The Rudolf Steiner Archive

When, out of that existence which is called the pre-earthly, the human being first grows through the germinal state into the physical-earthly life, we then see how in his physical existence the spiritual nature, which is at first hidden, begins to assert itself Out of the physical body; how the child sleeps, as it were, into the physical-earthly world. We see that the life of the child in its relation with the surrounding world is still a kind of dreaming; that it only gradually awakes. Threefold, however, do we find is that which the child manifests at especially conspicuous points in the stages of this awaking. Indeed, something of this threefoldness is observed with that intimate joy, that devoted love, with which one who is in the full sense a human being always observes a child. But the full significance of this threefoldness really becomes clear to one only when it is possible through spiritual science to observe the spiritual life in the physical-corporeal existence. This threefoldness is the learning to walk, learning to speak, learning to think. You know that the human being passes through this threefoldness in an age like the springtime of life. Such is this meaningful order of occurrence. We shall soon see why it must be this meaningful succession. It can, as a matter of fact, be different, but the succession according to nature is just this.

Learning to walk is something which, in an utterly one-sided manner, points to a series of things that the child achieves at the same time. The child enters into the world in such a way that it is in a state of equilibrium utterly unlike that in which it later moves about in the world. There is associated with this at the same time the right use of the arms and the right placing of the human organism in a posture suitable for man in his relation with the world, in the capacity for movement in relation with the world suitable for the human being, in the capacity for movement suited to the human being in the earthly existence. This is what the child must first learn. Out of what the human being acquires in the mobility of his organism there proceeds what adapts him to the equilibrium of the solid, the fluid, the gaseous. In all of this lies the basis for something else. While the human being is undertaking all this activity—learning to walk, learning balance, learning to use the arms and hands and fingers—these movements, which take place in his entire system, are working upward into the system which is the basis for human speech. This tenses the muscles, causes the blood to flow, exercises an influence upon the etheric body, works over into those physical, etheric, astral organs of breathing, proceeds further exerting a certain plastic activity in the brain. One might say that it passes beyond into those organs which, out of the inner human being, bring about speaking through imitation of the surroundings. Language is the transposition of movement and transposition of balance. One who can bring reality into cognition through beholding the actuality of the soul-spiritual sees how dexterity—not the achieved, but the striving that the child must exercise in order to gain the dexterity practiced by the hand in grasping—works onward into the melodious element of language. What is rhythm in language comes to expression in the manner in which the feet are set down in the movement of walking. It is of much significance to observe whether the child, in learning to walk, steps on the heel, the ball of the foot, or the toes. Out of speech there grows what darts forth out of the human being as childish thinking. Walking, speaking, thinking,—all of this evolves out of that dim, dreamy state of consciousness. When the human being is born, and is not yet able to do these things, the force is none the less within the child in the last after-effects of its presence in the pre-earthly existence. Spiritual science can show us how this exists in the pre-earthly life. The earliest sounds of language are not such as manifest thinking, but proceed out of bodily comfort or discomfort.

How did walking, speaking, thinking appear in the pre-earthly life? Thinking, as it flows out of the child,—one who observes the manifestation of this thinking, as he traces it backward, finds that it disappears in an indefinite darkness. It emerges again in the very last period before the earthly birth. There one sees the human spirit-soul being in spiritual intercourse with that host of Beings described in my Occult Science as Angels. This is an intercourse which may be described by saying that thoughts are not being conceived and expressed abstractly, but that a living stream of thought is flowing here and there from one Being to another: there is living intercourse with the Angels. Out of what has flowed into the human soul in the form of a force, there develops something which is slept through, as it were, during the germinal life but later becomes manifest as the force of thinking, conceiving. This we possess in order to enter rightly into intercourse with human beings. Just think what we should be if we were not thinking beings, what we should be as human beings together! All that we are as human beings together results from the fact that we are thinking beings. Here on this earth we mutually understand one another in the relation of man to man by means of the thinking which we express in speech. This manner in which we understand one another here by means of thinking,—this we have acquired out of the pre-earthly intercourse with the Angels. This intercourse which we there practice with the Angels can be practiced also with other human beings who are there in the pre-earthly existence. This takes the form of direct speaking in thoughts. Loftier, however, is the intercourse with the hierarchy of the Angels, since this affords not only satisfaction for the soul but a force which reappears in the thinking that the child acquires in the third stage of his earthly life.

Let us consider now the second stage, that of language. This is not so completely bound up with the sense-nerve system as is thinking. Speaking is bound up with the breast system, man's rhythmic system, with that which comes to expression in breathing, in blood circulation. When that which there struggles out of the child, imitating in language the outer world, is traced back to the pre-earthly life, we find that these forces are acquired out of intercourse he is permitted to experience during the pre-earthly existence with the second hierarchy, that of the Archangels, those Beings who rule over peoples, Beings with this responsibility for the very reason that they have the relation with human beings which we have just described. These forces acquired by the human being in relation with the Archangels sink down into night and come again to manifestation in the forces of the earthly life of speech, by means of which we have mutual understanding with other human beings. Without language, what should we be as human beings in mutual association if we could not pour forth in the coarser vibration of the air, which manifest speech, the ether vibrations of thought? That our rhythmic system becomes the bearer of a denser manifestation,—this force we receive from the Hierarchy of the Archangels. And thus can we follow this process as we go back to the pre-earthly existence; we can say not only in abstract ways that man lives there among spiritual Beings, but can declare in an entirely specific manner what this or that class of Beings has bestowed upon us for the life on earth. We thank these spiritual Beings—that is, we place ourselves in a right relation with these Beings—when we say: For my thinking, I thank the Angels; for language, I thank the Archangels.

Let us go back now to the first thing that the child learns: to walk, learning a balanced posture. There is more connected with this than is usually thought. Connected with it is the bringing about by the ego of a specific physical process which changes man from a creeping to a walking being. It is the ego that erects the human being; the astral body that is at work within the feeling for speech in the erect being; the etheric body that permeates all of this with the force of thinking. But all of these work into the physical body. When we consider the animal, which has its back parallel with the surface of the earth, its action, its walking, its behavior—everything that proceeds out of the astral—is utterly unlike these things in man, who is a being with volition acting out of his upright, vertical nature. What comes about in man, taking place in the ego, astral body, etheric body,—all of this is in the physical body a sort of combustion process. Here is a point where our physical science, if it was desirous of fulfilling itself, would be able to discover its union with Anthroposophy. It must be said that the combustion processes in man are altogether different from those in the animal. When the flame of the organic being works horizontally, it destroys what comes out of conscience; there cannot work into this what is derived from the moral out of conscience. The fact that, in the case of the human being, these processes are streamed through by the conscience is due to the fact that the flame of volition in man is perpendicular to the earth. Within this striking in of the moral, of the nature of conscience, the child places himself just as into the external posture of balance. Together with the learning to walk, there darts into man the moral human nature—indeed, the religious permeation of the nature of man. These are truly lofty forces which are there at work when the child passes over from the creeping to the walking movement. These forces, if we follow them back through the darkness of the child's consciousness, lead us to a still loftier association of man with the Beings whom we call the Primal Forces, the Archai. Everything through which the human being has passed in the pre-earthly life is here reactivated. If to the prayer-like formula, for my thinking I thank the Angels, for language I thank the Archangels, we wish to attach a third unit, we must say: For my being placed within the earthly existence according to physical and moral forces, I thank the Archai—who have been endowed with this power by still loftier Beings.

And now we can answer the question for ourselves: How is it that the human being, who possessed a brilliant consciousness before birth, brings with him here a dull consciousness? Indeed, into this consciousness there dips down what we can combine under the concepts of walking capacity, speaking capacity, thinking capacity, which we have received into ourselves from the higher Hierarchies to be transformed by us. We see thus that what makes us human beings, that through which we are human beings among human beings, manifests our connection with the loftier divine-spiritual worlds. Into these divine-spiritual worlds we enter again and again in a certain way during our earthly existence. The truth is that we must say to ourselves: For the real nature of man, the state of sleep, out of which dreams come into play, is at least just as significant as the waking state. When man passes over from the waking state to the state of sleep, these three capacities that have been acquired in the manner described begin to grow silent: conceiving, speaking, action all grow silent. But we see then that, as thinking grows silent when we fall asleep, the human being, in the same degree in which thought disappears from his consciousness, comes near to the Angels, and, as his speaking capacity comes to an end, he approaches the Archangelic Beings. In the degree to which the human being has entered into complete stillness, he passes through the quieting of his activity into proximity with the Primal Beings, the Archai.

What is important, however, is that we should enter during the sleeping state in a worthy manner into proximity with these three hierarchies: that we come close to the Angels, Archangels, Archai in a worthy way during the state of sleep. Here is the point at which one would have to speak in a special manner to the human beings of the present time; for the manner in which we enter into proximity with the Angels depends very much upon the manner of one's thinking during the waking state. The manner in which man uses worthily his speaking forces determines whether he comes worthily near to the Archangels; the way in which man uses rightly his capacity for movement and his moral sense determines whether he comes worthily near to the Archai.

We are living in a time when the human being is no longer willing to have in his thinking anything extending beyond the physical world, when he desires to be stimulated by the external world. A pure, self-sustained thinking, such as I recommended more than thirty years ago in my Philosophy of Freedom as the foundation for moral intuition,—such thinking, unfortunately, is sought but little at present and but little cultivated in children. But through such thinking, which Goethe and Schiller would still have called idealistic thinking,—through such thinking one breaks free from the mere waking world in earthly existence and retains something for the sleeping state. So much power do we possess for approaching the Angels during sleep as there is idealism in our thinking. And just as helpless are we for the steps we must take toward the Angels as materialism is at work in our thinking. In the same sense it is to be observed that those persons fall victims to Ahrimanic elemental spirits—to which then their thinking is forced to turn—who do not, through idealism developed during the waking state, find the forces for drawing near to the Angelic Beings. It is so very beautiful when the child has learned to think so directly, in a manner of which human beings no longer form any conception! The thinking of the child just after it has learned to think is filled with spirituality. It is wonderful to see how—up to the time when they have been nibbled at by materialism—children upon sleeping move immediately as if on wings toward their Angelic Being, how united they become during sleep with the Angelic Beings. Thus we may say that we seek during sleep—but only through idealism, through spiritualizing the realm of thoughts—those worlds out of which we have evolved in order to learn to think here as human beings together with human beings.

And when we consider language, idealism in one's disposition has the same significance for intercourse during sleep with the Archangels as idealism in thinking has for association with the Angels. The person who is able, when addressing his words to another person, to stream good will into these words, a good mood that passes over into the soul of the other person, which does not pass by the other person but penetrates into him with the interest that one may have for a human being,—that mood which may be called an idealistic mood of good will, it is this that, when astral body and ego have passed over into sleep, gives to language the melodious sound. This gives to astral body and ego, which also share in language, the capacity to come near to the Archangelic Beings, whereas it is the unsocial, egotistic attitude of mind which scatters these forces in the realm of the Ahrimanic elemental beings. Thus the human being, when he falls asleep, and has not used language in the right, idealistic manner, really dehumanizes himself.

Such is the situation likewise when our actions, our conduct is such as to be humanly friendly, but is also fully aware that the human being is not only that entity living in flesh, but in his inner nature is a spiritual being, for out of this awareness arises respect for the other person likewise as a spiritual being. It is out of action based upon this attitude that we gain for the sleeping state the power that brings us in the right manner close to the Archai, whereas, if we are not in a condition to perform humanly kind actions, if we are aware of our own nature only as bodily, the corresponding forces are then scattered in the realm of Ahrimanic elemental Beings: we alienate ourselves from the very nature of man.

Thus the human being brings three kinds of gifts out of the pre-earthly existence, but it is in this way that he connects these again in a threefold manner with his primordial form between sleeping and waking, while he remains unconscious, but returns again and again into proximity with these Beings. This, then, is just as we here on earth have to form our association with other human beings out of three sources: the source of thought, of speech, of action. Thus are we during sleep in a threefold relation with the spiritual world: with the Angels, with the Archangels, with the Primal Forces.

The nature of our link in association with these Beings is of determinative significance when we pass through the portal of death. For it is possible to know through spiritual vision that one is able to draw ever nearer to the Angels, the Archangels, the Beings of the Archai. But it is something which may become extremely bad for future human beings if they surrender themselves wholly to the Ahrimanic elemental Beings, if materialistic thinking, speaking, action become ever more habitual. Thanks to the spiritual world, however, human souls of the present time—at least as to most persons—have such an inheritance of a good mood in thinking, speaking and action that the materialism of the present time cannot degrade everything. Very materialistic persons do not possess out of the contemporary life on earth much that can render possible approach to the hierarchies, yet out of the life of the past there flows forth what brings them there. Yet humanity may very easily meet with a different reward if a spiritual conception of life is not acquired. The idealizing of thinking, speaking and action provides man with the possibility of creating in a certain way new connections with the three classes of divine-spiritual Beings—the Angels, the Archangels, the Archai—and this man needs for the time between death and a new birth. Otherwise, in a far future time, if he has not had a connection in the present time with the Angels, he must be born as a being crippled in thinking; if he has not entered into a union with the Archangels, as a man without language; if he has not had a connection with the Archai, as a being crippled in limbs and in moral impulses. It is within the power of mankind on earth, through materialism in civilization and culture, to drag the whole of earthly humanity down to ruin, or through spiritualizing to lift humanity to a loftier height, such as I described in my Occult Science as the Jupiter existence of the earthly beings.

It is simply true that Anthroposophy is not a theory: every word, every thought passes over into our whole spiritual human nature. We cannot do otherwise than to possess the thought: you are truly a crippled person if you do not possess the right relation with the Higher Beings. This gives us the right sense of responsibility in a moral relation with the spiritual world, and it is out of this that there comes about in man a right sense of responsibility in relation also with the physical world. Only thus does it arise. When you consider what thus occurs to the human being, how through idealism in his thinking he enters into proximity with the Angels, how through his words, through the idealistic attitude expressed in his speaking, he enters into proximity with the Archangels, how through the idealism embodied in his actions he draws near to the Archai—how during sleep he struggles upward to the three Hierarchies—you will then find intelligible what anthroposophical research discloses to us: that the constitution of human destiny is woven in this way. All of this we carry through the portal of death, and it later becomes conscious. After death we must form our thoughts in association with the Angels; it is through the disposition of mind we possess that we must acquire our concepts after death. The manner in which we take our place through language in the midst of mankind gives us the capacity, the power, to enter into association with the Archangels. Through the manner in which we use our limbs must we gain the possibility of possessing self-consciousness after death through association with the Archai. Thus do we enter livingly within and thus is that woven which develops into a clearer power of consciousness between death and a new birth.

If we now observe the child during the earliest years of life, we behold the preceding earthly existence in its after effects. We see not only into the preceding pre-earthly life, but also the preceding life on earth, and thus only does one gain a view for the entire life on earth. One observes the child, how it learns to walk, to use its arms; one observes whether it steps on the ball of the foot or on the heel. Not only does one notice how it directs its physical look, but how still earlier actions are carried out with delicacy, with tenderness, with a pitying heart, how this gives to the child in this life a firm tread, how an insecure, wavering step is the outcome of brutish, pitiless action in the previous life. Every step taken by the child, the striving for this or that forming of the tread, reveals to us how this forming is the outcome of the previous life on earth. We learn to recognize the physical as the image of what is living in the child as a moral impulse out of the previous life on earth. The most impressive thing that can be observed is the learning to walk. Human freedom comes about through the fact that man is born with his destiny as little interfered with as whether he has light or dark hair.

The primary measure of destiny is expressed in the learning to walk. In learning to speak, something else is really indicated. This also is in relation with the pre-earthly existence, but it is difficult to describe. Since it is difficult to characterize, I shall express this in popular language. When the human being passes through the portal of death, he has in a certain way formed his nature morally. Always during the sleeping state he has been weaving his own being, and what he has then woven he himself begins to see. What a person is, comes to manifestation in his learning to walk. When he has passed through the portal of death, he enters in the right manner into association with the Angels, Archangels, Archai, but something further is added to this which the person receives from the second group of the hierarchies. These stream into this person, as an additional, more impersonal karma, that which places him in his next life within a specific language, integrates him within a certain body of people. Individual destiny is connected with what the person is in relation with the Archai. Capacity for speaking we receive from the Archangels. But what language we learn,—this is received from far loftier Beings: the Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes.

When we consider thinking, conceiving, this is in relation, as I have shown, with the Angels; these Beings can bestow upon man the gift of thinking. This capacity, however, man achieved first in the earth period of evolution; he did not possess it during the Moon period. In this way there comes about a development for the Angels themselves; they enter thus into relation with the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones. They have gained in this way the capacity for a direct association with the Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim, and these do not bestow a capacity which is to be shared only within a single human group, but one to be shared by the whole of humanity. Thinking is really something belonging in common to the whole of humanity. For this reason is logic identical over the whole earth. Walking, in which personal destiny is expressed, we receive from the Archai, out of their own forces. The capacity for speaking is received by the human being from the Archangels, but these are directed in this by the second group of the hierarchies. It is from the Angels that the human being receives the gift of thinking, but these bestow this upon man under the influence of the highest hierarchies.

Thus are things woven in the cosmic order, and man is understood only when he is clearly seen in this relation of being interwoven with the cosmic order. In this way one understands, not only the single person, but also the nature of a living or dying branch of language, a deficient or a perfect capacity for thinking. Man exists on earth in a certain dualistic relation. He sees entities and sees them in a certain dependency under natural laws. In relation with these, man comes to a consciousness of his own relation with the Godhead. Here on this earth there is no relation between the physical and the moral cosmic order. But, when we look back into the life before birth and that after death, we then enter into a world where these two realms are merged into one. Moreover, a human being cannot determine rightly what he himself is unless he is in a position to see truly into himself as a spiritual being. Man does not acquire a unitary world view unless he can see beyond birth and death, if he does not look into the higher worlds. In order to understand his entire, total being, man needs a consciousness permeated by knowledge of his connection with the spiritual world.

The last two lectures concentrated on artistic feeling and creation. I wished to call attention to the fact that anthroposophical contemplation leads to a particular manner of beholding the world, which must lead, in turn, to an inner vitalization of the arts, present and future. At the end of yesterday's lecture I stressed the fact that, by gaining a direct relation to the spiritual, a person can acquire the forces necessary for the creation, out of his innermost core, of true art. It has always been so. For true art stands beside real knowledge on the one hand, and on the other, genuine religious life. Through knowledge and religion man draws closer to the spiritual element in thought, feeling and will. Indeed, it is his inward experience of knowledge and religion, during an earth life, that brings about a sense of the validity of all that I discussed during the last two lectures. Looking at the physical surroundings akin to his physical body, he comes to realize that physicality is not the whole of his humanness. In all artistic and religious ages he has recognized this truth, saying to himself: Though I stand within earth existence, it contradicts that part of my human nature which was imaged forth from worlds quite different from the one in which I live between birth and death.

Let us consider this feeling I have just described in respect to cognition. Through thinking man strives to solve the riddles of existence. Modern man is very proud of the naturalistic knowledge which, for three or four centuries, now, while marvelous relationships in nature were traced out, has been accumulating. But, precisely in regard to these relationships, present-day natural science must say to itself on reflection, with all intensity: What can be learned through the physical senses leads to a door which locks out world mysteries and cosmic riddles. And we know from anthroposophical contemplation that, to pass this door, to enter the realms where we may perceive what lies behind the outer world, we must overcome certain inner dangers. If a human being is to tread the path leading through this door, he must first attain, in his thoughts, feelings and will, a certain inner steadiness. That is why entering this door is called passing the Guardian of the Threshold. If real knowledge of the spiritual-divine foundation of the world is to be acquired, attention must be called not only to the dangers mentioned, but also to the fact that no person penetrates this door in the state of consciousness brought about between birth and death by merely natural conditions.

Here we should consider the tremendous seriousness of cognition. Also the abyss lying between the purely naturalistic world and the world we must seek if we would enter our true home and discover what bears a relationship to our inmost being. For in the merely naturalistic world we feel ourselves strangers in regard to this inmost being. On entering physical existence at birth, inevitably we carry with us our eternal-divine being; but if its source is to be recognized, we must first become aware of the abyss lying between earth life and the regions of cognition which we must enter in order to know our own being.

An understanding of cognition highlights, on the one hand, the gravity of the search for a true relationship with the spiritual world; on the other, it helps us to recognize that, if earthly existence were immediately satisfactory, if what modern naturalism dreams to be the case were so, namely, that man is merely the highest pinnacle of natural phenomena, there would exist no religious human beings. For in such circumstances man would have to be satisfied with earthly existence.

Religion aims at something entirely different. It presents a reality which reconciles man to earthly existence, or consoles him beyond earthly existence, or perhaps awakens him to the full meaning of earthly existence by making him aware that he is more than anything which earthly existence implies.

Thus the anthroposophical world-conception is capable of giving a strong impetus to cognition as well as to religious experience. In the case of cognition it stresses the fact that one must travel a road of purification before passing the gate to the spiritual world. On the other hand, it stresses the truth that religious life leads far beyond the facts observable by a person with only ordinary earthly consciousness. For Anthroposophy recognizes that the Mystery of Golgotha, the earth-life of Christ Jesus, though placed among historical events comprehensible to the senses, can be comprehended in its fulness only supersensibly.

Fortunately the abyss on the edge of which man lives, the abyss opening out before him in religion and cognition, can be bridged. But not by contemporary religion, nor yet by a cognition, a science, derived wholly from the earth.

It is here that art enters. It forms a bridge across the abyss. That is why art must realize that its task is to carry the spiritual-divine life into the earthly; to fashion the latter in such a way that its forms, colors, words, tones, act as a revelation of the world beyond. Whether art takes on an idealistic or realistic coloring is of no importance. What it needs is a relationship to the truly, not merely thought-out, spiritual. No artist could create in his medium if there were not alive in him impulses springing from the spiritual world. This fact points to the seriousness of art, standing alongside the seriousness of cognition and religious experience. It cannot be denied that our materialistically oriented civilization diverts us, in many ways, from the gravity of art. But any devoted study of true artistic creation reveals it as an earnest of man's struggle to harmonize the spiritual-divine with the physical-earthly.

This became evident at that moment of world-evolution when human beings were faced in all seriousness with the great question of art; became evident in the grand style during the time of Goethe and Schiller. A glance at their struggles will corroborate this statement. Much that is pertinent, here, has already been quoted in past years, in other connections. Today—to provide a basis for discussion—I shall cite only a few instances.

During the eighteenth century there emerged a guiding idea which Goethe and Schiller themselves accepted: namely, the differentiation between romantic and classical art. Espousing classicism, Goethe tried to become its nurturer by familiarizing himself with the secrets of great Greek art. His Italian journey was fulfilment of his longing. In Germany, that northern land, he felt no possibility of reconciling, artistically, the divine-spiritual hovering, before his soul and the physical-sensory standing before his senses. Greek art, so abundant in Italy, and now deeply perceived, taught him the harmonization he lacked when he left Weimar for Italy. The impression he makes in describing his experience is—I must coin a paradoxical expression—at once heroic and touching.

In art Goethe was a classicist in the sense (if we use words which satisfactorily express his own idea) that he directed his gaze primarily toward the external, the sensory-real. But he was too profound a spirit not to feel a discrepancy between the sensory and that which derives from other realms, home of his soul. Sense-evidence should be purified, elevated through shaping, through an appropriate treatment. Thus Goethe the artist distilled from natural forms and human actions an element which, although presented imperfectly in the sensory-physical, could be brought to clarity without infidelity to the physical. In other words, he let the divine-spiritual shine through purified sensory forms. Always it was his earnest endeavor not to take up the spiritual lightly in his writings, not to express the divine-spiritual offhandedly. For he was convinced that romanticism can make only a facile, all-too-easy introduction of the spiritual into the physical; not deal with it comprehensively and effectively.

Never was it his intention to say: The gods live; I resort to symbolism to prove my conviction that the gods live. He did not feel thus. On the contrary, he felt somewhat as follows: I see the stones, I behold the plants, I observe the animals, I perceive the actions of human beings. To me all these creations have fallen away from the divine-spiritual. Nevertheless, though their earthly forms and colors show a desertion from the divine-spiritual, I must, by my treatment, lift them to a level where they can reflect, out of their own natures, that same divine-spiritual. I need not become unfaithful to nature—this Goethe felt—just purify seceded nature by artistic fashioning; then it will express the divine-spiritual. This was Goethe's conception of classicism; of the main impulse of Greek art, of all true art.

Schiller was unable to go along with this viewpoint. Because his gaze was directed idealistically into the spiritual world, he used physical things as indicators only. Thus he was the dayspring of post-Goethean romantic poetry. It is extraordinarily interesting to watch the reversal of method. For romantic poetry, as opposite pole to the classicism striven for by Goethe, despaired, as it were, of elevating the earthly-sensory to the divine; being satisfied to use it only as a more or less successful way of pointing to the divine-spiritual.

Let us look at the classicism of Goethe, composer of these beautiful lines:

Who possesses science and art
Possesses religion as well:
Who possesses the first two not,
O grant him religion.
(“Wer Wissenschaft and Kunst besitzt,
Hat auch Religion;
Wer jene beiden nicht besitzt,
Der habe Religion.”)

Goethe, permeated by a conviction that every artist harbors the religious impulse, Goethe, to whom the trivially religious was repulsive because there lived in him a deep religious impulse, took the greatest pains to purify artistically the sensory-physical-earthly form to a point where it became an image of the divine-spiritual. Let us look at his careful way of working. He took up what was robustly earthly without feeling any necessity of changing it greatly to give it artistic form.

Consider, in this respect, his Goetz von Berlichingen. He treated the biography of this man objectively and with respect while dramatizing it, as demonstrated by the title of the first version: Geschichte Gott friedens von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand, dramatisiert (History of Gottfried of Berlichingen of the Iron Hand, Dramatized). In other words, by changing only slightly the purely physical, he led it over into the dramatic; wishing, as artist, to part with the earth as little as possible; presenting it as a manifestation of the spiritual-divine world order.

Take another instance. Let us see how he approached his Iphigenie, his Tasso. He conceived these dramas, shaped their subject matter, poetically. But what happened then? He did not dare to give them their final form. In the situation in which he found himself, he, Goethe, who was born in Frankfurt and studied in Leipzig and Strassburg before going to Weimar, he, the Weimar-Frankfurt Goethe, did riot dare to finish these dramas. He had to go to Italy and walk in the light of Greek art to elevate the sensory-physical-earthly to a level where it could image forth the spiritual. Imagine the battle Goethe went through in order to bridge the abyss between the sensory-physical-earthly and divine-spiritual. It was like an illness when he left Weimar under cover of night, saying nothing to anybody, to flee to an environment in which he could master and elevate and spiritualize, as never in the north, the forms he worked with. His psychology is deeply moving. As I said before, it has about it something that might be called heroic-touching.

Let us go further. It is characteristic of Goethe—the paradox may strike you as peculiar—that he never finished anything. He began Faust in one great fling, but only the philistine Eckermann could induce him, in his old age, to bring this drama to a conclusion, and then it was only just barely possible for the author. For Goethe to bring his Faust to artistic form was a tremendous struggle which required the help of somebody else. Then take Wilhelm Meister. After its inception, he did not wish to finish. It was Schiller who persuaded him to do so. And if we scrutinize the matter, we might say: if only Schiller had not done so. For what Goethe then produced was not on the same level as his first sketch which would have remained a fragment. Take the second part: episodes are assembled. The writing is not all of a piece; it is not a uniform work of art. Now observe how—as in Pandora—Goethe strove to rise to the pinnacle of artistic creation by drawing his figures from the Greek world which he loved so much. Pandora remained a fragment, he could not complete it; the project was too vast for him to round it out. The serious, difficult task of the artist weighed upon his soul, and when he tried to idealize human life, to present it in the glory of the divine-spiritual, he could complete only the first part of the trilogy, the first drama: Die Natuerliche Tochter.

Thus in every possible way Goethe shows his predilection for the classical; always endeavoring, in his works, to purify the earthly physical to the point where it could spread abroad the radiance of the divine-spiritual. He struggled and strove, but the task was such that, apprehended deeply enough, it surpassed human forces, even Goethe's. We must say, therefore, that precisely in such a personality the arts with their grave world-mission appear in their full grandeur and power. What appeared, later, in romanticism is all the more characteristic when considered in the light of Goethe.

Last Thursday was the hundred-and-fiftieth birthday of Ludwig Tieck, who was born on May 31, 1773, and died on April 28, 1853. Tieck—unfortunately little known today—was in a certain respect a loyal pupil of Goethe. He grew out of romanticism, out of what at the University of Jena during the nineties of the eighteenth century was regarded as as the modern Goethe problem. In his youth he had experienced the publication of Werther and of the first part of Faust. At Jena, together with Novalis, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, he struggled to solve the riddles of the world. In his immediate environment Ludwig Tieck felt the breath of Goethe's striving toward the classical, and in him we can see how spiritual life was still active at the end of the eighteenth, and during the first half of the nineteenth, century. With Schlegel, Tieck introduced Shakespeare into Germany; and as a personality he illustrates how Goethe's tremendous efforts were reflected in certain of his prominent contemporaries. Tieck felt the grandeur and dignity of art as a mighty cultural ideal. He looked about; he did not gather his life experiences in a narrowly circumscribed spot. After sitting at the feet of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel at the University of Jena, he journeyed through Italy and France. Then, after becoming acquainted with the world and philosophy, he strove, in a true Goethean manner, artistically to bridge the abyss between earthly and heavenly existence.

Of course he could not compete with Goethe's power and impetus. But let us look at one of Tieck's works: Franz Sternbald's Wanderungen (Franz Sternbald's Journeys), written in the form of Wilhelm Meister. What are these Sternbald journeys? They are journeys of the human soul into the realm of art. The question pressing heavily upon Sternbald is this: How can I raise sense-reality to the radiance of the spiritual? At the same time Tieck—whose hundred-and-fiftieth birthday we ought to be celebrating—felt the seriousness which streams down upon art from the region of cognition and that of religious life. Great is the light which falls, from there, upon Ludwig Tieck's artistic creations. A novel which he wrote comparatively early in life bears the title William Lovell; and this character is under Tieck's own impression (received while sitting at the feet of Schelling and Fichte in Jena) of the extreme seriousness of the search for knowledge. Imagine the effect of such teachings upon a spirit as receptive as Tieck's. (Differently, though not less magnificently, they influenced Novalis.) In his younger years Tieck had passed through the rationalistic “free spirit” training of Berlin's supreme philistine Nikolai. It was therefore an experience of the very greatest importance when he saw how in Fichte and Schelling the human soul relinquished, as it were, all connection with outer physical reality and, solely through its own power, endeavored to find a path through the door to the spiritual world. In William Lovell Tieck depicts a human being who, entirely out of the forces of his own soul, subjectively, seeks access to the spirit. Unable to find in the physical-sensory the divine for which Goethe constantly strove through his classical art, William Lovell seeks it nevertheless, relying entirely on his own forces, and thereby becoming confused, perplexed in regard to the world and his own personality. Thus William Lovell loses his hold on life through something sublime, that is, through the philosophy of Fichte and Schelling. In a peculiar way the book points out the dangers of cognition, through which, of necessity, men must pass. Tieck shows us how the cognitionally-serious can infuse the artistically-serious.

In his later years Ludwig Tieck created the poetic work: Der Aufruhr in den Cevennen (The Uprising in the Cevennes). What is his subject matter? Demonic powers which approach man, nature spirits which lay hold of him, possess him, drive him into religious fanaticism, and cause him to lose his way through the world. Oh, this Ludwig Tieck certainly felt what it means, on the one hand, to be dependent solely upon one's own personality and, on the other, to fall prey to elementals, gods of the elements. Hence overtones of gripping power in Tieck's works; for example in his Dichterleben (Life of the Poet) in which he describes how Shakespeare, as a thoroughly poetic nature, enters the world, how the world puts obstacles in his path, and how he stumbles into pitfalls. In Dichterleben Tieck discusses a poet's birth and all that earthly life gives him on a purely naturalistic basis. In Tod des Dichters (Death of the Poet) which deals with the last days of the Portuguese poet Camoens, he describes a poet's departure from life, his path to the gate of death. It is deeply moving how Tieck describes, out of the seriousness of the Goethe age, the beginning and end of an artist's life. What was great in Tieck was not his own personality, but rather his reflection of Goethe's spirit. Most characteristic, therefore, is his treatment of those “really practical people” who want to stand solidly on the earth without spiritual impulse in artistic presentation. Oh, there exists no more striking satire on novels about knights and robber barons than Tieck's Blaubart (Bluebeard). And, again, no more striking satire on the mawkishly emotional trying to be artistic than Tieck's Der gestiefelte Kater (Puss-in-Boots). The woeful excess of sentiment which mutters of the divine-spiritual (a sentimentality illustrated by the affected Ifliand and babbling Kotzebue) he sends packing.

Ludwig Tieck reveals how the Goetheanism of the first half of the nineteenth century was mirrored in a receptive personality; how something like a memory of the great ancient periods played into the modern age; periods in which mankind, looking up to the divine-spiritual, strove to create, in the arts, memorials of the divine-spiritual. Such a personality represents the transition from an age still spiritually vital, at least in memory, to an age blinded by a brilliant natural-scientific world-conception and less brilliant life-practice; an age which will never find the spirit without the impetus which comes from direct spiritual perception, which is to say, from imagination, inspiration and intuition, as striven for by Anthroposophy.

Look, from this point of view, at the tremendous seriousness ensouling these writers. Not only Goethe but many others despaired of finding their way into the spiritual world through contemporary cultural life. Goethe did not rest until, in Italy, he had acquired an understanding of the way the Greeks penetrated the secrets of existence through their works of art. I have often quoted Goethe's statement: “It seems to me that, in creating their works of art, the Greeks proceeded according to nature's own laws, which I am now tracing.” Clearly, he believed that in their art the Greeks received from the gods something which enabled them to create higher works of nature, images of divine-spiritual existence. The followers of Goethe, still under his direct influence, felt compelled to return to ancient times, at least to ancient Greece, to attain to the spirit.

Herman Grimm, who in many ways still felt Goethe's living breath (I mentioned this in my last article in Das Goetheanum), said repeatedly that the ancient Romans resembled modern human beings; though they wore the toga, walked like moderns; whereas the ancient Greeks all seemed to have had the blood of the gods flowing through their veins. A beautiful, artistically felt statement! Indeed, it was only after the fifteenth century (I have often mentioned this) that man entered into materialism. It was necessary. We must not berate what the modern age brought. Had things stayed as they were, man would have remained deterministically dependent upon the divine spiritual world. If he was ever to become free, his passage into a purely material civilization was an historical necessity. In the book The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I have described modern man's attitude in this respect. But the evening glow of the ancient spiritual life was still lighting up the sky in Goethe's time, indeed, right up to the middle of the nineteenth century. Therefore his longing for Italy, his hope of finding there, through an echo from ancient Greece, something unattainable in his own civilization: the spirit. Goethe could not live without having seen Rome and a culture which, however antiquated, still enshrined the spiritual in the sensory-physical.

He was preceded in this mood by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, a kind of personification of that evening-glow of ancient spiritual life. Goethe's appreciation of Winckelmann comes out in his marvelously beautiful book on this man and his century: a glorious presentation of the strivings of a personality longing for the spirit. Through this book one senses what Goethe felt vividly: that Winckelmann went to the south, to Rome, to find in ancient spirituality the spirit he missed in the present and restore it. Winckelmann was intoxicated by his search for spirituality: Goethe could feel that. And his book is superb precisely because he was permeated with that same longing. In Rome both men sensed, at last, something of the breath of ancient spirituality. There Winckelmann traced the mysteries of art to remnants of Greek artistic impulses and absorbed them into his soul; there Goethe repeated the experience. Thus it was in Rome that Goethe rewrote Iphigenie. He had fled with his northern Iphigenie to Rome in order to rewrite it and give it the only form he could consider classical. Here he succeeded. Which cannot be said of the works written after he returned home.

In all this we see Goethe the artist's profoundly serious struggle for spirituality. Only after he had discovered in Raphael's colors and Michelangelo's forms the results of what he considered genuine artistic experience could his own search come to fruition. Thus he represents the evening glow of a spirituality lost and no longer valid for modern man.

Permit me, now, to make a personal remark. There was a certain moment when I felt deeply what Winckelmann said when he traveled south to discover the secrets of art, and how Goethe followed in his footsteps. At the same moment I could not but feel strongly that the time of our surrender to the evening glow had passed; we must now search with all our might for a new unfolding of spiritual life, must give up seeking for what is past. All this I experienced at the destiny-allotted moment when, years ago, I had to deliver some anthroposophical lectures about the evolution of world and man in the very rooms where Winckelmann lived during his Roman sojourn; the very rooms where he conceived his thoughts about Italian and Greek art, and enunciated the comprehensive ideas which filled Goethe with the enthusiasm expressed in his book on Winckelmann. Here in Winckelmann's quarters the conviction permeated me that something new must be stated on the path to spiritual life. A strange connection of destiny.

With this personal remark I conclude today's observations.

Dear friends,

If we are going to consider the mutual concerns of priest and physician, we should look first at certain phenomena in human life that easily slide over into the pathological field. These phenomena require a physician's understanding, since they reach into profound depths, even into the esoteric realm of religious life. We have to realize that all branches of human knowledge must be liberated from a certain coarse attitude that has come into them in this materialistic epoch. We need only recall how certain phenomena that had been grouped together for some time under the heading “genius and insanity” have recently been given a crass interpretation by Lombroso¹ and his school and also by others. I am not pointing to the research itself—that has its uses—but rather to their way of looking at things, to what they brought out as “criminal anthropology,” from studying the skulls of criminals. The opinions they voiced were not only coarse but extraordinarily commonplace. Obviously the philistines all got together and decided what the normal type of human being is. And it was as near as could possibly be to a philistine! And whatever deviated from this type was pathological, genius on one side, insanity on the other; each in its own way was pathological. Since it is quite obvious to anyone with insight that every pathological characteristic also expresses itself bodily, it is also obvious that symptoms can be found in bodily characteristics pointing in one or the other direction. It is a matter of regarding the symptoms in the proper way. Even an earlobe can under certain conditions clearly reveal some psychological peculiarity, because such psychological peculiarities are connected with the karma that works over from earlier incarnations.

The forces that build the physical organism in the first seven years of human life are the same forces by which we think later. So it is important to consider certain phenomena, not in the customary manner but in a really appropriate way. We will not be regarding them as pathological (although they will lead us into aspects of pathology) but rather will be using them to obtain a view of human life itself.

Let us for a moment review the picture of a human being that Anthroposophy gives us. The human being stands before us in a physical body, which has a long evolution behind it, three preparatory stages before it became an earthly body—as is described in my book An Outline of Esoteric Science.² This earthly body needs to be understood much more than it is by today's anatomy and physiology. For the human physical body as it is today is a true image of the etheric body, which is in its third stage of development, and of the astral body, which is in its second stage, and even to a certain degree of the ego organization that humans first received on earth, which therefore is in its first stage of development. All of this is stamped like the stamp of a seal upon the physical body—which makes the physical body extraordinarily complicated. Only its purely mineral and physical nature can be understood with the methods of knowledge that are brought to it today. What the etheric body impresses upon it is not to be reached at all by those methods. It has to be observed with the eye of a sculptor so that one obtains pictorial images of cosmic forces, images that can then be recognized again in the form of the entire human being and in the forms of the single organs.

The physical human being is also an image of the breathing and blood circulation. But the entire dynamic activity that works and weaves through the blood circulation and breathing system can only be understood if one thinks of it in musical forms. For instance, there is a musical character to the formative forces that were poured into the skeletal system and then became active in a finer capacity in the breathing and circulation. We can perceive in eurythmy how the octave goes out from the shoulder blade and proceeds along the bones of the arm. This bone formation of the arm cannot be understood from a mechanical view of dynamics, but only from musical insight. We find the interval of the prime extending from the shoulder blade to the bone of the upper arm, the humerus, the interval of the second in the humerus, the third from the elbow to the wrist. We find two bones there because there are two thirds in music, a larger and a smaller. And so on. In short, if we want to find the impression of the astral body upon the physical body, upon the breathing and blood circulation, we are obliged to bring a musical understanding to it.

Still more difficult to understand is the ego organization. For this one needs to grasp the meaning of the first verse of the Gospel of St. John: “In the beginning was the Word.” “The Word” is meant there to be understood in a concrete sense, not abstractly, as commentators of the Gospels usually present it. If this is applied concretely to the real human being, it provides an explanation of how the ego organization penetrates the human physical body. You can see that we ought to add much more to our studies if they are to lead to a true understanding of the human being. However, I am convinced that a tremendous amount of material could be eliminated not only from medical courses but from theological courses too. If one would only assemble the really essential material, the number of years medical students, for instance, must spend in their course would not be lengthened but shortened. Naturally it is thought in materialistic fashion today that if there's something new to be included, you must tack another half-year onto the course!

Out of the knowledge that Anthroposophy gives us, we can say that the human being stands before us in physical, etheric and astral bodies, and an ego organization. In waking life these four members of the human organization are in close connection. In sleep the physical body and etheric body are together on one side, and the ego organization and astral body on the other side. With knowledge of this fact we are then able to say that the greatest variety of irregularities can appear in the connection of ego organization and astral body with etheric body and physical body. For instance, we can have: physical body, etheric body, astral body, ego organization. (Plate I, 1) Then, in the waking state, the so-called normal relation prevails among these four members of the human organization.

But it can also happen that the physical body and etheric body are in some kind of normal connection and that the astral body sits within them comparatively normally, but that the ego organization is somehow not properly sitting within the astral body. (Plate I, 2) Then we have an irregularity that in the first place confronts us in the waking condition. Such people are unable to come with their ego organization properly into their astral body; therefore their feeling life is very much disturbed. They can even form quite lively thoughts. For thoughts depend, in the main, upon a normal connection of the astral body with the other bodies. But whether the sense impressions will be grasped appropriately by the thoughts depends upon whether the ego organization is united with the other parts in a normal fashion. If not, the sense impressions become dim. And in the same measure that the sense impressions fade, the thoughts become livelier. Sense impressions can appear almost ghostly, not clear as we normally have them. The soul-life of such people is flowing away; their sense impressions have something misty about them, they seem to be continually vanishing. At the same time their thoughts have a lively quality and tend to become more intense, more colored, almost as if they were sense impressions themselves.

When such people sleep, their ego organization is not properly within the astral body, so that now they have extraordinarily strong experiences, in fine detail, of the external world around them. They have experiences, with their ego and astral body both outside their physical and etheric bodies, of that part of the world in which they live—for instance, the finer details of the plants or an orchard around their house. Not what they see during the day, but the delicate flavor of the apples, and so forth. That is really what they experience. And in addition, pale thoughts that are after-effects in the astral body from their waking life.

You see, it is difficult if you have such a person before you. And you may encounter such people in all variations in the most manifold circumstances of life. You may meet them in your vocation as physician or as priest—or the whole congregation may encounter them. You can find them in endless variety, for instance, in a town. Today the physician who finds such a person in an early stage of life makes the diagnosis: psychopathological impairment. To modern physicians that person is a psychopathological impairment case who is at the borderline between health and illness; whose nervous system, for instance, can be considered to be on a pathological level. Priests, if they are well-schooled (let us say a Benedictine or Jesuit or Barnabite or the like; ordinary parish priests are sometimes not so well-schooled), will know from their esoteric background that the things such a person tells them can, if properly interpreted, give genuine revelations from the spiritual world, just as one can have from a really insane person. But the insane person is not able to interpret them; only someone who comprehends the whole situation can do so. Thus you can encounter such a person if you are a physician, and we will see how to regard this person medically from an anthroposophical point of view. Thus you can also encounter such a person if you are a priest—and even the entire congregation can have such an encounter.

But now perhaps the person develops further; then something quite special appears. The physical and etheric bodies still have their normal connection. But now there begins to be a stronger pull of the ego organization, drawing the astral body to itself, so that the ego organization and astral body are now more closely bound together. And neither of them enters properly into the physical and etheric bodies. (Plate I, 3) Then the following can take place: the person becomes unable to control the physical and etheric bodies properly from the astral body and ego. The person is unable to push the astral body and ego organization properly into the external senses, and therefore, every now and then, becomes “senseless.” Sense impressions in general fade away and the person falls into a kind of dizzy dream state. But then in the most varied way moral impulses can appear with special strength. The person can be confused and also extremely argumentative if the rest of the organism is as just described.

Now physicians find in such a case that physical and biochemical changes have taken place in the sense organs and the nerve substance. They will find, although they may take slight notice of them, great abnormalities in the ductless glands and their hormone secretion, in the adrenal glands, and the glands that are hidden in the neck as small glands within the thyroid gland. In such a case there are changes particularly in the pituitary gland and the pineal gland. These are more generally recognized than are the changes in the nervous system and in the general area of the senses.

And now the priest comes in contact with such a person. The person confesses to experiencing an especially strong feeling of sin, stronger than people normally have. The priest can learn very much from such individuals, and Catholic priests do. They learn what an extreme consciousness of sin can be like, something that is so weakly developed in most human beings. Also in such a person the love of one's neighbor can become tremendously intense, so much so that the person can get into great trouble because of it, which will then be confessed to the priest.

The situation can develop still further. The physical body can remain comparatively isolated because the etheric body—from time to time or even permanently—does not entirely penetrate it, so that now the astral and etheric bodies and the ego organization are closely united with one another and the physical organism is separate from them. (Plate II) To use the current materialistic terms (which we are going to outgrow as the present course of study progresses), such people are in most cases said to be severely mentally retarded individuals. They are unable from their soul-spiritual individuality to control their physical limbs in any direction, not even in the direction of their own will. Such people pull their physical organism along, as it were, after themselves. A person who is in this condition in early childhood, from birth, is also diagnosed as mentally retarded. In the present stage of earth evolution, when all three members—ego organization, astral organization, and etheric body—are separated from the physical, and the lone physical body is dragged along after them, the person cannot perceive, cannot be active, cannot be illumined by the ego organization, astral body, and etheric body. So experiences are dim and the person goes about in a physical body as if it were anesthetized. This is extreme mental retardation, and one has to think how at this stage one can bring the other bodies down into the physical organism. Here it can be a matter of educational measures, but also to a great extent of external therapeutic measures.

But now the priest can be quite amazed at what such a person will confess. Priests may consider themselves very clever, but even thoroughly educated priests—there really are such men in Catholicism; one must not underestimate it—they pay attention if a so-called sick person comes to them and says, “The things you pronounce from the pulpit aren't worth much. They don't add up to anything, they don't reach up to the dwelling place of God, they don't have any worth except external worth. One must really rest in God with one's whole being.” That's the kind of thing such people say. In every other area of their life they behave in such a way that one must consider them to be extremely retarded, but in conversation with their priest they come out with such speeches. They claim to know inner religious life more intimately than someone who speaks of it professionally; they feel contempt for the professional. They call their experience “rest in God.” And you can see that the priest must find ways and means to relate to what such a person—one can say patient, or one can use other terms—to what such a human being is experiencing within.

One has to have a sensitive understanding for the fact that pathological conditions can be found in all spheres of life, for the fact that some people may be quite unable at the present time to find their way in the physical-sense world, quite unable to be the sort of human being that external life now requires all of us to be. We are all necessarily to a certain degree philistines as regards external life. But such people as I am describing are not in condition to travel along our philistine paths; they have to travel other ways. Priests must be able to feel what they can give such a person, how to connect what they can give out of themselves with what that other human being is experiencing. Very often such a person is simply called “one of the queer ones.” This demands an understanding of the subtle transition from illness to spirituality.

Our study can go further. Think what happens when a person goes through this entire sequence in the course of life. At some period the person is in a condition (Plate I, 2) where only the ego organization has loosened itself from the other members of the organism. In a later period the person advances to a condition where neither ego nor astral enter the physical or etheric bodies. Still later, (Plate I, 3) the person enters a condition where the physical body separates from the other bodies. (Plate II) The person only goes through this sequence if the first condition, perhaps in childhood, which is still normal, already shows a tendency to lose the balance of the four members of the organism. If the physician comes upon such a person destined to go through all these four stages—the first very slightly abnormal, the others as I have pictured them—the physician will find there is tremendous instability and something must be done about it. Usually nothing can be done. Sometimes the physician prescribes intensive treatment; it accomplishes nothing. Perhaps later the physician is again in contact with this person and finds that the first unstable condition has advanced to the next, as I described it with the sense impressions becoming vague and the thoughts highly colored. Eventually the physician finds the excessively strong consciousness of sin; naturally a physician does not want to take any notice of that, for now the symptoms are beginning to play over into the soul realm. Usually it is at this time that the person finally gets in touch with a priest, particularly when the fourth stage becomes apparent.

Individuals who go through these stages—it is connected with their karma, their repeated earth lives—have purely out of their deep intuition developed a wonderful terminology for all this. Especially if they have gone through the stages in sequence, with the first stage almost normal, they are able to speak in a wonderful way about what they experience. They say, for instance, when they are still quite young, if the labile condition starts between seventeen and nineteen years: human beings must know themselves. And they demand complete knowledge of themselves. Now with their ego organization separated, they come of their own initiative to an active meditative life. Very often they call this “active prayer,” “active meditation,” and they are grateful when some well-schooled priest gives them instruction about prayer. Then they are entirely absorbed in prayer, and they are experiencing in it what they now begin to describe by a wonderful terminology. They look back at their first stage and call what they perceive “the first dwelling place of God,” because their ego has not entirely penetrated the other members of their organism, so to a certain extent they are seeing themselves from within, not merely from without. This perception from within increases; it becomes, as it were, a larger space: “the first dwelling place of God.”

What next appears, what I have described from another point of view, is richer; it is more inwardly detailed. They see much more from within: “the second dwelling place of God.” When the third stage is reached, the inner vision is extraordinarily beautiful, and such a person says, “I see the third dwelling place of God; it is tremendously magnificent, with spiritual beings moving within it.” This is inner vision, a powerful, glorious vision of a world woven by spirit: “the third dwelling place of God,” or “the House of God.” There are variations in the words used. When they reach the fourth stage, they no longer want advice about active meditation, for usually they have reached the view that everything will be given them through grace and they must wait. They talk about passive prayer, passive meditation, that they must not pray out of their own initiative, for it will come to them if God wants to give it to them. Here the priest must have a fine instinct for recognizing when this stage passes over into the next. For now these people speak of “rest-prayer,” during which they do nothing at all; they let God hold sway in them. That is how they experience “the fourth dwelling place of God.”

Sometimes from the descriptions they give at this stage, from what—if we speak medically—such “patients” say, priests can really learn a tremendous amount of esoteric theology. If they are good interpreters, the theological detail becomes clear to them—if they listen very carefully to what such “patients” tell them, to what they know. Much of what is taught in theology, particularly Catholic pastoral theology, is founded on what various enlightened, trained confessors have heard from certain penitents who have undergone this sequence of development.

At this point ordinary conceptions of health and illness cease to have any meaning. If such a man is hidden away in an office, or if such a woman becomes an housewife who must spend her days in the kitchen or something similar in bourgeois everyday life, these people become really insane, and behave outwardly in such a way that they can only be regarded as insane. If a priest notices at the right moment how things are developing and arranges for them to live in appropriate surroundings, they can develop the four stages in proper order. Through such patients, the enlightened confessor is able to look into the spiritual world in a modern way but similarly to the Greek priests, who learned about the spiritual world from the Pythians, who imparted all kinds of revelations concerning the spiritual world through earthly smoke and vapor.³ What sense would there be today in writing a thesis on the pathological aspect of the Greek Pythians? It could certainly be done and it would even be correct, but it would have no meaning in a higher sense. For as a matter of fact, very much of what flowed in a magnificent way from Greek theology into the entire cultural life of Greece originated in the revelations of the Pythians. As a rule, the Pythians were individuals who had come either to this third stage or even to the fourth stage.

But we can think of a personality in a later epoch who went through these stages under the wise direction of her confessors, so that she could devote herself undisturbed to her inner visions. Something very wonderful developed for her, which indeed also remained to a certain degree pathological. Her life was not just a concern of the physician or of the priest but a concern of the entire Church. The Church pronounced her a saint after her death. This was St. Teresa.⁴ This was approximately her path.

You see, one must examine such things as this if one wants to discover what will give medicine and theology a real insight into human nature. One must be prepared to go far beyond the usual category of ideas, for they lose their value. Otherwise one can no longer differentiate between a saint and a fool, between a madman and a genius, and can no longer distinguish any of the others except a normal dyed-in-the-wool average citizen.

This is a view of the human being that must first be met with understanding; then it can really lead to fundamental esoteric knowledge. But it can also be tremendously enlightening in regard to psychological abnormalities as well as to physical abnormalities and physical illnesses. Certain conditions are necessary for these stages to appear. There has to be a certain consistency of the person's ego so that it does not completely penetrate the organism. Also there must be a certain consistency of the astral body: if it is not fine, as it was in St. Teresa, if it is coarse, the result will be different. With St. Teresa, because of the delicacy of her ego organization and astral body, certain physical organs in the lower body had been formed with the same fragile quality.

But it can happen that the ego organization and astral body are quite coarse and yet they have the same characteristic as above. Such an individual can be comparatively normal and show only the physical correlation: then it is only a physical illness. One could say, on the one hand there can be a St. Teresa constitution with its visions and poetic beauty, and on the other hand its physical counterimage in diseased abdominal organs, which in the course of this second person's life is not reflected in the ego and astral organization.

All these things must be spoken about and examined. For those who hold responsibility as physicians or priests are confronted by these things, and they must be equal to the challenge. Theological activity only begins to be effective if theologians are prepared to cope with such phenomena. And physicians only begin to be healers if they also are prepared to deal with such symptoms.

• 1 . Cesare Lombroso (1836–1909), Italian anthropologist. Wrote Genius and Insanity (1864) and The Criminal: Anthropological, Medical and Legal Aspects (1876).
• 2 . Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Esoteric Science (Hudson, N.Y.: Anthroposophic Press, 1985).
• 3 . Pythians: priestesses of Apollo who delivered the oracles at Delphi.
• 4 . Teresa of Avila (1515–1582), Carmelite nun. Reformed the Carmelite Order in association with John of the Cross. Canonized by the Catholic Church.

Let's imagine that we are in the world into which the Apocalypticer wants to translate men during the next earthly period. He describes his visions of the breaking in of spiritual worlds and of how they will take possession of earthly human beings. He precedes this by three stages which we must become familiar with; three stages,—in a certain sense each of these represents something which must fall before mankind will become worthy and capable of obtaining the spiritual world in a pure form for their working, thinking and feeling.

The first stage is the fall of Babylon; we will call it this to begin with. The second stage is the fall of the beast and his companion the false prophet who spreads the teaching of the beast. The third stage is the fall of the divine counter powers which are usually called Satan. These three stages become quite objective and real in connection with the spiritual perception of future human evolution.

A great deal concerning human evolution will be decided in our century, and one has good reason to direct the eye of one's soul upon these three falls'. For they will break in upon us in a certain form; they will occur after the first appearance of Christ on earth in his etheric body, which is really his second appearance upon earth. And mankind will have to prepare itself and make itself strong enough in order to go through this threefold fall of the adversaries of the Christ impulse without endangering their soul development. We shouldn't forget how precise the Apocalypticer really is, for each time such a fall occurs he lets an angel come down from the spiritual worlds, and we notice something which can give someone who hasn't acquired a spiritual conception of the world a rather strange feeling. He lets the angel who comes down rejoice about the great suffering and terrible things which accompany this terrible fall, and it will be necessary for us to understand this rejoicing. But before we do that let's take a look at the three stages of the fall of the powers who oppose the Christ.

First comes what is called the fall of Babylon. Here we can place the sum of all the errors which men and mankind can fall into through their human nature before our souls. Everything which tends to drag human beings down below the spiritual level at which they really belong is included in what the Apocalypticer calls the Babylonian temptation.

Man is really only a human being—although of course he has to acquire this humanness first, and he can't just have it at every moment in his evolution—man is only truly human if there is a complete harmony between the material and spiritual principles in him, that is, if the material doesn't play up into emotions which are not controlled by the spiritual. This is the important thing and we must understand it quite well, for even the Apocalypticer could not speak the way he does if he assumed that passions, desires and everything which comes from the will sphere was quite unjustified right from the beginning. To say that this is unjustified—this ascetic striving in a false sense—also arises from the sphere of passions and desires, for someone who doesn't feel strong enough to permeate his passions from the spiritual side in such a way, that he places them in the service of good world evolution is indulgencing his weak emotions. He wants the good evolution, but he wants to impoverish it in this way and he wants to indulge his weakness. For the Apocalypticer it's not a question of tearing out emotions or of tearing out passions and desires, it's a question of their not remaining uncontrolled by the spiritual world.

Babylon is the city in which a falling away from spirituality through passions held sway in an almost stereotyped way at a certain period in its mystery development, and everything which represents emotions in human life, which remain out of control on a smaller or larger scale is summarized by this city. Here we should translate the strong, coarse expressions which were used at that time (they weren't coarse then) into our language. The people in ancient times didn't form abstract concepts, they always referred to concrete things, always pointed to something characteristic and looked at concrete things. And so the Apocalypticer speaks of Babylon. Why of Babylon?

Really deep mysteries existed in Babylon or in the mystery centers of Babylon in which one could be initiated into the secrets of the super-earthly cosmos, far out into star worlds, and in which one could learn about starry secrets concerning the star worlds and their spiritual content. The earliest priests in ancient Babylon used human powers of clairvoyance and dreams in a way which we would call mediumistic today; this was the case in ancient Babylon. A wonderful, ancient Babylonian teaching developed in this somewhat mediumistic way. However, as one can also see today, mediums—even though they are suited for spiritual mediations, and they are often used in this way, although the process must be controlled by discerning initiates—have very questionable moral characteristics. Mediums become morally degenerate, and because there is a certain discrepancy between what they reveal and what they are, they can eventually no longer distinguish between truth and lies. Here one gets into a region where morality and immorality are no longer distinct.

You must understand how mediums get into this condition. Someone is a medium if his ego and astral body are pulled out of his physical and etheric bodies by an external force, and this was also what happened at the time of the Babylonian priests. However, another power sits in this ego and astral body as soon as they have been pulled out of the medium's physical and etheric body. Depending on whether the initiate who brings this about has good or bad intentions and belongs to the left or the right, this can be a good power or an evil one. Excellent things came to light in this way in ancient Babylonian times, but the problem was with what occurred when the medium returned to his physical body. You see, one cannot get by in the spiritual world with the logic and discrimination between lies and truth which one has in the physical world. It is a complete error to think that one can use the concepts of lies and truth which one rightly uses in the physical world, in the spiritual world. There is nothing there which one could distinguish in such a way. Some of the beings there are good and others are evil. One has to know them through themselves, and in fact, they tell one the kind of being they are. Even the evil ones are truthful in their own way. Of course this is difficult to understand, just as it is difficult to understand what happens in the spiritual world as soon as one enters it. For instance, here in the physical world we say that a straight line is the shortest path between two points. However, in the spiritual world it is the longest distance between two points and every other one is shorter. So that we cannot apply anything which we have to use in the physical world to the spiritual world.

Hence a true initiate must have the right attitude of soul for the spiritual world, but he must also feel fully responsible for the fact that the moment he returns to the physical world he has to work with physical concepts. A medium cannot do this because he doesn't leave his body consciously. When he comes back again his ego and astral body fill the physical and etheric bodies with a line of thought which is no doubt appropriate for the spiritual world, but it corrupts all moral feelings in the physical world. Hence mediums become corrupted, and the corruption with respect to truth and lies then' extends to other forms of corruption. Hence the fact is that Babylon went through this development from the greatest revelations of spiritual worlds to a terrible corruption; first with respect to the principle of spiritual revelation, and then also with respect to human life in general, so that the previous corruption in the spiritual sphere extended to the latter. This spiritual corruption is very powerful; so that someone becomes more immoral if he becomes corrupt after he has gone into spiritual realms than he did before with his ordinary human tendencies. This is why Babylon was considered to be a representative of moral corruption.

The expressions for corruption which we find here are ones which were in common use. The whole of humanity over the entire earth imitated the Babylonians and thereby became a kind of city of Babylon. And this is what the Apocalypticer means. The city of Babylon is to be found among mankind on earth; it exists wherever human beings have succumbed to the Babylonian temptation. It is this human attitude which must fall before that fin—al condition of which the Apocalypticer speaks can come. And if we investigate what is active in the Babylonian corruption, we find that the Ahrimanic principle is active in it everywhere. Ahriman is sitting in men, and he is a power who stands close to them in the whole world, as it were. He is in our emotions, which thereby degenerate. The Ahrimanic and Luciferic principles are opposite poles. The Ahrimanic element is present in what falls here, as for instance when Babylon falls, and it is opposed to the Luciferic element. What kind of an image must the Apocalypticer use when he sees this? The image of jubilating Luciferic, angelic sentiments. We must be aware of this.

It's a big mistake to look upon the worst world conceptions as the best ones, as for instance the idea about the evil principle being down below and the good principle being in everything which comes to meet it from above. This is not the actual state of affairs. The Ahrimanic principle is down below and one has the Luciferic principle above where the angels are rejoicing about the falls. The rejoicing one hears is the voice of Lucifer which accompanies the diving angels, for the actual Christ principle is the balance between the two.

One can only understand something like what the Apocalypticer is presenting if one understands this threefoldedness in the world's makeup in the right way. For anyone with ordinary human feelings it is completely incomprehensible why pure and good spirits would begin to scream for joy when the misery which is described here befalls other beings. This is of course immediately comprehensible if one sees it as the jubilant cries of those who were basically opposed to the creation of the world in which man experiences his spiritual development. They want to keep his whole evolution on a very different spiritual level. They didn't want that connection or marriage of the spirit with matter which took place in earthly existence. So that when what is grasped by Ahriman is eliminated from earthly existence, what they're really feeling in their souls is: we now have the satisfaction that one part of earth-existence will no longer be continued; it is falling during earth evolution he world view which speaks out of the images which the Apocalypticer describes for each fall is wonderfully honest in this respect.

Now the first one, the fall of Babylon, is all the errors men can fall into when they are also influenced by the initiation principle, it is human perversions. When Babylon falls the remaining human aberrations will be eliminated from further world evolution, at a point in time which we will discuss later. To begin with we will place coming events before our soul in a qualitative way.

The second thing is where man is no longer just involved by himself. The beings who fall with Babylon are men; it is human aberration. However, in the case of the fall of the beast and the false prophet who supports the teaching of the beast, what falls is something spiritual and superhuman, and not something human.

Something which is outside of the human kingdom falls, namely, the beast who breaks in upon human communities, and the one who proclaims the teaching of this beast. Hence one is dealing with something which can take possession of' human beings where something superhuman is working directly in men with an evil impulse, and it's not a matter of a weak nature working, as in the case of a medium. We can add the following to make the Imagination even clearer. All those who will participate in the fall of Babylon will have become degenerate through the fact that they tried to do things which their organization couldn't stand; their organization became weak with respect to these things, and therefore they became corrupt. In the fall of Babylon man's organization acts out of weakness. In the fall of the beast and the false prophet it's not as if a medium became corrupt because he got weak, but it's as if the spirit which overpowers the ego and astral body of the medium during hypnosis would then go into his physical and etheric body and make use of the physical body in order to wreak havoc on earth through the human being.

This is exactly the idea which we encounter here in the Apocalypticer. He wants to say that a time will come when we will see human beings walking around on earth who couldn't stand what really, lay in the Christian annunciation who took the Christ into their souls, but who didn't get to the level of the Christ with their etheric and physical bodies, and therefore became corrupt and devoted to other spirits; but they didn't devote themselves to them with full consciousness, so that they became corrupt. These are the first ones, who are included in the fall of Babylon.

The other ones walk around like men, but their fate is that their human ego is not in them, so that one can no longer speak of them as human beings, for they are possessed by the beast and the false prophet. This will come after the fall of Babylon. There will be people walking around on earth who will be demons, for Ahrimanic powers will act in them directly.

Many of the preliminary conditions for all of these things already exist today; one could say that all of this is already present in a germinal form. After all we already have the terrible case where Ahriman appeared amongst us as an author, perhaps not through a human being entirely, but at least through the temporary weakness of a human being. Nietzsche was a wonderful and brilliant writer, but the Nietzsche individuality was not in him when he wrote the AntiChrist and Ecce Homo. I know this individuality in Nietzsche, and I even described it in my autobiography; but Ahriman becomes a direct author here, and Ahriman is a much more brilliant writer than Nietzsche.

Ahrimanic powers will intervene more and more and Ahrimanic spirits will also use human bodies for other things. A time will come when Christians will have to ask themselves seriously when they meet this or that human being: Is that really a human being or is it a very loose mantle for Ahrimanic spirits? In the future one will have to make this distinction in addition to the other ones one has to make today. This will be the second fall, and the beast and his herald will take possession of human bodies. Thereby these demons will have fallen. So first we have the fall of corrupt human beings and then the fall of certain corrupt spirits, who are close to men. These spirits take a tumble in the second fall.

Then we have the third fall, which is the fall of Satan in the Apocalypse. Here we have a very high being who does a different kind of work than the one which can be done on earth. The beast and the false prophet are powers who lead mankind astray; they want to steer men in the wrong direction in a moral and intellectual respect. However, the power which is meant in the fall of Satan wants something quite different. It wants to throw the whole earth off its course, and not just mankind. Seen from a human, earthly standpoint, this power is a terrible adversary of the Godhead.

One can only ask the following in a hypothetical way, and one can't look at it from the viewpoint of human or earthly evolution, if one doesn't want to commit an intellectual or spiritual sin. If one looks at it from other viewpoints, how does this satanic power in the universe compare with other spirits?

Now Michael has a different standpoint than human beings do, and it's no wonder that his opinion about Satan is quite different from that of men. Human beings tend to be rather abstract, and they think that Satan is an evil power. But he is also a great power from the viewpoints which are important for the earth, a great power that has gone astray. And archangel Michael does not have the rank of Satan, who is at the level of a principality or an archai; Michael is only an archangel. Satan is a very terrifying power from Michael's standpoint and not a despicable one, because he thinks that this power who belongs to the Archai is higher than he is. Except that Michael holds views which are in line with earth evolution.

With respect to everything which is connected with the orbits of the planets, Michael decided a long time ago to travel in the orbits which are prescribed by the sun's existence. Satan is a power who is continually lurking around in our cosmos. There is something sinister about this lurking of Satan. One can perceive this at the moments when one sees a comet shooting through our cosmos, with its different orbit (drawing).

If one draws it according to Copernicus which is not quite correct, although it doesn't make much difference here one has sun, Mercury, Venus, earth, Mars; those are the inner planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune—one can see that such comets have very irregular orbits with respect to these regular orbits. The view that these comets describe long ellipses is nonsense, but we don't have to go into that now. But in any case, the segments of the cometary orbits which lie within our planetary system do not agree with the planetary orbits at all.

And so this Satan lies in wait in order to catch every comet that comes along, and to use its momental inertia so that—when he has collected enough comets—he can throw the planets out of their orbits, and the earth with them. This situation exists in the universe; Satanic powers are continually lying in wait so that they can transform the entire planetary system. Thereby this planetary system would be taken away from the divine, spiritual powers in whose footsteps men should be walking, and it would be taken into quite different directions of world evolution. This intention is a terrible mistake from Michael's point of view, but an intention about which Michael would have to say: I couldn't even do it, for it would be impossible for a being who is in the archangel class to do something like that. Only beings who are in the archai class might have enough forces to carry out something along these lines. Michael—who decided to move in the sun's orbit a long time ago, and who therefore (in the sense of the Ptolemaic system) has become what is known in occultism as an archangel of the rotation of time for the planets and has decided to remain entirely within the orbital periods.

The angels had to decide to remain in these scheduled orbits at some point. In a certain epoch of Atlantean evolution the gods descended into the mystery centers, and one could really perceive that the hosts of archangels which include Oriphiel, Anael, Zachariel and so on, resolved to move within the prescribed planetary orbits. So this came about at a certain time.

However, the mighty hosts which are led by Satan have not made this decision up to the present time and they're still trying to use every cometary orbit in order to give a different configuration to the entire planetary system. Here one is dealing with an adversary of Christ who not only wants to corrupt individual human beings, and who doesn't just want to corrupt groups of human beings like the beast and the false prophet, but we have to do with Satan and his hosts and with direct attacks upon the earth's connection with the planetary system, as it were. This will have to be the third fall. In both of these last two falls we again have the rejoicing of the Luciferic kind of spiritual beings.

One must foresee these things. For the first stage, the Babylonian stage, will have straying human beings who have drawn an aberration into themselves through their physical constitution, so that there is no hope that anything particularly good will become of these walking human bodies over which the ego and astral body have entirely lost control. These bodies must be given up for lost although perhaps not the ego and astral body which belong to them. The former will then go on as such along the karmic paths of humanity. At a particular point in time we see certain men walking around in their bodies, who are men who have succumbed to the Babylonian temptation and whose bodies and what is in them fall out of evolution: the fall of Babylon.

The second thing is that human beings will walk around—one will be able to see this—of whom one will have to say that Ahrimanic power's, are living in them. Here Ahriman is acting directly; this is the beast; the fall of the beast and of the false prophet of the beast, who is a superhuman being and not a man.

The third thing is that one will notice that something about the laws of nature is becoming unexplainable. This will be the greatest and most important experience that people will be able to have, when they notice that something is becoming unexplainable about natural laws and that phenomena are not taking place in accordance with the laws of nature. It will often happen that one will have something which is not merely an erroneous calculation, but is calculated correctly, let's say that a planet should be in a certain place, but it doesn't get there.

Satan will make some first successful attempts to bring disorder into the planetary system. Mankind will have to develop a very strong spirituality in order to counteract this. For the disorder that can be brought about in this way will and can only be harmonized through the strong spirituality of human beings. These are the things which we can foresee today if we place future stages of human and earth evolution before our soul. This is what we see again when the Apocalypticer speaks to us. You should try to feel your way into this coincidence with what can really be gained from Anthroposophy or can gradually be disclosed through Anthroposophy.

For one will be able to speak of comets and one can already speak about them today to the effect that Satan is lying in wait for them in the cosmos, and that he wants to use their orbits to replace cosmos with chaos. For if you take what can be gained through Anthroposophic understanding into yourself and you can discover it again in the Apocalypse, there is something important about this rediscovery. A kind of soul encounter with the Apocalypse and therewith the Apocalypticer himself is present in this; that is important,—thereby with the Apocalypticer himself. For this will be very important, that the priest who is living into the future should increasingly get the longing to meet the Apocalypticer who looked into the future in this way after the Mystery of Golgotha,—the Apocalypticer at any time, regardless of whether he is living on earth or not.

For priests must get the feeling that the help that can come from John, the creator of the Apocalypse, to the one who wants to work in a Christian way that this help is an extremely important one, and one that one needs. However, we will only really be able to accompany John the Apocalypticer if we approach the Apocalypse with the attitude of soul that I described. Then John becomes our ally, and after all he is closely connected with Christ Jesus, he was initiated by Christ Jesus himself, he is an initiate of Christ Jesus. Therefore, he is an important ally. It is tremendously important to come to the Christ through him.

It is really true that a real understanding of the Apocalypse leads deep down into the region where one has the greatest imaginable prospects of meeting John and then the Christ himself. There is a deep truth connected with this and a truth which one can hope will have a very deep aftereffect upon your thinking and feeling, for it is a real priests' truth, that is, a truth which draws a priest into the spiritual realm in a legitimate way. We will continue with this tomorrow.

Continuation of the themes introduced in the last lecture leads us today to material that will serve as preparation for the two following lectures. It leads us to study the connection of man, the whole man, with our planet Earth. As I have often said, man is under an illusion if he ascribes to himself as a physical being an existence separate from the Earth. As a being of soul-and-spirit man is independent and individual; as physical man and to some extent also in respect of his etheric body, he belongs to the organic totality of the Earth.

I will begin today by describing how this connection between man and Earth-existence appears to supersensible vision. Let us suppose that someone with Imaginative Consciousness were to take a journey through the primeval Alps where the rocks consist of quartz, of silicious minerals and similar formations. These primeval mountains are composed of the hardest rocks on Earth, but as well as being the hardest, these rocks, when they appear in their original form, have an inherent purity about them, a quality untouched by the commonplace things of Earth. We can well understand it, when in a beautiful essay which has already been read here, Goethe speaks of his experiences among these primeval mountains, of the solitude he felt as he sat there, and the impressions made upon him by these granite rocks, towering up from the Earth. Goethe speaks of granite, composed as it is of silica, mica and felspar, as the ‘enduring son of Earth’.

When with ordinary consciousness a man approaches these primeval mountains he can of course admire them from outside; he is deeply impressed by their forms, by their wonderful moulding, primitive as it is, but extraordinarily eloquent. But if he approaches this hardest rock of the Earth with Imaginative Consciousness he penetrates beneath the surface of mineral nature and is then able with his thinking to grow together, as it were, with the rock. The soul reaches into the depths of the rock, and in spirit, man enters into a holy palace of the Gods. The interior is revealed to Imaginative vision as transparent, and the outer surface as the walls of this palace of the Gods. At the same time the knowledge comes that within this rock there is a reflection of the Cosmos outside the Earth. The world of stars is mirrored once again before the soul. Finally we get the impression that all quartz rocks are like eyes through which the Earth can see into the Cosmos. We are reminded of the many-faceted eyes of insects which divide into numbers of parts whatever comes towards them from outside. We should, and indeed must, picture innumerable quartz and similar formations on the surface of the Earth as being eyes enabling the Earth inwardly to reflect and indeed inwardly perceive the cosmic environment. And gradually the knowledge dawns in us that every crystal formation present in the Earth is a sense-organ for perceiving the Cosmos.

The majesty of the Earth’s snow-covering, but even more of the falling snowflakes, lies in the fact that in each single snowflake there is a reflection of part of the Cosmos; so that with this crystallised water, reflections of part of the starry heavens fall down upon the Earth.

I need not remind you that the starry firmament is there by day as well as at night, only it cannot be seen by day because the sunlight is too strong. If you ever have an opportunity of going into a deep cellar with a high tower above it open at the top, you can see the stars even in the daytime because you are looking out of the darkness and the sunlight does not obtrude. There is, for example, such a tower in Jena through which the stars can be seen in the daytime. I mention this in passing to make it clear to you that this reflection of the stars in the snowflakes and indeed in every crystal is of course there in the daytime too. It is not a physical reflection, it is a spiritual reflection, and the impression of it must be communicated inwardly.

That is not all. This spiritual sense-impression, if I may call it so, gives rise to an impression in the soul that if you enter imaginatively into the crystal covering of the Earth you yourself are able to share in all the experiences coming from the Cosmos to the Earth through the crystals. You thereby extend your own being into the Cosmos and feel yourself one with the Cosmos. And most important of all: it now becomes a deep truth to one possessed of Imaginative vision that our Earth, with everything belonging to it, has in the course of ages been born out of the Cosmos. The kinship between the Earth and the Cosmos comes vividly before the eyes of soul. And so this inner penetration into the millions of the Earth’s crystal eyes is a preparation for feeling and experiencing in soul the inner kinship of the Earth with the Cosmos.

Through this experience, however, you again feel that as Man you are closely united with the Earth. For this birth of the Earth out of the Cosmos took place when Man himself was still a very primitive being, not a physical but a spiritual being. But in his own being Man shared in the processes undergone by the Earth after its birth out of the Cosmos. In actual fact the same inner connection once existed between the Earth and the neighbouring Cosmos as that between an unborn child with the body of the mother. Later, however, the child begins to make itself independent. Similarly, the Earth gradually developed into independence after having been more completely one with the Cosmos during the earliest Saturn epoch. Man accompanied this process towards independence until he was finally able to say: My finger is a finger only as long as it is part of my organism; the moment I sever it from my organism it is no longer a finger and it perishes. And if man as a physical being can be thought of as separated by a few miles only from the conditions of the Earth-organism he would wither and decay like the amputated finger. Because he can move freely over the face of the Earth man deceives himself into thinking that as a physical being he has an existence of his own, independent of the Earth, whereas a finger cannot move over the organism. If it could do so, it would be succumbing to the same delusion to which man succumbs if he thinks of himself as a physical being independent of the Earth. It is precisely through higher knowledge that this integration of physical man into the Earth becomes clear.

Such is the acquaintance that can be made, through Imaginative Consciousness, with the hardest component of the Earth’s surface. Further acquaintance can be made by descending a little more deeply into the Earth, to the veins or lodes of metal ores, or any metallic substance in the Earth’s interior. Here you have penetrated below the surface of the Earth. But metals have a very special character, a character deviating from that of other earthly substance. Metals have a certain independence which can be experienced, and this experience is of very great significance for man.¹

Even someone who acquires certain higher knowledge through Imaginative vision has not yet reached the goal when, through experiencing the quartz and other primeval rocks as the million eyes of the Earth, he expands his being into the Cosmos. If however he penetrates further into the interior of the Earth, the first impulses for experience can arise from the wonderful stimuli that can be received in a metal mine. Once the impulses have been set in motion, however, all that is necessary to be able to experience the nature of metallic substance without going down the shaft of a mine, is spiritual vision. But the first feeling of the experience in question can be acquired with particular intensity in metal mines themselves. It is no longer the case today but it was still true a few decades ago, that miners who are inwardly wedded to their work display something of this profound sense of the spiritual reality in metals. For the metals do not only ‘see’ the surrounding Cosmos: they speak in a spiritual way, but nevertheless they do speak and tell their story. And the language they speak is similar to the impressions of language from a different domain.

When we succeed in establishing an inner connection of soul with human beings living between death and rebirth we shall need a special language to communicate with them. What the Spiritualists say is puerile, for the simple reason that the dead do not speak the language of earthly man. Spiritualists believe that the dead speak in such a way that their words can be written down, just as though a letter were being received from a contemporary living on the Earth. True, in most cases the messages heard in seances sound high-flown and pompous, but the same sort of thing is sometimes written even by living contemporaries. The fact of the matter is that we have first to find the right approach to the language which the dead speak and which bears no resemblance whatever to any earthly language—this is so, although it also has a vocal-consonantal character. But the same language which can be apprehended only by spiritual hearing is spoken by the metals in the interior of the Earth. And the same language by means of which we come near the souls of the dead living between death and a new birth, can also recount the memories of the Earth, the experiences undergone by the Earth in its course through the periods of Saturn, Sun, Moon, and so on. The metals can tell us of the past history of the Earth. The destinies of our whole planetary system, however, are to be learnt from what Saturn has to communicate. It is of what the Earth has undergone in the evolutionary process that the metals tell.

The language spoken by the metals of the Earth can also take two forms. In its usual form it will reveal what the Earth has undergone in the course of its evolution since the Saturn period. What is said about this evolution in the book Occult Science: An Outline originated in the way I have often described—by direct spiritual perception of the process concerned. That, however, is a rather different way of learning about the Earth’s history from the one I have in mind just now. The metals—if I may put it in this way, although naturally it seems to be rather strangely expressed—the metals tell us more of the ‘personal’ experiences of the Earth, of the Earth as a specific entity in the Cosmos. So if I wanted to lay particular emphasis upon the stories told by the metals, stories learnt by spiritual penetration into the interior of the Earth, I should have to give many details of the Saturn-, Sun-, Moon-periods, and so forth.

A first example would be that the conditions on Old Saturn described in the book Occult Science as consisting of differentiations of warmth, appear as mighty, gigantic beings-of-warmth, which even during the Saturn period had reached a certain degree of density. To put it crudely: if it were possible—which of course it is not—for a man of Earth to encounter these beings he could become aware of them and even touch them. Thus about the middle of the Saturn period these beings were not purely spiritual but displayed a certain physical quality. If you had tried to touch them your fingers would have blistered. It would be wrong to assume that they had a temperature of millions of degrees of warmth but their temperature was such that any contact would have caused blisters.

Then we should have to pass to the Sun period and to relate, as I did in Occult Science, how other beings appeared, manifesting wonderful transformations, metamorphoses. Gazing at these beings in process of metamorphosis we should get the impression that the metamorphoses described by classical authors such as Ovid have something to do, though of course not directly, with experience of the communications make by the metals. Ovid was certainly not himself capable of understanding the language of the metals directly, nor indeed does his work Metamorphoses wholly convey the impression one gets, but what he says is derived from this source, and the underlying process is very definitely indicated. Paracelsus, who lived at a much later time than the personality to whom I have just referred, did not go to college to learn what he regarded as of greatest importance. I do not imply that he did not actually go to college, for as a matter of fact he did, and I have no objections whatever to such a course. But for knowledge of the greatest importance he went where more significant information could be obtained. He went, for example, to men such as metal-miners and acquired a great deal of his knowledge in this way.

Anyone familiar with the technique of acquiring knowledge is aware of how extraordinarily illuminating the simple words of a peasant engaged on the business of sowing and reaping can be. You will say that he does not understand what he is talking about, but what matters is that you who are listening should understand. Certainly it will be only very rarely that the speaker himself understands what he has said—it is a matter of instinct. And even more fundamental knowledge can be acquired from creatures such as beetles and butterflies and birds, who understand nothing at all about what they say to us.

Pythagoras on his travels studied with great intensity what could be learnt by listening to the speech of the metals in the mines of Asia Minor, and a great deal of what he learnt made its way into what then became Greco-Roman culture. In a weakened form it appears in a work such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This is one form of the speech of the metals in the interior of the Earth.

The other form—grotesque as this seems, it is true—the other form is revealed when the speech of the metals becomes poetical, begins to be cosmic poetry. Cosmic phantasy comes to expression in the speech of the metals. And then this cosmic poetry tells of the most intimate relations existing between the metals and the being of man. These most intimate relations do indeed exist. The crude relations known to physiology involve only a few metals. It is known that iron plays an important role in human blood; but iron is really the only metal of this kind. A few others—potassium, calcium, sodium, magnesium—also play a certain part. But a larger number of metals that are important for the structure and functioning of the Earth, seem to crude observation to play no part in the human organism. But that is only apparently the case. If you penetrate into the Earth and there learn to know the speech of the metals, you will also learn that the metals are truly not present only in the interior of the Earth but everywhere in its environment as well, although in exceedingly fine distribution, in a hyper-homeopathic solution, if I may so express it.

In the crude, material sense we cannot have lead within us; in the finer, more ethereal sense we cannot live without it. For what would become of man if lead from the Cosmos, from the atmosphere, did not have an effect upon him, if lead in an infinitely fine state of distribution did not penetrate with the rays of the sun through his eye into his skin, if lead did not penetrate into him through the breathing-process, and again in an infinitely fine state, into the foodstuffs? In short, what would man be if lead did not work in him?

Without lead he would indeed have sense-perceptions; he would be able to perceive colours and musical tones, but with every perception he would become slightly faint, slightly out of his body. He would never be able to stand back from his perceptions and reflect in thoughts and mental concepts about what he had perceived. If we did not absorb any lead in the infinitely fine homeopathic potencies of which I spoke, into our nervous system and, above all, into our brain, we should be entirely given over to all our sense-perceptions as if they were something outside us. We should be unable to form any mental picture of our sense-perceptions or retain any picture of them in our memory. It is the finely distributed lead in our brain that makes this possible.

If a considerable quantity of lead is introduced into the human organism the result is lead-poisoning—a dreadful condition. But those who are aware of the facts can realise from this power of lead to poison, that just because it has a disastrous effect if introduced into the human organism in any considerable quantity, if administered in extremely fine hyper-homeopathic dilution, it can at any moment bring about fading, dying processes to the extent necessary to enable a man to be a conscious being, not perpetually involved in processes of growth and formation—which cause faintness and loss of consciousness. For this is what happens if the growth-forces become overpowering.

Man has definite relationships to all metals, including those of which crude physiology says nothing. Knowledge of these relationships is the foundation for a true therapy. Intimate information about the relationships of the metals to the human being can be given only by the poetic speech of the metals of the Earth. So it may be said that the ordinary speech of the metals gives information about the actual destiny of the Earth; information about the curative relationships of the metals to the human being is given by the metals when their speech becomes poetic.

It is a remarkable thought that from the cosmic aspect, medicine is a kind of poetry. But many mysteries of existence lie in the fact that what at one level causes or leads to illness, is, at another level, something lofty, most perfect, most beautiful. This is what emerges when Inspired cognition finds access to the metallic veins and metals in the Earth.

Now still another relationship can be established with metals, namely, when they are subjected to natural forces, for example, to fire. Just think of the remarkable formation of antimony orc. It is composed of single spear-shaped structures, showing by this formation that it follows certain lines of force that are active in the Cosmos. If antimony is subjected to a process of combustion it becomes the ‘antimony mirror’. When it is spread on glass it develops a special power of reflection. It has other peculiarities, too, for example it readily explodes if it is deposited on the cathode. All these characteristics of antimony indicate how a metallic substance of this kind is related to the forces of the Earth, of the Earth’s environment. The same can be said of all metals. All of them can be studied when brought into the process of combustion and if the temperature rises higher and higher they pass over into the super-homeopathic condition of which I have spoken. It is at those temperatures that they assume a quite different form. In this connection the ideas of modern physicists are rigidly schematic. As the lead is being melted the physicists picture it getting softer and softer, and so it does, to begin with. The lead gets softer and softer as the temperature rises, and it also gets hotter and hotter, increasingly fluidic, until lead-fumes are produced. What the physicists do not know is that all the time something that does not reach beyond a certain temperature is being thrown off, separated off. This they do not know. Lead in this finest, ‘super-homeopathic’ state passes over continually into the universal invisible life and in that form works upon man.

In the Earth itself there are metals of infinite kinds, but above the Earth these metals are everywhere present in the finest possible state of distribution; they have vaporised. Down in the Earth the metals have their sharp contours and definite structures; at a still greater depth they exist in a molten condition. But in the environment of the Earth, the metals in the finest possible state of distribution continually radiate out into cosmic space. Now in cosmic space there is inner elasticity. The forces do not radiate into infinity—as the physicists imagine to be the case with light-rays—but these forces radiate to a certain boundary and then return. These backward radiating forces may be pictured as returning in all directions from the periphery of the universe. And we become aware that these backward-streaming forces are at work where we witness one of the most wonderful, most beautiful of all sights in human life: when a child is learning in the first years of earthly life to walk, to speak and to think.

It is one of the most wonderful sights in the whole of life to observe how a child stops crawling and stands up in order to orientate himself in the world; to ‘come to himself’ as a human being. It is the backward-radiating forces of the metals that work inwardly in the forces which give the child the power of orientation. As the child learns to raise himself from his horizontal position in crawling, he is permeated by the backward-radiating force of the metals. This is the force that actually raises the child into the upright position. If this connection is recognised, another experience comes simultaneously. It is that in the deeds, in the essential nature of the human being living here on Earth, one recognises the connection with his earlier incarnation. The faculties for perceiving the workings of the metals in the Cosmos and the karmic connection between the successive lives on Earth, are the same. The one recognition comes with the other and neither is possible without the other. That is why I once said in an entirely different context that in this power of orientation, in the power which enables the child to rise from crawling to standing and walking, the faculty of learning to speak and think, lie the fruits coming from earlier lives on Earth. I said then that anyone with an eye for these things perceives in the way the child takes his first steps, whether in taking steps he tends to put toes or heels down first, whether he bends his knees sharply or only slightly—in all this, karmic disposition from an earlier incarnation can be perceived. It shows itself primarily in the gait. This is because together with the faculty which enables the backward-raying forces of the metals to be perceived comes the faculty to perceive the connection of a man’s present life with his earlier lives.

The assertion that Anthroposophy is not open to proof is entirely unjustified. Those who assert this are accustomed to bring forward sense-perception as proof. But that is tantamount to saying: Are you actually telling me that the Earth moves freely in space? It is simply not possible. Either there must be something to support it or it must fall!—In point of fact it does not fall because cosmic bodies mutually support each other. Support is necessary only in the conditions prevailing on the Earth. So it is only for truths recognised by the everyday consciousness that proofs can rightly be offered, if they are demanded. Truths relating to the spirit are mutually confirmatory—but this must also be felt as an inner conviction.

I have told you that from the way a child—or an adult—walks, whether he raises toes or heel first, treads firmly or lightly, bends his knees a great deal or is more prone to stand stiffly—from all this the fulfilment of his karma from the previous earthly life can be perceived. Today I have shown you how the backward-raying forces of the metals enable us to recognise the connection between earthly lives. Here you have two mutually confirmatory truths. But what happens all the time is that we hear a truth, then after some time we hear the same truth from a different angle and perhaps we hear it a third time. In this way the truths of Anthroposophy confirm one another— just as in the Cosmos the heavenly bodies uphold each other without needing extraneous supports. It must indeed be so when we ascend from truths that are valid for everyday consciousness only, to truths that are self-sustaining realities in the Cosmos. And what anthroposophical knowledge comprises is indeed self-sustaining reality. You must hold together in your mind statements made at different times, statements which mutually support, attract, or also resist each other, revealing thereby the inner life of anthroposophical knowledge. Other forms of knowledge, customary today, live by virtue of the supports on which they are based; Anthroposophical knowledge is self-sustaining.

• 1. See True and False Paths in Spiritual Investigation, Lectures 3 to 5. (Rudolf Steiner Press.)

[ 1 ] The description of the life of the philosophical spirit from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present time, which has been attempted in this second volume of The Riddles of Philosophy, cannot be of the same character as the survey of the works of the preceding thinkers. This survey had to remain within the most restricted circle of the philosophical problems. The last sixty years represent the age in which the mode of conception of natural science attempted, from different points of view, to shake the foundation on which philosophy formerly stood. During this time, the view arose that maintained that the results of natural science shed the necessary light on the question of man's nature, his relation to the world and other riddles of existence, which the intellectual work of philosophy had formerly sought to supply. Many thinkers who wanted to serve philosophy now tried to imitate the mode of investigation of natural science. Others laid the foundation for their world conception, not in the fashion of the old philosophical mode of thinking, but simply by taking over that basis from the mode of conception of natural science, biology or physiology. Those who meant to preserve the independence of philosophy believed it best to examine thoroughly the results of natural science in order to prevent them from invading the philosophical sphere. It is for this reason necessary, in presenting the philosophical life of this period, to pay attention to the views that, derived from natural science, have been introduced into world conceptions. The significance of these views for philosophy becomes apparent only if one examines the scientific foundations from which they are derived, and if one realizes for oneself the tendencies of scientific thinking according to which they were developed. This situation is given expression in this book by the fact that some parts of it are formulated almost as if a presentation of general natural scientific ideas, and not one of philosophical works, had been intended. The opinion appears to be justified that this method of presentation shows distinctly how thoroughly natural science has influenced the philosophical life of the present time.

[ 2 ] A reader who finds it reconcilable to his mode of thinking to conceive the evolution of the philosophical life along the lines indicated in the introduction of the first volume of this book, and for which the more detailed account of the book has attempted to supply the foundation, will also find it possible to accept the indicated relation between philosophy and natural science in the present age as a necessary phase of its evolution. Through the centuries since the beginning of Greek philosophy this evolution tended to lead the human soul toward the experience of its inner essential forces. With this inner experience the soul became more and more estranged in the world that the knowledge of external nature had erected for itself. A conception of nature arose that is so exclusively concerned with the observation of the external world that it does not show any inclination to include in its world picture what the soul experiences in its inner world. This conception considers it as unjustified to paint the world picture in a way that it would show these inner experiences of the human soul as well as the results of the research of natural science. It characterizes the situation in which philosophy found itself in the second half of the nineteenth century, and in which many currents of thought can still be found in the present time. Such a judgment does not have to be artificially introduced to the study of the philosophy of this age. It can be arrived at by simply observing the facts. The second volume of this book attempts to record this new development, but it has also made it necessary to add to the second edition a final chapter that contains “A Brief Outline of an Approach to Anthroposophy.”

One can be of the opinion that this account does not belong in the framework of the whole book but, in the preface to the first volume, it was announced that the purpose of this presentation “is not only to give a short outline of the history of philosophical problems, but also to discuss these problems and the attempts at their solution through their historical treatment.” The view expressed in this book tries to show that many situations arising from the attempted solutions in the philosophy of the present tend to recognize an element in the inner experience of the human soul that manifests itself in such a way that the exclusive claim of natural science can no longer deny that element a place in the modern world picture. As it is the philosophical conviction of the author of this book that the account of the final chapter deals with soul experiences that are adequate to bring fulfillment to the search of modern philosophy, he feels he was justified in adding this chapter to his presentation. As a result of observation of these philosophies, it seems to the author to be basically characteristic of them and of their historical manifestation that they do not consistently continue their direction toward the goal they are seeking. This direction must lead toward the world conception that is outlined at the end of the book, which aims at a real science of the spirit. The reader who can agree with this can find in this conception something that supplies the solutions to problems that the philosophy of the present time poses without giving answers. If this is true, the content of the last chapter will also throw light on the historical position of modern philosophy.

[ 3 ] The author of this book does not imagine that everyone who can accept the content of the final chapter must necessarily also seek a world conception that replaces philosophy by a view that can no longer be recognized as a philosophy by traditional philosophers. What this book means to show is that philosophy, if it arrives at the point where it understands itself, must lead the spirit to a soul experience that is, to be sure, the fruit of its work, but also grows beyond it. In this way, philosophy retains its significance for everyone who, according to his mode of thinking, must demand a secure intellectual foundation for the results of this soul experience. Whoever can accept these results through a natural sense for truth, is justified in feeling himself on secure ground even if he pays no special attention to a philosophical foundation of these results. But whoever seeks the scientific justification of the world conception that is presented at the end of the book, must follow the path of the philosophical foundation.

[ 4 ] That this path, if it is followed through to its end, leads to the experience of a spiritual world, and that the soul through this experience can become aware of its own spiritual essence through a method that is independent of its experience and knowledge through the sense world, is what the presentation of this book attempts to prove. It was not the author's intention to project this thought as a preconceived idea into his observation of philosophical life. He wanted to search without bias for the conception expressed in this life itself. He has at least endeavored to proceed in this way. He believes that this thought could be best presented by speaking the language of a natural scientist, as it were, in some parts of the book. Only if one is capable of temporarily identifying oneself completely with a certain point of view is it possible to do full justice to it. By this method of deliberately taking the position of a world view, the human soul can most safely obtain the ability to withdraw from it again and enter into modes of conception that have their source in realms that are not comprised by this view of the world.

[ 5 ] The printing of this second volume of The Riddles of Philosophy was about half finished before the great war that mankind is now experiencing broke out. It was finished just as this event began. This is only to indicate what outer events stirred and occupied my soul as the last thoughts included in this book passed before my inner eye.

Rudolf Steiner
September 1, 1914, Berlin

[ 1 ] In the study of Anthroposophy, sleeping and waking have been dealt with often and from varied points of view. But our understanding of these facts of life must be deepened and refreshed again and again, when other points in the constitution of the world have been considered by us. Our previous explanation, showing how the Earth is the seed of a newly arising macrocosm, will give us fresh possibilities for a deeper understanding of sleeping and waking.

[ 2 ] In the waking state, man lives in the Thought-shadows cast by a dead and dying world, and in the Will-impulses into the inner nature of which, with his ordinary consciousness, he can no more penetrate than into the processes of deep, dreamless sleep.

[ 3 ] Where sub-conscious impulses of Will flow into the shadows of Thought, the free dominion of self-consciousness arises. In this self-consciousness, the human ‘Ego’ lives.

[ 4 ] While man experiences his environment in this condition, his inner feeling is permeated by extra-earthly, cosmic impulses, entering from a remote and cosmic past into the present time. He does not become conscious of this fact. For a being can only become conscious of things in which it partakes with its own, dying forces, and not with the growing forces that are the creative kindlers of its life. Thus man experiences himself in consciousness while that which lies at the basis of his inner being is lost to the eye of his mind. And by this very fact he is able, during the waking state, to feel himself so entirely within his shadowed Thoughts. There is no glimmer of life to hinder the full absorption of his inner being in the dead and dying. But from this his ‘life in the dead and dying,’ the essential being of the earthly sphere conceals the fact that it is in reality the seed of a new Universe. Man in the waking state does not perceive the Earth in its true nature. The cosmic life that is germinating in the Earth escapes him.

[ 5 ] Thus man lives in what the Earth gives to him as the basis of his self-consciousness. In the age of unfolding of the self-conscious Ego, the true form both of his inner impulses and of his outer environment is lost to his mind's eye. But as he thus hovers over the true being of the world, he experiences in consciousness the being of the ‘I’: he experiences himself as a self-conscious being. Above him is the extra-earthly Cosmos; beneath him, in the earthly realm, a world whose true essence is hidden from him. But in between, the free ‘I’ manifests itself, its essence radiating out in the full light of knowledge and of free volition.

[ 6 ] It is different in the sleeping state. In sleep, man lives in his astral body and Ego in the germinating life of the Earth. The strongest ‘urge into new life’ is there in the environment of man in dreamless sleep. His dreams too are permeated by this life, though not so intensely as to prevent him from experiencing them in a kind of semi-consciousness. Gazing half consciously upon his dreams, man witnesses the creative forces whereby he himself is woven out of the Cosmos. Even while the dream lights up, the Astral—kindling man to life—becomes visible as it flows into the etheric body. In this lighting-up of dreams, Thought is still alive. It is only after man wakens that Thought is gathered up into the forces whereby it dies and becomes a shadow.

[ 7 ] This connection between our dream-conceptions and our waking thoughts is of the greatest significance. Man thinks within the sphere of those very forces whereby he grows and lives. Yet he cannot become a thinker until these forces die.

[ 8 ] At this point there dawns in us a true understanding of why it is that man takes hold of the reality of things in Thought. For in his thoughts he possesses the dead picture of that which, working from the fully living reality of the world, builds and creates him.

[ 9 ] It is the dead picture. But this dead picture proceeds from the work of the greatest painter—from the very Cosmos. It is true that the life remains out of it. If it did not, the Ego of man could not unfold. Nevertheless, the full content of the Universe, in all its greatness, is contained within this picture.

[ 10 ] So far as was possible at that time and in that context, I indicated this inner relation of Thought and World-reality in my ‘Philosophy of Freedom.’ It is in the passage of that book where I say that there is indeed a bridge leading from the thinking Ego's depths to the depths of Nature's reality.

[ 11 ] Sleep extinguishes the ordinary consciousness because it carries us into the germinating life of Earth—the Earth as it springs forth into the new, living Macrocosm. When the extinction is overcome by Imaginative consciousness, there stands before the human soul—not a sharply outlined Earth in mineral, plant and animal kingdoms of Nature—but a vital process, kindled to life within this Earth and flaming forth into the Macrocosm.

[ 12 ] It is thus: In the waking state man must lift himself with his own Ego-being out of the being of the world, in order to attain to free self-consciousness. And in sleep he unites with the being of the world once more.

[ 13 ] Such is the rhythm in the present moment of cosmic time the rhythm of man's earthly existence outside the inner being of the world while he experiences his own being in consciousness, and of his existence within the inner being of the world where the consciousness of his own being is extinguished.

[ 14 ] In the condition between death and a new birth, the human Ego lives within the Beings of the Spirit-world. Then, everything that was withdrawn from man's consciousness during his waking life on Earth comes into it again. The macrocosmic forces emerge from their full state of life in a far distant past to their dead and dying nature in the present. And there emerge the earthly forces—the seed of the new living macrocosm. Then the human being looks into his sleeping states as clearly as in his earthly life he looks forth upon the Earth that glistens in the sunlight.

[ 15 ] The Macrocosm, as it is today, has indeed become a thing of death. Yet it is through this alone that between death and a new birth man can undergo a life which signifies, compared to the waking life on Earth, a loftier awakening. For it is indeed an awakening, whereby he becomes able fully to control the forces that light up so dimly and fleetingly in dreams. These forces fill the Cosmos, they are all-pervading. From them the human being derives the impulses through which, as he descends on to the Earth, he forms this body—the greatest work-of-art of the Macrocosm.

[ 16 ] That which lights up so dimly in the dream—deserted, as it were, by the clear light of the sun—lives in the Spirit-world where the spiritual Sun flows through and through it, and where it waits until the Beings of the Hierarchies or man himself shall summon it to the creation of a new existence.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 17 ] 156. In Waking life, to experience himself in full and free Self-consciousness, man must forego the conscious experience of Reality in its true form, both in his existence and in that of Nature. Out of the ocean of Reality he lifts himself, that in his shadowed Thoughts he may make his own ‘I’ his very own in consciousness.

[ 18 ] 157. In Sleep, man lives with the life of his environment of Earth, but this very life extinguishes his consciousness of Self.

[ 19 ] 158. In Dreaming, there flickers up into half-consciousness the potent World-existence out of which the being of man is woven and from which, in his descent from Spirit-world, he builds his body. In earthly life this World-existence with its potent forces is put to death in man; it dies into the shadows of his Thought. For only so can it become the basis of self-conscious Manhood.

When Goethe in ripe old age looked back upon the whole development of his life, he named three men who had had most influence upon him; Linné, the Naturalist, Spinoza, the Philosopher, and Shakespeare, the Poet.

To Linné he placed himself in opposition and through this reached his own point of view regarding the forms of plants and animals. From Spinoza he borrowed a mode of expression which enabled him to give out his ideas in a thoughtful language which was deeper and richer than that of Philosophers. In Shakespeare he found a spirit that fired his own poetic gift according to the inmost demands of his own being.

Anyone who can gain an insight to the soul strivings of Goethe as these comes to light in his Götz and Werther, where he reveals what he had gone through inwardly, can also see what took place in him when first he absorbed himself in Hamlet.

A vivid impression of this is to be obtained from his statement that Shakespeare is an interpreter of the World-spirit itself. Goethe holds that Shakespeare's genius openly reveals what the World-spirit hides within Nature's activities. His whole attitude towards Shakespeare is expressed in this statement.

It is only within the last five hundred years that what we to-day call Intellectualism has taken possession of our soul life. In the outlook which obtained earlier the soul of humanity was active in a different way. Understanding through thinking played a secondary part.

A battle against the overlordship of thought is visible in Goethe's soul. He still wishes to experience the world inwardly with different soul forces. But the mental life which surrounds him makes thought the basic element in the activities of the soul. So Goethe asks himself: Can one get into intimate touch with the surrounding world through thought? Such a possibility stirs him deeply and out of the overwhelming effect it has upon his soul, his Faust is born.

Goethe presents Faust to us as a teacher who had worked for ten years in a period which saw the advent of Intellectualism. As yet however Intellectualism had only a slight hold upon human nature, and in Philosophy, Jurisprudence, Medicine and Theology Faust does not as yet recognize it as a power which could carry conviction. He could, as a man of science, fall back upon the understanding of an earlier time when men realized spirit in Nature without the intermediary of intellectuality. He wishes to obtain direct vision of spirit. What Faust went through in vacillation between thinking experience and spiritual vision became for the young Goethe an inner battle.

Hamlet and other Shakespeare characters arose before Goethe's soul as he passed through this inner battle. Hamlet, who obtains his life's tasks through soul experiences which appear to him as expressive of relationship to the Spiritual world and who not only is thrown through doubt into inaction, but also through the power of his intellect. The deep abyss of the soul life is contained in Hamlet's words:

The native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.

The youthful Goethe had often looked into this abyss and the glimpses he had caught of it intensified his sympathy with Hamlet's character.

By following the soul life of Goethe one is led from the Hamlet frame of mind to that of Faust and thus one can experience a bit of Goethe biography. It has not got to be proved through documents, neither need it be historic in the ordinary sense of the term. And yet it will reflect history better than what is usually so named.

One gains a picture of Faust as he lived in Goethe, as the teacher born out of a soul condition which oscillates between intellectualism and spiritual vision. During ten years Faust instructs his pupils under these conditions of wavering and one can well imagine to oneself Hamlet as one of these pupils; not the Hamlet of the Danish Saga but Shakespeare's Hamlet. For Goethe has represented in his Faust the teacher who could have Hamlet's 'native hue of resolution sickled o'er with the pale cast of thought.' In this light Shakespeare is the poet who has before his soul a character born out of the waning of consciousness of the Middle Ages and a New Age. Goethe is the one who wants to penetrate into that world outlook in which such characters develop fully.

In many Shakesperian characters Goethe could feel the reflection of this waning consciousness. This brought Shakespeare so near to him, for it was connected with his feelings for Art. Into this feeling for Art Spinoza's intellectualism penetrated and in Spinoza there existed already that mental activity which gives the thought life of modern humanity its soul bearings.

This 'Spinoza-ism' became tolerable to Goethe only when he came to stand before Italian works of art and could feel in these works as an artist that necessity of material creating which Spinoza could clothe only in pure thought.

Together with Herder he had adopted Spinoza's philosophy but only in Italy could he write from the aspect of art what was impossible through reading Spinoza; 'There is necessity, there is God.'

In order to feel on sure ground in Art, Goethe realized the need of an outlook upon the world, but this outlook would have to include Art as one of its most important elements and not relegate it to an inferior place. The creative spirit in the world revealed itself to Goethe in Nature but he found in Shakespeare the artist who revealed the Spirit in his own creation.

Goethe felt deeply how from his inmost being man must strive toward scientific knowledge, but he felt no less deeply how in this striving thought can wander away in error. He felt himself thus in danger with Spinoza. With Shakespeare he felt himself within the world of direct, artistic outlook. Goethe has himself spoken of his relation to Shakespeare in these words: 'A necessity which excludes more or less or entirely all freedom, as with the ancients, is no longer endurable to our way of thinking; Shakespeare came near this however, for he made necessity moral and thus joined the old world to the new world to our joyful astonishment.'

In his youth Goethe found the way to the 'New World' through Shakespeare because Shakespeare understood in his dramatic characters how to hold the balance between the impelling necessity of Nature's activities in man and his freedom in his thought life. The mutual relationship of these two elements must be experienced to-day if we do not want to loose hold of reality through our life of thought.

NOTE BY EDITOR: In the last lecture of the recent course on dramatic art¹ Dr. Steiner put before us an interesting point of view regarding the representation of Hamlet's character on the stage.

It has always been the custom to make of Hamlet a deeply philosophic character and in rendering the great soliloquies this side of his being has always been brought into evidence. But Dr. Steiner in a reading which he gave of the 'To be or not to be' soliloquy, showed a new aspect of the Hamlet mind which amplifies what he has written in the above article. Hamlet's mental penetration was not that of a New World philosopher. He did not 'reason out' as a modern thinker does. His thoughts oscillate as do his feelings and it is an error to attribute ponderous weight to the statements in this particular speech where the man himself was merely reflecting his passing, changing feelings and ideas. A modern thinker would never have spoken of death as 'the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns,' when but a few moments previously he had encountered and spoken with his dead Father.

Hamlet is typical of a transition state when the ascendancy of logical reasoning over inner feeling as a perceptive faculty was not established as it became in times nearer our own.

Dr. Steiner's rendering of the speech in what one might name a 'homely' way would probably offend such actors who only see the philosopher in Hamlet, but it is true to the historic aspect of human development in which Hamlet stands as a remarkably complete symbol.

The full significance and true aspect of Hamlet's outlook therefore can be grasped through Anthroposophy.

• 1. Speech and Drama, 19 lectures, Dornach, 5th to 23rd September, 1924.

Men could not reject a spiritual knowledge such as Anthroposophy, if they would but observe with the necessary attention the everyday phenomena of their own mental life. For these phenomena are eloquent witnesses to its reality.

On the one side, looking towards the inner life of man, there stands the fact of Memory. In memory, the experiences man has with the things of the world are preserved in the soul. On the other side is external Perception, behind which the thoughtful human soul feels irresistibly impelled to surmise and seek the inner secrets of the World of Nature.

In both directions, the conscious experience of man comes up against a 'nothingness.'

That which comes to us in memory is no longer there in the outer world. External perception can indeed stimulate, but it cannot bring forth the memories of past experience. On the other hand, careful observation will shew that for the experience of memory man is in every case dependent on his own bodily nature. We feel the memory rising up into consciousness from an exercise of our bodily nature. Science can indeed confirm this, but the feeling is sufficiently certain even without it. Science will shew for instance how memory is impaired by a diseased condition of certain parts of the body. These proofs however only corroborate what is directly evident to the naïve consciousness of man,—provided this be combined with accuracy of observation, which may very well be the case, for the naïve feeling need not be superficial; it is quite able to perceive deeply and truly. Thus in the act of memory man feels how there arise out of his body the forces which—as though with unseen spiritual hands take hold of facts which are no longer there in the world of external Nature. This experience is certainly more delicate, less tangible than others which we have through the immediate sense of life. Yet in its way its evidence is no less certain than that of pains or pleasures, for example, where we know with the sureness of a direct experience that their source is in the body.

On the other side we have our perceptions of the outer world. The life of the soul comes up against these perceptions; it cannot penetrate through them to that which they reveal. Impelled as it is to surmise that something is there revealing itself,—with its own activity it can go no further. Here it has reached its 'nothingness.' It cannot but surmise that it stands at the frontier of a world full of inner content, and yet, as it seeks to penetrate through the perceptions, it feels itself—spiritually—reaching out into the void.

We need only take one more step in this reflection. Behind Memory there begins the region where our own body—for the ordinary consciousness—vanishes into the unknown. Behind Perception, external Nature does the same. The relations of these two to the conscious inner experience of man are of the same kind. Now in Memory, with its foundation in a bodily activity, there arises Thought. For it is in thought that our memories of past experience come forth into conscious life. But thought is also kindled by outward Perception. That which manifests itself to us from without, is brought home to our inner consciousness in thought. Thus do the inner life of Man and the external world of Nature meet in the element of Thought.

And is not this a meeting as it were of old acquaintances? With what a happy sense of kinship does the soul contrive to understand new things perceived in the light of old experience remembered. The strongest sense of the reality of life comes to the soul when it can do this. The inner life of memory, the outer world in perception, meet not as strangers but as friends, who have something to tell one another upon a common subject.

Now the inner force which lives in memory can be intensified. By working upon his soul, man can strengthen the force that shews itself in memory. This possibility, and the way in which it can be realised, are subjects which have frequently been dealt with in these columns.

In doing this, man strikes and penetrates into his bodily nature more deeply than in the process of ordinary consciousness. With the deepened, strengthened force of memory he now perceives himself to be discovering those bodily activities which—as we saw—are always involved in the normal memory process. Indeed, lie not only approaches but penetrates right into them. Vet it is nothing of a bodily nature which comes before the soul at this point. We must picture it as follows. It is as though a shadow-figure, seen against a wall, were suddenly to come to life and step towards us. It is familiar to its because thought is familiar. For it stands there in the soul in just the same way as a thought in ordinary consciousness. But while a thought is not alive, this is alive. It is an 'Imagination.' Like a thought, it is justified by its relationship to a reality. It is therefore not in the least what we should ordinarily call a fancy or imagination. For we perceive at once that it relates to a reality,—in the very same way as the thought in which we hold a memory relates to a reality.

But there is this difference. The thought refers to a reality which was once there in our experience and is now no longer there. The Imagination—though in the very same manner—brings before our soul a reality which in the ordinary experience of life has never yet occurred to us. We have in fact entered a sphere of spiritual perception.

We have penetrated into our own body, yet it is not' Body' but 'Spirit' which we have struck here. It is indeed the Spirit which underlies the Body. We take hold of it 'with spiritual hands,' in the same way as we take hold of past experiences when they arise in ordinary memory.

And as in Thought external Nature meets the inner life of Man, so in Imagination the Spirit of Nature meets the human Spirit. The Spirit that is in Man, taken hold of in Imagination, goes out to meet the Spirit that is in Nature, and this Spirit too reveals itself now in Imagination. To the ordinary consciousness, Thought arises in the act of Memory and kindled by Perceptions from the outer world. To the strengthened consciousness, Imagination arises in the living inner experience of the soul itself, and kindled by a no less living experience of the outer world.

All this can be achieved in the full light of consciousness, where self-deception, suggestion, auto-suggestion and the like are quite impossible. Anyone who reaches true Imagination, lives in it as he lives in the most certain thought, the reference of which to a reality is unmistakable. When we have ceased to allow the slightest vagueness or unconscious element in our experience of the relation of our thoughts to reality, we shall certainly not fall into illusions in our experience of Imagination.

Herein lies the reason why the man who has attained true 'Imaginative Experiences' can speak of them to one who has not yet done so, while the latter can accept his statements with full conviction without giving himself up to any blind belief in authority. In effect, he who tells of Imaginations is only speaking of what is there in the listener himself—beneath the level of his memories—as his own reality of Spirit. In every-day life when a memory is recalled to a man, not by his own thought alone but by another man in conversation with him, he will say to himself, 'I certainly did have that experience in the course of my life, in my ordinary consciousness.' So when he listens to a statement of Imaginative Experience he can say, 'That is I myself in my spiritual perceptions, hitherto unknown to my ordinary consciousness. The man who tells of true Imaginations has only helped me to call up into consciousness what my consciousness had not yet called up for itself. My relation to him is of the same kind as my every-day relation to a man who might remind me of something that had slipped my memory.'

The World of the Spirit, in effect, is simply a thing 'forgotten' by the ordinary consciousness, which—strengthened and intensified—can rediscover it like a returning memory of past experience.

When these lectures were first translated into English and published in ANTHROPOSOPHY: A Quarterly Review of Spiritual Science in 1929, lecture 16 “Earthquakes, Volcanoes, and the Will of Man” was not published. Rene Querido translated this 16th lecture into English from the French and kindly furnished the diagram following lecture 16 which shows the interior of the Earth. Rene Querido also wrote the preface for this reprint edition.

The present cycle of lectures was given in 1906 in Paris and the report of it by Edouard Schuré now published in English in its entirety for the first time marks the beginning of a new phase in the life of Rudolf Steiner. Accompanied by Marie von Sievers (later Marie Steiner), Rudolf Steiner had been invited, by the famous French author and dramatist Edouard Schuré, to address a group consisting mainly of Russians in a small villa on the outskirts of Paris. Among them were writers of note such as Dimitri Merejkowski, his wife Zinaida Hippius, a poetess in her own right, and S. Minski. Originally it had been planned that the course be held on Russian soil but the revolution of 1905 had made that impossible.

At this time Edouard Schuré (1841–1929), a man of 65, stood at the height of his career. He had written more than a dozen major works including The Great Initiates (1889), A History of the German Lied, A Collection of Celtic Legends, two important works on Richard Wagner, and a number of dramas striving to recapture the lost ritualistic element of the ancient mysteries on the stage. He felt powerfully drawn not only to Richard Wagner the composer, but also to the man. He had met the maestro on three occasions and was present in Munich at the dramatic opening of Tristan and Isolde.

Schuré's interest in the occult was profound. He had written The Great Initiates (1889) as a result of his deep connection over a period of many years with Margherita Albana-Mignaty, who continued to inspire him even after her death. Rudolf Steiner often referred to the importance of this book and although it was written ten years before the end of Kali-Yuga (the Age of Darkness), he spoke of this work as a herald of the new Age of Light, when human beings would again seek for their spiritual connection with the great initiates of the past. For some time before their first meeting in Paris, Marie von Sievers and Schuré had corresponded. An unusual set of circumstances led to the fact that indirectly it was Schuré who had brought about the meeting between Marie von Sievers and Rudolf Steiner which was to prove so fruitful for the growth of the Anthroposophical movement. Unable to reply to a specific question related to the occult, Schuré advised the young Marie von Sievers to turn to Rudolf Steiner in Berlin. A little later Marie von Sievers wrote so enthusiastically to Schuré (in excellent French) of her meeting that he, too, wished to become acquainted with Steiner personally. This was to happen six years later in Paris on the occasion of these lectures. The recognition must have been immediate. Schuré, twenty years Steiner's senior, never tired of recounting this significant meeting: for the first time, he felt himself to be in the presence of an initiate. “Here is a genuine Master who will play a crucial part in your life.” Schuré recognized Steiner as one who stood fully in the world of today and yet could also behold in clear consciousness the boundless vistas of the super-sensible. A warm friendship quickly developed between the two men: vacations spent together in Barr (1906–1907) in Schuré's summer house in the Alsace; long walks over the Odilienberg, and an active correspondence (mostly on the part of Marie Steiner, who translated several of Schuré's dramas into German). The substance of a number of intimate conversations has been recorded by Rudolf Steiner in the “Document of Barr.”¹ In 1907 Schuré's Sacred Drama of Eleusis was produced under the direction of Rudolf Steiner at the great Munich Congress of the Theosophical Society. It was on this occasion that Rudolf Steiner said that from this time on, art and occultism should always remain connected. In 1909 the first performance of Schuré's drama, The Children of Lucifer, was given using a German translation of the French text by Marie Steiner. The deeper connection now becomes obvious: Schuré the poet, a Celtic-Greek soul, devoted to the renewal of the ancient mysteries, and one of the first Frenchmen to recognize Richard Wagner's impulse towards the “Gesamtkunstwerk” (a total ritualistic experience embracing all the art forms), now whole-heartedly supported Rudolf Steiner in the great Munich endeavors (1907–1913). This period saw the birth of the mystery dramas and the first performances of Eurythmy. It was also in Munich that plans had been made for the building of the First Goetheanum (the House of The Word) which was later erected on the Dornach hill near Basel in Switzerland.

The war years (1914–1918) brought an unfortunate clouding over of their friendship due to Schuré's stubborn chauvinism which nevertheless did not interfere with his continued championing of Richard Wagner. But with Rudolf Steiner, he broke his connection. A few years after the war the friendship was renewed and it must have been an amazing sight to have seen the old, still robust, white-haired Schuré in animated conversation with Steiner as they walked up and down on the terrace of the First Goetheanum in Dornach. Years later, Schuré would still speak of his profound indebtedness to Rudolf Steiner both for the personal help he had received from him and for his having brought the new mysteries clearly to expression in an age of materialism.

These lectures were given on the fringe of the International Theosophical Congress held in Paris and attended by delegates from many countries. Rudolf Steiner himself attached a distinct importance to this course in Paris where he formulated a basic view of Esoteric Christianity which a few years later was to separate him radically from the Theosophical Society. In the 37th chapter of Rudolf Steiner, The Story of My Life (written in 1924–25 shortly before his death) we find the following passage:²

In the Paris cycle of lectures I brought forward a perception which had required a long process of “ripening” in my mind. After I had explained how the members of the human being—physical body; etheric body, as mediator of the phenomena of life; and the “bearer of the ego”—are in general related to one another, I imparted the fact that the etheric body of a man is female, and the etheric body of a woman is male. Through this a light was cast within the Anthroposophical Society upon one of the basic questions of existence which just at that time had been much discussed. One need only remember the book of the unfortunate Weininger, “Geschlecht und Charakter,” (Sex and Character), and the contemporary poetry.

But the question was carried into the depths of the being of man. In his physical body man is bound up with the cosmos quite otherwise than in his etheric body. Through his physical body man stands within the forces of the earth; through his etheric body within the forces of the outer cosmos. The male and female elements were carried into connection with the mysteries of the cosmos.

This knowledge was something belonging to the most profoundly moving inner experiences of my soul; for I felt ever anew how one must approach a spiritual perception by patient waiting and how, when one has experienced the “ripeness of consciousness,” one must lay hold by means of ideas in order to place the perception within the sphere of human knowledge.

It is perhaps not without significance that it was in Paris, where Thomas Aquinas had elaborated some seven centuries earlier his Christ-oriented Scholasticism, that Rudolf Steiner gave his first course on an Esoteric Christian Cosmology appropriate to the dawn of the new Age of Light. Schuré's notes in French of the 18 lectures, published in French in 1928, constitute the only record of this course. They now appear for the first time in English translation in their entirety in book form, readily available to the modern student of the Science of the Spirit.

R. M. Querido

• 1. The “Document of Barr,” dated Sept. 9, 1907 and printed in English translation in the Golden Blade, 1966.
• 2. Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co., London and New York, 1928.