermons ... although even in matters of moment, the experience of recent years has often demonstrated the contrary. But to comment on the immediate situation is not the task of one, who not being a Swiss national, would speak to the Swiss of their own history. When I gave a general survey of recent history in a public lecture in Zürich^T4 I had of course to speak with a certain reserve, although I did not hesitate to indicate the radical consequences which must be drawn from the facts. It is extremely convenient for the majority of people today to look upon Woodrow Wilson as a great man, as a benefactor of mankind. But if one denies this and speaks the truth, the truth is found to be unpalatable and one is regarded as a mischief-maker! And this has always been the case with those truths which are drawn from the well-spring of the super-sensible. But today we are living in the epoch of the Consciousness Soul and it is necessary that mankind should be aware of certain truths.

There is really no point in continually repeating the obvious—that people today are not receptive to spiritual ideas. The question is not whether people are receptive or not, but whether we ourselves take the necessary steps in order to bring before mankind the necessary truths when the opportunity arises. And in addition we should harbour no illusions about the receptivity of mankind to truths. We must be quite clear that, today especially, men are seldom receptive to what is vitally necessary for them ... and that they insist upon ordering the world in a way that does not correspond with the true evolutionary impulse of our epoch. Indeed one experiences the bitterest disappointments in this domain. But one accepts them without resentment, in order to learn from them what we are to do under certain circumstances.

I will speak later of these matters in greater detail. It would have been a splendid thing if only a few people could have been found in Central Europe who, from an understanding of certain Masonic impulses, could have realized the significance of what I said here two years ago on the subject of secret societies. But, inevitably, there was no response. One cannot imagine a more sterile attitude than that of Central European Masonry in recent decades. This is shown by the fact, frequently mentioned, that one meets with resistance when one refuses to amalgamate in any way the teachings of spiritual science with the Freemasonry of Central Europe. On the other hand when a super windbag, the so-called Nietzsche specialist, Horneifer, appeared and talked solemn nonsense about symbolism and the like, he was taken seriously in many quarters. The deeper reason for all this is that certain demands are made upon those who wish to take up spiritual science, and this is by no means easy! One finds today advocates of a renewal of the spirit who explain to people that they need only lie down on a couch and relax and the higher ego, God, and heaven knows what else will awaken in them and then there will be no need to wrestle with these terrible concepts of anthroposophically orientated spiritual science. One need only listen to one's inner voice, surrender passively, then the higher mystical ego will manifest itself and one will feel and experience the presence of God in oneself.

I have known statesmen who prefer to listen to these ‘pundits’ who recommend them to take the easy path to the higher ego rather than listen to the teachings of spiritual science. A friend told me recently that one of these pundits had said to him when he was still one of his disciples: you have no idea how stupid I am! Yet this very man who confessed to his stupidity in order to show that intelligence is not needed in order to introduce men to the primal sources of wisdom, this man has a large following everywhere. People prefer to listen to such men rather than to those who speak of the thorny path ahead if man is to understand the task of the Consciousness Soul, who tell us of four aspects of evolution or that men must experience one another through warmth, through a sensation of colour, through respiration, that they must ‘digest’ one another. In order to arrive at an understanding of this, one must swallow a whole library of books—a most unpleasant prospect! But people find this prospect unpalatable, most unpalatable! But if people find this prospect unpalatable, that is due to the impulse which is impelling our age towards catastrophe, to the tragedy of our time. This situation, however, is no cause for pessimism; rather is it a call to energetic action, to translate our knowledge into deeds. And this cannot be repeated too often.

I mentioned yesterday the problem of suction and pressure in connection with the Russian revolution. I leave it to each of you to ask yourselves if this problem after all is not a matter deserving of careful reflection. Otherwise people might say: It is true that in Russia the bourgeoisie failed to unite with the peasants, but here in Germany we are more fortunate, bourgeoisie and peasants will join forces and then socialism will come into its own. But they forget that many people in Russia said the same and it is precisely because people held this view that Russia collapsed.
We will continue our discussion tomorrow.

• T1. Kosmische und menschliche Geschichte, Vol II and Vol III (Bibl. Nrs. 171 and 172).
• T2. See Die Wissenschaft vom Werden des Menschen, August–September, 1918 (Bibl. Nr. 183).
• T3. 14th March, 1918, Das geschichtliche Leben der Menschheit und seine Rätsel (in Bibl. Nr. 67) and 30th March, 1918, Anthroposophischer Lebensgaben (in Bibl. Nr. 181).
• T4. Die Geschichte der Neuzeit im Lichte geisteswissenschaftlicher Forschung, 17th October, 1918 (included in Bibl. Nr. 73).

We cannot fully estimate the nature of man's being, as it appears at present, without fixing our eyes on extended periods through which he has passed in the course of his evolution. This will become evident when considering the facts described by me during recent days. Our souls undergo repeated earth-lives that are always separated from one another by the life between death and a new birth. In this manner our souls have passed through the most manifold periods of human evolution. By reflecting on these things, we shall clearly recognize that the nature of the human being can be comprehended only when we consider extended periods during which our souls have repeatedly lived on earth.

These matters have been discussed by me in previous Kristiania (Oslo) lectures, dealing with the sequence of evolutionary epochs, such as those that preceded and those that followed the Mystery of Golgotha. Today I wish to discuss this subject from a particular standpoint.

Mankind has undergone great changes in the course of its evolution. This fact is not sufficiently appreciated. People know that a Greek period existed, an Egyptian period, and other earlier periods. But, although they are aware of evolving culture-impulses, they believe that human beings in regard to their soul-life were just the same (at least, in historic ages) as they are today. This is not true. At a certain stage we come to a stop in this historic retrospect. We come to a long pause leading to a period which present-day scientists are very fond of describing as that of man's supposedly ape-like ancestors.

Mankind's evolution, however, was not in the least as people now imagine it. In order to understand the changes it has undergone, let us envisage the relatively great dependency, existing in the present age during the human being's first years of life, of the spirit and soul organism on the physical-bodily one.

You need only to consider the stage of early childhood until the change of teeth, and the extensive transformation accompanying the change of teeth which must strike every unprejudiced observer. The child's entire soul-constitution becomes different. We then find another life period lasting until puberty. We all know that at this age the development of spirit and soul is dependent on the development of the body. And, if we observe these things without prejudice, we notice the same dependence of spirit and soul on the body also at a later age lasting until the twenties, although today, in the time of youth movements (this is not said in a critical sense) it is just the young people who do not like to emphasize this dependence. Naturally, they consider themselves, at sixteen or seventeen, fully developed young women and young men; and those vaunting unusual mental faculties write newspaper articles at twenty-one. These young people would thus like to hush up the fact that their spirit and soul is greatly dependent on their bodily organism. At any rate, the present-day human being becomes more or less independent of the body once he has reached a certain age. A man in his twenties is an adult who does not feel himself as dependent upon his body as would a child were it to pass in full consciousness through the stages between change of teeth and puberty.

There was still a feeling in comparatively recent ages that the human being matured gradually. It was then clearly realized that the so-called apprentice had to be treated differently from the journey-man; and a master's rank could not be attained until relatively late in life.

As regards present-day man, however, it can be asserted that after a certain age, his spirit and soul are no longer greatly dependent on his body. Of course, on reaching a venerable age, we notice a renewed dependence on our physical organism. When the legs become shaky, when the face becomes wrinkled, when the hair becomes grey, we cannot then deny the influence of the body. This, however, is not ascribed to a genuine parallelism of body and soul. People of today feel that, even though the bodily forces decline, soul and spirit remain, and must remain, more or less independent of the bodily-physical. Yet this was not always the case. If we go back to earlier epochs of mankind's evolution, we find the human being even in his old age remaining as intensely dependent on his body as does a child's soul today remain dependent on its body between the change of teeth and puberty. And if we are enabled—not by external history, but by spiritual science—to go back to the first period of evolution after the great Atlantean catastrophe which caused a new configuration of the earth's continents, we come to what I called in my Occult Science the primeval Indian epoch. The human being then felt himself, even after having reached his fifties, to be just as dependent on the physical as the child's soul is dependent on the change of teeth, and the youthful person's soul on puberty. This means: Just as we experience today during childhood the ascending line of growth, so ancient man experienced, in his fifties, the descending line within spirit and soul. Then things happened in such a way that a man, on reaching his fifties, matured inwardly just by becoming older, in a similar manner as modern man matures on attaining puberty. And at that time, seven or eight thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha, human beings eagerly looked forward, during their whole life, to this stage of existence. For everyone could say to himself: Something will be revealed to me out of my bodily constitution that I could not experience in younger years, before I became forty-nine or fifty. Naturally, such an idea is bound to shock modern men most profoundly. You only need to think of a present-day man who is absolutely sure of being a finished product after reaching the twenties. What could be said if he had to wait until the age of maturity revealed something to him which he could not know before, which he could not feel, and experience before!

In ancient India, however, man's bodily constitution enabled him to feel, already in his fifties, something like a gradual separation of the physical body from spirit and soul. He felt more and more how the physical approximated, as it were, the corpse-like. And he felt in this estrangement of the physical body, in this approach of the physical body to the earth-elements, a liberation of spirit and soul. By considering the body merely as a garment, he felt its relationship to the earth, to all that would belong to earth after death. It was less amazing to ancient than to modern men that the body had to be discarded, delivered to the earth-forces. For ancient man passed slowly and gradually through this process of discarding the body.

This sounds paradoxical, because it implies the terrifying conception of having a physical body that is slowly becoming a corpse. Ancient man, however, did not think of his body as a burdensome object passing, as it were, into a kind of putrefaction. Instead, he thought of it as an independent sheath or shell which, even though becoming earth-like, was yet full of life. Yet the physical body, at the age of fifty, assumed a sheath-like, shell-like character.

This gradual becoming similar to the earth taught ancient man something that can be known today only through abstract science. The inner nature of metals, for instance, became known to him. At the age of fifty, he was instinctively able to differentiate between copper, silver, and gold. He felt the resemblance of these metals to his own organism gradually turning to earth. A rock-crystal called forth in him other feelings than furrowed soil. By aging, man gained wisdom concerning terrestrial matters.

This fact influenced primeval civilization. The young, looking up to the old, said to themselves: These ancients are wise. Once I have become as old as they are, I shall also be wise. Such an attitude caused a profound veneration and a tremendous respect for old age.

In those ancient days of mankind's evolution (the epoch of primeval India), a lofty civilization, connected with a wondrous veneration, a wondrous respect for old age, existed in a certain part of the world (not in that part, however, inhabited by men with receding foreheads, such as are excavated today by anthropologists). And we must ask ourselves: How did it actually happen that men passed through these experiences?

It did happen, because primeval man lived less intensively in his physical body than we do. Today man crawls into the very core of his physical body, the experiences of which he shares. Thus he feels himself to be identical, at one with his physical body. And we must undergo a common destiny with whatever is felt to be at one with us. Because, in those ancient times, men felt themselves more self-dependent within the physical body; because their thinking was more imaginative; because their feeling was like an inward weaving and living in the world of reality—for all these reasons their physical body from the beginning seemed to them like a sheath in which they were encased. This sheath began to harden as life drew near its end. A man in his fifties could feel how the body developed increasingly in accord with the outer world, thus becoming a mediator that could instill in him wisdom concerning the outer world.

The situation changed when civilized mankind of those days passed into the next age, called by me in my Occult Science the primeval Persian. Then a man in his fifties could no longer experience this dependence of his physical body upon the earthly. Instead, the aging physical body exerted a different influence on those still in their forties, from the forty-second or forty-third year to the forty-ninth or fiftieth. During these years, they participated intensively in the change of seasons. They experienced spring, summer, autumn, winter within their body. As it were, their body began to bud and blossom during spring and summer, and went into decline during autumn and winter. Human life took part in the seasons, the changing air-currents ...

And this perception of the changing air-currents, the changing seasons, was connected with another thing. Man felt that his speech was being transformed into something no longer belonging essentially to him. Just as the primeval Indian felt that, once he had attained the fifties, his whole physical body did not really belong to him, but more or less to the earth, so the primeval Persian felt that the body, by producing speech, belonged to the people around him. At fifty, a member of primeval Indian culture no longer said: I am walking. If expressing his own feelings, he would say: My body is walking. He did not say: I enter through the door; but instead: My body carries me through the door. For he experienced his body as something related to the outer world, to the earth. And, five or six millennia before the Mystery of Golgotha, a member of the Persian civilization felt that speech came forth by itself, that he had it in common with his whole surroundings. At that time, people all over the world did not live in such an international way as today, but as members of definite folk communities. They felt how speech became alienated from them; how, if expressing their real feelings, they could say: “It is speaking within me.”

It was really the case that people after attaining the forties expressed the following in a certain, very respectful sense: Divine-spiritual forces are speaking through me. And the human being also felt as if his breath did not belong to him any longer, but was dedicated to the surrounding world.

On reaching his late thirties, a member of the Egypto-Chaldaean culture—which lasted from the third or fourth millennium until the eighth or ninth pre-Christian century—had a similar feeling with regard to his thoughts, his mental images. The Egyptian or Chaldaean felt in his thirty-fifth year as if his mental images were connected with heavenly forces, the course of the stars.

As the primeval Indian, at the end of his life, felt the connection of his body with the earth, as the primeval Persian felt the connection of his speech, his breath, with the seasons and the surrounding world, so a member of ancient Egyptian, of ancient Chaldaean culture felt that his thoughts were directed by the course of the stars. And he felt how divine star-powers were interwoven with his thoughts.

In Egypto-Chaldaean culture, the human being felt this dependence of his thoughts upon heavenly powers until his forty-second or forty-third year. Subsequently no new element entered into human development. The primeval Persian, too, felt as if his thoughts had been given to him by the stars; but he attained, moreover, in his forties the relationship to speech that I have described. Likewise, the primeval Indian, from his thirty-fifth year, possessed this relationship to the star-powers. Therefore he considered astrology as something self-evident. In his forties, he also attained the dependence of speech upon his surroundings. In his fifties, moreover, he experienced how his physical body became objective, became shadow-like. He accustomed himself, as it were, to the dying, because dying had approached him already in his fifties. The soul was less firmly joined to the body. Hence outer conditions could bring forth these bodily changes. This fact was perceived by the soul, experienced by the soul. And thereby man, as he grew older, merged himself more and more with the world.

Then came the Graeco-Latin era, which lasted from the eighth pre-Christian century until the fifteenth post-Christian century, for until then, the echo of Graeco-Latin culture still resounded in all civilized countries. This marked the age when man felt himself until his thirties still dependent upon his physical body, but no longer dependent on the stars, the seasons, the earth. He felt himself firmly entrenched within his physical body. The Greek felt a concord, a harmony between the soul and spirit element and the bodily-physical. Only this bodily-physical element no longer separated itself from him. This is all very difficult to express, for we are prevented, by the customary and totally inadequate historical teaching given to us in school, from forming a conception of these changes in mankind's evolution.

There then came the time when the human being became connected with his physical body in such a way that his physical body was committed no longer to participate in the course of the universe directed by spiritual laws. Now man was completely bound to his physical body. Mankind did not reach this stage until the eighth pre-Christian century.

Thus a great transformation of mankind's whole evolution occurred in as far as it concerned civilized mankind. Although the human being on reaching the thirties felt himself still at one with his physical body, he no longer was separated from it. He felt himself united with his physical body. It could no longer unveil to him the world's mysteries. During this period, therefore, mankind attained an entirely new relation to death. At an earlier time, when the human being prepared himself for dying, as it were, by undergoing a separation from his physical body, this dying signified for him nothing but a transformation in the midst of life; for, in his fifties, he became familiar gradually with the process of dying. He experienced dying as a process which merged him, in a wisdom-filled and blissful way, with the universe. He experienced death as something guiding him into a world in which he had already lived during his earth-life. Death at that time was something entirely different from what it became later. It might be said: More and more the human being was confronted by the possibility that soul and spirit might participate in death.

Let us compare Hellenism with the primeval Indian epoch. In primeval India, the body gained independence. The individual was aware of being something else besides his body which became independent and sheath-like. He could not have possibly conceived the thought that death might be the end. Such a thought did not exist among human beings of the primeval Indian period. Only by degrees, and most decisively in the eighth pre-Christian century, did man say to himself (still out of an unconscious feeling, because he was unable to think about these things in a rationalistic way): My body dies; but, with regard to soul and spirit, I am at one with my body. No longer did he notice the difference between the bodily and the spirit and soul element.

The human being became dominated by a thought that terrified him when it first arose out of dark spiritual depths in the ninth or eighth century before the Mystery of Golgotha. It was the thought: Might not my soul pursue the same path as my body—die, as my body dies?

This thought which in the primeval Indian epoch would have been totally inconceivable now came more and more to the fore. Out of this mood emerged words like those famous ones of the Greek hero: Better a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of the shades.

This was the time when mankind nurtured a mood that grew in the right way towards the Mystery of Golgotha. For, what brought forth in ancient human beings the ability to preserve a freshness of soul which made it impossible for them to conceive that the soul might take the same path of death as the body?

This freshness of soul, this independence of soul with regard to feeling, was given to ancient man by this knowledge: I have had a life—for he could look into this life—which was pre-earthly; through it I passed with my soul and spirit before I descended to the physical world. While dwelling in this higher world, I was united with the exalted Sun-Being.

The ancient Mysteries had evolved a teaching which pointed out that man, in his pre-earthly existence, was united with the spirit of the sun, just as in earth-life his body is united with the physical light of the sun.

The teachers in the ancient Mysteries told the following to their pupils who, in their turn, told it again to others (they did not designate the exalted Sun-Being as the Christ, but He was the Christ, and we may therefore be permitted today to use this name): The Christ is a Being Who shall never descend to the earth. You, however, dwelt in your pre-earthly existence, before descending to earth, within spiritual worlds in communion with the Christ. And the force of the Christ has given you the faculty of making your soul independent of the body.

This instinctive memory of a pre-earthly existence was lost through the soul's increasing identification with its physical body. And, in the Greek epoch, earthly man could employ his instinctive consciousness-forces only by looking at physical life. The Greek was able to live such a harmonious earth-life, because his outlook into the divine worlds of the spirit had faded away. He was so successful in subduing the sensible-physical that the spiritual vanished more or less from his life's horizon. No longer did civilized men have a consciousness of the fact that before descending to earth, they dwelt in the presence of the exalted Sun-Being Who was later called the Christ. Now darkness encompassed those who looked at pre-earthly, prenatal existence. And thus arose the mystery of death.

What happened henceforth must be envisaged as something concerning not only mankind but also the gods. The divine-spiritual powers who sent the human being down to earth gave him the impulses towards the development that I have just described. Since his spirit and soul became increasingly merged with the physical body; since, as it were, his spirit and soul became identical with the physical, and since, therefore, the mystery of death confronted also the spirit and soul, the divine-spiritual powers who had sent the human being down to earth were threatened with the danger that he might be lost to the gods, that his soul, as well as his body, might die.

Yet man would never have become a free, independent being, had he not grown into his body during this epoch. Man could only become free in evolution if his view of the pre-earthly was dimmed. He was obliged to stand on earth—totally forsaken, as it were—within his physical body's abode. Thus his independent ego could radiate and gleam up.

For this shining forth of the independent ego can be best accomplished by the human being entering completely into his physical body. When man grows upward into the worlds of spirit and soul, his ego retreats; he is being merged with the objective element of spirit and soul. Man could become a free ego-being only if given the impulse by the gods to merge himself more and more with his physical body. He was thus, however, confronted by the mystery of death; for the physical body was bound to be claimed by death.

Now, if man's vision had not been awakened in another way, all of mankind on earth would have become more and more convinced that the soul and physical body were both dying together. And, if nothing else had happened; if history had continued its course in a straight line, all of us today would have come to the common conviction that the soul as well as the body are doomed to be laid in the grave.

At this point, the divine-spiritual powers decided to send down on earth the exalted Sun-Being, the Christ, in order that men, who no longer had any knowledge of their communion with the Christ during pre-earthly existence, could gain consciousness of their communion with the Christ after He had descended on earth and had shared on Golgotha and in Palestine their human destiny in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. The God descended into the earthly world at the moment of mankind's world historic evolution when men had lost their feeling of communion with the Sun-Being beyond the earthly world.

Why did the Christ come down on earth? Because human beings, having fought their way to the attainment of complete ego-consciousness, needed Him on earth. Men had to experience the presence of a victor, who could die and resurrect himself—be the vanquisher of death.

In the course of history, this mystery had to be set before mankind at a time when man, no longer able to look back into pre-earthly existence, was granted a view of his communion with the giver of man's immortality, with the Christ. It is a divine event, and not merely for mankind, that the Christ was sent down on earth from higher worlds. For the human race would have fallen away from the gods, had they not sent down upon earth the loftiest among them, in order that He undergo a human destiny, a human existence, thus interweaving a divine event with earthly-human events and mankind's entire world evolution.

The Mystery of Golgotha cannot be comprehended unless we regard it not only as a human event, but also as a divine event. The fact must be grasped that something which could be envisaged previously only in the divine worlds could now be envisaged in the earthly world.

Possibly you might raise the objection: Not all men have become followers of the Christ; many do not believe in the Christ. Must all these have the opinion that at death their soul would be laid in the grave with the body?

This, however, is not the way in which the Mystery of Golgotha may be interpreted. It is valid through all the centuries preceding ours that the Christ, in His infinite compassion overflowing with grace, died not only for His immediate followers, but for all men in all ages, everywhere on earth.

All men on earth have been redeemed from the riddle of death by the Christ. At first, this deed did not touch human consciousness. It is natural, however, that some men were found who could consciously grasp the grandeur and significance of the Mystery of Golgotha. Yet the Christ did die and did rise as much for the Chinese, Japanese, and Hindus as for the Christians.

Just because since the fifteenth century human evolution must increasingly regard intellectualism as its highest soul-force, and just because this intellectual impulse will become more and more powerful in the future, have we approached an epoch when it is incumbent upon the earth's entire population to grasp, with its ever growing consciousness, what was brought forth by the Mystery of Golgotha.

Thus it will become necessary that the Mystery of Golgotha be penetrated by a knowledge that can be really understood by all men on earth.

In preceding centuries, Christianity developed in a way that still conformed to the peculiarities of ancient ethnic religions. Christian development had not yet attained universality. The Christian missionaries who went among the followers of other religions found little or no understanding, because the Christ was presented as a separate god who had the same qualities as those possessed by the ancient heathen folk deities. This was the manner in which Christianity had been disseminated. Why had Constantine, why Chlodvig, accepted Christianity?—Because they believed that the Christian god would be a more powerful helper than their former gods. They exchanged, as it were, their former gods for the Christian god. Hence the Christ had to take on many qualities of the ancient folk deities. These qualities have adhered to the Christ through the centuries.

In this way, however, Christianity could not become a universal religion. On the contrary, it had to retreat more and more before intellectualism. And we have seen, particularly in the nineteenth century, many a theological development which understood nothing whatsoever of the Christ-event in its super-sensible aspect. Here the desire was to speak only of Jesus, the man, although conceding that as man he towered above all other men. Yet, henceforth, the desire was only to speak of Jesus, the man, and not of Christ, the God.

We must, nevertheless, be able to speak again of Christ, the God, because this Christ, while undergoing His destiny through the Mystery of Golgotha, manifested to men on earth what He had formerly signified to them, before they had descended to earth from the high heavens.

Hence, we must state that the ancient folk religions were primarily local religions. People prayed to the god of Thebes, to the god on Mount Olympus. They were local deities who could be worshipped only in near-by places. Thus, from the beginning, these ancient faiths were bound to certain territories.

Later the local gods, who had their abode in a definite spot, were replaced by gods bound to the personalities of single men, of the guiding folk heroes. Yet a people's god was either a still living folk hero or his surviving soul, the ancestral folk soul. All religious faiths had a restricted character.

With Christianity, however, there appeared a world religion which bestowed a spiritual element upon the whole earth, just as the sun bestows a physical element upon the whole earth. The climate in the vicinity of Mount Olympus is different from the climate in the vicinity of Thebes; the latter, in its turn, is different from the climate in the vicinity of Bombay. If a religious faith nestles close to a locality, it cannot spread beyond this locality. The sun, however, sheds its light on all the earth's localities, shines upon all men as the same sun.

When, however, the human form was taken on by that God Whose physical reflection shone forth in the sun's radiance, then the human race received a God who could be accepted as God by all men on earth. If the possibility is found of penetrating the being of this Christ-Divinity, we shall be able to represent Him as the God acceptable to all mankind. Today we stand only at the beginning of anthroposophical teachings. As it were, we are still stammering the language of Anthroposophy. Yet Anthroposophy will continue to develop more and more. And a part of this development will consist in its capability of finding words to describe the Mystery of Golgotha—words of a kind that spiritual science can bring to the Hindus, the Chinese, to all men on earth; and which will elucidate the Mystery of Golgotha in such a way that the Hindus, the Chinese, the Japanese will be unable to reject what is told them concerning the Mystery of Golgotha.

For this purpose, we must attach a genuinely serious significance to all that represents Christian tradition. Throughout the centuries, people have subjected themselves more or less to the words of the Gospels. They have studied these Gospels in a way commensurate with their understanding of these ancient books. We have certainly no intention of speaking against the validity of the Gospels. Our cycles on each of the Gospels attempt to penetrate, by means of special anthroposophical interpretation, into the deeper meaning of these Gospels. Yet one thing must be said: Why is the passage at the end of one Gospel taken so lightly? There it is written: 1 have still many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. And why are the words of another Gospel not taken more seriously: And, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the earth-cycles? For the Christ spoke the full truth. He could have said to men other things than those recorded in the Gospels. Only those Christ-words are recorded in the Gospels, for the understanding of which the men of that epoch—few in number—were ready. But mankind must become more and more mature in the course of earthly evolution. From the Mystery of Golgotha on, the Christ dwelt among men as the Living Christ, and not as the dead Christ. And He is still present among us. If we learn to speak His language, we shall recognize His presence; we shall recognize the truth of His words: And, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the earth-cycles. And the anthroposophical world view desires to speak His language, His spiritual language. The anthroposophical world view desires to speak in such a way of nature, of all the beings on earth, of the starry sky and the sun that, by means of this language, the Mystery of Golgotha may be understood; that the Christ may be experienced as the One Who is ever present.

And, also after the Mystery of Golgotha, we may regard as Christ-words all that we have gained from the spiritual world; aided by that power which, through the Mystery of Golgotha, descended from heaven to earth. If as men we speak of the spiritual worlds, we may make true the word of St. Paul: Not I, but the Christ in me. For today we have entered an age in which we cannot even emulate the Greeks who, although feeling themselves still at one with their physical body, yet felt this physical body as something harmonious and independent. Today we penetrate at a still earlier age than the Greeks into that which underlies our physical body, thus separating ourselves from the spiritual around us. We can deepen our being only by seeking the union with the God Who descended from heaven to earth. And we can feel ourselves united only with that God Who entered the earthly sphere, because men on earth could no longer enter the heavenly sphere with their immediate and ordinary consciousness. By finding the Christ, we also find anew the approach to the super-sensible world; not now, however, by means of the physical body (this was the case in ancient times), but by means of heightened soul-power. And today, when the parallelism between the development of body and soul lasts only up to the age of twenty (later on it will last a still shorter period), this heightened soul-power can be attained alone by immersing ourselves, in the midst of the sensible events of earthly evolution, into the knowledge of a super-sensible event: the Mystery of Golgotha. Everything on earth took place in a sensible way. Only in the Mystery of Golgotha something super-sensible mingled with earthly events. And this can be understood only out of a super-sensible knowledge.

Hence the union with the Christ awakens in our human souls the powerful faculty of attaining a relationship to the super-sensible world—a relationship formerly attained by human beings through being connected with their physical body in such a way that the body could become sheath-like. Thus, feeling the approach of death before physical death occurred, they merged themselves with the spirit prevailing in their surroundings.

We must attain by means of the soul what could be attained, in earlier days, through the mediation of the body. For, although we admire in the highest degree what has been preserved of Indian writings—which did not originate, however, from the earliest primeval Indian epoch, but from a later period—although we admire what has been bequeathed to us through the glory of the Vedas, the grandeur of the Vedanta-philosophy, the radiant splendor of the Bhagavad-Gita, we must, nevertheless, recognize the fact that this could be attained in ancient times only because the body reflected to the human being, as he grew older, a certain spirituality. Ancient man was compensated for the waning of his physical existence, which set in after the thirty-fifth year, by having, as it were, the spirit pressing out of his body, as the latter became hard, withered and wrinkled. And this spirit was perceived by the human being. The great philosophical poems of ancient times were not composed by youths, but by patriarchs who had acquired wisdom. It resulted from what was given by the body. In the present stage of human evolution, which differs from the ancient ones, we must receive from the soul, as it grows more powerful, what was formerly contributed by the body. Our body becomes old. We must remain united with it. We cannot let the spirit emerge from this body, because we have utilized it since early childhood.

If we did not do this, we could never be free men. This must be accepted as our rightful earthly destiny. One fact, however, must be made clear to us: Our soul has to gain strength. Since the spiritual strength formerly corresponding to the waning body flows to us no longer we must attain it by strengthening our soul through our own effort. And we shall experience this strengthening of the soul by looking, in a genuine and living way, toward a great and powerful event: The divine event that took place as the Mystery of Golgotha in the midst of earthly life. In beholding the Mystery of Golgotha and becoming conscious that its after-effect is still dwelling among us, is still existing in the spiritual-super-sensible sphere, our spirit and soul become strengthened and approach the spiritual world anew.

The Christ has descended to earth in order that men, who no longer see Him in heaven by means of their memory, may be permitted to see Him on earth. Seen from today's viewpoint, this is what rightly places the Mystery of Golgotha before our spiritual eye.

The disciples, who had preserved a remnant of ancient clairvoyance, could still have the Christ as their teacher when He dwelt among them after the resurrection in the spiritual body.

Yet this power gradually fell away from them. And its complete disappearance is symbolically represented through the Festival of the Ascension.

The disciples sank into profound sadness, because they were forced to believe that the Christ was no longer among them. They had taken part in the event of Golgotha. Now, however, they had to believe that the Christ had moved away from their consciousness, that the Christ was no longer on earth. Thus they were plunged into deep sorrow, for they had seen the Christ-figure disappear in the clouds, that is, move away from their consciousness.

But every genuine knowledge is born out of sorrow, of suffering, of grief. True, profound knowledge is never born out of joy. True, profound knowledge is born out of suffering. And out of the suffering, which encompassed the disciples of the Christ at the Festival of the Ascension, out of this deep soul-anguish arose the Mystery of Pentecost. The disciples could no longer view the Christ by means of their outer, instinctive clairvoyance. But the force of the Christ unfolded within them. The Christ had sent to them the spirit enabling their soul to experience the Christ-existence in their innermost depths.

This experience gave meaning to the first Festival of Pentecost occurring in human evolution. The Christ, Who had disappeared from the outer, clairvoyant view still clinging to the disciples as a heritage of ancient evolutionary periods, appeared at Pentecost within the disciples' inner experience. The fiery tongues signify nothing but the arising of the inner Christ in the souls of His pupils, the souls of the disciples. Out of inner necessity, the Festival of Pentecost had to follow the Festival of the Ascension.

My dear friends! Today we will reconnect to what was spoken of in the previous lesson, in part in order to maintain continuity, but also in part for new members, or at least for members who were not here last time, but who are here today. Today's lesson should therefore begin with a short recapitulation of what was brought before our souls in the previous lesson.

We made our way in thought, to where just in the normal course of life and connecting to the sense-perceptible world with normal awareness and with the power of reasoning, to where a human being can feel himself confronting the supersensible, confronting, moreover, that part of an individual’s being that is related to his own true being. And we will first cultivate this mood, these inner feelings, before we enter into the mysteries of the life of the spirit, which we will certainly get to the next time.

This initial demeanor should lead us to an awareness of how a person, normally constituted in soul, regards the world of the senses around about himself, which cannot give him any inkling about his own true being. And if with certain justice there resounds to people throughout time, affording noble possibilities, the admonition "Know yourself!", then it is also true that a person can find no answer, can find no satisfaction, if under the inscribed words "Know yourself!" he merely gazes at what is spread out before his senses in the context of the external world. So a person is led by this suggestion to something other than what is in the sensory world, this world external to man.

In regard to this perception, which a person can have when he looks back with the question of his own nature upon the expanse of world existence-awareness, when we with this perception broach in thoughts supersensory existence-awareness, which is identical to the inner nature of humankind, then the corresponding demeanor will once again be given with the words, the words that that I already have placed before your souls at the last lesson:

Where on grounds of earth , color upon color,
Life stirring reveals itself,
Where out of stuff of earth, form on form,
All without life takes shape,
Where feeling creatures , strong in will,
Delight in the warm glow of their existence,
Where you yourself, O Man , derive
Bodily existence from earth and air and light,

There you enter your own being’s
Deep, night-bedecked, cold inner darkness.
You’d ask within the dark expanse
Never, who you are, and were, and will become.
For your true existence the day dims
To the night of the soul, to darkness of spirit
And you turn yourself, soul-searching,
Unto the light, that from darknesses strengthens,

We have before us, we feel it in our souls, the impression, presenting itself before us, that in spite of our perceiving the absolute beauty, immensity, and grandeur of the world around us, as we get a sense of all the surrounding immensity, grandeur, and beauty in this world, that we just cannot find our own true being in this world. For the person striving after the spirit, it is necessary ever and again to bring up this feeling in soul. For the experience of this feeling, its deep experience, as we gaze out on the world outside of ourselves, that in this world there is no answer to the question of what we ourselves are, brought up ever and again in one’s soul, this impression forces the very impulses to emerge from our souls that can carry us over into the spiritual world. But directly because we perceive this, that through such feelings we will be carried over into the spiritual world, we must also bring up in our souls that someone in customary awareness, in customary life, is unprepared to enter into the very world that is certainly the world of his own being.

Therefore, right at the boundary between the sensory world and the spiritual world stands the Guardian, who with all seriousness warns a person about crossing over unprepared. It is always so, my friends, and we must be aware of it, that standing in appropriate holiness at the threshold of the spiritual world, for the unprepared person, stands the Guardian. We will get to know him more and more in times to come. Always it is so, that we must time and again reactivate this inner state of awareness, and so come to the feeling of meeting this Guardian and so making quite clear to ourselves, that a very special condition of soul is needed in order to achieve real knowledge, real insight.

If this insight, which can indeed come in this materialistic age, I might add, to every person on the street, if this true knowledge were present in a person, it would be a shame, for he would receive it wholly unprepared. He would approach it without the proper inner state of being, which certainly must be present, a properly prepared inner state of awareness. Therefore, it is so, that we must also direct ourselves properly and bring up before the soul a second sort of demeanor, which speaks to us, ever and again, of how we must present ourselves before the Guardian::

And from darknesses clarifies itself
(Revealing you in counterpart,
Yet also portraying you as parable,
Earnest spirit-word in ethereal realm,
Audible to your heart, forcefully effective),¹
The bringer of spirit-premonitions to you,
He who alone can illuminate your way;
Before him spread the sensory fields,
Behind him yawns the deep abyss.

And from his fields spirit dark,
Hard by the yawning chasm of existence,
Rings forth the ancient might of his creator-word;
See, I am the only door to inner knowing.

The Guardian himself begins to speak while we are still more or less in the sensory fields. He instructs from a realm, where still, for us, as we approach, impenetrable darkness holds sway, and he holds forth in the darkness. But it grows lighter, forming up before us through spirit-awareness, and initially only he himself emerges from it and forms up, and so coming forth from this apparent darkness, from this maya of darkness, he then speaks:

From the wide expanse of the beings of space
Who in the light experience existence,
From the onward tread of the course of time
Which in creating finds itself expressed,
From the depths of the feeling heart,
Where in one's self the world is born anew:

There sounds in speech filled with soul,
There shines in thoughts filled with spirit,
The from godly healing forces
In world shaping powers
Welling working word of existence-awareness:
O Man, know yourself!

Whoever can inwardly accept with sufficient depth the word resounding from the mouth of the Guardian, will become aware, as he gazes back upon himself, of how the backward gazing, the taking hold of truth in the backward gazing becomes the beginning of self-awareness. Moreover, it is self-awareness that is preparatory for real entry into true proper self-awareness. True self-awareness encloses us in spiritual world-awareness, in the being that is one with our true human essence. And so awareness arises, which can be obtained while still on this side of the threshold of spiritual existence, just so awareness arises, which those impure in thinking, feeling, and willing of course hold in terrible awe, even though the images appear to protect. Awareness then arises of the three emerging from the chasm, from the yawning abyss. Appearing out of the yawning abyss between the sensory world and the spiritual world are rearing beasts.

What we should feel at the chasm of existence, between what is maya, mere appearance, and true being in the world of true reality, this should be placed before our souls in the fourth declamation:

Yet you must beware the abyss;
Lest your beasts within devour
You, if in heedless haste you pass me by;
They are in you throughout this age of man,
As foes of knowing placed within.

Behold the first beast, the crooked back,
The bone-locked head, the withered body,
Dull blunt blue is its skin.
Your fear of spirit-creator-being
Produced this monster in your willing;
Your courage of knowing alone overwhelms it.

My friends, one must clearly place in one’s soul this idea, that at first courage, courage in becoming aware, does not rule in the soul, but in the most thorough manner cowardice rules in the soul, cowardice, which in fact is strongly held onto by most people in these times, as a matter of course, even while approaching insight into the spiritual world.

Behold the second beast, it bares its teeth,
Contorts its face, and lies in scornful mockery,
Yellow with grayish cast is its body;
Your hatred of spirit-revelation
Produced this weakling in your feeling;
Your fire of knowing must tame it.

This is the second that we carry in us, which sows all the doubts in our souls, and which plants all manner of feelings of uncertainty concerning the spiritual world in our souls. It lies in feelings, in feelings that are weak, in feelings that cannot soar in spirited flight, in enthusiasm. Genuine experience must indeed emerge from lowly outward enthusiasm, which twines itself around all possibilities of outer life. A simple entwining! Inner enthusiasm, inner fire, the fire of awareness, is the very thing that vanquishes the second beast.

Behold the third beast, with long-split mouth,
Glazed eye, and slouching attitude,
Dirty red its form appears to you;
Your doubt in spirit-light-dominion
Produced this specter, this ghost in your thinking;
The work of knowing must weaken it.

We must find the courage and the fire to bring activity into our thinking. If we plod along in our usual state of awareness, we work in whims, in caprice, we deal with what really signifies nothing at all. When we prepare ourselves in a manner corresponding to creative thinking, however, the spiritual world streams into our creative thinking. And then a real entrance into the spiritual world is born, out of courage in knowledge, out of fire in knowledge, and out of living work in knowledge.

Only when you subdue the three,
Will wings of your soul grow,
To soar across the deep abyss
That severs you from fields of knowing,
For which your yearning heart,
Healing-seeking, would hallow itself.

These mood-songs of demeanor can carry us quite far, so that we may feel properly what should be made to rule in us, so that as human beings we can enter the spiritual world properly, genuinely, and truly alive. It is also true, that in normal life, the most banal things often lead a person to realize that life is really serious, and not just a game. The very things that should lead us to an existence-awareness, however, do not make as strong an impression as does outer life. Outer life, when made active in the soul, can all too easily be made into a game. A person learns by himself, by playing it as a game, that it is serious. And if he makes endeavors of the spirit into a game, he will thereby embarrass himself and others enormously. He will be embarrassed, even if he deals with them only slightly in anything other than the most absolutely serious manner.

Of course, one does not need to maintain such a serious attitude to the point of becoming sentimentally attached to it. That is not the point, for the serious quality of life can be brought to light even in humor. But then even the humor becomes serious. The very manner portrayed here, which may be serious or playful, is not sentimentality, false piety, or untruthful flirtatious gaming, but rather it is the possibility of really going all out in endeavors of the spirit, and really living in endeavors of the spirit, with persistence, steadfastness, and tenacity..

Concerning the gravity of the words I am now speaking, my dear friends, to really understand their significance, it would be really, really good for striving after knowledge, if all of us, who as friends are sitting here, especially those who have been involved in anthroposophical endeavors for a somewhat longer time, would consider the following question: How often have I undertaken to do this or that as a function of anthroposophical life, and how often after a short time have I simply no longer thought about it? Perhaps I would have done it, had I thought about it, but I just did not think any further about it. It is simply gone, as a dream is gone from my life.

It is not unimportant and insignificant to consider such a question straightaway. And perhaps it might not be totally unimportant if a great number of our friends would place before their souls something actually happening at this time.

The Christmas Conference should have initiated real esotericism in the larger stream of the anthroposophical way of looking at the world, as it will be carried by the Anthroposophical Society in the future, all-inclusive. How often, and many questions could similarly be entertained, how often have I just forgotten what I held in glorious utter certainty during the Christmas Conference, how often have I just forgotten it, and how often have I thus maintained my thoughts and my realizations in the manner formerly present, as if the Anthroposophical Society were continuing as it had before Christmas. And perhaps if a few of you say to yourselves, such is not the case for me, it might be necessary just then to ask yourself this question. Am I not fooling myself, about it not being the case for me? Have I seen, in all acts pertaining to Anthroposophy, have I really seen that with Christmas a new phase of the Anthroposophical Society has begun? Entertaining these questions right away as questions concerning awareness is of very special significance. For then the proper seriousness will be inscribed in the soul.

You see, it would be good for this sort of attitude to be connected with the lifeblood of the Anthroposophical Society, and henceforth also with the lifeblood of each member who has sought admittance into the class. This attitude should be connected, it is imperative that it be attached to everything that impacts strongly on one's life. Hence, it would be good for each and every one who wishes to belong to the class to say to himself: Is there anything that I can do, now that the Anthroposophical Society has been re-founded, that is different from what I was doing earlier? Is there something new that I can take up in my life in devotion to Anthroposophy? Is there some way that I can work differently than before, so that I can bring in something brand new?

Actually, it would be tremendously significant, if this were to be taken seriously by each individual belonging to the class. Through this, the possibility would emerge, my friends, of the class continuing its work without the burden of heavy chains, for each person who continues in the old jog-trot really burdens the progress of the class accordingly. It might not be much noticed, but it is true nevertheless. It is not possible to forge ahead in esoteric life while walking along the hum-drum path that otherwise has dominion in life, on the path of lies, lies portrayed as truth. But if someone tries to work in esoteric life, vague portrayals are not effective, but rather truth is effective. You can certainly make colorful vain constructs, but colorful conceits make no impression on the spiritual world. The unvarnished, the simple unvarnished truth is what works effectively in the spiritual world.

You may conclude from this that spiritual realities are very different, as they continue to work under the surface of existence, from what is displayed today in outer life, which is so many lively lies just patched together. Uncommonly little of actual genuine worth lives between people today. And this should be brought before the soul ever and ever again, right at the beginning of the inner striving of the life of this Class. For only out of awareness built in this way can we find the inner strength that must be used, in the things which we will unravel more and more from lesson to lesson, which will be laid more and more before our souls, and through which we will find our way into the spiritual world.

You may conclude from this that spiritual realities are very different, as they continue to work under the surface of existence, from what is displayed today in outer life, which is so many lively lies just patched together. Uncommonly little of actual genuine worth lives between people today. And this should be brought before the soul ever and ever again, right at the beginning of the inner striving of the life of this Class. For only out of awareness built in this way can we find the inner strength that must be used, in the things which we will unravel more and more from lesson to lesson, which will be laid more and more before our souls, and through which we will find our way into the spiritual world.

And rooted deep within our human nature is all that hinders true cognition, to begin with in thinking. The usual human thinking plays itself out in the thought specter of the third beast, the very third beast whose gestalt has been depicted as follows:

Behold the third beast, with long-split mouth,
Glazed eye, and slouching attitude,
Dirty red its form appears to you;

And this is the picture of the way most people usually think. This type of human thinking looks out over the details of the external world, and does not become aware that these details of the external world constitute a corpse. Where has such a person been living? He has been living on the corpse of this conventional thinking.

Today, my friends, we are all thinking in just this way, in our ever-present human civilization, as it is so called in our present age. From waking in the morning until falling asleep at night, we are thinking under the guidance received in our normal schooling and in our normal living. We are thinking, but in such a way that our thinking is corpse-like. Thinking is dead. It was living once, but when? It was alive once, but where?

It was present before we were born. It was present in our souls in actuality in pre-earthly existence. Now just imagine, my friends, that a person lives on the physical earth, and his soul-nature stirs within his physical body, and that until his death he moves his physical body about by means of the activity of his soul-nature. For external appearance, however, this active soul-nature is invisible, and all that remains visible is the corpse, the dead corpse. Imagine that this dead structure is all that lives in this human frame during life, and so you must imagine, that thinking lives just so. A living, organic, enmeshed, and intrinsically awake reality was present before the person stepped into earthly life. Then it becomes a corpse, it becomes the grave of our true head, the tomb of our true brain. And just as if a corpse in the grave were to assert, "I am a man," just so is our thinking, as if it were in the brain of a corpse, lying entombed, and considering only things of the external world. It is a corpse. It may be depressing for someone to be a corpse, but it is actually true, and esoteric knowledge must stand by truth.

This lies, however, in the continuation of the address of the Guardian of the Threshold. For as soon as our souls have gone beyond the earnest warning concerning the third beast, then the Guardian speaks again. He speaks, as the words so far intoned rest in our hearts.

The third beast’s glassy eye
Is the bad² contrary-type
Of thinking, that denies itself
In you and chooses death,
Forsaking spirit powers
That held it before its earth-life
Living in spirit in spirit fields.

I will recite it once again:

The third beast’s glassy eye
Is the bad contrary-type
Of thinking, that denies itself
In you and chooses death,
Forsaking spirit powers
That held it before its earth-life
Living in spirit in spirit fields.

Thinking, with which we have to accomplish so much here in the fields of sensory life, is to the gods of the world a mere corpse of our being of soul. We have, while we have been treading the earth, during our time on earth, become dead in our thinking. The death of our thinking was in preparation already before the year 333 AC. By the middle of this fourth post-Atlantean period in 333, the ground had been prepared for thinking to be dead. Vitality still poured forth in thinking before this, inherent from pre-earthly existence. The Greeks formerly felt alive, the Orientals formerly felt alive within their thinking, within their thinking that meshed effectively with the work of the spirit, with spirit work. The Orientals, the Greeks of old, they knew that in their thinking, that in each thought, God was living. Such has been lost. Thinking has become dead. And we must abide by the earnest warning of the times, given to us by the Guardian.

Yet you must beware the abyss;
Lest your beasts within devour
You, if in heedless haste you pass me by;
They are in you throughout this age of man,
As foes of knowing placed within.

This era began 333 years after the onset of Christianity, in the fourth century, after the first third of the fourth century had gone by. And such thinking today, among all sorts of thinking in the world, this thinking clearly arises out of forces of death, not out of living forces. And the dead thinking of the 19th century became encrusted on the surface of human civilization's dead materialism.

It is otherwise with feeling. In the same manner, mankind’s great Ahrimanic enemy, Ahriman himself, cannot yet put feelings to death inwardly in the way he has put thinking to death. Feelings still live on in worldly human ways at the present time. For the most part, however, people have tucked feelings out of full awareness into semi-unconsciousness. Feelings do surge up in the soul, but who has it under control, as one has thinking under control? To whom is it clear, what lies in feelings, as clear as it is, what lies in thinking?

Simply take one of the saddest things, specifically, in the eyes of the spirit, the saddest appearance of our time, my dear friends. If people think clearly about it, they are citizens of the world, and they know quite well that thinking makes a man a man, even though thinking is fairly dead in the present age of the world. Today in feelings, however, people are separated into nations and tribes, and directly due to this they allow certain unconscious feelings to rule, to the detriment of all. Everywhere strife arises on the stage of today's world, growing out of these undistinguished feelings, by means of which a person feels himself to be affiliated with only one particular group of human beings.

World karma of course places us into particular human groupings, and it is something that we feel, that is earned in the working process of world karma, that we are situated in this or that clan, class, or culture. It is not in thinking that we become so situated. Thinking, unless it becomes colored by feelings and willpower, is the same in all parts of the world, but feelings form up in particular ways characteristic of particular regions of the world. Feelings may seem to rest in semi-consciousness, but they really live in the unconscious. So the Ahrimanic spirit, that otherwise has no influence on the life of feelings, has acquired the possibility of mucking about unconsciously in feelings. This mucking about in feelings is somewhat limited, limited to confounding truth with error, so through Ahrimanic influences, through Ahrimanic impulses in us, our feelings become colored with prejudice.

Our feelings, if we wish to gain entrance into the spiritual world, must ascend fully into our souls. In regard to self-awareness, we must be fully able to incorporate our feelings. We must be able to say, by continually reexamining our own being, just what sort of people we are, as feeling human beings. We do not attain this easily. In regard to thinking, it will be comparatively easy for us, as we go about gaining clarity about ourselves. Naturally, we don't always do it, but at least we are more likely to admit to ourselves that we are not exactly geniuses, or that we fall short of clear thinking in this or that respect. It is the height of conceit or opportunism not to allow ourselves to come in this way to having at least some sort of clarity about our thinking.

Concerning our feelings, however, we simply cannot come to the point of really placing them clearly before our souls. We may certainly have persuaded ourselves that almost always our streaming feelings are appropriate. Immediately we must sweep our souls, intimately, thoroughly, if we as feeling human beings wish to be on the right track in our self-characterization. Whatever the case, we must just do it. We lift ourselves up only by what we by ourselves as feeling human beings from time to time conscientiously place before ourselves, we lift ourselves up only in this way over every obstacle that the second beast erects before us on the path into the spiritual world.

Instead of this however, if we do not cultivate this sort of self-awareness in ourselves from time to time, then certainly, inevitably, this mocking apparition will be intertwined in us when we regard the spiritual world. We ourselves will become mockers, and if we do not become aware of our sick feelings, we also will not be aware that in regard to the spiritual world we are indeed mockers. We dress up the mockery in all possible ways, but we alone are certainly mocking the spiritual world. Concerning this, which I was impelled to speak about previously, those who are not in earnest are mockers. Sometimes they feel ashamed to carry any sort of mockery inwardly, within their thoughts, but they are mocking nonetheless, in regard to the spiritual world. For how could someone be flippant and playful in regard to the spiritual world, if he were not mocking it? About such things the Guardian of the Threshold speaks.

The second beast, the mocking face,
It is the bad contrary-force
Of feeling, that hollows-out suitable³ soul
And in it fashions living emptiness
Instead of spiritual worth, which was
Illuminating it before its earth-existence
By means of spirit’s sunny might.

The first beast is the mirror image of our will. This mirror image of our will certainly shows us just what is living in our will. And the will certainly does not merely dream. It does not live in mere semi-consciousness. It lives wholly in the unconscious.

This has been presented to you many times, my dear friends, that the ways and means of the will lie deep in the unconscious. And in the life of customary awareness a person seeks the paths of his karma deep in the unconscious. Every step during life that a person takes by way of his karma is certainly measured out, but the person knows nothing of this. It all happens out of awareness. Former lives on earth are woven effectively into karma. Karma carries us to the situations of our life, to the circumstances of our life, to the uncertainties of our life. Such is the error-fraught state of the individual person, of the person who solely for his own individual self seeks for pathways in the world. In thinking, a person seeks the path that all people seek. In feeling, a person seeks the path that his social group seeks. In feelings one certainly knows whether a person's origins are in the north, west, south, or eastern parts of Europe, or in the middle but originating from the west, the south, or the east. And a person must be ready to enter the unconscious impulses of the will, just in order to maintain in himself, not just a generic person, not just a member of a specific group, but a specific unique human individual. So works the will. But please take note, willfulness works in this way in the very depths of the unconscious. The first beast points to this error-fraught state of the will.

And the Guardian speaks of this in earnest warning:

The first beast, the bony mind,
It is the bad creative-might
Of willing, that estranges suitable body
From your soul's domain
And devotes it to adverse powers,
Who would rob world-existence
Of gods-existence in times to come.

In our will, mighty spirits are working which actually wish to rip our body away from us during our conscious earth-existence, and in this way wish to carry off a piece of our souls. This would enable the building of an earth existence, during Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan, that should not be developed, but would instead be a departure from divine intentions regarding the earth. The earth would be estranged, the earth would be dispossessed, after a certain time in the future. In this sort of world robbed of gods, a person would be bound to certain powers working in his will, which is where he seeks his karma.

The first beast, appearing within as a mirror image, appropriately shows what is effectively working within the will, with its bone-locked head, withered body, dull blunt blue skin, and crooked back. Such is the Ahrimanic spirit that holds sway in the will for all seeking after karma, and it can only be vanquished through courage in knowledge. And just so, as I have been leading up to, just so the Guardian of the Threshold speaks about this first beast:

I will read it once again.

The first beast, the bony mind,
It is the bad creative-might
Of willing, that estranges suitable body
From your soul's domain
And devotes it to adverse powers,
Who would rob world-existence
Of gods-existence in times to come.

In these words, sounding forth from the mouth of the Guardian of the Threshold, the admonition is expounded, and called out to those seeking insight, to human spirits seeking knowledge.

Let these words live in our souls, my friends, with truly genuine intensity, and often and again hearken unto the following, spoken by the Guardian:

The third beast’s glassy eye
Is the bad contrary-type
Of thinking, that denies itself
In you and chooses death,
Forsaking spirit powers
That held it before its earth-life
Living in spirit in spirit fields.

You must ever and again comparatively grasp the similarities in these verses. [The first section of the mantra was now written on the board.]

The third beast’s glassy eye
Is the bad contrary-type
Of thinking, that denies itself
In you and chooses death,
Forsaking spirit powers
That held it before its earth-life
Living in spirit in spirit fields.

Feel initially what the section engenders in you.

Next the second section, which alludes to feeling: [The second section of the mantra was now written on the board.]

The second beast, the mocking face,
It is the bad contrary-force

As a "counter-force" it is no longer merely a sort of thinking, a counter-type of thinking, but now is a "force!" [Both words were underlined twice, and then the writing continued.]

Of feeling, that hollows-out suitable soul
And in it fashions living emptiness
Instead of spiritual worth, which was
Illuminating it before its earth-existence
By means of spirit’s sunny might.

Feel next, here [in the first section] "denies", and here [in the second section] "hollows-out" [Both words were underlined twice.], and feel starkly the coloring coming through the verses, in which the first time there is the word "denies" and the second time "hollows-out".

Then the words of the Guardian, in which he addresses the will:

The first beast, the bony mind,
It is the bad creative-might
Of willing, that estranges suitable body
From your soul's domain
And devotes it to adverse powers,
Who would rob world-existence
Of gods-existence in times to come.

[This third section was now written on the board.]

The first beast, the bony mind,
It is the bad creative-might

Now there is not “type”, not “force", but rather "might.” [The word "might" was underlined twice.] You must feel the progression.

Of willing, that estranges suitable body

And here we have the progression, first of something intellectual in "denies", then something lurking within in "hollows-out", and then something that directly takes a person off the inner path in "estranges.” [Estranges was underlined twice, and then the writing continued.]

From your soul's domain
And devotes it to adverse powers,
Who would rob world-existence
Of gods-existence in times to come.

Feel however, how through all three verses, through all three dictums, how "bad" resounds. [In each section the word "bad" was especially emphasized at this point with vertical boundary lines and underlined three times.]

And when you inwardly feel yourself accepting these dictums at each stopping point, given in progressive steps in the distinctions between thinking, feeling, and willing, [These three words were underlined.] and when you truly come to feel how all three may be bound together by the same ever-present badness, then for you, my dear friends, each of the verses becomes a mantra, a mantra in its inner sense, and they will be able to become a guide for you into the spiritual world, on each of three stepping stones, that of the third beast, that of the second beast, and that of the first beast. [The words "third", "second", and "first" were at the same time underlined on the board.] And when you unfailingly keep in mind this concordance, and unfailingly bind these three together with the definitive word into an inner soul-organism, when you unfailingly bring these three verses into motion within yourself in this way, then these three verses will be your guide, my friends, along the way into the spiritual world, as you come upon the Guardian of the Threshold.

Whom we will get to know better in the next class.

• 1. The lines in parentheses were clarified later as a Zwischensatz.
• 2. böse: The German word übel is the same as the English word evil, which carries a high degree of conceptuality, but what is used here is böse, a word any small child can understand, for böse is bad. It is bad contrary confused dead thinking, bad contrary angry heartless feelings, and bad vicious defiant willfulness.
• 3. eigne: In regard to eigne (intrinsic, suitable, appropriate) as opposed to deine (your own), die eigne Seele ward erleuchtend suggests that spiritual worth was illuminating a well-suited soul before its earth-existence. And in the third stanza, den eignen Leib is not “your own” body, but “suitable” body.

Good morning, gentlemen! Has anyone come up with anything today?

Mr. Pea: I would like to ask how it is that people today look at the starry sky the way they do, and yet the ancient Babylonians looked at it quite differently?

Dr. Steiner: Well, the question belongs there, to say something at all about the whole turnaround that has occurred in the way the world is viewed. You have this astronomy course here with Dr. Vreede, and you will see how difficult it actually is today to get through the computational and mathematical considerations.

You see, if you want to understand these things, you have to imagine, above all, that the ancients were indeed much, one might say, more spiritual than the present people. For a relatively long time, people were aware of those effects in nature that are actually quite unknown today. I would like to draw your attention to a few things in this regard. For one cannot understand what the ancient Babylonians and Assyrians wanted with their star science if one does not understand certain things that are actually quite unknown today.

For example, Rousseau still recounts the following: In Egypt, that is, in a warmer region, of which we have also heard such remarkable things in the last lesson, he had managed, by looking at them in a certain way, for example at toads that came towards him, by staring into their eyes, to make the toads stand still and unable to move at all. The toads were paralyzed. He always succeeded in doing this in warmer regions, in Egypt, for example. There he was able to paralyze the toads and later also kill them. But he wanted to do the same in Lyon. There a toad came towards him. He looked at it, stared at it, and lo and behold, he was paralyzed! He could no longer move his eye, was paralyzed, as if he were dead. It was only when people came and got a doctor, and he was given viper venom, snake venom, which just pulled him out of the cramp, that he came out of it. Then the story had turned. So you see, you just have to go from Egypt to Lyon for such effects, emanating from nature beings, to simply reverse themselves.

We can therefore say that there are indeed effects that are very closely related to human will, because it is an expression of human will. There are such effects. And these forces are also there. Because what was there a century ago is still there today, will always be there as long as the earth exists. But people today no longer want to know about such things and no longer care about them.

But, you see, gentlemen, this is still connected with a few other things. We have to take into account the place where they are made if we want to understand how certain things are. So in a sense we have to consult geography. But not the kind of geography that is valid today, because it does not talk about the difference between the effects of toads, starting from humans or towards humans, but it only talks about very external things.

Now I will tell you another example along these lines. You see, in the 17th century there was a scholar, van Helmont. This scholar still had much of what had been known earlier. For actually the things of earlier knowledge were only completely lost in the 19th century. In the 17th century they were still quite present, and in the 18th century they began to decline. But it was only in the 19th century that people became quite clever in their own opinion!

Van Helmont reflected on how one could know more than one can have through the ordinary human mind. Today, people do not think about how one could know more than one can know through the ordinary mind, because they believe that the human mind can know everything. But van Helmont, who was a doctor, did not think much of this human mind. He wanted spiritual knowledge.

But to gain spiritual knowledge in a spiritual way, as we try to do today in anthroposophy, was not yet possible at that time. Mankind had not progressed that far. So van Helmont used even older methods. He did the following, which I certainly do not recommend anyone imitate. It can't be done. And it wouldn't be as effective today as it was back then. But van Helmont did it.

You see, he took a certain plant that is a poisonous medicinal plant. It is prescribed for certain diseases. He took that. Of course, being a doctor, he knew that he could not eat this plant because it would kill him. But he licked the tip of the root, the lower part of the root. And now he describes the state he entered into in the following way. He says he felt as if his head had been switched off completely, as if he had become headless. He had become completely headless from it. Of course, his head had not fallen off, but he no longer felt it. So he could no longer know anything through his head. But now his abdominal area began to function like a head. And lo and behold, he received great revelations in the form of images, what we today in anthroposophy call imagination, in the form of images from the spiritual world. And that gave him a great jolt in life, a terrible jolt; because now he knew: you can not only say something about the spiritual world through the intellect, but you can also really see the spiritual world. He did not think through the nervous system, which is in the metabolic-limb system of man, but he looked at it and really saw the spiritual world. He thus received imaginations of the spiritual world.

This lasted two hours. After these two hours, he had a slight dizzy spell. Then he recovered. Now you can imagine that this, of course, gave his life a significant jolt; because from that moment on, he knew that one can see the spiritual world. But he knew something else as well. He knew that the head with its thinking is an obstacle to seeing the spiritual world.

Of course, we do not do it by licking a plant root like van Helmont – some people believe that, but it is nonsense – but through spiritual exercises, the thinking of the head itself is eliminated. The head is there only to grasp what is seen with the rest of the human organism. Thus the same process is evoked in a spiritual way that van Helmont evoked in an ancient way.

Now I am not telling you everything that would be necessary to refer you once more to spiritual training; that can be done on another occasion. But today, in answer to Mr. Erbsmehl's question, I am telling you that the two things I have told you are connected with the influence of the stars. And since the influence of the stars is denied altogether today, people no longer look at these things.

Van Helmont, on the other hand, had experienced this great shock in his life, and because he liked it, he wanted to repeat the experience more often, and he nibbled at the tip of the plant root again and again. But he did not achieve the same result.

Yes, but what does it mean that he did not achieve the same result? You see, it means that van Helmont did something later on that was no longer quite in accordance with the earlier thing. Van Helmont himself has no explanation for this. Of course I cannot tell you when van Helmont first nibbled on the tip of the plant root, because he does not give the date. But from what can otherwise be known from spiritual science, the following can be said.

You see, the first time van Helmont nibbled on the tip of the root, there was definitely a full moon. And he didn't pay attention to that. Later he didn't do it during a full moon anymore, and then he didn't succeed in the same way anymore. Something remained with him from the first time; he was always able to see something in the spiritual world. But he never managed to have such a jolt again as the first time.

Now, in the 17th century, he no longer knew that this was dependent on the moon and believed that it came from the plant root alone. But in older times, such things were known quite precisely. And therefore, in older times, this view was also very much alive everywhere, that the stars have a certain influence on the life of humans, animals and plants.

If one were to examine how such things happen, one would have to say: We do not eat poisonous plants, but we do eat plants, and we also eat the roots of plants. And while poisonous plants can only be used for healing, the other plants, which are not poisonous, are used as food. You see, gentlemen, the thing is this: When you eat a plant root, it is just as the poisonous plant root is under the influence of the moon. The moon has an influence on the growth of plant roots. Therefore, certain plant roots are very necessary for a certain human constitution. You know, for example, that there is also a population of the intestines, that is, the digestive organs, worms that are very troublesome. Now, for people who are prone to worms, beetroot is a good food. When the beetroot enters the intestines, the worms become angry, are paralyzed and then leave with the intestinal waste. So you can see that the root also has an influence on the life of these lower animals, the worms. The beetroot root does not poison us, but it poisons the worms. And again, you will find that the greatest effectiveness in expelling the worms comes from those plant roots that we eat during the full moon. Such things must be taken into account.

Now, you see, you can say: If you study the plant root, it turns out that the plants give us something that has a very strong effect on the metabolic limb system. You could even provide great help to people who have certain illnesses by giving them a root diet, by eating roots and by doing it in such a way that you give them at the time of the full moon and let them rest at the time of the new moon.

Now, you see, everything that can be observed in plants also has a meaning for humans, namely for human reproduction, for human growth. Children who have an addiction to staying small could also be nursed back to health with root food so that they would grow more easily; you just have to do it at the appropriate time in youth, between birth and the age of seven. The forces of the moon have a great influence on everything in the plant world and everything in the animal and human world that has to do with reproduction and growth. So you have to study the moon not only by pointing a telescope at it, but by studying what it causes on Earth. And with the Babylonians and Assyrians, those who were the scholars there, who were then called initiates, knew exactly: this plant is so under the influence of the moon, another so, and so on. They did not speak of the moon as a mere sphere, frozen up there in space, but they saw the effects of the moon everywhere. And these moon effects are mainly seen on the surface of the earth. They do not go deeper into the earth. They go just far enough to stimulate the roots of plants. They are not stuck in the earth at all.

You can find proof, for example, that the moon's forces do not go into the earth at all if you ask swimmers who swim in moonlight. They soon go out again because they always have the feeling that they are sinking. The water is pitch black. It does not go into the water, it does not go deeper at all, it does not connect with the earth, the moonlight. And so you see that the matter is such that the animals and plants are under the influence of the moonlight, which does not even come from the earth, but only from the very outermost surface to the roots of the plants. Now, this gives you a first insight into the starry sky.

Let us now turn to the example I gave you of Rousseau, who could paralyze, even kill, toads in the hot zone, but who himself became paralyzed in the temperate zone, in Lyon. What is the reason for this?

Yes, gentlemen, you just have to consider: when the Earth, which is a sphere, is almost a sphere, when it is illuminated by the sun, the sun's rays fall almost vertically in the hot zone. There they have a completely different effect than in the temperate zone, where they fall obliquely on the earth, at a completely different angle. And just as growth and reproduction in plants and in humans are influenced by the moon, so what its inner animal powers are, what is transmitted to the gaze, is influenced by the sun. These animalistic, bestial forces, which are indeed deeds, depend on the sun. So the sun, with its forces, causes humans in Egypt to be easily fascinated, paralyzed, even killed by toads, while in temperate zones they must yield to the influence of the toads themselves. So that depends on the sun again.

And then you will know that sometimes thinking itself, the whole inner life, is more difficult, sometimes easier. This again depends on Saturn, depending on where it is.

And so we have stellar effects for everything that occurs in human, animal, and plant life. Only the minerals are earthly effects. Therefore, with a science that is limited only to the earthly, one cannot possibly come to really understand the human being in any way. And one cannot know what the stars do if one does not look at the deeds of the stars.

Just imagine – today it's not so bad, but in the past it could still happen – that someone was a great statesman because of me. One could have asked those who lived with him in the house, who cooked for him, the cook, for example, who was not at all interested in statecraft, what the man does. She might have said: He has breakfast, lunch, and dinner; otherwise he does nothing at all, and during the rest of the time he goes out. Otherwise he does nothing. She would simply not have known what else he does.

Today's scholars only talk about the stars in terms of what they can calculate; they only know that. The others, the earlier people, were interested in what else the stars do. And that is why they had such a star science. They knew that the moon has a relationship to the plant in man, the sun to the animal in man, and Saturn has a relationship to the completely human in man. And so they went further.

Now they said to themselves: So the sun has a relationship to the animal in man. When the sun shines completely vertically, then man in the hot zone can have a strong effect on animals.

Now, you see, in Europe, for example, there is a strong effect of man on horses; but it will never be as intimately connected with the horse as it is with the Arabs, in the hot zone, because this relationship between man and animal cannot take place there. It depends on the vertical incidence of the sun's rays, on the effects of the sun.

Please continue, gentlemen. In Babylonia and Assyria, people knew that certain effects and forces emanated from the sun. But now people have observed the sun (it is being drawn). They said to themselves, there is the constellation of Leo, a group of stars out in the sky, and there is the constellation, let's say, of Scorpius. Now there is a certain time of the year when the sun is in the constellation of Leo, that is, it covers the lion, and you can see the lion behind the sun. At another time, the sun covers the constellation of Scorpius, or Sagittarius, or some other group of stars.

Now the Babylonians and Assyrians knew that these effects, which emanate from people onto animals, are strongest when the sun is in front of Leo; they become weaker when the sun moves on and is in Virgo or Scorpius. So they not only knew that there is a relationship between the planets and what people do, but they also knew that there is a relationship between the position of the sun and whether it covers Leo or covers Scorpio, because that is when these things change.

What do we do today? Today we simply calculate: the sun is in the zodiac in Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Pisces and so on; we calculate how long it will be in that constellation, when it will be in it and so on. We know that on March 21, the sun is in the constellation of Pisces, but that's all we know. The ancient Babylonians and Assyrians, for example, still knew that when Saturn is in a certain constellation, called the Pleiades, the human head is at its freest. They knew all this. They could easily judge this because they lived in a hotter area than we do and developed a certain science from which they understood the whole human being from the heavens.

If we can say that this science was such that it was applied to people – well, this science has gradually been forgotten. But in those days, the planetary system was understood, and the fixed starry sky was also understood. It was known that depending on whether a planet is here or there, it means this or that for human life. It was known that when the sun is in Leo, the sun exerts the strongest influence on the human heart.

The thing is this: people have now tried to see how it is with minerals. They have said to themselves: the stars affect plants, animals and humans; they do not affect minerals. Only the earth affects minerals. But the minerals in the earth did not just come into being today; they came into being much earlier and were also plants in ancient times. All minerals were plants. You know from the bituminous coal that it was a plant. But just like the bituminous coal, all other minerals were once plants. The moon had an influence on them, and in even earlier times, the sun also had an influence, and in still earlier times, Saturn also had an influence. And now they wanted to know which mineral, in much earlier times, when it was still a plant, had an influence from the sun. So they examined the effect of the mineral on humans and found out, for example, that when the sun is in front of Leo and has a strong influence on the heart, the same effect on the heart is produced as when gold is administered to humans. From this they concluded that the sun once had a great influence on gold. Or when Saturn is in the Pleiades constellation, then the strongest influence is on the human head. It becomes free. And then they tried to find out which mineral, when it was still an animal – because before they were plants, the minerals were animals – could have had the strongest influence from Saturn. Then they found that it was lead. And in this way one finds out that lead also has the effect of making the human head freer. Therefore, someone who gets a dull head and for whom this is caused by the fact that he carries out certain digestive processes, which should no longer take place in the head, through illness with the head, must be given lead.

And so we get a metal for each planet. And that is why the Babylonians and Assyrians wrote the sun with this sign:®. But they also wrote gold with this sign. They knew that the stars no longer have any influence on the minerals now that the earth is there, but they once had it. They wrote the sun and gold like this:®. We write the sun and the gold with the letters that are in our alphabet; but the ancients always made this sign:®. They also did not write “lead”, but they made this sign:, and that means both Saturn and lead. It would not have occurred to anyone in ancient times to write Saturn or lead with ordinary letters. If he wanted to write that, he wrote this sign Ahin. If he wanted to write “silver,” he wrote this sign: C. That means both the moon and silver. So that the Earth, insofar as it is metallic, was also related to the stars.

Yes, you see, gentlemen, you don't really know very much about man and his relationship to the universe if you can't go into such things.

Now, on to the next point. These things were generally known in ancient times. The fact of the matter is that when Christianity first spread, such knowledge was also spread throughout the more southern regions of Europe. For example, there is a book about nature from the first Christian centuries that contains much of this. Today, we need to know it again, otherwise we cannot find the confusing information there, because it is quite confusing; but it contains much of such ancient wisdom. But then came the time when Christianity limited itself only to the intellect, and gave up everything else for the dogma. That was the time when everything of such an ancient science was eradicated in Europe. Between the 5th and 11th or 12th centuries, work was actually done to eradicate this ancient science in Europe. And to a high degree, they succeeded. You see, it was like this: the people who practiced this ancient science in ancient Greece, in Rome, in Spain, that is, in southern regions, these people were at the same time already quite spiritually and physically depraved people. The history of Rome at that time is actually a terrible one; they were morally completely corrupt people. They still had the old science, but they could no longer maintain themselves as human beings, figures such as the autocrats Nero or Commodus.

The following story can be told about Commodus, for example, the Roman Caesar. This Commodus, like all Roman emperors, was an initiate. But what does “initiate” mean in this case? It is the same as if someone today bears some title by name. Every Roman emperor was considered an initiate from the outset because he was an emperor. This does, however, show that in those days science was held in very high esteem. Except for Augustus, the Roman emperors did not have this science. But they too were initiated into the mysteries; they were even able to initiate others themselves. Now there was a certain degree where the person being initiated had to be struck on the head. This is a symbolic act. The emperor Commodus gave this blow in such a way that the person concerned collapsed dead. You couldn't punish it because it was the emperor Commodus. Just as they were as “initiates”, they were as human beings.

Further north, there were still people who, although they later developed into the Central European culture, were still quite uncivilized at that time. But the Germanic peoples later conquered Italy, Greece and Spain. Only those who worked with pure logic, with pure thinking, were preserved there. That was to be only dogma. The other should not be understood. Thinking was limited only to the most external things. And so it has come about that what was old knowledge has been eradicated everywhere by schools and monasteries. And one can see how, in fact, only by devious means, I would say, through contraband, some of this Babylonian science has come to Europe. But as a rule it did not travel far. In Babylonia, such science was cultivated for a relatively long time.

But even into the Middle Ages there was a Greek empire in Constantinople. Yes, you see, gentlemen, they were strange figures! Just as the Polish Jews sometimes come to us with their caftans and their old scrolls, which are also not very well regarded sometimes, but are profoundly knowledgeable in Judaism, such figures also arrived in Constantinople again and again at a time when everything was being eradicated. They arrived with large, mighty parchment scrolls on which they had written many things. Now, you see, these parchment scrolls were taken from these strange figures in Constantinople and opened there. And so everything that came from Babylonia and Assyria was stored in Constantinople. And no one took care of it. And in Europe, everything was eradicated. It was only in the 12th and 13th centuries and later in the Middle Ages, with the decline of the empire, that these parchments were freed again, and many people stole them. They then traveled around Europe. All that was not yet deciphered by the learned but by the unlearned came from these parchment scroll.

And so a little knowledge was spread again in the Middle Ages. Such a little knowledge then had a stimulating effect on others again, otherwise there would not have been a van Helmont, Paracelsus and so on, if these people had not brought the parchment scrolls they had stolen to Europe and sold them there for a lot of money. As a result, a lot of things came to Europe again. And many secret societies still exist today because of all the knowledge that came to Europe. There are all kinds of orders, freemasons, odd fellows and so on; they would have no knowledge at all if it had not been brought to Europe from Constantinople in the parchment scrolls that were sold for a lot of money back then.

But this knowledge was not appreciated. If you were a learned canon like Copernicus, you did not go to the people who had such parchment scrolls. You were not allowed to do that. You would have lost all respect. Yes, but as a result, the old science also lost all respect. And a man like Copernicus first established the kind of science that we still have today, really still have today.

But then something very strange happened, gentlemen. The most beautiful thing about it is that Copernicus now founded a certain astronomical science, and it was already so that he no longer knew everything that had been known about it in the past, just as we no longer know it today. But the following period did not even understand what Copernicus said. Two sentences of Copernicus were understood; the third was no longer understood. Because if one understands the two sentences of Copernicus, then one believes that the sun is in the center, around the sun Venus, Mercury, Earth and so on revolve. That is taught today in all schools. But if you understand the whole of Copernicus, it is not at all like that. Copernicus himself still draws attention to the fact that the sun is stationary (it is drawn), with Mercury behind it, Venus behind it, the earth here and so on. In reality, all this revolves with the sun through space in such a spiral. You can read that from Copernicus if you want. So there is the strange fact that even Copernicus trampled on the old science, but that the more recent ones have not even understood Copernicus. Now people are beginning to understand Copernicus, that is, to see that he said three sentences, not just two; the third sentence was too difficult for people to understand. And so, little by little, astronomy has become what it is today: a mere calculation.

And now you can imagine: what remained of the old science was not achieved in the way we want to achieve something today. We have to achieve something today with the full clarity of mind. The ancients proceeded more instinctively. And so it is no longer understandable what the ancients meant by knowledge.

A few years ago there was a very interesting example of this. A Swedish scholar came across an old alchemical book that contained all sorts of information about lead and silver. It said that if you add lead to silver, this will happen, and if you add gold, that will happen, and so on. What did the scholar do? He said: Since we have written these things down, let's try to reproduce them! And he imitated them in his laboratory, took lead as it is available today, silver as it is available today, treated them in the fire as described there – nothing came of it!

Nothing could come of it, because what he read there were such signs. Now he believed that this sign © means gold; so I take gold and process it chemically. This sign r. means lead; so I take lead and process it chemically.

But the terrible thing was that the man with whom the Swedish scholar read this, the alchemist, did not mean the metals in this case, but the planets, and meant that if you mixing solar forces with Saturn forces and moon forces – what is described here actually refers to the human embryo – when solar and lunar forces act on the child in the womb, then this and that happens.

Now it happened to this Swedish scholar that he wanted to do in the retort with the outer metals what the old alchemist refers to as germination in the human womb. Of course that could not be right, because he should have seen the development in the human womb; then he could have figured it out. You see, so little is understood today of what was actually meant in this ancient science.

All of this will now show you how this question, which Mr. Erbsmehl asked, is actually to be answered. It is actually to be answered in such a way that one becomes aware: It is all well and good and right with modern science. Today, one can calculate exactly the position of a star; one can calculate the distance between it and another star, and one can also see through the spectroscope what color the light rays have, and from that one can deduce the material composition of the stars. But how the stars affect the earth is something that must first be researched again! And this must not be researched in the way that many people do today, by simply taking old books. Of course, it would be easy if one could simply take old books and find out what people no longer know today. But that is no longer of any use with Paracelsus, because people no longer understand him even when they read him with today's eyes. Rather, it is a matter of learning anew how to research what influence the stars have on people. And that can only be done with spiritual science, with anthroposophical spiritual science.

Then you come back to researching not only where the moon is, but how the moon is connected to the whole person. You realize that the child experiences the influence of the moon for ten lunar months, so ten times four weeks in the womb, and experiences the influence of the moon in such a way that during this time the full moon is experienced eight, nine, ten times. Now, the child swims in amniotic fluid and is therefore a completely different being before it is born, protected from the forces of the earth. That is the important thing, that it is protected from the forces of the earth, and since it also has the influence of the other stars, it has the influence of the moon.

You see, it should be the case that today at our universities and at our schools, and even at the elementary schools in a certain way, as far as that can be, things would be studied quite differently, that above all the human being would be studied, the human heart, the human head, and in connection with that the stars would be studied. And at the universities, there should first be a description of how the human germ develops from the very small human seed through the first, second, third, fourth, fifth week and so on. This description exists, but the other description, of what the moon does during the same period, does not exist. Therefore, one can only have a science of the physical development of man if, on the one hand, one describes what happens in the mother's womb and, on the other hand, one describes the actions of the moon.

And again, one can only truly understand how, for example, teeth change around the seventh year if one not only describes - as is done today - how the milk tooth is, the other grows in after it, and the milk tooth is pushed out, but if one again has a sun science; because this depends on the forces of the sun.

And likewise, when a person becomes sexually mature, today one describes the purely physical processes. But these depend on Saturn; one needs a Saturn science. So one cannot proceed as one does today, describing each thing separately. Because then, of course, it turns out as it did in a hospital in a large European city. A man came to the university hospital with a spleen disease, as he believed. He asked: “Which department should I go to with a spleen disease?” He was told that he should go to any department. Unfortunately, he mentioned in passing that he also had a liver disease. He was told: “You can't have anything from us, you have to go to a completely different hospital, that's for people with liver disease, and the ones we have here are only for people with spleen disease.” He was now “between two bundles of hay”, like the well-known donkey, between two bundles of hay that were the same size and looked exactly the same. It is a famous logical image of the freedom of will! They said: What does a donkey do when he is between two bundles of hay that are the same size and smell the same? If he wants to choose the left one, then he thinks: the right one tastes just as good; if he wants to choose the right one, he thinks: the left one is just as good. And then he goes back and forth and dies of hunger between these two haystacks! So it was with the two diseases, he did not know where to go, and actually could die between his decision inside whether he belonged to the department for liver diseases or to the department for spleen diseases!

I only mention this to show that today everyone only knows a very small part of the world. But you can't know anything like that today! Because if you want to know something about the moon today, you have to go to the observatory and ask the people there. But they don't know anything about the origin of man. So you have to ask a gynecologist, an obstetrician, a female professor. But he doesn't know anything about the stars. But the two things belong together.

This is the source of the misery of today's knowledge: that everyone knows a piece of the world, but no one the whole. That is why it is, and it is based on it, that science today, when it is presented in popular lectures, is so terribly boring. Of course, gentlemen, the subject must be boring if you only tell people what is just a small part of the subject.

Imagine you want to know what a chair looks like that is not here, and someone describes the wood to you; but you want to know how it is designed. Then you will be bored if the person only describes the wood of the chair to you. So today it is boring to learn, as it is called today, anthropology, the science of the physical human being, because what is important is not described. And if it is described, it has no relation to the matter at hand.

So star science will only come into its own when it is combined with human science. And that is what it is about; that is the way I can answer this question for you today in a way that is appropriate to the subject. It is really the case that one must understand such important things as those I have told you about Rousseau and van Helmont - which are there, and which cannot be understood from the earth at all. People have become materialistic even in terms of words. For example, what was it called when someone could paralyze animals with his gaze? It was called magnetism. Yes, but later on the word magnetism was only applied to iron, to the magnet. And when people talk about it in science today, they only talk about leaving it with iron and not abusing magnetism. Only quacks still talk about magnetizing a person; but they can no longer imagine what it means. To see through such talk, a spiritual science is needed.

Next time at nine o'clock on Wednesday.

Question regarding earthquakes.

Dr. Steiner: You probably mean the earthquakes that are happening in America now? Of particular importance with regard to such questions are always those volcanic phenomena that, I might say, do not occur so intensely, not so powerfully at the same time, but which show in detail that something is happening over time in the earth's environment. And here I would like to draw your attention to something else, which is perhaps less noticeable, but which many people can relate to more than these individual phenomena, which of course had a terrible effect on those who were nearby, but which are of less significance for the greater part of humanity. And then you just remember that in the last few years people could talk about the fact that extraordinary weather conditions prevail. We cannot deny that in recent years there have not been any really proper, lasting summers, especially not in our areas. But that is spreading across a large part of Europe and further afield.

Now, when something like this is mentioned, people usually talk about how large icebergs float in the northern seas and how so-called cold spells then emanate from these mighty floating icebergs. You may also remember that during last year's so-called cold spell, it was reported by ships that if they took even a slight northerly course, these huge floating icebergs could be found everywhere in the Atlantic Ocean.

But we must realize that the things that occur in this way do not come from the earth alone, but are connected with the whole evolution of the world. And here we must ask ourselves: What about the distribution of warmth and cold on our earth?

I would like to draw your attention to something that I may have mentioned before, but in a different context, which can be important for us when considering this question. You may have heard that particularly in northern Siberia, in Asia, there are very special conditions in the ground. To give you an idea, I would just like to note the following. If we have the map of Europe like this (it is drawn), here is Norway, here is the north coast of Germany, here it goes over to Holland and so on, there would be Ireland, England, and there we would come over the large peninsula to Asia. There is the border between Asia and Europe. There is Russia. Here we come over to Asia and have Siberia. Over there is the so-called Arctic Ocean. That is just drawn to help you orient yourself. Now, elephant-like animals have been found in this area of Siberia a long time ago, which no longer exist today, and which therefore existed on Earth a very, very long time ago. And you also know that elephant-like animals no longer live up there at the Arctic Ocean. Elephant-like animals belong in much warmer areas. But the strange thing is that these elephant-like animals, which are deep in the ground, in the icy ground, were so fresh that you could still have eaten the meat if you like to eat elephant meat. These animals were in the icy ground just as if someone had wanted to eat the meat and had stored the animals in the ground for that purpose. So these animals in northern Siberia were simply preserved, as they say, their meat was kept fresh, for many, many millennia.

Now, you see, gentlemen, it is impossible that this could have happened slowly over time. Because if the animals had lived up there, simply died and gone into the ground, they would have rotted away long ago, and at most you would have found the remains of bones, as you would find anywhere else. But here you find whole fresh animals. This is only possible if these animals once lived there and an ice wave came very quickly, covering these animals, sealing them in, so that they could be preserved in the same state with the fresh meat for thousands of years. So you can see: there must have been a time when a mighty blast came from the south and blew water up into the ice region. The water froze instantly, and these animals were instantly frozen in this enormous Siberian ice cellar, where they remained for thousands of years.

Now you will all admit, of course, the earth has no reason to suddenly do something like that. Because where should the forces come from in the earth itself, that it could carry out something like that? These things can only come from the extraterrestrial stellar influences. So if you imagine that there is the earth (it is drawn), “since here the southern regions are the equatorial regions – only south in relation to the north, of course – then such a stellar constellation must have existed here once, which simply threw the water up again. So, through the constellation of the stars, through the position of the heavenly bodies, this water was thrown up, immediately froze and buried these animals. You can see from such things that the constellation of the stars has a powerful influence on the distribution of land and water and ice on Earth.

Now, I recently explained to you how volcanoes also originate from that which is outside of the earth, how that which is under the earth is, so to speak, brought out from the interior of the earth. So we can also say that when, for example, the mighty Etna erupts, things are not hurled out from below; rather, a stellar constellation acts from above downwards, and this brings these fiery masses out of the interior of the earth.

From this we see that today very many things interact, and this causes, on the one hand, that we have these cold spells. The cold spells are therefore also caused by the extraterrestrial. The fact that we have these volcanic eruptions and earthquakes also stems from the extraterrestrial. But now one can never fully assess such an occurrence if one is not clear about the fact that man himself is intimately connected with all these extraterrestrial conditions.

You see, you have probably already heard of so-called haemorrhages, where a person's blood no longer takes the right path, so that it spews out of the mouth instead of being distributed throughout the body. This is called a haemorrhage. Such haemorrhages occur particularly easily when a person is at certain stages in life. We must ask ourselves: What is the actual relationship between a hemorrhage and what is happening outside? — Now, if you remember that man does not consist only of his physical body, which we can touch with our hands, but that man consists of the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the I-body, then you will have to say to yourself: Of course, we can shed the physical body. It is heavy, it is heavy mass, it is connected with the earth. But the etheric body is connected with the environment. And when we look at things in the human being, it is the case that the moon has a huge influence on the human being. But the moon does not have such an influence on people as it does now; rather, we are led back to very ancient times. In ancient times, the moon had an extremely strong influence on people. People had to do something specific during the waxing moon, something specific during the waning moon, and so on. And in particular, in those older times, the reproduction of the human race was entirely based on the moon. It is so interesting to see how people who still have traditions from ancient times think about these things. They definitely think that it is of great importance whether a person is conceived in the waxing moon or the waning moon, for example. This is a very important thing in ancient traditions. And the moon then also exerts its influence on the whole development of the person, but in such a way that the person carries these lunar influences within them. So it is not that it has a direct influence on the person when there is a full moon or something like that; but we see the moon waxing and waning; that once had an influence on the person, and that has remained and continues. So it is not the current phase of the moon that has a great influence, but something that is similar to the old moon phase and is an old heirloom has a great influence. And so you could say that the moon has a certain influence.

But we wouldn't have any blood in our heads at all if it weren't for the moon. We would all walk around with very pale faces, terribly pale faces, if it were not for the influence of the moon. The moon draws our blood up from our body to our head. That is the influence of the moon, that the blood is willing to go to the head at all. This is extremely interesting. The blood only goes up into the human head because of the influence of the moon. Otherwise, the blood would always go down. Now, when a person becomes so weak in his entire body that he can no longer sufficiently resist these forces of the moon that draw the blood up, the blood rushes too strongly into the human head, and that is how a hemorrhage occurs. We must always have this influence, but when it becomes too strong, the blood rushes too strongly to the human head and that is how blood comes out.

And you see, what the hemorrhage is in the individual human being is something like water bursting out [pointing to Siberia] or erupting from a volcano in the great outdoors outside. Only there it is not the influence of the moon, but the influence of the more distant stars. You must imagine that when we simply develop as human beings, we are continually exposed to other influences. I will illustrate this to you. Imagine once again, here would be the earth (it is drawn), here the moon goes around the earth. I will draw it as it looks. So the moon goes around the earth, and it has its greatest influence on people first. But outside of the moon are the other stars, Venus, Mercury, the sun, Mars, Jupiter and so on, and then the fixed stars. Now you must be aware that it is different whether, let's say, Mars is behind the Sun or whether Mars has already moved on and is already next to the Sun. When Mars is behind the Sun, it has less effect on Earth because the Sun covers its effect. When Mars is in this position [next to the Sun], it has a stronger effect on Earth. And so it always depends on the position of the stars how strongly the earth is affected. This science of the position of the stars is almost not developed at all today, and so people only look at what is happening on earth, icebergs and so on, but they do not look at the stars.

Now one cannot investigate these things from the earth either, but one must be clear about the fact that one must investigate these things from the human being. These things must be investigated from the human being.

Now I would like to tell you something: if you go through the development of humanity in modern times, you will indeed find huge changes in this development of humanity. We do not want to go back very far, but let us go back, say, six hundred years. If we go back six hundred years – today is 1923 – we come to 1323. You have to bear in mind that if you had lived then, you would not have known that there was such a thing as America or Australia. People did not know any of this, they only knew about Europe and Asia and a small part of Africa, very little of Africa. So six centuries before our time, imagine, people only knew about a small part of the world. And above this earth they saw the moon rise and set, the sun rise and set, the stars, and everything was such that all life took place only in a small space. Yes, gentlemen, in those days people knew little about the earth and had no idea about the movement of the stars. But they knew something about the spiritual influences of the stars. This is connected with the fact that people lived in small circumstances. People got their influence from these small circumstances.

Well, you know, it didn't take long: in 1492, Christopher Columbus of Genoa set out with a small number of ships, and he was of the opinion that one could travel around the world. Christopher Columbus did not want to discover America at all, but he was given the idea that the earth must be spherical. Before that, people thought the earth was flat. Now he was given the idea that the earth must be spherical. And so he equipped himself with a number of ships. There was resistance, but he still got these ships from the government, equipped them, and believed that he could sail around the world. At least that's what he thought. He said to himself: if we go from Europe over there to the east, we'll find (pointing to the drawing) Asia, down there is Hither India, there is Farther India. — So he knew that if you go over there by land, you come to India. Now he wanted to go around the globe of the earth from Spain and come to India from the other side. That was what Columbus wanted. He wanted to travel around the world because he hoped, so to speak, to make the first practical use of the roundness of the earth. He wanted to travel around and discover India from the other side. Now he set out and came across America, and thought: This is the other side of India. — That is why this area was also called the West Indies, as it is still called in part today.

So you see how, through the thinking of people, the spherical shape of the earth has actually been gradually conquered for knowledge, how it was only gradually realized that one had come to the other side of America and realized that this was not India, but a new country. So 1492, that's only 431 years ago that people discovered America at all.

But the discovery of America means something completely different. And if you want to understand what the discovery of America means, then please consider the following. You see, in 1492, I told you, Christopher Columbus set out first and discovered America. In 1543, Copernicus came on the scene and was the first to put forward the world view that the sun stands still and the earth moves around the sun like the other planets. So what every child learns at school today has only been around since that time. Do you realize how many years that is? It's only 380 years! It is only since that time that people have had any idea at all of what is already taught in elementary school today. Before that, people knew nothing about any of these things. But they thought about it all the more, about what influence the moon has on people. People knew what I have told you now, that the moon drives the blood to the head. People recognized this influence on people.

Now you have to consider what the discovery of America actually means. You see, people talk so thoughtlessly and history presents it that way: discovery of America, people have possessed genius after all! - Yes, gentlemen, but you have to imagine it quite differently. What kind of people do you think lived in America at the time when Columbus came across it? Well, not even five hundred years ago, the copper-red Indians lived over there, and these Indians did not think like you do today in Europe. They knew a lot about the influence of the stars. So there lived in all of America at the time a population that knew an extraordinary amount about the influence of the stars. They oriented themselves entirely to the influence of the stars. And then the Europeans came, civilized humanity. Now, you see, as late as the 19th century, the Indians said that the Europeans always brought something strange with them, something white, with little ghosts on it. But these were very harmful ghosts, terribly harmful ghosts, and the Europeans would use them to conjure the Americans. At least that's what the Native Americans thought. And do you know what it was that the Native Americans feared so much, what they thought made the Europeans such terrible guys who caused so much havoc? It was the books, the white sheets of paper with the letters on them! The Native Americans looked at them, thought they were magic and said: “These people are using them to cast spells on us.

And so the people came together. And then the extermination of the Indians began. But where did the people who exterminated the Indians come from? They came from Europe! And if the people who still lived in Europe in 1323 had come over there, their beliefs would have been much more similar to those of the Indians. Because these people in 1323 in Europe still knew about the influence of the stars. They could have understood each other much better. But the people who came over did not understand the Indians at all, they could only exterminate them. And on the spot where the exterminated Indians were, European humanity developed. You just have to bear in mind that the Americans who developed there are, after all, Europeans. Isn't it true that the ideas that people often have based on what they learned at school are really quite stupid sometimes.

I would just like to point out one thing to you. Today people talk so much about the French. But around Nuremberg, the people are still called Franks today. The French are just the immigrated Germanic people who then adopted the Latin language in a modified form. So everything that is talked about, when one does not know how things came about and rages because it is presented that way in history, is sometimes so boundlessly foolish, so boundlessly stupid. And so it is boundlessly stupid there too. They don't even consider that the people of Europe who migrated to America had developed in Europe over the last three hundred years. The main immigration only happened much later, in the 18th and 19th centuries. That's when America was first settled. And what kind of people came over then? Well, the illiterate ones also came over, but they didn't have much influence. Those who came over and had a great influence were those who had been educated in Europe, especially in science, who had learned the Copernican doctrine, who had completely different views about the stars.

Imagine how this all fits together in world history. On the one hand, the spherical shape of the earth is proven by the fact that one can travel around the earth at all, and on the other hand, that it is not the sun that rises and sets, but that there is space all around and the earth goes around the sun, that the earth is not a plane, that the sun does not sink into the water in the evening, but that the earth goes around the sun.

You see, people do not think about what the actual connection is between the discovery of America, which took place in 1492, and 1543, when Copernicus came up with his new view of the stars. There is a close connection. Don't think that what happened could have happened without the influence of the stars on people. Columbus did not think: “Now I will go over to the West” without the influence of the stars. You only have to consider how foggy it was. He did not know that he was discovering America. He just wanted to sail around the world. It's like a blind hen finding a grain of corn. You can't say that it was his own mind, but that people are driven by influences. And what drives them are the stellar influences. So we also have to ask ourselves: Why did Copernicus think the way he did about the stellar influences? — then we ourselves have to look for the causes in the stellar influences.

We have a time in the Middle Ages - I told you, it was still like this six hundred years ago - when people still have concepts that relate to a very small world. Then suddenly they get concepts that go all around on the earth and all around in the sky. All concepts diverge. Yes, gentlemen, you really have to think a little deeper about what is going on in people. One must penetrate into these things with real science. One must therefore study man. Now I have already told you many things about man. I will now tell you a well-attested fact again, so that you can see how things are.

There was an Austrian poet, Robert Hamerling, who was transferred to Trieste as a secondary school teacher at a certain time, in 1855, and he took a great interest in everything that was going on. At the time, Robert Hamerling was also very interested in how all sorts of swindlers passed through Trieste, but so did some people who produced anomalies, so-called mediums. He liked to visit all such gatherings, but he was not at all superstitious. He really saw how most of these things were fraudulent. But once he thought to himself, when he saw a person with a particularly strange medium: now I want to see for myself. Now Hamerling had known a young girl in Graz, where he lived before coming to Trieste, who died very soon afterwards and from whom he had received a lock of hair. He had this lock of hair from the young girl made into a small wreath, tied it together, pinned it on a small piece of paper and then put it in a little box. He kept this as a souvenir. It had become particularly valuable to him after the person in question had died. He took it with him to Trieste among his other things. Nobody knew anything about it. He never told anybody anything about it – he remembered that very clearly – and never showed the box to anybody. Besides, the circumstances were such that he would not have liked to show it anyway. It was something that embarrassed him a great deal. So he had a secret box, so to speak, that contained this. He took it with him when he went to the meeting to see the medium. And with this medium it was the case that people gave all kinds of objects, which they put in envelopes or boxes; the medium took it in his hand, touched it and then said what was in the box. Now, such things are very often interspersed with fraud; you have to keep an open mind about these things.

For example, I was once at a meeting where a medium was brought in, and the man they call the impresario went around the audience and had all kinds of things written down on pieces of paper. He took these, but stopped walking. The medium was blindfolded. And while he was still standing there – he just said: Tell me, what do I have in my hand? – the medium immediately said what he had in his hand. So if someone wrote down his own name, he gave it to the impresario, who read it and then crumpled up the piece of paper. The medium could not see anything, but then said what was on it. Now, you see, the people at the table where I was sitting at the time were terribly curious – because the people were terribly amazed – and they said that now someone should write something down where the guy was not clever enough, where he could not communicate, because they all believed that he communicated with the medium through all kinds of signs. Well, I wrote down the name Spinoza and a work by Spinoza, the “Ethics”, because people believed that the impresario naturally did not know who Spinoza was. But he took over Spinoza and the “Ethics” just as well, and the medium answered correctly. People were terribly amazed. But, you see, the matter was very simple. The impresario was a ventriloquist and the medium only pretended to answer, while the impresario spoke from the medium's mouth. So one must not be taken in. I must always emphasize that one must not be taken in by these things. That is precisely the difference between superstitious, gullible people and those who can judge these things.

But Hamerling took the little box with him and no one knew anything about it. Then he sent this little box, the contents of which no one knew about, down among the other objects. The medium was sitting in front of a table. He sent up the box. Well, first the other things were determined. The medium did that fairly quickly. And the moment she came to his box, she took it in her hand and flung it away. Now Hamerling thought: now it is the case that this is of course agreed with all the others; with me it cannot be an agreement, the medium does not come to that and flings it away! - So he went and said that he still wanted to know what was in it. The box was picked up again. The medium flung it away again. It was picked up again. Then the medium said, very stammeringly: a lock of hair and a piece of paper! Now, of course, he was amazed. Any fraud was out of the question, absolutely out of the question. Then he asked why she kept throwing it away. She said: because it comes from a dead person. Now, that was even more surprising. So that is a case where – I am not mentioning other cases except those that you can find in the literature, otherwise I could mention hundreds of others – any deception is out of the question. And what is the underlying cause? The medium must not know what is there at that moment, but must seek it out from the unconscious. There is a very specific influence at work here.

I once told you that sometimes the influence of buckwheat groats down in the cellar can still be felt on the third floor. Do you remember how I told you that? Such an influence, which only manifests itself in the head, is the underlying cause. And the medium then says what is in there – why? Because the medium is a person in whom the blood is more subject to the influence of the moon than in other people. It does not have to be so strong as to cause a hemorrhage – it could also occur in a medium who is not subject to giddiness – but the blood is drawn to the head more than in other people. This results in a strong influence, and this kind of influence can be present.

If you consider this, you will say to yourself: Yes, the powerful influences of the stars, of course, they are constantly affecting people. And everything that Europe has experienced together with America and the whole earth for four hundred years is under the influence of the stars. But what is this star influence like? Well, gentlemen, you have to imagine the following. Imagine that here is the Earth (it is being recorded). There was the piece of earth that people used to know only. Somehow the stars are above it, I am of course only drawing it schematically for you. People are under the influence of these stars. This is the time before the discovery of America. People have firmly established ideas. If you look at the pictures and portraits of the old councilmen, you will see that people have their fixed ideas and that they stand with both feet firmly on the ground. This is because in those days there was a constellation of stars where the stars were very close together. Since then, we have had a different star constellation. When the earth is there, the stars are, so to speak, much more oblique, of course again drawn very schematically. If you were to draw it in detail, each one would naturally stand out, so to speak. You will say: But the fixed stars have not changed? — But they have changed too, although not to such an extent. So you can see from this: the spaces between them became larger in the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th centuries. The concepts have dissolved. And now there is again a time coming when the spaces become smaller, when the stars again contract. This is only very little with the fixed stars, but it is still the case. Even when one records the fixed stars, one sees that the fixed stars have to shift. And now men are exposed to the fact that they have acquired ideas through the influence of stars that were far apart. But now they have to get concepts under the influence of the stars that are close together again. There is a completely new star constellation in the world. This can be seen if one has lived awake from the previous century into this century. You see, I was born in 1861, so I consciously experienced the time in the seventies, eighties, nineties and now the 20th century. Yes, in my childhood it was quite different from today! In my childhood people simply thought quite differently than today. Everything has changed now, and in one area in particular it has changed completely. When I was a little boy of twelve, I didn't have much money back then to buy books, but every year we were given a school program; it contained the most important physical terms of the time. Well, I spent a lot of time chewing over those. They were hard to grasp. Even back then, I had to learn differential calculus to understand the concepts. But I know what the physical concepts were back then.

But today it is quite different. When someone studies physics at university today, he learns something completely different from what we learned as boys. And from what happened then, we can see that the physical concepts have disintegrated. Today, no physicist knows which concepts to use. In the past, we spoke of space and time as two different things. Today, the physicist speaks of four dimensions, taking the first, second, and third as dimensions of space and the fourth dimension as equivalent to time. Most people have no idea what teaching is like today. People who are outside of schools still live with the concepts that I learned as a boy. But in actual physics today, they are already talking about something completely different. This shows that the concepts have become completely mixed up. Today, the physicist knows least of all what he is supposed to do. Everything has become mixed up.

Yes, gentlemen, it shows you in the human mind that there is a different star constellation. For the story is that today's people all have more blood in their heads than people through all the centuries have had in their heads, because the moon is supported by the stars, which in turn are closer together. So if you study human evolution, you find that a wave of blood has gone up to the head through the star constellation. But this wave is not only happening in man, but on the whole earth. And it is this same influence that once threw the cold from south to north and buried the mammoths, which are still fresh meat in Siberia today, as if in a large ice cream factory. Just as it was thrown up then, just as blood is driven up into the head by the moon, so today these volcanic eruptions are thrown up by the stars. Thus we have today the effect of a star constellation coming from the other side of the Earth. It passes through North America, through Greenland, and throws cold air over here, so that today, as a result of the star constellation, large masses of cold air are continually being thrown from west to east.

And now I have told you: If you go to Italy, you only need to light a piece of paper on certain parts of the ground and it will smoke from below. It is not that the earth throws up the smoke, but that I make the air above warm and thin, causing these vapors to rise. Now the star constellation throws these air masses from west to east. We are exposed to them here, which is why we now have this climate. Here it goes from west to east. But this causes the ground below to throw out its masses, its fire masses. First they were thrown out over America by the huge volcanoes and the huge earthquakes. Now it is moving further and further east. Etna and Vesuvius are all beginning to erupt because the wave is flowing over there, and down below it is becoming elastic. It is not pushed up from below, but is brought to the surface by the star constellations. In the human being, blood is pushed into the brain, and on Earth, masses of air are thrown over and fiery masses of gas are thrown out from under the Earth and transported to other places. It is the same story. It all starts with the stars.

If people understood why they think differently now, they would also understand why Etna is spitting fire. But for that to happen, the human being must first know that he is not something that can be considered in isolation, but must be considered in connection with the whole universe. That is precisely it. And people have completely forgotten how to consider things in the universe. It is really quite interesting how animals, in this respect, as I have also told you before, are much cleverer than humans. Animals usually even migrate before a volcanic eruption or something like that occurs, while people stay put. Why do animals migrate? Yes, when the other influence comes, the other star influence, then it is like this with the animal: the animal is built so that it has its legs there (see drawing $. 138), its backbone, the vertebrae, its head there. When the stars move across it, the entire spine is continuously exposed to the stars, vertebra by vertebra exposed to the stars, and they belong together, they belong so closely together that we have 28 to 31 vertebrae in our back and the moon takes 28 to 31 days to go around. It is so closely related.

But man walks upright. With him only the head, this little piece of the head, is exposed to the starry sky. He has his spine lifted out. So that with man only the blood is exposed to the influence of the stars, not the nervous system. But with animals the nervous system is exposed to the influence of the stars. That is why the animal notices the influence of the stars much sooner than man and migrates when earthquakes and volcanic eruptions occur. Man stays put. The mere fact that the animal can migrate and thus shows us that the star influence is acting on the animal, that in itself is proof that we are not dealing here with random waves coming from the earth, but that the star influence is acting from outside. That is what shows us this whole interesting connection with the whole universe. Man is not merely an earthly creature, but man is a being placed in the entire world of the stars.

Now, of course, this also leads us to understand that after people have forgotten their old knowledge of the stars, they have to get it again. So, I would like to say: It is indeed the case that with anthroposophy, we have to give humanity what it needs in a new way, otherwise humanity will remain confused. Because the stars, which are arranged more closely together, no longer fit the concepts from other times; only the concepts that anthroposophy can bring fit again.

Now I have already been given four questions today. We will see if we can make progress next time. I may have to be away on Wednesday. I will let you know when we will have the next session.

How does one come to see the spiritual world?

Good morning, gentlemen! Now let us try to finish, at least for the time being, what we have begun to consider. You see, an understanding of life comes only from the fact that one begins to observe the sleep of man, as I have already mentioned to you several times. When one is immersed in life from morning to evening, one usually has the opinion that sleep gives one strength, removes fatigue and so on. But sleep actually does much more. You just need to think about it. Think back to your life, the dreams you have had in your sleep, you don't always remember them. Dreams are something you soon forget, as you all know. Only at most you may remember that you had a dream here or there that you often told. Then you remember it by telling it. But the dreams that you don't tell are quickly forgotten. If you remember your life back to your childhood, you will remember some memories from your childhood up to later in life. But these memories are always interrupted. When you think back today, there is the time during which you slept. That is a break, and you do not remember it. The memory starts again only yesterday evening and goes until yesterday morning. Then there is another break. So that actually, when you remember back, you do not have your whole life, but in this remembering back, what is in the night is actually always left out. If you draw a line of retrospection, a period of time flows from evening to morning without retrospection, then again from morning to evening, then again a pause from evening to morning, and so on. We actually only remember our lives in such a way that we do not remember a whole part of our lives at all. That is quite clear. That is the time that we have slept through.

Now let us consider a person who cannot sleep. You know, some people complain that they cannot sleep. But many of these complaints should not be taken so seriously, because some people tell you that they never sleep at all during the night. And when you ask them how long they have not slept at night, they say: Yes, not for ten years already. Well, anyone who couldn't sleep for so long would have been dead long ago. People do sleep, but because they have such vivid dreams while sleeping, it seems to them as if they had been awake. You should tell such a person: just lie down for once, you don't need to sleep; just lie down. He is already asleep, and even if he is not aware of it, he is asleep. I just wanted to tell you this so that you can see that a person really does need sleep for life. Sleep is more necessary for life than food. And those who cannot sleep cannot live.

Now, how much of our lives between birth and death do we oversleep? Yes, gentlemen, you see, this oversleeping lasts longest in very young children. When a child is born, it is almost always asleep. Then gradually the time spent awake decreases, and sleeping becomes less and less. And when you get a little older, if you count back, you have to say that you have actually slept a third of your life. That is also healthy. You have actually slept a third of your life.

This has been known for quite a long time. But today people don't like to remember such things that have been known for a long time. Even in the 19th century, at the very beginning, people who wrote about this said: Man should work for 8 hours, be alone for 8 hours and sleep for 8 hours. That leaves 16 hours of wakefulness and 8 hours of sleep, so 3 times 8 = 24 hours.

So that gives us a third of 24 hours for the time of sleeping. That was also a very correct observation. A person needs a third of his entire life to sleep. Now, people don't care about how important sleep is for life because today they don't care at all about what soul and spirit are. They only care about what the person experiences with his body when he is awake, but not what soul and spirit are. That is just how people often say in their daily lives today: God, yes, sleeping, that's all very well, but you don't need more than the necessary heaviness in bed. And so they drink so and so much beer in the evening so that they can sleep. But what matters is not having the necessary heaviness in bed, but realizing the great importance of sleep.

And now let us try to understand what sleep actually means. You see, gentlemen, basically people like themselves very much. This is particularly evident in the case of sick people. Sick people show how much they like themselves, because when something hurts them, they take terrible care of themselves and so on. That is all very well, but it shows that people like themselves very much. What does a person actually like when he likes himself? Yes, he likes his body. And that is the great secret of life, I would say, that a person likes his body. And the love that a person has for his body shows when that body is not quite right.

But there are also snags with this love of the body. The body moves all day long. The body works hard all day long. And the soul and spirit within it, without the person knowing it, grows less and less fond of the body as the day progresses. That is the strange thing, and one must know that. While the human being lives in the day and must constantly be active, the soul-spiritual aspect grows less and less fond of the body. That is why a child sleeps so much. It loves its body very much and always wants to enjoy its body. When you see a child, you can always see how it enjoys its body. Just think about what it is like when the child has drunk its milk and falls asleep. In this sleep, the child has the pleasant feeling of digestion. It enjoys what is going on in its body. And only when it gets hungry does it wake up. Because what happens when it is hungry, it likes less. Then it wakes up again. So you see, the child still wants to enjoy its body even during sleep. You can make the most beautiful observations. Only the scholars do not do that because they do not have the ability to do so.

Observe a herd of cows in a meadow, eating and then lying down comfortably, enjoying their digestion. They enjoy what is happening in their body.

That is what you need to know: that a person actually wants to enjoy his body. But in humans it is somewhat different than in cows, and in the adult human it is somewhat different than in the child. The little child does not work yet, so he enjoys his body while sleeping. The cows do everything out of instinct, so they also enjoy their digestion while sleeping. The human being does not even get to enjoy his digestion. A person actually becomes so that when he uses his body all day, by evening he is no longer sympathetic to his body. He no longer loves it. And you see, that's why he sleeps. He sleeps because he no longer likes his body. The antipathy that a person develops towards his body throughout the day makes him fall asleep at night, and he sleeps until he has overcome this antipathy in his soul, and he wakes up again when he feels sympathy for his body again. This must be understood first of all, that waking up depends on the person developing sympathy for his body again. And this sympathy exists for all the individual organs of the body. Therefore, when a person wakes up, he slips into his organs, so to speak.

Just think of how dreams are when you wake up. When you wake up, you dream of snakes, for example. You slip into your intestines and dream of snakes. The snakes represent the intestines.

So when a person wakes up, they slip into their body out of sympathy with their body and their soul and spirit. People have to have this sympathy, otherwise they would always want to leave their body.

And now imagine: the person has died, he has laid down his body; the body is no longer with the person. The first thing that happens, I have told you, is that the person has his thoughts as a memory of his whole life. And these are then lost after a few days already. They are scattered all over the world. But then he is left with the sympathy for what his body has experienced. And this sympathy with what his body has experienced, he must now gradually lose. This is what we first go through after death, that we must lose our sympathy with our body.

How long does it take to restore this sympathy with the body if we live one day? It takes a third of the day. Therefore, the loss of sympathy after death also takes a third of a lifetime. If a person has, let's say, reached the age of thirty, it takes about ten years for him to get rid of the whole body, to have no more sympathies with the world and life at all - this is, of course, an approximation. So that after death a person first has a few days when he has a memory back, and then he has this breaking off, I would say, of memory back, which takes a third of the whole life he has spent on earth. Now, that is true on average for the individual person, but it is longer for one person and shorter for another because one person has more sympathy for his body, likes himself more, the other likes himself less and so on. So after death we go through something that could be called: the human being gets used to all the things that hold him together with his body.

But now you may say: What you are telling us is still somewhat theoretical. How can you know that a person still has something to him when he has discarded his physical body? How can you know that? — Yes, for that, gentlemen, you have to study how a person develops in life.

There is the first period of life in which the human being develops, the first period of life; this is until the human being gets the second teeth. First he has the milk teeth, then he gets the second teeth. Yes, you see, you can say that the human being has the milk teeth from heredity. But the second teeth, he no longer has them from heredity. The second teeth come from his ether body. The ether body is active in him and gives him the second teeth. So we have the physical body, as I already wrote to you the other day; it gives the first teeth. Then there is the ether body; it gives the human being the second teeth, the teeth that then remain.

Now one must just acquire the ability to see — today people only acquire the ability to think abstractly, to develop theories, but not to see what I have just described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. If you really look at the child as it gradually gets its second teeth, you can see this supersensible work of the etheric body. And this is the same body that a person retains when they die, retains for a few days, and then disperses throughout the world. So if you study what gives a person their second teeth, you find out that after death, a person still has their etheric body for a few days and then throws it away a few days later, that is, it disperses throughout the world.

Now he still has his astral body and his ego. This astral body is what always craves the physical body. With the ego inside, it always craves the physical body. So we can say: the human being develops - I have already told you this recently - the need in his astral body. The astral body develops all needs. The needs are not in the physical body. When the physical body is a corpse, it no longer has any needs.

So we can say: What gives the human being false teeth is also gone a few days after death. What remains now? Here one must again study what now begins to be particularly active in man from the moment he has his second teeth until the moment he becomes sexually mature. That is again an important period of human life. Our present-day science cannot study such things because it does not pay any attention to them at all.

You see, from the moment the child gets its second teeth until the moment it reaches sexual maturity, something supersensory is at work in the child. And what does this supersensory element want? This supersensory element wants to gradually take hold of the whole body. It is not yet inside when the child has its second teeth and begins to get this astral body into its whole body so that it permeates it. Then the child becomes more and more mature. And when the astral body is completely inside the body, then the child is sexually mature. That is the important thing to know: the astral body is the one that brings sexual maturity to the child.

Of course, these things cannot be studied in the way that today's scholars would like to study them. Today's scholars only want to study what is tangible. They do not observe human life. But anyone who has really learned to observe what it is that works its way into the body from the second teeth to sexual maturity knows that this is the astral body. It is the source of all needs. Of course, a child already has needs before the second teeth come in, because the astral body is present in the head; but later it spreads throughout the entire body. You can see this very clearly in boys, how the astral body spreads. The boy changes his voice, and with that he also becomes sexually mature. This is the penetration of the astral body into the whole physical body. In the case of a woman, you can observe it by the development of the secondary organs of sexual life, the breasts and so on. This is the penetration of the astral body. And this astral body the person retains after death if he has already discarded the etheric body.

You see, it is this astral body that wants to enter the physical body again every morning. Because while a person sleeps, he has no needs, neither sexual nor other needs. These arise when he is awake. They arise when the astral body wants to enter the physical body in the morning. And so, in life, this astral body is always striving to enter the physical body every morning. Of course, it wants to do the same after death, and it must first unlearn this habit.

If someone is thirty years old, how long has he been in his physical body? He has been in it for twenty years, he has not been in it for ten years. The ten years that he was not in his physical body, he slept through, and after death he wants to be in it again. And that is why he works in his astral body for a third of his life after his death, which he has gone through here on earth. After this time the astral body is satisfied. Then the human being only lives in his ego. So that after spending about a third of his lifetime after death, the human being only continues to live in his ego.

But this ego, this actual spiritual part of man, needs an enormous amount if it is to continue to live. You see, it is not without reason that I have been telling you that reason, the intellect, thoughts about the world are actually spread out. I have told you how everything in the world, when properly studied, is actually intelligently arranged. I have made it clear to you in the animal world. This whole world is such that we should not believe that our mind is the only one, but the mind that we have is only as if scooped out of the mind spread throughout the world. Mind is everywhere. And the one who believes that his mind is the only one is as foolish as the one who believes: “I have a glass of water here, this glass of water was empty at first, then it became full, that is, the water grew out of the glass.” - One must first draw the water from the well, from the whole body of water. And so one must also first bring the mind that one has out of the whole world mind.

We just don't realize any of this during our lifetime. Why not? Because our body does it. Gentlemen, if you should ever know – I have made this clear to you – what your body does with a very small piece of sugar that you have swallowed, how this small piece of sugar is not only dissolved in the body but also transformed into all kinds of other substances, if you knew what is going on there, then you would be amazed. You are amazed after I have told you only the very basics of what goes on in the human body. But no matter how much of what goes on in the human body is observed, it is always only a small part. You breathe in. The breath you inhale must be used throughout your entire body. Just think, you breathe in about eighteen times a minute. What you breathe in must be used throughout your whole body. This requires a tremendous amount of reason, a truly tremendous amount of reason.

Well, our body does all that. Our body, it really works for us with tremendous cleverness. It is quite admirable what one must feel when one realizes what the human body actually accomplishes in terms of cleverness. It is quite enormous. So it takes a lot out of us during our lifetime.

But now, after death, we no longer have it. Now we no longer even have the etheric body. We do not have the astral body, not even a longing for the physical body. So we only have the ego at all, and the ego now realizes that it does not have the body and now begins to familiarize itself with everything that is necessary for the body.

And that is where the mighty thing that must be understood begins. Today's science makes it particularly easy for itself. Today's science says: Where does man come from? Well, man comes from what has arisen as fertilization, as a fertilized germ in the mother. So science says: There is the fertilized germ, and in there, well, somehow man is already predisposed. If you don't know anything, you say: there is a predisposition; that's where the whole person comes from. Yes, you see, people have been aware of this for a long time, but in their own way, that is, they have been unclear about it.

Just imagine that this is the mother egg (it is drawn) from which you yourself emerged. So you would have been inside it, would have been inside it, so to speak, as a small human being. But this mother egg was in turn born of a mother egg. So the little human being must have been in the womb again, and the mother egg, that is, the mother, must have been in the grandmother again, and further up to the great-grandmother, great-great-grandmother, to Eve. And you come to the strangeness that in the great-mother Eve, the whole of humanity was inside, but so nested. Mr. Miller, he was inside the egg, which in turn was inside the egg with all the other human eggs, it was just nested that way. The whole human race was in the original mother Eve. This theory, which was also called the theory of evolution back then, later became known as the nesting theory.

So at the beginning of the 19th century, people came to the conclusion that the story of the egg containing the whole human race, with each individual contained within the next, and then so many of them, was not acceptable. And so they adopted another theory. They then said: No, in the egg there is actually nothing yet; but when this egg is fertilized, all the external conditions, wind and weather and sun and light and everything possible, can get to it. And from the influence of all of nature on this egg, man comes into being.

Yes, gentlemen, that is something that does materialism a great deal of good, if it can imagine something like that. But it does not stand up to closer scrutiny. Because just think what we become when the whole of nature is constantly working on us. We become what people today call nervous. Those who are sensitive to every breath of air and every ray of light do not become real people, but rather a bundle of nerves. We become just that from the surrounding nature. So that can't be it either.

A proper study shows us something completely different. A proper study shows that there is absolutely nothing inside this egg. Before it is fertilized, it is still, I would say, halfway so that you can see all kinds of things inside. It has a shape. So in the unfertilized egg, you can still see all kinds of threads and so on. But when the egg is fertilized, those threads are destroyed and the whole egg is nothing but a real 'mess', if I may express myself so. In more scientific terms, it is a chaos. It is a completely disordered substance.

You see, such a substance, which is completely disordered, is not found anywhere else in the world. All substances are in some way internally ordered, arranged. If you take the most arbitrary substance, if you just take a grain of dust and look at it through the microscope, you will see how finely and artfully it is constructed inside. The only thing that is completely chaotic inside is the fertilized egg. And the substance must first become completely chaotic; it must no longer be anything in itself if a human being is to develop from it. People are always thinking about the egg white, for example. They always want to study how the egg white is formed internally. Yes, the egg white is internally configured as long as it is not fertilized. When it is fertilized, it is just what I have called a “mess”, that is, a chaos, an absolutely disordered substance. And out of this comes the human being. Even in the Primordial Mother Eve, if she existed at all, the whole human race was not present, nor somehow in an egg germ that was later fertilized, but the egg germ is completely chaotic, disorderly, and was also disorderly in the Primordial Mother Eve. And if a human being is to arise out of this egg germ, then this must be brought about from outside, that is, the human being must enter into this egg germ. A proper scientific study shows, in turn, that the human being must enter this egg germ from the outside. That is to say, the human being comes from the spiritual world. He does not come from the material. The material must first be destroyed.

This is already the case with plants. In plants, you have the earth and in the earth the plant germ. Now, people are not properly studying what happens to the plant germ in the earth. It must first be destroyed, and then the new spring causes the new plant to arise from the destroyed material from outside in a spiritual way. This is how it is with animals, and especially with humans. It is only that it is easier for the plant. The whole universe forms its shape. In the case of the human being, the whole universe does not initially form his shape. He must actually form it himself. The human being must actually enter into this destroyed matter, otherwise no human being could arise from this destroyed matter. The human being must therefore first come from the spiritual world and enter into this destroyed matter. The whole process of fertilization is only there to ensure that the human being, who wants to enter the world, is confronted with a destroyed substance, that he has a destroyed substance. He could not do anything with an undestroyed substance. He cannot enter the world like a plant, because then he could only become a plant. He must really form the whole universe within himself. And he does form it. It is truly wonderful how man forms the universe within this destroyed substance.

I will show you an example of how the human being now forms the universe into this destroyed substance. If you have the earth's surface here (it is drawn), then we can just show it, because if you just look at a piece of earth, it looks even. The sun comes up in the morning, goes up to a certain height, then goes down again. That is a certain angle up to which the sun rises. It is very interesting that the sun always rises up to a certain angle and then goes down again. The angle is of course a little higher in summer than in winter, but up to a certain angle the sun rises. This angle is therefore an inclination of the sun to the earth.

We find this angle elsewhere, too. You see, when light enters our eye, where the optic nerve enters from the brain into the eye – I have drawn the eye for you – there is what is known as the blind spot. You cannot see there. You see most clearly only at points that are somewhat away from this blind spot, where the optic nerve enters. And that is where the interesting thing is: the same inclination that the sun has to the earth in its orbit, this point, where we perceive most brightly in our inner being, has the same inclination to the blind spot.

And something else. If you take the heart, it is also slightly tilted. It has the same inclination as the sun to the earth. I could show you countless such things, from which you would see: Everything that is out there in the universe, we somehow carry it within us. We carry the inclination of the sun in the inclination of our eye and in the inclination of our heart. We are formed entirely out of the reason of the universe.

Oh, gentlemen, that is where you start, when you gradually get some knowledge, to really tell yourself how actually man is a whole small world. Everything in the world outside is recreated in man. Center Just imagine if you were given this “mess”, this destroyed matter, and you were supposed to recreate it inside! You would not be able to do that. You see, when the ego is alone after death, it has to learn from the whole world how to recreate the whole world. So that after the person has shed the sympathy with the body during this third of the previous life, he now begins to learn from the whole universe how to become a human being again. And that takes longer than life on earth lasts, because on earth, things are such that one can learn a lot or a little. Actually, most people today learn very little. And however strange it may seem, scholars learn the least of all, because what they learn is all useless. It is only good for understanding what a corpse looks like, but not how a living body is affected. But the ego must learn this after death. It must learn the secrets of how a body is built from the whole world. And one can point to this time, which the ego now spends learning from the whole world how a person works and lives internally.

You see, when a person, through the exercises I have described in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, brings themselves to remember the time when one would otherwise not remember, when one was a very small child, then one comes to understand what this actually consists of, this life of the infant, who as yet knows nothing of the world, who only uses his body, only wriggles, only lives in his eyes, lives in his ears, but does not yet understand anything of all this. In ordinary life, a person does not think of looking back. They say: Oh, what do I care about my childhood; I'm here now. But if you look back into this short time, which you otherwise do not remember, in terms of knowledge, you realize what you actually did there. Yes, you actually get a terribly uncomfortable feeling when you think about it. Because this fidgeting of the very young child consists of trying to forget all this knowledge of the universe. You give it to the body, and it knows it afterwards. Therefore, it can take it over during life.

The small child gives the body the whole wisdom of the world. It is so terribly painful, so terribly sad that today's science has no idea of what is going on in life, how the small child gives the body the wisdom of the world that it has acquired, how it gradually grows into the eyes, into the hands. Gradually it grows into it, giving all the wisdom of the ego to the body, while the ego actually used to possess all the wisdom of the world.

It may seem strange to you, but it is actually true: if you really have mastered anthroposophy, how can you tell people something about the universe? You can tell something about the universe simply because you remember back to the first days of childhood, when you still knew everything from the experiences you had before you entered the body. And anthroposophy actually consists of the fact that you gradually get all this world wisdom out of the body that you gave up to the body.

Yes, gentlemen, for that, ordinary science today gives no guidance. It gives no instruction at all on how to find the knowledge that one has put into the body oneself. It leads people to experiment, and they should only learn what they experience externally; whereas the right thing would be to guide people into the living body. Our students are guided to the dead body, which is already a corpse, and learn nothing about the living human being. That would admittedly be a more difficult study, because there the human being must practice self-knowledge, must look into himself, because there the human being is to become more perfect. But that is precisely what the modern person does not want: he does not want to become more perfect, he wants the school to train him a little, and then he wants to stop there, does not want to become more perfect. Man does not want this because, in the education he enjoys today, I would say he is already far too proud to somehow admit that he should perfect himself.

Well, with that I have, I would say, told you a little bit about the self. But we will talk about these things more in the coming hours, so you will hear much more and gradually find everything more understandable.

You see, I have told you a little about what the self has to do during the time until the human being comes down to earth again. But there are people who say: Oh, I'm not interested in what the self has to do afterwards! You can wait until after you die and then you'll see.

Yes, gentlemen, that would be just as if the germ, after it has emerged and been fertilized, and the human being has hatched, would say in the mother's body: Oh, I don't like living in the mother's body, I'll leave sooner. — Yes, but if he doesn't want to live his proper nine months in the mother's body, he cannot become a human being. He must go through with it first. Nor can the ego experience anything after death if it does not live here in such a way that it is stimulated to do so. Therefore it is quite wrong when someone says: I'll wait until death has occurred, then I'll see if I am something or nothing, and so on. People are not very logical. People today are actually as logical as the one who swore that he did not recognize any God, and he swore: “As surely as there is a God in heaven, I am an atheist!” That's more or less how people are today. They repeat the old sayings. Quite unconsciously they repeat the sayings, even when they contradict them. And so people believe: You can wait, then you will see whether I am still something or nothing. Isn't it true that people say to themselves: Do I believe in immortality, or do I not believe in immortality? Yes, if I don't believe in immortality and there is one after all, then I could be in a bad way. But if I believe in immortality and there is none, then it doesn't do any harm. So in any case it is better if I believe in immortality.

But, you are not supposed to play with the idea, instead it is important to really become clear about the facts. And so one must say: Here on earth, man must receive the stimulus that his ego can truly penetrate into the world after death. And today's science thoroughly dispels this stimulus, if at all, when people are no longer made aware of the facts. It is not admitted, but actually today it is in the interest of keeping people as stupid as possible, so that after death they sleep and have no idea how to penetrate the secrets of the whole universe in order to become truly human again.

You see, gentlemen, if humanity continues to live as it does today, merely concerning itself with outward things, then in the future people will be born who will no longer be able to lift a finger because they have not learned anything until the next life.

We will come back to how lives repeat themselves. Today I just wanted to give you some ideas so that you can see that it is not just a careless assertion about what the ego is like after death, but that one can point out from knowledge itself that the human being in turn descends and has to form his life from the confused material. This is really recognized on the basis of objective facts.

That is what this is about. It is just not going so fast, but I will answer the question in full when one takes together what is known about the end of human life, how man gradually loses his etheric body and his astral body, and how then the ego must descend to form its astral body and so on. Then one comes to understand how man repeatedly descends. And then, in the course of time, one also comes to understand when man will be liberated from his entire earthly life, when he will no longer have to descend. The question of when he once began will also be answered then. He must once have begun as a kind of plant. For that he does not need to be human. I have also described to you how the earth was once a large plant, and we will see how the earth will once again become a plant, and man will then be freed from his humanity.

I will then deal with the whole question again from a different angle. You will, of course, have to have the patience not to say after the first few lessons: I can't go along with this. You will see that the more detailed it becomes, the more it will seem plausible to you.

Good morning, gentlemen! Has anyone thought of anything for today?

Mr. Burle asks about the theory of relativity and how it is viewed today. He says that people used to read a lot about it, especially in the past. Now it may have been forgotten again; at least he doesn't hear as much about it as he used to.

Dr. Steiner: Well, you see, the matter of the theory of relativity is a difficult one, and today you will probably have to be very careful and in the end you will have to say that even if you are careful, you are not familiar with it. But that is the case with many people who talk about the theory of relativity today. They talk about it in such a way that they often praise it as the greatest achievement of our time, but do not understand it. I will try to explain it as popularly as possible. As I said, it will be difficult today, but next time we will come to more interesting things.

Einstein's theory is based on the motion of a body. You know that bodies move by changing their position in space. So if we want to record a motion, we say: a body is at a location a and moves to another location b. If you are standing somewhere outside and see a train passing by, you will have no doubt at all that the train is rushing past you, moving, and you are standing still. But you can easily come to doubt it, at least for the moment, of course, if you are not thinking deeply, if you are sitting somewhere in a railway compartment and are asleep at first, then wake up and look out the window: a train is passing by. You have the distinct feeling that a train is passing by. That does not necessarily mean that it is true, however. Before you fell asleep, your train was stationary, and while you were sleeping, your train itself began to move. While you were sleeping, you did not notice that your train was moving, and the other train appears to be passing by. If you look more closely, the train standing outside is completely still, while your train is moving. So while you are moving, you believe that you are at rest, and the other train, which is really at rest, is moving. You know, it can also happen that you look out the window and believe that you are sitting quietly in the train you are currently on, while the whole train is moving in the opposite direction. That's how it looks to the eye. You can see that what we humans say about movement is not always true. You wake up and form the judgment: the train that is outside is moving. Immediately afterwards, you have to correct yourself: that is not true at all, it is standing still; I am moving!

Such a correction of judgment occurred once in a major way, or even more than once, in world history. We need only go back six or seven centuries, when everyone was of the opinion that the earth was stationary in space and that the entire starry sky was moving past. This view was corrected, as you may have heard, in the 16th century. Copernicus came along and said: All that is wrong; the sun, the fixed stars are actually stationary, and we with our Earth fly at breakneck speed through space. We believe to be at rest on Earth - just as one previously believed to be at rest in the railroad car and the other train was driving and have now corrected that. Copernicus corrected the whole of astronomy, saying: It is not true that the stars move; they are stationary. But the Earth, with people on it, rushes through space at a tremendous speed.

You have given the possibility that it is not immediately possible to tell from observation what is actually correct with regard to motion: whether one is at rest oneself and a passing body is really in motion, or whether one is in motion oneself and a body that one believes is passing by is at rest.

Don't you think so? When you consider this, you will say to yourself: Yes, a correction may be necessary for everything we recognize as movement. Take, for example, how long it took for all of humanity to correct its judgment regarding the Earth. That took thousands of years. When you sit in a train, it may take only a few seconds for you to correct your judgment. So it varies how long it takes to correct such a judgment.

This has led people like Einstein to say: We cannot know whether what we see in motion is really in motion, or whether we, who are standing still, are not somehow mysteriously in motion and the other in rest. So we draw the final conclusion from this uncertainty.

Well then, gentlemen, it could be like this: let us assume there is a car here (a picture is shown). In this car, one drives from Haus Hansi up to the Goetheanum. But who can say for sure that the car is really driving up? Who can say that with certainty? The car could be standing still, the wheels could be turning, and the whole Goetheanum that one is approaching could be moving in the opposite direction. We would only have to experience something like this for the Earth as Copernicus did for the Earth! (Laughter.)

Einstein took such things and said: We can never be certain whether one or the other body moves. We only know that they move in relation to each other, that they change their distances; that is the only thing we know. Of course, we know that when we travel to the Goetheanum, because we come closer to the Goetheanum; but whether we come to it or it comes to us, we cannot know. Now, you see, what we can say is that it is in real rest or real motion, that is absolute. So what is an absolute rest or an absolute motion? That would be a rest or motion of which one could say: In the universe, the body is at rest or the body is moving. But of course this is always a fatal thing, because at the time of Copernicus, it was still believed that the sun was stationary and the earth was moving around it. In relation to the earth it is correct, but in relation to the sun it is not correct, because the sun moves very fast, rushing at a tremendous speed through the starry universe, which is in the constellation of Hercules – and of course we are all with it. On the one hand we revolve around the sun, but with the rotation around the sun we rush with it through space. So we cannot say that the sun is at absolute rest in space either. And so Einstein and those who shared his view said: You cannot say at all whether something is at absolute rest or in motion, but you can only speak of things being in relative rest - relative, that is, with respect to each other - it appears to one to be at rest or in motion.

You see, gentlemen, during a course that was held in Stuttgart, someone once believed that we anthroposophists know nothing of note about the theory of relativity. And so, because he was or is a fanatical supporter of the theory of relativity, he wanted to make it clear to people in a very simple way how the theory of relativity, Einstein's theory of relativity, really applies. What did he do? He took a matchbox and said: “Here is a match. Now I hold the box very still and move the match towards it. It catches fire. But now I'm going to do a second experiment. Now I'm going to hold the match very still and move the box towards me. It catches fire again. The same thing happens. What has happened is that fire has been created, but the movement I have made is not absolute, it is quite relative. One time, when the box is there and the match is there, I move the match this way, the other time I move the box. For fire to occur, it does not matter whether the box or the match moves, but only whether they move relative to each other, in relation to each other.

But this can be applied to the whole world. You can say for the whole world: the thing is that you don't know whether one or the other moves, or whether one moves more strongly or weakly, or whether the other moves more strongly or weakly. You only ever know how they move in relation to each other, whether they come closer or further away from each other; you don't know more than that. And you don't know whether one body moves faster or slower than the other. Imagine you are traveling in an express train rushing by terribly fast, and a passenger train passes by outside, you look out the window. You can't judge what is actually going on, because at the moment when you are traveling in the express train and the passenger train is traveling in the opposite direction, you have the feeling that your express train is traveling much slower than it used to. Just try it. At that moment you have the feeling that now the train is moving slowly. In perception, so much of the speed is taken away from the fast as it approaches you. So you get a completely false judgment about the speed of the movement in your own train. If, on the other hand, someone is traveling more slowly next to you, you feel as if your train is traveling faster. So you never have a judgment when you see two movements and how they actually relate to each other, but you only ever get a judgment about how the two bodies relate to each other in terms of their distances.

Now you can stop at this point and say: Gosh, Einstein was a clever guy, he finally realized that in the universe we cannot talk about absolute motion at all, but only about relative motion. That is clever, and as you can see, it is also correct for many things. Because no one can say that when he sees a star at rest, it is a star at rest. If you move at a certain speed, the star appears to be moving in the opposite direction; but it could also be moving towards you. So you can't possibly conclude from looking at it that the star is at rest or in motion. It is necessary to know this, because the fact that we finally know this today means that we would have to change the entire terminology used in certain sciences. I will show you this with an example.

How do you get knowledge from the stars at all? You see, you can't get knowledge from the stars if you have the same view as the prince who went to the observatory. The astronomer naturally had to show him the observations he made of the stars because the prince was the ruler of the country. Well, he also let the prince look through the telescope, and they observed a star. When you point the telescope somewhere, you don't see anything at first. Then you wait a little; then the star comes into the telescope, as they say, and then it comes out on the other side. The prince watched this. Then he said: Yes, now I understand quite well that you know something about the stars, that you know where the stars are and how they move, I can see that quite well now. But how you, when you are so far away, come up with what the stars are called, I still can't understand. — With such views, of course, one cannot pursue astronomy. But how does it happen when you observe stars? There is the telescope; the astronomer sits there, and he looks in with his head from above, and there are crosshairs here; and when the star appears to move like this, you don't see anything yet, and when it is here, you see the star. If it is visible exactly where the threads cross, then you determine the location of the star.

Now, it was always thought that when observing, one could say: either the Earth moved, or the telescope was moved forward and the lens – that's what the glass that is far away is called; the glass that is close is called the eyepiece – was moved so far that the stationary star can now be seen inside. In the past, people believed that the star was moving. Today we have to say: We know nothing about the rest or motion of the star. We can only say: In the viewfinder, the crosshairs of my telescope coincide with the view of the star; the two overlap. We can say nothing more than what we have directly in front of us. We would be uncertain about the whole world as a result.

This has far-reaching consequences. It is important for our view of the motion not only of the heavenly bodies, but even of the bodies on our earth. And the conclusions that Einstein and those who think as he does drew from it are very far-reaching. They said, for example: Yes, if motion is only relative, if it is not absolute, then one cannot say anything real about anything at all, not even about simultaneity or different times. If, for example, I have a clock in Dornach and another in Zurich and the hands are in the same position, I am still not at all sure that, because they are far apart, in reality there is only one erroneous observation; perhaps there is no simultaneity at all!

So you see, the most far-reaching conclusions have been drawn from this. And the question arises: can we not get out of this at all? Can we not say anything at all today about the things themselves when they move? That is the important question. It is quite certain that nothing can be said from the observation of the movements. And in the broadest sense, it is also true that if I drive up to the Goetheanum in my car, it may just as well be that the Goetheanum comes towards me.

Yes, but there is one thing, gentlemen, that does happen. Even the example I gave you with the matchbox is not quite right. Because, you see, I would have liked to shout to the gentleman who made it so finely: “Why don't you nail the matchbox to the table and then try to move it back and forth!” You have to apply at least a great deal of force if you have to drive with the whole table back and forth. — So there must be a catch somewhere.

You can recognize this catch if you only approach the matter attentively. Suppose you drive from Dornach to Basel, and now you could say: It is not true that the car moves; rather, the car remains stationary, only turning the wheels, and Basel comes towards it. — Fair enough. But there is one thing that speaks against this: the car will be ruined after a few years. And the fact that the car is ruined can only be attributed to the fact that it is not the road that moves, but the car that moves and is ruined by what happens inside it. So if you don't just look at the movement, but look inside the body itself to see what the movement does, you will come to the conclusion that you cannot fully grasp Einstein's conclusion. So you can notice that the car is actually being ruined, not just the wheels, because they are turning. Now someone might say: Yes, they would of course also turn if a mountain were to come towards you or Basel were to come towards you, or otherwise the thing would wear out. But you can still say: maybe that's the way it is. With inanimate bodies, the matter cannot be decided at all, and for inanimate bodies one can only say that it is uncertain which way the one or the other moves. But the living organism! Imagine you are walking to Basel and someone else remains standing here in Dornach, remains standing for the whole two hours while you walk to Basel. Now, if it were not you who had moved but Basel who had come to meet you, you would have done almost no differently than the person who remained standing. But you became tired; a change took place in you. From this change that takes place within yourself, you can see that you have moved. And in the case of living bodies, it is possible to determine from the changes that take place within them whether they are really in motion or only in apparent motion, at rest.

But this is also what must lead us to recognize that we cannot form a theory from the external observation of the world, not even from something as clear as movement. Instead, we must form our theory from the internal changes. Well, there you have it again: with the theory of relativity, too, one must say that he who looks only at the outward side of things comes to nothing at all. One must look at the inner side. It is precisely this theory of relativity that leads one to at least begin with spiritual science, with anthroposophy, because anthroposophy points out everywhere that one must look at the inner side.

Einstein's theory has led to some extraordinarily strange consequences. The matter becomes particularly interesting, for example, when Einstein gives his examples. He gives an example in which he wants to prove that the change of location has no significance at all. Because it cannot be determined from the point of view whether a body changes its location or not, the change of location cannot have any significance. That is why Einstein says: If I hurl a clock that has a certain hand position out into space, so that it flies out at the speed of light and then turns around and comes back, this movement has had no significance for the inside of the clock. The clock comes back unchanged. That is how Einstein makes his examples: whether a body moves or not, we cannot decide. The clock is the same whether it is at rest or moving, it is the same for it. - Yes, but, gentlemen, you should just be invited to look at a clock that flies out into space at the speed of light and comes back again! The clock, yes, you won't see it at all anymore. It will be so pulverized that you won't see it.

But what does that mean? It means that you cannot think that way at all. You come to thoughts that are thoughtless. And so you find on the one hand that Einstein is a terribly clever person and that he draws conclusions and makes judgments that are terribly captivating to people. Not true, the ordinary people who are not very good mathematicians, they don't understand much of Einstein's theory; and then they start reading about Einstein's theory in some popular book, read the first page, then yawn; read half of the second page, then stop. And then they say: It must be something terribly clever. Because if it wasn't something terribly clever, then I would have to understand it. Besides, a lot of people say that it's something terribly clever. –That's where the judgment about the theory of relativity comes from. But there are also people who understand it. And it is among such people that Einstein finds his following, and that following grows larger every day. It is not, as Mr. Burle says, forgotten. A few years ago, when you spoke with university professors, they did not want to know anything about Einstein's theory. Today, everything is full of the erudition of Einstein's theory of relativity.

But people also come up with some very strange ideas in the process. For example, I once had a debate with university professors about Einstein's theory. Yes, you see, as long as you stay in the area that I have also discussed with you, Einstein's theory of relativity is correct; there is nothing you can do about it: it is like that with the train, with the solar system, with the movements of the whole world. So far it is quite correct. But now the gentlemen extend it to everything and say, for example: Relative is also the size of a human being; he has no absolute size, but only relative. That seems to me only that he is so high. He is so high in relation to — well, if we are here —, in relation to the chairs or in relation to the trees, but one cannot speak of an absolute size. You see, that applies as long as you remain a mathematician, as long as you are only concerned with geometry. The moment you stop being concerned with geometry, when you enter life, that's when the pleasure stops, that's when it's different! You see, if someone has no feeling, then he can carve a head out of wood that is a hundred times as big as your head. Then he has it. Yes, the one who has a feeling for it will never do that because he knows that the size of a human head is not relative, but is conditioned in the whole of space. It can be a little larger or a little smaller, but if someone is a dwarf, it is an illness; if someone becomes a giant, it is also an illness. It is not just relative, but the absolute is already visible. Within certain limits, of course, human height fluctuates. But in the universe, a person is definitely intended for a certain height. So again, one cannot speak of relativity. One can only say that man gives himself his own size through his relationship to the universe. There was only one of the college of professors with whom I had the debate who admitted that. The others were so twisted in their heads by the relativity theory that they said that human size is also only relative because we look at it that way.

You know, if you have a picture, it can be large; if you go further, it gets smaller and smaller according to the perspective. The size of this picture that you see is relative. The relativists believe that human size is only as it is because it is always seen against a background. But that is nonsense. Human size has something absolute about it, and a person cannot be much taller or much shorter than he is predetermined to be.

Now, people think all this up because they generally do not form any opinion about what is involved in a process or in a thing that happens on earth in our environment. From what I have already told you, you will be able to deduce the following: there is the earth; on the earth is some human being. Now you know, however, that the human being is not only dependent on the forces of the earth, but he is dependent on the forces that come from the universe. Our head, for example, reflects the whole universe. We have discussed this. If it did not matter how tall a person is, what would have to be there? Suppose Mr. Burles' head, Mr. Erbsmehl's head, Mr. Müller's head is formed from the universe. Yes, gentlemen, if the heads are three or four times different from each other, there should be an extra universe for each one. But since there is only one universe, which does not grow or shrink because of the individual human being, but is always there, remaining the same, the heads of people can only be approximately the same. It is only because people do not know that we live in a common world that also has a spiritual effect that people can believe that it is irrelevant how big a person's head is, that it is merely relative. It is not relative, but it is dependent on the absolute size of the universe.

So we come back to having to remind ourselves: it is precisely when you think correctly in relation to the theory of relativity that you enter into spiritual science, not into materialistic science.

And if you then look more closely at people, you see that people who think like Einstein run out of ideas when they come to life or to the spiritual. You see, when I was a boy, I was able to take part in the lively debates that took place about gravity. Gravity - when a body falls to the earth, it is said to be heavy. It falls down because it has weight, because it is heavy. But this force of gravity is everywhere in the universe. The bodies attract each other. If there is the earth and there is the moon (see drawing), then the earth attracts the moon, and the moon does not fly away, but moves in a circle around the earth, because the earth, when it wants to fly away, always pulls it back towards itself. Now, in the past, when I was a boy, there was a lot of debate about what this force of gravity is actually based on.

The English physicist Newton, whom I have told you about before, simply said: bodies attract each other, one body the other. That is not a very materialistic view, because if you imagine that a person should just touch something and draw it towards them, all sorts of things besides matter are needed to do so. If now the Earth is to attract the Moon, then this cannot be reconciled with a materialistic view. But materialism flourished precisely in my youth. One could also say that it dried up people, it withered, but one could also say that it flourished. So people said: That's not true, the Earth cannot attract the Moon, because it has no hands to attract it. That's not possible. So they said: the world ether is everywhere (see drawing). So what I am drawing in red here is the world ether; it also consists of nothing but tiny little grains. And these tiny little grains, they bump into each other here, bump into each other there, but bump more strongly there than they do in the middle. Now, when there are two bodies, the Earth and the Moon, and the impact from the outside is stronger than from the inside, it is as if they were attracted to each other. So the force of attraction, the force of gravity, was explained by the impact from the outside.

I cannot begin to tell you how much cognitive pain this caused me at the time. From the age of twelve to eighteen, I really agonized over whether the Earth attracts the Moon or the Moon is pushed to the Earth. Because, you see, the reasons given are usually not exactly stupid, but clever. But there is already a certain relativity theory in that. One wonders: is there anything absolute in it, or is everything relative? Is it perhaps really immaterial whether one says that the Earth attracts the Moon or that the Moon is pushed towards the Earth? Perhaps one cannot decide anything at all. Well, you see, people have thought about this a lot. And what I actually want to say is: At least they came up with the idea that there is an ether in addition to the visible substance. They needed the ether, because what is supposed to push if not the grains of ether! When Einstein first established his theory of relativity, everyone still believed that the ether had to exist. And Einstein then thought of everything he had described as relative motion as taking place in space, which is filled by the ether. But then he realized: Gosh! If motion is only relative, it is not at all necessary for the ether to be there. Nothing needs to push, nothing to pull. We cannot decide anything about this. So space can also be empty.

And so, over time, there are actually two Einstein theories. Of course, they are united in one person. The earlier Einstein described everything in his books as if the whole space of the world were filled with ether. Then his theory of relativity led him to say: space is empty. Only, the theory of relativity is not about saying anything about ether, because we don't even know if it is so. The examples he gives sometimes become quite grotesque. For example, Einstein says: If there is the earth, and there is some tree, I climb up; here I slip, fall down – this is an occurrence that you have probably also experienced; at least as a boy I very often experienced it when I climbed up a tree, that I slipped and fell down – then you say: Well, the earth is pulling me. I have a weight. This comes from gravity, otherwise I would have remained in the air, otherwise I would be wriggling if the earth were not pulling me. — But Einstein says you can't say any of that, because think of the following: There is the earth again, and now I am up there on a tower, standing; but I am not standing in a vacuum, surrounded by free space. Rather, I am standing in a box that is suspended at the top. If I were to fall out of the box from the tower, my relationship to the walls would always remain the same. I don't notice any movement, the walls go with me. Yes, by golly, now I can't tell whether the rope from up there, on which my box is hanging, will be lowered and I will arrive at the bottom of the box because someone is lowering me from above, or whether I can arrive, whether the box will slip because the earth is attracting me. I can't decide that. I don't know whether I'm being lowered or whether the earth is drawing me towards it.

But with this example, which Einstein chooses, it is just the same as with the other comparison that is always used in schools. There the children are already told how a planetary system is formed, that there is a nebula at first, out of this nebula the planets separate. In the middle, the sun remains. They say: That can easily be proven. You take a small oil droplet that floats on water, in the middle a sheet of card through which a pin is stuck, you put that in the water, start to turn it. Then small droplets split off from the large one, and a tiny planetary system is there. That's how it must be out there. Once there was a nebula; the planets split off, the sun remained in the middle. Who could possibly disagree with this, if you still see it in the fat droplet today! Yes, but one little thing has been forgotten, gentlemen: that I have to stand there and turn when I am the teacher in front of the children and show that! If I don't turn: nothing forms from a small fat planet system! So — the teacher would have to tell the children — there must be a great teacher, a giant teacher out there who once turned the whole story. Then the example is complete. And so Einstein, if he were to think in complete accordance with reality – if he even gets around to formulating such a thought – would have to assume that someone is directing the rope up there. That is necessary right away. Otherwise you cannot say: It makes no difference to me how I come down, whether someone lets me down or whether I tumble; there must be someone up there. So if Einstein were to elaborate on this example, he would immediately have to consider: who is there to hold the rope? He does not do this because contemporary materialism forbids it. Therefore, he devises examples that have no reality, that cannot be imagined, that are impossible to think.

And there is something else connected with this. Imagine, gentlemen, there is a mountain. There is Freiburg im Breisgau. On the mountain I set up a cannon so that you can still hear the shot in Offenburg on my account. But you hear the shot later. If someone notes on a clock when they heard the shot in Freiburg and when someone heard it in Offenburg, they will see that the times on the two clocks differ. The sound took some time to travel from Freiburg to Offenburg.

Now, you see, this story has also been used for the so-called theory of relativity. Because it is said: Let us now assume that I am not standing in Offenburg listening to when the sound arrives, but that I am initially standing in Freiburg. There I hear the sound simultaneously as it arises. Now I am traveling by train in the direction from Freiburg to Offenburg. Because I am traveling ahead, a little way from Freiburg, I hear the sound a little later than it occurs. Even further towards Offenburg, a little later again; even further towards Offenburg, a little later again.

But this only lasts as long as you drive slower than the speed of sound. If you drive just as fast as the speed of sound from Freiburg to Offenburg, what happens then? If you drive just as fast, at the same speed as the speed of sound: you arrive in Offenburg, and there it runs away from you, you still don't hear it. If you travel at the same speed, you will never hear it, because by the time you are supposed to hear it, it will have gone. You are supposed to hear it, but by then it is no longer there. Now people say: Gosh, that's right, you can't hear sound if you're moving as fast as sound itself! And if you move even faster than sound, what happens then? If you go slower, you hear it later; if you go just as fast, you don't hear it at all. If you move faster, you hear it earlier than it sounds! People say that this is quite natural, that this is quite correct. So if you hear the sound in Offenburg two seconds later when you move slower than the sound, you don't hear the sound at all when you move at the same speed as the sound. But if you move faster than the speed of sound, then you will hear it two seconds earlier than when it is released in Freiburg! I would just like to invite you to listen, really listen to the sound before it is released in Freiburg! You can see for yourself whether you hear it earlier, no matter how fast you are moving.

The other objection is that I would then like to ask you what you look like when you move so fast or even faster than sound.

What follows from this? It follows that you can think anything if you don't stick to reality. With this theory of relativity, you end up with the idea that you hear the sound earlier than the shot is released! (Laughter.) You can think of it quite well, but it can't happen. And that, you see, is the difference! People who do science today mainly want to think logically; and Einstein thinks wonderfully logically. But the logical is not yet real. You have to have two qualities in your thinking: first, the things have to be logical, but second, they have to be real. You have to be able to live in reality. Then you don't think up this box that is pulled up and down on a rope. Then you don't think of the clock that flies out into space at the speed of light and back again. Then you don't think of the guy there who moves faster than the sound and therefore hears the sound earlier than the shot takes place. Much of what you read in books today, gentlemen, as such considerations, is very nicely thought out, but none of it is in reality.

And so we can say: Einstein's theory of relativity is clever and it also applies to a certain part of the world, but you can't do anything with it when you look at reality. For from the theory of relativity one never comes to understand why a person tires so terribly when he goes to Basel, since he cannot say whether he is going into Basel or whether Basel is coming to meet him. The fatigue could not be explained if Basel were to come to him, and why I fiddle with my feet when I walk; I could stand still, wait for Basel to come to me! You see, all these things show nothing other than that it is not enough to think correctly and intelligently, but that something else is needed: one must be immersed in life and must judge things according to life.

That is what I can tell you about the theory of relativity. It has caused a great stir, but, as I said, people understand it only a little, otherwise they would already be thinking about these things.

So, see you next Saturday.

Rudolf Steiner: Gentlemen! I mentioned our wish to look further into the history that is connected with our present study of the world. You have seen how the human race gradually built itself up out of the rest of mighty Nature. It was only when conditions on the earth were such that men were able to live upon it—when the earth had died, when it no longer had its own life—that human and animal life could develop in the way I have pictured.

Now we have also seen that in the beginning, human life was actually quite different from what it is today, and had its field of action where the Atlantic Ocean is now. We have to imagine that where the Atlantic Ocean is today, there was formerly solid ground. Today we have Asia on the one hand; there is the Black Sea, below it is Africa, then there is Russia and also Asia. On the other hand, there is England, Ireland, and over there also America. Formerly all this in between was land, and here very little land; over here in Europe at that time there was actually a really huge sea. These countries were all in the sea, and when we come up to the north, Siberia was sea too; it was still all sea. Below where India is today, the land was appearing a little above the sea. Thus we actually have some land there, and on the other side again land. Where today we find the Asian peoples, the inhabitants of the Near East and those of Europe, there was sea—the land only rising up later. The land, however, went much farther, continuing right on to the Pacific Ocean where today there are so many islands, Java, Sumatra, and so on; they were all part of the continent formerly there—all this archipelago. Thus, where now the Pacific Ocean is, there was a great deal of land with sea between the two land masses.

Now the first peoples we are able to investigate have remained in this region, here, where the land has been preserved. When we took around us in Europe we can really say: Ten, twelve or fifteen thousand years ago the earth, the ground, became sufficiently firm for men to dwell upon it. Before that, only marine animals were there which developed out of the sea, and so on. If at that time you had looked for man, he would have been where the Atlantic Ocean is today. But over there in Asia, in eastern Asia, there were also men earlier than ten thousand years ago. These men naturally left descendants, and the descendants are very interesting on account of their culture, the most ancient on earth. Today these are the peoples called the Japanese and Chinese. They are very interesting because they are the last traces, so to say, of the oldest inhabitants of the earth.

As you have heard, there was, of course, a much older population on earth that was entirely wiped out. That was the humanity who lived in ancient Atlantis, of whom nothing remains. For even if remains did exist, we would have to dig down into the bed of the Atlantic Ocean to find them. We would have to get down to that bed—a more difficult procedure than people think—and dig there, and in all probability find nothing. For, as I have said, those people had soft bodies. The culture which they created with gestures was something that one cannot dig out of the ground-because there was nothing that endured! Thus, what was there long before the Japanese and Chinese is not accessible to ordinary science; one must have some knowledge of spiritual science if one wants to make such discoveries.

However, what has remained of the Chinese and Japanese peoples is very interesting. You see, the Chinese and the older Japanese—not those of today (about whom I am just going to speak)—the Chinese and Japanese had a culture quite different from ours. We would have a much better idea of it if our good Europeans had not in recent centuries extended their domination over those spheres, bringing about a complete change. In the case of Japan this change has been very effective. Although Japan has kept its name, it has been entirely Europeanized. Its people have gradually absorbed everything from the Europeans, and what remains of their ancient culture is merely its outward form. The Chinese have preserved their identity better, but now they can no longer hold out. It is true that the European dominion is not actively established there, but in those regions what the Europeans think is becoming all-prevailing, and what once existed there has disappeared. This is no cause for regret; it is in the nature of human evolution. It must, however, be mentioned.

Now if we observe the Chinese—among them, things can be seen in a less adulterated form—we find a culture distinct from all others, for the Chinese in their old culture did not include anything that can be called religion. The Chinese culture was devoid of religion.

You must picture to yourselves, gentlemen, what is meant by a “culture without religion”. When you consider the cultures that have religion you find everywhere—in the old Indian culture, for instance—veneration for beings who are invisible but who seem to resemble human beings on earth. It is the peculiar feature of all later religions that they represent their invisible beings as manlike.

Anthroposophy does not do this. Anthroposophy does not represent the super-sensible world anthropomorphically but as it actually is. Further, it sees in the stars the expression of the super-sensible. The remarkable thing is that the Chinese have had something of the same kind. The Chinese do not venerate invisible gods. They say: What is here on earth differs according to climate, according to the nature of the soil where one lives. You see, China in the most ancient times was already a large country and is still today larger than Europe; it is a gigantic country, has always been gigantic, and has had a tremendously large, vigorous population. Now, the idea that the population of the earth increases is just superstition on the part of modern science, which always makes its calculations from data to suit itself. The truth is that even in the most ancient times there was a vast population in China, also in South America and North America. There too in those ancient times the land reached out to the Pacific Ocean. If that is taken into account the population of the earth cannot be said to have grown.

So, gentlemen, we find a culture there that is quite ancient, and today this culture can still be observed as it actually existed ten thousand, eight thousand years ago. The Chinese said: Above in the north the climate is different, the soil is different, from what they are farther south; everything is different there. The growth of the plants is different and human beings have to live in a different way. But the sun is all-pervading. The sun shines in the north and in the south; it goes on its way and moves from warm regions to cold regions. They said: On earth diversity prevails, but the sun makes everything equal. They saw in the sun a fructifying, leveling force. They went on to say, therefore: If we are to have a ruler, our ruler must be like that; individual men differ, but he must rule over them like the sun. For this reason they gave him the name “Son of the Sun.” His task was to rule on earth as the sun rules in the universe. The individual planets, Venus, Jupiter, and so on, act in their various ways; the sun as ruler over the planets makes everything equal. Thus the Chinese pictured their ruler as a son of the Sun. For they took the word “son” essentially to imply “belonging to something.”

Everything was then so arranged that the people said: The Son of the Sun is our most important man. The others are his helpers, just as the planets are the helpers of the sun. They organized everything on the earth in accordance with what appeared above in the stars. All this was done without prayer, for they did not know the meaning of prayer. It was actually all done without their having what later would constitute a cult. What might be called their kingdom was organized so as to be an image of the heavens. It could not yet be called a state. (That is a mischief that modern men perpetrate.) But they arranged their earthly affairs to be an image of what appeared to them in the stars above.

Now something came about through this circumstance that was naturally quite different from what happened later: a man became the citizen of a kingdom. He had no creed to profess; he simply felt himself to be a member of a kingdom. Originally the Chinese had no gods of any kind; when later they did have them, they were gods taken over from the Indians. Originally they had no gods, but their connection with the super-sensible worlds was expressed by the essential nature of their kingdom and its institutions. Their institutions had a family quality. The Son of the Sun was at the same time father to all the other Chinese and these served him. Although it was a kingdom, it partook of the nature of a family.

All this was only possible for men whose thinking had as yet no resemblance to that of later humanity. The thinking of the Chinese at that time was not at all like that of later men. What we think today would have been quite foreign to the Chinese. We think, for example, “animal”; we think “man”; we think “vase” or “table”. The Chinese did not think in this way, but they knew: there is a lion, there a tiger, a dog, there's a bear—not, there is an animal. They knew: my neighbor has a table with corners; someone else has a table that is rounder. They gave names to single things, but what “a table” is, never entered their head; “table” as such—of that they had no knowledge. They were aware: there stands a man with a bigger head and longer legs, there one with a smaller head, with shorter legs, and so on; there is a smaller man, here a bigger man, but “man” in general was to them an unknown factor. They thought in quite a different way, in a way impossible for man today. They had need, therefore, of other concepts. Now if you think “table,” “man,” “animal,” you can extend this to legal matters, for Jurisprudence consists solely of such concepts. But the Chinese were unable to think out any legal system; with them everything was organized as in a family. Within a family, when a son or daughter wants to do something, there is no thought of such a thing as a legal contract. But today, if someone here in Switzerland wants to do something, he consults liability laws, marriage laws, and so on. There one finds all that is needed, and the laws then have to be applied to individual cases.

Inasmuch as human beings still retain something of the Chinese in them—and there always remains a little—they don't really feel comfortable about laws and must always have recourse to a lawyer. They are even at sea sometimes with general concepts. As for the Chinese, they never had a legal code; they had nothing at all of what later took on the nature of a state. All they had was what each individual could judge in his individual situation.

So, to continue. The whole Chinese language was influenced by this fact. When we say “table,” we at once picture a flat surface with one, two or three legs, and so on, but it must be something that can stand up like a table. If anyone were to tell me a chair is a table, I would say: A table? You stupid! that's not a table, that's a chair. And if someone else came along and called the blackboard a table, I'd call him something even stronger, for it's not a table at all but a blackboard. With our language we have to call each thing by its own special name.

That is not so with Chinese. I will put this to you hypothetically; it will not be a precise picture, but you will get the idea from it. Say, then, that Chinese has the sounds OA, IOA, TAO, for instance.

It has then a certain sound for table, but this same sound signifies many other things too. Thus, let us say, such a sound might mean tree, brook, also perhaps pebble. Then it has another sound, let's say, that can mean star, as well as blackboard, and—for instance—bench. (These meanings may not be correct in detail; I mean only to show the way the Chinese language is built up.) And now the Chinese person knows: there are two sounds here, say LAO and BAO, each meaning things that are quite different but also both meaning brook. So he puts them together: BAOLAO. In this way he builds up his language. He does not build it up from names given to single things, but according to the various meanings of the various sounds. A sound may mean tree but it may also mean brook. When, therefore, he combines two sounds, both of which—beside many other things—mean brook, the other man knows that he means brook. But when he utters only one sound, no one knows what he means. In writing there are the same complications. So the Chinese have an extraordinarily complicated language and an extraordinarily complicated script.

And indeed, gentlemen, a great deal follows from this. It follows that for them it is not so easy to learn to read and write as it is for us-nor even to speak. With us, reading and writing can really be called simple; indeed, we are unhappy when our children don't learn quickly to read and write—we think it is “mere child's play.” With the Chinese this is not so; in China one grows quite old before one can write or in any way master the language. So you can easily imagine that the ordinary people are not at all able to do it, that only those who can go on learning up to a great age can at last become proficient. In China, therefore, noble rank is conferred as a matter of course from a spiritual basis on those who are cultured, and this spiritually high rank is called into being by the nature of the language and script. Here again it is not the same as in the West, where various degrees of nobility can be conferred and then passed on from one generation to another. In China rank can be attained only through education and scholarship.

It is interesting, gentlemen, is it not, that if we judge superficially we would surely say: then we don't want to be Chinese. But please don't assume that I am saying we ought to become Chinese, or even particularly to admire China. That is what some people may easily say about it. Two years ago when we had a Congress in Vienna,⁶ someone spoke of how some things in China were managed even today more wisely than we manage them—and immediately the newspapers reported that we wanted Chinese culture in Europe! That is not what was meant. In describing the Chinese culture, praise must be given in a certain way—but only in a certain way—for what it has of spiritual content. But it is a primitive culture, of a kind that can no longer be adopted by us. So you must not think I am agitating for another China in Europe! I simply wish to describe this most ancient of human cultures as it actually existed.

Now—to continue. What I have been saying is related to the whole manner of Chinese thinking and feeling. Indeed, the Chinese (and also the Japanese of more ancient times) occupied themselves a great deal, a very great deal, with art—with their kind of art. They painted, for instance. Now when we paint, it is quite a different affair from the Chinese painting. You see, when we paint (I will make this as simple as possible), when we paint a ball, for example, if the light falls on it, then the ball is bright in one part and dark over in the other, for it is in shadow; the light is falling beyond it. There again, on the light side, the ball is rather bright because there the light is reflected. Then we say: that side is in shadow, for the light is reflected on the other side; and then we have to paint also the shadow the ball throws on the ground. This is one of the characteristics of our painting: we must have light and shade on the objects. When we paint a face, we paint it bright where the light falls, and on the other side we make it dark. When we paint the whole man, if we paint properly, we put shadow in the same way falling on the ground.

But beside this we must pay attention to something else in our picture. Suppose I am standing here and want to paint. I see Herr Aisenpreis sitting in front; there behind, I see Herr Meier, and the two gentlemen at the back quite small. Were I to photograph them, in the photograph also they would come out quite small. When I paint, I paint in such a way that the gentlemen sitting in the front row are quite big, the next behind smaller, the next again still smaller and the one sitting right at the back has a really small head, a really small face. You see, when we paint we take perspective into account. We have to do it that way. We have to show light and shade and also perspective. This is inherent in the way we think.

Now the Chinese in their painting did not recognize light and shade, nor did they allow for perspective, because they did not see as we see. They took no notice of light and shade and no notice of perspective. This is what they would have said: Aisenpreis is certainly not a giant, any more than Meier is a dwarf. We can't put them together in a picture as if one were a giant and the other a dwarf, for that would be a lie, it is not the truth! That's the way they thought about things, and they painted as they thought. When the Chinese and the Japanese learn painting in their way, they do not look at objects from the outside, they think themselves right into the objects. They paint everything from within outwards as they imagine things for themselves. This, gentlemen, constitutes the very nature of Chinese and Japanese painting.

You will realize, therefore, that learning to see came only later to mankind. Human beings in that early China thought only in pictures, they did not form general concepts like “table” and so on, but what they saw they apprehended inwardly. This is not to be wondered at, for the Chinese descended from a culture during which seeing was different. Today we see as we do because there is air between us and the object. This air was simply not there in the regions where the Chinese were first established. In the times from which the Chinese have come down, people did not see in our way. In those ancient times it would have been nonsense to speak of light and shade, for there was not yet any such thing in the density the air then had. And so the Chinese still have no light and shade in their painting, and still no perspective. That came only later. From this you can see the Chinese think in quite a different way; they do not think as men do who came later.

However, this did not in the least hinder the Chinese from going very far in outer cleverness. When I was young—it is rather different now—we learned in school that Berthold Schwarz⁷ invented gunpowder, and this was told us as if there had never been gunpowder before. So Berthold Schwarz, while he was doing alchemistic experiments, produced gunpowder out of sulphur, nitre and carbon. But—the Chinese had made gunpowder thousands of years earlier!

Also we learned in school that Gutenberg⁸ invented the art of printing. We did learn many things that were correct, but in this case it looked to us as if there had formerly been no knowledge of printing. Actually, the Chinese already possessed this knowledge thousands of years earlier. They also had the art of woodcarving; they could cut the most wonderful things out of wood. In such external things the Chinese have had an advanced culture. This was in its turn the last remnant of a former culture still more advanced, for one recognizes that this Chinese art goes back to something even higher.

Thus it is characteristic of the Chinese to think not in concepts but in pictures, and to project themselves right into things. They have been able to make all those things which depend upon outer invention (except when it's a matter of steam-engines or something similar). So the present condition of the Chinese, which we may say is degenerate and uncultivated, has actually come about from centuries of ill-treatment at the hands of the Europeans.

You see that here is a culture that is really spiritual in a certain sense—and really ancient, that goes back to ten thousand years before our time. Much later, in the millennium preceding Christianity, individuals like Lao Tse⁹ and Confucius¹⁰ made the first written record of the knowledge possessed by the Chinese. Those masters simply wrote down what had arisen out of the intercourse among families in this old kingdom. They were not conscious of inventing rules of a moral or ethical nature; they were simply recording their experience of Chinese conduct. Previously, this had been done by word of mouth. Thus everything at that time was basically different. That is what can still be perceived today in the Chinese.

In contrast to this, it is hardly possible to see any longer the old culture of the Japanese people, because they have been entirely Europeanized. They follow European culture in everything. That they did not develop this culture out of themselves can be seen from their inability to discover on their own initiative what is purely European. The following, for example, really happened. The Japanese were to have steamships and saw no reason why they should not be able to manage them perfectly well themselves. They watched how to turn the ship, for instance, how to open the screw, and so on. Their instructors, the Europeans, worked with them for a time, and finally one day the Japanese said proudly: Now we can manage by ourselves, and we will appoint our own captain! So the European instructors were put ashore and off steamed the Japanese to the high seas. When they were ready to turn back, they turned the screw, and the ship turned round beautifully—but no one knew how to close the screw, and there was the ship whirling round and round on the sea, just turning and turning! The European instructors watching from the shore had to take a boat and bring the revolving ship to a standstill.

Perhaps you remember Goethe's poem, “The Magician's Apprentice” where the apprentice watches the spells of the old master-magician? And then, to save himself the trouble of fetching water, he learns a magic verse by which he will be able to make a broom into a water-carrier. One day when the old magician is out, the apprentice begins to put this magic into practice, and recites the words to start the broom working. The broom gets really down to business, and fetches water, and more water, and always more water. But the apprentice forgets how to stop it. Just imagine if you had your room flooded, and your broom went on fetching more and more water. In his desperation the apprentice chops the broom in two—then there are two water-carriers! When everything is drowned in water, the old master returns and says the right words for the broom to become a broom again.

As you know, the poem has been done in eurythmy recently, and the audience enjoyed it immensely. Well, the same kind of thing happened with the Japanese: they didn't know how to turn back the screw, and so the ship continued to go round and round. A regular ship's dance went on out there until the instructors on land could get a boat and come to the rescue.

Surely it is clear from all this that the European sort of invention is impossible for either the Chinese or the Japanese. But as to older inventions such as gunpowder, printing and so forth, they had already gone that far in much more ancient times than the Europeans. You see, the Chinese are much more interested in the world at large, in the world of the stars, in the universe as a whole.

Another people who point back to ancient days are the Indians. They do not go so far back as the Chinese, but they too have an old culture. Their culture may be said to have arisen from the sea later than the Chinese. The people who were the later Indian people came more from the north, settling down in what is now India as the land became free of water.

Now whereas the Chinese were more interested in the world outside, could project themselves into anything, the Indian people brooded more within themselves. The Chinese reflected more about the world—in their own way, but about the world; the Indians reflected chiefly about themselves, about man himself. Hence the culture that arose in India was more spiritualized. In the most remote times Indian culture was still free of religion; only later did religion enter into it. Man was their principal object of study, but their study was of an inward kind.

This too I can best make clear by describing the way the Indians used to draw and paint. The Chinese, looking at a man, painted him simply by entering into him with their thinking—without light and shade or perspective. That is really the way they painted him. Thus, if a Chinese had wanted to paint Herr Burle, he would have thought his way into him; he would not have made him dark there and light here, as we would do today, he would not have painted light and shadow, for they did not yet exist for the Chinese. Nor would he have made the hands bigger by comparison because of their being in front. But if the Chinese had painted Herr Burle, then Herr Burle would really have been there in the picture!

It was quite different with the Indians. Now just imagine the Indians were going to paint a picture: they would have started by painting a head. They too had no such thing as perspective. But they would at once have had the idea that a head could often be different, so they would make another, then a third again different, and a fourth, a fifth would have occurred to them. In this way they would gradually have had twenty or thirty heads side-by-side! These would all have been suggested to them by the one head. Or if they were painting a plant, they imagined at once that this could be different, and then there arose a number of young plants growing out of the older one. This is how it was in the case of the Indians in those very ancient times. They had tremendous powers of imagination. The Chinese had none at all and drew only the single thing, but made their way into this in thought. The Indians had a powerful imagination.

Now you see, gentlemen, those heads are not there. Really, if you look at Herr Burle, you see only one head. If you're drawing him here on the board, you can draw only one head. You are therefore not painting what is outwardly real if you paint twenty or thirty heads; you are painting something thought-out in your mind. The whole Indian culture took on that character; it was an inner culture of the mind, of the spirit. Hence when you see spiritual beings as the Indians thought of them, you see them represented with numbers of heads, numbers of arms, or in such a way that the animal nature of the body is made manifest.

You see, the Indians are quite different people from the Chinese. The Chinese lack imagination whereas the Indians have been full of it from the beginning. Hence the Indians were predisposed to turn their culture gradually into a religious one—which up to this day the Chinese have never done: there is no religion in China. Europeans, who are not given to making fine distinctions, speak of a Chinese religion, but the Chinese themselves do not acknowledge such a thing. They say: you people in Europe have a religion, the Indians have a religion, but we have nothing resembling a religion. This predisposition to religion was possible in the Indians only because they had a particular knowledge of something of which the Chinese were ignorant, namely, of the human body. The Chinese knew very well how to put themselves into something external to them. Now when there are vinegar and salt and pepper on our dinner table and we want to know how they taste, we first have to sample them on our tongue. For the Chinese in ancient times this was not necessary. They already tasted things that were still outside them. They could really feel their way into things and were quite familiar with what was external. Hence they had certain expressions showing that they took part in the outside world. We no longer have such expressions, or they signify at most something of a figurative nature. For the Chinese they signified reality. When I am becoming acquainted with someone and say of him: What a sour fellow he is!—I mean it figuratively; we do not imagine him to be really sour as vinegar is sour. But for the Chinese this meant that the man actually evoked in them a sour taste.

It was not so with the Indians; they could go much more deeply into their own bodies. If we go deeply into our own bodies, it is only when certain conditions are present—then we feel something there. Whenever we've had a meal and it remains in our stomach without being properly digested, we feel pain in our stomach. If our liver is out of order and cannot secrete sufficient bile, we feel pain on the right side of our body—then we are getting a liver complaint. When our lungs secrete too freely so that they are more full of mucus than they should be, then we feel there is something wrong with our lungs, that they are out of order. Today human beings are conscious of their bodies only in those organs that are sick. Those Indians of ancient times were conscious even of their healthy organs; they knew how the stomach, how the liver felt. When anyone wants to know this today, he has to take a corpse and dissect it; then he can examine the condition of the individual organs inside. No one today knows what a liver looks like unless they dissect it; it is only spiritual science that is able to describe it. The Indians could think of inner man; they would have been able to draw all his organs. With an Indian, however, if you had asked him to feel his liver and draw what he felt, he would have said: Liver?—well, here is one liver, here's another, and here's another, and he would have drawn twenty or thirty livers side-by-side.

So, gentlemen, you have there a different story. If I draw a complete man and give him twenty heads, I have a fanciful picture. But if I draw a human liver with twenty or thirty others beside it, I am drawing something not wholly fantastic; it would have been possible for these twenty or thirty livers really to have come into being! Every man has his distinctive form of liver, but there is no absolute necessity for that form; it could very well be different. This possibility of difference, this spiritual aspect of the matter, was far better understood by the Indians than by those who came later. The Indians said: When we draw a single object, it is not the whole truth; we have to conceive the matter spiritually. So the Indians have had a lofty spiritual culture. They have never set great store by the outer world but have had a spiritual conception of everything.

Now the Indians took it for granted that learning should be acquired in accordance with this attitude; therefore, to become an educated man was a lengthy affair. For, as you can imagine, with them it was not just a matter of going deeply into oneself and then being capable all at once of knowing everything. When we are responsible for the instruction of young people, we have first to teach them to read and write, imparting to them in this way something from outside. But this was not so in the case of the ancient Indians. When they wanted to teach someone, they showed him how to withdraw into his inner depths; he was to turn his attention away from the world entirely and to focus it upon his inner being.

Now if anyone sits and looks outwards, he sees you all sitting there and his attention is directed to the outer world. This would have been the way with the Chinese; they directed their attention outwards. The Indians taught otherwise. They said: You must learn to gaze at the tip of your nose. Then the student had to keep his eyes fixed so that he saw nothing but the tip of his nose, nothing else for hours at a time, without even moving his eyes.

Yes indeed, gentlemen, the European will say: How terrible to train people always to be contemplating the tip of their nose! True! for the European there is something terrible in it; it would be impossible for him to do such a thing. But in ancient India that was the custom. In order to learn anything an Indian did not have to write with his fingers, he had to look at the tip of his nose. But this sitting for hours gazing at the tip of his nose led him into his own inner being, led him to know his lungs, his liver, and so forth. For the tip of the nose is the same in the second hour as it is in the first; nothing special is to be seen there. From the tip of his nose, however, the student was able to behold more and more of what was within him; within him everything became brighter and brighter. That is why he had to carry out the exercise.

Now, as you know, when we walk about, we are accustomed to do so on our feet and this going about on our feet has an effect upon us. We experience ourselves as upright human beings when we walk on our feet. This was discouraged for those in India who had to learn something. While learning they had to have one leg like this and sit on it, while the other leg was in this position. Thus they sat, gazing fixedly at the tip of their nose, so that they became quite unused to standing; they had the feeling they were not upright men but crumpled up like an embryo in a mother's womb. You can see the Buddha portrayed in this way. It was thus that the Indians had to learn. Gradually they began to look within themselves, learned to know what is within man, came to have knowledge of the human physical body in an entirely spiritual way.

When we look within ourselves, we are conscious of our paltry thinking; we are slightly aware of our feeling but almost not at all of our willing. The Indians felt a whole world in the human being. You can imagine what different men they were from those who came later. They developed, as you know, a tremendous fantasy, expressed poetically in their books of wisdom—later in the Vedas and in the Vedantic philosophy, which still fill us with awe. It figured in their legends concerning super-sensible things, which still today amaze us.

And look at the contrast! Here were the Indians, there were the Chinese over there, and the Chinese were a prosaic people interested in the outer world, a people who did not live from within. The Indians were a people who looked entirely inward, contemplating within them the spiritual nature of the physical body.

So—I have begun to tell you about the most ancient inhabitants of the earth. Next time I will carry it further, so that we will finally arrive at the time we live in now.

Please continue to bring your questions. There may be details that you would like me to enlarge upon, and I can always at some following meeting answer the questions they have raised. But I can't tell you when the next session will be, because now I must go to Holland. I will send you word in ten days or so.

• 6. The Second International Congress, Vienna, June 1–12, 1922. See The Tension Between East and West.
• 7. Berthold Schwarz, Franciscan monk, Freiburg, around 1300.
• 8. Johann Gutenberg, 1394–1468.
• 9. Lao Tse, Chinese philosopher, 6th century B.C.
• 10. Confucius, 531–478 BC., Chinese ethical teacher.

I have spoken to you of our wish to look further into the history connected with the study of the world that we have undertaken. You have seen how the human race has gradually built itself up from the rest of great Nature. It was only when conditions on the earth were such that men were able to live upon it, that is, when the earth had perished, no longer had its own life, only then could human and animal life develop on the earth in the way I have pictured.

We have also seen that to begin with, human life was actually quite different from what it is today, and its field of action was where the Atlantic Ocean is now. We have to imagine that where today the Atlantic Ocean is, there was formerly solid ground. I will make a rough sketch of this. Today we come to Asia over there, this is the Black Sea, below is Africa, this is Russia, and there we find Asia. Here would be England, Ireland, yonder America; formerly all this was land and very little water, but over here in Europe at that time there was actually a really huge sea. These countries were all in the sea, and when we come up here, on this side there was sea too. Below where India is today—that is Indo-China—the land was appearing a little above the sea. Thus we actually have some land here, and here again land. Where today we find the Asian peoples, the inhabitants of the Near East and those of Europe, there was sea—the land rising up only later. This land, here, went much further, continuing right on to the Pacific Ocean where today there are so many islands, Java, Sumatra, and so on, which are all portions of the continent formerly there—all this archipelago. Thus, where now the Pacific Ocean is, there was a great deal of land with sea between.

Now the first peoples we are able to follow up have remained in this region, where the land has been preserved. When we look around us in Europe we can really say: ten, twelve, or fifteen thousand years ago the earth became sufficiently firm for men to dwell upon it. Before this only marine animals were there which developed out of the sea. If at that time you had looked for man, it would have been where the Atlantic Ocean is today. Already fifteen thousand years ago, however, in Asia, in Eastern Asia, there were also men. These men have naturally left descendants, and their descendants are very interesting on account of their culture, the most ancient on earth. These are the peoples referred to today as Mongolians; they include the Japanese and Chinese. They are interesting as being the remnants—the remaining traces—of the oldest inhabitants of the earth.

As you have seen, there was a much older population on the earth, who, however, have been entirely wiped out. They were the peoples who lived in ancient Atlantis, of whom nothing remains. For in this case even if any remains did exist we should have to dig down into the bed of the Atlantic Ocean to find them. We should have to get down to this bed—a more difficult thing to do than people imagine—and dig there to find in all probability nothing, for as I said those people had soft bodies. The culture resulting from what they did is impossible to unearth because it is no longer in existence. Thus, what was there long before the Japanese and Chinese is not accessible to ordinary science; we must have some knowledge of spiritual science if we want to make such discoveries.

What has remained of the Japanese and Chinese peoples, however, is very interesting. You see, the Chinese and older Japanese—not those of today, about whom I shall be speaking presently—these Chinese and Japanese have a culture quite different from ours. We should have a better idea of this had not our good Europeans in recent centuries extended their domination over these spheres, bringing about a complete change. In the case of Japan, this change has been very effective. Although Japan has preserved its name, it has become entirely Europeanized, its people have gradually absorbed everything from the Europeans, and what remains to them of their ancient culture is merely its outward form. The Chinese have preserved their identity better, but now they can no longer hold out. It is true that the European domination is not actively established there, but in these regions what the Europeans think is becoming all-prevailing, and what once existed there has disappeared. This is no cause for regret; it is in the nature of human evolution. It has, however, to be mentioned.

Now if we observe the Chinese—among whom things can be seen in a less adulterated form—we find there a culture distinct from all others, for the Chinese in their old culture do not include anything that can be called religion. The Chinese culture was devoid of religion.

You must picture to yourselves what is meant by a “culture without religion.” When you consider the cultures that have religion you find everywhere—in the old Indian cultures, for instance—veneration for beings who are invisible but yet seem to resemble human beings on earth. It is the peculiar feature of all later religions that they represent invisible beings anthropomorphically.

Anthroposophy no longer does this; anthroposophy no longer represents the super-sensible world anthropomorphically, but as it actually is. Further, it sees in the stars the expression of the super-sensible. The remarkable thing is that the Chinese have had something of the same kind. The Chinese do not venerate invisible gods but say: what is here on the earth differs according to climate, according to the nature of the soil where one is. You see, China in the most ancient times was already a big country and is still bigger than Europe today; it is, as you will admit, a gigantic country, has always been gigantic, and has had a tremendously big, vigorous population. Now the idea that the population of the earth increases is just superstition on the part of modern science, which always makes its calculations from data to suit itself. The truth is that also in the most ancient times there was a vast population in China, also in South America and North America. There, too, in those ancient times the land reached out towards the Pacific Ocean. If that is taken into account, the population of the earth cannot be said to have grown.

Thus we find a culture that is quite ancient, and today this culture can still be observed as it actually existed ten thousand, eight thousand, years age. These Chinese said: above in the north the climate is different, the soil is different, from what they are further down; everything is different there. The growth of the plants is different and human beings have to live in a different way. But the sun is all-pervading. The sun shines in the north and in the south; it goes on its way and moves on from warm regions to those where it is cold, and so on. Thus these people said: on earth diversity prevails, but the sun makes everything equal. Hence they saw in the sun a fructifying, levelling force. They went on to say therefore: if we are to have a ruler, our ruler must be like that; individual men differ but he must rule over them like the sun. For this reason they gave him the name of “Son of the Sun.” He was called upon to reign over the universe. The individual planets, Venus, Jupiter, and so on, act in their various ways; the sun as ruler over the planets makes everything equal. Thus the Chinese pictured their ruler as Son of the Sun. For they took the word son essentially to imply “belonging to something.”

Everything, then, was so arranged that the people said: the Son of the Sun is our most important man; the others are his helpers, just as the planets and so on are the helpers of the sun. They organized everything on earth in accordance to what appeared overhead in the stars. All this was done without prayer, for the Chinese did not know the meaning of it. It was all done without their actually having what later constituted a cult. In what might be called their kingdom, everything was organized in such a way that it was an image of the heavens. It had not yet reached the point of being a state—that is an infliction of modern man; they appointed all their earthly affairs in the image of what appeared to them in the stars above.

Now something came about through this—naturally quite different from what happened later—a man became the citizen of a kingdom. He did not profess any particular creed but felt himself just as member of a kingdom. Originally the Chinese had no gods of any kind; when later they had them, these gods were taken over from the Indians. To begin with, they did not have gods, but all their connection with the super-sensible worlds found expression in the essential nature of their kingdom and its institutions. Hence these institutions had a family quality. The Son of the Sun was at the same time father to all other Chinese and these were at his bidding. Even if it was a kingdom, it partook as a whole of the nature of a family.

All this is possible only for men whose thinking has no resemblance to that of later comers; and the thinking of the Chinese at that time did not at all resemble that of later men. What we think today would have been quite foreign to the Chinese. We think, for example, animal; we think men; we think scales or table. The Chinese did not speak in this way, but they knew: there is a lion, there a tiger, there a bear—not there is an animal. They knew: my neighbour has a table with corners; someone else has a less angular table, a table that is rounder. They gave names to single things, but what a table is never entered their head; the table as such—of that they had no knowledge. They were aware: there stands a man with a bigger head, there one with a smaller head, with shorter legs, and so on; there is a smaller man, here a bigger man, but man in general was to them an unknown factor. The Chinese thought in a quite different way, in a way impossible for man today. They had need, therefore, of other concepts. Now if you think table, man, animal, you can extend this to legal matters, for jurisprudence consists solely of such concepts. But the Chinese were unable to think out any legal system, everything with them savouring more of the family. In the family, when a son or a daughter wants to do anything there is no thought of any law of obligation. Today if anyone wants to do anything in Switzerland, the law of obligation, marriage laws, and so on, all come in. This is implicit and has to be applied individually.

Inasmuch as human beings still retain something of the Chinese within them—and there always remains a little—they do not know what to make of the law and must have recourse to a lawyer. They are at sea, too, with general concepts. As for the Chinese they never had a legal code; they had nothing at all of what later took on the nature of a state. All they had was what the individual man could see in each individual case.

Now, to continue. The whole Chinese language, for instance, is influenced by this. When we say “table,” we at once picture a flat surface with one, two, or three legs, and so on; but it must be something that can stand like a table. Were anyone to tell me a chair was a table, I should say: a table? How foolish you are; that's no table; it's a chair. And if someone else came along and called the blackboard a table, we should tell him he was even more foolish; it was not a table at all but a blackboard. In accordance with the character of our language we have to call each thing by its special name.

That is not so in the case of the Chinese. I will put this to you hypothetically; it will not give you an exact picture, but you will gather some idea of it. Say, then, that the Chinese has the sound OA, IOA, TAO,¹ and so on. He has perhaps a certain sound for table, but this same sound signifies many other things too. Thus, let us say, such a sound might mean tree, brook, also perhaps flint. Then he has another sound, let us suppose, that can mean star, as well as table, and bench. (I don't mean that this actually is so in the Chinese language but it is the way the language is built up.) Now the Chinese knows: there are two sounds here, for example LAO and BAO, each meaning some things that are quite different but both signifying brook as well. So he puts them together—BAOLAO. In this way he builds up his language. He does not build it up upon names given to single things, but according to the various meanings of the various sounds. A sound may signify tree but it may also signify brook. When a Chinese therefore combines two sounds which, besides many other things, signify brook, the other man knows that he means brook. But when he utters only one sound, no one knows what he means. In writing there are the same complications. So the Chinese have an extraordinarily complicated language and an extraordinarily complicated script.

Indeed, a great deal follows from this. It follows that with them, it is not so easy as with us to learn to read and write—nor even to speak. With us, reading and writing can really be called quite simple; indeed we are disappointed when our children do not learn to read and write—so it must be simple enough for them. In the case of the Chinese this is not so; in China one grows quite old before one can write or in any way master the language. Hence you can imagine that the ordinary people are not able to do all this, and only those who can go on learning up to a great age can at last become proficient, In China, therefore, spiritual nobility is conferred as a matter of course on those who are cultured, and this spiritual nobility is called into being by the nature of the language and of the script. Here again it is not the same as in the West where some degree of nobility having been conferred, it can be passed on from generation to generation. In China it was possible to acquire rank only by being learned.

It is strange that if we are willing to judge superficially, at this point we are emphatic: then we do not want to be Chinese! But you must not understand me to say that we ought to become Chinese or for that matter particularly to admire China—although that is what some people may easily say afterwards. When two years ago we had a congress in Vienna, one of us spoke of how some things in China were managed even today more wisely than with us. Immediately the newspapers were saying that we wanted Chinese culture in Europe! But that is not what was meant. In describing Chinese culture, in a certain way—but only in a certain way—praise must be given for what it has of spiritual content. It is primitive, however, and of a kind that can no longer be adopted by us. So you must not think I am looking for another China in Europe. I am simply wishing to describe this most ancient of human cultures as it actually existed.

Now—to proceed. What I have said here is connected with the whole manner of Chinese thinking and feeling. Indeed the Chinese, and the Japanese of more ancient times as well, occupied themselves a great deal, a very great deal, with a kind of art—they painted, for instance. Now when we paint, it is quite a different affair from the Chinese painting. I will show you this as simply as possible: when we paint a ball, for example, if the light falls in this way, the ball is bright here, and there dark for it is in shadow—the light is falling beyond it. There again, on the light side, the ball is rather bright because there the light is reflected. Then we say: That side is in shadow, for the light is reflected on the other; and here we have to paint the shadow the ball throws on the ground. This is one of the characteristics of our painting—we must have light and shade on the objects.

When we paint a face, we paint it bright where the light falls (a drawing is made), and over here we make it dark. When we paint the whole man, if we paint rightly, we put shadow in the same way falling on the ground. But besides all this we must pay attention to something else in our picture. Suppose I am standing there and want to paint; I see Mr. A. sitting in front; there behind, Mr. M., and the two other gentlemen sitting right at the back—I must paint these too. Mr. A. will be quite big and the two gentlemen right at the back quite small. Were I to photograph them, in the photograph also they would come out quite small. When I paint I do it in such a way that the gentlemen sitting in the front row are represented as being quite big, the next behind smaller, the next again still smaller and the one sitting right at the back has a tiny little head, a tiny little face. There you see we have to paint in accordance with perspective. This too has to be done with us. We have to paint in accordance with the light and shade and also with perspective. This is inherent in the very way we think.

Now the Chinese in their painting recognized neither light nor shadow, nor did they recognize perspective, because they did not see at all in the we do. They took no notice of light and shade or perspective, for this is what they would have said: A. is certainly not a giant any more than M. is a diminutive dwarf. We can't put them together in a picture as if one were a giant and the other a dwarf, for that would be a lie, it would not be the truth! This is the way they thought about everything, and they painted as they thought. When they learn to paint, the Japanese and the Chinese do not learn by looking at objects from the outside, they think themselves right into the objects; they paint everything from within outwards in the way they have to imagine it to themselves. This constitutes the very nature of Chinese and Japanese painting.

You will realize, therefore, that learning to see came only later to mankind. Human beings in China at that time thought in their own way in pictures; they did not form general concepts like table and so on, but what they saw they apprehended inwardly. This is nothing to wonder at, for the Chinese descended from a culture during which seeing was different. Today we see in the way we do because there is air between us and the object. This air was indeed not there (this is no longer so in modern China. I am speaking of the regions where the Chinese were first established). In the times from which the Chinese have come down, people did not see in our way. In those more ancient times it would have been nonsense to speak of light and shade, for there was not yet any such thing in the density of the air. Thus with the Chinese it is a case of their having no light and shade in what they paint—nor do they have perspective. That only comes later. From this you see how the Chinese inwardly think in a quite different way; they do not think like the men who came later.

All this, however, did not in the least hinder the Chinese from going very far where cleverness in outward affairs is concerned. When I was young—it is rather different now—we learned at school that Berthold Schwarz invented gunpowder, and this was said as if there had never been gunpowder before. Berthold Schwarz, when making alchemistic experiments, produced gunpowder out of sulphur, nitre, and carbon. But the Chinese had made gunpowder thousands of years before!

At school we were taught that Guttenberg discovered how to print. We learned many things that are quite correct, but it always looked as if formerly there had been no knowledge of printing. Thousands of years ago the Chinese already possessed this knowledge, just as they had the art of woodcarving—knew how to cut the most wonderful things out of wood. In these outward affairs, the Chinese have had an advanced culture. This culture was in its turn the last remnant of a former culture still more advanced, for one recognizes in this Chinese art that it goes back to something even higher.

It is characteristic of the Chinese, then, to think not in concepts but in pictures, also to project themselves right inside objects. Thus they have been able to make all those things which depend upon outer invention—that is, when it is not a matter of steam engines or anything of that kind. So the present condition of the Chinese, which we may say is degenerate and uncultivated, has actually arisen as the result of years of ill-treatment at the hands of Europeans.

Thus you see that here we have a culture which in a certain sense is really spiritual—a culture which is quite ancient and goes back ten thousand years before our time. Comparatively late, in the millennium preceding Christianity, people like Lao Tse and Confucius made the first written record of knowledge possessed by the Chinese. Those old masters simply wrote down what had arisen out of the family intercourse in this old kingdom. They were not conscious of inventing rules of a moral or ethical nature, but merely recorded their experience of Chinese conduct. Previously this had been done by word of mouth. Thus everything at that time was basically different.

This is something that may to a certain extent still be perceived in the Chinese—hardly in the Japanese any longer because in everything they follow European culture. That this culture has not developed out of themselves can be seen in their inability to discover on their own initiative what is purely European. For example, the following once really happened. The Japanese were to have steamships and saw no reason why they would not be able to manage them perfectly well. They covertly made a study of how to turn the ship, to manipulate the screw, and so on. They then had instructors, Europeans, to work with them for a time until one day the Japanese said with pride: Now we can manage on our own, appoint our own captain! So the European instructors were put ashore and off steamed the Japanese to the high seas. Wanting then to try revolving the ship they turned the screw, when lo and behold, the ship twisted round—but no one knew what to do next, and there was the ship whirling round and round on the sea, puffing out smoke and just turning and turning. The European instructors watching from the shore had to take a boat and bring the revolving ship to a standstill. You remember perhaps Goethe's poem called “The Magician's Apprentice”—we have performed it in eurythmy—where the apprentice listens to the spells of the old master- magician. As a result, to save himself the trouble of fetching water, by mean? of a magic formula he converts a broom into a water-carrier. One day when the old magician is out, the apprentice decides to put this idea into practice, and remembers the words to start the broom working. The broom gets down to the business of fetching water, of bringing more and always more water. Now the apprentice forgets how to stop it, Imagine if you had your room flooded and your broom went on fetching more and more water! In his desperation, the apprentice chops the broom in two—then there are two water-carriers! When everything is drowned in water, the old master comes back and says the right words to make the broom become a broom again.

Well, the same kind of thing happened with the Japanese; they did not know how the screw had to be manipulated, and so the ship continued to go round and round. A regular ship's dance went on out there until the instructor-; on land could get a boat and come to the rescue.

It becomes clear from this that the invention of European things is an impossibility for both the Chinese and the Japanese. But where the invention of older affairs is concerned, such as gunpowder, printing, and so forth, they had already got as far as that in much more ancient times. You see, the Chinese is much more interested in the world around him, in the world of the stars as well as in the outside world generally.

Another people who point us back to ancient days are the Indians, but they do not go as far back as the Chinese. The Indian people also have an old culture. This old culture, however, might be said to have arisen from the sea later than the Chinese. The people in India who were the later Indian people came more from the north, settling down here as the land became free of water.

Now whereas the Chinese interested themselves in what was in the world outside, could project themselves into anything, these Indian people brooded more within themselves. The Chinese reflected more about the world, in their own way, but about the world; the Indians reflected chiefly about themselves, about man himself. Hence the culture that arose in India went deeper. In the most remote times Indian culture was still free of religion; only later did religion enter into what at first was still without it. Man was their principal object of study, but this study was of an inward kind.

In this case, too, I can best explain matters by the way in which the Indians used to draw and paint. The Chinese, looking at a man, painted him simply by entering into him with their own thinking—without light, shade, or perspective. That is really the way they painted him. Thus, if a Chinese had wanted to paint Mr. B., he would have thought his way in to him; he would not have made him dark there and light here, as we would do today; he would not have painted light and shade because they did not yet exist for him. Neither would he have made the hands bigger in comparison because of being in front. But if our Chinese had painted Mr. B., then Mr. B. would really have been there in the picture!

It was quite different with the Indians. Now just imagine the Indians were going to paint a picture; they would have started by painting heads. They too, had no such thing as perspective. But they would at once have had the idea that the head might possibly be different, so they straightway made another, then a third again different, and a fourth, a fifth. In this way, they would gradually have had 20 or 30 heads side by side! All these would have been suggested to them by the one head. Or in the case of a plant, if they were painting a plant, they imagined at once that this might be different, and there arose a number of young plants growing out of the older one. This is how it was in the case of the Indians in those very ancient times. They had tremendous powers of imagination. The Chinese had none at all and drew only the single thing, but made their way right into this in thought. The Indians had this powerful imagination.

But you see those heads are not there; if you look at Mr. B. you see only one head; hence if you were painting him it is only one head that you can paint. You are, therefore, not painting what is outwardly real if you paint 20 or 30 heads; you are painting something merely thought-out in your mind. The whole Indian culture took on that character; it was a quite inward culture of the mind, of the spirit. Hence when you see the spiritual beings of the Indians, as the Indians have thought of them, they have been represented with numbers of heads, numbers of arms, or in such a way that what is of an animal nature in the body is made manifest.

The Indians are quite different people from the Chinese. The Chinese lack imagination whereas the Indians have been full of it from the beginning. Hence the Indians were predisposed gradually to turn their culture into a religious one, which up to this day the Chinese have never done; there is no religion in China. Europeans, who are not given to making fine distinctions, speak of the Chinese having a religion, but the Chinese themselves do not admit it. They say: You in Europe have a religion; the Indians have a religion; we, say the Chinese, have nothing resembling your religion. This tendency was possible, however, in the Indians only because they had particular knowledge of something of which the Chinese were ignorant—namely, the human body. The Chinese knew well how to put themselves into anything external to them. Now when there are vinegar, salt and pepper on our dinner table and we want to know what they taste like, we have first to sample the pepper, salt, vinegar on our tongue. In the case of a Chinese in olden times, this was not necessary. He tasted things that were still outside him; he could really put himself into things and was quite familiar with what was external to him. Hence he had certain expressions showing that he took part in the outside world. We no longer have such expressions, or at most they signify for us something of a figurative nature. For the Chinese, they signified a reality. When, on getting to know someone, I say of him: what a sour fellow he is!—we mean it figuratively; we do not imagine him really to be sour in the way vinegar is sour. But for a Chinese this meant that the man actually evoked in him a sour taste.

It was not so with the Indians; the Indians for their part could go much more deeply into their own bodies. If we go deeply into our own bodies, it is only when certain conditions are present that we can feel anything there. If every time we have had a meal, this meal remains in our stomach without being properly digested, we feel pain in our stomach. If our liver is out of order and cannot secrete sufficient gall, we feel pain on the right side of our body—then we get a liver complaint. When our lungs exude too freely, secrete too much so that they become more full of mucous that they should be, then we feel that there is something wrong with our lungs, that they are out of order. Human beings today are conscious of their bodies only in those organs that are sick. Those men of more ancient times, the Indians, felt when a man's organs were sound; they knew how the stomach or the liver felt. When today anyone wants to know this, he has to take a corpse and dissect it; he then examines the condition of the separate organs inside. No one today knows what a liver looks like unless they dissect it; it is only spiritual science that is able to describe it. The Indians thought man from within and would have been able to draw all his organs. In the case of an Indian, however, who had been asked to feel the liver and to draw what he felt, he would have said: Liver—well, here is another liver, another and yet another, and he would have drawn 20 or 30 livers side-by-side.

But you have there a different story. If I give a complete man 20 heads, I have a fanciful picture. But if I draw the human liver with 20 or 30 others beside it, I am drawing something not wholly fantastic; it would have been possible for these 20 or 30 livers really to have come into being! Every man has his distinctive form of liver, but there is no absolute necessity for that form, it could very well be different. This possibility of difference, this spiritual aspect of the matter, was far better understood by the Indians than by those who came later. The Indians said: When we draw a single object, it is not the whole truth; we have to conceive the matter spiritually. Hence the Indians have had a lofty spiritual culture; they have never set great store by the outer world but have had a spiritual conception of everything.

Indians thought it very important that learning should actually be acquired in accordance with this; hence, to become an educated man was a lengthy affair. For, as you can imagine, it was not just a matter of a man going deeply into himself and being capable all at once of knowing everything! When we are responsible for the instruction of young people, we have first to teach them to read, write, and so on, in this way imparting to them something from outside. But this was not so in the case of the Indians. When they wanted to teach anyone, they showed him how to withdraw into his inner depths; he had indeed to turn his attention as far as possible away from the world and to focus it upon his inner being.

Now if anyone sits and looks outwards, he sees you all sitting there and his attention is directed to the outer world. This would have been the way with the Chinese; they directed their attention outwards. The Indians did something different. They said: You must learn to gaze at the tip of your nose. Then the student had to keep his eyes fixed so that he saw nothing but the tip of his nose, nothing else for hours at a time, without even moving his eyes.

Yes, indeed, the European will say: How terrible to train people to be always contemplating the tip of their nose. True, for the European there is something terrible in it; it is impossible for him to do the same. But in ancient India, that was the custom. In order to learn anything, an Indian did not have to write with his fingers, he had to look at the tip of his nose. But this sitting for hours gazing at the tip of his nose led him into his own inner being, into what was within—for the tip of the nose is the same in the first hour as it is in the second, and nothing particular is to be seen there. From the tip of his nose, however, the student was able to behold more and more of what was within him; within him everything became brighter and brighter. This is why he had to carry out the exercise.

Now as you know, when we walk about we are accustomed to do so on our feet; and this going about on our feet has an effect upon us, we feel ourselves to be upright men when walking on our feet. This was discouraged for those in India who were to learn something. While learning they had to have one leg like this and to sit on it, while the other leg was in this position. Thus they sat, gazing fixedly at the tip of their noses, so that they became quite unaccustomed to stand and had the feeling they were no longer upstanding men but crumpled up like an embryo in the mother's womb. You can see the Buddha portrayed in this way. It was thus that the Indians had to learn. Gradually they began to look within them, learned to know what is within man, came to have knowledge of the human physical body in an entirely spiritual way.

When we look within us, we are conscious of our paltry thinking, learn something of our feeling but almost nothing of our willing. The Indians felt a whole world in the human being. Naturally you can imagine what different men they were from those who came later. Then, as you know, they developed those tremendous powers of imagination expressed in poetical form in their books of wisdom—later, in the Vedas and in the Vedantic philosophy, which still fill us with admiration. It figured in all their legends concerning super-sensible things—even today objects of wonder.

Now look what a contrast! Here were the Indians, here the Chinese, and the Chinese were a prosaic people, interested in what was outside, a people who did not live from within. The Indians were a people who looked entirely inwards, actually contemplating within them the spiritual nature of the physical body.

I have begun by telling you something about the most ancient inhabitants of the earth. Next time I shall be continuing, so that in our historical survey we shall finally arrive at the actual time in which we are living.

• 1. The German pronunciation of the vowel sounds has been used:
  German a, English ah (as in father)
  German i, English ee (as in feet)