The Rudolf Steiner Archive

To-day I would like first to remind you how events which take place behind the veil of appearance, outside the physical, sense-perceptible world, can be described in pictorial terms. One has to speak in this way of these events, but the pictures correspond throughout with reality.

With regard to sense-perceptible events, we are living in a time of hard tests for humanity, and these tests will become harder still. Many old forms of civilisation, to which people still mistakenly cling, will sink into the abyss, and there will be an insistent demand that man must find his way to something new. In speaking of the course that the external life of humanity will take in the early future, we cannot—as I have often said—arouse any kind of optimistic hopes. But a valid judgment as to the significance of external events cannot be formed unless we consider also the determining, directing cosmic events which occur behind the veil of the senses.

When a man looks out attentively with his physical eyes and his other senses at his surroundings, he perceives the physical environment of the earth, and the various kingdoms of nature within it. This is the milieu in which comes to pass all that manifests as wind and weather in the course of the year. When we direct our senses towards the external world, we have all this before us: these are the external facts. But behind the atmosphere, the sun-illumined atmosphere, there lies another world, perceptible by spiritual organs, as we may call them. Compared with the sense-world, this other world is a higher world, a world wherein a kind of light, a kind of spiritual light or astral light, spiritual existence and spiritual deeds shine out and run their course. And they are in truth no less significant for the whole development of the world and of man than the historical events in the external environment of the earth and on its surface.

If anyone to-day is able to penetrate into these astral realms, wandering through them as one may wander among woods and mountains and find signposts at cross roads, he may find “signposts” there in the astral light, inscribed in spiritual script. But these signposts have a quite special characteristic: they are not comprehensible without further explanation, even for someone who can “read” in the astral light. In the spiritual world and in its communications, things are not made as convenient as possible: anything one encounters there presents itself as a riddle to be solved. Only through inner investigation, through experiencing inwardly the riddle and much else, can one discover what the inscription on a spiritual signpost signifies.

And so at this time—indeed for some decades now, but particularly at this time of hard trials for mankind—one can read in the astral light, as one goes about spiritually in these realms, a remarkable saying. It sounds like a prosaic comparison, but in this case, because of its inner significance, the prosaic does not remain prosaic. Just as we find notices to help us find our way—and we find signposts even in poetical landscapes—so we encounter an important spiritual signpost in the astral light. Time and time again, exactly repeated, we find there to-day the following saying, inscribed in highly significant spiritual script:

O Man,
You mould it to your service,
You reveal it according to the value of its substance
In many of your works.
Yet it will bring you healing
Only when it reveals to you
The lofty power of its spirit.

Injunctions of this kind, pointing to facts significant for man, are inscribed, as I have said, in the astral light, presenting themselves first as a kind of riddle to be solved, so that men may bring their soul-forces into activity.

Now, during our days here, we will contribute something to the solving of this saying—really a simple saying, but important for mankind to-day.

Let us recall how in many of our studies here the course of the year has been brought before our souls. A man first observes it quite externally: when spring comes he sees nature sprouting and budding; he sees how the plants grow and come to flower, how life everywhere springs up out of the soil. All this is enhanced as summer draws on; in summer it rises to its highest level. And then, when autumn comes, it withers and fades away; and when winter comes it dies into the lap of the earth.

This cycle of the year—which in earlier times, when a more instinctive consciousness prevailed, was celebrated with festivals—has another side, also mentioned here. During winter the earth is united with the elemental spirits. They withdraw into the interior of the earth and live there among the plant-roots that are preparing for new growth, and among the other nature-beings who spend the winter there. Then, when spring comes, the earth breathes out, as it were, its elemental being. The elemental spirits rise up as though from a tomb and ascend into the atmosphere. During winter they accepted the inner order of the earth, but now, as spring advances and especially when summer comes on, they receive more and more into their being and activity the order which is imposed upon them by the stars and the movements of the stars. When high summer has come, then out there in the periphery of the earth there is a surging of life among the elemental beings who had spent the winter in quiet and silence under the earth's mantle of snow. In the swirling and whirling of their dance they are governed by the reciprocal laws of planetary movement, by the pattern of the fixed stars, and so on. When autumn comes, they turn towards the earth. As they approach the earth, they become subject more and more to the laws of earth, so that in winter they may be breathed in again by the earth, once more to rest there in quietude.

Anyone who can thus experience the cycle of the year feels that his whole human life is wonderfully enriched. To-day—and it has been so for some time past—a man normally experiences, and then but dimly, half-consciously, only the physical-etheric processes of the body which occur within his skin. He experiences his breathing, the circulation of his blood. Everything that takes its course outside, in wind and weather, during the year; all that lives in the sprouting of the seed-forces, the fruiting of the earth-forces—all this is no less significant and decisive for the whole life of man, even though he is not conscious of it, than the breathing and blood-circulation which go on inside his skin.

When the sun rises over any region of the earth, we share in the effects of its warmth and light. But when a man accepts Anthroposophy in the right sense, not reading it like a sensational novel but so that what it imparts becomes the content of his mind, then he gradually educates his heart and soul to experience all that goes on outside in the course of the year. Just as in the course of a day we experience early freshness, readiness for work in the morning, then the onset of hunger and of evening weariness, and just as we can trace the inner life and activity of the forces and substances within our skin, so, by taking to heart anthroposophical ideas—entirely different from the usual descriptions of sense-perceptible events—we can prepare our souls to become receptive to the activities that go on outside in the course of the year. We can deepen more and more this sympathetic participation in the cycle of the year, and we can enrich it so that we do not live sourly—one might say—within our skin, letting the outer world pass us by. On the contrary, we can enrich our experience so that we feel ourselves living in the blossoming of every flower, in the breaking open of the buds, in that wonderful secret of the morning, the glistening of dew-drops in the rays of the sun. In these ways we can get beyond that dull, conventional way of reacting to the outer world merely by putting on our overcoat in winter and lighter clothes in summer and taking an umbrella when it rains. When we go out from ourselves and experience the interweaving activities, the flow and ebb, of nature—only then do we really understand the cycle of the year.

Then, when spring passes over the earth and summer is drawing near, a man will be in the midst of it with his heart and soul; he will discern how the sprouting and budding life of nature unfolds, how the elemental spirits fly and whirl in a pattern laid down for them by planetary movements. And then, in the time of high summer, he will go out of himself to share in the life of the cosmos. Certainly this damps down his own inner life, but at the same time his summer experience leads him out—in a cosmic waking-sleep, one might say—to enter into the doings of the planets.

To-day, generally speaking, people feel they can enter into the life of nature only in the season of growth—of germination and budding, flowering and fruiting. Even if they cannot fully experience all this, they have more sympathy and perception for it than they have for the autumn season of fading and dying away. But in truth we earn the right to enter into the season of spring growth only if we can enter also into the time when summer wanes and autumn draws on; the season of sinking down and dying that comes with winter. And if during high summer we rise inwardly, in a cosmic waking-sleep, with the elemental beings to the region where planetary activity in the outer world can be inwardly experienced, then we ought equally to sink ourselves down under the frost and snow-mantle of winter, so that we enter into the secrets of the womb of the earth during mid-winter; and we ought to participate in the fading and dying-off of nature when autumn begins.

If, however, we are to participate in this waning of nature, just as we do in nature's growing time, we can do so only if in a certain sense we are able to experience the dying away of nature in our own inner being. For if a man becomes more sensitive to the secret workings of nature, and thus participates actively in nature's germinating and fruiting, it follows that he will livingly experience also the effects of autumn in the outer world. But it would be comfortless for man if he could experience this only in the form it takes in nature; if he were to come only to a nature-consciousness concerning the secrets of autumn and winter, as he readily does concerning the secrets of spring and summer. When the events of autumn and winter draw on, when Michaelmas comes, he certainly must enter sensitively into the processes of fading and dying; but he must not, as he does in summer, give himself over to a nature-consciousness. On the contrary, he must then devote himself to self-consciousness. In the time when external nature is dying, he must oppose nature-consciousness with the force of self-consciousness.

And then the form of Michael stands before us again. If, under the impulse of Anthroposophy, a man enters thus into the enjoyment of nature, the consciousness of nature, but then also awakes in himself an autumnal self-consciousness, then the picture of Michael with the dragon will stand majestically before him, revealing in picture-form the overcoming of nature-consciousness by self-consciousness when autumn draws near. This will come about if man can experience not only an inward spring and summer, but also a dying, death-bringing autumn and winter. Then it will be possible for the picture of Michael with the dragon to appear again as a forcible Imagination, summoning man to inner activity.

For a man who out of present-day spiritual knowledge wrestles his way through to an experience of this picture, it expresses something very powerful. For when, after St. John's tide, July, August and September draw on, he will come to realise how he has been living through a waking-sleep of inner planetary experience in company with the earth's elemental beings, and he will become aware of what this really signifies.

It signifies an inner process of combustion, but we must not picture it as being like external combustion. All the processes which take a definite form in the outer world go on also within the human organism, but in a different guise. And so it is a fact that these inner processes reflect the changing course of the year.

The inner process which occurs during high summer is a permeation of the organism by that which is represented crudely in the material world as sulphur. When a man lives with the summer sun and its effects, he experiences a sulphurising process in his physical-etheric being. The sulphur that he carries within him as a useful substance has a special importance for him in high summer, quite different from its importance at other seasons. It becomes a kind of combustion process. It is natural for man that the sulphur within him should thus rise at midsummer to a specially enhanced condition. Material substances in different beings have secrets not dreamt of by materialistic science.

Everything physical-etheric in man is thus glowed through at midsummer with inward sulphur-fire, to use Jacob Boehm's expression. It is a gentle, intimate process, not perceptible by ordinary consciousness, but—as is generally true of other such processes—it has a tremendous, decisive significance for events in the cosmos.

This sulphurising process in human bodies at midsummer, although it is so mild and gentle and imperceptible to man himself, has very great importance for the evolution of the cosmos. A great deal happens out there in the cosmos when in summer human beings shine inwardly with the sulphur-process. It is not only the physically visible glow-worms (Johannis Käferchen) which shine out around St. John's Day. Seen from other planets, the inner being of man then begins to shine, becoming visible as a being of light to the etheric eyes of other planetary beings. That is the sulphurising process. At the height of summer human beings begin to shine out into cosmic space as brightly for other planetary beings as glow-worms shine with their own light in the meadows at St. John's time.

From the standpoint of the cosmos this is a majestically beautiful sight, for it is in glorious astral light that human beings shine out into the cosmos during high summer, but at the same time it gives occasion for the Ahrimanic power to draw near to man. For this power is very closely related to the sulphurising process in the human organism. We can see how, on the one hand, man shines out into the cosmos in the St. John's light, and on the other how the dragon-like serpent-form of Ahriman winds its way among the human beings shining in the astral light and tries to ensnare and embrace them, to draw them down into the realm of half-conscious sleep and dreams. Then, caught in this web of illusion, they would become world-dreamers, and in this condition they would be a prey to the Ahrimanic powers. All this has significance for the cosmos also.

And when in high summer, from a particular constellation, meteors fall in great showers of cosmic iron, then this cosmic iron, which carries an enormously powerful healing force, is the weapon which the gods bring to bear against Ahriman, as dragon-like he tries to coil round the shining forms of men. The force which falls on the earth in the meteoric iron is indeed a cosmic force whereby the higher gods endeavour to gain a victory over the Ahrimanic powers, when autumn comes on. And this majestic display in cosmic space, when the August meteor showers stream down into the human shining in the astral light, has its counterpart—so gentle and apparently so small—in a change that occurs in the human blood. This human blood, which is in truth not such a material thing as present-day science imagines, but is permeated throughout by impulses from soul and spirit, is rayed through by the force which is carried as iron into the blood and wages war there on anxiety, fear and hate. The processes which are set going in every blood-corpuscle when the force of iron shoots into it are the same, on a minute human scale, as those which take place when meteors fall in a shining stream through the air. This permeation of human blood by the anxiety-dispelling force of iron is a meteoric activity. The effect of the raying in of the iron is to drive fear and anxiety out of the blood.

And so, as the gods with their meteors wage war on the spirit who would like to radiate fear over all the earth through his coiling serpent-form, and while they cause iron to stream radiantly into this fear-tainted atmosphere, which reaches its peak when autumn approaches or when summer wanes—so the same process occurs inwardly in man, when his blood is permeated with iron. We can understand these things only if we understand their inner spiritual significance on the one hand, and if on the other we recognise how the sulphur-process and the iron-process in man are connected with corresponding events in the cosmos.

A man who looks out into space and sees a shooting-star should say to himself, with reverence for the gods: “That occurrence in the great expanse of space has its minute counterpart continuously in myself. There are the shooting-stars, while in every one of my blood-corpuscles iron is taking form: my life is full of shooting-stars, miniature shooting-stars.” And this inner fall of shooting-stars, pointing to the life of the blood, is especially important when autumn approaches, when the sulphur-process is at its peak. For when men are shining like glow-worms in the way I have described, then the counter-force is present also, for millions of tiny meteors are scintillating inwardly in their blood.

This is the connection between the inner man and the universe. And then we can see how, especially when autumn is approaching, there is a great raying-out of sulphur from the nerve-system towards the brain. The whole man can then be seen as a sulphur-illuminated phantom, so to speak.

But raying into this bluish-yellow sulphur atmosphere come the meteor swarms from the blood. That is the other phantom. While the sulphur-phantom rises in clouds from the lower part of man towards his head, the iron-forming process rays out from his head and pours itself like a stream of meteors into the life of the blood.

Such is man, when Michaelmas draws near. And he must learn to make conscious use of the meteoric-force in his blood. He must learn to keep the Michael Festival by making it a festival for the conquest of anxiety and fear; a festival of inner strength and initiative; a festival for the commemoration of selfless self-consciousness.

Just as at Christmas we celebrate the birth of the Redeemer, and at Easter the death and resurrection of the Redeemer, and as at St. John's Tide we celebrate the outpouring of human souls into cosmic space, so at Michaelmas—if the Michael Festival is to be rightly understood—we must celebrate that which lives spiritually in the sulphurising and meteorising process in man, and should stand before human consciousness in its whole soul-spiritual significance especially at Michaelmas. Then a man can say to himself: “You will become lord of this process, which otherwise takes its natural course outside your consciousness, if—just as you bow thankfully before the birth of the Redeemer at Christmas and experience Easter with deep inner response—you learn to experience how at this autumn festival of Michael there should grow in you everything that goes against love of ease, against anxiety, and makes for the unfolding of inner initiative and free, strong, courageous will.” The Festival of strong will—that is how we should conceive of the Michael Festival. If that is done, if nature-knowledge is true, spiritual human self-consciousness, then the Michael Festival will shine out in its true colours.

But before mankind can think of celebrating the Michael Festival, there will have to be a renewal in human souls. It is the renewal of the whole soul-disposition of men that should be celebrated at the Michael Festival—not as an outward or conventional ceremony, but as a festival which renews the whole inner man.

Then, out of all I have described, the majestic image of Michael and the Dragon will arise once more. But this picture of Michael and the Dragon paints itself out of the cosmos. The Dragon paints himself for us, forming his body out of bluish-yellow sulphur streams. We see the Dragon shaping himself in shimmering clouds of radiance out of the sulphur-vapours; and over the Dragon rises the figure of Michael, Michael with his sword.

But we shall picture this rightly only if we see the space where Michael displays his power and his lordship over the dragon as filled not with indifferent clouds but with showers of meteoric iron. These showers take form from the power that streams out from Michael's heart; they are welded together into the sword of Michael, who overcomes the Dragon with his sword of meteoric iron.

If we understand what is going on in the universe and in man, then the cosmos itself will paint from out of its own forces. Then one does not lay on this or that colour according to human ideas, but one paints, in harmony with divine powers, the world which expresses their being, the whole being of Michael and the Dragon, as it can hover before one. A renewal of the old pictures comes about if one can paint out of direct contemplation of the cosmos. Then the pictures will show what is really there, and not what fanciful individuals may somehow portray in pictures of Michael and the Dragon.

Then men will come to understand these things, and to reflect on them with understanding, and they will bring mind and feeling and will to meet the autumn in the course of the year. Then at the beginning of autumn, at the Michael Festival, the picture of Michael with the Dragon will stand there to act as a powerful summons, a powerful spur to action, which must work on men in the midst of the events of our times. And then we shall understand how this impulse points symbolically to something in which the whole destiny—perhaps indeed the tragedy—of our epoch is being played out.

During the last three or four centuries we have developed a magnificent natural science and a far-reaching technology, based on the most widely-distributed material to be found on earth. We have learnt to make out of iron nearly all the most essential and important things produced by mankind in a materialistic age. In our locomotives, our factories, on all sides we see how we have built up this whole material civilisation on iron, or on steel, which is only iron transformed. And all the uses to which iron is put are a symbolic indication of how we have built our whole life and outlook out of matter and want to go on doing so. But that is a downward-leading path. Man can rescue himself from its impending dangers only if he starts to spiritualise life in this very domain, if he penetrates through his environment to the spiritual; if he turns from the iron which is used for making engines and looks up again to the meteoric iron which showers down from the cosmos to the earth and is the outer material from which the power of Michael is forged. Men must come to see the great significance of the following words: “Here on earth, in this epoch of materialism, you have made use of iron, in accordance with the insight gained from your observation of matter. Now, just as you must transform your vision of matter through the development of natural science into Spiritual Science, so must you rise from your former idea of iron to a perception of meteoric iron, the iron of Michael's sword. Then healing will come from what you can make of it.” This is the content of the aphorism:

O Man,
You mould it (iron) to your service,
You reveal it (iron) according to the value of its substance
In many of your works.
Yet it will bring you healing
Only when it reveals to you
The lofty power of its spirit.

That is, the lofty power of Michael, with the sword he has welded together in cosmic space out of meteoric iron. Healing will come when our material civilisation proves capable of spiritualising the power of iron into the power of Michael-iron, which gives man self-consciousness in place of mere nature-consciousness.

You have seen that precisely the most important demand of our time, the Michael-demand, is implicit in this aphorism, this script that reveals itself in the astral light.

[Following the lecture Rudolf Steiner gave a Brief Report on the Vienna Conference. See GA 259]

With his ordinary consciousness man knows only a fragment of all that is bound up with his existence. Looking out into the world with our ordinary consciousness we get pictures and images of the outer world through our senses. And when we proceed to think about what the senses have thus given us, when we form thoughts about what we have perceived, memory-pictures of these thoughts remain. Our life of soul is such that we perceive and live with the outer world and bear within us memory-pictures of what is past.

The process of memory, however, is not rightly understood by the ordinary consciousness of man. He thinks that he has known and perceived certain things in the outer world, that pictures have remained somewhere in the background of his being and that he can call them up again in his soul as memory-pictures. But the process is by no means so simple. Consider for a moment what goes on in man, step by step. You are certainly familiar with the ‘after-images’ that arise from what is perceived by the senses, by the eye, for example. As a rule we do not stop to think about them, but they are aptly described by Goethe in his Theory of Colours. He speaks of them as ‘vanishing after-images.’ We look intently at some object and then close the eyes. Different images or pictures linger for a while on the retina and then die away like an echo. In ordinary life we pay little heed to these images because we set up a more forceful activity than that of mere perception. We begin to think. If our thought-activity is weak when some object in the outer world is perceived, an after-image remains on the retina. But if we really think, we take the outer stimulus further inwards, as it were, and a thought-image lingers on as a kind of echo.

A thought-image is stronger and its ‘echoing’ more intense than that of an after-image produced by one of the senses, but it is really only a higher development of the same process. And yet these after-images of thought would also fade away, just as an after-image fades away from the eye, if they came into being merely as thought ¬pictures – which, however, they do not. Man has a head, but as well as this the rest of his organism, which is of quite a different nature. The head is pre-eminently an after-image of what happens before the human being descends from the spiritual to the physical world through birth, or rather, through conception. The head is much more physical than the rest of the organism. The rest of the organism is less developed, so far as the Physical is concerned, than the head. Let me put it thus: In the human head the Spiritual is present only as an image; in the rest of the organism the Spiritual works strongly as spirit. The head is intensely physical; it contains little of the spirit as being spirit. The physical substance of which the rest of the organism is composed is not a faithful after-image of what the human being was before his descent to birth. The Physical is more highly developed in the head of man, the Spiritual in the other parts of his organism.

Now our thoughts would fade away just as visual after-images fade away, if they were not taken over and worked upon by our spiritual organism. But the spiritual organism could not do much with these images if something else as well were not taking place. For something else is taking place while we are perceiving these images of which we then make the fleeting thoughts that really only reside in our head. Through the eye we receive the pictures which we then work up into thoughts. We receive these visual images from the physical and etheric universe. But at the same time, in addition to the pictures, we absorb into us the Spiritual from the remain¬ing universe. We do not only bear the spirit within us, but the spirit of the remaining universe is constantly pouring into us. We may therefore say that with the eye we perceive something or other in the physical and etheric universe and it remains within us as an image. But behind this an absolutely real spiritual process is working, although we are unconscious of it. In the act of memory, this is what happens: We look inwards and become aware of the spiritual process which worked in our inner being during the act of perception.

I will make this clearer by a concrete example. We look at some object in the outer world – a machine, perhaps. We then have the image of the machine. As Goethe described it, an after-image lingers for a short time and then ‘echoes’ away. The thought of the machine arises and this thought remains a little longer, although it too would ultimately fade away if something else were not taking place. The fact is that the machine sends something else into our spiritual organism – (nothing very beautiful when the object is a machine, far more beautiful if the object is a plant, for instance). And now – perhaps after the lapse of a month – we look inwards and a memory arises because, although we were entirely unconscious of it, something else passed into us together with the perception of the object which stimulated the thought. This thought has not been wandering around somewhere in the depths of our being. A spiritual process has been at work and later on we become aware of it. Memory is observation, later observation of the spiritual process which ran parallel with the act of physical perception.

In his onward-flowing stream of existence man is contained within the ocean of the spiritual world. During the period between death and a new birth his existence continues within this spiritual world. But there are times when with his head he comes forth from the spiritual world. In other words, with a part of his being he leaves the spiritual world like a fish that tosses itself above the water. This is earthly life. Then he plunges once more back into the ocean of spirit and later on again returns to an earthly life. Man never leaves this ocean of spiritual existence with the whole of his being but only with his head. The lower part of him remains always in the spiritual world, although in his ordinary conscious¬ness he has no knowledge of what is really going on. Spiritual insight, then, tells us the following: Between death and a new birth man lives in the spiritual world. At birth he peeps out with his head, as it were, into a physical existence, but the greater part of his being remains in the spiritual world, even between birth and death. And it is well that this is so, for otherwise we should have no memories. Memories are only possible because the spiritual world is working in us. An act of memory is a spiritual process appertaining to an objective and not merely to a subjective world.

In his ordinary consciousness man does not regard memory as being a real process, but here he is in error. It is as though he were looking at a castle on a mountain just in front of him and seeing it actually there, believes in its reality. Then he moves away a certain distance, sees the castle in greater perspective, and says to himself: Now I have nothing but a picture, there is no longer any reality. And so it is in ordinary life. In the stream of time we imagine that we get further and further away from reality. But the reality of the castle in space does not change because our picture of it changes, any more than does the reality of that which has given rise to our memory-picture. It remains, just as the castle remains. Our explanation of memory is erroneous because we cannot rightly estimate the perspective of time. Consciousness which flows with the stream of time is able to open up a vista of the past in perspective. The past does not disappear; it remains. But our pictures of it arise in the Perspective of time.

Man’s relation to the more spiritual processes in his being between birth and death has undergone a fundamental change in the course of earthly existence. If we were to regard man as a being consisting merely of physical body and etheric body, this would be only the part of him which remains lying there in bed when he is asleep at night. By day, the astral body and Ego come down into the physical and etheric bodies. The Ego of those men who lived before the Mystery of Golgotha – and in earlier incarnations we ourselves were they – began to fade in a certain sense as the time of the Mystery of Golgotha drew near. After the Mystery of Golgotha there was something different about the process of waking. The astral body always comes right down into the etheric body and in earlier times the Ego penetrated far down into the etheric body. In our modern age it is not so.

In our age the Ego only comes down into the head-region of the etheric body. In men of olden times the Ego came right down and penetrated into the lower parts of the etheric body as well. Today it only comes down into the head. The outcome of this is man’s faculty of intellectual thinking. If the Ego were at any moment to descend lower, instinctive pictures would arise within us. The Ego of modern man is quite definitely outside his physical body. Indeed his intellectual nature is due to the fact that the Ego no longer comes down into the whole of his etheric body. If such were the case he would have instinctive clairvoyance. But instead of this, modern man has a clear-cut vision of the outer world, albeit he perceives it only with his head. In ancient times man saw and perceived with his whole being – nowadays only with his head. And between birth and death the head is the most physical part of his being. That is why in the age of intellectualism man knows only what he perceives with his physical head and the thoughts he can unfold within his etheric head. Even the process of memory eludes his consciousness and, as I said, is interpreted falsely.

In days of old, man saw the physical world and behind it a world of spirit. Objects in the physical world were less clear-cut, far more shadowy than they are to the sight of modern man. Behind the physical world, divine-spiritual beings of a lower and also of a higher order were perceived. To state that ancient descriptions of the Gods in Nature are nothing but the weavings of phantasy is just as childish as to say that a man merely imagines something he has actually seen in waking life. It was no mere phantasy on the part of man in olden days when he spoke of spiritual beings behind the world of sense. He actually saw these beings and against this background of the spiritual world, objects in the physical world were much less clearly defined. Thus the man of antiquity had a very different picture of the world. When he awoke from sleep his Ego penetrated more deeply into his etheric body and divine-spiritual beings were revealed to him.

He gazed into those spiritual worlds which had been the forerunners of his own world. The Gods revealed their destinies to him and he was able to say: ‘I know from whence I come, I know the divine world with which I am connected.’ This was because he had the starting-point of his perspective within him. He made his etheric body an organ to perceive the world of the Gods. Modern man cannot do so. He has no other starting-point for his perspective than in his head and the head is outside the most spiritual part of the etheric body. The etheric counterpart of the head is somewhat chaotic, not so highly organised as the other parts of the etheric body, and that is why modern man has a more defined vision of the physical world, although he no longer sees the Gods behind it. But the present epoch is one of preparation for what lies in the future. Man is gradually progressing to the stage where the centre of his perspective will be outside his physical being. Nowadays, when he is really only living in his head, he can have nothing but abstract thoughts about the world. It may seem rather extreme to say that man lives in his head, for the head can only make him aware of earthly, physical existence. But it is none the less a fact that as he ‘goes out of his head’ he will begin to know what he is as a human being. When he lived in his whole being he had knowledge of the destinies of the Gods. As he gradually passes out of himself he can have knowledge of his own destiny in the cosmos. He can look back into his own being. If men would only make more strenuous efforts in this direction, the head would not hinder them so much from seeing their own destinies. The obstacle in the way of this is that everyone is so intent upon living only in the head. It is simply an unwillingness to look beyond what the head produces that makes people loath to admit that the wisdom which Anthroposophy has to offer in regard to the being of man is something that can be understood by ordinary, healthy intelligence.

And so man is on the way to a knowledge of his own being, because he will gradually begin to focus his perspective from a point that lies, not inside, but outside himself. It is the destiny of man to pass out of his etheric body and so, finally, to attain to knowledge of himself as a human being. But obviously there is a certain danger here. It is possible for man to lose connection with his etheric body. This danger was mitigated by the Mystery of Golgotha. Whereas before the Mystery of Golgotha man was able to look out and see the destinies of the Gods, after that Event it became possible for him to see his own world-destiny. In the course of his evolution, man’s tendency is more and more to ‘go out of himself ‘ in the sense described above. But if, as he does so, he understands the words of Paul: “Not I but Christ in me” in their true meaning, his connection with the Christ will bring him back again into the realm of the human. His link with the Christ sets up a counter¬balance to the process which gradually takes him ‘out of himself.’ This experience must deepen and intensify. In the course of world-destiny the outer Gods passed into twilight, but just because of this it was possible for a God to work out His destiny on the Earth itself and thus be wholly united with mankind.

Think, then, of the man of olden times. He looked around him, perceived the Gods who arose before him in pictures, and he then embodied these pictures in his myths. Today, man’s vision of the Gods has faded. He sees only the physical world around him. But as a compensation he can now be united in his inner life with the destiny of a God, with the death and resurrection of a God. Looking out with their clairvoyant faculties in days of yore, men saw the destinies of Gods in fleeting pictures upon which they then based their myths. The difference in the myths is due to the fact that experience of the spiritual world varied according to men’s capabilities of beholding it. Perceived by this instinctive clairvoyance the world of the Gods was dim and shadowy – hence the diversity in the myths of the various peoples. It was a real world that was seen but it arose in a kind of dream-consciousness. The figures of the Gods were sometimes more and sometimes less distinct, but never distinct enough to guarantee absolute uniformity in the different myths.

And then it happened that a God worked out His destiny on the Earth itself. The destinies of the other Gods were more remote from man in his earthly life. He saw them in perspective and for that reason less distinctly. The Christ-Event is quite near to men—too near, indeed, to be seen aright. The old Gods arose before men’s vision in the perspective of distance and for this reason somewhat indistinctly. If it had been otherwise, the myths would have been all alike. The Mystery of Golgotha is too near to man, too intimately part of him. He must first find the perspective in which to behold the destiny of a God on Earth and therewith the Mystery of Golgotha.

Those who lived in the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place could behold with spiritual vision and so understand the Christ. They could readily understand Him for they had seen the world of the Gods. So now they knew: Christ has gone forth from the world of the Gods. He has come to this Earth for His further destiny beginning with the Mystery of Golgotha. As a matter of fact they no longer saw the Mystery of Golgotha itself in clear outline but until this moment they could see the Christ Himself quite well. Therefore they had very much to say of the Christ as a God. They only began to discuss what had become of this God at the moment when he came down into a human being at the Baptism of John in Jordan. Hence in the earliest time of Christianity we have a strongly developed Christology but no ‘Jesuology’.

It was because the whole world of the Gods was no longer within man’s ken that Christology afterwards became transformed into mere Jesuology—which grew stronger and stronger until the nineteenth century, when Christ was no longer understood even with the intellect and modern Theology was very proud of understanding Jesus in the most human way and letting the Christ go altogether.

Precisely through spiritual knowledge the perspective must be found once more to recognise what is the most important of all—the Christ in Jesus. For otherwise we should no longer remain united with the human being at all. Increasingly we should only be looking at him from outside. But now, by recognising Christ in Jesus, through our union with the Christ we shall be able to partake once more with living sympathy in man and in humanity—precisely through our understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Thus we may say: In going more and more out of himself, man is on the way by-and-by to transform all spiritual reality into mere abstract concepts and ideas. Mankind has already gone very far in this direction and such might be its impending fate already at this moment. Men would go farther and farther in their abstract, intellectual capacity and would develop within them a kind of faith whereby they would say to themselves: Yes, now we experience the Spiritual, but this Spiritual is a Fata Morgana. It has no weight. It consists of so many ideas.

Man must find the possibility once more to replenish these ideas with spiritual substance. This he will do inasmuch as he takes the Christ with him and experiences the Christ as he passes over into the intellectual life. Modern intelligence must grow together with the consciousness of Christ.

In olden times man spoke of the Fall into Sin. He spoke of this picture of the Fall as though with his own being he had belonged to a higher world and had fallen down into a lower, into a deeper world. Take it in a pictorial sense and it is quite true to the reality. We can in a very real sense speak of a Fall into Sin. But just as the man of olden times felt truly when he said to himself: ‘I am fallen from a spiritual height and have united myself with something lower’—so should man of modern time discover how his increasingly abstract thoughts are also bringing him into a kind of Fall. But this is another kind of Fall. It is a Fall that goes upwards. Man as it were falls upward, that is to say he ascends, but he ascends to his own detriment just as the man of olden times felt himself fall to his detriment. The man of old who still understood the Fall into Sin in the old sense could recognise in Christ Him Who had brought the human being into the right relation to this Sin, that is to say, into the possibility of a salvation. The man of old, when he developed the right consciousness, could recognise in Christ the Being Who had lifted him again out of the Fall. So should the man of modern time as he goes on into intellectualism see the Christ as the one who gives him weight so that he shall not spiritually fly away from the Earth or from the world in which he should be.

The man of old perceived the Christ Event paramountly in relation to the unfolding of the will which is, of course, connected with the Fall into Sin. So should the man of modern time learn to recognise the Christ in relation to thought—thought which must lose all reality if man were unable to give it weight. For only so will reality again be found in the life of thought.

Mankind indeed is going through an evolution. And as Paul might speak of the old Adam and of the new Adam, of the Christ, so too may the modern man in a certain sense. Only the modern man must realise it clearly. He must perceive that the man of old who still had the old consciousness within him, felt himself lifted up by the Christ. The man of the new age, on the other hand, should feel himself protected by the Christ from rushing forth into the spiritual emptiness of mere abstraction, mere intellectualism.

The modern man needs Christ to transform within him this sin of going out into the void, to make it good again. Thought becomes good by uniting itself once more with the true reality, that is, the spiritual reality. Therefore, for a man who can see through the secrets of the universe there is the fullest possibility to place the Christ into the very centre even of the most modern evolution of human consciousness.

And now go back to the image with which we began. I began by speaking of the faculty of memory in man. We human beings live on and on in the spiritual world. We only lift ourselves out of the spiritual world inasmuch as with our heads we peer forth into the physical. But we never emerge from the spiritual world altogether. We only emerge with our head. So much do we remain in the spiritual world that even our memory processes are constantly taking place within it. Our world of memories remains beneath, in the ocean of the spiritual world.

Now so long as we are between birth and death and are not strong enough in our Ego to perceive all that is going on down there even with our memories—so long are we quite unaware of how it is with us as humanity in modern time. But when we die, then it becomes a very serious matter, this spiritual world from out of which we lift ourselves in physical existence, like a fish that gasps at air. Then we no longer look back on our life imagining that we perceive unreal memory-pictures, giving ourselves up to the illusion that the perspective of time kills the reality. For that is how man lives in relation to time when he gives himself up to his memory. He is like one who would consider what he perceives in the distance, in the perspective of space, as unreality, as a mere picture. He is like one who would say: ‘When I go far away from it, the castle there in the distance is so small, so tiny that it can have no reality, for surely no men could live in so tiny a castle. Therefore the castle can have no reality.’ Such, more or less, is the conclusion he draws in time. When he looks back in time he does not think his memory-pictures realities, for he leaves out of account the perspective of time. But this attitude ceases when all perspective ceases, that is to say when we are out of space and time. When we are dead it ceases. Then that which lives in the perspective of times emerges as a very strong reality.

Now it is possible that we had brought into our consciousness that which I call the consciousness of Christ. If we did so, then as we look back after our death we see that in life we united ourselves with reality, that we did not live in a mere abstract way. The perspective ceases and the reality is there. If in life we remained at the mere abstract experience, then too, of course, the reality is there. But we find that in earthly life we were building castles in the air. What we were building has no firmness in itself. With our intellectual knowledge and cognition we can indeed build, but our building is frail, it has no firmness. Therefore the modern man needs to be penetrated with the consciousness of Christ, to the end that by uniting himself with realities he may not build castles in the air but castles in the spirit. For earthly life, a castle in the air is something which in itself lies beneath the spirit. The castles in the air are always at their place, only for earthly life they are too thin and for the spiritual life too physically dense. Such human beings cannot free themselves from the dense physical, which in relation to the Spiritual, after all, has a far lesser reality. They remain earthbound. They get into no free relation to earthly life if in this life they build mere castles in the air through intellectualism.

So you see, precisely for intellectualism the Christ consciousness has a very real significance. And this significance is in the sense of a true doctrine of salvation—salvation from the building of castles in the air, salvation for our existence as it will be when we have passed through the gate of death.

For Anthroposophy these things are no articles of faith. They are clear knowledge which can be gained as clearly as mathematical knowledge can be gained by those who are able to manipulate the mathematical methods.

The hour is so late, that I shall make this lecture a short one, and leave over till tomorrow the main substance of what I have to say in these three lectures. To-morrow the Eurhythmies are put earlier, so that it will be possible to have a longer lecture.

I pointed out yesterday that in order to master the conditions of our present declining civilisation, one needs to differentiate,—so to differentiate between the various groups of peoples massed together over the face of the earth, that one's attention is actually directed to what is living and working in each of the separate groups, in particular among the Anglo-American peoples, among the peoples of what is properly Europe, and among the peoples of the East. And we have seen that the aptitude for founding a cosmogony suited to the new age is to be found pre-eminently among the Anglo- American peoples,—the faculty for developing the idea of freedom, amongst the peoples of Europe, whilst that for developing the impulse of altruism, the religious impulse with all that it connotes by way of human brotherhood, is to be found amongst the population of the East. There is no other way in which a new civilisation can be founded than by making it possible hereafter for man, all the world over, to work together in real co-operation. But, my dear friends, in order that this may be possible, in order that any such real co-operation may be possible, several things are necessary. It Is necessary to recognise, dispassionately and as a matter of fact, how much our present civilisation lacks, and how strong the forces of decline in this present civilisation are. When one considers the forces present in our civilisation, one cannot say: “It is altogether bad;” that is not the way to look at it; in the first place, it would be an unhistoric point of view; in the second place, it could lead to nothing positive. The impulses that reside in our civilisation were, in some age, and in some place, justified. But everything that in the historic course of mankind's evolution leads to ruin, leads to ruin for the very reason that something which has a rightful title in one age and one place has been passed on to another age and another place, and because men, from various Ahrimanic and Luciferic motives, cling to whatever they have grown accustomed to, and are not ready to join in with that actual forward movement which the whole cosmic order requires.

Our age prides itself on being a scientific one. And, at bottom, it is from this, its scientific character, that the great social errors and perversions of the age proceed. That is why it is so imperative that the light should shine in upon our whole life of thought and action, inasmuch as the activities of modern times are entirely dependent on the modern system of thought. We noticed yesterday, in the general survey into which we were led, how the collective civilisation of the earth was made up of a scientific civilisation, a political civilisation tending towards freedom, and of an altruistic economic civilisation that really is derived from the altruistic religious element.

People nowadays,—as I said before, yesterday,—when they consider the forces actually at work in our social structure, remain on the surface of things; they are not willing to penetrate deeper. The lectures in our class-rooms teach what professes to pass for economic wisdom, drawn from the natural science methods of the present day; but what lives in men, and what stirs the minds and the being of men,—that is regarded as a sort of unappetising stew. No attention is paid to what are really its true features.

Let us turn first to the civilisation of Europe. What is the pre-eminent trait of this European civilisation? If one follows up this trait of European civilisation, one finds that one has to go a long way back in order to understand it. One has to form a clear idea of how, out of the ancient primal impulses of the original Celtic population, which still really lies at the base of our European life and being, there gradually grew up, by admixture with the various later strata of peoples, our present European population, with all its religious, political, economic and scientific tendencies. In Europe, in contradistinction to America on the West and Asia on the East,—in Europe a certain intellectual strain was always predominant. Romanism—all that I Indicated yesterday as the specifically Roman element—could never have so got the upper hand, unless intellectualism had been a radical feature of European civilisation. Now there are two things peculiar to intellectualism. In the first place, it never can rouse Itself to make a clean sweep of the religious impulses within it. Religious impulses always acquire an abstract character under the influence of intellectualism. Nor can intellectualism ever really find the energy for grappling with questions of practical economics. The experiments now being carried out in Russia will hereafter show how incapable European intellectualism is of introducing order into the world of economics, of industry. What Leninism is shaping is nothing hut unadulterated intellectualism. It is all reasoned out; an order of society built up by thought alone. And they are attempting the experiment of propping up this brain spun communal system upon the actual conditions prevailing amongst men. Time will show—and very terribly—how impossible it is to prop up a piece of intellectual reasoning upon a human social edifice.

But these things are what people to-day refuse as yet to recognise in all their full force. There is unquestionably among the population of Europe this alarming trait, this sleepiness, this inability to throw the whole man into the stream so needed to permeate the social life of Europe. But the thing that above all others must be recognised is the source from which our European civilisation is fed,—whence this European civilisation is, at bottom, derived. Of itself, of its own proper nature, European civilisation has only produced a form of culture that is intellectual, a thought-culture. Prosaicness and aridity of thought dominate our science and our social institutions.

For many, many years, we have suffered from this intellectualism in the parliaments of Europe. If people could but feel how the parliaments of Europe have been pervaded by the intellectualist, utilitarian attitude, by this element that can never soar above the ground, that lacks the energy for any religious impulse, that lacks the energy for any sort of economic impulse! As for our religious life, just think how we came by it. The whole history of the introduction and spread of this religious life in Europe goes to show that Europe, within herself, had no religious impulses. Just think, how flat and dull the world was, how interminably flat and dull—prosaic to the excess at the time of the expansion of the Roman Empire. Yet that was only the beginning of it. Just conceive what Europe would have become if Roman civilisation in all its flat prosaicness had gone on without the impulse that came over from the Asiatic East, and which was religious, Christian,—what it would have been without the Christian impulse, which sprang from the p lap of the East, which could only spring from the lap of the East, never from that of Europe. The religious impulse was taken over as a wave of culture, of civilisation, from the East. The first and the only thing Europe did was to cram this religious impulse, that came over from the East, with the concepts of Roman law, thread this Eastern impulse through and through with bald, abstract, intellectualist, legal forms.

But this religious impulse from the East was, at bottom, alien to the life of Europe, and remained alien to it. It never completely amalgamated with the being of Europe. And Protestantism acted in a most remarkable way as what I might call a test-tube, in which they separated out. It is «just like watching two substances separating out from one another in a test-tube, to watch how European civilisation reacted with respect to its religious element. In the seventh, in the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth centuries a kind of experiment was being made to combine religious feeling and sentiment with scientific and economic thought into one homogeneous substance; and then, actually, just as two substances react in a test-tube and separate out, so these two separated out,—the cold intellectualist thought and the religious impulse fell apart and deposited Protestantism, Lutheranism. Science on the one side, one truth; on the other side the rival truth, Faith. And the two shall mix no further. If anyone tries to saturate the substance of Faith with the substance of Thought, or to warm the substance of Thought with the substance of Faith, the experiment is regarded as downright sacrilege. And then, as the climax of all that was cold and dreary, came the Konigsberg-Kant-school with its Critique of Pure Reason alongside its Critique of Applied Reason—Ethics alongside Science,—making a most terrible gulf between what in man's nature must be felt and lived as a single whole. These are the conditions under which European civilisation still exists. And these are the conditions under which European civilisation will be brought ever nearer and nearer to its downfall. It was as an alien element from the East that Europe adopted the religious impulse, and it has never combined organically with the rest of her spiritual and physical life. So much with regard to the spiritual life of Europe.

You see, my dear friends, the progress of modern civilisation has had Its praises sung long enough. They have gone on singing its praises until millions of human beings in this civilised world have been done to death, and three times as many maimed for life. It has been blessed in unctuous phrases from the pulpits of the churches, till untold blood has been shed. Every lecturer's desk has sounded the praises of this progress, until this progress has ended in its own annihilation. There can be no cure before we look these things straight in the face. And to-day, people of the Lenin type and others come and beat their brains over socialist systems and economic systems, and fancy that with these concepts which have long since proved inadequate to direct European civilisation, they can now, without any new concepts, without any revolution of thought, effect a reform in our economic system, in our system of society.

I think I have here, once before, spoken of the beautiful concepts that our learned professors arrive at when they are dealing with these subjects. But it is so beautiful that I must really come back to it once more. There is a well-known political economist called Brentano, Lujo Brentano. Not long ago an article appeared by him, entitled: “The Business Director (Der Unternehmer).” In it Brentano tries to construct the concept of the Business Director the Capitalist Director. He enumerates the various distinctive marks of the capitalist director. The third of these distinctive marks, as given by Lujo Brentano, is this: That he expends the means of production at his private venture, at his own risk, in the service of mankind. Mark of the capitalist director! Then that excellent Brentano goes on to examine the function of the Worker, of the ordinary Labourer, in social life; and now, see what he says: That the labour-power, the physical labour-power of the labourer is the labourer's means of production; he expends it at his own venture and risk in the service of the community. Therefore, the labourer is a Business Director (Untemahmer); there is absolutely no difference between a labourer and a business director; they are both one and the same thing! You see, what they nowadays call scientific thought has by now got into such a muddle that when people are constructing concepts, they are no longer able to distinguish between two opposite poles. It is not quite so obvious here, perhaps, as in another case of a Professor of Philosophy at Berne, one of whose specialities was that he wrote such an awful lot of books, and had to write them so awfully fast, that he had not time to consider exactly what it was he was writing. However, he lectured on philosophy at the Berne University. And in one of the books by this Professor of Philosophy at Berne, this statement occurs:—A civilisation can only be evolved in the temperate zone; for at the North Pole it cannot be evolved, there it would be frozen up; nor could it be evolved at the South Pole, for there the opposite would occur, it would be burnt up! That is actually the fact. A regular Professor of Philosophy did once write in a book that it is cold at the North Pole and hot at the South Pole, because he was writing so fast that he had no time to consider what he was writing.

Well, that excellent Brentano's blunders in political economy are not quite so readily perceived; but at bottom they proceed from just the same surface view of things, from which so much in Europe has proceeded. People take for granted what already exists, and starting from this, proceed to build up their whole system of concepts just on what exists already. That is what they learn from natural science, from the natural science methods. This is how the science institutes do it; and in our day,—the age when people set no store by authority and take nothing on faith, (of course not!)—that is what they obediently copy. For nowadays, if a man is an Authority, that is sufficient reason for what he says being true,—not a reason for turning to his truth because one sees it to be true, but because he is an Authority. And people regard economic facts, too, in this way. They regard economic facts as being all exactly on a par with one another. Whereas, as a matter of fact, they are made up of mixed elements, each of which requires individual consideration.

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That is a thing that one would so like to tell the people of the present day; for people of the present day suffer under a poverty of concepts that has grown positively alarming. This poverty of concepts is really such that anyone who has got any feeling for ideas finds to-day that quite a small number of ideas dominate our spiritual life, and they meet him at every turn. If anyone is hunting for ideas, this is what he finds; he takes up a work on Physics; it contains a certain limited number of ideas. Next, he studies, say, a work on Geology; there he finds fresh facts, but precisely the same ideas. Then he studies a biological work; there he finds fresh facts, but the same ideas. He reads a book on Psychology, dealing with the life of the soul. There he finds more facts, which really only consist of words, for they only know the soul really as a collection of words. When they talk of the will, there is a word there; but of the actual will itself they know nothing. When they talk of Thought they know nothing of real thinking; for people still only think in words. Nor do they know anything of feeling. The whole field of Psychology is to-day just a game of words, in which words are shaken up together in every conceivable kind of way. Just as the bits in a kaleidoscope combine into all sorts of different patterns, so it is with our concepts. They are jumbled up together into various sciences; but the total number of ideas is quite a small one, and keeps meeting one again and again. These ideas are forcibly fitted on to the facts. And people have no desire to find the concepts that fit the facts, to examine into the ideas that fit the facts. People simply do not notice things.

In a certain town in Central Europe, not long ago, there was a conference of Radical Socialists. These Radical Socialists were engaged in planning out a form of society suitable for adoption in Europe. The form of society as there planned by them was almost identical with what you can read in a collection of articles that appeared in the “Basler Vorwärts” of this week,—a series of articles in the Basel “Vorwärts,” putting forward in outline a scheme of society almost identical with what was thought out some time back in a Mid-European town. And what is the special feature of this scheme of society as planned out there? People think it very clever, of course. They think that it cannot be improved on.

But it is what it is, solely for the reason that it was drawn up by men who, as a matter of fact, had never really had anything to do with industrial and economic life, who had never acquired any practical acquaintance with the real sources and mainsprings of industrial and economic life. It was a scheme invented by men who have taken an active part in the political life of recent years. Well, you know what taking an active part in the political life of recent years means,—one was either elector or elected; one was elected either -in the first ballot, or in the second ballot. Say that one did not succeed in getting elected in the first ballot. Well, one had raised those huge sums of money, of course, subscriptions had been collected, and the huge sum raised, in order that one might have enough voters to get elected. The money was all spent; one had vented a terrible lot of abuse on the rival candidate the fellow was a fool, a knave and a cheat, If nothing worse. And came the second ballot. So far, no one had got an absolute majority, and now it was a question of electing one of those who had had proportional majorities. Now there was a change in the proceedings. Now, one-third of the election money was returned by one's opponent,—the same who was a fool, knave, cheat, etc. One accepted the returned money, and all of a sudden one's speeches took a different tone; there is nothing for it, one said, but to elect the man (the man who before was a knave, fool, cheat, etc),—he will have to be elected. After all, one had got back a third of the election money, and, inspired by this return of a third of the election money, one was gradually converted into his active supporter. For, after all, one of the two must be elected; the other man had no chance; all that could be done was to save a third of the election expenses.

So they had taken an active part in political life. So, too, no doubt, they had had a voice in the political administrations, but they had no notion, not the remotest, vaguest notion, of industrial and economic life. They simply took the political ideas they had acquired,—ideas that had, of course, become much corrupted, but still they were political ideas of a sort,—and they tried now •; to fit them on to industrial and economic life. And accordingly, if these ideas were put into effect, one would get an industrial and economic life organised on purely political lines. Industrial economic organisation has already become confounded with political organisation,—so impossible has it become for people to keep apart things that have become so welded, so wedged together. But the time has come when it is urgently necessary to carry into many, many places an insight into what really exists. And that is a thing for which people to-day show no zeal.

There is nothing to be expected from the influence of a civilisation which never contemplates external reality,—which wants to bind external reality to a couple of hard and fast concepts; nor need one hope with this little set of concepts to draw near to that true reality which is the business of anthroposophical science to discover. For it is this true reality that the spiritual science of Anthroposophy has to seek and find. Therefore, the spiritual science of Anthroposophy must not be taken after the pattern of what people were often pleased to call “religious persuasions.”

That, you see was what one suffered from so terribly in the course of the old Theosophic movement. What more was the old Theosophic movement than just that people wanted a sort of select religion? It consisted in no new impulse proceeding from the civilisation of Europe itself. It consisted merely in emotions, which were to be had out of the old religious element just as well. Only people had grown tired of these old religious concepts and ideas and feelings, and so had taken up something else. But the same atmosphere pervaded it as pervaded the old persuasion. They wanted to feel good, with an evangelical sort of goodness if they had been evangelicals, or with a catholic kind of goodness if they had been Catholics; but they did not at bottom want the thing really needed, namely, an actual new religious impulse along with other impulses, because the life of the European peoples has grown up habituated to an alien religious impulse, that of Asia. That is the point. And until those things are organically interwoven that were inorganically intermixed,—till then, European civilisation will not rise again. It cannot be taken too seriously; it must pervade everything that is going to live in science, in economic, in religion, in political life.

We will speak more of this, then, tomorrow. To-morrow the eurhythmic performance takes place here at 5 o'clock. Then, after the necessary interval, that is, I take It, about half past seven tomorrow, there will be the lecture.

We have spoken at length about the relationship between a humanistic worldview and a social approach to life. We are discussing these matters because it is necessary today, from various points of view, to recognize how a thorough recovery of our lives and a truly fruitful development towards the future are only possible if spiritual-scientific views and ideas enter into the way people think and imagine.

Besides what I said recently about looking back on life, there is something else that applies to this life review. I have drawn your attention to the fact that when a person looks back on his life, he should actually be aware that he is only aware of discontinuous elements of his life with his ordinary consciousness, and that between these discontinuous links, which man looks back on, are the states of sleep, which actually fall away, with regard to which man, in terms of his retrospective view, even indulges in a certain delusion. He assumes that life is continuous; but it is not continuous. This life is such that it only shows us fragmented episodes. But from the spiritual-scientific background one should be clear about the fact that what is not perceived from the review of life is nevertheless an experience, just as much an experience as that which is incorporated into ordinary consciousness.

Now, the experiences that the human soul always undergoes between falling asleep and waking up are not easy to describe, because the person has to free themselves from a number of things that are part of their usual perception of consciousness if they are to have any idea at all of the experiences that take place between falling asleep and waking up.

We live for ordinary life in space and time. When we are completely asleep – from the point of view of ordinary consciousness, speaking now – then it is the case that we live neither in ordinary time nor in ordinary space. When we recall what happens to us in the time between falling asleep and waking up, the memory itself is a kind of shadow image or, as they say, a projection of the experience during sleep into the space and time of waking day life.

But if you want to take a closer look at these conditions, then you must also bear in mind that the state of sleep is not merely rest in relation to the waking state. It is precisely in this respect that one of the cases arises in which people judge more out of preconceived ideas than out of real observation. One might ask, if one calls the ordinary waking life the normal state of man: When does rest occur? Rest actually only exists in two points, at the moment of falling asleep and at the moment of waking up. In a sense, falling asleep and waking up are zero compared to the waking state during the day. But the state of sleep is not zero; the state of sleep is the opposite. We must here resort to the favorite comparison from arithmetic. You may, for instance, have some property, say fifty francs; then you have something. When have you nothing? Well, just when you have nothing. But if you owe fifty francs, then you have less than nothing, then you have the negative. Thus, in relation to waking, nothingness is falling asleep and waking up; in relation to the ordinary waking state, the state of sleep itself is the negative. For while we sleep, processes opposite to those of waking occur, processes of a completely different kind, processes that, above all, in their reality, are not subject to the laws of space and time like the processes of waking daytime life.

But, as you may have already suspected from my previous lecture, it is actually only in this state of sleep that our real self is truly in its element. The self certainly lives in our will, but even there it sleeps, as we know. The real self does not enter into our ordinary thought life. We would not even be aware of the real self if we did not perceive it as a kind of negative. And when we look back on our experiences, we do not say to ourselves: We have experienced days and nights – but we only look back on the days. And instead of saying: We look back on the nights – we say: “I” – we feel, we perceive ourselves as I.

People must gradually come to understand such truths, otherwise they will be crushed by the purely scientific world view, which has indeed taken hold of all other life, of all other views of life, in the majority of modern people. We will only be able to know ourselves completely as human beings if we say to ourselves at every moment of our lives: You are not only a human being in flesh and blood who has a consciousness, as is familiar to most people now living, but you are a human being who has only slipped out of his body from the moment he falls asleep until he wakes up. But then you live under completely different circumstances than in ordinary waking life, and only then, between falling asleep and waking up, is your ego in its actual element; there it can unfold, there it is what it can lay claim to: to be substantial. During daytime wakefulness, our ego is present only in our volition. In thinking, in imagining and even in a large part of feeling, of sensing, only images of the ego are present.

Therefore, it is a great mistake when some philosophers claim that there is a reality in what a person addresses as his or her self. Only when a person awakens in sleep in higher consciousness would he become aware of his real self. Or if he were to see through what the process of the will is, then he would experience his real self in willing.

But these things must actually pass over into the human being's intuitive perception, into his feeling, if they are to play the right role in life. Man must, so to speak, be able to say to himself: You are a being who, with his ordinary conception of the world, actually perceives only one half of it; you are embedded with the other half of this being, continually in supersensible experiences, which you cannot perceive with your ordinary consciousness alone. A certain reverence for the creative principles behind man can only be attained by man in the right way, when he can connect with the supersensible in this way. Therefore, in a materialistic age like ours, not only will the view of the supersensible fade away, but in such an age reverence for the creative principles of the world will also fade away. Respect will have vanished altogether from human hearts. There is little respect and few feelings in the present time that can truly uplift the soul to the supersensible! And much of the sentiment that people try to preserve is nothing more than a certain sentimentality, and sentimentality is at the same time also untrue, sentimentality is never completely true.

When one – and I must mention this again on this occasion – takes such things into one's consciousness, intellectually and emotionally, then the fact that human and world life has something of the character of a great mystery comes before one's soul's eye. And without this view, that life and the order of the world are a mystery, real progress in the development of humanity cannot really be imagined. Epochs such as our own, in which no one really wants to believe that life contains secrets, can basically only be episodes. They can serve to cut people off from their own origins for a while, and then, precisely through the reaction against this cutting off, they can penetrate all the more to a real feeling for the mystery of life. But this mystery of life can reveal itself to man neither out of sentimentality nor out of abstraction. It can only reveal itself when man is inclined to enter concretely into the facts of the supersensible world. And it will be something of a beginning of such an engagement with supersensible facts if one can really develop a kind of sacred feeling when entering into the state of sleep and can develop a sacred feeling with regard to looking back into this state of sleep, in which one, one may, without actually speaking figuratively, characterize it in this way: was in the dwellings of the gods.

Ultimately, we must realize how far removed our present-day view of life is from this idea, how thoughtlessly the present human race sees this other side of life. But how can we see through what lies beyond birth and death if we cannot see through what lies beyond falling asleep and waking up? For that which lies in man beyond birth and death is also there between birth and death; only between birth and death it is hidden behind the physical shell. But if there were less egotistical religiosity and more altruistic religiosity - I have already spoken of this - then in what man lives through from birth on, the continuation of prenatal life or life before conception would be seen in the spiritual world. But then the phenomena in human life would appear to us as miracles, and we would constantly have the need to unravel them. We would have the longing to see the revelation of that which is formed, embodied from supersensible worlds into the sensible world, through human evolution. And basically, it is already the case today that we can only understand the after-death life in the right way if we look at the prenatal life.

You see, there are secrets of life. A number of secrets of life must be revealed in our time because of the developmental demands of humanity. A human being cannot become aware of their full humanity if they do not broaden their view of themselves to include prenatal and post-mortem life. For we only know part of our being if we do not allow the prenatal and post-mortem to reveal themselves to us in this physical existence. Even today it is still extraordinarily difficult to speak of these things to people who have not been introduced to them through anthroposophy, because either there is the utmost interest in these things, in which case the truth is not allowed to come among people, or there is a lack of proper understanding. You only need to look around in life, then you will find that the usual world views today pay very, very little attention to prenatal life. They care about the afterlife out of selfishness, because they demand not to perish with their physical body. And the religious denominations count on this selfishness by basically only speaking of the afterlife, not of the prenatal life.

But the matter is not just that, but it is still difficult today to talk about these things because it is a dogma of the Catholic Church not to believe in prenatal life, a dogma that other Christian denominations have also adopted. So that pretty much most Christian denominations today consider it heresy to speak of prenatal life. But it is something that reaches extraordinarily deep into the spiritual development of humanity when one dogmatically forbids looking at prenatal life. It is indeed difficult to imagine — and here I am not speaking of conscious things, but rather of unconscious ones in the development of humanity — that anything could succeed more in lulling man into illusions about his actual being than withholding from him views about prenatal life. For the whole view of man is falsified by the fact that people are deceived into believing that the mere fact of being born of father and mother is the only reason man is placed on earth at all. By withholding man's insight into prenatal life, the church has created an enormous means of exerting power. Therefore the church as such will fight in the most terrible way against all those teachings that dwell on prenatal life. The church will not tolerate that. There should be no illusions about that; but nor should there be any illusion that life simply cannot be understood if no consideration is given to prenatal life.

But something will follow from this that you should really take into account deeply and thoroughly. Consider this: it was in the interest of the church creeds to withhold important information about themselves from people. The church creeds have made it their mission to withhold the most important truths about themselves from people. These church creeds have thus found their means to envelop people in dullness, in illusion. And today it is necessary not to succumb to any illusions on this point, not to compromise out of any kind of indulgence with all kinds of church dogmas. There is no compromising on this. And it should be noted that it is of no avail to assert somewhere: Anthroposophy is concerned with the Christ, it is not atheistic, it is not pantheistic either, and so on. This will never help you, for the church creeds will not be annoyed that you do not concern yourself with the Christ; they do not care much about that, but they will be annoyed precisely because you do concern yourself with the Christ. For it matters to them that they have the monopoly on saying anything about Christ. In these matters one must not practice inner indulgence, otherwise one will always be tempted to shroud the most important things in life in twilight and fog and illusion. Humanity today has a need to approach spiritual knowledge. But dogmatic church creeds are the ones that are most opposed to spiritual knowledge, especially those dogmatic church creeds that have gradually developed in the West. The Church as such cannot actually be hostile to spiritual knowledge; that is quite impossible, because the Church as such should actually only be concerned with the feelings of man, with ceremonies, with worship, but not with the life of thought. The educated Oriental does not understand the Western church creeds at all, because the educated Oriental knows exactly: he is bound to the external cult; it is his duty to devote himself to the ceremonies to which he devotes himself in his confession. He can think whatever he wants. In the Oriental confession one still knows something of freedom of thought. This freedom of thought has been completely lost to Europeans. They have been educated in the bondage of thought, especially since the 8th or 9th century AD. That is why it is so difficult for people of Western culture to understand the things I mentioned the other day: that it is easy to prove any opinion. You can prove one opinion and you can prove its opposite. Because the fact that something can be proved is no proof of the truth of what is asserted. To arrive at the truth, one must go into much deeper layers of experience than those in which our usual proofs lie. But certain church creeds have not wanted to bring experience to the surface; therefore they have separated people from such truths as these: There you stand, O human being! As your organism develops from infancy, what you have lived through in prenatal life gradually develops within you.

And what, in particular, develops mainly from prenatal life in the individual human life between birth and death?

Now, we distinguish between an individual life and a social life in a human being. If you do not keep these two poles of human experience separate, you cannot arrive at any concept of the human being at all: individual life – that which we have, so to speak, as our most personal sense of ownership every day, in every hour; social life – that which we could not have if we did not constantly exchange ideas and engage in other interactions with other people. The individual and the social play into human life. Everything that is individual in us is basically the after-effect of prenatal life. Everything we develop in our social life is the germ of our after-death life. We have even seen recently that it is the germ of karma. So we can say: there is the individual and the social in man. The individual is the after-effect of the prenatal life. The social is the germ of the after-death life.

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The first part of this truth, that the individual is, so to speak, the after-effect of prenatal life, can be seen particularly clearly by studying people with special talents. Let us say, because it is good to look at the root of the matter in such cases, that we study human genius. Where does the power of genius come from? Man brings the genius into this life through his birth. It is always the result of pre-birth life. And since, understandably, pre-birth life is particularly evident in childhood — later, a person adapts to life between birth and death, but in childhood everything that a person experienced before birth comes out — that is why, in the case of genius, the childlike manifests itself throughout life. It is virtually the characteristic of genius to retain the childlike throughout life. And it is even part of genius to retain youthfulness and childlikeness until the very last days, because all genius is connected with prenatal life. But not only genius, all talents, everything that makes a person an individuality is connected with prenatal life. Therefore, if you give people the dogma that there is no prenatal life, that there is no preexistence, what are you implicitly doing with it? You are spreading the doctrine that there is no reason for special individual talents. — You know that the actual church creeds, when they are completely sincere and honest, profess that there are no reasons for personal talents. It is not right to deny personal talents themselves; but if you deny their reasons, then you can consider personal talents to be quite meaningless.

This is connected with the fact that an education of European humanity has emerged from the church confessions, as they have prevailed for centuries, which has ultimately led to the modern levelling of people. What are people's individual talents today? And what would individual talents be if the usual socialist doctrine were implemented? In these matters, it is less important to look at the outward name of a thing than at the inner connections. A person who is a Catholic believer in dogma on the one hand and a hater of social-democratic teachings on the other is subject to a very strange inconsistency. He is as inconsistent as someone who says: I met a little boy in 1875, I was very fond of him then, and I am still very fond of him today. But now someone says to him: But look, the little boy of 1875 has become the guy who is now standing in front of you as a Social Democrat. Yes, so the answer goes, I still like the little boy of 1875 in his life back then, but I don't like, I hate, the man he has become. But social democracy grew out of Catholicism! Catholicism is just the little boy who has grown into social democracy. The latter does not want to admit it, nor does the former want to admit it, but only because people do not want to see any liveliness in the external social sphere, but only want to see something made of papier-mâché. When you make something out of papier-mâché, it remains stiff and keeps its form as long as it lasts; but that which is in the social life grows and lives and can also be preserved. But here one must distinguish between 'deception and reality. You see, you distinguish between deception and reality when you, for example, come up with the following idea. 8th century: Catholicism; 20th century: From the real Catholicism of the 8th century, social democracy has emerged! And what is present as Catholicism alongside it is not the real Catholicism of the 8th century, but its imitation, counterfeit Catholicism; for real Catholicism has since grown into social democracy.

This is not generally recognized, not because people are unwilling to face reality, but because they create illusions and deceptions to shield themselves from reality. And it is easy for them to do so. For one simply gives the same name to what has long since ceased to be itself. But if today what is represented in Europe from Rome - I have to describe it - is given the name Catholicism in the same sense as what was represented in the 8th century from Rome, it is just the same as if I were to say of a sixty-year-old man: “He's just the eight-year-old lad!” Once upon a time he was an eight-year-old lad, but today he is no longer an eight-year-old lad.

I am drawing your attention here to something that needs to be considered because social life, too, may be seen as something alive and not as something inanimate and dead. And until such things are seen through, present-day humanity will not rise to an understanding of real social life. The social life has its roots in spheres that we today no longer grasp with our externalized names in any language, at best in the oriental languages, a little in the European languages, least of all in English or American, which is of course very far removed from reality. So our languages are obstacles to understanding the social. Therefore, humanity will only advance in its understanding of the social if it emancipates itself from mere linguistic understanding. But today, anything that goes beyond mere linguistic understanding is very much condemned. And what is most often found today is that when something is to be explained, some kind of word explanation is presented first. But it does not matter what you call a thing, what word you use for it; the important thing is to lead people to the thing and not to the word. So, above all, we must overcome the bondage of languages if we want to advance to social understanding. But the bondage of languages will only be overcome if the greatest prejudices of our time are overcome. During the years of terror that we have gone through, the cry rang out throughout the world: Freedom to the individual nations! — and the smallest nations today want to create their own social structures. A passion, a paroxysm of nationalism has come over humanity, and this is just as damaging to the social life of the earth as materialism is to the life of thought. And just as man must work his way out of materialism to freedom and spirituality, so must humanity work its way out of all nationalism, in whatever form it may appear, to universal humanity. Without this, no progress can be made.

However, we will not find the possibility in languages of completely getting out of nationalism if these languages do not draw on deeper forms of expression for the spiritual. You see, I would like to conclude these reflections more or less with an image. If you reflect on this image, which I will use, you will be able to come up with many things that may be important for your understanding of the present time. Look at any piece of writing today. These little devils standing on the white paper are called letters, which you put next to each other. They have grotesque forms and in their juxtaposition they then signify the sounds of our languages. This goes back to other more expressive forms of writing. And if we trace this back very far, we come to the forms of writing, let us say, as the Egyptians had them, or what the original Sanskrit was like, which more or less developed entirely from the snake character in its forms. The Sanskrit signs are transformed snake forms with all kinds of things attached to them. The Egyptian forms of writing were still painted, drawn forms of writing, were still pictures, and in their oldest times were even the imagination of that which was depicted. The writing was directly out of the spiritual. Then writing became more and more abstract until it became what was more or less bad enough: our ordinary writing, which is only connected to what it represents by learning its forms.

Then came something even more terrible, shorthand, which is now the deathblow to the whole system that developed out of ancient pictographic writing. This downward development must give way to an upward one; we must return to a development that leads us out of all that we have been driven into, especially with writing. And with that an attempt was made to make a beginning. Here on this hill at Dornach it stands. However much is lacking in the Dornach building, however much is imperfect, it is something in its forms that expresses in a contemporary way the supersensible essence to which the human being is meant to aspire today. I would like to say that it is also meant as a world hieroglyph. If you really study its individual forms, you will be able to read much more in them than you can absorb from descriptions of the spiritual. This is at least the intention. The intention is to realize a world scripture in it. Writing emerged from art, and writing must return to art. It must go beyond symbolism, allow the spiritual within itself to live directly, by becoming a hieroglyph again in a new way.

What is written here on this hill will only be properly understood if one says to oneself: There are many demands of humanity in the present time that should have an answer. Basically, the language of today is not sufficient to provide an answer. Such an answer is attempted with the forms of this building. Much in it is imperfect; but the attempt at such an answer has been made through this building. And if one looks at it from this point of view, then one will look at it in the right way.

This is what I wanted to add to the previous reflections.

You will have observed from our various studies that a connection exists, even though an inner connection, between a principal being inhabiting a planetary body at a certain period and this celestial body itself. One can consider this link between the human being and all that belongs to the whole earth from most varied aspects. We will study the subject today from a single aspect and thence again form ideas about the actual being of man.

We know, of course, that man goes through his earthly life in successive incarnations, and that these bring him into a more intimate relation with the actual planet Earth than the periods which lie between death and a new birth. The periods that man lives through between death and a new birth represent for him more of a spiritual existence; at such times, he is more withdrawn from the Earth itself than in the time between birth and death.

To be more withdrawn from the Earth or to be more closely connected with it, means, however, from time to time to stand in a certain relationship to other beings. For what we call the regions of the world outwardly perceptible to the senses is, after all, only the expression for certain connections between spiritual beings. Though our Earth may look to physical sight what the geologists imagine, may seem to be only a mineral mass surrounded by a sheath of air, yet in the last resort that is only the outer semblance. What actually appears as this mineral mass is nevertheless the bodily nature of certain spiritual beings. And again what we behold beyond the Earth, shining down as the world of stars, that too as we see it is only the outer sense expression for a certain association of Spiritual Beings, of Hierarchies. It is by virtue of the solid Earth, the firm ground upon which we live between birth and death, this physical external earth, it is through this that in the main we develop our life between birth and death. Through all that shines down to us from cosmic space, that sparkles to us as the star-world and that seems to concern us so little, with this we have a greater connection between death and a new birth. It is more than a picture, it is a reality of deepest significance if one says: Man descends from star- worlds to physical birth that he may pass through his existence between birth and death. We must not think, however, that the appearance of the universe which we have here on earth when we talk of the star-world is the same as what meets our spiritual vision in the period between death and a new birth. That which appears externally to man living upon earth as the star-world is then displayed in its inner being, its spirit-nature. There we have to do with the inner nature of what is outer nature for our earthly existence here. In fact we must say to ourselves: Whether we look down to the earth or up to the cosmos, what meets our sense-perception is always but a kind of illusory picture, and we only reach the truth if we go back to the Beings who underlie this semblance with the different grades of cosmic self-consciousness.

Thus it is semblance, illusion, whether one looks upwards or down: the truth, the essentiality, lies behind the semblance. That illusion meets us above end beneath is connected with the fact that our life between birth and death, on the one hand, and between death and a new birth, on the other hand, is always threatened with the possibility of leaving the path of full humanity. Here on earth between birth and death we can become too closely related to the earth, can unfold an urge to find too great an affinity with the earthly powers. And likewise between death and a new birth we can develop an urge to become too closely allied to the cosmic powers outside the earth. For here on earth we stand too near the external symbolic expression, to what is clothed in physical materiality, we stand here, as it were, estranged from the inner spirituality. When we evolve between death and a new birth we stand fully within the spirituality, we live with it, and again we are threatened with the possibility of being swallowed up, of being dissolved in it. Whereas here on earth we are exposed to the threat of growing hardened in physical existence, between death and a new birth we are exposed to the possibility of drowning in spiritual existence.

These two possibilities are due to the fact that besides those powers that are meant when speaking of the normal orders of the Hierarchies, other beings are also in existence. Just as the elemental beings are to be found in the three kingdoms of nature, just as man exists, as the nearer hierarchies exist of whom a genuine spiritual science says that they are there “according to their cosmic time,” so there exist other beings, who, as it were, unfold their nature at the wrong time. They are the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings of whom we have often spoken. You will have already realised that the Luciferic beings are essentially those who as they now present themselves should have lived in an earlier cosmic epoch. On the other hand, the Ahrimanic beings as they now present themselves should live in a later cosmic epoch. Retarded cosmic beings are the Luciferic beings, premature cosmic beings are the Ahrimanic beings. The Luciferic beings disdained to take part with others in the age that was appointed to them; they are retarded, because they scorned to take full part in evolution. When they manifest themselves today, therefore, they are revealed as having stayed behind at earlier stages of existence.

The Ahrimanic beings cannot, so to say, wait till a later age in cosmic evolution to develop the qualities implanted in them. They want to forestall the time. And so they harden in their present existence and reveal themselves to us now in the form they should reach only in a later development of cosmic life.

When we look out into cosmic space and behold the totality of the stars—what is this sight? Why do we have this view? We have this special sight, the appearance of the Milky Way, the appearance of the rest of the star-strewn heavens, because it is the manifestation of the Luciferic nature of the world. All that surrounds us shining and radiating is the manifestation of the Luciferic nature of the world, it appears as it does because it has remained behind at an earlier stage of its existence. And when we walk over the solid ground of the earth it is hard and solid because conglomerated within it are the Ahrimanic beings, beings which should only possess at a later time of their evolution the stage that they now provide for themselves artificially.

Thus it is possible that if we surrender ourselves to the sense world by gazing at the aspect of the sky, we make ourselves more and more Luciferic. When in the life between birth and death we have this inclination to gaze upon the heaven, this means nothing actually immediate and direct; it means a sort of instinct that has remained in us from the time before birth or conception when we were in the spiritual world and lived with the stars. We have entered then into too close a relationship with the cosmic worlds and we have retained this inclination—though indeed to surrender oneself to gazing at the physical star-world is not a particularly noticeable tendency of mankind. We develop this tendency when through our karma—which we always draw to us between birth and death—we have too deeply slept away the time between death and a new birth, when we have developed too little inclination to live there in full consciousness.

If we immerse ourselves in the earthly life, on the other hand, that is directly developed here between birth and death. That is the actual Ahrimanic possibility in man's life. The Luciferic possibility is connected with what we acquire through our relationship to the illusory spirit-world; the Ahrimanic relationship which we form is due to our developing too great an inclination between birth and death towards the surrounding physical external world.

If we grow too strongly into a connection with the earth, so strongly that we never turn our thoughts to the super-sensible that lies beyond the merely terrestrial, then the Ahrimanic affinity appears in us.

Now all this has a deeper significance for the whole development of man's being. If between death and a new birth we are swallowed up, as it were, in the spiritual world and then later do not find the right balance between the spiritual and the material world, evolving with too strong an affinity to the extra-earthly, we can gradually come to an earth existence—can come even in the next incarnation to an existence in which we cannot grow old. Such things are now, in this age, reaching a critical point. That is the one possibility that confronts us as a danger—the not being able to age. We can be reborn and the Luciferic powers con hold us back at the stage of childhood, they can condemn us in some way not to become mature. Those people who give themselves up all too easily to an ardent enthusiasm, a nebulous mysticism, who have a disinclination for severely contoured thinking and scorn to form clear concepts of the world, those people, that is to say, who scorn to develop inner activity of soul and go through life more or less in dream—they are exposing themselves to the danger in their next incarnation of not being able to grow old, of remaining childish in the bad sense of the word. It is a Luciferic attack that will break into humanity in this way.

Such human beings would then not descend rightly into earthly life in the next incarnation, they would not leave the spiritual world sufficiently in order to enter earthly life. The Luciferic powers, who at one time formed a connection with our earth, endeavour to unfold instincts in man that would make his earthly evolution come to a stage where men remain children, where they do not grow old. The Luciferic powers would like to bring about a condition where no aged people walked about on earth but only those who spent their life in a sort of illusory youth. In this way, the Luciferic powers would gradually bring the earth planet to the point of becoming one body with one common soul, in which the separate souls, so to say, were swimming. A common soul-nature of the earth, and a common bodily-nature of the earth, that is Lucifer's aim for humanity's evolution. He would make of the earth a great organic being with a common soul in which the single souls would lose their individuality,

I have often explained that the course of earthly evolution does not depend on the mineral, plant, animal kingdoms, which are all, in fact, waste products of evolution, but on what takes place within the boundary of the human skin. The evolutionary forces of our planet lie within the organisation of man. If you remember this you will understand that what finally becomes of the earth cannot be learnt by forming physical concepts, such concepts have only a narrow, limited interest for us. In order to realise what will become of the earth we must know the human being itself. But the human being can enter into a union, a relation of forces with the Luciferic power that has united itself with the earth, and then the earth can carry too few individualised beings; it can become a collective being with a common soul-nature. That is what the Luciferic powers are striving for. If you take the picture that many nebulous mystics describe ns a desirable future state, where they want to merge into the ALL, to vanish in some kind of pantheistic Whole, you will be able to see how this Luciferic tendency is already living in many human souls.

On the other hand, the Ahrimanic beings have also entered into a connection with our earth. They have the opposite tendency. They act above all through the forces that drew our organism, into itself between birth and death, that permeate our organism through and through with spirituality, that is, make us more and more intellectual, imbue us increasingly with reasoning and intelligence. Our waking intelligence depends on the connection of the soul with the physical body, and when this is exaggerated and becomes too strong, then we become too similar to physical existence and likewise lose the balance. The inclination then arises which hinders man in future from alternating in the right way between earthly life and the spiritual life that lies between death and a new birth.

That is the goal for which Ahriman strives; he would hold men back in the coming earthly age from passing in the right way through earthly life and super-earthly life. Ahriman wishes to hold man back from going through future incarnations. He would like even now, in this incarnation, to cause man to live through everything that he can live through on earth. But that can only be done intellectually, one cannot do that in full humanity. It is, however, possible for man to become so clever that in his cleverness he can conceive of all that still may be on earth. In fact, many men have just such an ideal, that is, to form an intellectual concept of all that may yet come about on earth, But one cannot acquire the experiences that are still to be passed through in future lives. In this life, one can only acquire the pictures, the intellectual pictures, and these then become hardened in the physical body. And then man reaches a profound disinclination to go through future incarnations. He positively sees a sort of blessedness in not wanting to appear on earth again.

I have often pointed out that oriental culture has fallen into decadence and Ahriman is particularly able to create this deviation in the decadent East. While the Orientals are inwardly under the influence of Lucifer, Ahriman can approach their nature and implant in them the inclination in a definite incarnation to wish to have done with earth existence and not appear again in a physical body. The Ahrimanic approach is the more easily accomplished since the Oriental is already under the power of Lucifer. It can then even be placed before men as an ideal by certain teachers, who are in the service of Ahriman, that in a certain incarnation, before the earth itself has reached its goal, they should have finished with physical existence on earth.

Certain theosophical teachings have slavishly borrowed various things from the modern decadent Orient. Among these tenets appears one which has never in any way been taken over into our anthroposophical conception, namely, that it even denotes a special grade of perfection for a human being to appear no more in an earthly life. That is an Ahrimanic impulse and one in fact, that can also bring about something of a terrible nature. The earth could reach the point not, as desired by Lucifer of becoming a great unitary organisation with a unitary soul-nature, but of becoming over-individualised. Men would someday reach a stage of Ahrimanic development where they would. certainly die, but the terrible part would be that, after they had died, they would become as like the earth as possible, would continue to cling to the earth, so that the earth itself would become merely an expression of separate individual human beings. The earth would become a sort of colony of the single individual human souls.

This is what Ahriman strives to do with the earth: to make it entirely an expression of intellectuality, to intellectualise it completely. It is absolutely essential for mankind to realise today that earthly destiny depends on man's own will. The Earth will become what the human being makes of it. It will not be what physical forces make of it. These physical forces will die out and have no significance for the Earth's future. The Earth will be what man makes of it.

We are living in a decisive hour of earthly evolution in which humanity can choose one of three paths. One can live in nebulous mysticism, in dreaming, in an infatuation for things of the physical, senses, that is, in going along in a muse—for life in material nature is indeed only musing and brooding—in a sleep condition in which one passes through life without clear ideas. That is one of the tendencies to which man may incline.

A second tendency would be for men to permeate themselves entirely with intellect and intelligence, to gather together as it were everything that intellect can gather together, to scorn all that poetry and phantasy can spread over earthly existence, to turn everywhere to the mechanical and to dried-up pedantry. Men stand today before the decision either to become spiritual voluptuaries entirely sunk in their own existence—for whether one submerges in one's own existence through nebulous mysticism or material desolation is ultimately only two sides of the same thing—or else to consider everything prosaically, to bring everything into a routine scheme, to classify and correlate everything. Those are two of the possibilities.

The third possibility is to seek for the balance, the equilibrium between the two. One cannot speak of the equilibrium in so definite a way as of the two extremes. One must strive for equilibrium by not being too strongly attracted by either, but pass through the two in a proper balance of life, letting the one be regulated and ordered by the other.

This cosmic hour of decision stands before the human soul today. Man can decide to follow the Luciferic temptation and not let the earth complete its evolution, to let the earth resemble the Old Moon, or rather make it a caricature of the Old Moon, a great organism with an individualised dreamy soul, in which the human beings are contained as in a common Nirvana. Or man can become over-intellectualised, give up the common possession of the earth, desire to have nothing in common, but ossify the body and make it sclerotic by permeating it with too much intellect. Man can decide whether to make the body a sponge through nebulous mysticism and sensuality, or make it a stone through over-intellectuality, over-self-sufficiency. And modern humanity looks as if it did not desire the balance between the two alternatives, but wanted the one or the other.

We see on the one hand an ever-increasing expansion of the Western instincts which aim at intellectuality, self-sufficiency, pedantry, and form opinions in such a way that intellectualism is pressed too strongly into the body. On the other hand, we see the danger threaten from the East that men burn up and consume the body. We see it in the conceptions of the decadent Orient and we see it—only another aspect—in the frightful social developments arising in Eastern Europe. The hour of decision has already arrived. Mankind must decide today to find the equilibrium. And the actual task set before man can only be recognised from the depths of spiritual-scientific knowledge. One must study those ideas that can show what possibilities of evolution lie before mankind in two directions, On the one hand we have the merging in Nirvana which has in fact become a “sacred doctrine of the Orient”—though far removed from the ancient conception of Nirvana which meant a striving for equilibrium out of the old clairvoyance. The Nirvana as now conceived by the decadent Oriental is the world of Lucifer. On the other hand, what the modern Western civilisation is striving for—in so far as it does not fill itself with the knowledge of Spiritual Science—is the mechanising of the world, a continuous striving to make the processes of human existence mechanical. Ahrimanising on the one hand—Luciferising on the other hand.

I described lately from a certain aspect the chaotic, unorientated life of recent times and if this should continue then undoubtedly humanity would become Ahrimanised. This process can only be checked if the conception of the spiritual world is brought into the over-intellectual life, the over-individualised human existence completely saturated with egoism. This concept of the spiritual world is needed everywhere, but above all it is necessary for a spiritual impulse to enter the different sciences. Otherwise it will gradually come to the point where the various sciences rule mankind like some abstract authority. Humanity will become totally Ahrimanised by these different sciences which encircle man with authoritative power. It is especially important at the present day when social life problems are so thrusting at human evolution to lift up the gaze to the connection of man with his planetary life.

Within the old religious Faiths man's conception of this connection with the spiritual world is outworn and stunted. It is stunted to a merely abstract intellectual acknowledgment as, for instance, the evangelical Confession threatens to become, or stunted to an external power-principle as the Roman Faith. Those are in fact only other expressions for what is drawing near man to seduce him. It is essential, however, for man to find his inner orientation and to acquire an inner impulse so that the view may be unimpeded of what links him to his planet and through his planet to the whole cosmos. Men must feel again that Geology is not knowledge of the earth. A colossal mineral mass on which are watery oceans and which is surrounded by air is not the earth, and what surrounds us as Milky Way and suns, that is not the universe, The universe is Ahrimanic beings beneath, Luciferic beings above, which appear through the outer sense-illusion, and Beings of the normal Hierarchies to whom man raises himself when through both sense-illusions he comes to the truth; for the actual Beings do not appear in the external sense-illusion, they only manifest themselves through it.

The man of today must recognise this: I can consider the earth. If I am able to interpret what appears on the earth below as the emanation of Spiritual Beings then I perceive what lives in Cherubim, Seraphim, Thrones. But if I am unable to form a spiritual picture of what lives on the earth, if I surrender myself to the illusion of its material appearance, then I remain geologist. I cannot swing myself up to geosophist, then my being becomes Ahrimanised. And if I gaze up to the star-worlds and only form concepts of what I see physically, then I make myself Luciferic. If I am able to read the Spirit in what appears to me in outer semblance. if I can say to myself: Yes, I behold stars, I behold a Milky Way and suns, they inform me of Kyriotetes, Exusiai, Dynamis—Spirits of Wisdom. Powers, Mights—then I find the equilibrium.

It is not a question of talking of cosmic beings as superior to earthly beings, the point is everywhere to penetrate the sense-appearance to the genuine essentiality, to that essentiality with which we as men are really connected. Sense-appearance of itself does not deceive us. If we interpret sense-appearance in the right way, then the Spiritual Beings are there, then we have them. Sense-appearance as such is not deceptive, it is our concept of it that can be deceptive, through our too close relationship with the earthly between birth and death on the one hand, through our too close relationship on the other hand with the extra-earthly while we dwell there between death and new birth.

If man confines himself to what has gradually formed within our civilisation he experiences hardly anything of such views. And our civilisation has totally forgotten that it was once different. People read today even with a certain eagerness what was written about Nature in the twelfth, thirteenth centuries but they do not read it with enough discernment. If they read with discernment they would realise that the time in which man thinks as he does now is only a few centuries old. They would see that people thought differently about things of the outer world in the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth centuries, even in the fourteenth century; that in the stone, in the earth, they did not see stone, earth, but the body of the divine-spiritual. And in the stars they certainly did not see what one sees today but the revelation of the divine-spiritual. It is only in recent centuries that man has merely a geology and a cosmology but not a geosophy and a cosmosophy! Under the cosmology he would become Luciferised, under the geology he would become Ahrimanised, unless he saved himself by finding the equilibrium through a geosophy and a cosmosophy, And, in fact, since man is born out of the whole universe all this together is needed to give Anthroposophy. Anthroposophy consists of these different “sophies,” cosmosophy, geosophy, and so on. We only understand man aright when we know how to bring him into a spiritual connection with the universe. Then we shall not look for him in a one-sided way in his relationship with light, levity, which would mean servitude to Lucifer, nor one-sidedly in his relationship with gravity, a servitude to the Ahrimanic powers, but endeavour to pour into his will the impulse to find the equilibrium between levity and gravity, between inclining to the earthly and inclining to the Luciferic. Man must reach this balance and he can do so only by again acquiring the super-sensible in addition to his sense-concepts.

Now, still something of a complete paradox: Bring before your soul what has just been said, and how man must know of it so that he can come to a decision in this world-age; assume that one must actually speak of a possible Ahrimanising and Luciferising of the world. Bring this before your soul as a weighty matter for humanity. Then take what you read today in popular literature, what reaches your mind from lecture rooms and other educational institutions, and observe the immense disparity, then you will see what is required if men are to come out of the present decadent life to what is of urgent importance. Serious work in spiritual fields is urgently necessary and this can only be accomplished if one resolves to take earnestly such ideas as we have again discussed today.

Tomorrow we will continue further.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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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.)

Countless numbers of human beings have felt the Festival of Easter to be something that is related on one side to the profoundest feelings of the human soul and on the other to very profound cosmic mysteries. Our attention is attracted to the connection of this festival with the mysteries of the universe by the fact that it is what is called a moveable feast and has to be regulated year by year according to those constellations of which we propose to speak more exactly during the next few days. When it is noted how all through the centuries religious customs and ceremonies having an intimate connection with humanity have been associated with the festival of Easter, we realise the very special value that has gradually come to be placed on it in the course of man's historical development.

From early Christian centuries—not indeed from the immediate foundation of Christianity, but from its early centuries—this has been a festival of the greatest importance, one associated with the fundamental idea and the fundamental impulse of Christianity, as revealed to Christian consciousness in the fact of the resurrection of Christ.

The Festival of Easter is the festival of resurrection, but points to times even before Christianity. It points to festivals connected with the period of the Spring equinox, which have certainly had something to do with the fixing of Easter, a festival that was associated with the re-awakening of Nature and the reviving life of the earth.

With this we have reached the point where we will at once speak of “Easter as a page from the History of the Mysteries,” in so far as the subject is one that can be dealt with in words. As a Christian festival Easter is a festival of resurrection. The corresponding heathen festival, which took place approximately at the same time, was a kind of resurrection-festival of Nature, a re-awakening of the objects of Nature, which had slumbered, if I may so express it, during the winter. Here I must explain that the Christian festival of Easter is absolutely not a festival that, according to its inner meaning and nature, is comparable with the heathen festival held at the time of the Spring equinox; but if we think of it as a Christian festival, it coincides absolutely with very ancient heathen festivals that had their source in the Mysteries and occurred in the Autumn. The strangest thing regarding the fixing of Easter, which quite obviously, according to its whole content, is connected with certain procedures in the Mysteries, is that it directs our attention to a radical and profound misunderstanding that has come to pass in the general acceptance of one of the most important facts concerning our human evolution. This is nothing less than that the Festival of Easter has been confused, in the course of the early Christian centuries, with an entirely different festival, and has on this account been changed from an Autumn to a Spring festival. This fact indicates something prodigious in human evolution. But let us consider for a moment the content of the Easter festival. What is most essential in it? The most essential thing in it is: that the Being who stands in the centre of Christian consciousness, Christ Jesus, passed through death; of this Good Friday reminds us. Christ Jesus then rested in the grave during the period of three days; this represents the union of Christ with earthly existence. The time between Good Friday and Easter Sunday is held by Christians as a solemn festival of mourning. Then Easter Sunday is the day on which the central figure for all Christendom rose from the grave, the day on which this fact is held in remembrance. The essential content of the Easter festival is: the death, burial, the repose in the tomb (Grabes-ruhe), and resurrection of Christ Jesus.

Let us now consider some of the features of the corresponding ancient heathen festival. Only by doing this can we arrive at an inner comprehension of the connection between the Festival of Easter and the living content of the Mysteries (Mysterien-wesen). In many places, among many people we find ancient heathen festivals which in outward form and ceremonial resemble absolutely the main features of those of the Christian Easter. From among numerous ancient feasts let us take that of Adonis. This was met with among certain peoples, and over long periods of the past, in Asia-Minor. A statue provided its central point. This statue represented Adonis the spiritual prototype of all youthful growing forces, all the beauty of man.

It is true that ancient peoples have in many respects confused the image with what it represented. In this way these old religions have frequently acquired a fetishlike character. Many people saw in the statue the actual god of beauty—the youthful forces of man, the evolving germinal powers revealing in splendid life all that was glorious in existence, all that man possessed or could possess of inner worth and inner greatness.

With mournful singing and ceremonies expressive of the profoundest human grief and woe the divine image was on this day (if the sea happened to be near) sunk beneath the waves, where it remained for three days; otherwise an artificial tank was constructed so that it could be lowered into it. During these three days profound quiet and sorrow lay upon the whole community of those who followed this religion. When the three days were over the image was raised again from the water. The earlier songs of sorrow were turned into songs of joy, into hymns about the risen god, the god who had come back to life.

This was an outward ceremony, one that deeply stirred the hearts of wide circles of people. It recalled, by means of an outward act, what happened to every one attaining to initiation in the Holy Mysteries. Every man attaining initiation in these ancient times was conducted into a special chamber. The walls were black; the whole room, in which was nothing but a coffin, was dark and gloomy. The aspirant for initiation was then laid in the coffin by those who had conducted him there with solemn dirges, and was treated as one about to die. He was made to realise that, now he was placed in the coffin, he had to pass through what a man experiences when going through the gates of death, and during the three days following. The arrangements were carried out in such a way that he who was in the act of being initiated reached full inner comprehension of what a man experiences in the first three days after death.

On the third day there rose in a particular place before the eyes of him who lay in the coffin a budding branch representing springing life. The former songs of woe turned into hymns of joy. The neophyte, who had experienced all this, now rose from the grave with a changed consciousness. A new language had been imparted to him and a new writing: the language and the writing of the spirit.

If what took place in the depths of the Mysteries to those about to experience initiation were to be compared with the religious ceremony performed outside, this would have to be done in a figurative way, though similar in form, to that which was experienced by carefully selected individuals in the Mysteries. And the ceremony—take that of the cult of Adonis, for instance—was explained to those participating in it in an appropriate way. It was a religious act that took place in the Autumn, and those who took part in it were instructed as follows: Behold it is Autumn; the earth now loses its green plants, all its leafy covering. Everything withers. Instead of the fresh, green, sprouting life which arose to deck the earth in Spring, all is now bleak and bare, or perhaps covered with snow. Nature is dying. But when all around you dies, you must experience that which in man resembles to some degree the death you see in surrounding Nature. Man also dies, Autumn comes to him also. When life draws to an end it is well that the human heart and soul of those who survive should be filled with deepest sorrow. And in order that the full seriousness of the passage through the gates of death should rise before your souls, that you not only experience death when it comes but that you are reminded of it again and again each year, for this reason you are shown every Autumn how that Divine Being who represents the beauty, youth, and greatness of man dies, how he goes the way of all natural things. But just at the moment when Nature is most desolate and dreary, when death is near, you have to remember something else. You have to remember that though man passes through the gates of death, though here in earthly existence he only experiences things of a nature similar to that which perishes in Autumn, that so long as he lives on earth he only experiences temporal things, when once he is withdrawn from earth his life will continue on into the wide spaces of universal ether. There he sees himself grow ever larger and larger—he becomes one with the whole world. During the three days his life expands to the confines of the universe. While here, earthly eyes are directed to the image of death, to that which is mortal and perishable; out there, after three days, the immortal soul awakens. About three days after death it rises again; it is born anew in the land of the spirit.

All this was brought about in the depths of the Mysteries through an impressive inner transformation of the body of the neophyte who had presented himself for initiation. The notable impression, the tremendous forward push that human life received in this ancient form of initiation, was the awakening of the inner soul-forces, the waking of sight. This brought to him the knowledge that henceforth he lives not merely in the world of the senses but in the world of the spirit.

The teaching that from this time onwards was given on suitable occasions to the pupils of the Mysteries I can describe somewhat as follows:—They were told: what takes place in the Mysteries is a picture of what takes place in the spiritual world, and what takes place in the cosmos is a model for that which takes place in the Mysteries. What everyone who was admitted to the Mysteries had to realise was: the mysteries veil in earthly acts performed by men, what is experienced by them in other states of existence, and in the wide astro-spiritual spaces of the cosmos.

Those who in olden times were not admitted to the Mysteries, who on account of the degree of ripeness they had acquired in life were not fitted to receive direct vision of the spiritual world, had communicated to them in the ceremonies carried on in the Mysteries—that is in pictures—what was suited to them. So the purpose of the Mystery-Festival, which we have come to know as the one corresponding to the festival of Adonis, was for the purpose of arousing in the consciousness of men, or at least for placing before their eyes in pictures, the certainty that at the time of autumnal decay, when death overtakes everything in Nature, it also overwhelms Adonis, the representative of all youth and beauty, all the grandeur of the human soul. The god Adonis dies also. He passes into the water, into the earthly representative of the cosmic ether. But just as after three days he rises out of the water, or is taken from it, so the human soul is raised out of the water of the world; or in other words, out of the cosmic ether, some three days after passing through the gates of death. The secret of death is what these Ancient Mysteries sought to reveal, aided by the appropriate Autumn festival. It was clearly demonstrated and made obvious through the fact that the first half—the one side of the religious ceremony—accorded with dying Nature, but the other half with its opposite, with what is most essential to man's own existence. It was intended that man should look upon dying Nature so as to realise that, though to outward seeming he dies, according to inner reality he rises again in the spiritual world. The meaning of these old heathen festivals that were associated with the Mysteries was to reveal the truth concerning death.

In the course of human evolution a most important thing now took place, which was, that what the pupil passed through on a certain plane in regard to the death and resurrection of the soul when preparing himself for initiation into the Mysteries was consummated by Christ Jesus down to the physical body (bis zum Leibe). For how did the Mystery of Golgotha appear to one who was an adept in the Mysteries? Such an adept gazed into the ancient Mysteries. He saw how anyone preparing for initiation was led according to the state of his soul through death to resurrection, which meant to the awakening of the higher consciousness of his soul. The soul dies so that it may rise again in a higher state of consciousness. What has to be firmly maintained here is that the body does not die, but that the soul dies so that it may be awakened to a higher consciousness.

What the soul of every man experienced who passed through initiation was experienced by Christ Jesus as far as to the body; that simply means, it was experienced on a different plane, for Christ was no earthly man, but a Sun-being within the body of Jesus of Nazareth, and could experience in every part of his human nature what the ancient Initiate of the Mysteries experienced in his soul. Those who still existed as “Knowers” of the ancient Mysteries, who were conversant with the ceremony of initiation, were such men as have even to this day a deep understanding of what happened on Golgotha. What could such men say of it? They could say: Through thousands of years men have been brought to the secrets of the spiritual world through the death and resurrection of their souls. The soul was separated from the body during the ceremony of initiation. Through death it was led to everlasting life. What was experienced there by a few exceptional men has been experienced in the body by a Being who came down from the Sun at the baptism in Jordan and entered into the body of Jesus of Nazareth. That which for long thousands of years had been an ever-recurring procedure of the Mysteries had now become an historic fact. The most essential fact for men to know was this: that because the Being who entered into the body of Jesus of Nazareth was a Sun-being, that which could only take place as regards the souls, and in the soul-experiences of those presenting themselves for initiation, could now take place as far as bodily existence. In spite of the death of the body, in spite of the dissolving of the body of Jesus of Nazareth in the mortal earth, a resurrection of Christ could take place, because the Christ rose higher than the souls of those seeking initiation. Such men could not take their bodies into the deep regions of sub-material existence (tiefe Regionen des Untersinnlichen) as Christ Jesus did; and for this reason they could not rise so high at resurrection as the Christ did; to make the infinite difference of this apparent, the ancient ceremony of initiation was enacted as an historic fact for all the world to see on the place of consecration—on Golgotha.

In the early Christian centuries only a few people were aware that a Sun-Being—a Cosmic Being—had lived in Jesus of Nazareth, and that the earth had thereby been fructified (befruchtet); that a Being had actually descended to earth from the sun—a Being such as until then it had been possible to see only in the sun from the earth, through methods employed in the centres of initiation. The most essential fact regarding Christianity as accepted by those who had a real knowledge of the ancient mysteries was expressed as follows: The Christ to whom we could rise through initiation, the Christ we could find when we rose to the Sun in the ancient Mysteries, has descended into a mortal body, the body of Jesus of Nazareth. He has come down to earth. At first it was more what might be described as a holy attitude of mind—a solemn feeling of reverence, experienced in mind and soul, that made some understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha possible at the time. What formed the living content of human consciousness at that time gradually became, through events we shall learn of later, a festival of remembrance recalling the historical event of Golgotha.

As this memory developed, people lost the consciousness, more and more, of Christ as a Sun-Being.

Adepts in the wisdom of the Mysteries could not be in any uncertainty as to the nature of Christ. They knew well that true Initiates, those who had been initiated and had therefore become free from their physical bodies and had experienced death in their souls, rose as far as the Sun-sphere, and that there they found the Christ, that from Him, the Christ in the Sun, their souls received the impulse to resurrection; they knew who the Christ was, because they had raised themselves up to Him. These ancient Initiates, who understood what took place during initiation, knew from what took place on Golgotha that the same Being who formerly had to be sought in the Sun had now come down to men on earth. How did they know this? Because the proceedings in the Mysteries, undergone by the neophyte that he might rise to Christ in the sun, could no longer be carried out in the same way as before, for the simple reason that human nature had in the course of time become different. The ancient ceremony of initiation had become impossible because of the way in which the being of man had evolved. The Christ could no longer be sought in the Sun according to the methods of ancient initiation. He therefore came down to earth, there to accomplish a deed through which men might now find Him. That which is contained in this Mystery (Geheimnis) belongs to the most sacred things that can be spoken of on earth.

For how actually did the Mystery of Golgotha appear to men living in the centuries immediately following it? In ancient places of initiation men looked up towards existence on the Sun (Sonnendasein) and became aware, through initiation, of the Christ in the Sun. They looked out into space in order to draw near to Christ.

If I represent diagrammatically how evolution progresses in the ensuing years, I must represent it in time; that means I must represent the earth—in one year, in another, in a third year, as progressing in time. Spatially, the earth is always there, but the passage of time must be represented thus. (A diagram was shown).

The Mystery of Golgotha then took place. Let us suppose that a man who lived in the 8th century, instead of looking out from the Mysteries to the Sun in order to find Christ, looked to the turning-point of time at the beginning of the Christian era, looked to the time after the Mystery of Golgotha, he was then able to see the Christ in an earthly happening—in the Mystery of Golgotha. What had previously been perceived spatially had now, because of the Mystery of Golgotha, to be seen in time. (Sollte nun zeitliche Anschauung werden.) This was the fact of greatest importance.

It is especially when our souls are affected by all the things which took place in the Mysteries, and which were an image of the death of man, and the resurrection that followed, and when added to these we consider the form of the religious procedure, more especially at the festival of Adonis (which was again an image of what took place in the Mysteries), that we realise how these three things, united and raised to their highest aspect, were concentrated within the historic deed on Golgotha.

There now was seen on the outward plane of history what formerly had been enacted in deep inwardness in the sacred precincts of the Mysteries; what formerly had only been for Initiates was now there for all mankind to see. No longer was an image required that had to be sunk symbolically in the sea and raised from it again. Instead, men were to have the memory of what had actually happened on Golgotha. Instead of the outward symbol connected with an event that was experienced in space, inward, intangible, formless thoughts were to arise—thoughts that lived only in the soul, thoughts of the historical deed done on Golgotha.

In the centuries that followed we now become aware of an extraordinary development in humanity. The penetration of mankind into what was spiritual declined more and more. The spiritual content of the Mystery of Golgotha could no longer find a place in the souls of men. Evolution tended towards the training of a materialistic intelligence. Men lost the inward emotional understanding of such things as, for instance, that where the transitory quality of external Nature is revealed—at the moment when the life of Nature is seen to be most desolate and as if dying—is exactly the moment when the vitality of the spirit becomes most apparent. Mankind also lost understanding of the external festivals of the year: understanding that the coming of Autumn, bringing as it does death to the outward things of Nature, is the time when it is most easy to realize that the death of all these things is connected with the resurrection of what is spiritual.

Along with this, Autumn lost the possibility of being the season of resurrection; it lost the possibility of directing the mind, by way of the fleeting things of Nature, to the everlasting quality of the spirit. Man has need of the support of substance. He needs the support of that which does not die in Nature but springs again, the germinating power of seeds which fall to the ground in Autumn but rise again. Man accepts substance as a symbol of what is spiritual, because he is no longer capable of being stirred by substance to perceive spirit in its reality. Autumn has no longer power to demonstrate the immortality of spiritual things, as compared to the mortality of natural things, through the inner force of the human soul. Man has need of the support of Nature, of external resurrection. He likes to see how plants spring from the earth, how the strength of the sun increases, and the coming of light and warmth; he needs the resurrection of Nature in order to cultivate thoughts of resurrection.

But with this the direct connection linking it with the festival of Adonis disappears, as also that which can link it with the Mystery of Golgotha. That inner experience that comes to every one at earthly death loses power when the soul knows: man passes through earthly death, and during the three days that follow undergoes certain experiences of a very solemn nature; but later the soul is filled with inner joy and happiness, because it knows that after these three days it rises from death to spiritual immortality.

The power contained in the festival of Adonis was lost. Humanity was so organised at one time that this power could be developed with the greatest intensity. When looking on the death of the god, men saw the death of all that was beautiful in humanity, the death of all its splendour and youthful powers. With great sadness the god was laid beneath the waves on a day of mourning—Good Friday (Char-Freitag, Day of Mourning). People felt the deep solemnity of this, because it was intended to evoke in them realization of the frailty of all natural things. But it was intended that this feeling regarding the mortality of natural things should then be changed into a feeling concerning the super-sensible resurrection of the human soul after three days. As the god, or rather the likeness of the god, was raised from the water, the well-instructed believer saw in this image the representative of the human soul a few days after death. Behold! they said to him, what happens in spirit to those who die. What happens is brought before your soul in the likeness of the risen god—the god of beauty and of youthful vigour.

This outlook, which was bound up so deeply with the destiny of humanity, was brought directly before the human spirit every Autumn. It would not have been thought possible at that time to associate this with external Nature. What could be experienced in spirit was represented symbolically in ceremonial acts. But the image of a former time had to be effaced, it had to emerge again as memory—as formless, inward, soul-felt memory of the Mystery of Golgotha, which represented the same thing; at first men had not the power to carry out this change, because the spirit had passed into the subconscious part of human souls (in die Untergründe der Seele des Menschen ging). So things remained until our day; men had need of the support of external nature. But external nature provides no image—no complete image of the destiny of man after death. Thoughts about death persisted. Thoughts about resurrection faded more and more. Even if people spoke of resurrection as part of their belief it was not a vital fact in the lives of the men of later times. But it must become so once more; it must become so, because the Anthroposophical outlook stirs men's minds to true thoughts concerning resurrection.

If on one side it is said, at the appropriate season, thoughts on Michael are precious to the soul of the Anthroposophist as bringing thoughts of annunciation, if thoughts concerning Christmas give depth to his soul, those on Easter must be specially thoughts of joy. For Anthroposophy must add to the thought of death the thought of resurrection. She must herself become like a festival of resurrection within the souls of men, bringing an Easter spirit into their whole outlook on life. This Anthroposophy will do, when people have realised how the old thoughts of the Mysteries can live on in rightly conceived thoughts of Easter; when they have acquired a right understanding of the body, soul, and spirit of man, and of the destiny of these in the physical, psychic, and spiritual heavenly worlds.

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.