The Rudolf Steiner Archive

During the past weeks we have been seeking to understand more and more what it means to say that the present age stands in the sign of the dominion of Michael. Thus we were led last time to show how the karma of a human being may work itself out in reality. We showed how difficulties of karma may even go so far that a human being cannot find the way between death and a new birth to live through all that is necessary for the weaving of karma by partaking in the events of the starry world.

So long as our conception is really limited to what happens here in the physical life on earth it is of course difficult for us to receive what we must receive if we are to take the idea of karma in real earnest. But we are living in the age of great decisions and great decisions must take place to begin with in the spiritual field. And in the spiritual field they will be rightly prepared, if out of the deeper anthroposophical spirit, single human beings have the courage to take their study of the spiritual world in real earnest—so much so that they can receive what is brought from the spiritual world and make use of it to understand the phenomena of the outer, physical life.

Hence for a number of months past I have not recoiled from bringing to you detailed facts out of the spiritual life, facts well fitted to enable you to understand the spiritual configuration of the present time.

To-day I will bring forward a few more things as it were to illustrate what I shall then have to say next Sunday, probably in conclusion, showing the whole karma of the spiritual life of the present time in its connection with the tasks and aims of the Anthroposophical Movement.

To begin with, however, I shall bring forward to-day certain facts whose connection with our main subject you will not at once perceive. Nevertheless you will recognise at once how deeply they characterise the spiritual life of the past. Many of these things will seem strange and far-fetched, but life in its totality bears many a paradox, seen from an earthly point of view.

The examples I shall choose to-day are not ordinary ones. For as a rule, a succession of earthly lives is not a continuous succession of historic personalities. It is not generally such that the continuous chain would be visible at all to superficial observation. Nevertheless there are certain successive earthly lives such that if we describe them one after another, we are at the same time giving descriptions of history.

It is seldom the case in such a high degree. But if we do find individualities for whom it is the case, if we can point to the several incarnations as to historic personalities, such an individuality enables us to learn a very great deal about karma. I have already given isolated cases of this kind as you know.

To-day I will tell you about a personality who lived at the end of the first Christian century. Already at that time he was a philosopher. As a philosopher he was most evidently one of the Sceptics, that is to say, he was one of those who really think nothing in the world is certain.

He belonged to that sceptical School which though it already saw the dawn of Christianity, stood altogether on the ground that it is impossible to gain certain knowledge, and above all that it is quite impossible to say with certainty whether a Divine Being could assume a human form or the like.

This individuality—his name in that incarnation is of no great importance, he was a certain “Agrippa”—this individuality in his incarnation in that time, gathered up into himself as it were, the whole of Greek Scepticism. Indeed if we use the word not in a contemptuous sense, but as a technical term, he was one whom we should even call a Cynic. I mean a Cynic not in his conception of life, for in that he was a Sceptic, but a Cynic in his way of taking things. For he was really very fond of making light and joking about most important things that met him in the world. In that life Christianity passed him by, leaving no trace. But a certain mood remained with him as he passed through the gate of death. This mood was not so much a result of his scepticism, for that was his philosophic conviction, a thing that one does not carry very far after one's death. But it lay in the deeper habits of his soul and spirit as an easy-going way of taking important events of life, a certain mischievous delight when things in the world which look important turn out to be not quite so important. This fundamental mood he carried with him into the life after death. Now as I told you yesterday, having passed through the gate of death, man first enters a sphere which leads him by and by into the region of the Moon, where there is the colony of the primeval wise Teachers of mankind. They had once lived on Earth though not in a physical body, nor had they taught in the way we conceive the teaching of later times. They had wandered over the Earth in an etheric body only. And their teaching was such that one man or another who was to receive instruction from them in the Mysteries felt it like an indwelling of these wise Beings of primeval times. He had the feeling: the wise Being has been with me just now. And as an outcome of this indwelling he then felt an inner inspiration. Such was the manner of the teaching given to a human being in those times.

We are referring to the most ancient time of earthly evolution, when the great primeval Teachers wandered upon Earth in their etheric bodies. Then, if we may put it so, they followed the Moon which had already separated as a heavenly body from the Earth. And it is their region which the human being passes, like the first station in his cosmic path of evolution after death. It is they who explain the laws of karma to him, for they have to do with all the wisdom of the past.

Now when the above-mentioned personality, the philosopher“Agrippa,” came into that region, it happened that there dawned upon him most intensely, the meaning of a former incarnation. The characteristic of that former incarnation which now made so great an impression on him as he looked back after death, was this, that in it he had still been able to see a very great deal of how the cults of Asia Minor and Africa proceeded out of the ancient Mysteries.

Now in this Christian time in his super-sensible life, this individuality went once more, with great intensity, through all that he had once undergone on earth in connection with many a decadent system of the Mysteries in Asia Minor. And so it came about that he now saw supersensibly, how in the ancient Mysteries the Christ had been expected (you must remember what I said, that in his life on earth he had not been touched by Christianity).

Now the Mysteries which he had witnessed—I mean the cults that proceeded from the Mysteries—had already grown external. He had in fact received the impressions of cults and religious institutions which were transmitted in the first centuries A.D., in a Christianised metamorphosis of course, to Roman Christianity. Please observe very carefully what I now mean. The point is that in this region after his death, there was prepared in this individuality an understanding for the external features of the cults and clerical institutions which had formerly been Pagan but were arising again in the first Christian centuries and passing over into the clearly defined Roman cult and ceremony with all the ecclesiastical conceptions that were connected with it.

Now this brought about in him a very peculiar spiritual configuration. In the further course of the life between death and a new birth we see him again, elaborating his karma most especially in the region of Mercury, so that he is able to see many things, not in an inward sense but in the sense of being gifted with outward intelligence. He gains a wide sweep of vision for many facts and relationships.

As we follow this individuality further, we find him again on earth. We find him as the Cardinal who carried on the Government of Louis XIV when Louis XIV was still a child, Cardinal Mazarini. We may study the Cardinal in all his greatness and splendour and with the external conception of Christianity into which he finds his way so readily, so naturally, under the woman who was Louis XIV's guardian.

He absorbs of Christianity all the external institutions, the Christian cult, the Christian pomp and grandeur. For him all these things are surrounded, as it were, with an Eastern glamour as of Asia Minor. Indeed we may say he rules Europe like one who in a former incarnation had strongly absorbed the character of Asia Minor.

But in this life Cardinal Mazarini did indeed have occasion to be more powerfully touched by the facts and circumstances. You need only remember that it was the time of the Thirty Years' War. Remember all the things that took place proceeding from Louis XIV. There was indeed a peculiar quality in this Cardinal Mazarini. He was a great statesman with a wide sweep of vision, yet on the other hand in the midst of a certain noise and confusion. We might say that he was intoxicated by his own deeds so that they seemed deeds of magnificent skill, but not coming out of the depths of the heart.

Now this life took a peculiar course in passing through the time between death and a new birth. We can actually see how in passing again through the region of Mercury, all that this personality had done was dissolved as in a cloud of mist. But there remained with him the ideas he had absorbed about Christianity and all he had undergone by way of scepticism in relation to knowledge. These things were transformed in his life between death and a new birth.“Science can never lead us to the final truths.” An intense feeling for knowledge of which there was a suggestion already in his former passage through Mercury, came and passed away again. And there was karmically developed in his life a peculiar mentality. It was a mentality which held fast with great tenacity to penetrating ideas which he had passed through before. But while he held fast to them, he could evolve for his next life on earth very few concepts with which to master and express them. As this personality passes through the life between death and a new birth one has the feeling: Whatever will he try to do in his next incarnation? Is there anything with which he is really united? One has the feeling: he may be more or less intensely united with all kinds of things and yet again with nothing. All the antecedents are there: the preceding life of scepticism, followed by his intense life in a Christianity with all its external details along the paths by which one becomes a Cardinal. All these things are deeply embedded in him. He will become a man rich in knowledge, yet able to come forward with concepts by no means profound. Moreover the map of Europe which he once ruled over is as though blotted out. One does not know how he will find his way to it again. What will he do with it? He will be altogether at a loss with it.

Yes, my dear friends, we have to enter into such things as these; we have to study what was undergone in passing through the life between death and a new birth in order that we may not err; in order that at length exact and true knowledge may be the outcome.

This personality is re-born in the approaching age of Michael, showing, if I may put it so, a strangely double countenance. He cannot be quite a statesman, nor quite a cleric, but is drawn strongly in both directions. I am referring to Hertling, who became Chancellor of the German Reich at a great age. In karmic sequence he had to use up in this way the remnants of his Mazarini nature. All the peculiar qualities with which he came to Christianity, and entered into it, came forth again in his Christian professorship at the present time.

By this example you may see in what strange ways the men of the present time built up their present individualities in past existences.

Anyone who did not research, but merely thought things out, would of course come to absolutely different conclusions. But we only understand karma when we can take these most extreme cases and connections, seeming almost paradoxical in the world of sense. They are there none the less in the spiritual world, even as that other fact is there, which I have often mentioned—I mean that Ernst Haeckel, who so violently fought against the Church, is the re-incarnation of Abbot Hildebrand, who became Pope Gregory the Great. Here we see how indifferent a matter is the external content of a man's belief or theory in earthly life, for all these things are his thoughts. But if you study Haeckel, especially in connection with what he was as Abbot Hildebrand, as Gregory—(I believe he too is included among these pictures from Chartres)—you will see that there is in fact a real dynamic sequence.

I chose the above example in order that you might see how present individualities carry the past into this present time.

If you will afterwards observe the features of the Monk Hildebrand, who became Gregory the Great and whom you know from history, you will see how wonderfully the soul-configuration of Haeckel is contained in this countenance of Hildebrand, of Gregory the Great.

I will now take another example, which will probably be of great and deep value to you all. Though I almost shudder to speak of it in any easy way, yet I cannot but choose it, for it leads so infinitely deeply into the whole spiritual texture of the present time.

I will now mention another personality, of whom as I said, I almost shudder to speak in this way. And yet he is infinitely characteristic of all that is carried from the past into the present and of the way in which this happens. I have often referred—and it will be known to you from external history—to the Council of Nicæa, which was held in the 4th century, where the decision was made for Western Europe as between Aryanism and Athanasianism, and Aryanism was condemned.

It was a Council in which the important personalities were imbued with all the high scholarship of the first Christian centuries, and brought it forth. They did indeed dispute with deep and far-reaching ideas. For in that time the human soul still had quite a different mood and constitution. It was as a matter of course for the human soul to live directly within the spiritual world. And they were well able to dispute with real content and meaning as to whether Christ was the Son, of the same essence with the Father, or only of like essence with the Father. The latter was the standpoint of Aryanism. To-day we will not go into the dogmatic differences of the question. We will only bear in mind that it was a question of immensely deep and sharp-witted controversies, which were, however, fought out with the peculiar intellectualism of that time. When we to-day are clever and sharp-witted we are so as human beings. Indeed to-day, as I have often said, almost all men are clever. They are really dreadfully clever—that is to say, they can think. Is it not so? It is not saying much, but it is a fact that they can think: I may indeed be very stupid and still be able to think ... but the fact is the men of to-day can think. In those times it was not so. It was not that men could simply think, but they felt their thoughts as inspiration. He who was sharp-witted felt himself gifted by the grace of God, and his thinking was a kind of clairvoyance. It was still so even in the 4th century A.D., and those who listened to a thinker still had some feeling of the living evolution of his thought. Now there was present at the Council of Nicæa a certain personality who took an active part in these discussions, but at the end of the Council he was in a high degree disappointed and depressed. His main effort had been to bring forward the arguments for both sides. He brought forward weighty reasons both for Aryanism and for Athanasianism. And if things had gone as he wished, undoubtedly the result would have been quite different. Not a wretched compromise, but a kind of synthesis of Aryanism and Athanasianism would have been the outcome.—One should not construct history in thought, but this may be said by way of explanation.—It would probably have been a very much more intimate way of relating the divine in the inner being of man to the divine in the universe. For, in the way in which Athanasianism afterwards evolved these things, the human soul was very largely separated from its divine origin. Indeed, it was thought heretical to speak of the god in the inner being of man.

If, on the other hand, Aryanism alone had won the day, there would of course have been much talk of this god in the inner being of man. But it would not have been spoken of with the necessary depth of reverence, and above all, not with the necessary inward dignity. Aryanism alone would indeed have come to regard man at every stage as an incarnation of the god who dwells within him. But the same may be said of any animal, indeed of the whole world, of every plant, of every stone. This conception only has real value if it contains at the same time the active impulse to rise ever higher and higher in spiritual development, for then only do we find the god within. The statement that there is a divine within us at any and every stage of life can have a meaning only if we take hold of this divine in a perpetual upward striving of the self, by whom it is not yet attained.

But a synthesis of the two conceptions would undoubtedly have been the outcome if the personality to whom I now refer had been able to gain any decisive influence at the Council of Nicæa. He failed. Deeply dissatisfied, he withdrew into a kind of Egyptian hermitage, lived a most ascetic life, and was deeply imbued at that time in the 5th century with all that was the real spiritual substance of Christianity during that age. Indeed he was probably one of the best informed of Christians in his time, but he was not a wrangler. This is evident from the very way in which he came forward at the Council. He spoke as a man who quietly weighs and judges all aspects of the question, and is yet deeply enthusiastic for his cause, though not for this or that one-sided detail. He spoke as a man who—I cannot say was disgusted, that would not be the true expression—but as a man who felt his failure with extraordinary bitterness, for he was deeply convinced that good would only come for Christianity if the view for which he stood won its way through.

Thus he withdrew into a kind of hermitage. For the rest of his life he became a hermit, following however, in response to the inner impulses of his soul, a quite definite course of the inner life. It was that of investigating the origin of the inspiration of thought. His mystic penetration was in the effort to perceive whence thinking receives its inspiration. It became one great longing in him to find the source of thinking in the spiritual world, until at length he was filled through and through with this longing. And with this longing he died, without having reached any real conclusion, any concrete answer during that earthly life. No answer was forthcoming. The time was after all unfavourable.

Then, passing through the gate of death, he underwent a peculiar experience. For several decades after his death he could still look back upon his earthly life, and he saw it forever coloured by that element to which he had come at last. He saw it forever in the atmosphere of that which, looking backwards, came immediately next his death. He saw the human being thinking.

Still this was no fulfilment of the question. And this is most important. There was as yet no thought in answer to the question. But though there was no answer, he was able, after his death, to look, in marvellously clear imaginations, into the cosmic intelligence of the universe. The thoughts of the universe he did not see. He would have seen them if his longing had reached fulfilment. He did not see the thoughts of the universe, but he saw in pictures the Thinking of the universe.

Thus there lived through the journey between death and a new birth an individuality who was as in a state of equilibrium between mystic imaginative vision and his former sharp-witted thinking—a thinking, however, in perpetual flow, that had not reached its conclusion.

In the elaboration of the karma, his mystic tendency won the day to begin with. He was born again in the Middle Ages as a visionary, a woman, who unfolded truly wonderful insight into the spiritual world. For a time, the tendency of the thinker fell entirely into the background; the quality of spiritual vision was in the foreground. For this woman had wonderful visions, while at the same time she gave herself up mystically to the Christ. Her soul was penetrated, with infinite depth, by a visionary Christianity. They were visions in which the Christ appeared as the leader of peaceful hosts, not quarrelsome or contentious, but like the hosts of peace, who would spread Christianity abroad by their very gentleness—a thing which had never yet been realised on earth. It was there in the visions of this nun. It was a deep, intensive Christianity, but it found no place at all in what afterwards evolved as Christianity in its more modern form. Nevertheless during her life this nun, the seeress, came into no conflict with positive dogmatic Christianity. She herself grew out of it and grew into a deeply personal Christianity, which was afterwards simply non-existent on the earth. And thus, if I might put it so, the whole universe then faced her with the question: how should this Christianity be realised in a physical body in a new incarnation? And at the same time, long after the seeress had passed through the gate of death, there came over her again the echoes of the old intellectualism, the inspired intellectualism. The after-echoes of her visions were now, if I might put it so, idealised through and through, filled with ideas.

Then, seeking for a new human body, this individual became the individuality of Solovioff, Vladimir Solovioff.

Read the writings of Solovioff!—I have frequently described the impression they make upon a modern man and have said it again in my introduction to the German edition of his works. You may well try to feel it in his writing. You will feel how much there lies between the lines, how much of a mysticism which we may often feel even sultry and oppressive. It is a Christianity quite individual in its forms of expression. It shows quite clearly how it had to seek for a pliable, in all directions supple body, such as can be obtained only out of the Russian people.

Looking at these examples, I think one may indeed preserve the holy awe and reverence before the truths of karma, which should indeed be held sacred and virginal in the inmost depths of life. For one who has a true feeling for the contemplation of the spiritual world, these deep truths are, verily, not unworthily unveiled. I mean this in the sense of what is so often said about the sacred veils of truth, of which people say that they should never be drawn aside.

Anthroposophy has been reproached again and again, notably in theological circles, for drawing aside the veil of sacred mystery from secret and mysterious truths, and thus making them profane. But the more deeply we enter into the esoteric portions of the anthroposophical conception, the more do we feel that there can truly be no talk of profanation. On the contrary the world itself will fill us with a holy awe when we behold the lives of man one after another in the marvellous working of former into later lives. We must only not be profane in our inner life or in our way of thinking and then we shall not make such objections.

Read the writings of Solovioff against the background of the previous nun, with her wonderful visions and infinite devotion to the Being of Christ. See that ancient personality going forth with deep and bitter feelings from the Council where he had brought forward such great and important things. Discover in the soul and in the heart of this individual what I may call the twofold background of Christianity, now in its rationalistic, but inspired rationalistic form, and now again in its visionary form of seership. See all this in the background, and of a truth the lifting of the veil will not profane the secret.

A German romanticist once had the courage to think differently from all others about the famous saying of Isis:“I am that which was, that which is, and that which is to come, and my veil has no mortal yet lifted.”—To which the German romanticist replied: Then we must become immortal, that we may lift the veil!—While others all took the saying as it stood.

When we discover the truly immortal within us, the divine and spiritual, then may we draw near to many a secret without profaning it, to many a secret to which, with a lesser faith in the divine in our own being, we might indeed not draw near.

And this indicates the spirit which should go abroad ever more and more under the influence of such studies as our last and as this present one. For these spiritual studies are meant to work upon the life and action of those who bear their karma, in the way I have described, into the Anthroposophical Society.

I will begin today with the soul-life of man, and lead on from thence to a penetration into cosmic secrets.

Let us start with something of the very simplest. Let us consider the soul-life of a human being as it is seen when he carries his inner self-reflection beyond the point I specially had in mind when I wrote the articles in the Goetheanum on the Life of the Soul. (Now published as a brochure entitled Vom Seelenleben). We shall consider the soul-life more intimately than was done in the Goetheanum articles. Those four articles on the soul-life form a kind of introduction, a preparation for that which we are now to consider.

When we practise self-reflection in a wide and comprehensive way, we see how this soul-life can be raised to a level higher. We begin by letting the external world work upon us—we do this from childhood—and then we form thoughts upon that which the outer world has brought to us. We are really human beings in that we allow the impressions of the outer world to live on further in our thoughts, realising them inwardly in our thoughts, creating a world of mental pictures, which in a certain way reflect the impressions made on us from outside. We are not doing anything specially helpful for the soul-life if we simply form a number of thoughts as to how the outer world is reflected in our soul, for in so doing we only attain what I might call a shadowy picture of the world of ideas in our inner being. We really practise better self-reflection if we focus our attention rather on the inner energy, in the attempt to enter livingly ourselves into the element of thought, without looking at the outer world, and follow further in thought what has come to us as impressions of the outer world. One man may thereby be led, according to his disposition, into mere abstract thinking. He may create world-systems, or he may make schemes about all imaginable things in the world, and so on. Another man, while reflecting upon the things that have made an impression on him, and by spinning out his thoughts further, may perhaps evolve some even more fanciful conception or other.

We will not enter further into the way in which, according to temperament or character or other influences on a man, this inner thinking, devoid of outer impressions, may develop, but we will recognize the fact that it is a matter of especial significance for us when we withdraw in regard to our senses from the outer world and live in our thoughts and ideas, spinning them out even further, often perhaps in the direction of mere possibilities only.

Many people regard it as unnecessary to develop this living in thought, in the direction of mere possibilities. Even in these difficult times one may see people occupied the whole day with their business (which of course is necessary for the outer life) afterwards meeting together in small groups, playing cards or dominoes or such like, in order, as is frequently said, to pass the time. It does not often happen, however, that people come together in such groups in order to exchange thought for instance, about all the things in which they were engaged during the day, and to consider what might have happened if this or that had been different. They would not be so much interested in this as in playing cards, but it would be a spinning out of their thoughts, and if we preserve a sufficiently sound sense of reality such a continuation of our thoughts need not become fantastic.

This life in thoughts leads finally to what you encounter if you read The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity in the right way. If you read The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity in the right way you must become acquainted with this feeling of living in thoughts. The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity is wholly drawn from reality, while at the same time it has proceeded entirely from actual thinking. You will find therefore a fundamental tone or feeling in this Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. I conceived it in the eighties, and wrote it at the beginning of 1890, and I can truly say that in all those who at that time were in a position to make acquaintance with the root-nerve of this Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, everywhere I met with lack of understanding. This lack of understanding arises from a definite reason. Human beings, even the so-called thinkers of today in reality only get so far in their thinking as to experience in it an image of the outer sense-world; and then they say: perhaps there might come into a man's thinking something of a super-physical world, but it would have, to enter in the same way as a chair or a table which is outside of us, and which is acknowledged by our thinking to be outside of us. Thus this thinking which is within us would have to be able to experience in some way or other something super-sensible, outside of man in the same way as the table or chair is outside of us and is experienced. In some such way as this, Edward von Hartmann conceived the activity of thinking.

This book, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity then came to his notice. In this book thinking is so experienced that within the experience of thinking we come to this realisation, viz. that if a man really experiences thinking, he is living, even if at first somewhat indefinitely, in the cosmos, This union of man in his innermost thinking experience with the cosmic secrets is the root-nerve of The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. Therefore in this book you find the sentence, “In thinking, man lifts an edge of the veil of the cosmic secret.” This is perhaps simply expressed, but it is meant to imply that when a man really experiences thinking, he no longer feels himself to be outside the cosmic secret, but within it, no longer outside the divine Essence but within It. When a man attains to the reality of thinking within himself he attains to the Divine within himself.

It was this fact which could not be understood. For if a man really understands it, if he has really taken the trouble to acquire this experience of thinking, he rests no longer within the world in which he was previously, but he is living in the etheric world. He is living in a world of which he knows: it is not conditioned from any part of physical earthly space, but by the whole cosmic sphere.

He can no longer doubt the order and reality of the cosmic etheric sphere if he has grasped thinking as it is portrayed in the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. Thus he reaches what may be called etheric experience. When a man enters into this experience he really makes a noteworthy step forward in his whole life.

I may characterise this step forward thus: If we think in ordinary consciousness, we think: in this room are tables, chairs, human beings and so on. We may perhaps think of much more also; but we think of these things outside us. Thus we comprehend these things in our thinking—and there are various things outside—from the central point of our being. Every man is aware of this; he wants to grasp the things of the world with his thinking.

If however we have acquired the experience of thinking just characterised, it is no longer the world we should grasp. Man is not so much riveted, as I might say, in his own ego; something entirely different happens. He has the feeling, quite a right feeling, that with his thinking, which is not confined to any one place, he can grasp everything inwardly. He feels that he is contracting the inner man. Just as in his ordinary thinking he extends spiritual feelers outwards, as I might say, so with this thinking which experiences itself within him he extends himself continually into his own being. Man himself becomes the object.

This is a very important experience which a man may have when he realises: formerly you always comprehend the world; now that you have this experience in thinking you must comprehend yourself. The result of this process of strong self-comprehension is that he breaks through the skin.

And just as he inwardly grasps his own self he also grasps from within the entire cosmic ether, not in its details, naturally, but he gains the conviction that this ether is spread out over the cosmic sphere within which he exists together with the stars, sun and moon, etc.

A second thing which man can develop in the inner life of his soul is the power not to be stimulated immediately in his thoughts from outside, not to spin these thoughts out and weave them further, but to give himself up to his memories. If he does this, and really makes his memories an inner experience, then again a quite definite experience results. The experiencing of thinking already described leads a man to himself, he grasps himself; and he has a certain satisfaction in this grasping of his own inner being.

When, however, he passes on to the experience in memory, then, if undergone inwardly in the right way, it finally seems to be no longer the most important thing to approach oneself. This is the case in the experience of thinking. That is why one finds in thinking that freedom which depends entirely on the personal element in man. Therefore, a philosophy of spiritual activity must start from the experience of thinking, because man thereby arrives at his own being; he finds himself as a free personality. This is not the case with the experience of memory. In the experience of memory, if a man follows it up seriously and immerses himself entirely in his memory, he will finally acquire the feeling of becoming free from himself, of getting away from himself. Therefore those memories which enable one to forget the present are the most satisfactory. (I will not say that they are always the best, but they are, in many cases the most satisfactory).

We can get an idea of the value of memory if we can have memories which carry us out into the world, in spite of the fact that we may be completely dissatisfied with the present and would like to get away from it. If we can develop memories of such a nature that our feeling of life is intensified while giving ourselves up to our memories this furnishes what I might call a kind of preparation for what memories may become when they are much more real.

You can make memory a real experience if you recall with the utmost possible realism something which you actually experienced say ten, twenty or thirty years ago. I will merely indicate how this can be done. Suppose you go over your old treasured papers and look up, let us say, old letters which you had written or which. were written to you on some occasion or other. Place these letters before you, and by means of them you will live intensely in the past. Or perhaps a better way may be not to take the letters you have written, or which other people have written to you, because too much subjectivity comes into this; it would be still better, if you are able to do so, to take your old school books and look at them as you did long ago when you really sat in front of them as a child at school, and in this way bring back into your life something which formerly existed. That is really an extraordinary experience. If you carry out something of this kind you change the whole mood of soul which you possess at present. It is very extraordinary. But you must be a little resourceful in this connection, and all kinds of things can help you in this. Perhaps a lady may find in some comer or other a garment, or something she wore twenty years ago; she puts this on and thereby transports herself back into the position in which she was at that time; or anything of a like nature which may bring the past with utmost possible reality into the present. In this way you are able to separate yourself thoroughly from your present experience.

When we have experiences in our present consciousness we really stand too intimately in the experiences, too close for the experiences to result in anything, so to speak. We must be able to stand further away. Man is further away from himself when he sleeps than when he is awake; for he is then outside his physical and etheric bodies with his astral body and ego. When you actually invoke past experiences into the present, as I have described, you draw near to the astral body which is outside the physical body in sleep. You may not at first believe that such a vivification of past experiences by means of an old garment perhaps can have the powerful effect I have indicated, but it is really only a question of making an experiment yourself in these matters. If you do make the experiment and you really enchant into the present what has been experienced in past years so that you can live in it and entirely forget the present you will then see that you draw very near to your astral body, to your astral body of sleep.

Now if you expect that it is only necessary to look to right or left and see a cloudy form as your astral body, you will be disappointed, for it does not happen in that way; you must pay attention to what really does occur. What may really occur is, for example, that after a time, through such experiences, you may gradually see the dawn in a new way; you may have a new feeling on seeing a sunrise. Gradually, along this path you will come to experience the warmth of the dawn as something of a prophetic nature, as if it were announcing something, as if the dawn had a natural prophetic force in itself. You will begin to feel the dawn as spiritually forceful, and you will be able to connect an inner meaning with this prophetic force, so that you get a feeling, which you might at first regard as an illusion, that the dawn is related with your own being. Through such experiences as I have described you may gradually bring yourself into a condition in which you feel when you see the dawn: “The dawn does not leave me alone. It is not merely yonder while I am here; I am inwardly united with this dawn; it is a quality of my own inner feeling. I myself at this moment am the dawn.” When you feel thus united with the dawn so that you yourself experience as it were the colour, radiation, and shining, the appearing of the sun out from the colours and the light, so that in your own heart a sun arises, as it were, out of the morning glow as a living feeling,—then you will also feel as if you yourself are traveling with the sun over the vault of heaven; you will feel that the sun does not leave you alone, the sun is not there while you are here but you feel that your existence extends in a certain sense to the sun existence and that you travel with the light throughout the day.

If you develop this feeling which, as we have said, does not come from thinking—for in that way one can only reach man himself—but which we can develop out of memory in the way indicated, when you develop this experience out of your memory, or rather out of the forces of memory, then the things which you perceived formerly with your physical senses begin to wear a different aspect; they begin to be spiritually and psychically transparent. When a man has once attained this feeling of traveling with the sun, of gaining strength at dawn to go with the sun, he sees all the flowers of the meadow in a different aspect. The blossoms do not remain passive, showing the yellow or red colours which they have on the surface but they begin to speak. They speak to our hearts in a spiritual way. The blossoms become transparent. The spiritual part of the plant stirs inwardly, and the blossoming becomes a kind of speaking.

In this way man really unites his soul with the external life of nature, and he thus gains the impression that there is something behind the existence of nature, that the light with which he has united himself is borne by spiritual Beings, and in these spiritual Beings he gradually comes to recognize the features of that which has been pictured by Anthroposophy.

Let us now consider the two stages of feeling which I have described. Let us take the first feeling which can be brought about through thinking as an inner experience; this inner experience of thinking carries him far, and the feeling of being in a confined space entirely ceases. Man's experience widens out; he feels quite distinctly that in his inner being there is a portion which extends right out into the entire cosmos, and which is of the same substance as the cosmos. He feels himself one with the whole world, with the etheric substance of the world; but he feels too that standing on the earth, his feet and legs are drawn down by the gravity of the earth. He feels that he is bound with his entire human nature to this earth. But in the moment man has this thinking-experience he no longer feels bound to the earth, but he feels himself dependent on the wide spaces of the cosmic sphere. Everything comes from the universe, no longer from below, up from the centre of the earth, but everything comes in from the expanses of space. One feels that if one is to understand man, this feeling of streaming in from space must be there.

This extends even to the understanding of the human form. If I wish to grasp the human form either in sculpture or in painting I can really only do so as regards the lower part of the form by thinking of something proceeding out of the inner bodily nature of man. I shall not be bringing the right spirit into this unless I can draw the upper part in such a manner that I think of it as borne in from outside. Our brow, the upper part of our head is from without and is really placed on the rest of the body. He who has looked with artistic understanding at the paintings in the small cupola in the Goetheanum (now destroyed) will have seen that the lower part of the countenance was always so represented as having grown out from within man, and the upper portion of the head as something given to him from the cosmos. In the ages when men had a feeling for such things this was especially felt. You will never understand the form of a true Grecian sculptured head unless you have this feeling for it, for the Greeks created under the inspiration of such feelings.

Thus man feels himself united with the environment in his experience of thinking.

Now one might imagine that this process was simply carried further, and that one would go still further out when one passes on from the experience of thinking to the experience of memory; but this is not the case. If you really develop this experience of thinking in yourself you will ultimately gain an impression of the third Hierarchy, of the angels, archangels and the Archai.

Just as you may picture man's bodily experience here on earth in the forces of gravity and in the transmutation of nourishment in digestion, so you may also form an idea of the conditions under which these beings of the third Hierarchy live, if, through this experience of thinking, instead of wandering about on the earth you feel yourself carried by forces which stream towards you from the furthest expanses of the cosmos.

Now when man passes from the experiences of thinking to that of memory it is not as if this were the end of the cosmic sphere, the limit to which man can attain. We can reach such a cosmic boundary if we really enter into the reality of this thinking-experience; but we do not then go further out; the matter presents itself differently. Here, for instance, we may have an object of some kind, a crystal, a flower or an animal; and if we pass from the experience of thinking to all that the experience of memory can bring us, then we look right into this object. The gaze which has extended to the universe can, if carried further through the memory-experience, look into things. It is not that you press forward into indefinite abstract distances; the gaze that is carried further looks into things and sees the spiritual in everything. It sees, for example, in the light the active spiritual beings of light, and so on. It sees in the darkness the spiritual beings active therein. So that we can say: the experience of memory leads us into the second Hierarchy.

There still exists something in the human soul-life which goes out beyond memory. Let us make clear to ourselves what this is. Memory gives our soul its colouring. We can know quite exactly, when we approach a man who judges everything in a disapproving way, one who emanates his sour atmosphere over everything, a man who, if one tells him something beautiful immediately replies with something unpleasant, and so on, we can know with certainty that all this is connected with his memory. Memory gives the soul its colouring.

We may meet a man who always has an ironic twist of the mouth, especially if we say something to him; or he may wrinkle up his brow or pull a tragic face. Another man may look at us in a friendly way, so that we are cheered not only by what he says but by the way he looks at us. Indeed it is interesting, at some special statement in a lecture to glance at the countenances in the audience, to see the expression of the mouth, or to look at the foreheads or the blank expression on many of the countenances, or the nobility of many others and so on. In what you see there is expressed not merely what has remained as memory in the soul and has given the soul a certain colouring, but something is expressed which has passed over from the memory into the physiognomy, into the gesture, into the whole attitude of a man. If a man has taken nothing in, if he shows by his countenance that he has not learnt anything by what he has experienced of sorrow, pain or joy in his life, that too is characteristic. If his countenance has remained quite smooth, that is as characteristic as if it expresses in deep wrinkles the tragedy or the earnestness of life, or even perhaps its many satisfactions. That which remains in the soul as the result of the power of memory passes over into and moulds the physical body; and so markedly does this take place that man later actually has from it outwardly his physiognomy and his gestures, and inwardly his temperament, for we have not always the same temperament in old age as we had in childhood. The temperament in old age is often the result of what we have undergone in life, and which has inwardly become memory in the soul.

That which passes inwardly into man in this way can also be carried into reality, though this is more difficult. It is still fairly easy to bring before our soul-vision things which we experienced in childhood or, many years ago, in order to realize memory to a certain extent, but it is more difficult to transpose oneself into the temperament of one's childhood, into one's earlier temperament. But the practice of such an exercise may be of infinite significance for us; and more is really attained when we can do this inwardly in the depths of the soul than if we do something externally.

Something is already attained in a man if, say at the age of forty or fifty, he plays a child's game, or jumps as he did when a child or if he tries to make a face such as he made when an aunt gave him a bonbon when he was eight years of age; and things of that kind.

To transpose oneself back to the very gesture, to the very attitude, brings something into our life which leads convincingly to the feeling that the outer world is the inner world, and the inner world is the outer world.

We then enter with our whole being, e.g., into the flower, and we have in addition to the thought-experience and the memory-experience what I may call the experience of gesture, in the truest sense of the words. From this we gain an idea of how the spiritual everywhere works unimpeded in the physical world.

You cannot apprehend inwardly with full consciousness your behaviour of say twenty years ago as regards your gesture on any occasion without realizing the union of the spiritual and the physical in all things; that is, if you penetrate into the depths of this matter with all earnestness and energy. Then you have arrived at the experience of the first Hierarchy.

 Thought-experience: third Hierarchy. Memory-experience: second Hierarchy. Gesture-experience: first Hierarchy. 

The memory-experience leads us to identify ourselves with the dawn when we stand face to face with the morning glow. It enables us to feel inwardly, to experience inwardly all the warmth of the dawn; but when we rise to the experience of gesture, then that which approaches us in the dawn unites with everything that can be experienced objectively as colour or tone.

When we regard the objects around us illuminated by the sun and simply look at them as they appear to us, we see them in the light. But we do not see the dawn in this way, especially when we pass over gradually from the memory-experience to the experience of gesture; then everything which is experienced as colour gradually separates itself off from all material existence. The experience of colour becomes living, it becomes psychic, spiritual. It forsakes the space in which the external dawn appears to us. The dawn begins then to speak to us of the secret of the connection of the sun with the earth; and we learn how the Beings of the first Hierarchy work. When we again turn our gaze to the dawn and it appears to us almost as it did formerly in the mere experience of memory we learn to recognize the Thrones. Then the dawn dissolves away. The colour becomes living, becomes psychic, becomes spiritual, becomes a Being, and speaks to us of the relation of the sun to the earth as it once existed in the old Sun-period; it speaks to us in such a manner that we learn what the Cherubim are. And then, when full of enthusiasm and veneration we are carried away by this two-fold revelation of the dawn, the revelation of the Thrones and of the Cherubim, and we live on further within the soul, there presses into our own inner being, from out of the living Being which the dawn has now become, that which constitutes the nature of the Seraphim.

Everything which I have described to you today, I have done simply to point out how, from the simple following on in the soul from thinking to the gesture that is full of thought and permeated by soul, man can acquire for himself a feeling (for, to begin with he has only feelings) about the spiritual foundations of the cosmos, right up to the sphere of the Seraphim.

I wanted to give you this as a kind of introduction to the studies which are to lead us on from the soul-life out into the expanses of the spiritual cosmos.

We will utilize the last lecture of this course by bringing together, to some extent, the Mysteries as I have outlined them as belonging to this or the other region of the earth; and I shall attempt to show you the nature of the Mysteries at any rate from one point of view, in the form they took in the Middle Ages, approximately from the 10th to the 15th centuries.

I do not speak of this epoch of time because it is particularly complete in itself, but because it can to a certain extent be useful in showing what form the human soul-strivings took in the most civilized parts of the earth at that time. The spiritual striving of that period is often described as the Mysteries of the Rosicrucians. This designation is in a certain sense quite justifiable, but one must search behind it, not for the charlatan element which is so often met with in literature, without one's being aware of this fact—one does not always realize what an element of charlatanism is at work in these things—but we must look behind, and direct our attention to that deeply earnest striving for knowledge which existed during these centuries in almost every region of Europe, in Central Europe, Western and Southern Europe. We must realize clearly that the figure of Faust as described by Goethe, with all his deep soul-striving, with all his earnest efforts, is really simply a later figure, no longer anything like as deep in soul as many an investigator to be found in the medieval laboratories, figures of whom nothing reaches us by way of history, but who laboured between the 14th and 15th centuries. I mentioned in the last lecture that in the investigators of this epoch a tragic note predominates. The peculiar trait is the feeling which existed in those investigators that they must strive after the highest, the highest which is creatively active in man; yet not only could they not reach this highest, but from a certain point of view their striving after the highest is even doubtful.

I have said that we do not find theoretical, easily obtained knowledge among these scientists in their alchemical laboratories between the 14th and 15th centuries, but something which is deeply connected with the whole man, with the longing for knowledge which came from their inner feeling, a cognition acquired with heart and feeling.

Now what was the origin of this? This can be best explained to you if I try to make you understand the tragic scepticism of the medieval investigators, by once again turning our attention to the form taken by human cognition on earth in very ancient days.

The most ancient form of human knowledge, which was so closely connected with the life of the individual human being, was not of such a nature that man looked up to the planets and saw the mathematical grandeur and mathematical movements, which can be calculated and observed today; at that time each planet, as all else spread out in the heavens, was a living being, and not only a living being but it possessed a soul. Indeed it was not only an ensouled being but a being permeated by spirit. Man constantly spoke then of the families of the planets, of the families of the heavenly bodies, for he knew that just as there exists a blood relationship between the members of a human family, similarly there exists an inner relationship, between the members of a planetary system. There was a parallelism between the human element and what revealed itself outside in the cosmos.

I should like to depict one aspect of what was perceived and known by man in the very oldest Mysteries, when he looked up to the sun. At that time there still existed Mystery-sanctuaries which were so arranged that there was a specially prepared kind of skylight, so that at certain definite times of the day the sun could be seen through a diminished light. Thus you must imagine that the most important chamber in many an ancient Sun Temple was that in the roof, in which a skylight was inserted and the window filled with some kind of material—not glass in our modern sense—but a material through which one saw the orb of the sun in a dim twilight at a certain definite time of the day. The pupil had been prepared in his soul to observe the solar orb with the right feeling, the right mood of soul. He had to make, his feeling so receptive, so inwardly perceptive that when, so to speak, he exposed his soul through his eye to the sun orb it made an impression on him which he could really bring to his consciousness.

Now, of course, many people today look up at the sun through smoked glass, but they are not prepared in their feeling to receive this impression which the sun makes as a special impression. But the pupil in these ancient Mysteries received this impression of the darkened solar orb after long exercises had been undergone, and this impression was then a quite definite one. A man who, as a pupil of the Initiates of the Mysteries, was able to have this impression could truly never forget it.

With this impression the pupil also gained something which, from that time on, gave him more understanding for certain things around him than he formerly had. The attempt was made, after the pupil had been prepared through the majestic and magnificent impression of the sun to permit the especial quality of the substance gold to work upon him; and through this preparation, through this sun-preparation, the pupil was led to a deep understanding of the quality of gold.

When one looks into these things, it is really painful to experience the triviality of our modern consciousness which we find in so many historical works in which we are told the reason why this or the other ancient philosopher allocated gold to the sun or attributed the same symbol to gold and to the sun. Man no longer knows what was known by this means in these olden times, and which really was evoked by means of these many exercises and through preparation. I mean that this direction of the vision inward into the dimmed direct light of the sun, prepared the pupil to understand the substance gold on the earth.

How then did he understand this? After he had undergone this preparation, his attention awoke to the fact that gold is not affected by that which, for the organism, constitutes the breath of life, i.e., oxygen, and to which most of the other metals are so thoroughly receptive. Oxygen does not affect or alter gold. This non-receptivity, this obstinacy of gold in the face of that from which man really has his life, made a deep impression on the pupil of the ancient Mysteries. Thus he received the impression that gold cannot directly approach life. Now the sun too cannot directly approach life; and it is well that neither gold nor the sun can directly approach life. Then the pupil was gradually led to the fact that because gold has no relationship with oxygen, with the breath of life, that therefore when in a certain dose it is introduced into the human organism it has a quite special effect on the organism of man. Gold has a quite special relation with the human organism when, as we have said, it is introduced into it in the correct dose. It has no relation to the etheric body, no direct relation to the astral body; but gold has a direct relation to what lies in human thought, in human thinking.

Just consider how far removed thinking lies from human life, especially in our modern age. A man can sit down like a piece of wood and think quite intellectually. He can think quite livingly in an intellectual way; but on the other hand he cannot by thinking bring about any change in his organism. Man's thinking has become more and more powerless; but thinking is set in motion by the ego-organization, and gold inserted in the right dose into the human organism can bring back power into thinking. It restores to thinking the power to work down into the astral body and even into the etheric body; thus thinking can be animated by gold.

That was one of the secrets of these ancient Mysteries; the secret of the connection of gold with the sun. The relationship between the substance gold and the cosmic working of the sun was perceived by the pupil of these ancient Mysteries of which I have just spoken.

And in a similar way, the pupil of these ancient Mysteries was then led to experience the opposite pole of gold, the opposite effect. Gold is an impulse for the animation of human thinking, so that human thinking can work down as far as the etheric body. And what would be the opposite pole of that?

In regard to the human organism, in its several members, the ego-organization, the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body, we may say that through gold the ego-organization becomes capable of working down into the etheric body. The etheric body can then work further on the physical body; but gold brings it about that thoughts can actually be maintained in all their power in the etheric body.

What is the opposite pole of this? We have the opposite pole, the opposite working, and this effect is what is produced when the breath of life—oxygen—is attracted by something in man or in nature; then, just as gold is obstinate in the face of oxygen and repels it, will have nothing to do with it, and therefore has no influence on the etheric body or on the astral body but simply on the thought-world of the ego-organization, in the same way what exists in man as carbon has a direct relationship with oxygen.

We breathe out carbonic acid. We produce in ourselves carbon dioxide. We unite carbon with oxygen. The plants require carbon dioxide for their life; and this carbon possesses the opposite characteristic of gold.

Now, this substance of carbon played an enormous part in the ancient Mysteries. On the one hand, gold was referred to as being a quite special substance for the study of man, while, on the other hand, carbon was referred to in the ancient Mysteries in such a way that it was called the Stone of the Wise, the Philosopher's Stone. Gold and the Philosopher's Stone were very important things in olden times. Carbon was the Stone of the Wise.

Carbon appears on the earth in a number of different forms. A diamond is carbon, hard carbon; graphite is carbon; coke is carbon; anthracite is carbon. On the earth carbon appears before us in many diverse forms; but through those methods which were customary in the ancient Mysteries, men learnt to understand that there existed other forms of carbon, besides those we find here on the earth. And so another preparation was necessary for the Mystery pupils besides that of which I have spoken as the sun preparation. In addition to that there existed the moon preparation.

Now if we turn to these ancient Sun Mysteries, we find there in addition to what I have said above a kind of observatory wherein a man could open his soul and his physical vision to the moon forms. At certain definite times he did not merely behold the sun through a diminished light, but for a period of time lasting for weeks the pupil had to open his psychic vision, his soul-filled eye, to the different forms which the orb of the moon adopted by night. Thereby the pupil received a quite definite experience in his soul, an experience which led to knowledge. Just as the soul capable of exposing itself to the sun became endowed with the power of the sun, by so exposing it to the phases of the moon it became endowed with the power of the moon. He now learnt what metamorphoses the substance of carbon could undergo. On the earth carbon is either coal or graphite or diamond or anthracite; but on the moon that which we find here on the earth as diamond or anthracite or coal, is silver—and that was the secret possessed in these ancient Mysteries. Carbon on the moon is silver. Carbon is the Philosopher's Stone, and on the moon it is silver.

What in the ancient Mysteries was so profoundly impressed on the pupil was the knowledge that any substance, however it looks externally, is only this in one place on the earth and at one definite time. None but an ignorant man was then unaware that carbon is only diamond, coal or anthracite on the earth; for what exists on the earth as diamond or graphite, that, on the moon, is silver. If we could at the present moment take a piece of our ordinary black coal and as it were carry it over into the moon, it would there immediately become a piece of silver.

A perception of this radical metamorphosis was what the pupil obtained in these ancient times. Now that is not to be found at the basis of that fraudulent alchemy which is spoken of today, but it does lie at the basis of the true ancient alchemy. And this ancient alchemy could not be acquired as we obtain our intellectual knowledge today. Today we observe or think about things, but alchemy could not be attained in that way. Today man directs his telescope to a certain star, he gets parallelisms and such like things. He calculates and calculates; or he may study a certain substance and place the spectrum on it, and so on; yet everything which can be learnt in this way is, after all, infinitely abstract, compared with what could in olden times be learnt of the stars; and this ancient wisdom, this real Astrology, could only be learnt, as I explained in the last lecture, by a real living intercourse with the Intelligences of the Cosmos. The knowledge then attained was knowledge through which man could speak in his soul, in his spirit, with the Intelligences of the Cosmos.

Now what gold is for the human organism is connected with the secret of the sun; and through the fact that the pupil exposed in the manner described his own soul to the sun Being, he thereby entered into relation with the Intelligences of the sun themselves, and they it was who told him of the properties of gold. In like manner he entered into relation with the Intelligences of the moon.

Now the pupil learnt to know these Intelligences of the moon as those great Teachers who existed on the earth in very ancient times, and who taught the primeval wisdom on the earth. They were the same Teachers who today, I would say, send down their forces, their impulses to the earth from the moon. They withdrew at a definite time from the earth to the moon, and there as it were they founded a colony on the moon, at the time when the moon separated from the earth.

Thus with this second-secret, the secret of carbon-silver, those Intelligences have to do who once lived on the earth and today constitute the moon Intelligences. Such was the knowledge, the cognition acquired by the pupil in ancient times.

I will bring forward a further instance. Just as the pupil could receive impressions from the sun or from the moon, so by means of a still further preparation of his soul he could also receive impressions from the other planets; and one of the secrets thus obtained in ancient times was that which related to Venus. Venus is today studied through the telescope, and is regarded as being like other stars, like other planets. The human body is studied by investigating first part of the liver and then part of the brain, analyzing them only according to their cellular structures (for although the liver and the brain are radically different substances, they are investigated today as though they were both alike.) So a student now directs his telescope towards Mercury, Venus and Mars, and so on, and thinks that they are all substances of a like nature. But in these ancient times it was known that if a man looked with his eyes at the moon or the sun, he saw something which still had a relation with the physical earth, with the earthly, the watery, the fiery; while if he extended his observation to the moon in a spiritual way, he came to the ether. If, however, he extended his observation to Venus, he came to a spiritual world, a purely astral world. What we see as the physical Venus is in a sense simply the external sign for something which lives and works in the astral light. The physical light of Venus is something quite different from the sunlight, for instance; for physical sunlight still has a relationship with what can live on the earth as the light which belongs to the earth, but as regards the light from Venus, it is childish to think that it is simply reflected sunlight, for the light from Venus shines out from the spiritual world. If the pupil exposed his soul nature to this light he learnt to know what Intelligences were connected with Venus.

Now these are Intelligences who, I might say, live in continual opposition to the Intelligences of the sun; and a great part, a great role was played in the ancient Mysteries by this opposition between the Intelligences of Venus and the Intelligences of the sun. It was then said, with a certain justice, that there was a continual conflict between the Venus Intelligences and the sun Intelligences. There existed a starting-point for such a conflict when the Venus Intelligences first began to combat the Intelligences of the sun. Then there followed intensifications; and through this conflict there came about catastrophes and crises. In that interval which lay between an opposition and a catastrophe or crisis, occurred, as it were, a section of that great conflict which really takes place in the spiritual world, but which only appears in its external symbol in the astrological and astronomical relationship between Venus and the sun. That which then took place occurred in successive phases. Now, no one can understand what lives on the earth as inner impulses of history if he does not know of this conflict between Venus and the sun; because what takes place here on the earth as conflicts and battles, what occurs here in the course of the evolution of civilization, is simply an earthly picture, an earthly copy, of this Venus-solar conflict.

This was well known in the ancient Mysteries. Such knowledge existed then because there was a relation between human beings on the earth and these spiritual beings, these Intelligences of the Cosmos.

Then came that epoch of which I have spoken to you, the epoch from the 10th to the 15th century after Christ. The medieval investigators, in their alchemical laboratories, were no longer able, as humanity evolved, to reach up to the Cosmic Intelligences. They could only get as far as the spirits of nature; and while these alchemical investigators made certain alchemical experiments—of which I gave an instance in the last lecture of the particular transformation of oxalic acid into formic acid—while these medieval investigators made numerous experiments of this kind which should reveal to them the working and weaving in the processes and things of nature, they could only do so when they had prepared themselves in the right way through that spirit of piety of which I have spoken: having done this, however, then through their experiments, the spirits of nature could speak to them. Let us realize clearly the situation in which such an investigator found himself.

Such an investigator stood in his laboratory. He said: “Here I have in my laboratory substances, retorts, kilns. I make various experiments. When I direct my questionings to Nature through my experiments, there enter my laboratory quite visibly the nature spirits with their revelations.”

This occurred as late as the 15th century, that the nature spirits appeared to the Rosicrucian investigator who was rightly prepared. This really occurred! But he knew from external knowledge that in olden times it had been possible to reach out not merely to the nature spirits, but to the higher Cosmic Intelligences, to those Intelligences who spoke of the Gold-secret in connection with the sun, of the Silver-secret and the Carbon-secret in connection with the moon, of the historically important Venus-secret, etc. True, this medieval alchemist knew all this from information imparted by tradition. But that was not the important thing. He who has been under the influence of the spiritual world, to him historical documents are not so terribly important as they are to modern materialistic times. One is always so astonished to find how infinitely important it is for many people when something like the Dinosaurus is found in the Desert of Gobi as recently. That is an important find, but these are only broken fragments, whereas we may really enter into the secrets of the Cosmos in a spiritual way. Historical documents were therefore certainly not such as deeply to affect these medieval investigators; but in another way the medieval alchemist acquired the knowledge that it had formerly been possible to attain this cosmic cognition, but that now they could only reach the Spirits of Nature, the spirits behind the elements, when certain observations of nature were made, or certain experiments performed—i.e., when these investigators approached the sphere of the Spirits of Nature, then certain Spirits of Nature came around them and told the investigators that there formerly existed human beings who stood in connection with the Cosmic Intelligences. It was a deep piercing pain to the investigators when the Spirits of Nature spoke to him of a former age in which man himself was able to come into connection with the Intelligences of the Cosmos. So these investigators had to say: “These Spirits of Nature tell of a still earlier age, now vanished into the abyss of human knowledge and experiences.” Thus this gift of the medieval alchemist of access to the Spirits of Nature was really of a dubious nature. While on the one hand they could come to the Spirits of Nature, to the spirits of the air, water and fire, and could approach them in all their living reality, on the other hand there were some amongst these spirits who told the investigators, and this information crushed them, how at one time humanity not only stood in connection with the Spirits of Nature, but with the living Intelligences of the Cosmos, with whom the Spirits of Nature still stood in connection, but with whom man could no longer get into touch. That was the feeling of these medieval alchemists and it often came to expression in a much grander, much more tragic way even than we find in Goethe's Faust, beautiful and mighty though that is.

That utterance which Faust addressed to the moon, the silver shining light of the moon in which he seeks to bathe, this Faust utterance would have been made in a much more intense manner by the investigators of the Middle Ages when the Spirits of Nature came to them and told them about the secrets of carbon, the secrets of silver, that secret which again is closely connected with man. What was it then that man experienced in ancient times in this connection? He experienced not merely how gold is connected with the sun, but how gold works in man, how silver and carbon work in man, and how other metals related to the other planets work in man. In olden times man experienced these things in the very circulation of the blood in his body. He experienced them in a conscious way. He felt the blood streaming and working through his head, and at the same time he felt this as allied to a picture of the whole earth. He really experienced that when he felt the blood streaming up through his head. And there, in that sphere where the head is not enclosed by the bones, where it opens itself downwards towards the breast, man felt a copy in miniature of what ascends from the earth in the atmosphere. Thus in that which man learnt from the cosmos outside he recognized that which he transmuted in his own organism, he could follow the planet in its passage through the various organs of the body. We find here a confirmation of Mephistopheles' lines in Goethe's Faust, which are written in such a penetrating way: “Blood is a very special fluid;” because in its various metamorphoses our blood really reflects those metamorphoses which are so magnificent—the change from carbon to silver. All this lives in man's blood.

So the medieval investigators experienced this loss of the knowledge of the Cosmic Intelligences as a loss of his own humanity. In reality it is but a faint reflection of this which we find in Goethe's Faust, when he opens, as it were, the Book of the Macrocosmos, seeking the Cosmic Intelligences; and shuts it again because he cannot approach them. He can only get as far as the Spirit of the Earth. That is simply a faint echo of what we find in so terribly tragic a way amongst the best of these medieval investigators, whose names have not come down to us. The greatest of these medieval investigators underwent this experience when they heard from the Spirits of Nature, whose sphere they entered through their alchemical investigations, that there once existed a connection between man and the Cosmic Intelligences.

Now all this is very deeply connected with what still had to develop in ancient Greece when the necessary need arose for what we have studied in these lectures as the Mysteries of Samothrace, the Mysteries of the Kabiri, to be weakened down into the philosophy of Aristotle, and which then played such an enormous part in the Middle Ages, while below the surface what we know as Aristotelianism worked so strongly right on into the 15th century, but in a tragic manner, as I tried to describe to you in a fragmentary way.

Behind the Macedonian epoch, was a Mystery which extended even as far as Greece. The significant details of this will be given to you in the, coming historical lectures; but with reference to this Mystery, which saw so deeply into the secrets of the cosmic substances and their connections with the Cosmic Intelligences, we have a Mystery which descended from the Cosmic Intelligences to the Spirits of Nature. Then man's vision had to be closed to these Cosmic Intelligences, and simply directed towards the Spirits of Nature. That was the crisis which was accomplished at the time of Alexander and Aristotle. We can still see in Aristotelianism how the abstractions of Aristotle are based upon the ancient Mysteries.

I must say here that anyone who knows about the carbon-silver secret, and then reads the observations of Aristotle—even those few observations which have come down to posterity, for the most important writings of Aristotle have not come down to us—anyone who reads these writings, the observations of Aristotle relating to the secret of the moon, will realize the connection of those olden times. Now these are the things which are to be illuminated more in detail in the Christmas lectures which I want to give concerning the historical development of humanity from the standpoint of Anthroposophy.

In continuation of what I have said in the preceding reflections on the tasks of anthroposophical world view in the present and for the development of humanity, today I would like to add a few more things from a different perspective: those points of view that can arise when one sees how the world view of the nineteenth century led, as it were, to a kind of absurdity in Friedrich Nietzsche, and how it can be shown, precisely from the phenomenon of Nietzsche, that such a view of the world and of the human being as is presented in anthroposophy is an historical necessity for the development of humanity. I do not wish to repeat things that I have already said about Nietzsche here and elsewhere in the anthroposophical movement, but I would like to point out two implications of Nietzsche's world view today that I have touched on even less.

Throughout his life, Nietzsche was characterized by a tendency to arrive at a view of the value and essence of morality in man. Nietzsche was a moral philosopher in the proper sense of the word. He wanted to come to terms with himself regarding the origin of morality, the significance of morality for humanity, and the value of morality for the world order. In this quest for clarity, we see how two main themes run through his entire life, which, in relation to many other things, has undergone the most diverse transformations.

The first is that throughout his life – from the point in his life that he had already passed through in his second year at university until the end of his life, one might say – he had an essentially atheistic view. The atheistic element is what has remained constant throughout all the transformations of Nietzsche's world view.

And the second is that, in the face of what has come to him peculiarly in the moral impulses of the present, what has also come to him in the intellectual and practical impulses of human life in the present, he has asserted one virtue as the most fundamental, and that virtue is honesty towards himself, towards others, towards the whole world order. Integrity, honesty, that is what he considered to be the most important thing, what is most necessary for modern man, both inwardly, to his soul, and outwardly, to the world.

Nietzsche once listed four cardinal virtues that he considered to be the most important for human life. Among these four cardinal virtues, honesty, this honesty towards oneself and others, is the first. These four cardinal virtues are namely: firstly, honesty towards oneself and one's friends; secondly, bravery towards one's enemies; the third cardinal virtue is generosity towards those whom one has defeated, and the fourth cardinal virtue is courtesy towards all people.

These four cardinal virtues, which Nietzsche described as being particularly necessary for present-day humanity, all tend towards the one he described as the first, and which he regarded as a kind of necessary temporal virtue: they tend towards honesty, towards sincerity. And one can say: there is a relationship between this virtue of sincerity and his atheism.

Nietzsche first of all grew out of his age completely and utterly. He then outgrew this age in an even more comprehensive sense. Even a superficial examination shows how he initially took root in Schopenhauer's worldview, which is also an atheistic one, and how he initially saw this Schopenhauerian worldview artistically realized in Richard Wagner's musical drama in the first period of his life.

Nietzsche started out with Schopenhauer and Wagner. He then absorbed what can be called the positivism of the time in scientific life, that is, the world view that thinks the whole world is built solely on what is immediately perceptible, on what is perceptible to the senses, and which therefore sees the sensual as the only thing that matters for the world view.

And Nietzsche then attained a certain independence in the third period, by assimilating the modern idea of development, which he so elaborated that he applied it to man, by setting himself the ideal, as a kind of positivistic ideal, that man must develop into the superman.

Thus Nietzsche has outgrown various currents of thought and currents of culture of his time. But how has he outgrown them? The answer to this significant question also contains important information about the characteristics of the entire age that occupies the last third of the 19th century. One must ask oneself the question: Why did Nietzsche become an atheist? He became one out of a sense of integrity, out of inner honesty. He took with complete honesty what the 19th century was able to offer him in the way of knowledge, what he was able to absorb with holy zeal from this 19th-century knowledge. And he said to himself quite intuitively: If I take this particular kind of 19th-century knowledge honestly, then it does not lead me anywhere towards the divine; then I must exclude the divine from my world of thought.

There lies the first great conflict between Nietzsche and his age, so that he had to become a fighter against his time. When Nietzsche looked around at the people who had also absorbed the knowledge of the 19th century, he saw that the vast majority of them still believed in a divine world order. He perceived this as dishonesty. It seemed dishonest to him to look at the world on the one hand as the knowledge of the 19th century looked at it, and then somehow to assume a divine order on the other. Because he was still speaking in the various thought formulas of the 19th century, he did not actually express what he instinctively felt about the 19th-century world view. He felt that the 19th century viewed world phenomena in the same way that one views the human organism when one has it as a corpse, when it has died. If one believes in this human organism in death, so to speak, if one believes that this dead organism has an inner truth, then one could not honestly believe that this organism only has a meaning when it is permeated by the living and ensouled and spiritualized human being. Anyone who studies a corpse should actually say to himself: What I can look at, what I can study, has no truth. It only has a truth if it is permeated by the spiritualized human being. It presupposes the spiritualized human being. But that is no longer there when I have the corpse before me.

Nietzsche felt this very clearly, although he did not express it so clearly: if you look at nature in the way that modern world knowledge looks at it, you look at it as a corpse. You should actually say to yourself: what you interpret as nature around you no longer has the divine in it. But if one accepts it in its absoluteness, if one speaks of this nature in such a way that one only follows its laws, then one must obviously deny that a divine underlies it. Because the way it stands before you, this nature, has no more of a divine basis than a human basis underlies a human corpse.

These were the feelings that lived in Nietzsche's soul. But the 19th-century world view had such a strong effect on him that he said to himself: Yes, we have nothing but this nature before us, and modern times have taught us to have nothing else before us. If we stick to this knowledge of nature, then we must reject God.

And so Nietzsche, as a student of Schopenhauer, rejected any divine, considering it dishonest to have modern knowledge and yet still speak of a divine. In this respect, his inner life was extraordinarily interesting because it strove for such intense honesty. He perceived it as a cultural lie of the 19th century that on the one hand there was a view of nature as it was, and on the other hand people still spoke of a divine. But he also took life seriously within this natural order in which one still believed. And he saw that the life of modern man had actually developed in such a way that it had become quite natural for him to assume such an order of nature. After all, nature had not forced modern man to accept this order, but life had become such that it could only endure such a view of nature. The view of nature actually came from life. And Nietzsche felt that this life was thoroughly dishonest. And he strove for honesty.

He had to say to himself: If we live in such an order as modern humanity recognizes as the true one, then we can never feel like human beings within this truth. That was actually the basic feeling in the first period of his life: How can I feel like a human being when I am surrounded by this natural order as it is now viewed? That which is truth does not allow me to come to my consciousness as a human being! Nietzsche felt and sensed this too, and so he said to himself in this first period of his life: “If one cannot live in truth, then one must live in appearance, in poetry, in art.

And when he turned his gaze to the Greeks, he believed he had recognized in them the people who, out of a certain naivety, had come to this dissatisfaction with the truth and who therefore consoled themselves with appearances, with beauty. This is what he expressed in his first, so beautifully written hymn, “The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music”. He wanted to say: Man, when you are in the realm of truth, you can never feel like a human being. So flee from the realm of truth into the realm where you create a world that does not correspond to truth. In this world of poetry you will be consoled by what truth can never give you.

The Greeks, he believed, had felt as the true naive pessimists that one could not be satisfied within the world of truth. That is why they created above all their wonderful tragedies, a world of beautiful appearance, in order to have in this world that which can satisfy man.

In Richard Wagner's musical drama, Nietzsche believed he saw a renewal of this beautiful appearance, with the express purpose of leading people away from the so-called real world into the world of appearances, in order to find satisfaction as human beings. So there was no possibility for Nietzsche to say to himself: Let us take the sensory world, deepen our contemplation of the sensory world, penetrate from the external manifestation to the inner divine, and thus feel connected to this divine as a human being and come to feel truly human in the world.

For Nietzsche, this consideration was not possible. He saw no possibility — because he wanted to be honest — of arriving at such a consideration from what the 19th century was. Hence the other: This whole reality gives us no satisfaction, so we satisfy ourselves with an unreal world. Just as if there were beings somewhere who came to a planet where they found only corpses, and in the face of these corpses would have to see not remnants of reality but true reality, because they had once permeated, and as if these beings, who thus encountered a planet of corpses, were beings who, in order to console themselves for these corpses, invented beings to animate them. That was Nietzsche's first sense of the world.

And basically, the writings that followed The Birth of Tragedy were: David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer, On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life, Schopenhauer as Educator, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, confrontations of his honesty with the dishonesty of the time. This time spoke, although it had no way out of sensuality into the spirit, it still spoke of spirit; this time spoke of the divine, although basically it could not include a divine in its knowledge anywhere. This period spoke something like this: In the past, people surrendered to the delusion of a divine, but we know from the study of nature that there is no divine. But we have our concerts, of course, in which we make music. — There is a chapter in David Friedrich Strauß's “The Old and the New Faith” that particularly annoyed Nietzsche, where David Friedrich Strauß asserts this philistine point of view. That is why Nietzsche wrote this essay about Strauss as a philistine and writer, in spite of the fact that Strauss was a relatively excellent man, in order to show how one can either be dishonest by still assuming a divine quality that one should no longer assume, or how one must fall into the banal and philistine, as he saw it with David Friedrich Strauss.

But now the second period in Nietzsche's life began. He remained true to himself with regard to the demand for honesty, he remained true to himself with regard to his atheism. But in the first period, he adopted ideals, albeit aesthetically colored, ideals that would have a justification and with which people could console themselves about the reality of the external senses.

But now, I would like to say, in the second period of his life, his mind clings more strongly to what, according to the prevailing view of the time, the world reveals to people alone. And so he said to himself: No matter how much a person devotes himself to ideals, these ideals are born out of his very nature! People imagine many beautiful things, but this ideal beauty is only an all-too-human one.

And so the time came for him when he saw particularly the human weakness, the all-too-human, the devotion of man to his physique. And since he took the view of nature seriously, he said to himself: Man cannot help but devote himself to his physique! - Nietzsche once said: Long live physics, even longer live honesty in believing in physics. “Let us be honest,” he said to himself in the second period of his life. ”Let us be clear: no matter how beautiful an idealistic thought a person has, it is still an emanation of his physical nature. Therefore, when we approach human life, let us not describe the smoke it produces at the top, but let us describe the fuels from which this smoke is formed at the bottom: then we will not arrive at the idealistic-divine, but at the human-all-too-human.

And so, in the second period of his life, Nietzsche, because he wanted to be honest with himself and with others, virtually killed all idealism in life. So he said to himself: What people usually call soul is actually just a lie. This is based on the structure of the body, and something that comes from this structure of the body reveals itself in such a way that it is given the name soul.

And Nietzsche saw in this inclination of some modern people, for example, to Voltaire, the true enlightenment, that true enlightenment that consists in man no longer engaging in some illusory world in order to elevate himself above reality, but rather that he actually looks at reality in its physical nature and sees all morality emerging from the physical.

And if you then look at the third period in Nietzsche's life, you can't help but notice how he, one might say, out of a highly pathological nature, took this honesty to excess, as he said: If If you take seriously and honestly what you can know about nature and the laws of nature in the modern sense, then you have to say: Everything that is supposed to live as spirit in the human being is precisely the emanation of his physical being. Therefore, the human being can only be the perfect one who, in comparison to others, shows the physical being to be the most perfect; that is, the one who has such a physical nature that the strongest instincts live in him.

Nietzsche ultimately saw instinctual life as superior to all spiritual life, as that which, in its development, leads man beyond himself, in that instincts become ever stronger and stronger, remain instincts, but rise ever higher and higher above the animal: this is where man becomes superman.

What was it, then, that actually impelled Nietzsche in this way, that he first recognized the ideal in appearance as necessary for man, that he then, as he put it, led this ideal onto the ice, because he saw how it arises from the physical, and that he then wanted to lead man to the superman through a higher development of his physique, his instinctive life? It was impossible, if one stood within the world view of the 19th century, to grasp the physical in the sense of this world view, and then still get out of it if one wanted to remain honest. One simply had to stay inside.

And Nietzsche developed, if one may say so, an iron honesty in placing himself with all that he had in the physical. So that in fact his ideal for the future, if one may still speak of an ideal, for human civilization should have consisted in man's enlightenment about the great illusion of having a spirit. That these undercurrents are usually not seen in Nietzsche, who, however, worked his way out as honestly as possible, is only due to the fact that he denied the spirit with so much spirit that he glorified the spiritual poverty of humanity in such a brilliant, brilliant, witty way.

It becomes simply impossible to be a moral philosopher, as Nietzsche was by his very nature within the 19th-century world view, if one honestly wants to take this on board. For if one is no longer able to speak of the fact that man's task on earth is to bring a spiritual and supernatural element into this earthly world, if one feels compelled to remain within the mere earthly world, then, if one wants to establish morality, one wants to establish it without justification. Morality becomes outlawed if one accepts the world view of the 19th century in all honesty. And that is what Nietzsche really experienced deep inside: that morality became outlawed. He wanted to be a moral philosopher. But where did the moral impulses come from? That was the big question for him. If one finds the luminosity of the supersensible in man, then morality arises as the demand of the supersensible on the sensible. If one finds no supersensible element in man, as was the case with the world view of the 19th century, then there is no source from which one could draw moral impulses. If one wants to distinguish good from evil, then one needs the supersensible. But the supersensible had to be rejected by Nietzsche, who honestly took the world view of the 19th century. And so he groped around in human life to find something like the origin of the moral impulses.

So he looked at the cultural development of humanity, found how strong racial people acted as conquerors towards weaker people, how these stronger racial people imposed the direction of their actions on the weaker ones, how they, out of their instinctive nature, demanded of those whom they had acted as conquerors towards: This is how you should act! Nietzsche could not believe in any categorical imperative, in moral commandments. He could only believe in the instinctive racial supermen, who saw themselves as the good ones, the others as the bad ones, that is, as the inferior human beings, on whom they imposed the direction of action.

And then it happened that those who were the inferiors according to the conquerors joined forces and now, not with the more brutal older means, but with the finer means of the soul and spirit, with cunning and guile, made themselves conquerors over the others. And those who had previously considered themselves the superiors, the good ones, they called the bad ones, because they were conquerors, power-seekers, force-seekers, militarists; they called them the bad ones. And they called themselves the good, who had previously been called the inferior, the bad. Being poor, limited, oppressed, weak, overcome and yet holding on in weakness, in being overcome, that is the good, and being a conqueror, overcoming the other, that is the evil.

Thus good and evil arose from good and bad. But good and bad did not yet have the later moral connotation, but merely the connotation of the conquering, the powerful, the noble, in relation to the army of slave people, who were the inferior, the bad ones. And what was later distinguished between good and evil, that came only from the slave revolt of the previously bad, inferior, who now called the others criminals and evil, in revenge for what had happened to them. Thus, to Nietzsche, the later morality, clothed in the concepts of “good” and “evil,” appeared as the revenge taken by the oppressed on the oppressors. But he found no inner foundation for morality. He could only stand beyond good and evil, not in the midst of good and evil. For to find an inner foundation for good and evil, he would have had to resort to the supersensible. But that was a delusion to him, it was merely the expression of weak human nature, which did not want to admit to itself that its true essence is exhausted in the physical.

If one wants to characterize Nietzsche, one would like to say: Actually, all thinking people of his time should have spoken as he did, if they had been as honest as he was. And he made it his goal to be completely honest. That is why he became a fighter against his time, and that is why he had such sharp intellectual weapons, and why he strove for a revaluation of all values. He saw the values by which he lived as being the product of dishonesty. Centuries had already worked to bring about modern scientific concepts and also introduced them into all of history. But the same centuries had left that which was no longer compatible with them in human souls: divine and moral ideas. Values had emerged that now had to be reevaluated.

Nietzsche's life is a tremendous tragedy. And I don't think that anyone has really grasped the essence of human civilization in the last third of the 19th century and how it continued to have an effect in the 20th century, in the right way, who has not even seen into such a tragedy as it took place in a soul experiencing this civilization, as in Nietzsche. It is really the case that we have to see the collapse we are now experiencing as a consequence of what Nietzsche calls the dishonesty of modern civilization. One would like to say that Nietzsche became a fighter against his time because he had to tell himself: If this dishonesty continues, then only a destructive struggle can break out among the nations that belong to this modern civilization. And this tragedy in Nietzsche's life arose from the fact that Nietzsche wanted to find the foundations of morality, but could not find them in the education of his time. Nowhere could he find a source from which he could draw moral impulses. And so he groped his way through and wounded his fingers everywhere in the groping. And out of the pain he described his time, as he has just described it.

What was he looking for? He was looking for something that can only be found in the supersensible realm, something that cannot be found in the realm of the sensible. That is what he was looking for. No matter how beautiful, great, and noble the moral principles you come up with, they cannot heat a machine, turn a wheel, or set the electrical apparatus in motion. But if one applies only that to one's cognition which sets the machine in motion, sets the electrical apparatus in motion, turns the wheel, if one introduces only that into one's cognition, then one can never understand how that which lives in man as a moral impulse is to reach into one's own human organism. You can think up the most exalted ideals, but they can only be smoke and fog, because there is no possibility of them taking effect in a muscle, in some skill or the like. There is nowhere in the sensory world where you can see moral ideals taking effect in the organic. Imagine the most beautiful moral ideals – Nietzsche could only say to himself – if you harbor them in your head, then you are to your own organism as you are to a machine. You can make posters for the machine, write on them “Moral Ideals”: it will not heat with them, it will not turn. But should you revolve around your moral ideals if you are as nature intended you to be? You can think them up, they may be very beautiful, but they cannot intervene in the workings of the world! Therefore, they are a lie in the face of reality. It is not the person who devotes himself to ideals who is effective, but the one who fuels his machine so that the instincts become powerful: “the blond beast,” as Nietzsche paradigmatically expresses it.

And so Nietzsche stood with his problems before Man, who could only have been moral to him if the moral impulses in him had found a point of contact. They did not. Therefore, no good and evil, but - “Beyond Good and Evil”.

But now consider: we have always had to characterize this whole modern world-knowledge by saying that it does not approach man, it cannot gain any conception, any idea of man. So, if one experiences in the sense of the modern world-view, one does not have man in one's soul. Yet in Nietzsche everything tended towards man. Everything tended towards something he could not have! And now, in keeping with the modern idea of development, he wanted to transform man into the superman, only he did not have man. How could it be shown, from what was not available, how man develops into the superman! Man was not there for contemplation, for intuitive perception, for feeling, for the impulses of the will. Now the superman! It was as if one had formed these words only out of old habit: man and superman - and now choked, because these words have no content, just as one chokes in a vacuum.

Nietzsche was faced with the necessity of entering the supersensible world with moral problems, and could not enter. That was his inner tragedy. And with that, he is at the same time the representative soul of the end of the 19th century, that representative soul who points out the necessity: If you want to remain honest as human beings, you must enter the supersensible world in order not to declare the ideals of morality to be a lie.

Nietzsche goes mad because he is confronted with the necessity of entering the supersensible world and cannot do so. Many other people do not go mad; but I do not want to explain the reasons why they do not go mad, because one must indeed observe certain limits of politeness when describing the peculiarities of civilization. But one thing is clear from Nietzsche's life: modern man can only be honest and upright with himself and others when he enters the supersensible world. In other words, honesty and uprightness do not exist in a nonsensory world view. Nor can the path from man to superman be found if one cannot take the other path from the sensual to the supersensible. And if morality belongs in a certain sense to the superman, then it demands that this superman be sought not in the sensual but in the supersensible, otherwise it is a mere word, the word “superman,” that is called out but to which nothing resounds from the world.

Tomorrow I will approach the subject from the other side, from the side of how what Nietzsche encountered must now be further developed so that moral values in human life can be understood in the right way and harmonized with the knowledge of our time.

[End of the lecture on the affairs of the Anthroposophical Society, see “Appendix”, p. 159.]

My dear Friends,

Suppose that we observe an animal during the course of a year. We will find that its life follows the cycle of the seasons. Take for example an insect: according to the time of year it will form a chrysalis (pupate), at another season it will emerge and shed its chrysalis-form, at another time lay its eggs, and so on. We can follow the course of nature, follow the stages of such an insect's life, and find a certain connection between them, for the animal organizes its life according to its natural surroundings.

If we then go on to consider people—say, the people of one of the larger human communities during earlier stages of the earth's evolution—we find that they too experienced, more or less instinctively, the Life of nature. But as humanity developed further, those instincts, which enabled people to experience their natural surroundings so directly, largely died out. Among more advanced humanity, therefore, we will not find that spontaneous harmony—a harmony between what arises from the human side and the immediate setting or natural surroundings. That has to do with the fact that humanity itself is undergoing a development, which constitutes its history, and which will form a whole within the long planetary development of the earth.

Returning to our example of a lower animal, in insect, where these matters are revealed most clearly, we find that its experience spans a comparatively short space of time—a year. Then the cycle repeats itself. With regard to mankind, a certain law of development is found to run like a thread through long ages of our earth's planetary evolution, as we have repeatedly observed during our historical studies. We have become familiar, for instance, with the type of instinctive clairvoyance belonging to earlier peoples. Their pictorial consciousness gradually diminished during an intermediate period of human development, eventually giving place to modern consciousness which is intellectual, conceptual. Our own historical time, dating from the first third of the fifteenth century, is the time of the developing Consciousness Soul. It is that time when man will step fully into his capacity of intellectual thinking in its narrower sense, which will then bring him fully to free consciousness of the Self.

If we consider a longer space of time from this point of view, we begin to find certain observable laws in the development of humanity. We can compare these developmental laws with those which, say, an insect experiences during the course of a year. Now in ancient times people still instinctively lived together with their natural surroundings and with the cycle of nature but these instincts have more or less died away, and nowadays we live in a time in which conscious inner life must replace them. What would happen nowadays if a man were to give himself up entirely to chance! Suppose he were not to adopt any inner guiding principles or rules, or that he did not tell himself at a certain moment: ‘This is how you should orientate yourself’—suppose that he were not to arrive at any such inner orientation but lived his life though, from birth to death, as chance directed. Man who by virtue of his higher soul development is ranged above the animals would sink because of the manner in which he handled his soul-life, below the animal level.

We may say, therefore, that the insect has a certain direction in its life through spring, summer, autumn and winter. It does not give its development up to chance, placing itself as it does within certain laws in each succeeding phase of its life. Mankind, however, has left behind the age of instinctive co-existence with nature. In his case it was more ensouled than that of the animals, but still instinctive. His life has taken on a newer, more conscious form. Yet we find that man, in spite of his higher soul-life and capacity to think, has given himself over to a more chaotic life. With the dying away of his instincts he has fallen, in a certain way, below the level of the animals. However much one may emphasize man's further steps forward, towering above the animals, one must still concede that he has lost a particular inner direction in his life. This directing quality of his life could be found once more by seeing himself as a member of the human race, of this or that century. And just as, for a lower form of life, the month of September takes its place in the course of the year, so does this or that century take its place in the whole development of our planet. And man needs to be conscious of how his own soul-life should he placed historically in a particular epoch.

This is an idea to which man needs to grow accustomed so as to step even further into the development of the Consciousness Soul. A man should be able to say to himself: ‘I live in this or that epoch. I am not man in the full sense of the word if I give myself over to chance. Chance has deposited me into earthly life through birth. But to give myself up to change as far as my consciousness is concerned would be simply to abandon myself to karma. I am only man, in the full sense of being man, if I take account of what the historical development of humanity asks from my soul-life, belonging as I do to this particular epoch.’ An animal lives within the cycle of the year: man must learn to live as part of the earth's history.

We have placed as the most vital event in the earth's history the Mystery of Golgotha. And we have often considered what it meant to live before the Mystery of Golgotha, or at some point after it. We have here a kind of fulcrum in historical development, from which vital, historical deed one can reckon backwards and forwards. But to do justice to such reckoning we must keep in mind the particular tasks awaiting the human soul in each historical age. The kind of presentation of the past which is customary cannot lead to such an understanding of each particular age. We may be told in bald terms, how Persian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek or Roman history unfolded, but that leaves us without any key to the position of each in the whole regular historical development of our planet—in the whole regular way an animal stands within the course of the year. Now, in order to gain a concept of what we need to arouse in our own soul-life in this age, we have had to consider the various ages of history from many points of view. Life is rich and diverse, and if one wants to reach some reality concerning our life on earth, we shall have to look at human life from ever-differing points of view, from which the particular tenor of soul-life in our own time.

If we look back to ancient times in human history we shall find, scattered about the inhabited earth, what are know as the Mysteries. We find that various groups of people, living their lives scattered about the earth, develop under the influence of the Mysteries. They do so outwardly—but more particularly in regard to culture and the life of the soul. We find that individuals are accepted into the Mysteries, according to their degree of maturity. There they undergo further development, which is to lead them to a particular grade of knowledge, of feeling, and willing. Then, when they have advanced in knowledge, in higher feeling, and higher willing, they step out again and move among the majority of mankind, giving guidance for the details of daily life, for the strengthening of the soul's inner work and of their will, their actual deeds. With regard to past ages of man, the best place in which to study such guidelines is actually the training of those preparing for initiation in the Mysteries.

Though not of course in the abstract, intellectual manner of today, the pupils in the Mysteries were led to know the world about them. Most importantly, they learned to know the so-called three kingdoms of nature and all that lives in them. In the lowest classes of our schools we learn, by way of all sorts of concepts and pictures, how we stand within the three realms of nature. Through concepts and ideas we learn to know mineral, plant and animal. We then seek there the key to understanding human life itself. Such concepts, with the intellectual soul-content imparted to people these days, did not exist among those working for initiation in the ancient Mysteries. Concepts did exist then; but they were not won, as today, through the exercise of observation and logic. Rather, people had to exercise their souls inwardly, so as to arrive eventually at inner pictures of mineral, of plant, and animal. These people did not absorb the abstract concepts of today but experienced pictures—pictures that intellectual modern man might find fantastic but, nevertheless, pictures. And man knew from direct experience that what he discovered, when he experienced these pictures, actually yielded him something that lived in the mineral, plant or animal—of what grew there, took form, and unfolded within them. This he knew: and he knew it from those pictures which to modern man would appear fantastic myths.

Ancient man knew that reality expressed itself in things which today are considered mere mythology. He could certainly say: ‘The animal before me has firm visible outlines.’ But these firm outlines were not what he tried to grasp or understand. He tried rather to follow the flowing, mobile, fluid quality of its life. He could not do this, however, in sharp outlines, in sharply defined concepts. He had to teach in pictures that were fluid, metamorphosing, changing. And thus it was taught in the Mysteries.

But when, on the basis of this Mystery-knowledge, a man was to rise to self-knowledge, he underwent a significant crisis in his soul. According to the type of knowledge available in those ancient times, early man obtained pictures of mineral, plant and animal. With his dreamlike consciousness, he could then see, as it were, into the inner realms of nature. From the content of the Mysteries he also received the guiding principles of self-knowledge, much as he did in later times. ‘Know Thyself’ has been an ideal in all civilizations, in all ages of human cultural development. But in progressing from his kind of imaginative, natural knowledge towards knowledge of himself, ancient man underwent an inner crisis of the soul. I can only describe the nature of the crisis by saying that when he learned to look at the nature of the mineral as it was spread before him man found fulfillment in his soul-life. He bore in himself the effects of physical-mineral processes. He bore in himself pictures of interweaving vegetative life, and also of animal life. In his world he was able to bring all these together: mineral, plant and animal. Looking back from the vantage point of the world around him into his own inwardness, he had, in his primitive type of memory, an inner picture of mineral, plant and animal, and of how they worked together.

Undertaking to obey the injunction ‘Know Thyself’, however, he found himself suddenly at a stand. He had a world of inner pictures, varied, richly diverse in form and colour, and sounding with inner music—this was his experience of his earthly surroundings. Yet he felt that this world of forms, diversity, and constant flux, this world that trembled with glowing colour and radiance and musical tones, let him down when he made the attempt to know himself. The pictorial way in which he tried to grasp the nature of man itself baffled him in his attempt. He was able to attain pictures of man too: but even while experiencing them he knew that the reality of man's being, the source of his human dignity, escaped him—it was not there.

In his Mystery-initiation man lived through this crisis. Yet out of it, arising from the impotence of self-knowledge, something else developed: a particular conviction about Life, a conviction on which every ancient civilization was based. It meant that really enlightened people in those ancient times could say: ‘Man does not reveal his true nature here on earth. The minerals, plants and animals all achieve their end here on earth; they can reveal themselves fully in the pictures which I have of them.’ This is at the root of all ancient civilizations: this living conviction that man does not belong to the earth in the same sense as do the other realms of nature. His home is elsewhere than on the earth. His home lies essentially in the super-sensible world. And this belief was no arbitrary figment. It was achieved through a crisis of the soul—after gaining the knowledge available at that time about the world external to man. And a solution to the crisis was only possible because people still had the capacity to turn their minds to life before birth, and from there to life after death. Everyone then knew instinctively of life before birth. It was part of earthly life, like a pre-natal memory. And they learned about life after death on the basis of life before birth.¹

On the basis of those capacities which he then had, man learned that after crossing the threshold of death the moment would come when he would not only have around him the natural world, external to man, but his own being would arise before his soul. For it was characteristic of the more ancient stages of human development that, between birth and death, man developed an exclusively pictorial consciousness. I have often spoken about this. He did not yet possess the intellectual consciousness which we have today. In those days this was only developed immediately after death. And people retained it then, after death. It is a peculiarity of man's progress that, in ancient times, man's consciousness after death was an intellectual one; whereas we experience a purely pictorial panorama of our life during the three days after death. There lies the peculiarity, that in ancient times men had a dreamy pictorial consciousness on earth, whereas nowadays we have an intellectual consciousness. Then after death, they grew into an intellectual consciousness which enabled them, once free of the body, to gain freedom. In ancient times man became an intellectual and free being after death.

On being initiated into this fact, the pupil in the Mysteries would be told that he could win knowledge of the world external to man through his picture-consciousness. If however he obeys the imperative ‘Know Thyself’, and looks back upon himself, he will not find his full human dignity there. He will not find it in earthly life before death. He will only become fully human when he has crossed the threshold of death, and pure thinking becomes his; for with pure thinking he can become a free being. It is a strange thing that this type of consciousness occurred after death in past ages of human development, whereas today after death we have the panorama of past life spread out before us. In a sense this consciousness has entered man's life in a counter-stream. It has moved from the life after death into his actual earthly life. And what we have gained, particularly since the first third of the fifteenth century, has trickled into earthly man from post-earthly man. The pupil in the ancient Mysteries knew clearly that the essence of man could only be found in super earthly life, after death. This has now taken its place in life on earth. A real super-sensible stream has entered into our life on earth. This sets up an opposition to the direction of our human life, moving from ‘before’ to ‘after’, the super-sensible stream moving from ‘after’ to ‘before’. Thus, as modern people, we take part in super-earthly life. We have undertaken to become worthy—worthy of what has been drawn from super-sensible into sensible existence. We now have to win our freedom by inner right. We must recognize fully the import of the super-sensible for the development of the Consciousness Soul.

For the people of ancient times, when the injunction ‘Know Thyself’ loomed before them, their response had to be that there is no self-knowledge on earth: for the essence of humanity is simply not fulfilled here on earth. Man reaches it only when he has gone through the threshold of death into the super-sensible world.

At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, and for centuries afterwards, man as he lived on earth was still called, in the language of ancient Mystery wisdom, the ‘natural man’. And it was considered that this natural man was not the real human being. The natural man was clearly differentiated from the spiritual being which bore the essence of man. The view then was that one only became spiritual man with the laying aside of the physical body. Only after crossing the threshold of death did one become spiritual man and, as such, ‘fully human.’ Initiation in the ancient Mysteries led to great humility with regard to earthly consciousness. Earthly man could not be made arrogant through Mystery-initiation. For whilst on earth he did not even feel that he was man in the fullest sense. He felt that he was more a candidate for humanity, and that he needed to use his life on earth in such a way that, after death, he could become fully man. So, according to Mystery-wisdom, man, as he went about his business on earth, was not a revelation of full humanity.

Now we must come to ancient Greece, and the time when Greek culture was widely influential. For it was then that people began to be aware, with their intellect and in freedom, that the true being of man was pouring from the sphere of after-death into man's earthly being. In Greek civilization the individual on earth was not regarded as entirely fulfilling his humanity. Men saw the work of the super-earthly, as it was drawing into the earthly. They saw in the detail of man's physiognomy, his way of going about, his shape—in all this they beheld with reverence, the super-earthly streaming into the earthly.

With the recent development of humanity all that has changed. Now man says: My great task is to become aware of my humanity. My task on this earth is to reveal, at least to some degree, man's being in its fullness. I too stand under the banner of the exhortation ‘Know Thyself’. I can compose my soul for freedom, because I have gained intellectual consciousness. I can lay hold of the inner strength of pure thinking in the act of self-knowledge. Before the eye of my soul man can appear. Not that man should grow proud in the partial fulfillment of this injunction ‘Know Thyself’. He should realize how at every moment this freedom of his has to be wrestled for. He should realize how, in his passions, emotions, feelings and sensibilities, he is always dependent on the subhuman. What was seen by that high form of pictorial consciousness in the world around, by ancient humanity, was also this realm of subhuman. They recognized that all their knowledge was of the subhuman realm in those ancient times. That was a significant point. For, they said, true man does not exist on earth. To grasp the intellectual nature of man they would have needed intellectual capacities themselves. With their non-intellectual form of knowledge they could only grasp the subhuman.

I have described in my (Philosophy of Freedom) how the intellectual is further developed into conscious, exact clairvoyance. It then lives in a free inner constitution of the soul. Only then can man know himself and his relation to the other parts of his being, outside his pure thinking and his free will. Through such a higher consciousness—imaginative, inspired and intuitive consciousness—man may reach in self-knowledge beyond his intellect and know himself as part of the super-sensible world. And then it will be clear to him that although he is fully human, as has become clear to him in his self-knowledge, full humanity requires of him that he perfect it ever more and more.

Thus modern man cannot develop the same sort of humility that he needed in ancient times, which arose when he had to say of himself: ‘Living in a physical body you are not yet fully human, you are only a candidate for humanity, not yet fulfilling your human dignity and worth. All you can do is prepare yourself for consciousness and freedom as they will arise in you immediately after death.’ A more modern man, who has meanwhile lived under Greek conditions in a different incarnation, would say: ‘Take heed that in your fleshly body between birth and death you do not neglect to be fully man. For as a modern man your inner task is the working-out of what has entered earthly life from the realm of the pre-earthly. You can become man on earth, and you must therefore take upon yourself the difficulty of becoming man on earth.’

All this is expressed in the development of man's religious consciousness. On a previous occasion we saw how in earlier times man looked up principally to the Father God, and in Christ he had the Son of God. In God the Father he saw the creative source of substance and the super-sensible origin of divine providence. Of this the earthly, perceptible world is merely an impress. He looked up to the cosmos from the earth; and in religious consciousness he looked up to God the Father. The pupils in the Mysteries had always been conscious that the most they could learn about man would be a preparation for the life after death. Now, through the Mystery of Golgotha, the Son of God has united with the earth's life, and man is able to develop an awareness of what St. Paul meant when he said ‘Not I, but Christ in me’. Now man can so direct his inner life as to let the Christ-impulse come to flower in him; he can let Christ's life flow and breathe through him. He can absorb the stream which has come to us from pre-earthly life and bring it to fruition in his life on earth.

A first stage in the reception of this stream consists in man noticing that at a particular point in his life he feels something flowering and coming alive in him. Previously it sat under the threshold of his consciousness, and he notices for the first time that it is there. It rises, filling him with inner light, inner warmth, and he knows that this inner life, inner warmth, inner light, has arisen in him during life on earth. He acquires a greater knowledge of life on earth than was his birthright. He learns to know something which arises within his humanity during his life on earth. And if man is sensible of the light and Life, of the love arising in him, and feels there the flowing, living presence of the Christ, he will receive strength—strength to grasp the fully human, the post-earthly, in the free activity of his own soul. Thus the Mystery of Golgotha and the Christ-impulse are intimately bound up with the attainment of human freedom, of that consciousness which is able to suffuse with inner life and warmth our mere thinking that is otherwise dead and abstract.

The exhortation ‘Know Thyself—bring your humanity to fruition in your own inner life’ has been addressed to humanity through all time, and is still in force today. But the experience of Christ in man is essential to our own day. It takes its place alongside the injunction ‘Know Thyself’, and must be given its full weight.

This indicates once again the enormous difference between the soul-constitution of the present day and that which prevailed in times past. We learn to consider man over great periods of time. The whole process is compatible with what takes place when the insect is sensitive to the period of summer in the setting of this world. For man should be able to live in the whole history of the earth as an animal lives in the course of the year. The insect ensures that it notices the transition to autumn, and it sets in motion another aspect of its life accordingly, as it did for spring and summer. And man knows: Once upon a time we were instinctively clairvoyant; we were unfree; our consciousness was pictorial; we were unable to obey the injunction ‘Know Thyself’; we know we could fully realize our humanity only on the other side of the gate of death; that time was analogous to spring in the life of the insect. Then came the Greek era, as summer and autumn come round for the insect. This was a bridge to that later era in which we now live. Our soul's work is different. We should be able to know ourselves to a certain degree here on earth, and accordingly be free after death to reach higher stages of development than in previous ages of man. Then one was wholly man only after death. In those ancient times man's task on the earth was to be a candidate for life, becoming fully man after death. In this, our own age, it is man's task to realize himself here in earth, that after death he may rise to higher stages of development than he could in former ages.

In those times the danger was that if he did not live his life on earth properly, man would not arrive at his full humanity. Today we face something different. We have to achieve our full humanity while on earth. If we fail in this, we betray ourselves and in the life after death plunge further down into the subhuman. In ancient days things could be left undone; today destruction follows. Then, not to become a candidate for life was an omission; today a man destroys, through his own humanity, something in the whole human race if he does not strive after full humanity in his own life. In past ages he merely left something undone; by doing so today he betrays mankind.

Thus we must grasp the need to place ourselves consciously in the world on a higher Level of being, as the insect does instinctively, on a lower Level, in its world. Otherwise man delivers himself up to chaos, which the animal instinctively does not do. We must learn through Anthroposophy to be really human, that we may not experience the scandal of being less in the world-order than the animals—despite the Gods having determined us for higher things. The animals do not neglect their part in the cosmic harmony, yet we as mankind turn the cosmic harmony into dissonance. And thus, I may say, we shall heap upon ourselves cosmic scandal, if we do not learn to think in this way and make our consciousness accord with the demands of the age. This we must learn in these days to join our feeling to our intellectual life. We must take in what would follow upon our not striving after that knowledge which makes us fully man. It would be a scandal before the Gods themselves.

• 1. I refer to my remarks in the so-called ‘French Course’.(Published as Cosmology, Religion and Philosophy)

To begin with today we will remind ourselves of the indications I have given you concerning the real nature of human thinking. In the present age, since the well-known point of time in the 15th century, our thinking has become essentially abstract, devoid of pictures and imagery. People take pride in this kind of thinking which as we know, did not begin to be general until the above-mentioned epoch; previously to that, thinking had been pictorial and was therefore a living thinking in the real sense.

Let us remind ourselves of the essential character of thinking as it is today. The living essence of thinking was within us during the period between death and rebirth, before we descended from the spiritual into the physical world. This living essence was then cast off and today, as men of the Fifth postAtlantean epoch, our thinking is the corpse of that living thinking between death and a new birth. It is just because our thinking now is devoid of life that our ordinary-level consciousness as modern men makes it so easy for us to be satisfied with comprehending the lifeless and we have no aptitude for understanding the living nature of the world around us.

True, we have thereby acquired our freedom, our self dependence as human beings but we have also shut ourselves off entirely from what is involved in a perpetual process of ‘becoming’. We observe the things around us in which no such process is operating, which are incapable of germination and have a present existence only. It may be objected that man observes the germinating force in plants and animals, but actually he is deceiving himself. He observes this germinating force only in so far as it is the bearer of dead substances; moreover he observes the germinating force itself as something that is dead.

The essential characteristic of this kind of perception is indicated by the following: In earlier epochs of evolution men perceived an active germinal force everywhere in their environment, whereas nowadays they have eyes only for what is dead; they hope somehow to grasp the nature of life too, merely by observing what is dead. Hence they do not grasp it at all!

Therewith, however, man has entered into a quite remarkable epoch of his evolution. Nowadays, when he observes the sense world, thoughts are no longer given to him in the way that applies to sounds and colours. From what I say in the book Riddles of Philosophy, you know that thoughts were given to the Greeks just as sounds and colours present themselves to us today. We say that a rose is red ; the Greek perceived not only the redness of a rose but also the thought of the rose, that is to say, he perceived something spiritual. And this perception of the purely spiritual has gradually died away with the rise of the abstract, lifeless thinking that is only a corpse of what thinking was in us before our earthly life.

But now the question arises: If we want to understand Nature, if we want to form a world-conception for ourselves, how are the sense-world outside us and the dead thinking within us to be related to each other? We must be quite clear that when man confronts the world today, he confronts it with lifeless thinking. But then, is there death also outside in the world? There ought at least to be an inkling today that there is not. In the colours, in the sounds, at the very least, life seems to proclaim its presence everywhere! To one who understands the real nature of the senses the remarkable fact becomes clear that although modern man invariably directs his attention to the sense-world alone, he cannot grasp this sense-world by means of thinking, because dead thoughts are simply not applicable to the living sense-world.

Make this quite clear to yourselves.—Man confronts the sense-world today and believes that he should not allow himself to look beyond it. But what does this mean for modern man—not to be willing to look beyond the sense-world? It actually means renouncing all vision and all knowledge. For neither colour, nor sound, nor warmth, can be grasped at all by dead thinking. Man thinks, then, in an element quite other than that in which he actually lives.

Hence it is a remarkable fact that although we enter the earthly world at birth, our thinking is the corpse of what it was before our earthly existence. And today man wants to bring the two together ; he wants to apply the residue from his pre-earthly existence to his earthly existence.

And it is this fact which since the 15th century has constantly asserted itself in the sphere of thinking and knowledge in the form of doubt of every kind. This is the cause of the great confusion prevailing at the present time; it is this that has allowed scepticism and doubt to creep into every possible mode of thinking; it is this that is responsible for the fact that men today no longer have the remotest concept of what knowledge really is. There is indeed nothing more unsatisfactory than to examine theories of knowledge in their modern form. Most scientists abstain from this and leave it to the philosophers. And in this field one can have remarkable experiences.

In Berlin, in the year 1889, I was once visiting the philosopher Eduard von Hartmann, now long since dead. We spoke about questions connected with theories of knowledge. In the course of conversation he said that one should not allow questions connected with theories of knowledge to be printed; they should at most be duplicated by some machine or in some other way, for in the whole of Germany there were at most sixty individuals capable of occupying themselves usefully with such questions.

Just think of it—one in every million! Naturally, among a million human beings there is more than one scientist or, at least, more than one highly educated individual. But as regards real insight into questions connected with theories of knowledge, Eduard von Hartmann was probably right; for apart from the handbooks which candidates at the Universities have to skim through for certain examinations, not many readers will be found for works on the theory of knowledge, if written in the modern style and based on the modern way of thinking.

And so things jog along in the same old grooves. People study anatomy, physiology, biology, history and the rest, unconcerned as to whether these sciences bring them knowledge of reality; they go on at the same jog-trot. But a time will come when men will have to be clear about the fundamental fact that because their thinking is abstract it is full of light and therefore embraces something in the highest sense super-earthly, whereas in their life on Earth they have around them only what is earthly. The two sets of facts simply do not harmonize.

You may ask: did the thought-pictures current in days of old accord more fully with man's nature when his thinking was full of life? The answer is, Yes—and I will indicate the reason to you.

The human being of today is engrossed from his birth to his seventh year in developing his physical body; then comes the point where he is able to develop his etheric body as well—this takes place from the seventh to the fourteenth year. Then from the fourteenth to the twenty-first year he develops his astral body; until his twenty-eighth year the sentient soul; until his thirty-fifth year the intellectual or mind-soul; and after that the consciousness-soul. It can then no longer be said that he develops but that he himself is being developed, for the Spirit Self which will evolve only in future ages, already participates to some extent in his development from his forty-second year onwards. And so the process continues.

Now the period from the twenty-eighth to the thirty-fifth year in human life is extremely important. Conditions during this period have altered essentially since the 15th century. Until then, influences had continued to come to man from the surrounding cosmic ether. Because this is no longer the case today, it is difficult to imagine how man could have been influenced by the surrounding ether. Nevertheless it was so. Between their twenty-eighth and thirty-fifth years, human beings experienced a kind of inner revival. It was as though something within them was given new life. These experiences were connected with the fact that in his twenty-eighth year a man was raised to the degree of ‘Master’ in his trade; it was not until that age that he experienced a revival—of course not in a crude but in a delicate form. He was given a new impulse. This was because the all-encompassing ether-world worked upon him—the ether-world which, as well as the physical world, is all around us.

In the first seven years of life the ether-world worked through the processes operating in the physical body of the human being but it did not work directly upon him until his twenty-eighth year when the period of the development of the sentient soul was over. But then, when he entered into the period of the intellectual or mind-soul at that time, the ether worked upon him with a vivifying effect.

This no longer takes place and man would never have achieved independence today as an individual and a personality, had the process continued. This also has to do with the fact that the whole inner disposition of the human soul has changed since those days.

You must now accept a concept that may be extremely difficult for modern thinking to grasp but is nevertheless very important.

In physical life it is quite clear to us that what is going to take place only in the future, is not yet here. In etheric life, however, this is not so. In etheric life, time is, as it were, a kind of space and what will some day be present already has an effect upon what precedes it, as well as upon what will follow. But this should not be a matter for wonder; it is the same in the physical world too.

If we really understand Goethe's theory of Metamorphosis, we shall say to ourselves that the blossom of the plant is already working in the root. And that is indeed so. It is the case too with everything in the ether-world: the future is already working in what has gone before. Thus the fact that man was open to the influences of the ether-world had an effect upon the preceding life back to his birth, chiefly upon his world of thoughts. As a result his world of thoughts was different from the one that is his in the epoch in which we are living today, when the doorway between the twenty-eighth and thirty-fifth years is no longer open, when it is closed. There was a time when men's thoughts were truly alive. They made him unfree but at the same time they gave him a feeling of being connected with his whole environment; he felt himself to be a living member of the world.

Today man feels that he exists only in a dead world. This feeling is inevitable because if the living world were working upon him, it would make him unfree. Only because the dead world requires nothing of us, can determine nothing in us, can give rise to nothing in us—only because it is a dead world that is working in upon us are we free men.

But an the other side we must also understand clearly that precisely because of what man has within him now in complete freedom, precisely through his thoughts, which are dead, he can acquire no understanding of the life round about him; he can understand the death around him—and only that.

Now if there were to be no change in the attitude and mood of man's soul, the discordance in culture and civilization which is becoming more and more apparent, would inevitably increase and the inner assurance and resoluteness of the soul would progressively diminish. This would be even more apparent if men were to pay real attention to the knowledge they glean today from what is said to be irrefutable. But they still do not pay attention. They still content themselves with traditional religious ideas which they no longer understand but which have been propagated. Even in the sciences people content themselves with these ideas. When a man pursues any particular science he generally has no idea, when he begins really to grasp it, that he is still clinging to the old traditions, while the modern ideas which are only dead, abstract thoughts, do not even approach the sphere of the living.

In earlier times, because the ether worked in him, man could also come in touch with the living nature of the sense-world. When he still believed in the reality of the spiritual world, he could also grasp the essential nature of the world of the senses. Today, when he believes only in the world of the senses, the strange thing is that his thoughts, although dead, are now spiritual in the very highest degree! Here there is dead spirit. But man is not conscious of the fact that today he Looks into the world with the heritage of what was his before his earthly life. If his thoughts were still living, vivified by the surrounding ether, he could look into the living world of his environment. As, however, nothing comes to him from his environment and he has to rely only on what he has inherited from a spiritual world, he can no longer understand the physical world around him.

This is apparently paradoxical but for all that an extraordinarily important fact. It provides the answer to the question: Why are modern men materialists? They are materialists because they are too spiritual! They would be able to understand matter everywhere if they could comprehend the life that is present in all matter. But because they confront the life with their dead thinking, men make this life itself into something that is dead and see lifeless substance everywhere. It is because they are too spiritual, because they have within them only what was theirs before their birth, that they become materialists. A man does not become a materialist through knowledge of substance—in point of fact he has no real knowledge—but he becomes a materialist because he does not live on the Earth in the real sense.

And if you ask why hardened materialists, such as Büchner, Vogt and the rest, have become such out-and-out materialists, the answer is: because they were too spiritual, because they had nothing within them that connected them with earthly life, but only what they had experienced before their life on Earth—and this was dead. This remarkable phenomenon in human civilization, this materialism, is in truth a profound mystery.

Now in the present epoch, because his thoughts are no longer imbued with life from without, from the ether, man can transcend his dead thoughts only by instilling life into them himself. And the only possibility of doing this is by instilling life as conceived in Anthroposophy into his world of thoughts, by imbuing his thoughts with life and then penetrating into the life inherent in the world of the senses. He must therefore vivify himself inwardly. He must himself impart life to dead thoughts through inner activity of soul, and then he will overcome materialism. He will begin to judge everything around him differently. And from this very platform you have heard a great deal about the many possibilities of such judgments.

Let us focus our attention today on a particular subject: the plant-kingdom in our environment. We know that many plants are consumed as foodstuffs by animals and human beings and are worked upon in the processes of nourishment and digestion. In the way generally indicated they can be assimilated into the animal and human organisms. And now we suddenly come across a poisonous plant, let us say henbane or belladonna. What have we there? Suddenly, among the other vegetation, we find something that does not combine with the animal and human organisms as do other plants.

Let us be clear in our minds about the basis of plant-life. I have often spoken about this. Let us picture the surface of the Earth and the plants growing out of it. We know that the physical organization of the plant is permeated by its ether body. But as I have often pointed out, the plant would not be able to unfold if the all-pervading astrality did not contact it from above by way of the blossom (lilac).

The plant has no astral body within it but the astrality touches it from above. As a rule the plant does not absorb the astrality but only allows itself to be touched by it. The plant does not assimilate the astrality but towards the blossom and the fruit there is interplay with the astrality which does not, as a rule, combine with the ether-body or physical body of the plant.

In a poisonous plant, however, it is different. In a poisonous plant the astrality penetrates into the actual substance of the plant and combines with it. A plant such as belladonna or, let us say, henbane, hyoscyamus, sucks in the astrality either strongly or more moderately and so bears astrality within itself—in an uncoordinated state, of course, for if it were coordinated the plant would have to become an animal. It does not become an animal; the astrality within it is in a compressed state.

As a result, interaction takes place between what is present in a plant saturated with astrality and the processes of assimilation in the animal and human organisms. If we eat plants that are not poisonous, we absorb not only those constituents of the plant which the chemist works up in the laboratory, not only the actual substance of the plant but also the etheric life forces ; but we must, as I have said here before, destroy the substance completely during the process of nutrition. In feeding on what is living, man must kill it within himself. That is to say, within his own organism he must expel the etheric from the plant-substance.

In the lower man, in the metabolic system, the following remarkable process takes place. When we eat plants, that is to say, vegetable substance—the same also applies to cooked foodstuffs but it is specially marked when we eat raw pears, or raw apples, or raw berries—we force out the etheric and absorb into our own ether-body the dynamic structure which underlies the plant. The plant has a definite form, a definite structure. It is revealed to clairvoyant consciousness that the structure we thus take into ourselves is not always identical with the form we see externally. It is something different. The plant-structure rises up within us and adapts itself to the organism in a remarkable way.

And now something very strange occurs. Just suppose—I must speak rather paradoxically here but it is exactly how things are—suppose you have eaten some cabbage. A definite form (blue in diagram) becomes visible in the lower man as a result, and activity is generated there.

To the extent to which this activity is generated in the lower man through the eating of cabbage, the actual negative of the process makes its appearance in the upper man, the head-man. So having sketched the form which appears in the lower part of the organism, I now sketch in the upper man a hollow form (blue, red).

It is actually the case that the eating of the cabbage produces in us a definite form or structure and that the negative of it appears in our head.

And into this negative we now receive the impressions of the external world. This is possible because we have the hollow space within us—I am of course speaking approximately—and all nutritive plants have this effect.

If we have eaten something that is usually known as a foodstuff, the cohesiveness of its form is only strong enough to persist for twenty-four hours, in the course of which we must continually be dissolving it; one period of waking and sleeping dissolves it and it must again and again be formed anew. This is what happens when we have eaten nutritive plants—plants which have a physical body and an etheric body in their natural growth and do not allow the astrality to do more than play around them.

But now let us suppose that we drink the juice of henbane. Henbane is a plant that has sucked astrality into itself and consequently has a much more strongly cohesive form. In the lower man, therefore, there is a much firmer form which cannot easily be dissolved and which actually asserts its independence! Consequently the corresponding negative is more pronounced.Now suppose some human being has a brain with a structure that is not properly maintained. He tends to lapse into clouded, somnolent states because his astral body is not established firmly enough in the physical body of his brain. He drinks the juice of henbane and that produces in him a firm plant-form which in turn gives rise to a strong negative. And so by energizing the etheric body of his lower body and bringing into it a firm form through the taking of henbane, clearly defined thoughts may arise in a person whose brain was, so to speak, too soft, and the clouded state may pass away. Then, if in the rest of his organism he is strong enough—he may often be ordered this medicine for his condition—if he is strong enough to rouse the corresponding life-forces into activity and his brain is again in order, a poison such as this may help him to overcome his tendency to lapse into somnolent states.

Belladonna, for example, has a similar effect. Let me indicate in a sketch the effect it produces.

By taking belladonna the etheric body is reinforced by strong ‘scaffolding’. Hence when belladonna is taken in a suitable dosage which the patient can stand—after all, one can be cured by a remedy only if one can stand it—then a strong scaffolding is built, as it were, within the etheric body of the lower man. This strong scaffolding produces its negative in the head. And upon this reciprocal action of positive and negative depends the healing process we expect from belladonna.

You must, however, be clear that when dealing with such effects, the factor of spatial distance can be ignored. The man of today, with his lifeless but massive intellect, imagines that if something is going on in his stomach it can get into his brain only if it visibly streams upwards. This, however, is not the case; processes in the lower body generate processes in the head as their counterpart and spatial distance does not come into consideration. If one is able to observe the etheric body, it can be seen distinctly how a form lights up in the etheric body of the lower body (red in diagram), while in the etheric body of the head, now darkened, the form is reproduced in negative.

You can perceive for yourselves that Nature everywhere tends to produce such phenomena. You know that a properly formed wasp has a kind of head in front, a kind of hind-quarter, and wings. That is a properly formed wasp.

But there are also wasps which look like this (lower form in diagram). They have a sting and drag their hind-quarters after them: the gall-flies. And even in the physical sphere, this appendage between the front part of the body and the hind-quarter is reduced to a minimum; the sting is greatly reduced.

As soon as one enters the spiritual realm, no visible sting is necessary any longer. And when you come across certain beings in the elemental world—you remember that I spoke to you not long ago about the elemental kingdoms—you may see, for example, some being ... then there is nothing ... far away there is a different being. And gradually it dawns on you that the beings belong together; where the one goes the other also goes. So you may find yourself in the remarkable position—in the elemental world it can indeed be so—of discovering that here there is one part of an elemental-etheric organism, and there the other part; then one part may have turned round, but when this happened the other part cannot move directly to a new position but must follow the path taken by the first.

So you see, for those substances which neither the human nor the animal organism can immediately destroy, which produce a stronger and more lasting scaffolding, it is a matter of finding a connection with what, in a quite different part of the human organism, can also work constructively and with healing effects.

This gives you a vista of how the world can again become living and be revealed as such to man. Today, having only a heritage from the spiritual world, man has no possibility of approaching the living environment. He will, however, one day understand it again, he will again perceive how physical thinking is related to the whole universe. Then the universe will help him to discover why things are connected in this way or in that, why, let us say, the relation of a non-poisonous plant to the human and animal body is different from that of a poisonous plant. Only in this way is a re-vitalizing of the whole of human existence possible.

Now this may cause the modern comfort-lover to say: the men of old were far better off than we are, for the surrounding ether still worked upon them and they had living thoughts; they still understood such matters as the essential difference between poisonous and non-poisonous plants.—You know, of course, that animals still understand this difference, for they have no abstract thoughts to detach them from the world. Hence the animals are able through instinct to distinguish poisonous from non-poisonous plants.

Yes, but it must be emphasized over and over again that under such conditions man would never have been able to exercise his freedom. For what keeps us inwardly living—even in our thoughts—robs us of freedom. However paradoxical it may seem, with respect to the thoughts belonging to earlier earthly lives, we must each become an empty nothingness; then we can be free. And we become a nothingness when we receive into ourselves as corpses the living thoughts which were ours in pre-earthly existence, receive them into ourselves, that is to say, in their condition of ‘non-being’. Therefore with our dead thoughts we really go about as blanks in our waking life on Earth as far as our soul-life is concerned. And only out of this state of blankness or nothingness can our freedom become reality.

This is quite comprehensible. But we can understand nothing truly if we have nothing living within us. We can understand what is dead, but that will not bring us a single step further in our living relation to the world. And so, while safeguarding our freedom in face of the interruption in understanding that has come about, we must achieve new understanding by beginning now, in earthly existence, to give life to our thoughts by the power of our will. At every moment we can distinguish between living and dead thoughts. When we rise to the level of pure thinking—I have spoken of this in the book, The Philosophy of Freedom—we can be free men. If we fill our thoughts with feeling we shall, it is true, leave freedom aside, but in compensation we shall renew our connection with the environment. We participate in freedom through the consciousness that we are always capable of approaching nearer and nearer to pure thought, and in acts of moral intuition draw from it moral impulses.

Thereby we become free men; but we must first regulate our inner life of soul, the inner disposition of our soul, through our own deeds on Earth. Then we can take the results of those deeds with us through the gate of death into the spiritual world. For what has been achieved by individual effort does not go to waste in the universe.

I may have demanded difficult thoughts from you today but you will realize on reflection that we come nearer to understanding the world by learning to understand man, and especially the relation of physical man—the apparently physical man for he is really not a physical man alone, being permeated always by the higher members of his organism—to the other aspects of the physically manifested world, as we have learnt to know it from the example of poisonous plants.

This lecture is also known as: Mysteries of the Pleroma: the Corruption of their Influence in Europe and Asia Today. It is lecture 7 of 12 from the lecture series: Cultural Phenomena—Three Perspectives of Anthroposophy.

In a time of great and momentous decisions like the present it is all the more necessary that in their study of contemporary events and happenings, men's minds should also be raised to the Spirit. The Spirit is no abstraction but a reality which transcends and works into the physical life of humanity. It is by no means enough to admit that the Spirit pervades all things physical, for this is to recognise one fragment only of the world in which man lives and moves as a thinking and acting being. For many centuries it was justifiable to hold such a view, but in our age this justification has ceased. In the lecture to-day, therefore, we will consider how certain happenings in the physical world are connected with impulses emanating from the spiritual world.

To begin with, we will study the character of certain spiritual impulses which have been at work in the course of evolution and have led on to the present state of affairs in the world. For long ages now, Western civilisation and its offshoots have paid attention to one fragment only of the whole story of the evolution of the world, and from a certain point of view this was quite right. In times when the Old Testament became the authoritative record, it was proper to regard the creation of man by Jahve or Jehovah as the dawn of world-evolution.

But in still earlier times the intervention of Jehovah was regarded not as the incipient but as a much later episode in the evolutionary process. It was said that another, more purely spiritual phase of evolution had preceded the creation of the world by Jehovah as it is described in the Bible and as it is ordinarily understood. In other words, it was held that the intervention of Jehovah had been preceded by that of other Beings, that the creation of man had occurred after the passage of an earlier phase of the evolutionary process.

Those men in Greece who meditated upon the earliest stages of world-evolution spoke of a primordial Being for the understanding of whose nature a much more highly spiritual mode of knowledge is required than for an understanding of the events described in the Old Testament. These men spoke of the Being whom they held to be the actual Creator of the world—the Demiurgos.

The Demiurgos was a Being dwelling in spheres of lofty spirituality, in a world devoid of every element of that material existence with which in the Bible story the humanity created by Jehovah is naturally associated.

We must therefore think of the Demiurgos as a sublime Being, as the Creator of the world who sends forth other Beings from Himself. The Beings sent forth by the Demiurgos were ranked in successive stages, each stage being lower than the last. (Such expressions are, of course, quite inadequate, but no other words are available.) The life of these Beings, however, was held to be entirely free from the conditions of earthly birth and earthly death.

In Greece they were known as Aeons—of the first rank, the second rank and so on. The Aeons were Beings who had issued from the Demiurgos. Among these Aeons, Jahve or Jehovah was a Being of a relatively subordinate rank. And this brings us to a consideration of the teachings of the Gnostics, as they were called, in the early centuries of Christendom. It was said that Jehovah united with matter and that from this union man came into existence.

According to this Gnostic conception, therefore, Jehovah was a somewhat lower descendant of the more lofty Aeons who had proceeded from the Demiurgos, and as the outcome of Jehovah's union with matter, man was created.

“Pleroma” was the name given to a world which transcends, although it has its basis in the phenomena of the world of sense. This conception was thoroughly intelligible to the Ancients although it was utterly beyond the grasp of a later humanity. The Pleroma was a world at a higher level than the physical world but peopled none the less by individualised Beings. And at the lowest level, at the lowest stage of the Pleroma, the human being created by Jehovah comes into existence. At this same stage, another Being appears, a Being incorporate not in the individual man nor yet in a nation, but rather in humanity taken as one whole, a Being who remembers its descent from the Demiurgos and strives again to reach the spiritual world. The name of this Being was Achamoth and in Greece, Achamoth was a personification of the spiritual strivings of mankind. The urge which lives in men to reach the spiritual world again was therefore said to be due to Achamoth.

Another conception was then added to this world of ideas, namely, that in order to reward the strivings of Achamoth, the Demiurgos sent down an Aeon of a very high rank. This Aeon—so it was said—united with the man Jesus in order that the strivings of Achamoth might be fulfilled. The Gnostic teaching was that in the man Jesus there had dwelt a Being belonging to the ranks of the Aeons, a Being of a far more highly spiritual order than Jahve or Jehovah.

And so, among those in whom these ideas lived during the early Christian centuries—and the hearts of many men in those times were turned with the deepest fervour and reverence to the Mystery of Golgotha—there grew up the conception of the great mystery connected with the man Jesus in whom a holy Aeon had come to dwell.

Study of this mystery took many different forms but no essential purpose would be served to-day by entering into a detailed consideration of the various ideas current in Greece, Asia Minor and its neighbouring districts, as to the manner in which this Aeon had been incorporate in the man Jesus. The kind of ideas which in those days men brought to their study of a mystery of this character have long since passed away from the sphere of human thinking. Man's thought to-day is concerned with all that surrounds and is connected with his life between birth and death and at best there dawns upon him the realisation that spiritual foundations underlie this physical world of sense. Direct, inner experience of the kinship of the human soul with the Pleroma which was once a matter of immediate experience and referred to as naturally as we refer to-day to man's connection with the spiritual world—which was moreover of far greater interest to human beings in those days than the physical world—this too has passed away. There is no longer any direct experience of kinship with the spiritual world. Such ideas lived in European civilisation no longer than the first three, or rather no longer than the first three and greater part of the fourth centuries of our era. By that time the minds of men were no longer capable of rising to the sphere known as the Pleroma, and the dawn of another age had broken. This was the age of thinkers like Augustine and Scotus Erigena who were among the first. It was the age of Scholasticism, of European Mysticism at its prime, an epoch when the language of the mind bore little resemblance to the language used in the early days of Christendom. Men's minds were now directed to the physical world of sense and on the basis of this material world they endeavoured to evolve their concepts and ideas of the super-sensible world.

Direct experience of kinship with the spiritual world, with the Pleroma, had died away. The time had come for man to pass into an entirely different phase of development. It is not a question here of the respective merits of two epochs of time, or of forming an opinion of the inherent value of the medieval mind. The point is to realise and understand that civilised humanity is faced with different tasks during the different epochs. In an earlier age, kinship with the world known as the Pleroma was a matter of immediate experience, and it was man's task and function to activate the spiritual forces of knowledge in the innermost recesses of the soul—the forces of spiritual aspiration. But as time went on, darkness crept over the world of the Pleroma. Faculties of an entirely different character began to function in the human mind and the development of rationalistic thought began. In the ages when there had been direct experience of kinship with the Pleroma, the faculty of individual thinking had not begun to function in the mind of man. Knowledge came to him through illumination, through inspiration and through an instinctive realisation of the super-sensible world. His thoughts were revealed to him. The springing-forth of individual thoughts and the building of logical connections in thinking denoted a later phase, the coming of which was already foreshadowed by Aristotle. This later phase of evolution cannot really be said to have begun in any real sense before the second half of the fourth century of our era. By the time of the Middle Ages the energies of the human mind were directed wholly to the development of thought per se and of everything that is associated with the activity of thinking.

In this connection, medieval culture and, above all, Scholasticism rendered inestimable service to the progress of civilisation. The faculty of thinking was turned to practical application in the shaping and association of ideas. A technique of thought of the very purest kind was worked out, although it too has been wholly lost.

The re-acquisition of the technique of Scholastic thought is a goal to which humanity ought for their own sake to aspire. But it goes against the grain in our days, when men prefer to receive knowledge passively, not by dint of their own inner activity. The urge to inner activity is lacking in our present age, whereas in Scholasticism it lived and worked with a tremendous power. And that is why even to-day it is possible for the thought of men who understand the essence of Scholasticism to be far more profound, far more consistent than the thought emanating from the world of science. Modern scientific thought is formal, short-winded, often inconsistent. Men should really learn a lesson from the technique of Scholastic thought, but the learning will not be of the kind that finds favour to-day. It must be an active learning, not a learning that consists merely in assimilating knowledge that has already been laid down as a model, or deduced from experiments.

The Middle Ages, then, were the period during which man was meant to unfold an inner faculty in his soul, namely the faculty of thought. The Gods drew a veil over the Pleroma—which was a direct revelation of their life and being—because, if this revelation had continued to influence the human mind, men would not have unfolded that strong, inner activity of thought which came to the fore during the Middle Ages and from which sprang the new mathematics and its kindred sciences, all of which are the legacy of Scholasticism.

Let us try now to summarise what has been said. Throughout many centuries the Pleroma was a revelation vouchsafed to man. Through an Act of Grace from on high, this world of light revealed itself in and through the light that filled the mind of man. A veil was then drawn over this world of light. Yonder in Asia, decadent remains of the world behind this veil were still preserved, but in Europe it was as though a precipitous wall arose from Earth to Heaven, a wall whose foundations stretched across the districts of the Ural Mountains and Volga, over the Black Sea and towards the Mediterranean. Try to picture to yourselves this great wall which grew up in Europe in consequence of the trend of evolution of which I have told you. It was an impenetrable wall, concealing from men all traces even of those decadent remains of earlier vision of the Pleroma which were still preserved over in Asia. In Europe, this vision was completely lost. It was replaced by a technique of thought from which a vista of the spiritual world was entirely absent. There you have a picture of the origin and subsequent development of medieval thought. Great though its achievements were, men's eyes were blinded to all that lay concealed behind the wall stretching from the Ural and Volga districts, over the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Medieval thought was incapable of piercing this wall and though men hankered after the East, the East was no reality.

This is not a symbolic but a true picture of Europe as it was in the Middle Ages. Under the influences of a Giordano Bruno, a Copernicus, a Galileo, men felt the call to set about understanding the Earth beneath their feet. And they then proceeded to work out a science of the Heavens modeled upon their conception of the Earth, in contrast to the older science of the Earth which had been a reflection of heavenly lore and of the mysteries of the Pleroma.

And so in the darkness there arose a new mode of knowledge and a new mental life, for the light was now shut off by the wall of which I have spoken.

The course of evolution is such that when the time is ripe for the development of certain definite faculties in one portion of the human race, other portions of humanity are separated off as it were behind a veil. And in the case of which we are speaking, a decadent culture grew up in the East behind the wall which had now been erected on the Earth, while Europe saw the beginnings of what was later to develop into Western culture in its most characteristic form. As a matter of fact the position to-day is fundamentally the same, except that men try now by means of historical documents and an external mode of knowledge devoid of all insight into the mysteries of the Pleroma, to inform themselves about the dark secrets of existence. The significance of these things in the present age becomes quite apparent when we look over to the East, behind the great wall, where decadence has corrupted an earlier insight into the world known as the Pleroma. What was once an instinctive but at the same time a highly spiritual form of knowledge has become corrupt; the life of the human soul in the spiritual worlds has descended to the material world which from the time of the Middle Ages onwards was the only world that remained accessible to the mind of man. Over yonder in the East we see a culture which in the true sense is not culture at all but an impulse to give an earthly, physical garb to purely spiritual experiences awakened by insight into the mysteries of the Pleroma.

Deeds of the Gods in the world of the Gods were conceived as the deeds of idols and the worship of idols superseded the worship of the Gods. Forces belonging in truth to the world of the Pleroma were dragged down to the material realm and gave rise to the practice of corrupt magical arts in the regions of Northern Asia. The magic arts practised by the Shamanic peoples of Northern Asia and their aftermath in Central Asia (Southern Asia too was affected to a certain extent but remained somewhat freer), are an example of the corrupt application of what had once been a direct vision of the Pleroma. What ought to have been achieved, and in earlier times was achieved by the inner activity of the soul was now assisted by earthly magic. The forces living in the Pleroma were dragged down to the material world in an Ahrimanic form and were applied not only on Earth but in the spiritual world bordering on the Earth, the influences of which pour down upon human beings. And so, Eastward of the Ural and Volga regions, in the astral world which borders on our physical world, there arose during the later Middle Ages, continuing through the centuries to our own day, an Ahrimanic form of magic practised by certain spiritual beings who in their etheric and astral development stand higher than man but in their development of soul and Spirit stand lower than man. Throughout the regions of Siberia and Central Asia, in the spiritual world immediately adjacent to the earthly world, terrible etheric-astral Beings are to be seen, Ahrimanic beings who practise an earthly, materialised form of magic. And these forces work upon human beings who are unskilled in such arts but who are infected by them and so come under the influence of this astral world.

In connection with these matters we must remember that ancient mythological lore was the outcome of a wonderfully spiritual conception of Nature. When men spoke in Greece of the Fauns and Satyrs and of the activities of the Fauns and Satyrs in earthly happenings, these beings were not the creations of fantasy as modern scholars would have us believe. The Greeks knew the reality of the Fauns and Satyrs who peopled the astral sphere adjacent to the earthly world. Approximately at the turn of the third and fourth centuries of our era these astral beings withdrew into regions lying Eastwards of the Ural, the Volga and the Caucasus. This territory became their home and there they entered upon their later phase of development.

Against this cosmic background the faculty of thought in its pure form began to evolve in the souls of the men of Europe. So long as they adhered rigidly to an inwardly pure, inwardly austere activity of thinking of which Scholasticism affords a splendid example their development was thoroughly in harmony with the aims of the spiritual world. They were preparing for something that must be achieved in our present age and in the immediate future. But this purity was not everywhere maintained. Eastwards of the great wall of which I have spoken, the urge had arisen to drag down the forces of the Pleroma to the earthly world and apply them in an earthly, Ahrimanic form of magic. And Westwards of this wall, the urge towards rationalistic thought and towards a purely intellectual grasp of the earthly world mingled with the element of lust in material existence. In other words, a Luciferic impulse gradually insinuated itself into the working of the faculty of pure reason now dawning in the human mind.

The result of this was the development of another astral world, immediately adjacent to the Earth, together with the efforts that were being made to unfold the faculties of pure reason and a pure, inwardly active form of thought. This astral world was ever-present among those who strove with the purity of purpose of men like Giordano Bruno, Galileo and others to promote the development of the faculty of earthly thought and to establish a standard and technique of thought. In and among all this activity we can divine the presence of beings belonging to an astral world—beings who attracted not only to themselves but to the religious life of men, forces proceeding from the element of lust in earthly existence, and whose aim was to bring the strivings for rationalistic thought into line with their own purposes. And so the efforts of the human mind to unfold the faculty of pure thought were gradually tinged with earthly, material considerations.

The technique of thought manifest in the latter part of the eighteenth century and especially in the nineteenth century was influenced in a very high degree by the astral forces which by this time had insinuated themselves into the sphere of rationalistic thought. The material lusts of human beings which a pure and developed technique of thought ought to have been capable of clarifying and to some extent dispersing, gave birth to an element well-fitted to provide nourishment for certain astral beings who set out to direct the forces of this astute, keen thinking to the needs of material existence.

Such is the origin of systems of thought of which Marxism is an example. Instead of being sublimated to the realm of the Spirit, thought was applied merely to the purposes of physical existence and of the world of sense. In this way the realm of human thinking became easy of access to certain Luciferic beings indwelling the astral world. The thoughts of men were impregnated through and through with the thoughts of these astral beings by whom the Western world was obsessed just as the East was now obsessed by astral beings whose existence had been made possible by the decadent magic arts practised among the Shamanic peoples. Under the influence of these astral beings, the element of earthly craving and desire crept into the realm of an astute but at the same time material mode of thought. And from this astral world influences played into and took possession of men of the type of Lenin and his contemporaries.

We have therefore to think of two worlds: one lying Eastwards of the districts of the Ural Mountains, the Volga and the Caucasus, and the other Westwards of this region. These two worlds in themselves constitute one astral sphere. The beings of this astral region are striving in our present age to enter into a kind of cosmic union. Westwards of the Ural and Volga districts live the beings whose life-breath is provided by the thinking of the West, permeated as it is by a Luciferic influence. In the astral sphere Eastwards of the Ural and Volga districts dwell those beings whose life-element is provided by magic arts which are the debased, materialised form of what once was a power functioning in the world known as the Pleroma. These beings are striving to unite, with the result that there has come into existence an astral region in which human beings are involved, and which they must learn to understand. If they succeed in this, a task of first importance for the evolutionary progress of mankind will be accomplished. But if they persist in ignoring what is happening here, their inner life will be taken hold of by the fiery forces emanating from the Ahrimanic beings of Asia and the Lucifer beings of Europe as they strive to consummate their cosmic union. Human beings are in danger of becoming obsessed by these terrible forces emanating from the astral world. Eastwards and Westwards of the Ural and Volga districts, then, we must conceive of the existence of an astral region immediately adjacent to the Earth—a region which is the earthly dwelling-place of beings who are the Fauns and the Satyrs in a later metamorphosis.

If the whole reality is revealed to us as we look over towards the East of Europe to-day, we see not human beings alone but an astral sphere which since the Middle Ages has become the Paradise of beings once known as the Fauns and Satyrs. And if we understand the nature of these beings, we can also follow the processes of metamorphosis through which they have passed since then. These beings move about among men and carry on their activities in the astral world, using on the one hand the Ahrimanic forces of decadent, Eastern magic and on the other, the forces emanating from the Luciferic, rationalistic thinking of the West. And human beings on the Earth are influenced and affected by these forces.

In their present state, the goat-form which constitutes the lower part of the bodily structure of these beings has coarsened and become bear-like, but on the other hand their heads are radiant and possessed of a high order of intelligence. They are the mirrored personifications of Luciferic rationalism developed to its highest point of subtlety. The beings indwelling this astral Paradise are half bear-, half goat-like in form, with semi-human countenances exhibiting a subtle sensuousness but at the same a rare cleverness. Since the later Middle Ages and on through the centuries of the modern age this astral region has become a veritable Paradise of the Satyrs and Fauns in their present metamorphosis, and there they dwell.

And in the midst of all these mysterious happenings a laggard humanity goes its way, concerning itself merely with physical affairs. But all the time these forces—which are no less real than the phenomena of the world man perceives with his physical eyes and grasps with his physical brain—are playing into earthly existence.

The conditions now developing as between Asia and Europe cannot be fully intelligible until we understand them in their astral aspect, their spiritual aspect. The decadent forces emanating from Shamanic arts which have been preserved in the astral regions of Central and Northern Asia are striving to consummate a kind of cosmic union with the impulse which has received the name of Bolshevism, and Eastwards and Westwards of the Ural and Volga districts endeavours are being made to consummate a union between a certain form of magic and Bolshevism. It is a world of myth and is for this reason well-nigh incomprehensible to the modern mind. Luciferic elements in the form of Bolshevism are striving to unite with the decadent forces proceeding from Shamanic arts and coming over from the East. From West to East and from East to West forces are working and weaving in this astral Paradise. And the influences which pour down from this astral world into the earthly world emanate from the passionate efforts for union between the beings known in olden times as the Fauns and Satyrs who surge over from the East, and the spirits of the West who have developed in a high degree, everything that is connected with the head.

The spectacle presented to super-sensible sight may be described in the following way: The nearer we come to the Ural and Volga districts, the more do these cloud-like, spiritual forms seem to gather together into a mass of heads, while the other parts of the bodily structure become indistinct. Seething over from the East we see those other beings, known in days of yore as the Fauns and Satyrs. Their once goat-like form has coarsened to a bear-like form and the further West they come in their efforts to consummate their astral union with the Luciferic beings of the West, the more do their heads seem to disappear. These beings come into existence in the astral world and the Earth-sphere is their home just as it is the home of physical humanity. They are the tempters and seducers of humanity on Earth because they can take possession of men; they can obsess human beings without in any way needing to convince them by means of speech.

It is urgently necessary that these things should be realised to-day. Men must awaken those inner faculties of soul which once gave birth to the mythological lore of olden times. For it is only by rising to the sphere of Imaginative knowledge that we can stand with full consciousness in the onward-flowing stream of human evolution.

Up to now we have given an outer description of what was experienced by those growing-up about the turn of the nineteenth century, by considering the trend of man's spiritual culture. Today, in order to find the bridge to a true self-knowledge, we will study the human being more from within. When we consider the externals of spiritual evolution, especially in the West, we are led back to the first third of the fifteenth century; in an inward study we find ourselves led back to the fourth post-Christian century. A date indicating some important moment would be the year 333 A.D., yet this date is of course only approximate. It is not a date from which to make calculations, but as pointing approximately to weighty matters affecting a large proportion of European humanity.

Let us look into the soul of a man who before this date lived into the culture of Southern Europe, or in certain districts of Northern Africa. These districts come into prominence when we try to gain an idea of what gave the tone to the cultural life of the time. The souls of these human beings were still so constituted that they were conscious that human thought was not simply a head process, but that it was revealed, either directly to the individual, or, where the human being was not able to receive such revelation directly, through the confidential communication of other human beings. The prevalent feeling among the educated today—and among the uneducated—is that their thoughts are worked out in their own heads—this feeling did not then exist. It was a period of actual transition. In the Middle East outstanding spiritual personalities were concerned with how thoughts came to humanity from spiritual realms. In Southern Europe and in Northern Africa doubts crept in as to whether the human being possessed the faculty of receiving thoughts by revelation. These doubts were only faint at first, there was still an overwhelming feeling: When I have a thought, this thought has been put into me by a God either indirectly or transmitted by way of human heredity, that is, through tradition, not natural heredity. Thought can enter earthly evolution only as revelation.

The first Westerners to feel strong doubts in this direction were those who had come from the Northern peoples and entered the civilization of the South. They were of Germanic and Celtic blood and had moved with the various migrations from the North to the South. These people, had they grown up only out of their own forces, might have reached the point of saying: Thoughts are something we work out for ourselves. This feeling, however, was dulled down by what they found as the Graeco-Latin culture, as the culture of the East. These cultures were extraordinarily intermixed up to the fourth century; every possible trend was working within them. Yet in the migrations southwards it was realized that thoughts can be grasped only by drawing them down into the world of the senses from a super-sensible world.

We have, my dear friends, only an external history, we have no history of feeling, no history of thought, no history of the soul. Hence such things do not come to our notice; we do not notice how the whole disposition of soul changes from one century to another. There was a tremendous swing round in man's inner perception in the fourth century. We find then something that for the very first time caused man to reflect upon the origin of thought; so that what previously had been accepted without question, namely, the fact that thoughts were revealed, gradually came to a point where a theory was needed to prove that they were the result of revelation. But these people were by no means convinced that the human being could create his thought-world out of himself.

Now consider the great difference here between the souls of the present day and the souls of that time. I am speaking of some souls only. What I am describing to you was naturally present in various shades. For one part of humanity matters were as I have described them; for another, there was still an invincibly strong, intense belief that soul-spiritual Beings descending into the human organism communicated thoughts to man. It was, if I may put it, only the “elite” among humanity who at that time grasped thought in such a way that they had to ask: Where do thoughts come from? The others knew very little about thoughts; for them it was quite evident that thoughts were given.

Now take the souls born approximately after the year 333. These souls were no longer able, out of a natural feeling, to give a matter-of-course explanation of the origin of thought. Thus a period followed in which theorists, philosophers and philosophical theologians argued as to the significance of thoughts in the world and there arose the struggle between Nominalism and Realism. The Nominalists were those in the Middle Ages who said: Thoughts live only in the human individuality; they are only a summing-up of what exists outside in the world and within the separate individuals. The Realists still had a vivid recollection of ancient times when men regarded thoughts as having substance, as something substantial that was revealed. They conceived thoughts so that they said: It is not I who think the thought; it is not I who, for instance, sum up all dogs into the general concept dog; but there exists one general thought “dog” and this is revealed out of the spiritual world, just as a color or tone is revealed to the senses. It was a struggle to understand rightly the nature of thought which had, as it were, alighted as an independent possession into the human soul. It is of extraordinary interest to steep oneself, from this point of view, in the spiritual history of the Middle Ages.

As we approach the fifteenth century, we discover with what intensity human beings strove to come to terms with what is revealed through thought in man. Whereas mankind before the year 333 really had the idea: There is a divine weaving streaming around the earth just as in the physical world the atmosphere streams round it; and in this streaming, Beings reveal themselves to man and leave behind in him thoughts. They are, so to speak, the footprints of the divine world surrounding the earth, which are graven into men as thoughts. Whereas those souls who before the year 333 considered that in the thought-world a feeling of their connection with the spiritual world existed, we find the Middle Ages permeated by the tragedy of still seeking to connect thought in some way with the divine-spiritual.

Now why did those souls who, up to the fifteenth century thought about thoughts, if I may put it so—why was it that they strove so vigorously to connect thoughts with what is divine-spiritual in the cosmos? It was because they felt an inner impulse which they were unable to express in clear concepts, but which was present in them as a definite experience of soul. This originated from all the souls who were born to play a leading part, from the fourth to the fourteenth century, being reincarnations from the time before the year 333 from the souls who had argued vehemently as to the real or merely nominal character of concepts, having lived previously at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha.

The Mystery of Golgotha took place in comparative isolation in Western Asia. But that was only the external manifestation of a spiritual event which took place in the physical world. Something happened in the souls who had reached a certain degree of maturity. When we consider those actually fighting over the reality or unreality of thoughts we find personalities in whom were reincarnated souls whose previous incarnation had taken place during the first three Christian centuries. Essentially, however, civilized mankind was made up of souls reincarnated from the time before the Mystery of Golgotha. Out of the real connection between the human soul and the divine spiritual world which expressed itself in the acceptance of thought being received through revelation—out of this experience which souls living in the Middle Ages had in an earlier earth-life many centuries before, arose the impulse to dispute about the reality or unreality of the thought-world.

For what is it that is known as Scholasticism at the beginning of the new era in the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth centuries? What actually filled the souls of the Scholastics? It is the following—the decisive moment had arrived in the evolution of man; it was not given utterance but was felt by outstanding souls of that time. The Gods had forsaken the sphere of human thought, as if man only had thoughts that were wrung dry.

When we observe the souls who lived from the fifteenth century on into later times, we find them to be those who in their previous incarnation had lived not long after the year 333. Up to the eighth, [or] ninth post-Christian centuries, at least those who were teachers still had the feeling that human thought was a gift of the Gods. And the men who in their previous earth-life had already felt the world of thought to be forsaken by the Gods were those—naturally I am speaking only of a part of humanity—destined to be born again about the turn of the nineteenth century.

When, therefore, we observe not only external destiny, but the inner destiny of the human soul, we must pay no heed to that which wells up out of our childhood from the depths of the soul. We must look to the time in which souls were incarnated who could no longer hear from their teachers that thoughts were Beings permeated, imbued by the divine. There-by the inner feeling arose to flee from thought, that something warmer, more saturated with substance should be found. This arose because already in a previous incarnation the divine character of thought had become subject to the gravest doubts, or had indeed been entirely lost. It was at the turn of the nineteenth century that what shines through with the greatest intensity out of the previous earth-life was experienced as tragedy.

Since the first third of the fifteenth century the receiving of thought from the divine-spiritual world was already lost to man. Because he could no longer receive thoughts out of the divine-spiritual world, they were grasped out of external observation. External observation and the art of making experiments reached such a height just because the taking in of things inwardly was replaced by gleaning them from the external sense world.

In the development of world-history, however, what is solely dependent on external conditions does not immediately become apparent. For even if since the fifteenth century man has lost the faculty of perceiving thought from within as a revelation from the divine-spiritual world, souls were not yet there able to feel the full tragedy of being forsaken by revealed thought. In those who had lived their former life on earth before the sixth or seventh century, particularly before the fourth post-Christian century, there lived the feeling: Yes, we must admit that we receive our thoughts from the external world, but in spite of this our soul tells us that even the thoughts received from the external world are given us by God. We no longer know how thoughts are God-given, but our inner being tells us that this is so.

A truly brilliant spirit who had such a mood of soul was Johannes Kepler. Johannes Kepler was as much a natural scientist of an earlier time as of a later one. He drew his thoughts from external observation, but in his inner experience he had an absolute feeling that spiritual Beings are there when man is receiving his thoughts from Nature. Kepler felt himself to be partly an Initiate, and for him it was a matter of course that he experienced his abstract building up of the universe artistically.

It is extraordinarily valuable, from a scientific point of view, to immerse oneself in the progress human thought has made through such a man as Kepler. But one is more deeply stirred when one steeps oneself in Kepler's life of soul, in that soul-life which in later times did not work with such intensity and inwardness in any other natural scientist, certainly not in any authoritative teacher of mankind at large. For between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries the feeling was entirely lost that through thought the human soul is brought into connection with the divine-spiritual.

Those who do not merely study the course of time in an unimaginative fashion just taking in the content, but are able to experience something in the course of events, have remarkable things revealed to them. I do not wish here to talk of how Goethe's special way of thinking about Nature has become an impossibility for later science. I mean for the external science of the times following his; for science did not realize where the difference lay between external science and that of Goethe. But I do not want to speak about this. You need only look at certain scientific books of the first third of the nineteenth century, those that gave the tone to the later mode of thought; you need only look, for instance, into the physiological works either of Henle or Burdach which absolutely belong to the first third of the nineteenth century, although they may have been written later, and you will note in them all a different style. There is still something of the spirit which wells up directly out of the soul when, let us say, they speak of the embryo or of the structure of the human brain; there is still something of what has since been entirely lost.

In this connection it is significant to bring to mind a personality still actively working during the last third of the nineteenth century. He was already subject to the forces driving out the spirit from science, nevertheless he still retained the spiritual life in his own soul. Just let the anatomy of Hyrtl work upon you; he hardly belonged to the last third, chiefly to the second third of the nineteenth century. These books are written in the style of later anatomists, but one can see that it was difficult for Hyrtl. He writes chapter after chapter, always restraining the impulse to allow his soul to flow into his sentences. Occasionally it peeps up through the style, occasionally even through the content. But there is, one might say, the iron necessity to stop the soul and spirit welling up from the man's inner being whenever natural processes are described. Today we can barely imagine what can be experienced when, let us say, we go back from a contemporary anatomical book to Hyrtl or Burdach. One feels as if charged with a certain amount of warmth in one's scientific feeling on going back to the second third, but particularly to the first third of the nineteenth century. Certainly at that time science was not at its zenith. But that is only of secondary importance and need not be considered further. I am speaking of what was experienced in science. And about that one can say: Through studying the path taken by the scientific soul, we can verify what Spiritual Science reveals to us, namely, that at the end of the nineteenth century more and more souls arose in whom there no longer lived from their previous earth-life the impulse that thought is God-given—I mean that there was no longer even an echo of this. For although the sense for the individual past earth-life had been lost, its echo still lived on long afterwards.

Thus felt those who still had a living warmth within them, who had not become dried up by the prejudice that in science one must be objective—in its usual sense; actually what is striven for by Spiritual Science is the truly objective science, but not in the scientists' meaning of the word. These souls not dried up through striving after objectivity asked: What is there in us still bound up with the divine-spiritual (they did not ask this consciously but subconsciously) from which we were torn in our previous earthly incarnation? Rising to the surface of consciousness was the feeling that man had lost his connection with the divine-spiritual world. On the other hand, it is a feeling that man dare not lose this connection, for without even this faint consciousness there is no life for his soul. Hence an intense yearning aroused, the strong inclination to that undefined longing for the Spirit, and yet the incapacity to reach it.

It is characteristic of the generation growing up about the turn of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth that it should ask the older generations: Can we discover the Spiritual in our earthly environment? And the leaders who were asked unconsciously by youth: How can we find the Spiritual in Nature, how can we find it within human life itself?—these leaders condemned as unscientific this bringing the Spirit into the study of Nature and of human life.

Thus in the second half of the nineteenth century a dreadful thing happened—the slogan “Psychology, science of the soul without a soul” arose. I lay no special stress on how certain philosophers said that we need a soul-science without soul. What the philosophers say has no great influence, but it is symptomatic of what figures very widely as feeling and of how one deals with the younger generation. True, only a few philosophers actually said: We need a psychology without soul. But the whole age said: We older people wish to teach you mineralogy, zoology, botany, biology, anthropology, even history, in a way to make it appear to you as if at the most there are experiences of the soul, but not a soul as such. And the whole world, in so far as it is observed scientifically, must be experienced as having no soul. Those who were first to bring with them out of their previous earth-life the tragedy of experiencing soullessness were compelled to ask with the utmost insistence: Where can we look to fill the soul with Spirit? And from what their age considered of greatest value—in other respects rightly so—they gleaned the least information.

Those who in the last third of the nineteenth century wrote that one can gather the nature of their soul-life from their books were, even in the nineteenth century, a vanishing minority. In general the people who wrote these books were not the most brilliant. Among those who do not write books there are distinctly cleverer people than among those who do write them. In the last third of the nineteenth century profounder natures were living in the midst of the superficial ones content with a science bereft of Spirit. And when one looks into these profounder natures, which is possible through Spiritual Science, one finds in the last third of the nineteenth century a wrestling with deep problems. Those who had this inner life were no longer listened to; they no longer found the opportunity to become leaders.

Many people foresaw clearly what the microscope was bringing in its wake in the second half of the nineteenth century. They were to be found among those who, participating in the cultural life, did not really penetrate into it because they felt dissatisfied with a culture devoid of Spirit, and therefore had their thoughts inwardly silenced in face of the growing scientific conceptions, yet asking with deep feeling: How can microcosmic evolution be brought into relation with macrocosmic evolution? This problem became increasingly pressing in their feeling life.

There were also men who, as a result of their education, followed the scientific tradition that continued to become ever emptier and emptier of spirit. They hoped, for instance, for always greater scientific results from the further development of the microscope; they hoped with its help to see smaller and smaller objects. But others of a deeper nature looked with disturbed feelings upon the further development of the microscope, particularly upon the views which followed in its train. The highest hope of one group was, by examining ever smaller and smaller objects, to penetrate into the nature of what is living. But others felt that this whole business would bring the world to naught, that the use of the microscope sucked the soul dry.

I trust you will not think that I am indulging in satire in a mystic, fantastical fashion on the use of the microscope. That would never occur to me. I am naturally fully aware of the services rendered by the microscope, and I would never wish to put a spoke in any scientific wheel. I am simply recounting facts relating to the life of soul.

The number of these solitary spirits steadily decreased. Fortlage, who lived as Professor in Jena at the end of the nineteenth century, was one of them. He spoke somewhat as follows: One can look more and more thoroughly into the microscope and go on discovering ever smaller things, but in this minuteness one loses what is substantially true. If you want to see what is being sought with the aid of the microscope—which, with ever greater perfection, allows one to penetrate further and further into the minute—then turn your gaze out into the infinite space of the universe. From the stars there speaks what you are seeking within the minute. You talk of the secrets of life, and seek for them from what is minute, and ever more minute. But there one loses life, not for reality, but for knowledge. Life is lost in this way. You can find it again when you understand how to read the stars.

Some have said: Life is brought down from the cosmos. But they sought for a material means, possibly in the meteor-showers flying through cosmic space and bringing germs out of other worlds down to the earth. But when one gazes from the earth out into limitless space, it is not limitless at all. For the mechanistic-mathematical way of perception, the firmament was done away with by Giordano Bruno: but for more intimate perception it is again there in the sense that one cannot simply draw a radius from the earth and prolong it into infinity. This radius has in fact an end, and at this end there is everywhere, at the inner periphery, life to be found and not death. From this world-periphery life radiates in from all directions.

I only wish to indicate to you by these examples the nature of those inner problems of experience which confronted the soul at the turn of the nineteenth century. Out of the dullest experience of soul the question really was put: Where can we rediscover the Spiritual?

You see, this question must set the mood if any phase of the youth movement is to find a right content—Where can I find the Spiritual? How does one experience the Spiritual? The really important thing is that side by side with all yearning expectation there shall also be found among the young, single ideals striving towards an inner activity of the soul. I should like to preface what I have to say tomorrow by the following.

In what I have named Anthroposophy, in fact in the foreword to my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, you will meet with something which you will not be able to comprehend if you only give yourself up to that passive thinking so specially loved today, to that popular god-forsaken thinking of even a previous incarnation. You will only understand if you develop in Freedom the inner impulse to bring activity into your thinking. You will never get on with Spiritual Science if that spark, that lightning, through which activity in thinking is awakened does not flash up. Through this activity we must reconquer the divine nature of thinking.

Anthroposophical literature demands that one shall think actively. Most people are only able to think passively, finding active thinking impossible. But active thinking has no room for sleepy nor for intellectual dreaming. One must keep in step with it and get one's thinking on the move. The moment thinking is set in motion one goes with it. Then what I should like to call modern clairvoyance ceases to be anything miraculous. That this clairvoyance should still appear as something particularly miraculous comes from people not wishing to develop the energy to bring activity into their thinking. It often drives one to despair. One often feels when demanding active thinking of anyone that his mood is illustrated by the following anecdote: Somebody was lying in a ditch without moving hand or foot, not even opening his eyes; he was asked by a passer-by: “Why are you so sad?” The man answered: “Because I don't want to do anything.” The questioner was astonished at this, for the man lying there was doing nothing and had apparently done nothing for a long time. But he wanted to do even more “doing nothings” Then the questioner said: “Well, you certainly are doing nothing,” and got the answer: “I have to revolve with the earth and even that I don't want to do “

This is how people appear who do not wish to bring activity into thinking, into what alone out of man's being can bring the soul back into connection with the divine-spiritual content of the world. Many of you have learnt to despise thinking, because it has met you only in its passive form. This, however, is only head-thinking in which the heart plays no part. But try for once really to think actively and you will see how the heart is then engaged; if one succeeds in developing active thinking the whole human being in a way suited to our present age enters with the greatest intensity into the spiritual world. For through active thinking we are able to bring force into our thinking—the force of a stout heart. If you do not seek the Spirit on the path of thought, which although difficult to tread must be trodden with courage, with the very blood of one's heart, if you do not try on this path to suck in that spiritual life which has flowed through humanity from the very beginning, you will create a movement where the infant would believe himself able to draw nourishment out of himself and not from his mother's breast. You only come to a movement with real content when you find the secret of developing within an activity which enables you to draw again out of cosmic life true spiritual nourishment, true spiritual drink.

But that is pre-eminently a problem of the will, a problem of the will experienced through feeling. Infinitely much depends today upon good-will, upon an energetic willing, and no theories can solve what we are seeking today. Courageous, strong will alone can bring the solution.

Let us devote the next few days to the question of how to find this good-will, this strong will.

From what has been said during the last few days it will be clear that nowadays one human being meets another in a different way from what was the case in the past, and this is of quite recent date—in fact, it entered human evolution with the century.

In poetical language no longer suitable for today, former ages foretold what in this century has come for the whole of humanity. Former ages spoke of how, at the end of the nineteenth century, the so-called Dark Age would have run its course, how in a new age there must come quite new conditions in human evolution, conditions difficult to attain because at first man is not accustomed to them. And in spite of the fact that we have now entered an epoch of light, much will seem more chaotic than what was brought by the long, gloomy Age of Darkness.

We must not merely translate into our language what was formerly presented in a picture derived from ancient clairvoyant vision: if so, we should be understanding only the old again. We must learn to perceive it anew with the spiritual means of today. We must permeate ourselves deeply with the consciousness that in this epoch for the first time human ego meets human ego in an intercourse of soul that is free of all veils.

Were we to go back to the first epoch after the great Atlantean earth-catastrophe, to the seventh or eighth millennium before Christ, we should find that fully grown men actually confronted one another as today only the child confronts grownups, with comprehension of the complete human being as I characterized it yesterday, a comprehension where soul and spirit are not found separated from the body but where the physical body is perceived as being of the nature of soul and spirit. In the epoch I have called the ancient Indian, which followed immediately upon the Atlantean catastrophe, the human being did not consider soul and spirit in the abstract way that we do today, with a certain justification.

It is precisely expressions used in this most ancient epoch which seem to us entirely spiritual which are misunderstood today. We misunderstand them if we believe that in the first post-Atlantean epoch of culture men overlooked all they saw in the outer world and were only willing to concentrate on what existed outside the world of the senses. This was by no means the case. They had a much fuller perception of, let us say, a human movement, or of the play of expression on a countenance, or of the way young people grow in five years, or of the plastic development of new leaves and blossoms in a plant, or in an animal of the way the whole of its forces pour into the hoof and other parts of its leg. Men did direct their gaze into the world we call that of the senses, but in the material processes they saw the Spiritual. For them what in the material world presented itself to their senses was at the same time spiritual. Naturally, such perception was only possible because over and above what we see in the sense-world, they actually perceived the Spiritual. They saw not only the meadow carpeted with flowers but over the flowers they saw in a vibrating, active existence the cosmic forces which draw forth the plants from the earth. In a certain way they saw—it seems grotesque to modern man but I am telling you facts—how the human being bears on his head a kind of etheric, astral cap. In this etheric, astral cap they experienced the forces underlying the growth of the hair. People today are prone to believe that the hair grows out of the head simply by being pushed from inside, whereas the truth is that outer Nature draws it forth. In olden times men saw the reality of things which later as an artistic copy shed their light into civilization. Just think of the helmet of Pallas Athene for instance which quite obviously belongs to the head. Those who do not rightly experience this helmet think of it as placed upon her head. It is not placed upon the head. It is bestowed by a concentration of raying cosmic forces that are working around the head of Pallas Athene and densifying, so that in olden times it would have seemed impossible to the Greek to form the head of Pallas Athene without this covering. They would have felt as we do today about a scalped head. I am not saying that this was the case among Greeks of later times.

In ancient times men were able to experience the sense-world as having soul and spirit, because they experienced something of an etheric and soul-spiritual nature. But these men did not ascribe any great importance to the soul and spirit. People readily believe that in the oldest Mysteries the pupils were principally taught that the sense world is semblance and the spiritual world the only reality, but this is not true. The strivings of the Mysteries were directed to making the material world comprehensible to the human soul by the roundabout way of comprehending what is of the nature of soul and spirit.

Already in the epoch of the first post-Atlantean culture, the Mysteries were striving to understand man as a being of soul and spirit, and particularly inwardly—not theoretically—to feel, to interpret any manifestation of the physical man in terms of the spirit. For example, it would have been impossible for them to have given a mechanistic explanation of walking, because they knew that when man walks he has an experience with every step, an experience which today lies deep beneath the threshold of consciousness. Why do we walk? We walk because when we stretch our leg forward and put down our foot, we come into a different relation to the earth and to the heavens, and in the perception of this change—that we place one foot into a different degree of warmth from that in which the other foot has remained—in the perception of this interchanging relation to the cosmos there lies something that is not only mechanical but distinctly super-dynamic.

This was the perception in more ancient times; the gaze of the human being even then was directed to man's external form, to his external movements. And it would never have occurred to the men of that time to imagine that what they saw as dumb show in Nature—the growth and configuration of plants, the growth and configuration of animals—was to be interpreted in the way that we scientifically do today. In the human heart and mind there was something altogether different; a man, belonging to the old Indian civilization to which I referred yesterday, felt it as entirely natural that during a certain period of the year the earth breathes in the being of the heavens, and during another period of the year she does not breathe in but works within herself by shutting out the heavens. It was natural for it to be different in ancient India because climatic conditions were different. But were we in imagination to extend our own climatic conditions we should have to say: During the summer the earth sleeps, gives herself up to the heavenly forces, receives the power of the sun in such a way that this power of the sun pours into the earth's unconsciousness. Summer is the sleep of the earth. Winter is her waking. During the winter the earth thinks through her own forces what during the summer in her sleeping and dreaming she has thought in relation with the heavens. During the winter the earth works over in her own being what during the summer has come to her through the in-working of the forces and powers of the cosmos.

Nowadays little is known of these things—in practical knowledge, I mean—as when the peasant out in the country puts potatoes into the ground during the winter. But nobody thinks about the fate of these potatoes because men have lost the faculty of getting right into the being of Nature. It would never have occurred to human beings who felt in this way to look out into Nature at animals, plants and minerals shining and sparkling in their color, to imagine that in this there is one single reality, a dance of atoms—that would have seemed utterly unreal. “But man needs this dance of atoms for his calculations about Nature.” Yes, that is just it, people believe they need the dance of atoms to be able to make calculations about Nature. Calculations in those days meant being able to live in numbers and magnitudes and not having to attach these numbers and magnitudes to what is only densified materiality. I do not want to raise objections against the service densified materiality renders today, yet one must mention how different the configuration of souls was in that more ancient age.

Then another age came in my book Occult Science. I have called it the old Persian; everything was built upon the principle of authority. People preserved during the whole of their life what is today experienced in a dull, repressed form between the seventh and fourteenth years. They took it with them into later life. It was more intimate but at the same time more intense. In a certain sense human beings looked through the external movement, through man's external physiognomy, or through a flower. They looked at something that was less outwardly objective. What they saw gradually became only a revelation of what exists as true reality. For the first post-Atlantean epoch of civilization the whole external world was simply reality, spiritual reality. The human being was spirit. He had a head, two arms and a body, and that was spirit. There was nothing to deter the ancient Indian from addressing the being he saw standing on two legs, with arms and a head, as spirit. In the next epoch men already saw more deeply into things. It was more in the nature of a surface behind which something more etheric was perceived, a human being more in a form of light. Man had the faculty of perceiving this form of light because atavistic clairvoyance was still present.

And then came the epoch of the third post-Atlantean culture. One felt the need for penetrating still further into the inner being of man or of Nature. The outer had become clearly perceptible and man is beginning to look through the outer perceptible to the spirit and soul within. The Egyptians, who belong to this epoch of the third post-Atlantean culture, mummified the human body. In the epoch of the old Indian culture, mummification would have made no sense; it would have been a fettering of the spirit. A distinction had arisen between body and spirit by the time mummification was practised. Formerly men would have felt they were imprisoning the human spirit, no distinction having been made yet between body and spirit, if the body had been embalmed as mummy.

Then among the Greeks—and actually into our own time—there was already a clearly established separation between the body and the spirit and soul. Today we can do no other than keep these two apart, the bodily and the soul-spiritual. Thus in earlier epochs man really saw the ego through sheaths.

Imagine the ancient Indian. He did not look at man's ego. His language was such that it really only expressed outwardly visible gestures and outwardly visible surfaces. The whole character of Sanscrit, if studied according to its spirit and not only according to its content, is of the nature of gesture, of surface; it expresses itself above all in movement and contour. The ego was therefore seen through the sheath of the physical body, in the next epoch through the sheath of the etheric, in the third epoch through the sheath of the astral man, man's ego still remaining indefinite, until in our epoch having cast off its veil it enters into human intercourse.

No one can adequately describe the impulse that has entered modern evolution, unless he draws attention to the relationship of ego to ego, free from the sheaths, which is emerging in a totally new way, though slowly, today. I shall not speak in the usual sense of our age being an age of transition. For I should like to know which age is not! Every age is an age of transition from the preceding one to the one that follows. And as long as one simply says—Our age is an age of transition—well, it remains just a hollow phrase. There is something to grasp only when one describes what makes a transition. In Our age we are going over from experiencing the other man through sheaths, to direct experience of the other man's ego.

And this is the difficulty in our life of soul; we have to live into this quite new relation between man and man. Do not think that we must learn all the teachings about the ego. It is not a question of learning theories about the ego. No matter whether you are a peasant on the land or someone working with his hands, or a scholar, it holds good for all of you that at the present time, in so much as we have to do with civilized men, their egos meet without sheaths. But that gives its special coloring to the whole of our cultural development.

Try to develop a feeling for how in the Middle Ages there was still much that was elementary in the way in which one human being experienced another. Let us imagine ourselves in a medieval town.

Let us say, a locksmith meets a town councilor in the street. Now what was experienced was not just that the man knew the other to be a town councilor; it was not exhausted by the locksmith knowing—we have elected that man. It is true there existed a link which gave the men a certain stamp. One belonged to the tailors' guild, one to the locksmiths' guild. But this was experienced in a more individual way. And when one as locksmith met a town councilor, he knew from other sources than from the directory: That is a town councilor. For the man walked differently, his look was different, he carried his head differently. People knew that he was a town councilor from things other than documents, the newspaper or things of the sort. One man experienced the other, but experienced him through his sheaths.

But in the sense of modern evolution we must increasingly experience human beings without sheaths. This has gradually arisen. But in a certain sense men are afraid of it. If we had a cultural psychology then it would describe, in connection with recent centuries, men's fear of being obliged to consort with human beings whose egos are unsheathed. It is a kind of terror. In the form of a picture, one might say that those people who in the last century really experienced their own times have frightened eyes. These frightened eyes, which you would not have been able to find either among the Greeks or the Romans, make their appearance in the middle of the sixteenth century, especially in the sixteenth century. Then we follow up these frightened eyes in literature. For instance, one can form a clear mental picture on reading the writings of Bacon of Verulam. We can glean from his writings with what kind of eyes he looked out at the world. Still more so with the eyes of Shakespeare. They can be pictured quite clearly. One need only supplement the words by the descriptions which circulated of Shakespeare's appearance. And so we must picture the people of recent centuries who lived most deeply in their own times as having frightened eyes, an unconsciously frightened look. At least once in their lives they had this frightened look. Goethe had it. Lessing had it. Herder had it. Jean Paul never got rid of it to the day of his death. We must have an organ for perceiving these subtleties if we want to develop any understanding of historical evolution.

Men who want to find their way livingly into the twentieth century should realize that those who represented the nineteenth century can no longer represent the twentieth.

It goes without saying that books about Goethe written in the nineteenth century by the philistine Lewes, or the pedant, Richard M. Meyer, can give no real conception of Goethe. The only literary work of the last third of the nineteenth century which can give some idea of Goethe is at best the Goethe of Herman Grimm. But that is a nightmare to those suffering from the great cultural disease of modern times, philistinism. For in this vast volume on Goethe you find the sentence: “Faust is a work that has fallen from heaven.” Just imagine what the commentators who pull everything to pieces have said; and imagine someone comes along and says that this should not be pulled to pieces. This may not seem important, yet we must notice such things in speaking about cultural phenomena. Read the first chapter of Grimm's Raphael and you will have the feeling: this must be an abomination to every orthodox professor, nevertheless something of it can be taken over into the twentieth century, for the very reason that for the orthodox professor nothing in it is right.

Thus man was seen within sheaths. Now we must learn to see him as an ego-being without sheaths. This alarms people because they are no longer capable of perceiving what I have described as the sheaths in which, for insurance, one could have seen our town councilor. It is no longer possible, at any rate not in Middle Europe, to give people outer representations of the sheaths. For outer representations, the sheaths still had a connection with the spiritual content existing in medieval councilors. Today—I must confess—it would be difficult for me to distinguish by their outer sheaths between a councilor and a privy councilor. In the case of a soldier, in the days when militarism was supreme one could still do it. But one had studiously to learn to do it, to make it a special study. It was no longer connected with basic human experience.

So there existed a kind of terror, and people made themselves indifferent to it by means of what I described yesterday as the web of intellectualism that spreads itself around us, and within which all are caught. In the centers of culture which have retained something of the East, the inner is still brought into a relation with the outer, the basic with the intellectualistic. Those of you who come from Vienna will sense that in the last century this was still very much so. For in Vienna, for instance, a man who wore spectacles was known as “doctor.” People did not bother about the diploma; they were concerned about the exterior. And anyone who could afford to take a cab was an aristocrat. It was the exterior. There was still a feeling of wanting to live within what can he described in words.

The great transition to this newer age consists in man meeting man free of his sheaths—according to his inner disposition, to what the soul demands; but the capacities for this untrammeled encounter have not yet been acquired; above all we have not yet acquired the possibility for a relation between ego and ego. But this must be prepared for by education. That is why the question of education is of such burning importance.

And now let me tell you quite frankly when the great step forward in educational method can first be made towards the individual ego-men of the new age. But I beg you not to use what I am going to say to impress other people who are of an opposite opinion, for if you do so the only result will be a volley of abuse against Anthroposophy. We shall work rightly in education only when we have learned to feel a certain bashfulness about speaking about it at all, when we feel abashed at the idea of talking about education. This is astonishing but it is true. The way in which education is being talked about will be regarded as shameless in future. Today everyone talks about it and about what he considers right. But education does not allow itself to be tied down in formal concepts, nor is it anything we come to by theorizing. One grows into education by getting older and meeting younger human beings. And only when one has grown older and has met younger people, and through meeting younger people and having once been young oneself we penetrate to the ego—only then can education be taken quite naturally.

Many suggestions about education today seemed to me no different from the content—horrible dictum—of the book of the once famous Knigge, who also gave directions as to how grownup people should be approached. It is the same with books on good breeding. Therefore what I have said and written about education, and what is attempted practically in the Waldorf School, aims only at saying as much as possible about the characteristics of the human being, in order to learn to know him, not to give directions: “You are meant to do this in such-and-such a way.” Knowledge of man—that is what must be striven for, and the rest left to God, if I may use this religious phrase. True knowledge of man makes the human being a teacher. For we should really get the feeling that we are ashamed to talk about education. But under the cultural conditions of today we have to do many things that ought to make us ashamed. The time will come when we shall no longer need to talk about education. Today these ways of thinking are lacking, but only for a little more than a hundred years.

Now read Fichte or Schiller thoughtfully. You will find in their writings what to modern people appears quite horrible. They have spoken, for example, about the State and about organizations to make the State into what it should be. And they have spoken about the aim of the State, saying: Morality must be such that the State becomes superfluous, that human beings are capable out of themselves of becoming free men, capable through their morality of making the State superfluous.

Fichte said that the State should be an institution which gives over the reins and gradually becomes entirely superfluous. It would hardly be possible to demand this of our contemporaries nor would they take it seriously. Today it would make a similar impression as the following incident on a troupe of actors.—A play had been performed for the fiftieth time by a traveling company when the director said: “Now that we have performed this for the fiftieth time, the prompter's box can be dispensed with.” But the actors were quite terrified at the idea. Finally one of them pulled himself together and said: “But, sir, then one will see the prompter!” This is about what would happen with our men of the present day. They do not see that the prompter, too, can be dispensed with. Thus it is today. The State will have found its best constitution when it makes itself superfluous, but the government officials and the Chancellors and the Privy Councilors—what would they all say to such a thing?

Now in practical everyday life we must be right within this great revolution going on in the depths of modern souls if we are to reach an outlook where there is as little talk about education as there was in older cultural epochs. Education was not talked about in earlier days. The science of education first arose when man could no longer educate out of the primal forces of his being. But this is more important than is supposed. The boy or girl, seeing the teacher come into the classroom, must not have the feeling: “He is teaching according to theoretical principles because he does not grasp the subconscious.” They want a human relation with the teacher. And that is always destroyed when educational principles are introduced. Therefore if we are to get back to a natural condition of authority between young and old it is of infinite importance, and an absolute necessity, that education shall not be talked about so much, that there should be no need to talk or think about it as much as is done today. For there are still many spheres in which education is conducted according to quite sound principles, although they are beginning to be broken through.

You see, theoretically it is all quite clear, and theoretically people know how to handle the matter, just as it is handled by the academic opinion of the present-day. But in practice it is quite good if there should happen to anyone what happened to me. A friend had scales by his plate and weighed the different foods so as to take the right quantity of each into his organism. From the physiological point of view this was correct—quite definitely so. But picture this transposed into the realm of education. Unfortunately it does happen, though in a primitive way and only in certain connections. But it is more wholesome when this happens intuitively, if parents, instead of buying some special physiological work on nourishment, judge how to feed their children through the feeling of how they themselves were once fed. And so in Pedagogy one must overcome everything which lays down rules as to how much food should be taken into the stomach, and of striving in the sphere of education for real insight into the nature and being of man. This insight into the nature of man will have a certain result for the whole of human life.

You see, whoever comes to an understanding of the human being in the way I have been describing during these days, and thereby imbues his knowledge with artistic perception, will remain young. For there is some truth in this—once we have grown up we have actually become impoverished. Yet it is of the greatest importance that we should have forces of growth within us. What we have in us as a child is of the utmost importance. But to this we are led back in inner experience through true knowledge of man. We really become childlike when we acquire the right knowledge of man and thereby qualify ourselves to meet those who are young and those who are still children in the right way.

There must be a striving that says, not in an egoistical sense as often happens today: “Except ye become as little children ye cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” We must seek for this even in practical life. Unless we were imbued with an active human force which worked in us during childhood, we could never be educators. Pedagogics is not enough if it makes the teacher or educator merely clever. I do not say that it should make him empty of thought. But in this way one does not become empty of thought. Pedagogics that makes the teacher merely clever is not of the right kind; the right kind of pedagogics makes the teacher inwardly alive and fills him with lifeblood of the soul which pours itself actively into his physical life-blood. And if there is anything by which we can recognize a true teacher or educator, it is that his pedagogical art has not made him a pedant.

Now, my dear friends, that you can find a pedant working in some place is perhaps only a myth or a legend. If teachers are pedants, if these myths and legends are founded on truth, then we may be sure that pedagogy has taken a wrong road. To avoid giving offense I must assume these legends and myths to be hypothetical and say: If pedants and philistines were to be found in the teaching profession it would be a sign that our Education is going under. Education is on the ascent only when, in its experience and whole way of working, pedantry and philistinism are driven right out of men. The true teacher can be no philistine, can be no pedant.

In addition to this, so that you may be able to check what I have been saying, I ask you to consider from what vocation in life the word pedant is derived. Then, perhaps, you will be able to contribute to the recognition of the reality of what has been indicated; I do not want to enlarge upon it because already much that I have said is being taken amiss. It is only on the assumption mentioned that we can have a right Pedagogy, otherwise it would have to become a Pedagogy in accordance with what I have been giving you in these lectures. Thus in the lecture tomorrow I will attempt to bring these talks to some conclusion.

The essential purpose of the lectures I have been giving here for some weeks past was to show how through his spiritual life man partakes in what we may call the world of the Stars, just as through his physical life on Earth he partakes in earthly existence, earthly happenings. In the light of the outlook acquired through Anthroposophy we distinguish in man the forces that lie in his physical body and in his etheric or formative-forces body, and those that lie in his Ego and his astral body. You know, of course, that these two sides of his being are separated whenever he sleeps. And now we will think for a short time of a man while he is asleep. On the one side the physical body and the etheric body lie there in a state of unconsciousness; but the Ego and the astral body are also without consciousness.

We may now ask: Are these two unconscious sides of human nature also related during sleep?—We know indeed that in the waking state, where the ordinary consciousness of modern man functions, the two sides are related through thinking, through feeling and through willing. We must therefore picture to ourselves that when the Ego and astral body plunge down, as it were, into the etheric body and the physical body, thinking, feeling, and willing arise from this union.

Now when man is asleep, thinking, feeling, and willing cease. But when we consider his physical body we shall have to say: All the forces which, according to our human observation belong to Earth-existence are active in this physical body. This physical body can be weighed; put it on scales and it will prove to have a certain weight. We can investigate how material processes take their course within it—or at least we can imagine hypothetically that this is possible. We should find in it material processes that are a continuation of those processes to be found outside in Earth-existence; these continue within man's physical body in the process of nutrition. In his physical body we should also find what is achieved through the breathing process. It is only what proceeds from the head-organization of man, all that belongs to the system of senses and nerves, that is either dimmed or plunged in complete darkness during sleep.

If we then pass on to consider the etheric body which permeates the physical, it is by no means so easy to understand how this etheric body works during sleep. Anyone, however, who is already versed to a certain extent in what Spiritual Science has to say about man will realize without difficulty how through his etheric body the human being lives, even while asleep, amid all the conditions of the ether-world and all the etheric forces surrounding existence on Earth. So that we can say: Within the physical body of man while he is asleep, everything that belongs to Earth-existence is active. So too in the etheric body all that belongs to the ether-world enveloping and permeating the Earth is active.

But matters become more difficult when we turn our attention—naturally our soul's attention—to what is now (during sleep) outside the physical and etheric bodies, namely, to the Ego and astral body of man. We cannot possibly accept the idea that this has anything to do with the physical Earth, or with what surrounds and permeates the Earth as ether. As to what takes place during sleep, I indicated it to you in a more descriptive way in the lectures given here a short time ago, and I will outline it today from a different point of view. We can in reality only understand what goes on in the Ego and astral body of man when with the help of Spiritual Science we penetrate into what takes place on and around the Earth over and above the physical and etheric forces and activities.

To begin with, we turn our gaze upon the plant-world. Speaking in the general sense and leaving out of account evergreen trees and the like—we see the plant-world sprouting out of the Earth in spring. We see the plants becoming richer and richer in color, more luxuriant, and then in autumn fading away again. In a certain sense we see them disappear from the Earth when the Earth is covered with snow.

But that is only one aspect of the unfolding of the plant-world. Physical knowledge tells us that this unfolding of the plant-world in spring and its fading towards autumn is connected with the Sun, also that, for example, the green coloring of the plants can be produced only under the influence of sunlight. Physical knowledge, therefore, shows us what comes about in the realm of physical effects; but it does not show us that while all the budding, the blossoming and withering of the plants is going on, spiritual events are also taking place. In reality, just as in the physical human organism there is for example the circulation of the blood, just as etheric processes express themselves in the physical organism as vascular action and so forth, and just as this physical organism is permeated by the soul and spirit, so also the processes of sprouting, greening, blossoming and fading of the plants which we regard as physical processes, are everywhere permeated by workings of the cosmic world of soul and spirit.

Now when we look into the countenance of a man and his glance falls on us, when we see his expression, maybe the flushing of the face, then indeed the eyes of our soul are looking right through the physical to the soul and spirit. Indeed, it cannot be otherwise in our life among our fellow-men. In like manner we must accustom ourselves also to see spirit-and-soul in the physiognomy—if I may call it so—and changing coloring of the plant-world on our Earth.

If we are only willing to recognize the physical, we say that the Sun's warmth and light work upon the plants, forming in them the saps, the chlorophyll and so forth. But if we contemplate all this with spiritual insight, if we take the same attitude to this plant-physiognomy of the Earth as we are accustomed to take to the human physiognomy, then something unveils itself to us that I should like to express with a particular word, because this word actually conveys the reality.

The Sun, of which we say, outwardly speaking, that it sends its light to the Earth, is not merely a radiant globe of gas but infinitely more than that. It sends its rays down to the Earth but whenever we look at the Sun it is the outer side of the rays that we see. The rays have, however, an inner side. If someone were able to look through the Sun's light, to regard the light only as an outer husk and look through to the soul of it, he would behold the Soul-Power, the Soul-Being of the Sun. With ordinary human consciousness we see the Sun as we should see a man who was made of papier-maché. An effigy in which there is nothing but the form, the lifeless form, is of course something different from the human being we actually see before us. In the case of the living human being, we see through this outer form and perceive soul-and-spirit. For ordinary consciousness the Sun is changed as it were into a papier-maché cast. We do not see through its outer husk that is woven of Light.

But if we were able to see through this, we should see the soul-and-spirit essence of the Sun. We can be conscious of its activity just as we are conscious of the physical papier-maché husk of the Sun. From the standpoint of physical knowledge we say: ‘The Sun shines upon the Earth; it sparkles upon the stones, upon the soil. The light is thrown back and thereby we see everything that is mineral. The rays of the Sun penetrate into the plants, making them green, making them bud.’—All that is external. If we see the soul-and-spirit essence of the Sun, we cannot merely say: ‘The sunlight sparkles on the minerals, is reflected, enabling us to see the minerals,’ or, ‘The light and heat of the Sun penetrate into the plants, making them verdant’—but we shall have to say, meaning now the countless spiritual Beings who people the Sun and who constitute its soul and spirit: ‘The Sun dreams and its dreams envelop the Earth and fashion the plants.’

If you picture the surface of the Earth with the physical plants growing from it, coming to blossom, you have there the working of the physical rays of the Sun. But above it is the weaving life of the dream-world of the Sun—a world of pure Imaginations. And one can say: When the mantle of snow melts in the spring, the Sun regains its power, then the Sun-Imaginations weave anew around the Earth. These Imaginations of the Sun are Imaginative forces, playing in upon the world of plants. Now although it is true that this Imaginative world—this Imaginative atmosphere surrounding the Earth—is very specially active from spring until autumn in any given region of the Earth, nevertheless this dreamlike character of the Sun's activity is also present in a certain way during the time of winter. Only during winter the dreams are, as it were, dull and brooding, whereas in summer they are mobile, creative, formative. Now it is in this element in which the Sun-Imaginations unfold that the Ego and astral body of man live and weave when they are outside the physical and etheric bodies.

You will realize from what I have said that sleep in summer is actually quite a different matter from sleep in winter, although in the present state of evolution, man's life and consciousness are so dull and lacking in vitality that these things go unperceived. In earlier times men distinguished very definitely through their feelings between winter-sleep and summer-sleep, and they knew too what meaning winter-sleep and summer-sleep had for them. In those ancient times men knew that of summer-sleep they could say: During the summer the Earth is enveloped by picture-thoughts. And they expressed this by saying: The Upper Gods come down during the summer and hover around the Earth; during the winter the Lower Gods ascend out of the Earth and hover around it.—This Imaginative world, differently constituted in winter and in summer, was conceived as the weaving of the Upper and the Lower Gods. But in those olden times it was also known that man himself, with his Ego and his astral body, lives in this world of weaving Imaginations.

Now the very truths of which I have here spoken, show us, if we ponder them in the light of Spiritual Science, in what connection man stands, even during his earthly existence, with the extra-earthly Universe. You see, in summer—when it is summer in any region of the Earth—the human being during his sleep is always woven around by a sharply contoured world of Cosmic Imaginations. The result is that during the time of summer he is, so to speak, pressed near to the Earth with his soul and spirit. During the time of winter it is different. During winter the contours, the meshes, of the Cosmic Imaginations widen out, as it were. During the summer we live with our Ego and astral body while we are asleep within very clearly defined Imaginations, within manifold figures and forms. During winter the figures around the Earth are wide-meshed and the consequence of this is that whenever autumn begins, that which lives in our Ego and astral body is borne far out into the Universe by night. During summer and its heat, that which lives in our Ego and astral body remains more, so to speak, in the psycho-spiritual atmosphere of the human world. During winter this same content is borne out into the far distances of the Universe. Indeed without speaking figuratively, since one is saying something that is quite real, one can say: that which man cultivates in himself, in his soul, and which through his Ego and astral body he can draw out from his physical and etheric bodies between the times of going to sleep and waking—that stores itself up during the summer and streams out during winter into the wide expanse of the Cosmos.

Now we cannot conceive that we men shut ourselves away, as it were, in earthly existence and that the wide Universe knows nothing of us. It is far from being so. True, at the time of Midsummer man can conceal himself from the Spirits of the Universe, and he may also succeed in harboring reprehensible feelings of evil. The dense net of Imaginations does not let these feelings through; they still remain. And at Christmastime the Gods look in upon the Earth and everything that lives in man's nature is revealed and goes forth with his Ego and astral being. Using a picture which truly represents the facts, we may say: In winter the windows of the Earth open and the Angels and Archangels behold what men actually are on the Earth.

We on Earth have gradually accustomed ourselves in modern civilization to express all that we allow to pass as knowledge in humdrum, dry, unpoetic phrases. The higher Beings are ever poets, therefore we never give a true impression of their nature if we describe it in barren physical words; we must resort to words such as I have just now used: at Christmastime the Earth's windows open and through these windows the Angels and Archangels behold what men's deeds have been the whole year through. The Beings of the higher Hierarchies are poets and artists even in their thinking. The logic we are generally at pains to apply is only an outcome of the Earth's gravity—by which I do not at all imply that it is not highly useful on Earth.

It is what lives in the minds and hearts of men as I have just pictured it, that is of essential interest to these higher Beings; the Angels who look in through the Christmas windows are not interested in the speculations of professors; they overlook them. Nor, to begin with, are they much concerned with a man's thoughts. It is what goes on in his feelings, in his heart, that in its cosmic aspect is connected with the Sun's yearly course. So it is not so much whether we are foolish or clever on Earth that comes before the gaze of the Divine-Spiritual Beings at the time of Christmas, but simply whether we are good or evil men, whether we feel for others or are egoists. That is what is communicated to the cosmic worlds through the course of the yearly seasons.

You may believe that our thoughts remain near the Earth, because I have said that the Angels and Archangels are not concerned with them when they look in through the Christmas windows. They are not concerned with our thoughts because, if I may use a rather prosaic figure of speech, they receive the richer coinage, the more valuable coinage that is minted by the soul-and-spirit of man. And this more valuable coinage is minted by the heart, the feelings, by what a man is worth because of what his heart and feeling contain. For the Cosmos, our thoughts are only the small change, the lesser coinage, and this lesser coinage is spied out by subordinate spiritual beings every night. Whether we are foolish or clever is spied out for the Cosmos every night—not indeed for the very far regions of the Cosmos but only for the regions around the Earth—spied out by beings who are closest to the Earth in its environment and therefore the most subordinate in rank. The daily revolution of the Sun takes place in order to impart to the Cosmos the worth of our thoughts. Thus far do our thoughts extend; they belong merely to the environment of the Earth. The yearly revolution of the Sun takes place in order to carry our heart-nature, our feeling-nature, farther out into the cosmic worlds.

Our will-nature cannot be carried in this way out into the Cosmos, for the cycle of the day is strictly regulated. It runs its course in twenty-four hours. The yearly course of the Sun is strictly regulated too. We perceive the regularity of the daily cycle in the strictly logical sequences of our thoughts. The regularity of the yearly cycle—we perceive the after-effect of this in our heart and soul, in that there are certain feelings which say to one thing that a man does: it is good, and to another: it is bad.

But there is a third faculty in man, namely, the will. True, the will is bound up with feeling, and feeling cannot but say that certain actions are morally good, and others morally not good. But the will can do what is morally good and also what is morally not good. Here, then, there is no strict regularity. The relation of our will to our nature as human beings is not strictly regulated in the sense that thinking and feeling are regulated. We cannot call a bad action good, or a good action bad, nor can we call a logical thought illogical, an illogical thought logical. This is due to the fact that our thoughts stand under the influence of the daily revolution of the Sun, our feelings under the influence of its yearly revolution. The will, however, is left in the hands of humanity itself on Earth. And now a man might say: ‘The most that happens to me is that if I think illogically, my illogical thoughts are carried out every night into the Cosmos and do mischief there—but what does that matter to me? I am not here to bring order into the Cosmos.’—Here on Earth, where his life is lived in illusion, a man might in certain circumstances speak like this, but between death and a new birth he would never do so. For between death and a new birth he himself is in the worlds in which he may have caused mischief through his foolish thoughts; and he must live through all the harm that he has done. So, too, between death and a new birth, he is in those worlds into which his feelings have flowed. But here again he might say on Earth: ‘What lives in my feelings evaporates into the Cosmos; but I leave it to the Gods to deal with any harm that may have been caused there through me. My will, however, is not bound on Earth by any regulation.’—

The materialist who considers that man's life is limited to the time between birth and death, can never conceive that his will has any cosmic significance; neither can he conceive that human thoughts or feelings have any meaning for the Cosmos. But even one who knows quite well that thoughts have a cosmic significance as the result of the daily revolution of the Sun, and feelings through the yearly revolution—even he, when he sees what is accomplished on the Earth by the good or evil will-impulses of man, must turn away from the Cosmos and to human nature itself in order to see how what works in man's will goes out into the Cosmos. For what works in man's will must be borne out into the Cosmos by man himself, and he bears it out when he passes through the gate of death. Therefore it is not through the daily or the yearly cycles but through the gate of death that man carries forth the good or the evil he has brought about here on Earth through his will.

It is a strange relationship that man has to the Cosmos in his life of soul. We say of our thoughts: ‘We have thoughts but they are not subject to our arbitrary will; we must conform to the laws of the Universe when we think, otherwise we shall come into conflict with everything that goes on in the world.’—If a little child is standing in front of me, and I think: That is an old man—I may flatter myself that I have determined the thought, but I am certainly out of touch with the world. Thus in respect of our thoughts we are by no means independent, so little independent that our thoughts are carried out into the Cosmos by the daily cycle of the Sun. Nor are we independent in our life of feelings, for they are carried out through the yearly cycle of the Sun. Thus even during earthly life, that which lives in our head through our thoughts and, through our feelings in our breast, does not live only within us but also partakes in a cosmic existence. That alone which lives in our will we keep with us until our death. Then, when we have laid aside the body, when we have no longer anything to do with earthly forces, we bear it forth with us through the gate of death.

Man passes through the gate of death laden with what has come out of his acts of will. Just as here on Earth he has around him all that lives in minerals, plants, animals and in physical humanity, all that lives in clouds, streams, mountains, stars, in so far as they are externally visible through the light—just as he has all this around him during his existence between birth and death, so he has a world around him when he has laid aside the physical and etheric bodies and has passed through the gate of death. In truth he has around him the very world into which his thoughts have entered every night, into which his feelings have entered with the fulfilment of every yearly cycle ... “That thou hast thought; that thou hast felt.” ... It now seems to him as though the Beings of the Hierarchies were bearing his thoughts and his feelings towards him. They have perceived it all, as I have indicated. His mental life and his feeling-life now stream towards him.

In earthly existence the Sun gives light from morning to evening; it goes down and night sets in. When we have passed through the gate of death, our wisdom rays out towards us as day; through our accumulated acts of folly, the spiritual lights grow dark and dim around us and it becomes night. Here on Earth we have day and night; when we have passed through the gate of death, we have as day and night the results of our wisdom and our foolishness. And what man experiences here on this Earth as spring, summer, autumn and winter in the yearly cycle, as changing temperatures and other sentient experiences, of all this he becomes aware—when he has passed through the gate of death—also as a kind of cycle, although of much longer duration. He experiences the warmth-giving, life-giving quality (life-giving, that is to say, for his spiritual Self) of his good feelings, of his sympathy with goodness; he experiences as icy cold his sympathy with evil, with the immoral. Just as here on Earth we live through the heat of summer and the cold of winter, so do we live after death warmed by our good feelings, chilled by our evil feelings; and we bear the effects of our will through these spiritual years and days. After death we are the product of our moral nature on Earth. And we have an environment that is permeated by our follies and our wisdom, by our sympathies and antipathies for the good.

So that we can say: Just as here on Earth we have the summer air around us giving warmth and life, and as we have the cold and frosty winter air around us, so, after death, we are surrounded by an atmosphere of soul-and-spirit that is warm and life-giving in so far as it is produced through our good feelings, and chilling in so far as it is produced through our evil feelings. Here on Earth, in certain regions at least, the summer and winter temperatures are the same for all of us. In the time after death, each human being has his own atmosphere, engendered by himself. And the most moving experiences after death are connected with the fact that one man lives in icy cold and the other, close beside him, in life-giving warmth.

Such are the experiences that may be undergone after death. And as I described in my book Theosophy, one of the main experiences passed through in the soul-world, is that those human beings who have harbored evil feelings here on Earth, must undergo their hard experiences in the sight of those who developed and harbored good feelings.

It can indeed be said: All that remains concealed to begin with in the inner being of man, discloses itself when he has passed through the gate of death. Sleep too acquires a cosmic significance, likewise our life during wintertime. We sleep every night in order that we may prepare for ourselves the light in which we must live after death. We go through our winter experiences in order to prepare the soul-spiritual warmth into which we enter after death. And into this atmosphere of the spiritual world which we have ourselves prepared we bear the effects of our deeds.

Here on Earth we live, through our physical body, as beings subject to earthly gravity. Through our breathing we live in the surrounding air, and far away we see the stars. When we have passed through the gate of death we are in the world of spirit-and-soul, far removed from the Earth; we are beyond the stars, we see the stars from the other side, look back to the world of stars. Our very being lives in the cosmic thoughts and cosmic forces. We look back upon the stars, no longer seeing them shine, but seeing instead the Hierarchies, the Spiritual Beings who have merely their reflection in the stars.

Thus man on Earth can gain more and more knowledge of what the nature of his life will be when he passes through the gate of death. There are people who say: ‘Why do I need to know all this? I shall surely see it all after death!’—That attitude is just as if a man were to doubt the value of eyesight. For as the Earth's evolution takes its course, man enters more and more into a life in which he must acquire the power to partake in these after-death experiences by grasping them, to begin with in thought, here on the Earth. To shut out knowledge of the spiritual worlds while we are on the Earth is to blind ourselves in soul and spirit after death. A man will enter the spiritual world as a cripple when he passes through the gate of death, if here, in this world, he disdains to learn about the world of spirit, for humanity is evolving towards freedom—towards free spiritual activity. This fact should become clearer and clearer to mankind and should make men realize the urgent necessity of gaining knowledge about the spiritual world.