The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the course of our present studies I should like it to become increasingly clear that man does not belong to the Earth alone, to Earth-existence alone, but also to the Cosmos, to the world of Stars. Much of what there is to say in this connection I have, as you know, already said. I want now to begin with a brief remark in order that misunderstandings may be avoided.

Anyone who speaks of man's connection with the world of the Stars is probably always liable to be accused of leanings towards the superficial form of Astrology that is so widely pursued nowadays. But if what is said on this subject is rightly understood, the immense difference will at once be apparent between what is meant here and the amateurish interpretations of ancient astrological traditions that are so common today.

When we say that man, between birth and death, is a being connected with the Earth and earthly happenings, what do we mean by this? We mean that man owes his existence between birth and death to the fact that, in the first place, he takes the substances of the Earth into his metabolic system as nourishment and digests them; further, that through his breathing, and through the inner processes connected with his breathing, he is related in still another way to the Earth—that is to say, to the atmosphere surrounding the the Earth. We also say that man perceives the outer things of the Earth by means of his senses, perceives indeed reflections of what is extra-terrestrial—reflections which are, however, of a much more earthly character than is generally supposed. So that in general one can say: Man partakes of earthly existence through his senses, through his rhythmic system, and through his metabolic system, and has within him the continuation of the processes set in operation through this Earth-existence itself.

But equally there takes place in man a continuation of cosmic, extra-terrestrial processes. Only it must not be supposed, when it is said that an influence from the Moon, or Venus, or Mars, is exercised upon man, that this is to be understood merely as if rays of light are sent down from Mars or Venus or the Moon, and permeate him. When, for instance, it is said that man is subject to the influence of the Moon, this must be taken as an analogy of what is meant by saying that man is subject to the influences of the substances of the Earth. When someone passes an apple-tree, let us say, picks an apple and eats it, it can be said that the apple-tree has an influence on him; but we should not construe this so literally as to say that the apple-tree had sent its rays towards him. Or, if you like, when a man passes a meadow where there is an ox, and a week afterwards eats its flesh, we shall not at once form the idea that the ox has exercised an influence upon him. Neither must we picture so literally what is said about the influence upon man of the world of the Stars. The relation of the world of the Stars to man and of man to the world of the Stars is for all that just as much a reality as the relation of the man to the ox he passes in the meadow and the flesh of which he afterwards eats.

Today I have to speak of certain connections which exist between man and the worlds both of Earth-existence and of extra-earthly existence. If we again turn our attention to how man lives in the alternating conditions of waking and sleeping, we must first be clear that it is in the waking state that his reciprocal relationship to earthly substances and earthly forces is actually established. During waking life he perceives through his senses; during sleep he does not. Moreover he eats and drinks only when awake—though possibly some people would like to do so in sleep as well! The breathing process and the process that is connected with the breathing, i.e. the circulation of the blood, as well as the other rhythmic processes—these alone continue in man both in the waking and sleeping states. But they differ in the two states. I will speak later of the difference there is between breathing during waking life and breathing during sleep. To begin with we will confine ourselves to the fact that man is related to the outer world during the waking state through his senses and through his metabolism. We will consider this at first in connection only with things that are common knowledge.

Let us then start from the fact that during his waking state man takes foodstuffs into himself from the outside world, inner activity being promoted by the process of digestion. But it must not be forgotten that while, in the waking state, after the food has been taken, inner physical and etheric activity proceeds under the influence of the intaken foodstuffs, this physical and etheric organism of man is permeated by his Ego-organization and astral body.

It is also the case that during the waking state, man's Ego and astral ‘being’ take command of what goes on in the physical and etheric bodies in connection with the process of nourishment. But what thus takes place under the influence of the Ego and astral being does not continue during sleep. During sleep the physical and etheric bodies of man are worked upon by forces that issue, not from the Earth but from the cosmic environment of the Earth—from the world of the Stars.

It might be said—and not in a figurative sense for it has real meaning—that by day man eats the substances of the Earth and by night takes into himself what the Stars and their activities give him. In a certain sense, therefore, man is bound up with the Earth while he is awake and removed from the Earth while he is asleep; heavenly processes take their course in his physical and etheric bodies during sleep.

Materialistic science thinks that when a man is asleep, the substances he has consumed simply activate their own forces in him, whereas in reality, whatever substances a man takes into himself are worked upon during his sleep by the cosmic forces in the environment of the Earth. Suppose, for instance, we consume white of egg—albumen. This albumen is only fettered to the Earth through the fact that during the waking state we are permeated by our soul and spirit—our astral body and Ego. During sleep this albumen is worked upon by the whole planetary system from Moon to Saturn, and by the world of the fixed Stars. And a chemist who wished to study the inner processes taking place in man during sleep would have not only to be versed in earthly chemistry but also in a spiritual chemistry, for the processes then are different from those that take their course during waking life.

The Ego and astral being of man are, as you know, separated from the physical and etheric bodies during sleep and are not directly related with the world of the Stars; but they are directly related with the Beings of whom the Sun, Moon and Stars are the physical mirror-images—namely, with the Beings of the Hierarchies. Man asleep is a duality; his Ego and astral body—I could equally well say, his spirit and soul—become subject to the spiritual Beings of the higher kingdoms of the Universe. His bodies, the physical and etheric bodies, are subject to the physical reflections, the cosmic-physical mirror-images of these higher Beings.

Aware of himself as an earthly being, man has become more and more a materialistic philistine under the influence of intellectualism. Almost as aptly as the modern age is called the epoch of intellectual and scientific progress, it could be called the epoch of materialistic philistinism. For man is not conscious that he is dependent on anything else than sense-impressions coming from the Earth, the rhythmic processes set going in him by earthly processes, the metabolic processes also occasioned in him by earthly conditions. Hence he does not know his real place in the Universe. The factors in operation here are of tremendous complexity. As soon as the veil that is spread before man in order that he may see only the sense-world and not the spiritual world behind it, is drawn aside, life becomes extraordinarily complex.

It is found to begin with that man is influenced not only by those Beings and their physical reflections, the Stars, which can be directly observed, but that within earthly existence itself, supersensible Beings akin to those of the world of Stars have so to speak set up their abode in the earthly realm.

You know that the people of the Old Testament worshipped Jehovah—who was an actual Being, connected with what manifests in the physical world as Moon. It is of course more or less a figure of speech to say that the Jehovah-Being has his dwelling in the Moon, but at the same time there is reality in the expression. Everything pertaining to this Jehovah-Being is connected with the Moon.

Now there are Beings who ‘scorned’—if I may so express it—to make the journey to the Moon with the Jehovah-beings when the Moon separated from the Earth, and who remained in the earthly realm. So that in a way we can divine the existence of the true Jehovah-beings when we look at the Moon. We can say: that is the outer physical image of everything that participates in a regular way in the World Order in connection with the Being known as Jehovah. But when we learn to know what takes place inside the surface of the Earth—whether in the solid or the watery states—we find beings there who have disdained to make their home on the Moon, and have in an irregular way made the Earth their dwelling-place.

Now the Moon-beings, as I will call them, have helpers. These helpers belong to Mercury and Venus, just as the Moon-beings belong to the Moon. The Venus-beings, the Mercury-beings and the Moon-beings form a kind of trinity. The so-called regular beings of this kind in the Universe belong to these Stars. But both in the solid and the watery constituents of the Earth, we find beings belonging, it is true, to the same category, but—one might say—to a different epoch of time. They are beings who did not share in the Earth's cosmic evolution.

These beings have an influence upon sleeping man just as the regular cosmic beings have; but their influence is pernicious. I must characterize it by saying: when a man goes to sleep, then in the condition between falling asleep and waking, these irregular Moon, Venus and Mercury-beings approach him and set about persuading him that evil is good and good evil. All this takes place in man's unconscious condition, between going to sleep and waking.

It is a shattering experience connected with initiation that beyond the threshold of ordinary consciousness things by no means without danger to humanity are encountered. People holding the materialistic view of life have no idea to what man is exposed between going to sleep and waking. He is actually exposed to these beings who persuade him in his sleeping state that good is evil, and evil good. The moral order on Earth is bound up with the human etheric body, and when man sleeps, he leaves his moral achievements behind him on the bed. He does not pass over into the state of sleep armed with his moral qualities.

Natural Science today is everywhere touching the fringe of things which need to be explained by Spiritual Science. You may recently have seen in the newspapers some interesting and thoroughly well-founded statistics. It was stated that criminals in the prisons have been found to have the soundest sleep of all. Really hardened criminals are never tormented during their sleep by bad dreams or the like. This only happens when they dip down again into their etheric bodies, for it is there that the moral qualities lie. It can much more easily happen to one who is striving to be moral, that through the constitution of his etheric body, he carries over something into his astral body and is then tormented by dreams as the result of comparatively trifling moral lapses. But generally speaking it is a fact that man does not carry over at all, or only to a very slight extent, the moral constitution he acquires during earthly existence but is exposed during sleep to the beings just referred to.

These beings are identical with those I have always designated as Ahrimanic. They set themselves the task of keeping man on the Earth by every possible means. You know from the book Occult Science that the Earth will one day pass over into the Jupiter condition. That is what these beings want to prevent. They want to prevent man from developing in a regular way together with the Earth and then passing over into the Jupiter condition in a normal way. They want to preserve the Earth as Earth and mankind for the Earth. Hence these beings work unceasingly and with great intensity to achieve the following.—You must remember that these are things that take place behind the scenes of existence—real processes that have been going on ever since there has been a human race on the Earth.—Man passes into the state of sleep in his Ego-being and astral-being. These Moon, Venus and Mercury-beings who are living unlawfully on the Earth, now endeavor to give man an etheric body composed of the Earth's ether whenever he is asleep. They hardly ever succeed. In rare cases of which I will speak at some later time, they have succeeded; but this hardly ever happens. Still they do not give up the attempt for over and over again it seems to them that their efforts might succeed, that they might surround, permeate a man while he is asleep and has left his etheric body behind, with another etheric body built up from the Earth's ether. That is what these beings desire.

If an Ahrimanic being of this category were actually to succeed in bringing a complete etheric body stage by stage into a man every time he slept, such a man would be able after death, when living in his etheric body, to maintain himself in that body. Otherwise, as you know, the etheric body dissolves in a few days. But a man to whom the above had happened would be able to continue existing in his etheric body and after a time there would arise a race of etheric humanity. That is what is desired from this side of the spiritual world, and then it would be possible by such means to preserve the Earth.

Within the solid and the fluid components of the Earth there are in very truth a host of such beings. Their desire is to make mankind into pure phantoms, etheric phantoms, until the end of the Earth's evolution, so that the normal goal of Earth-evolution could not be attained. And in the night-time these beings by no means lose courage; over and over again they believe that their efforts may succeed.

Now man today has quite a passably good intellect which has developed considerably at the present time when philistinism is on the increase. Man can certainly pride himself upon possessing intellect. But this intellect is not even remotely on a par with the intellect of those higher beings who desire to achieve what I am now describing to you. Let nobody say: ‘These beings must be fearfully stupid.’ They are certainly not stupid. Seeing that they work only upon human beings in sleep, there is nothing to deter them from believing that they might succeed before the end of Earth-evolution in preventing a large portion of the human race from reaching their future destinations—destinations bound up with the Jupiter embodiment of the Earth.

But one who is able to see behind the scenes of physical existence can perceive that these beings do sometimes lose courage, are disappointed. And the disappointments they experience are not experienced in the night, but by day. One sees, for instance, how these Ahrimanic beings suffer disappointments if one comes across them in hospitals.

Now of course the illnesses that befall men have one aspect that calls upon us in all circumstances to do everything we possibly can to heal them. But on the other side we must ask: how do the illnesses suffered by men arise out of the dark sources of natural existence?

Those illnesses which are not the result of external influences but arise out of the inner constitution of man, are connected with the fact that when the Ahrimanic beings have almost succeeded in making a man assume an etheric body that is not his normal one, then, instead of bringing the lawful working of the etheric forces into his physical body and into his own accustomed etheric body on waking, such a man bears into himself causes of illness. Through these causes of illness the true Venus, Mercury and Moon-beings protect themselves against the harmful influences of the irregular beings. Indeed if a man did not at some time or another get this or that illness, he would be liable to the danger of which I have just spoken. In any illness his body breaks down, collapses, in order that there can be ‘sweated out,’ if I may use the expression, whatever irregular etheric processes he has taken into himself through the Ahrimanic influences.

And a further reaction called forth in order to prevent man from falling a victim to this Ahrimanic influence, is the possibility of error. And a third thing is egoism. Man is not fundamentally intended to be ill, to fall a prey to error, or to be egoistic to an exaggerated degree. Egoism as such is again a means of holding man to the evolution proper to the Earth instead of being torn out of it by the Ahrimanic beings. This, then, is one order of beings which can be discovered behind the scenes of ordinary sense-existence.

One can form an idea of another order of beings by knowing that not only Moon, Mercury, and Venus have an influence upon man but that an influence is also exercised from beyond the Sun—from Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

You know from the lectures I gave in the so-called ‘French Course’^NoteNum that the Moon is the physical reflection of those beings who bring man into the physical world. Saturn is the physical reflection of those beings who bear him again out of the physical world. The Moon draws man down to the Earth; Saturn draws him again into the Universe and then into the spiritual world.

Just as the Jehovah-Moon-God has Venus and Mercury-beings as helpers, so Saturn has Jupiter and Mars-beings as helpers in bearing man into the Cosmos and into the spiritual worlds. These influences and the influences connected with the Moon-beings work upon man in exactly the opposite way.

The influences of Moon, Venus, and Mercury upon us are predominant until our 17th or 18th years. Then later on, when we have passed our 20th or 21st year, an influence from Mars, Jupiter and Saturn becomes particularly active; only in later years does this come to the point of leading us out of earthly existence into the spiritual world. The inner constitution of man is, in fact, dependent upon this transition, as one might say, from the inner planets to the outer planets. Until our 17th or 18th years, we are dependent, for instance, upon the major blood-circulation which affects the whole body. Later in life we are dependent upon the minor blood-circulation—but these are matters which must be left for future lectures. At the moment we must pay attention to the fact that just as the irregular beings of Moon, Venus, and Mercury have their habitations in the solid and fluidic components of the Earth, so the irregular beings of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn have the conditions for their existence—or, to speak pictorially, their habitations—in the warmth and in the air surrounding the Earth.

These beings have a great influence upon man during his sleeping state. But their influence works in exactly the opposite direction. The aim of these beings is to make man into a moral automaton—if I may so express it—into a moral automaton of such a nature that in his waking state he would not listen to his own instincts, his desires, or the voice of his blood, but would spurn all this and hearken only to the inspiration of these irregular Mars-, Jupiter-, and Saturn-beings. He would then become a moral automaton, without any prospect of a future state of freedom. That, then, is what these beings desire; and their influence too is strong, exceedingly strong. It is they who every night want to induce man to take the influence of the world of Stars into himself and never again the influence of the Earth. They would fain carry man right away from earthly existence. They desire—and have desired this ever since the human race first arose on the Earth—that man shall spurn the Earth, that he shall not awaken to freedom on the Earth—where alone this is possible. They desire that he shall remain a moral automaton as he was in the preceding metamorphosis of the Earth, in the Old Moon.

And in the middle, between these two hosts, of which the one sets its camp in the element of warmth and that of air, and the other in the elements of earth and of water—between these two opposing cosmic hosts stands Man. Life in his physical body conceals from him the fact that a fierce battle is waged in the Cosmos for possession of his being.

Today man must consciously find his way to such knowledge for it concerns him deeply and essentially. His very existence as a human being is constituted by the fact that forces are everywhere active around him, forces from the spiritual world. It is important for man today to have knowledge of his real position in the Universe.

A time will come when people will be far more justified in holding a poor opinion of our dark, materialistic knowledge compared with what will be known in the future about the spiritual reality behind the physical, than we are justified in saying that the scientific knowledge possessed by the Greeks was puerile, that they were mere children, whereas we have made splendid progress! In philistinism we certainly have made splendid progress and we shall have much more right to criticise when we can speak with full knowledge of this battle that is waging on the Earth for possession of man's being.

There are signs that a knowledge of these things must begin to spread in our time. It is certainly true that what I have told you today about the battle of the Ahrimanic and Luciferic beings in the Cosmos for the being of man is still hidden from the majority of people in the dark recesses of their inner nature. But these battles are now beginning to send their waves into that realm of existence of which men are clearly conscious. And today, if we are not to lead a sleepy existence in our civilization, we must know how to recognize the first waves that beat in upon us from those regions of the spiritual world which I have just characterized.

These two hosts—the Luciferic in the warmth and airy element of the Earth, the Ahrimanic in the solid and watery—these two hosts send their waves into our cultural life today. The Luciferic hosts are making their influence felt above all in outworn theology. In our cultural life, as an outflow of this Luciferic power, we encounter statements endeavoring to make Christ into a myth. The Christ descended to the Earth through the Mystery of Golgotha as a real Being, and that is naturally a truth that cuts right across the intentions of the beings who would like to make man into a moral automaton, without freedom. Therefore: Do away with the reality of Christ. Christ is a myth! You can discover in the literature of the 19th century, how clever and ingenious were the hypotheses of theologians like David Frederic Strauss, Kalthoff and those who merely echoed them, or better said, apish babblers like Arthur Drews! Everywhere the view is advanced that Christ is a mythological figure, a mere picture which has impressed itself upon man's imagination.—There will be many more attacks from these hosts—but this is the first.

The first waves coming from the Ahrimanic host in the solid and watery elements of the Earth press home the opposite view. In this case, Christ is denied and validity allowed only to the ‘simple man of Nazareth,’ to Jesus as the physical personality. Here again is a tit-bit presented by theology!

Making Christ into a myth—a purely Luciferic activity. Making the One who went through the Mystery of Golgotha into a mere man—even if endowed with every possible quality—a purely Ahrimanic activity. This, however, does not succeed at all easily, for the many testimonies and traditions have to be eliminated before producing this ‘simple man of Nazareth.’ Nevertheless this other tit-bit of theology is evidence of the onrush of the Ahrimanic breakers into human culture.

If these things are to be rightly assessed we must be able also to detect them behind the scenes of our ordinary existence on Earth. Otherwise, if men are not willing to turn their attention to what can be said today out of the spiritual world, they will become less and less able to judge such phenomena correctly, and these phenomena will then take effect in the sub-consciousness. It will become increasingly dangerous for men to surrender to the subconscious. Clear, thoughtful observation of what actually exists—a feeling for reality—that is the growing need of humanity.

Perhaps we can trace most definitely where this clear thoughtfulness, this sense of reality, must be applied, when we perceive the increase of such extraordinary phenomena as the theology which on the one hand denies Christ, and on the other hand makes Christ a myth. Such phenomena will become more and more prevalent, and if they are not to lead to corruption, humanity must acquire a clear, unswerving perception of the spiritual influences that are exercised upon the physical world, and particularly upon man himself.

I told you once before of the two men who found a piece of iron bent into a certain shape. The one said: “A good horse-shoe! I will shoe my horse with it.” The other said: “Not at all. It is a magnet and can be used for quite different purposes than shoeing a horse!” “I see nothing like a magnet about it,” said the other man. “You are crazy to say that there are invisible magnetic forces in it. It's a horse-shoe—that's its use!”

This is rather like the people today who are not willing to receive the knowledge that comes from the spiritual world. They want to “shoe horses” with everything in the world—if I may so express myself—because they will not acknowledge the reality of the supersensible forces. They want to shoe horses—not to make anything in which the magnetic forces are put to use. There was once a time—nor does it lie very far behind us—when a piece of iron so shaped would have been used for the shoeing of horses. But today this is no longer possible.

A time will come when in ordinary social life too, men will need what can be communicated from the spiritual world. Of this we must be mindful, and then Anthroposophy will penetrate not only into the intellect—that is of less importance—but above all into the will—and that is of great importance. Upon this we will ponder more and more deeply.

• NoteNum. Printed under the title: Philosophy, Cosmology and Religion. An abbreviated version of ten lectures given by Dr. Steiner in Dornach, 6th-15th September, 1922.

My dear friends,

With this lesson, I would like to restore to the Free School for Spiritual Science as an esoteric institution the task which it has been in danger of being deprived of during the past years. In this introductory lecture, I will not go further into explaining that situation, but I wanted to stress the importance of this moment by indicating the seriousness with which our movement—which is daily being endangered and undermined—must be imbued, especially in this School. This is no unnecessary observation, for such seriousness has not been apparent everywhere.

A kind of preparatory introduction will be given today, my dear friends. And I would like to emphasize that in this School spiritual life is to be revealed in its true meaning, so that you will be able to consider this School as an institution which can provide for the revealed spiritual needs of our times. This spiritual life can be deepened in all its aspects. But a center must exist from out of which this deepening derives, and the Center can be seen by those who wish to be members of the School to be the Goetheanum in Dornach.

Therefore, I wish to begin the School today, with those members for whom it has so far been possible to issue the membership card, to begin in a way that will make you conscious of the fact that every word spoken within this School is based on the full responsibility towards the spirit revealed to our times—that same spirit which has been revealed to humanity throughout the centuries and millennia, but revealed in each epoch in a special way. And this spirit will only give to humanity what it is able to receive.

We must be clear from the very beginning that it is not animosity towards what the sense-world has accomplished for humanity when in a School for Spiritual Science we attend to the revelations of the spirit. We must also clearly recognize that the sense-world has provided necessary, practical revelations to humanity and this fact should not cause us to undervalue those contributions in any way.

But it is nevertheless important that the spiritual revelations are received with all earnestness. For this—I must say it at the outset—much prejudice and obstinacy, which is deeply ingrained in the School's members, will have to go. It will be necessary to investigate how one finds the path to his own obstinacy, which hinders understanding what the School should be. For many still don't think correctly about the School. This must be gradually corrected. For it is only possible for those to be in the School who take it in all earnestness.

The matter itself demands this. And on the other hand, we must follow a difficult path in face of the opposition and undermining forces which are increasing day by day. The members of the School are by no means sufficiently attentive to this. All this, my dear friends, must be kept in mind.

The first and foremost thing to be observed in this School must of course be what it is possible for the spirit to give us. It will however be demanded of the members of the School that they accompany us on the difficult path strewn with obstacles and attempts at undermining it.

I have gone into these things in our weekly periodical, What is Happening in the Anthroposophical Society, and have also explicitly differentiated there between the General Anthroposophical Society and this School. And it is necessary that this difference be felt in all its explicitness by the members of the School, so that eventually only those persons are members who really want to be representatives of anthroposophy in all aspects of life. I say this now in order to emphasize the seriousness of the matter.

First of all, I would like to present to your hearts and to your souls what should stand over our School as a kind of engraving. That we really identify with what emerges from the life of the spirit onto our soul's ear and our soul's understanding. We shall begin with the words:

Where on earthly ground, color on color
Life is manifest in creation;
Where from earthly matter, form on form,
The lifeless is given shape;
Where sentient Beings, strong in will
Warm themselves in joy of existence;
Where you, O man, your bodily being
derive from earth and air and light.

There your true being enters
Deep, night-enveloped, cold darkness;
You ask in the dark sweeping expanse
No longer, who you are and were and will be.
For your own being the day grows dimly
To the soul's night, to spirit-darkness;
And you turn with angst of soul
Toward the light that from darkness streams.

I will repeat it:

Where on earthly ground, color on color
Life is manifest in creation;
Where from earthly matter, form on form,
The lifeless is given shape;
Where sentient Beings, strong in will
Warm themselves in joy of existence;
Where you, O man, your bodily being
derive from earth and air and light.

There your true being enters
Deep, night-enveloped, cold darkness;
You ask in the dark sweeping expanse
No longer, who you are and were and will be.
For your own being the day grows dimly
To the soul's night, to spirit-darkness;
And you turn with angst of soul
Toward the light that from darkness streams.

These words tell us that the world is beautiful and glorious and sublime and the endless glow of revelation in all that lives in leaf and blossom flows to our eyes with color on color from the visible universe; it is meant to remind us how the divine is manifested in what is lifeless in earthly matter, in the thousands upon thousands of crystalline and non-crystalline forms at our feet, in the water and air, in clouds and stars; it makes clearer to us that the animal life that frolics in the world and delights in its own existence and the warmth of its existence—that all that is divine-spiritual revelation. And it reminds us that we owe our own bodies to all those shapes, to all that is greening and growing, color on color. And it should also make us conscious of that fact that although all that is beautiful and glorious and grand and divine to the senses, it is futile to ask it what we ourselves are as human beings.

Nature, although it glows to us as grand and powerful in tone and strength and warmth, can never give us information about ourselves, although it does give us a huge amount of information about many divine aspects of the world. So we must evermore repeat to ourselves: what we feel as our innermost self is not woven from what we perceive as the beauty and grandeur and greatness and power of nature. And the question arises: Why does the reality of being all around us, of which we are also a part, remain dim and silent?

And what we might feel to be a kind of privation, we must experience as a blessing, so that we can say in all seriousness and sternness: We must first make ourselves truly human, warm in soul and strong of spirit, so that we, as spirit in humanity, may find the spirit in the world.

For this it is necessary that we prepare ourselves, without levity, to come to the frontier of the sense-world, where the spirit's revelation can rise in us. We must say to ourselves: If we arrive at this frontier unprepared and the full light of the spirit comes upon us at once, then, because we have not yet developed the strength of spirit and the warmth of soul necessary for receiving the spirit, it would shatter us and cast us back to our nothingness.

Therefore, at the frontier between the sense-world and the spirit-world stands that messenger of the gods, that messenger of the spirit, about whom we will hear more and more during the next lessons, whom we will want to know always better and better. That messenger of the spirit stands there and warningly speaks, telling us how we should be and what we must set aside so that we may approach the revelations of the spiritual world in the right way.

And when we have grasped, my dear friends, that the beauty, the greatness and the sublimity of nature is, at first, spiritual darkness for human knowledge, from which the light must be born which tells us what we are and were and will be; then we must know that the first thing to come from the darkness that must be grasped is that Spirit-Messenger who sends us the appropriate warning. Therefore, let this Spirit-Messenger's words resound in our souls, and let the Spirit-Messenger's description shine out before our soul's eye.

And from out the darkness you appear,
(the human being is addressed)
Your likeness manifesting you,
Yet also a parable of you,
Earnest spirit-words in cosmic ether
Heard by your heart, giving strength

To you the Spirit-Messenger, who alone
Can light for you the way;
Before him the fields of sense widen,
Behind him yawn the abyss-depths.

And before his dark spirit-fields,
Hard by the yawning abyss of being,
Resounds his ur-potent creative words:
Behold, I am the only gate to knowledge.

It must be clear to us that we must take seriously all that comes as warning from the Spirit-Messenger before daring to fathom what is found not on this side of the yawning abyss, that is, in the area of the senses, but on the other side spreading out as spirituality. This is veiled at first in darkness for human understanding, and can only be revealed by the countenance of the Spirit-Messenger, who appears at first to be similar to the human being, but transformed into one of gigantic stature. Then, although he is so similar to man, his form is shadowy, as though he were a mere parable of man. He warns that without the appropriate seriousness, no one should seek what lies beyond the yawning abyss. The earnest messenger entreats us to be earnest as well.

And then, when we hear that voice and have grasped it with due seriousness, we should be aware of how at first softly, most softly, and in abstractions, it wishes to give us indications and orientation from the spiritual world about the abyss which yawns before us and from which the Messenger holds us back less we take a careless step. The voice resounds:

From the distant beings in space
Who experience existence in light,
From the stages of the course of time,
which finds expression in creating,
From the depths of heart-felt feeling
Where in the Self the world is fathomed:

They resound in the speech of the soul,
They gleam in the spirit-thoughts,
From divine curative powers
In the cosmic formative forces
The undulating existential words:
O man, know thyself!

I will say it again:

From the distant beings in space
Who experience existence in light,
From the stages of the course of time,
which finds expression in creating,
From the depths of heart-felt feeling
Where in the Self the world is fathomed:

They resound in the speech of the soul,
They gleam in the spirit-thoughts,
From divine curative powers
In the cosmic formative forces
The undulating existential words:
O man, know thyself!

These words can make it clear to us how the secrets of existence must be fathomed from all that acts and works in the depths of space and which from the depths of space manifest how real knowledge must be fathomed from what is revealed in the march of time as creative action, and how all that is revealed of the world in the human heart must be revealed by the soul's honest seeking. For all this can only constitute a basis for what one needs for fathoming one's self, in which the world has planted the sum of its secrets. Thus, they can be discovered through human self-knowledge. Everything man needs in sickness and in health on his journey between birth and death, and what he will also have to use on that other existential journey between death and a new birth.

But all those who consider themselves members of this School should clearly realize that everything that is not acquired in this way is not real knowledge, but only pseudo-knowledge, that what usually passes for science, what man learns before he has acquired an awareness of the Guardian of the Threshold's warnings regarding spiritual knowledge, is all pseudo-knowledge. It doesn't have to stay pseudo-knowledge though. We do not scorn this pseudo-knowledge. But we must realize that it will only emerge from the stage of pseudo-knowledge once it has been transformed by all man can know about that purification and metamorphosis of his being, which he achieves when he understands what the Spirit-Messenger warns at the yawning abyss of knowledge—what the shining spirit warningly calls out from the darkness on behalf of the best spiritualinhabitants of the spiritual world.

Whoever does not acquire the awareness that between the sojourn in the fields of sense—which we must live during our earthly existence between birth and death—and the spiritual fields, a yawning abyss exists, cannot achieve true knowledge. For only by means of this awareness can true knowledge be acquired. He doesn't have to become clairvoyant, although knowledge from the spiritual world comes by true clairvoyance. But he must acquire an awareness ofwhat exists as a warning at the yawning abyss of the secrets of space, the secrets of time, the secrets of the human heart itself. For whether wego out into space, the abyss is there; or if we wander in the turning points of time, the abyss is there; if we enter into the heart itself, the abyss is there.

And these three abysses, they are not three abysses, they are only one abyss. For if we wander out into space so far that we come to where the expanses of space merge, we find the spirit; if we wander in the turning points of time to where they originate at the beginning of their cycles, if we wander into the depths of the human heart, so deep that we can only fathom ourselves: these three ways lead to only one goal, to one last stop, not to three different stops. They all lead to the same divine-spirituality that bubbles from the spring that fructifies and feeds all being, but also teaches man to recognize the ground of existence in knowledge.

In such earnest awareness, we shall stand in thought where the earnest Spirit-Messenger speaks and listen to what he relates about the obstacles relative to our times, which we must sweep away in order to come to true spiritual knowledge.

Obstacles to spiritual knowledge, my dear friends, have existed in all times. In all times the people have had to overcome this and that, put aside this and that according to the warnings of the earnest Guardian of the Threshold to the spiritual world. But there are obstacles peculiar to each age. What proceeds from human civilization is to a large extent not helpful, but rather hindrance for access to the spiritual world. And man must find the particular obstacles that emerge from each earthly civilization, and are implanted in his nature by that very civilization, and which he must put aside before he can cross the yawning abyss.

Therefore, let us now hear the earnest watchful Messenger of the gods speak about this:

Yes, you must beware of the abyss;
Otherwise its beasts will devour
You, if you pass by me in haste.
Your cosmic age has placed them there
In you as enemies of knowledge.

Behold the first beast, the crooked back,
The bony head, the scrawny body,
His skin is all a dullish blue;
Your fear of creative spiritual being
Begat the monster in your will;
Knowledge bravery alone will overcome it.

Behold the second beast, it bares
Its teeth in a warped face, scornfully it lies,
Yellow with gray spots is its body;
Your hate of spiritual revelation
Begat this weakling in your feeling;
Your flame for knowledge must subdue him.

Behold the third beast, with cloven muzzle,
Its eye is glassy, posture slouching,
Dirty-red its form appears to you;
Your doubts in the power of spiritual light
Begat this ghost within your thinking;
Your creative knowledge must make it yield.

Only when you've defeated the three
Will wings sprout upon your soul
To fly the abyss over,
Which separates you from the knowledge fields
To which your heart desires
to consecrate itself in healing.

I will read it again:

The Guardian speaks:

Yes, you must beware of the abyss;
Otherwise its beasts will devour
You, if you pass by me in haste.
Your cosmic age has placed them there
In you as enemies of knowledge.

Behold the first beast, the crooked back,
The bony head, the scrawny body,
His skin is all a dullish blue;
Your fear of creative spiritual being
Begat the monster in your will;
Knowledge bravery alone will overcome it.

Behold the second beast, it bares
Its teeth in a warped face, scornfully it lies,
Yellow with gray spots is its body;
Your hate of spiritual revelation
Begat this weakling in your feeling;
Your flame for knowledge must subdue him.

Behold the third beast, with cloven muzzle,
Its eye is glassy, posture slouching,
Dirty-red its form appears to you;
Your doubts in the power of spiritual light
Begat this ghost within your thinking;
Your creative knowledge must make it yield.

Only when you've defeated the three
Will wings sprout upon your soul
To fly the abyss over,
Which separates you from the knowledge fields
To which your heart desires
to consecrate itself in healing.

These, my dear friends, are the three greatest enemies of knowledge for contemporary humanity. The human being of today is afraid of the spirit's creativity. Fear sits deep in his soul. And he would like to conjure it away. So he dresses his fear in all kinds of pseudo-logical arguments by which he tries to refute spiritual revelations.

You will hear, my dear friends, from this or that side arguments against spiritual knowledge. It is sometimes dressed in clever, sometimes in sly, sometimes in foolish logical rules. Never, however, are the logical rules the reason why spiritual knowledge is refuted. Rather is it the spirit of fear that lives and works deep into humanity's inner life which, when it rises to the head, translates into logical reasons. It is fear!

But it is not sufficient to say: I am not afraid. Everyone can of course say that. We must first comprehend the nature and the seat of this fear. We must tell ourselves that we were born and educated according to the present time, in which the Ahrimanic side has installed spirits of fear, and that we are tainted by these spirits. And conjuring them away doesn't mean that they really go. We must find the ways and the means—and this School will provide guidance—to bravery and knowledge against those spirits of fear which reside as monsters in our will. For it is not what often leads people to knowledge nowadays—or what they say does—that can provide true knowledge, but rather only courage, the inner courage of soul which provides the strength and the capacity to follow the path that leads to true, real, light-filled spiritual knowledge.

And the second beast, which creeps into the human soul from the spirit of the times to become an enemy of knowledge, this beast lurks everywhere we go—in most of the literary works of the day, in most of the art galleries, in most sculpture and art in general and music. It wreaks its havoc in the schools and in society. In order to avoid having to confess its fear of the spirit, it resorts to mocking spiritual knowledge.

This mockery is not always openly expressed, because people are not conscious of what is within them. But I would say that only a thin wall, the thickness of a spiderweb, separates what is in people's consciousness and what is in their hearts wanting to mock true spiritual knowledge. And when the mockery is open, it is only when the more or less conscious impertinence of modern man is able to suppress the fear. But basically, everyone today is vaccinated against the spirit's revelations. And the mockery is manifested in the most unusual ways.

The third beast is lazy thinking, the kind of thinking that would make the whole world a movie, because then no one is required to think—everything is reeled out and all one has to do is follow what is reeled out. Even science would like to follow the world's phenomena with passive thinking. Man is too lazy and comfortable to activate his thinking. Humanity's thinking nowadays can be compared to someone who wants to pick something up from the floor and stands there with his hands in his pockets and thinks he can pick the thing up that way. But he cannot. And existence cannot be comprehended by thinking with its hands in its pockets. We must move our arms and hands if we want to grasp something from the floor. We must activate our thinking if we want to grasp the spirit.

The Guardian of the Threshold characterizes the first beast, which lurks as fear in your will, as a beast with a crooked back and a bony face and scrawny body. This beast, with its dull blue skin, is verily what rises from the abyss and stands alongside the Guardian of the Threshold for today's humanity. And the Guardian of the Threshold makes it quite clear to the humanity of today that this beast is actually in you! It rises from out of the yawning abyss which lies in front of the knowledge fields, and reflects what lurks in your will as an enemy of knowledge.

And the second beast, which is connected to the desire to mock the spiritual world, is characterized by the Guardian of the Threshold in a similar way. It emerges alongside the other monster, but its whole attitude is one of weakness and sleepiness. With this sleepy posture and gray-greenish body, it bares its teeth in a warped face. And this baring of teeth is meant to indicate laughter, but lies, because to mock is to lie. So it grins at us as the reflection of the beast that lives in our own feeling and, as the enemy of knowledge, hinders our search for knowledge.

And the Guardian of the Threshold characterizes the third beast, which will not approach the world in spirit, as emerging from the abyss with cloven muzzle, dull glassy eyes, slouching posture and dirty-red form. Such is the doubt which speaks through the cloven muzzle and doubt in the power of spirit-light which expresses itself in the dirty-red form. This is the third of the knowledge enemies that lurks in us. They make us earthbound.

If we approach spirit-knowledge accompanied by them, ignoring the Guardian of the Threshold's warning, we encounter the yawning abyss. One cannot pass over it earthbound, nor with fear nor mockery, nor with doubt. One can pass over it by grasping in thought thespirituality of being, by experiencing in feeling the soul of being, by strengthening the activity of being in the will. Then the spirit, the soul and the activity of being give us wings of release from the weight of earth. Then we can cross over the abyss.

The steps of prejudice are threefold and will cast us into the abyss if we fail to acquire courage, fire and creative knowledge. If, however, we do acquire creative knowledge in thinking and we want to activate thinking, if we do not wish to approach the spirit in dreamy lassitude, but receive the spirit with inner heartfelt fire, and when we have the courage to really grasp the spirit as spirit, not merely letting it approach us as a materialistic picture, then will the wings grow which will carry us over the abyss, where every human heart that is honest with itself today desires to go.

That is what I wish to bring before your souls, my dear friends, by means of this first introductory lesson, with which this School for Spiritual Science begins.

In closing, let us review once more the beginning, middle and end of the experiences with the Guardian of the Threshold.

Where on earthly ground, color on color
Life is manifest in creation;
Where from earthly matter, form on form,
The lifeless is given shape;
Where sentient Beings, strong in will
Warm themselves in joy of existence;
Where you, O man, your bodily being
derive from earth and air and light.

There your true being enters
Deep, night-enveloped, cold darkness;
You ask in the dark sweeping expanse
No longer, who you are and were and will be.
For your own being the day grows dimly
To the soul's night, to spirit-darkness;
And you turn with angst of soul
Toward the light that from darkness streams.

And from out the darkness you appear,
(the human being is addressed)
Your likeness manifesting you,
Yet also a parable of you,
Earnest spirit-words in cosmic ether
Heard by your heart, giving strength

To you the Spirit-Messenger, who alone
Can light for you the way;
Before him the fields of sense widen,
Behind him yawn the abyss-depths.

And before his dark spirit-fields,
Hard by the yawning abyss of being,
Resounds his ur-potent creative words:
Behold, I am the only gate to knowledge.

From the distant beings in space
Who experience existence in light,
From the stages of the course of time,
which finds expression in creating,
From the depths of heart-felt feeling
Where in the Self the world is fathomed:

They resound in the speech of the soul,
They gleam in the spirit-thoughts,
From divine curative powers
In the cosmic formative forces
The undulating existential words:
O man, know thyself!

Yes, you must beware of the abyss;
Otherwise its beasts will devour
You, if you pass by me in haste.
Your cosmic age has placed them there
In you as enemies of knowledge.

Behold the first beast, the crooked back,
The bony head, the scrawny body,
His skin is all a dullish blue;
Your fear of creative spiritual being
Begat the monster in your will;
Knowledge bravery alone will overcome it.

Behold the second beast, it bares
Its teeth in a warped face, scornfully it lies,
Yellow with gray spots is its body;
Your hate of spiritual revelation
Begat this weakling in your feeling;
Your flame for knowledge must subdue him.

Behold the third beast, with cloven muzzle,
Its eye is glassy, posture slouching,
Dirty-red its form appears to you;
Your doubts in the power of spiritual light
Begat this ghost within your thinking;
Your creative knowledge must make it yield.

Only when you've defeated the three
Will wings sprout upon your soul
To fly the abyss over,
Which separates you from the knowledge fields
To which your heart desires
to consecrate itself in healing.

As to what we will experience when we have passed the Guardian of the Threshold, what is necessary in feeling, willing, thinking to experience in order to pass by the Guardian's light, and enter into the darkness from out of which that light shines in which we recognize the light of our own humanity, and thus arrive at “O man, know thyself!”—which calls out, which manifests from the spirit that enlightens the darkness. About all that, my dear friends, next Friday during the next lesson of the First Class.

My dear friends! The call to self-knowledge, which the soul of man can take up, when it listens impartially to all the beings and events of life, in nature and in the life of the spirit, we will once again, at the beginning of our lesson, allow to pass before our souls.

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds.

You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.

Who speaks so world-mightily?
Who speaks so heart-inwardly?

Does it work streaming through space
Into your sense’s self-experiencing?

Does it sound weaving through time Into your life's evolving stream?

Are you the one, who yourself
In sensing space, in experiencing time
Creates the word, feeling yourself
Estranged in in space’s soul-emptiness,
As you lose the power of thinking
In time’s destroying stream?

We are in the midst, my dear brothers and sisters, of our souls finding the answer to this question, having gone quite far in its contemplation, along the way to the Guardian of the Threshold, to the abyss of existence. We were infused with the instruction of the Guardian of the Threshold along the way. What had stood there previously dark and dull, a person knowing that it nevertheless held his being, that it held the source of his existence, what had been before him dark and dull started to lighten, and then became bright, quite bright. Then in the brightness we heard the Guardian’s call.

See the ethereal iris’s
Light-abundant round.
Through your eyes’
Light-forming force
Let your “I” penetrate through the arc,
And then behold from yonder watch,
Color flooding the world’s chalice.

And the Angels, Archangels, and Archai allow their voices to resound upon this word of the Guardian of the Threshold, as they focus on human souls.

Sense our thoughts
Color breathing living
In the chalice's flood of light;
We carry the sensory-semblance
Into spirit-being-realms
And turn ourselves world-infused
To the service of higher spirits.

And so we see how there, through the flooding light of the world chalice, with which we became acquainted in the last lesson, the beings of the Third Hierarchy become irradiated and illuminated. We see droves of these high beings of Angels, Archangels, and Archai going forth in service to the higher spirits, to the Exusiai, Dynamis, and Kryriotetes. And we become witness to the Exusiai, Dynamis, and Kyriotetes speaking to the beings serving them, implementing what these serving beings require for humanity.

And so the Exusiai, Dynamis, and Kyriotetes speak:

What you have taken up,
Enlivened from dead sensory-semblance,
We wake it in existence;
We add it to the rays of light,
So that the emptiness of matter
Will bear spirit nature
And manifest endowed with love.

And then, urged on by what is within us, we then must turn our gaze to the highest spirits, to the First Hierarchy, turning to them as they turn themselves in blessing to human beings. From there we hear:

In your worlds of will
Feel our world-wide impact;
Spirit shines in matter,
When we are thinking working;
Spirit works in matter,
When we are living willing;
World is I-willing spirit-word.

We bear witness to what beings of the higher worlds discuss among themselves, to what the highest beings pour into human souls as world-words, to what inundates human hearts, and so we must feel ourselves within this dominion-over-all, moving-through-all world light, within which we ourselves live and move.

And now we come upon a truth, perceived there where disembodied spirit-beings live their lives, where spirits think their truths, where spirits are adorned in their beauty, where the work of spirits takes spirited effect. And we come upon the grand, the all-encompassing, the spirit-world-interwoven truth: that spirit is all that is. For we appear, we live, we move in spirit. We embrace spiritual existence.

And now we think about how spirit, within which we now live, is all that is. And now we know that there also where we otherwise are in life, there also in the world of sensory show is simply spirit. Spirit is alone, is all that is. This stands now before our souls as unwavering, almighty truth: that spirit is all. And it is good for us to envision this truth in imagery before the soul. [It was drawn in red.] That, illustrated in the image, is spirit. It is only spirit. [While speaking the word “is” was written within the red drawing in various places.]

That which appears here, is. It is spirit. And what is outside this red area, is nothing. That stands before our souls. And the spirit-world says to us, here it is, here it is, here it is, here it is. Everywhere the spirit is, is something.

[Presently while speaking on, the word “nothing” was written at various places between the areas drawn in red, and further away the words “minerals”, “plants”, and “animals.”]

And where there is no spirit, is nothing. And we are duly impressed, that that is the truth. Everywhere spirit is, is something, and where spirit is not, is nothing. And yet we ask ourselves, how does it appear to us, all that seems to show itself in the world of sensory appearance, out of which we have gone forth over the Threshold here into the spiritual world, where we find the truth of existence, the spirit, emplaced before our souls? Back over there we saw what here is drawn in red as nothing. We are too weak over there, concerning what is drawn in red, to see. What remains over there residually? Nothingness! What we see over there is nothingness, whether it is called minerals, it is a sort of nothingness, whether called plants, a second sort of nothingness, whether called animals, a third sort of nothingness, and so forth.

We perceive nothingness because we are too weak to see what is something. And this nothingness we talk about as the realm of nature. That is the grand beguilement, or as we say, the grand illusion. There are only various sorts of nothingness around us, before our eyes, as we gaze about embodied in corporeality. And we have the deeply felt impression that we are living there, and giving names to what fundamentally is nothing, to what is a grand illusion. And what appears to us presently, what lives over there as nothing and to what we give names, it appears to us as a summation of names, names that we give to the state of nothingness. For in their true state all beings are simply in existence, here where we have entered, here in the spiritual world. Names assigned to nothingness over there are wasted on what is bereft of being. And beings not from the realms of gods, to which we belong, and to which we rightfully belong, such beings can take possession of the names we have wasted on the nothingness. And henceforth they bear these names.

When we are not clear about this, that here upon the earth we give names to what has no real existence, we lapse with our names into a stark, strong illusion. We must know that we are giving names to what is intrinsically nothing. That stands out presently before our souls, while we are living and moving here within the light, so that it can be felt deep, deep, deeply by the spirit-craft of our hearts, which has remained with us in crossing over. Now we know that we have drawn out of the realm of illusion into the realm of truth. Earnest solemnity, sacred earnest solemnity in regard to truth begins to have dominion in our souls.

And now we look back at the trustworthy Guardian of the Threshold, who stands at the abyss of existence. He is not speaking just now. He spoke out of the darkness. He spoke as we were just feeling the luminosity. He spoke while the luminosity grew into brilliance. Now as we stand in the brilliance astounded by the grand truth that there is only spirit, he presently does not speak, he now silently indicates how on high the beings of the higher hierarchies are speaking among themselves. And we think for a moment in regarding the spirit, that down there in life on earth we have been struck with the impression minerals, plants, animals, and physical human beings have made on us, at what the clouds have to say, at what the mountains say, at what the gushing springs are doing, at the power of lightning, at the rolling thunder, at the stars whispering world mysteries. That was what we met with along the way down there. That was our experience. Now all is silent on this side of the abyss of existence. Presently we are witnesses as the gods speak with one another, as the whole choir of angels begins to speak.

Still looking upward, we see this choir turning to the higher spirits, turning to the spirits of the Second Hierarchy in service. We gaze at the loving, serving behavior of the Angels, Archangels, and Archai as they turn to the Exusiai, Dynamis, and Kyriotetes. We have the impression of the gathering of the Third Hierarchy in service.

We have the impression of the gathering of the Second Hierarchy in world-creating, in world-dominion, in world-illumination, and we hear what these beings, inwardly spirit illuminated, godlike in willing, and willing all that is godlike, what these beings are saying one to another.

We hear the Angels, as they allow their word to resound. Out of their care in guiding human souls they allow their word to resound.

Human beings are thinking!

That is carried by the Angels. That is what they are concerned with, in how they should be guiding human souls, for they note that there is thinking going on among human beings. They turn in supplication to the Dynamis, in order to obtain the force by means of which they can properly guide human beings in thinking.

Angels:
Human Beings are thinking!
We need the light from on high,
That we may shine in thinking.

The Dynamis from the realm of illumination, dominion, and action answer full of love, full of benevolence:

Receive¹ the light from on high,
That you may shine in thinking,
When human beings think.

And the flooding light, the force of illumination in thinking, streams forth from the Dynamis to the Angels. What the Angels receive, without human beings knowing it, illuminates within human thinking. Now we are aware of what works and moves within human thinking: the illumination of Angels! But the force of light belonging to this illumination, they have received it from the Dynamis. [The first part of the mantra was now written on the board.]

I) Angels:

There is thinking going on among human beings! That is their concern. That is what they put forth as their words of concern.

Human Beings are thinking!

Now they turn in their concern to the Dynamis:

We need the light from on high,
That we may shine in thinking.

The Dynamis answer:

Dynamis: Receive the light from on high,
That you may shine in thinking,
When human beings think.

Our spiritual gaze goes further. We see the gathering of Archangels turning in service to the spirits of the Second Hierarchy. Now they turn to the Exusiai and Kyriotetes, to these two categories of spirits of the Second Hierarchy. Angels have turned to the Dynamis, and Archangels have turned to the Exusiai and Kyriotetes. And their concern is that there is feeling among human beings. They appeal to the Exusiai and Kyriotetes for what they need for the feeling-life of human beings, in order to guide them.

Archangels:
Human beings are feeling!
We need the warmth of soul,
That we may live in feelings.

They must breathe life into feelings. And with mighty voice, since two choirs are answering, the answer from the Kyriotetes and Exusiai resounds in the spiritual world-all.

Receive the warmth of soul,
That you may live in feelings,
When human beings feel.

[The second part of the mantra was now written on the board.]

II) Archangels:
Human beings are feeling!
We need the warmth of soul,
That we may live in feelings.

It is answered.

Kyriotetes and Exusiai:
Receive the warmth of soul,
That you may live in feelings,
When human beings feel.

And we turn to the third gathering of the Third Hierarchy, to the gathering of the Archai. Their concern is that there is willing among human beings, the third concern of the Third Hierarchy.

We feel the Angels turning to the Dynamis, then we felt the Dynamis in action, far up in the heights, so that the light from on high is garnered and given to the Angels in their concern for human thinking. And we felt all that is encompassed by world-warmth is garnered by Exusiai and Kyriotetes, and is handed over to the Archangels, so that they can lead in feelings in human beings. And deep below, where the spirits and gods of the deep rule, from the abysses in which rules much that is evil, from there deep forces of goodness must be obtained. There all the gods of the Second Hierarchy pull together, for in their concern for human beings willing the Archai need the strength of the depths. And so they speak:

Human beings are willing!
We need the strength of the depths,
That we may work in willing.

And in answer to this, in mighty formidable cosmic voice, the mighty voices of the mighty spirits of the Second Hierarchy ring forth together, all three together, three choirs gathering into one choir, Kyriotetes, Dynamis, and Exusiai, three choirs in one:

Receive the strength of the depths,
That you may work in willing,
When human beings will.

[The third part of the mantra was now written on the board.]

III.) Archai
Human beings are willing!
We need the strength of the depths,
That we may work in willing.

It is answered by Kyriotetes, Dynamis, and Exusiai together:

Kyriotetes, Dynamis, and Exusiai:
Receive the strength of the depths,
That you may work in willing,
When human beings will.

That is the world, the world present in the sacred creator-words, the resounding of which we become witness to in spiritual worlds, as we are witness to what goes on in mineral and plant-like realms here on the earth.

And we take it in, as it comes to us on our way, as it becomes our experience.

Human Beings are thinking!
We need the light from on high,
That we may shine in thinking.

Receive the light from on high,
That you may shine in thinking,
When human beings think.

Human beings are feeling!
We need the warmth of soul,
That we may live in feelings.

Receive the warmth of soul,
That you may live in feelings,
When human beings feel.

Human beings are willing!
We need the strength of the depths
That we may work in willing.

Receive the strength of the depths,
That you may work in willing,
When human beings will.

We grow into the spiritual world. Instead of what surrounds us here on this sensation-laden earth, surrounding us there are the choirs of the spiritual world. And we become witnesses to what the gods are saying, to what the gods are saying in their concern for the human world, in their caring works concerning the human world.

Only when our meditation undergoes this full disengagement from what we are here on the earth, and we feel engaged with a world the gods there in their divine speech allow to exist, only then do we experience true reality. And just when we have this reality, we also have what is really around us here between birth and death. For behind all that lives here between birth and death in apparency, is what comprises the true reality we live in between death and a new birth.

People of earlier times lived upon the earth, but in a dull, dream-laden clairvoyant state of existence. Their souls were filled with a sort of dream-laden pictures that spoke of the spiritual world. Imagine before us such a man of olden times. Then, when not working, even though the sun still stood in the heavens, when putting his work aside to rest awhile, then he might have paused for reflection, to bring up the pictures he was able to experience in his soul, which reminded him of what he had experienced in pre-earthly existence in the spiritual world. But he did not understand the connection of his earth existence with the other existence, the one that glowed there within in his clairvoyant dreams. But the teachings of the adepts, the initiates, were there to make it clear. They brought clarity at first to their students, and through their students to all people, about what the connection is. And so one lived in the earth-world by means of memories of pre-earthly existence.

In life on earth today, the memory of the pre-earthly existence has been lost. Initiates can no longer bring clarity about the connection of life on earth with pre-earthly existence, for people have forgotten what they experienced in pre-earthly existence. Such a clarification is simply not possible. Cosmic memory does not need to be brought into clarity, for today it is simply not there.

But what must be heard through initiation science, is what the gods are saying there behind sensory existence. Then people must experience it. And increasingly the time will come in which people, having gone through the portal of death, will only be able to understand the spiritual world, into which they have entered, when they can say the following:

When the person has stepped through the portal of death into supra-earthly existence and then finds himself in the reality of the spiritual world, within the world of Angles, Archangels, Archai, Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes, Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones, when he experiences all this, then what he experiences there after death should not remain incomprehensible and dark for him, for then he must remember the things that he went through by means of initiation knowledge.

And it will be important, immeasurably important to the understanding of what can be experienced there in the life between death and a new birth, to have already heard it as such, for otherwise it cannot be understood, other than through a memory of having heard, back on earth, such as what resounds over there.

Human Beings are thinking!
Receive the light from on high.

Human beings are feeling!
Receive the warmth of soul.

Human beings are willing!
Receive the strength of the depths.

Those are the words, my brothers and sisters, that properly belong in the esoteric school today. They should ring forth there, by means of the instruction through which the power of the Age of Michael is channeled through the esoteric school. It can then be as follows. In the esoteric school the first to be heard within life on earth will be the voice of the Angels:

Human beings are thinking!

The answer of the Dynamis:

Receive the light from on high.

The voice of the Archangels is heard.

Human beings are feeling!

The answer of the Kyriotetes and Exusiai:

Receive the warmth of soul.

The words of the Archai:

Human beings are willing!

All three ranks of the Second Hierarchy answer, the Exusiai, Dynamis, and Kyriotetes:

Receive the strength of the depths.

Having heard this in esoteric schools, and on hearing them ringing forth again after having gone through the portal of death, people will hear both together, the esoteric school here and the life between death and a new birth there. They will understand what there resounds.

Or people may remain dull and unwilling to hear what the esoteric schools have to say about preparedness through Anthroposophy in general. They may not take up what can be gently heard through initiation knowledge from the higher realms. Then they go through the portal of death. There they hear what they should have heard earlier. They will not understand the incomprehensible ringing, the simple reverberation, the noise of worlds resounding in the words of power of the gods speaking among themselves.

The gospels speak of this. Paul speaks of it, that people should attend to the guiding wisdom of Christ before death brings them into the land of the spirit. For death in spirit-land comes also, at the same time, when we go through the portal of death and do not understand what resounds there, when instead we are only able to hear incomprehensible noise, instead of the understandable words of the gods. This is because what has befallen us, instead of life of the soul, is death of the soul. That the soul might live, for this reason there is initiation knowledge. That the soul remains alive when it passes through the portal of death, for this reason there are esoteric schools. This should permeate us thoroughly

And now let us recall the path we have been walking along in the spirit. Let us recall how we approached the Guardian in order to become acquainted with how someone might cross over the abyss of existence. And let us look just now upon the impressions that from over there have worked on our souls, let us take up into our souls what can parade before our souls as the inner drama of self-awareness.

We have gone down the path. Standing there in a certain way are three tablets. Presently we stand before the third, after we have taken up into our souls all the depths of the divine call. From the first tablet, a short time after having come to the abyss of existence, there it would peal forth:

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds.

You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.

Who speaks so world-mightily?
Who speaks so heart-inwardly?

Does it work streaming through space
Into your sense’s self-experiencing?

Does it sound weaving through time
Into your life's evolving stream?

Are you the one, who yourself
In sensing space, in experiencing time
Creates the word, feeling yourself
Estranged in in space’s soul-emptiness,
As you lose the power of thinking
In time’s destroying stream?

Now the Guardian of the Threshold approaches us. The second tablet looms. On it is written:

First come to know the earnest Guardian,
Who stands before the gates of spirit-land,
Denying entry to your sensory force
And to your intellect’s might,
For in weaving of sense
And in forming of thought
Out of space’s absence of being,
Out of time’s illusory powers
The truth of your own self
You must first forcefully master.

Then when we have arrived on the other side, passing by the earnest Guardian, standing there, we would hear a dialogue such as this:

Human Beings are thinking!
Receive the light from on high.

Human beings are feeling!
Receive the warmth of soul.

Human beings are willing!

Receive the strength of the depths.

From there we gaze back over here on the sensory world. From there we feel the words concerning this sensory world:

I walked within this world of sense,
Thinking’s heritage guiding me,
A god’s power having ushered me in.
Death, it stands at journey’s end.
I will feel Christ’s presence.
In matter’s death spirit-birth wakes,
So in spirit I’ll find the world
And in world-becoming know myself.

• 1. empfanget

You will remember that on the last occasion when I was able to speak to you here, I gave you a description of the experiences of the soul during sleep. Today I would like to carry the subject a little further. It will, I am sure, already be clear to you that one whose knowledge of human life confines itself to daytime existence, knows only half the life of man; for things of the very greatest importance take place during sleep. There is no need for me here to explain first the methods by which one comes to know these things; I assume from the outset that you receive what I say as coming from the exact clairvoyance which you will remember I described in my lectures here in London, a few months ago. [Knowledge and Initiation and Knowledge of the Christ through Anthroposophy. Two lectures, London, 14 and 15 April, 1922.]

When man passes from day-consciousness into sleep-consciousness—which is for the man of the present time unconsciousness—he is not in his physical body, nor in his etheric body. During sleep he is a purely spiritual being. On my last visit I gave you a description, from one aspect, of the experience man undergoes as soul and spirit between the times of falling asleep and awaking. Today I want to describe this experience from another side.

You will remember how in sleep man goes out into the cosmic ether, and feeling himself in the midst of a vast and vague unknown is at first overcome with anxiety and apprehension; then you will also remember how in this moment something awakens in the soul which one can call—borrowing the expression from conscious life—a yearning for the Divine. And we went on to speak of how in the second stage of sleep man experiences a reflection of the movements of the planets, and how, for one who has already a relation to the Mystery of Golgotha, Christ then appears, to be his Guide through the otherwise chaotic experiences that come to him while he is living his way through a kind of reproduction or copy of the life of the stars and the planets. For now comes the experience of the fixed stars. Man goes forth, from the planetary spheres—we mean of course the copy of the planetary spheres—and enters upon an experience of the constellations of the fixed stars. So that between falling asleep and awaking, man actually covers the whole cosmic existence beyond the Earth. I told you moreover that it is the forces of the Moon (the spiritual counterpart of what reveals itself to us in the various lunar phenomena) that bring man back again in the morning—or whenever he wakes up—bring him back into his physical and into his etheric body.

And now I should like, as I said, to describe these experiences from another angle. Unless we have allowed ourselves to become completely involved and imprisoned in the materialistic ideas of modern times, the conscious life that we lead in the daytime has for us a moral and also a religious foundation. We have our knowledge of Nature; but we cannot help feeling that we have in us something more than knowledge and science, that we have as well, moral duties, moral responsibilities, and we feel moreover that our whole being is grounded in a spiritual world. This latter realisation may be described as a religious consciousness. It is, however, only because he is in the physical body, that he is able to have this religious consciousness. It is, however, only because he is in the physical body, that he is able to have this religious consciousness in waking life. For you must understand that in his physical body man is not alone, but with him are spirits of higher cosmic rank; in his physical body, man lives together with higher spirits. And man lives, in his ether-body, with the moral purposes of these higher spirits. Thus, the religious consciousness of man is dependent on his life in the physical body, and his moral consciousness on his life in the etheric body. And this leads us to distinguish two parts in the cosmic ether, from which, as you know, our own ether-body is derived. One part is warmth, light, chemical ether, life ether. But behind all this, behind the warmth and light and chemical processes and life, is a moral element—the moral essence of the cosmic ether.

Now this moral essence of the cosmic ether is present only in the neighbourhood of stars and planets. If you are living on the Earth, then you are not only within the cosmic ether, but also within its moral essence, although by day you do not know it. And when you wander through the cosmos, then whenever you are in the environment of a star, you are in the moral essence of the cosmos ether. But in between the stars, the moral element is driven out of the ether by the action of the sunlight. Note that I say the sunlight, not the Sun, which is a cosmic body within which is contained the very source and origin of the moral ether; but when the Sun shines, then by means of its light it drives away the moral essence of the ether. And so it comes about that when we look out through our eyes on to the world, we see flowers, we see springs and brooks, we see the whole face of Nature, but without any moral element discernible within it; the sunlight has killed out the moral element. And when we fall asleep and leave our physical and etheric bodies, then we take with us what we have acquired in this way during waking hours on Earth by beholding Nature; but strange as it may sound, we leave behind us our religious feeling and our moral feeling, we leave them behind with the physical and with the ether-body, and our soul and spirit live as an a-moral being during the time of sleep.

This has an important consequence for us. We are living during this time in a world that has been irradiated by the light of the Sun. This means that the moral ordering of the world has gone out of the ether. Consequently the Ahrimanic Being has access to the ether in which we find ourselves as soon as we fall asleep. And this Ahrimanic Being speaks to man while he is asleep. And what he says is most mischievous, for he is rightly called the father of lies; he makes good appear bad to the sleeping human being and bad good.

Reference has been made in the newspapers recently to questions that are being investigated by scientists, as to why criminals sleep well, while moral people with a good conscience often sleep badly. The matter is explained when you consider what I have been telling you. In the case of a highly conscientious and devout man, who has a fine moral feeling, his moral sensibility enters so deeply into his soul that he takes it with him into sleep; with the result that he sleeps badly, believing as he does that he has been guilty of many misdeeds. A bad man, on the other hand, whose moral sensibility is very little developed, will carry with him into sleep no such pangs of conscience,—and this will mean of course at the same time that he will have, spiritually speaking, an open ear for the whisperings of Ahriman who makes evil appear good. Hence the quiet and contented sleep of the criminal! People say, it is not fair that criminals should sleep well, while good people often have poor and disturbed slumber. The fact is to be accounted for in the way I have shown.

The enticement to evil to which man is exposed during sleep is, in truth, exceedingly great, and it can easily happen that in the morning he brings over with him from sleep terrible demonic forces of temptation. Only when he has come down again into his physical and etheric body, will a man who is not very good and upright begin to feel pricks of conscience,—not before. There is thus abundant possibility for, man to fall a victim to Ahriman during the time of sleep.

The danger has by no means always been so great as it is today. In the course of the centuries it has gradually come about that men are so gravely exposed during sleep to the seductions of demonic powers, which make evil appear good. In earlier times of the evolution of mankind things were different. Man had then, as I have often explained to you, nothing like so strong an ego-consciousness as he has now. In the daytime, when he was awake, his ego-consciousness was weaker; and that meant also that during sleep he did not sail so smoothly into evil as he does today. He was protected. The fact is, we are living today in a time that is bringing us to a certain crisis in evolution. It behoves men to arm themselves against the powers of evil that approach them when they fall asleep. In older times men were protected through the fact that when they went to sleep, they entered more into the group-soul. During sleep man lived in the group-soul. We today still live to a certain extent in the group-soul during our waking hours; we feel we belong to a particular nation, often even to a particular clan; or perhaps we are inclined to put on aristocratic airs, and like to feel ourselves as members of a certain family. But sleep takes us right out of the group-soul feeling. It is hardly possible for the man of today to be an aristocrat in sleep. Yes, sleep is a great educator, more than you would think; on the one hand it educates man, it is true, in evil, as we have seen; but on the other hand, it educates him in democracy. The man of olden time passed into the group-soul when he fell asleep; and when he awoke and returned to his physical and to his etheric body, he brought with him a strong feeling of belonging to his group.

There you have the one side of man's life,—what he is during sleep. Man, of course, carries in him all the time the part of his nature that is exposed in sleep at the present day to the temptations of demonic forces, he has it in him continuously. Only, when he is awake, he has to let it merge into the moral and religious consciousness. The religious side of man is given to him, as we saw, by the powers that live with him in his physical body, and the moral side by the powers that live with him in his ether-body.

The man of an older time, who during sleep lived strongly, as we have seen, in the group-consciousness—it was with the Mystery of Golgotha that all this became changed for the further evolution of mankind—the man of an older time, when he dived down again, on awaking, into his physical and his etheric body, began to live then more in himself, But here we discover another difference between him and us. For when he was waking up and coming down again into his physical and ether body, before he was quite awake, he had a clear consciousness of the life he had lived ere he descended to Earth. And he had the same clear consciousness again just before falling asleep. Whilst, therefore, on the one hand he developed a strong group-consciousness, he had at the same time also a strong feeling of belonging to the life that is beyond the Earth. He knew quite well that he had come down from the spiritual world, had passed through the world of the stars, and had chosen for himself a physical body here on Earth. As time went on, this consciousness became darkened. In compensation, men became ‘clever’—as we understand the word today. They developed powers of judgment and discrimination. This kind of faculty has evolved only in the course of time. It is our physical body that gives us the power of judgment,—and this is the reason we are able to exercise the power best during the morning hours. We enter more deeply in these days into our physical and etheric bodies than men did in olden times. Consequently, while they had a consciousness of their life before birth, we have a consciousness rather of earthly existence. We establish ourselves firmly in our physical and etheric body. They did not do so. They might be said to ‘carry’ their physical and etheric body, they carried it round with them, feeling it as something external to themselves, rather as we feel the clothes that we wear. We have quite lost this feeling. We no longer say as they did, when they were going through a door: I carry my physical being through the door. That was for them an entirely natural way of speaking. We would never say that; we say: I walk through the door. We press our I, our ego, right into the physical body; it is therefore perfectly natural for us to express ourselves in this way. And in consequence of this development, we have lost also the consciousness of our connection with the spiritual world and with the world of the stars. The man of an earlier time knew that he was connected with the world of the stars. He knew quite well that he was connected with the world of the stars, and also with the spiritual world that is behind the world of the stars: he knew that he had descended from these worlds to earthly existence.

Modern man will say: In order to live, I need meat, vegetables, eggs, etc. He needs, that is, products of the physical world, and with these he must concern himself from birth to death. Please do not imagine for a moment dear friends, that I mean to speak scornfully or slightingly of the food we eat. It is good in itself and belongs to life; let that be fully recognised. I want only to point out that the men of olden time[s] knew that in order to have strength to live, man needs more than the forces of the Earth that reside in beef and cabbage and egg, he needs also Jupiter and Venus and Saturn, They knew for a fact that just as man, when he is here on Earth, needs to eat eggs, so too has he need to have received, before he came down to Earth, the strength of Jupiter and of Venus; otherwise he could not be earthly man at all. Modern man feels united with the Earth and is very much concerned about what he must eat to keep his body in health. The man of an older time felt a need to be in right relationship with the stars. He said to himself: If I suffer, here on Earth, from some inability or lack of skill, it must be that I did not acquit myself well while descending into the world of the stars; I must put that right next time I make the journey from death to a new birth.

It is indeed so that in those times man evolved what might be called a spiritual diet. In the Mysteries there were leaders and guides who were not unlike our modern doctors of medicine. The modern doctor gives his advice about man's body. That is quite understandable, and no reproach is intended. But the leaders in the Mysteries, who were also physicians, would for example, if a man suffered from some physical infirmity, give instruction as to how he could better his relationship to Venus, or it may be to Saturn. It was thus advice for the soul that these leaders in the Mysteries gave. Let us suppose a physician of this kind found that the person who had come to him for healing was too strongly attracted to his physical body. Instead of feeling his body merely as a garment for his soul, he was firmly bound to it, rather like a man of the present day who persisted in sleeping in his clothes. The physician would say to such a person: When the Moon is full, try going out for a walk in its light, when it is rising in the evening; and while you walk, repeat a certain mantram.

Why did the physician of the ancient Mysteries give this advice? Because he knew that when a person goes for a walk in the light of the Moon, repeating the while certain mantrams, that will counteract the Saturn force, and so it will come about that Saturn has less power over him. For, you see, this physician of olden times knew that the clinging to the physical body, the being so closely knit with it, was due to the fact that the person in question had held on too strongly to Saturn when he was passing through the world of the stars, on his way from the spiritual world into earthly life. This excessive attraction to the life of Saturn had given him the infirmity from which he was suffering. But now the two heavenly bodies, Moon and Saturn, tend to counteract one another. In order, therefore, to cure an affliction due to the Saturn forces, the physician would have recourse to the forces of the Moon. He would, in effect, prescribe a spiritual diet.

We have today a physical diet and that is quite right and suitable for us. In the olden times man felt the need for a diet of a more spiritual kind, and we must now learn to add to our physical diet also a spiritual diet. That is the mission of the present age; we have our physical diet, and we must regain a feeling for the importance of a spiritual diet as well. If we can do this, it will enable us to achieve the tasks that call for fulfilment at this present moment in earth evolution.

This is what I wanted to put before you in the first part of my lecture.

*

It is a satisfaction to me, my dear friends, that I shall be able to give you two more lectures after today, and so I do not need to hurry—as I would otherwise be obliged to do—but can go more fully into that which lies on my heart to say to you on the occasion of this visit.

Vision of the pre-earthly life, of the life man lived in the spiritual world before he united himself here on Earth with a physical and an etheric body, was possible to the men of old, for they possessed an elemental clairvoyance. To attain such vision today we need the help of anthroposophical science. When with this help we have learned to look with the consciousness of Inspiration upon the time we pass through before we descend to Earth, we behold how we live for a long while in an entirely spiritual world, a world where there is no mineral kingdom, no plant kingdom, no animal kingdom,—a world where there are not even the stars that we see shining far away in the encircling heavens, a world, where we have around us spiritual beings, beings of the higher hierarchies. Throughout this period of the time between death and a new birth, we live among spiritual beings. And then we begin to travel through the starry heavens on our way back to Earth, passing—now with more, now again with less, sympathy—through the various starry spheres. And this is the time when we prepare our coming earthly life. For according as we relate ourselves to the starry spheres through which we pass, so will be our life on Earth. Let me give you an example of how this preparation takes place.

Coming forth from the world that is purely spiritual, we pass first through the sphere of the fixed stars. Of these I will not speak just now; that will come in the next lecture. Then we pass through the spheres of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars, through the Sun sphere, and through the spheres of Mercury, Venus and Moon, and so by gradual stages come down to Earth. You will realise from the description that we approach the spheres of the stars from the other side. When you stand on Earth and look at Jupiter, you are seeing Jupiter from one side. And when a being—in this case, a human being—is descending from the spiritual world and passes, on his way to Earth, through the spheres of the stars, then at the time when we, looking from the Earth, see Saturn, this being, as he approaches Saturn, will be seeing it from the other side. It will be the same with all the stars. Coming from the spiritual world, he approaches the stars from behind, as it were, and sees the reverse of what men see on Earth with physical sight. You will not of course imagine that the human being who is making his journey to the Earth ‘sees’ in the way we do. He has no eyes as yet, he will only get eyes when he has a physical body. What he sees is spiritual. He sees Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, in their spiritual aspect; Venus also, then Mercury and Moon. And according to the measure of the sympathy or antipathy with which he passes through the one or other sphere, so will be the forces he receives in the course of his descent from each sphere in turn,—forces of Saturn, forces of Jupiter, and so on.

Let us imagine a particular case. In consequence of the way in which he lived his former life on Earth, a human soul may have the feeling, when the time comes to descend to a new life: It will be good if this time I come to Earth as a woman; if this time I incarnate in a female body.

It is an important question for the descending human soul to decide, whether it shall become man or woman. Its whole destiny on earth depends on the decision; for it is by no means a matter of indifference whether in one particular incarnation we go through our life as a man or a woman. But it is not enough for the soul simply to come to the conclusion: I will be a man, or, I will be a woman. Due preparation has to be made. If the soul desires to be a woman, it will approach the Earth at the time of Full Moon. When we, looking from the Earth, see the Moon full, the soul that is approaching from the spiritual world will see it dark. Now what the soul sees is of course, the spiritual aspect of the Moon. Seeing it dark, the soul sees it ‘peopled,’ as it were, with certain beings. And these beings it is who will prepare the soul, so that, when it comes on Earth, it shall be attracted to a female body. On the other hand, when we, looking from the Earth, see New Moon—which means, we cannot see it at all—then the soul that is descending and sees the Moon from the other side, will see it lit up, will see the light that rays forth from it out into cosmic space,—that is, of course, the spiritual in the light. In this case, the soul can become a man. Whether it receives the forces that bring it to a male or to a female incarnation depends, you see, on the manner of the soul's journey through the spheres of the stars.

And now, in addition to passing through the sphere of the Moon, the soul has also to go, for example, through the spheres of Mercury and Venus. While the manner of its journey through the sphere of the Moon determines whether the soul is to become man or woman, by its passage through the sphere of Venus the soul is endowed with greater or less sympathy for a particular family. For the soul could, of course, be man or woman in this or that or any other family. This attraction to a family is determined in the following way.

A human soul may be descending, for instance, at a time when Venus is right on the other side of the Earth, and the soul may thus be able to disregard the Venus sphere. Such a soul will then have no great connection with his family. Or the soul may, on the other hand, go past Venus, and it can do so in a variety of ways. It will then elect to take the path through the Venus sphere that guides it to some particular family. For the soul has this possibility; it can prepare itself for belonging to a particular family by choosing, as it were, the ‘ray’ that goes from Venus to this family. Coming down from the other side, the dark side, of Venus, the soul then draws near to Earth and finds its way to that family,

The same kind of thing may happen in regard to the Mercury sphere. The sphere of Mercury leads the soul to find its way into a particular folk or people. When the region inhabited by this people is receiving rays of Mercury, then the soul, coming from the other side and approaching the dark side of Mercury, will be helped to find its way to this people.

Thus are human souls prepared for life on Earth. Through the influence of the Moon—and when we speak of these heavenly bodies, it is always the spiritual in them that we have in mind—through the influence of the Moon, preparation is made for the soul to become man or woman; through the influence of Venus, for the soul to belong to some family; through the influence of Mercury, to belong to some folk or people.

The whole life of man on Earth depends, as you see, on the relationship he establishes with the spheres in the course of his descent from the spiritual world. The knowledge of this has been lost. We must regain it. We are accustomed to think of ourselves as composed of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, sulphur, etc. But we must come also to feel—quite simply and naturally—that we are composed and are created out of the world of the stars. For we are not just physical human beings made up of protein and a few other substances. All the forces of the universe have combined to form us. These forces of the universe work upon us while we are descending. When we come to Earth, we have them within us,—and something of a memory of this remains to us in sleep. Memory is however always, as you know very well, weaker than the actual experience. When someone who is dear to you has died, think how the memory of the event grows less vivid and powerful as time goes on. And it is the same with the memory we still have in sleep, of how it was with us when we had living and present experiences of the spiritual world, and of the world of the stars. The memory grows dim; and that is why man is exposed now in sleep to the temptations I described earlier in today's lecture. Thus a dim and feeble after-image in sleep—a weak cosmic memory—is all that is left of the experience we had with the spiritual world and with the stars during the time between death and our last birth.

This, dear friends, is what I wanted to say to you today byway of introduction. We shall continue with it next time we meet.

As we live through the day and realize all that we owe to the sun, and to what extent the tasks of life are connected with the sunlight, we forget that through the whole pleasure and satisfaction we derive from the sunlight, there runs the thread of sure knowledge that, on the following morning, after we have rested through the night, the sun will rise anew for us. This is a part of the confidence that lives in our soul—confidence in the lasting reality of the world order. We may not always consciously realize it, but if asked, we should certainly answer in this sense. We devote ourselves to-day to our work because we know that the fruit of our work is assured for tomorrow, that after the night's rest the sun will reappear, and the fruits of our labor can ripen. We turn our gaze upon the earth's covering of plants; this year we revere and admire all its display; we know that the world order ordains that the same covering of plants and fruits for next year will proceed from the seed of this year. If asked again why we live on with such a sense of security, we should in similar circumstances give the answer that the reality of the world order seems to us assured; it seems to us a matter of certainty that what has matured as far as seed in the old crops will in reality reappear.

But there is something of special significance for our inner soul-life, there is something in life which requires a pledge or guarantee of some kind, because, for those who truly think and feel, it does not bear that guarantee of certainty within itself—‘our ideals’—and so much is contained in the expression, ‘our ideals.’ When we think and feel in a higher sense, our ideals belong to those things that are more important to our souls than is external reality. It is our ideals which set our souls inwardly aflame, and in many connections impart to its life its value and dearness. When we look into external life, and at what assures for us the reality of life, we are often troubled by the thought: does this reality contain something that assures to us just the most precious thing in life—the realization of our ideals?

Innumerable conflicts of the human soul proceed from the fact that people doubt more or less strongly in the realization of that upon which they would fain rely with every fiber of their being; that is to say, the realization of their ideals. We need only consider the world of the physical plane in an unprejudiced way and we shall find innumerable human souls passing through the hardest, bitterest struggles owing to the non-attainment of what they hold to be of value in the ideal sense. For from the evolution of reality we cannot in the same sense conclude that our ideals in life will prove to be the seed of a future reality in the same way as the plant seeds of this year foretell the coming harvest. These plant-seeds, we know, will bear within them that which next year will be reality in the widest sense. But if we consider our ideals, we may indeed cherish in our souls the belief that these ideals will have some significance, some value for life; but certainty we cannot have. As human beings we should like our ideals to be the seeds for a later future, but we look in vain for that which can give them assured reality. Even when we consider the physical plane, we find our souls with their ideals, frequently in a parlous condition.

Let us pass from the world of the physical plane into the world of the occult, into the world of hidden spirituality. A man who has become a spiritual seer learns to know souls in the period through which they have to pass between death and a new birth, and it is very significant when one turns the spiritual gaze upon those souls who in their earthly life, were wholly filled with high ideals, with ideals brought forth out of the fire and the light of their hearts.

A man has passed through the gate of death, and has before him the well-known life-tableau, the memory-picture of his past earth life, and interwoven with it is the world of ideals. This world of ideals can come before a man after death in such a way that his feelings concerning it may be expressed as follows: ‘these ideals which have fired and illumined my heart in its innermost recesses, and which I have considered the dearest, the most intimate treasure of my heart, now assume a strange unfamiliar aspect. They look as though they would not rightly belong to all that I remember as actual earth-experience on the physical plane.’ Yet the dead man feels himself magnetically attracted to these ideals of his; he feels, as it were, fascinated by them. But they may also contain an element that gives him a mild shock; he feels that this element may be dangerous, that it may alienate him from the earth-evolution, and what is connected with the Earth-evolution in the life between death and a new birth. In order to express myself quite clearly, I should like to connect what I have said with concrete experiences, with which some of those sitting here are already familiar, but which must this evening be illumined from a certain side so that they may be brought into connection with what I have said in reference to the nature of human ideals.

Of recent years, a man of poetic nature joined us [Christian Morgenstern.]. As the result of a life of dedication to the purest idealism, and a life that had already in pre-anthroposophical days passed through a mystical deepening, this man entered our Movement. Despite the fact that his soul dwelt in a body that was a prey to consumption, he dedicated himself, heart and soul, to our Movement. In the spring of this year we lost him from the earth-life; he passed through the gate of death. He has left to mankind a series of wonderful poems, which have been recently published. Owing to the difficulties of his external physical life, he was in a certain sense, for long periods separated in space from our Movement, either in a lonely spot in the Swiss mountains, or in some other place, where he had to care for his health. But away there, he clung to our Movement, and his poems, which in certain circles have lately been recited over and over again, are the poetic reflection, as it were, of what we have been developing for more than ten years. Now he has passed through the gate of death, and a very remarkable thing results from the occult observance of this soul. The significance of the soul's life in that disease-stricken body has become apparent only since the death of that body. That which this soul absorbed while his soul faithfully followed the progress of our Movement, developed greater force under the surface of the gradually dying body. The diseased body concealed this so long as the soul dwelt within it. And now, when one comes into the presence of this soul after death, there shines forth, as it can only shine forth in the spiritual life, the content of the life which this soul absorbed. The cloudlike sphere, as it were, in which our friend now lives after having passed through the gate of death, is present like a mighty cosmic tableau. For the occult observer it is a most striking sight. It may, perhaps, be said that the occult seer is able to cast his gaze round the whole wide sphere of the cosmic world, but it is one thing to allow the gaze to wander round the whole sphere of the cosmic world of soul, and another to see, separated out from a particular human soul something that has the appearance of a mighty tableau, like a painting of what otherwise is there of itself in the spiritual world. Just as we have the physical world around us, and then see it reflected in the magnificent paintings of a Raphael or Michelangelo, so is it in the spiritual world in the case of which we are here speaking. Just as one never says in presence of a picture by Michelangelo or Raphael, ‘this picture gives me nothing more for I have the whole great reality before me,’—so one does not say, in observing the tableau that mirrors in a soul all that one elsewhere perceives in the vision of spiritual reality, that this soul tableau is not an infinite enrichment. And it may be said that there is infinitely more to be learnt in the presence of this friend who after death contains in his soul a reflection of all that has been described from out the spiritual worlds through the course of many years, than from direct contemplation of the vastness of spiritual reality.

This is an occult fact. I have repeatedly mentioned it to friends in different places and I have now taken from it elements that are of importance in connection with the subject we are to-day considering. As this occult fact presents itself, it shows me something else. In face of all the opposition to-day to the promulgation of occult teaching as we give it—the question may often be put (I will not say there is ‘doubt’ but that the question is put): ‘What progress will this occult teaching find in the hearts and souls of men?’ ‘Is there any guarantee, any assurance that the work of the Anthroposophical Society will continue to influence the course of the spiritual evolution of humanity?’ The sight of what the soul of our friend has become is one such assurance from the occult world. Why? The friend who has left behind him the poems: Wir Janden einen Pfad (‘We found a Path’) lives in the immense cosmic tableau that is for him after death like a kind of soul-body; but while he was connected with us, he absorbed into his being our teaching about the Christ. He absorbed this anthroposophical teaching, binding it to his own soul in such a way that it became the very spiritual heart-blood of his soul; it contained the Christ as substance. The Christ Being flowed into him in the teaching. The Christ, as He lives in our Movement, passed over into his soul. In the face of this occult fact, the following presents itself. The man who goes through the gate of death may indeed live in a cosmic tableau of this kind; he will go forward with it through the life that lies between death and a new birth. This will work and be embodied in his whole being, or rather it will ‘en-soul’ his whole being, and it will permeate his new earth-life, when he again descends to a life on earth. There is also this in addition, that such a soul receives a germ of perfection for its own life, and progresses in the evolution of the earth's existence. All this comes to pass because of the fact that such a soul has absorbed the teaching into its being. But this particular soul accepted all the teaching, steeped through and spiritualized by the Christ Being, by the conception of the Christ Being which we can make our own. All that such a soul absorbed, however, is not merely a treasure stimulating the further evolution of this single soul, but through Christ Who is there for all mankind, it is a treasure which works back again upon the whole of mankind. And that cosmic tableau which for clairvoyant eyes is being developed in the soul of him who this spring passed through the portal of death-that Christ enfilled soul-tableau, is to me an assurance that what may be given to-day from out of the spiritual worlds will, through the love of Christ radiate into souls who will come later. They will be set on fire, inspired by it. Not only will our friend carry forward our Christ-enfilled teaching to the greater perfecting of his own life, but because it has become part of his being it will become an impulse from the spiritual world to the souls who will live in the coming centuries; into them will pour the rays of that which is Christ-enfilled. Your souls cannot take in for themselves alone the teaching which is their most precious possession, but they will bear it through epochs of evolution yet to come. If you will enfill this teaching with Christ, it will stream forth as a seed into the whole of humanity because the Christ Being belongs to the whole of humanity. Where Christ is, the treasures of life are not isolated; their fruitfulness for individuals is always there, but at the same time they become a treasure for the whole of mankind.

We must place this clearly before our souls. We see then what a significant difference there is between Wisdom that is not filled with Christ, and Wisdom that is illuminated by the Light of Christ. When we come together in a narrower circle of our Society we are not there for the sake of abstract considerations, but in order to follow up true occultism, undismayed by what the modern world has to say against this occultism. Consequently we may speak of matters which only come to our knowledge through investigation in the spiritual.

A second example shall be mentioned. In recent years we have had occasion in Munich to perform what we call the Mystery Dramas, and Swedish friends have frequently been present. The performances of these Mystery Dramas had to differ in many respects from other performances. There had to be a sense of responsibility to the spiritual ·world. One could not attend these Mystery Plays as if one were going to an ordinary theatre. What is done in such a case must proceed from one's own soul-powers. But let us understand clearly that when in our physical life we want to carry something out through the will of our souls, we are compelled to use our muscular power, which is imparted to us from without, as it were, but which belongs to us. If we lack this muscular power that comes to us from outside, we cannot carry out certain things. In a certain sense muscular force belongs to us, and yet again not to us. So it is with our spiritual faculties, only there, our physical forces, our muscular forces do not help us when these faculties are to be active in the spiritual spheres. The powers of the spiritual world itself must come to our aid; the powers and forces which stream out of the spiritual world into our physical world must irradiate and permeate us. Undertakings of a different character may indeed begin with another consciousness. It was always clear to me that the facts could only be presented as the years went on, that the different impulses might only be used when definite spiritual forces, moving in this direction, flowed into our human forces, when spiritual ‘Guardian-Angel’ forces flowed into our human forces.

In the early days when we were beginning our activities in a very small circle—and when we gathered together in Berlin, at the beginning of this century, it was always very easy to count the number present. For a short time a faithful soul was always among them, a soul who through her Karma possessed a special talent for beauty and art. Even though it was for a short time, this soul worked with us, in all our most intimate activities. With an inner depth of feeling, and an enlightened enthusiasm, this soul worked among us, and absorbed the cosmological teachings which it was possible to give at that time. And I remember even to-day how at that time a fact came before my soul which may perhaps seem unimportant, but which may be mentioned here. When our Movement began, a periodical which, for well-considered reasons, was called ‘Lucifer,’ came into being. At that time I wrote an article under the title of ‘Lucifer’ which was meant to lay down, in germ at any rate, the direction along which we wished to work. That article, even if it does not say so in words, adhered to the direction in which the then Theosophical—and now Anthroposophical Society—should be maintained, and I may say that that article too is Christ-enfilled. The lifeblood of Christianity is in that article, and as such it can flow into those souls who absorb what that article contains. It may perhaps here be mentioned that at that time this article met with the most heated opposition among the circle of the few who had joined us from the old theosophical Movement. Everywhere was this article considered entirely ‘untheosophical.’ The personality of whom I have been speaking entered into this article with the warmest possible heart and the deepest inner feeling; and I was able to say to myself: when it is a question of the actual truth, her acquiescence is of far more importance for the progress of the Movement than all the rest of the opposition together. In short, this soul was deeply interwoven with all that was to flow into our anthroposophical Movement. She soon died; as early as 1904 she passed through the gate of death. For a while after death she had to struggle through in the spiritual world to that which she really was. Not so early as 1907, but from the time of our plays in Munich, from 1909 onwards, and then in an increasing degree as time went on, this soul was always there guarding and illuminating what I was able to undertake in connection with our Munich Festival Plays. All that this soul, owing to her talent for the beautiful, was able to give to the artistic realization of our anthroposophical ideas, worked down out of the spiritual world, as though from the guardian angel of our Mystery Plays, in such a way that one felt in oneself the power to take the necessary initiative. Just as in the physical world our muscular energy supports us, so the spiritual force streaming down from the spiritual worlds flowed into one's own spiritual force. Thus do the dead work with us, thus they are present with us. That was yet another case—and here comes the point about which I must specially speak to-day—that was again a case in which all that the personality had absorbed in the field of Anthroposophy manifestly assisted progress not only in her individual life, but it flowed back again to us in something that we ventured to do for the whole Movement. Two possibilities existed; this personality had accepted all that she could, she had it in her soul, and so she could apply it for the sake of her further progress through life and also through the life after death. ... That is right—it ought to happen so—for the human soul must, if it is to attain its divine goal, become ever more and more perfect; it must do all that is possible to help forward this perfecting. But because this soul had taken into herself the whole purport of what it is to be ‘Christ-enfilled,’ what she had taken into herself was able to work not merely for herself but it was able to flow down to us—and become in its effectiveness, a kind of common possession for us all. That is what Christ brings about when He permeates the fruits of our knowledge. He does not take away all that these fruits of our knowledge represent for our individuality; Christ died for all souls; and when we rise up to that knowledge which must be possessed by all true earth-men:—‘Not I, but the Christ in me’—when we realize the Christ within us in all that we know, and when we attribute to Christ the forces which we ourselves employ, then, what we take into our being works not for ourselves alone, but for the whole of humanity. It becomes fruitful for the whole of humanity. Look at the souls of men over the earth. Christ died for them all, and that which you receive in His Name you receive for your own perfecting, but also as a most precious possession that is effective for all mankind.

And now let us return to our introductory words this evening. It was said that when, after death, we look back upon our life-tableau, on that which we have lived through, it appears to us as though our ideals might have something strange about them. We feel in regard to our ideals that they really do not bear us forward to the common life of men, that they have no inherent guarantee of reality in the general life of men, that they carry us away from it. Lucifer has a powerful influence over our ideals because they flow in such beauty out of the human soul, but only out of the human soul, and are not rooted in external reality. This is why Lucifer has such power, and it is really the magnetic impulse of Lucifer which we experience after death. Lucifer approaches us, and the ideals we have are especially valuable to him, because by the indirect path of these ideals he can draw us to himself. But when we permeate with Christ all that we attain spiritually, when we feel the Christ in us, knowing that what we receive, is also received by the Christ in us—‘Not I, but the Christ in me’—then, when we pass through the gate of death we do not look back upon our ideals as though they tended to alienate us from the world. Our ideals have been committed to Christ and we know that it is Christ Who makes our ideals His own concern. He takes our ideals upon Himself. ‘Not I alone can so take my ideals upon myself that they are seeds for humanity upon the Earth, as surely as the plant-seeds of the present summer are seeds for the earthly plant-robe for the coming summer; but the Christ in me can do this; the Christ in me permeates my ideals with the reality of substance.’ And of those ideals we can say: ‘Yes, as man we give expression to ideals upon the earth, but in us lives Christ, and He takes them upon Him.’ These are the real germs of future reality. Christ-enfilled Idealism is permeated with the Seed of Reality, and he who truly understands Christ looks upon these ideals in this way; he says: Ideals have not as yet in themselves that guarantee of their own reality, their own actuality, which inheres in the plant-seed for the coming year; but when our ideals are committed to the Christ within us, then they are real seed. Whoever has a true Christ consciousness making into his life substance St. Paul's words ‘Not I, but the Christ in me is the Bearer of my ideals,’ he has this realization. He says: there are the ripe germinating seeds, there are the streams and seas, the hills and valleys—but close by is the world of idealism; this world of idealism is taken over by Christ, and it is like the seed of the future world in the world of the present, for Christ bears our ideals on into the next world as the God of Nature bears the plant-seeds of this year on into the coming year.

This gives reality to idealism; it removes from the soul those bitter, gloomy doubts which can arise in the feeling: What becomes of the world of ideals that are intimately bound up with external reality, and with all that I must consider of value? He who takes the Christ-Impulse into himself perceives that all that ripens in the human soul as wisdom-treasure is permeated, saturated through and through with reality. And I have brought two examples before you, in order to show you out of the occult world, how different is the working of that which is committed, Christ-enfilled, to the soul, from that which is committed to it only as wisdom which is not Christ-enfilled. What the soul has filled with Christ in this earth-life flows down to us in quite a different way from that which is not filled with Christ.

A terrible impression is produced, when clairvoyant consciousness looks out into the spiritual world and sees souls, in whom full Christ consciousness has not arisen during their last incarnation, fighting for their ideals—fighting for what is dearest to them, because in their ideals Lucifer has a power over them, which enables him to separate them from the fruits of reality which the whole world ought to enjoy.

Quite different is the aspect of those who have allowed their soul-wealth, their wisdom-wealth, to become Christ-enfilled. Such souls work upon us already in this life, evoke in us an after-glow, they animate and vitalize our souls, even in bodily life. What can be felt as most precious inner soul-warmth, as comfort in the most difficult conditions of life, as support in the blackest abyss of life, is this very condition of being filled with the Christ Impulse. And why? Because he who is really permeated with the Christ Impulse feels that in the conquests of his soul, however imperfect they may appear in earthly life, there lies this Christ-Impulse as the assurance and the guarantee for their fulfillment. This is why Christ is such a consolation in the doubts of life, such a support for the soul. How much for the souls of earth remains unfulfilled in life! How much seems to them to be of value, although in the outer physical world it can only appear to be like vain hopes of spring. But what we honestly feel in our soul, what we can unite with our soul as a valued possession—that we can commit to Christ; and whatever may be the prospects of its realization, when we have committed it to Christ He bears it forth upon His wings into Reality. It is not always necessary to have knowledge of this, but the soul that feels the Christ within it, as the body feels its life-giving blood, senses the warmth, the element of realization in this Christ-Impulse in respect of all that cannot be realized in the external world, though the soul with perfect justification longs for its realization. The fact that clairvoyant consciousness sees these things when it surveys souls after death is only a proof of how justifiable is the feeling of the human soul, when in all that man does, in all that he thinks, he feels himself Christ-enfilled, takes the Christ into his soul as its comfort, as support, saying in earth life: ‘Not I, but the Christ in me!’ For man may say: ‘Not I, but the Christ in me’ in this earth-life! Recall to your souls a passage which stands in my book Theosophy and which is meant to indicate one of those points where, at a certain stage of the spiritual life, there is a realization, a fulfillment of what fills the soul in this earthly-life. In a certain passage of my Theosophy I have drawn attention to the fact that ‘Tat wam asi,’ ‘Thou art That,’ upon which the Eastern sages meditate, comes before man as a reality at that moment when the transition from the so-called soul-world into the spiritual world takes place. Look up the passage in question. But something else can become a reality, in a matter that is of immense human significance in reference to St. Paul's words: ‘Not I, but the Christ in me’ which the Christ-enfilled soul may say in this life. If man knows how to experience in such a way that it is inner truth, this ‘Not I, but the Christ in me,’ it comes to fulfillment after death with mighty import. For what we accept in the world under the aspect of life which can be expressed in the words ‘Not I, but the Christ in me,’ becomes our own possession, our inner nature between death and a new birth, to such an extent that we may impart it as fruit to the whole of humanity. What we so take that we accept it under the point of view ‘Not I’ Christ makes into a common possession for all humanity. What I accept from the point of view ‘Not I,’ of this I may dare, after death, to say and to feel, ‘“Not for me alone” but for all my fellow men I And then only may I say the words: “Yes, I have loved Thee above all, even above myself,” therefore have I hearkened to the command, “Love thy God above all.”‘—‘Not I, but Christ in me’ And I have fulfilled that other command, ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself,’ for that which I have attained for myself will, through the fact that Christ bears it in reality, become the common property of all earth-humanity.

We must allow such things as these to work upon us, and then we experience what Christ has to signify in the human soul. Christ can be the bearer and supporter, the comforter and illuminator of the soul of man; and so we gradually become familiar with that which may be called the relation of Christ to the human soul.

In the three previous lectures I have tried to give you an outline of the kind of knowledge that should serve as a foundation for physicians. Owing to the very brief time at our disposal, it has only been the merest sketch. But you will have realized that to speak in detail would need considerable time. The kind of knowledge I have given as a foundation for medicine would constitute, as it were, a first course which would take at least a year and longer still if that were possible. It is impossible for me to do more than give a general description of these things, so I should like you to regard what I have said in the three previous lectures as a sketch of what a physician ought to have as a basis. Let me call it the exoteric side of medical knowledge, and it ought really to be followed by the esoteric side, of which we will speak now.

This esoteric side must be built upon the foundation of the exoteric knowledge. In your medical studies you must not be too proud to master the exoteric side; you must master this with all earnestness. It is difficult at the present time, but, as we shall see, much will be achieved in this direction by the establishment of the Medical Section here at Dornach.

After all, it is possible now to expand the short sketch that has been given by many details contained in my lecture courses and writings. Up to now, very little has been done in this direction and the work will only begin to develop in the real sense of anthroposophical medicine when this work that I am preparing with the help of Frau Dr. Wegman comes to the fore. It will then be apparent that Anthroposophy can give a great stimulus to medicine and medical studies. But you must realize quite clearly that medicine is a very special kind of study, with definite preliminary requirements—a study in which the results of Spiritual Science simply cannot be ignored. There can be no true medicine without the knowledge that results from Spiritual Science. The chaotic conditions prevailing today are due to the fact that the current trend of study and knowledge is utterly unsuited to medicine. We have a science of nature that has found its way even into theology, a science that is suited only to technical purposes and not at all to a real knowledge of the being of man. This science is not able to impart a true knowledge of man's nature. Medical science in the real sense demands something quite special and you will realize that this is so when I come to speak of how the human being really comes into existence.

I spoke yesterday from the exoteric side and will now make the transition to the esoteric aspect: external substances are, in reality, processes. Salt is only a precipitation of processes; the magnesium process, the iron process are processes which exist outside in nature. The lead and mercury processes are processes in external nature which the human being cannot have within his physical organism. For all that, it is only in outward semblance that these processes are not within the human being.

How does the human being come into existence? The physical germ comes into being through fertilization and there must be a union between this physical germ and the etheric body of the human being. But fertilization does not create the etheric body. The etheric body forms around what are, later on, ego organization and astral organization, in order to receive the being of spirit and soul who comes down from the spiritual worlds, the being who has been living in pre-earthly existence. The real kernel of man is of the spirit and soul. It has come firstly, from earlier incarnations, secondly, from the period between death and rebirth, and has been in existence long before any fertilization takes place. This kernel of spirit and soul exists before a connection is made with the physical germ cell which is the result of fertilization. It unites, first, with the etheric body which in turn unites with the physical embryo. Ego, astral organization, etheric organization—this trinity unites with what comes into being through the physical fertilization. You must regard the etheric body as something that is built in from out of the cosmos. Now at the time when the etheric body first unites with the physical organization it contains within itself the forces which are not suitable for the physical organization, namely, the lead forces, the tin forces and so on. It is only in semblance that the human being is not a complete microcosm because certain substances are not within him physically. The substances that are not contained in the physical organism of man are of the greatest importance for the constitution of the etheric body, and in the etheric body, before it unites with the physical body, there are lead processes, tin processes, mercury processes, and so on.

And now the etheric body (and the other members, too, of course) unite with the physical body. All the forces derived by the etheric body from the substances that are not contained within the physical body now pass over to the astral body—this happens to a slight degree during the embryonic period but in a high degree when the real breathing begins at birth. The etheric body then takes on those forces which the physical body works up within itself. Thus the etheric body passes through a very significant metamorphosis. It takes on the content and constitution of the physical body and gives over to the astral body its own constitution, its relationship with the environment of the human being. The astral body is now inwardly linked with what the human being is capable of knowing, and the moment you begin, my dear friends, to acquire not merely a theoretical but a true and inwardly digested medical knowledge—in that moment you make alive within you the knowledge that is already within the astral body. It is there, but it remains unconscious, and it is, in reality, a knowledge of man's relationship with his environment.

Let me take a special case. Think of some district that is depressing—on account of the soil containing gneiss and the mineral known to you as mica. Mica has a very strong influence on the physical constitution of a person who is born in such a district. The physical body is different in a district where there is much mica. The mica forces work upon the physical body from out of the soil. Now you will find that many rhododendrons grow in districts where the soil contains a great deal of mica. This plant grows plentifully in the Alps and in Siberia and so forth. The rhododendron substance is something that is intimately connected with the etheric body before it comes down into the physical body in such regions. This relationship with the rhododendron the ether body gives over to the astral body. And now, suppose that illnesses occur which are due to a preponderating working of the mica by way of the ground water. The etheric body has given over what came to it from the rhododendron, to the astral body. This element is present externally, in the rhododendron plants. This indicates that the rhododendron contains a sap that has a remedial effect upon this illness. In many cases, though not in all, a specific remedy is to be found in regions where particular illnesses occur.

And now suppose you are a physician. Every night when you go to sleep, you pass, in your astral body, into the environment which was once connected with the etheric body but is now connected with the astral body. If you have medical knowledge, if you know what healing forces exist in the environment, that knowledge becomes experience during sleep, and so you have continually the confirmation of what you learn, externally, through dialectics. And this factor must be reckoned with in medical study, because no outer dialectic learning of medical science really helps. It becomes fragmentary and chaotic if there cannot arise during every sleep, within the span of the astral body, the confirmation that is necessary. If medical knowledge is not acquired in such a way that the astral body, in the intercourse with the environment, is able to say “Yes” to what the student has learned, it is just as if he were listening to something that he cannot understand and only confuses him. So you see, medical knowledge is intimately connected with the sleeping state.

Such things convince us that medical knowledge must be acquired by the whole man, by man as a living, feeling being, for together with this ‘nightly’ intercourse with the healing substances, something else grows up, something that can never be acquired through dialectic—I mean, the true desire to help. Without the sincere desire to heal, the feeling of sympathy on the part of the physician with the person he has to cure, without this strong desire to give personal help, no healing in the real sense is possible.

And here I must say something that may seem very strange and paradoxical, but as you want to know in what way things are wrong today and what ought to be done, I must say it, for in Dornach we are working from esoteric impulses. People have often said to me that steps might have to be taken to protect the remedies that are prepared in our pharmaceutical laboratory, so that they shall not be copied by other people. I once replied that I was not so very anxious about this, provided we succeeded in bringing true esoteric impulses into our medical work. Then people will realize that the remedies are made with an esoteric background, and that it is not the same if the remedies are made here, with the esoteric life behind the work, or whether some factory copies them. This may seem very strange, but it is true nevertheless. Much more important than protecting things by business devices is the growth of an attitude which aims at making the remedies effective from out of the Spiritual. This is not superstition—it is something that can be substantiated in Spiritual Science. Therefore, people possessed of understanding will begin to realize that with the taking of remedies that are produced here, a beginning has been made in the right direction.

Such objections as have been made to me are due to the fact that people do not realize in the least how seriously the esoteric, spiritual life must be taken, above all, in medicine. If you once grasp this, you see that a center for medicine must be instituted here as a reality, not as a mere formality.

And now you will understand that a first, exoteric course of medical study should be followed by a second which approaches the human being esoterically, which merges medical knowledge into what becomes a true medical consciousness, a true medical attitude. There have, of course, always been individuals who sought instinctively for this. And in the last third of the nineteenth century, at a time when there was so little that was capable of producing this attitude, one could see, but only in isolated individuals who were then regarded as cranks, sporadic manifestations of this medical consciousness. The basis of the reputation enjoyed by the Viennese School of Medicine at the time when I was growing up was connected with its attitude to therapy, where the actual therapy hardly mattered at all, especially treatment of pneumonia, an illness where one can do very little for the central disease itself. You have all heard of medical nihilism, and this is its origin. The most eminent physicians in Vienna were deliberate advocates of medical nihilism In other words, they held the point of view that no remedy heals. To a certain extent, Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902), too, held this view. His view was: If a hundred patients are said to have been cured, one can assume with fifty percent of them that it did not matter whether they had been given a remedy or not; they would have got well without it; with 30 percent it could be said that the remedy had done actual harm; and with the remainder, chance might have brought it about that the remedy selected had helped. It is not I who make this statement, but Virchow, who had a great reputation in the medical world last century. I know eminent men today, too, who adhere to this view, although they may be advocates of therapy. No true medical consciousness is expressed in this view. Medical consciousness can never be regarded as a merely formal attitude. It must be a reality. Therefore, the second medical course would have to contain the human aspect that is built up on the basis of the exoteric material. There must be that human factor that worked, in a somewhat degenerate form, but, for all that so magnificently and attractively, in a person like Paracelsus.

Certainly, objections to Paracelsus can be made in certain details, but this medical consciousness lived in him, in a splendid way. Whenever he came to a district where the soil was strikingly red, he knew that a number of diseases—especially those that are due to diseases of the blood—were caused by the red sandstone in the soil. {Translator's note: The word in the German is the name of a substance described as a system of sandstone, shale and conglomerates of the lower terrain of Germany.}

The way in which a process of illness develops is very characteristic. We find that the people living in a district where there is this red sandstone soil have accustomed themselves to this soil and have a certain characteristic temperament. They have a very lively activity of the spleen. Coming as a stranger to the district, one does not easily take a liking to them. They are frightfully stubborn, dogmatic, obstinate, and when one considers what they do to be foolish—they just return the ‘compliment!’ But suppose a stranger comes and wants to set up a business or something of the kind. He cannot stand the soil, especially not the water, and he will show certain symptoms of illness. Paracelsus said that illnesses which are contracted in such a district are then passed on to the natives who are born there. He said that something must be present in the etheric body (which he calls the ‘Archaeus’). He said that the ‘Archaeus’ must have undergone something before it entered the embryo. Now in these districts we always find that laburnums are prevalent and in the blossoms, leaves and sometimes also in the roots of the laburnum there is a fluid which can provide a very useful remedy.

What is important is to unfold a quite different perception of nature through this medical consciousness. In my young days I knew a physician whom one often met in the meadows and fields—among the plants and insects and flowers. In the place where he carried on an unpretentious practice, there were three or four very learned men. But the work of this unpretentious physician who had such a love for the wildflowers in the meadows was much more fruitful for the sick people than that of the city physician and the other learned men. Their wisdom came from the schools, but his wisdom and understanding of remedies came from that direct intercourse with nature which leads to a real medical knowledge when we can love nature, in all her details. To look at fragments of nature under the microscope is not to love her. We must love nature. We must all be able to expand her to the macrocosmic. This shows you how necessary it is to call up this subconscious life of the astral body, particularly for medical knowledge, to call it up in reality.

It is not at all my wish to revive the stock-in-trade of ancient medicine, my dear friends, but only to lay before you the results of present-day observation. One is obliged to resort to the terminology of ancient tradition, because neither modern language nor modern medical terminology contain the right expressions. It might even be more favorable for the spreading of our views if we were to devise an altogether new terminology. But that would take years, and as you want to hear about these things now, I shall have to use the old expressions with certain modifications.

It will be a good thing to look, first of all, at the plant world—not because I want to recommend plant remedies for everything, but because much can be learned from the plants, above all for an esoteric deepening.

It is very important to study three things connected with medical tradition, but not to study them in the way that is current in present-day science. When a student has learned something of today, he knows it and he thinks: Well, that's all right, I know it and I can apply it. But a religiously-minded person learns the Lord's Prayer. He, too, knows it, but he does not think that the mere fact of knowing it is sufficient. He says it every day as a prayer. What he knows, he prays, every day. He lets what he knows pass through his soul every day, and that is a very different matter—very different, indeed.

Or think of an Initiate. We presuppose that he knows the elements of occult science. He himself attaches no importance to the mere fact of knowing them, to the fact that he once assimilated them. He knows that it is much more important to let the very first rudiments and then all that follows flow through his soul from time to time so that his soul can always be receiving new forces of inspiration. A person who is fundamentally religious has quite different experiences from one who merely regards nature as something that is there before us in the physical world. We must live in the rhythms of nature again and again if we desire a living and not a dead kind of knowledge. There must be constant, rhythmic repetition of knowledge and the activity of knowledge. That is what I mean when I say that a real medical consciousness must be the basis for medical science. The acquisition of medical knowledge from the nature of the human being and from his environment—that is what is so important, in therapy as well. Again and again you must let the plants really come to life in the soul.

Three things are of particular significance in the plant. One is the scent that is connected with the oils. The scent, or aromatic element is that which attracts certain elementary spirits who like to come down into plants. The activity (not the substance) which underlies this aromatic nature, is to be found, in its most concentrated form, in the mineral kingdom, in sulfur. This spiritual extract that is active in the aroma of the plants gives rise to a kind of longing in the elementary beings who come down through the scent. In ancient medicine, this element was known as the sulfuric nature of the plants. If we contemplate the sulfuric nature of the plants we can acquire an understanding for their scent, if we know that something spiritual is in play above and below when the plant gives off its scent. That is the first thing.

A second thing that we acquire is an inner feeling-filled understanding of what is growing in the leaf. The form and character of leaves is so manifold; they may be serrated, with pointed or round ends, geniculated, and so forth. We should evolve a delicate perception of this leaf nature of the plants. For those spiritual beings who come down through the scent can draw life from this leaf nature. And streaming from the cosmic periphery inwards, there is everywhere the striving to the drop formation. This can give you a marvelous feeling for the cosmic, form-loving principle that is contained in the leaf. And then, think of the plant covered with glistening drops of dew in the morning. In their essential nature these drops of dew are a reflection of the striving of the cosmic periphery to produce the spherical form, the drop form in the plant kingdom. The principle of drop formation is at the basis of the leaf nature in the plant. If the peripheric, cosmic forces alone were spiritually active in the plant, it would always produce this spherical form. The spherical formation is particularly to the fore when the cosmic forces get the upper hand in the formation of berries, also in the formation of many leaves, but the drop formation here is immediately taken possession of by the earthly forces, and manifold forms arise.

This striving towards drop formation is concentrated, in the mineral world, in quicksilver. Therefore, ancient medicine called this 'striving towards drop formation', the Mercurial principle. In ancient medicine, Mercury was not the substance of quicksilver but the dynamic striving towards the drop formation.

On the earth, quicksilver is the metal which has the drop form because the conditions for this exist. On the earth, quicksilver has the form which silver has on the moon, where it would also have to exist in the drop form. The point is that ancient medicine called everything that had the drop form Mercury. All metals were also 'Mercury' in ancient medicine. This ancient medicine had living, mobile concepts, and we, too, must develop them. We must gradually grow into a frame of mind which makes us say: “When I walk over the fields in the morning and see the silver pearls of dew on the leaves, these pearls of dew reveal to me what is living spiritually in the leaves themselves; it is the striving towards the cosmic form of the sphere.” But this must become a feeling within us, so that we are able to understand the plants. We must understand them in their cosmic, spherical form.

If you get such an insight into the nature of the plants that you understand the forces in them which are striving towards drop formation, and then again think of their scent, you will gradually begin to understand everything that works centrifugally in the human being. There is a centrifugal force at work when the nails are cut. The centrifugal forces working through the human being make the nails grow again. During the first seven years of life particularly, the forces which come to a conclusion with the second dentition, work out centrifugally through the human being. They express themselves strongly in the formation of sweat. The element which in the scent of plants strives upwards and attracts the Nature Spirits is also active in the smell of sweat which works in the centrifugal direction. And so if you want to look for the plant nature in the human being, you must seek it where it strives outwards, and in this way you unfold an intimate knowledge of the connection between what is outside and what is within the human being. For you see, when the etheric body gives over its special features to the astral body, the whole thing is changed. The inclination of the etheric body would be to unfold what it takes from the environment, in the upward direction; inasmuch as this is given over to the astral body, it unfolds in the centrifugal direction. In this respect, too, the human being bears the plant existence within him.

And now think of how the plant sinks into the earth with its root; how with its root it enters into a close connection with the salts in the soil. A process takes place here that is exactly the opposite of the one we know in the material world. Take sodium chloride which, in solution, tastes salty, and now think of the process being exactly reversed, the solution being arrested, a congealment taking place and the smell and the taste become latent. There you have the process which goes on between the soil and the root of a plant. That is what was known as the salt process in ancient medicine. Ancient medicine did not use the word salt in the way we use it today, but meant by salt that element which, in the downward-pointed root of the plant, enters into a connection with the substances of the earth. That is the salt nature.

By directing your attention rhythmically to these wonderful secrets of nature you fill your medical knowledge with life that is capable of practical application. If you try in this way to fill your medical knowledge with life, you will begin to regard nature and the human being in such a way that the capacity to heal will be born of the strong impulse to give help, of which I have spoken. The capacity to heal can only come from this foundation. It must be quickened by keen, diligent, and zealous exoteric learning, for otherwise mere vagueness will be the result. But it is necessary to know that the real foundation of medical knowledge lies in this rhythmic, meditative absorption in the natural environment of the human being, and not in theoretical study.

What I am now going to write on the blackboard is not there in order that you may “learn” it, but in order that it may quicken life in your medical thinking.

You healing Spirits,
You unite
With Sulfur's blessing
In the ethereal fragrance;

You come to life
In upward springing Mercury
Dewdrop
Of growing
And becoming.

You make your halting place
In the Earth Salt
Which nourishes the root
In the soil.

Ihr heilenden Geister
Ihr verbindet euch
Dem Sulphursegen
Des Ätherduftes;

Ihr belebet euch
Im Aufstreben Merkurs
Dem Tautropfen
Des Wachsenden
Des Werdenden.

Ihr machet Halt
In dem Erdensalze
Das die Wurzel
Im Boden ernährt.

This is what the soul receives in looking out into the universe around. The human being answers:

I will unite
The Knowledge of my Soul
With Fire of the flower's fragrance;

I will bestir
The Life of my Soul
On the glistening drop of leafy morning;

I will make strong
The Being of my Soul
With the all hardening Salt
Whereby the Earth with loving care
Nurtures the root.


Ich will mein Seelenwissen
Verbinden dem Feuer
Des Blütenduftes;

Ich will mein Seelenleben
Erregen am glitzernden Tropfen
Des Blättermorgens;

Ich will mein Seelensein
Erstarken an dem Salzerhärtenden
Mit dem die Erde
Sorgsam die Wurzel pflegt.

If over and over again, as the pious are wont to do in prayer, we make this inwardly living, it will quicken in the soul the forces which render us capable of medical work. The ordinary powers that are educated in the schools cannot awaken true medical knowledge, for true medical knowledge must be drawn forth from the soul. And so at the very summit of the esoteric studies which we are to pursue, I always place this thought: that the powers of the soul must first be quickened in order to bring to birth in the soul the faculty that can lead to true medical knowledge.

For reasons I will not now mention, I will postpone the more esoteric lecture I had intended to give today, to the end of this course, and speak to you now about something else.

A certain amount of astonishment may have been caused when it was said yesterday that if we want to get at the realities, we must think, for instance, of thought being behind solid, earthy phenomena, and courage behind all that is of the nature of air. There is a significance from the point of view of medical history in having our attention drawn to the fact that thought is to be connected with all that is solid, earthy, all that stands before us with definite contours. For this leads us to say to ourselves that thought—thought as a force—is not to be connected with the watery, with the circulation of fluids in the human organism. Neither is thought to be connected with the airy and the warmth nature in man. We have spoken of the conception we must have of the air and the warmth in the cosmos. Within the human being, too, all these things are present, but in a particular form. Within the human being it is like this—only that which has contours, including that which, although it may be soft and pliable, has, nevertheless, the character of solidity, only this may be thought of as corresponding to thought. We have said that behind the fluid, or the watery element which confronts us in the physical world, we have to think of something spiritual—namely, something that is of the nature of feeling.

This element of feeling within the human organism must be thought of in a special way. We usually think of subjective feeling in this connection; we think of feeling that is connected with the psychical and bodily constitution of the human being. But within the human being, feeling is not merely this direct experience; feeling has an up-building activity within the human being. The watery or fluid body, as a formation of the universal, cosmic fluidity, contains feeling as its very essence. This etheric activity that works within the fluid body must be understood, but it cannot be understood by the same kind of knowledge that we apply to something that is outside the human being, because the substances and processes within the human organism do not work in the same way as they do in the external environment. The moment we come to the fluid organism—when we have to do with a part of the human organization which is in fluid circulation, although there are vascular organs within it—in that moment the knowledge forces which can be applied to what is outside the human being in the physical world are no longer adequate.

That is why medicine lost its knowledge of the fluid man—that was the last of the higher members of which knowledge was lost. One may say that up to the middle forties of the nineteenth century, medicine still had an inkling of the existence of this fluid man. People spoke of the humors, of the circulation of the fluids, of the mixture and the separation of the fluids. Medicine was not confined to the physiology and pathology of cells but actually perceived the combinations and separation of fluids. In the nineteenth century, of course, it was all tradition, but this tradition led back to the time before the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when men had not only tradition but also actual knowledge—knowledge in the form in which we today wrestle for in Anthroposophy and should be able to reach in imagination. Knowledge in those days had, it is true, an illusionary character, but men had instinctive imaginations. It was known that the human organism cannot be understood by mere sense perception and cogitation; it was known that thinking and sense observation could only be applied to those parts of the organism which have firm contours, and that knowledge of the circulation of the fluids in the watery man must be gained through imagination. It is, therefore, not to be wondered at that the perception of this fluid man was lost. Perception of the fluid man can only come again when we attain to imaginations in full consciousness.

Let us go over what has been said, once again. When the bony system is building itself up from out of the human organism taken as a totality, when the human being is, as it were, crystallizing into the skeleton—this is not a good way of expressing it, but you will understand what I mean—cosmic thoughts are weaving in him. The organs that have definite outlines have these outlines only because they are subject to the same forces to which the building of the bones is subject. It is only the bony structure in the physical sense that is of the nature of thought, and the other organs with definite outlines have been built up out of the etheric world by an activity of thought. Inasmuch as they have definite outlines and contours, an activity of the nature of thought has been working. The forms in the human organism of which physiology and pathology speak are the result of an activity that is of the nature of thought.

But this is only one member of the human organization, and it must fall out of the human organization if one does not rise to imagination. It is imagination that can lead us to the fluid man, to the way in which the muscles are formed out of the fluidity and how the being of man pours into the muscles. Muscles appear to be solid, but this is mere semblance.

Imagination is indispensable if one wants to comprehend the uniting of the solid nature of the bony structure with the fluid nature of the blood into what has the semblance of another solid structure—muscle.

We must therefore realize: Thought, which is of course, supported by physical perception, can in reality, only grasp the bony system, and apart from the bony system everything else that thought may say about the human being is fantasy.

We must ascend from thinking to imagination. With imagination we can grasp the nature of the fluid man and understand how this fluid man shoots into the muscular system. The fundamental nature of the muscles can only be grasped by imagination. Why is this? You see, if you apply thoughts, you cannot help applying, too, those laws which are discovered by thought, namely, mechanical laws. You apply the laws of statics and dynamics, and this is possible with the bony system. But just try to apply statics and dynamics to the muscular system and see how you get on! Try to calculate from the laws of statics how you can crush a cherry pit, or a peach pit, by biting it. Try to find out by an experiment how much weight of pressure is necessary to crush this cherry stone. Some—not all of us perhaps—try to bite them! But try to reckon out whether, according to the laws of mechanics, a muscle is capable of crushing a cherry pit. Thought alone will never help you to understand the muscular system. It is quite impossible. The moment we come to the muscles, the principles of mechanics become futile. We must be able to pass over to a form of knowledge that can leave the laws of mechanics behind and which grasps the whole picture of the muscles through imagination. Ordinary gravity is non-existent here. For the moment you come to the watery element you have to do with pure buoyancy.

In the things that you do with your etheric body, you have nothing to do with weight but with what overcomes weight to a great extent. Even this will make you realize that quite a different form of knowledge must be applied to the muscular system. This form of knowledge is imagination. The muscular system is comprehended through imagination—though there are transitions everywhere. It is not possible to understand the muscular system unless we conceive of it as a structure that has not arisen in the same way as the bony system. It has taken shape, as it were, through a coagulation of blood. This is just as inadequate an expression as when I say that the bony system crystallizes, but it is a comparatively correct picture. Suppose you take some bone—the radius or the ulna, or upper arm—and apply the laws of leverage to it. This is quite all right. But while you can understand by the laws of leverage and other laws of mechanics what goes on in the radius or upper arm, just think whether these laws help you to understand what is going on in a muscle. Your mental pictures here must all become mobile, must be transformed. The essential characteristic of imagination is that it can always yield and give way and so embrace the substance of things that have their being in the process of metamorphosis. And this is the characteristic of the muscle; the muscle has its life in its metamorphosis. In contrast to the bones to which the laws of mechanics can be applied, the muscle is just as mobile as the pictures of metamorphosis—say pictures, not thoughts—which we have in imagination.

In the bony system we have the solid, earthy man; in the muscular system we have the fluid man, the watery man.

At the stage of inspiration, above imagination, we come to the airy man, to what is aeriform within the human being. In inspiration we approach a mode of cognition that very much resembles the hearing of musical tones, melodies. Inspiration has nothing any longer to do with concepts but with something that is like the cognition, the realization of music. Music must not always be heard; inasmuch as it is spiritual, it can also be felt, experienced. All inspiration has, fundamentally, something musical about it. It is a strange fact that the form of the inner organs of man, of those organs which really provide for the growing organization during life in nourishment, breathing, etc., that none of these organ forms can be explained by any laws of mechanics. Not even by imaginative knowledge are they to be explained. It is just nonsense to try to explain the form of the lungs, of the liver, through their position, through the lie of the cells or through weight. Just try to discover if anyone has succeeded in explaining the form of the liver or the lung and you will find that there is nobody. For these organs, which look after the life that is coming into being during earthly life, are present, in germ, at a very early stage, although later on they are much metamorphosed. They are all of them the outcome of the formative forces of the air.

Modern science says: Air is composed of oxygen, nitrogen and a few other substances. The aeriform substance is more or less uniform, only differentiated through inner mechanical movement, such as can be observed in wind. But the air that is described by physics today does not exist, in reality. The air that surrounds our earth is permeated throughout with formative forces. We breathe in these formative forces together with the physical substantiality of the air. Once our organs are complete and we breathe in the air, these formative forces coincide, as it were, with the form of the lung and are not particularly significant except for the purposes of growth. But during the embryonic period, while there is a physical isolation from the external air—then these formative forces of the air work by way of the body of the mother. They build up the lungs and the other organs, with the exception of the muscles and bones. All the inner organs that are to receive life are built up out of the formative forces of the air.

What happens here can be compared—although the comparison is a crude one—to the Chladnic sound figures. Plates covered with fine dust are secured at some point, a violin bow is drawn across the edge of the plate, and then the dust forms itself into certain patterns according to how the violin bow is drawn across the plate. The figures in the dust are formed out of the formative forces produced in the air. So too, the inner organs of man are formed out of the universal formative forces of the air. The lung is formed out of the breathing forces, also the other organs, only the other organs are formed more or less indirectly, the lungs directly. This fact, that the organs are built out of the formative forces of the air, is only to be grasped through inspiration. What has been built out of the air, formed out of the air, has something of the nature of music about it, just as the musical element is at the basis of the Chladnic sound figures.

Much of what modern physiology says is so fundamentally false that one sometimes is embarrassed to say what is correct, so greatly does it differ from what is stated in the ordinary way. In acts of hearing, all the organs of the human being, not only the inner organs of hearing, vibrate together with the air. The whole man vibrates, if only slightly; and the ear is not the organ of hearing just because it vibrates but because it brings to consciousness what is present in the rest of the organism. There is a great but also a subtle, delicate distinction in saying that man hears through the ear, or through the ear is brought to consciousness what has been heard. The human being is built out of sound, although not from sound that is actually heard. Inspiration is required for comprehension of the inner organs. The organization of man's inner organs, of the aeriform man, must be understood by means of inspiration. It is really not to be wondered at that real understanding of the inner organs of man was already lost in days of antiquity, for inspiration was lost and inspiration is the only means whereby the inner organs can be understood. They can be taken from the corpse and diagrams can be made of them, but they cannot be understood by this means.

You see, therefore, that the whole human organism stands really towards the background of the physical world. After reading my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, people always get the picture: Here is the physical world and behind it, the spiritual world, in stages or degrees. We reach the nearest spiritual world through imagination, a further spiritual world through inspiration and a further world through intuition. But people do not picture to themselves that of all that is within the human being, the bony system alone is built up by the elementary spirits, whereas the muscular system is built up by spiritual beings of a higher hierarchy. This must be known and understood. A man must be able to reach these beings through imagination if he is to understand the muscles.

To understand the inner organs, still higher spiritual beings must be reached through inspiration. The inner structure of a skeleton, too, can only be truly understood with inspiration. Just think of the following. A modern scientist investigates a plant by analyzing its substance by the methods current today. But this is by no means the plant in its reality. The plant is built up from out of the cosmos, as I said yesterday. It is only the root that is built up from earthly forces. The whole form of the plant is a spiritual reality, a super-sensible reality; this super-sensible reality is then filled with matter. And a man who merely examines this physical matter in the plant is like someone who has a document in front of him that is wet with ink, that he has covered with sand to dry and who then imagines that the sand is the essential thing of the document. The document is covered with this sand and then it is scratched away and the man says: I am examining the sand and I read what the document contains out of the sand. This, more or less, is the way in which people explain the root of a plant, whereas in reality the root is spiritual, filled with physical substance in its framework. So too, the human organs merely receive physical substance.

The reality is that only the bony system is physical; the muscles are etheric, the organs are astral.

If we can attain true intuition we get to the warmth man, the organization that is a space of warmth, inwardly differentiated. The human being actually experiences himself in warmth; his relationship to warmth is not the same as to carbon or nitrogen. Warmth is within him and the human being is within it when he experiences warmth.

The experience of warmth is intense and real and a modern man cannot deny that he has it, whereas he has no inkling of the fact that he experiences air, water, earth. He has no inkling of this because he has grown out of these experiences. Understanding of the warmth involves the application of intuition to the human organization, but it is the delicate differentiations of the warmth in the forms of the organs themselves which have to be perceived and experienced. When intuition can be applied to the warmth organism through the whole body, this form of cognition leads, not, in this case, to an understanding of the inner organs as such, but to the activity of these inner organs. The activity of the inner organs must be grasped by an understanding of the organization within the warmth ether. Every other kind of knowledge is incapable of bringing about understanding of the activity of the organs. The activity of the warmth ether, of the warmth man, must be cognized by intuition.

It will not do simply to think: There is the physical world and one must acquire imagination, inspiration and intuition in order to attain the other worlds. The other worlds are actually present; the etheric world is present in the muscular system, the astral world in the organs and the devachanic world, the spirit world, is present in the warmth man. The spiritual is always around us; it is actually present. Man is a spirit and this spirit is merely filled with physical substance. To say that man is a physical being is an illusion; man in himself is a spirit who actually reaches up into the higher world through his warmth organization.

That is why it is so odd that spiritualists should sit around a table and address themselves to spirits who are far, far inferior to those eight or ten people who are sitting around the table without knowing that they are spirits! This is a truth that must be taken very, very deeply to heart, and then progress can be made.

If through initiation we have grasped the nature of this wonderful activity from organ to organ which goes on in the warmth ether, we find that there are two kinds of warmth. The warmth ether is a quite special element. When any process calls forth a change in the warmth ether, there is always a counter-working. There is always action and reaction with streamings of warmth. The warmth ether is differentiated within itself. There is always a coarser etheric substance which runs counter to a more delicate one.

Suppose you are in a room that is comfortably warm. You make it warmer—so warm that you cannot stand it. That is not merely a physical condition but also a condition of the life of soul. The more delicate warmth is experienced by the soul. The experience of warmth is really always twofold; there is the warmth that we experience psychically and the warmth in which we live, the warmth that is outside the soul; there is the warmth that is within our warmth organism and the warmth that is external to us. Warmth is of the nature of the soul. We can therefore speak of a physical warmth and a soul warmth.

If we pass on to the inner organs, to the aeriform man, where inspiration is needed, here we have the airy element in its main form. Whereas the finer warmth works within warmth, in the aeriform there works light. Intuition reveals warmth within warmth; warmth remains warmth when it is differentiating itself within itself. But this is not the case with air. The real air is not the fantastic air of the physicists which surrounds our earth like another skin. The real air is inconceivable without some condition of light—for darkness is also a condition of light. Light and air belong together; light is an active, organizing force in the whole airy organism. Here we come still further into the realm of soul. There is not only external light but also metamorphosed inner light which permeates the whole human being, which lives in him. The light lives within him together with the air.

Equally, the chemical forces (chemism) are within the human being, together with the water, with the fluid element. Water conceived as physical water, the water of the physicists, is pure fantasy. To picture the fluid element within the human being without the chemical forces is just like picturing a human organism without a head. It can be drawn without a head and the life of soul can be entirely eliminated, but then there is no longer any reality. If you cut the head away from your body, the body cannot live, it is no longer an organism. In the same way, the fluid nature in man is not what the physicists fantastically describe as water. Just as the organism, with the head, forms one whole, so is the fluid organism bound up with the chemical forces. The solid or earthy in the human organism only exists in statu nascendi. Like the water in the human being, it is immediately transformed. Within the human being the earthy is bound up with life.

The physical body and its corresponding etheric body form one whole; they are one unit, seen from two sides. We have the ether stages: warmth, light, chemical forces, life—and we have the physical stages: warmth, air, water, earth. When we give an abstract description of the ethers we give the first place to the warmth ether; when we start from the fluid or solid as the lowest ether, then the highest ether is the life ether. But when we describe the human being we say that the warmth man, the inner activity of the organs, is known by means of intuition. As we descend to the coarsest stage, from the warmth to the earthy in the physical organism, we ascend, in the etheric body, from warmth into life. What does this mean? Think of it. It means that the human being really reverses his own attributes, or qualities. He expends the warmth ether only upon the warmth organism, the light ether upon the airy organism, the chemical ether upon the fluid organism, the life ether upon his solid organization. If you really grasp this, then you cannot think as people ordinarily think. If you insist upon thinking along the ordinary lines, you can, in reality, grasp only the bony system, the earthy human being. It is necessary for you to pass over from ordinary thinking to an inner comprehension of the world, as I have said before.

The fact that medical science has a certain peculiarity is connected with these things. Medical knowledge was an outstanding part of the ancient mysteries where man had real insight into the treatment of a sick human being. The physicians were trained in the mysteries—they were not merely medical men, but they were also sages, wise men who looked after the religious cults. It is natural that the physician should have kept his knowledge secret, as was the case with all mystery knowledge. For you see, if a man wants to know something, he must clothe this knowledge in thoughts; otherwise he floats about in indefiniteness. The picture that comes in imagination, what is heard spiritually (inspiration) and also what is beheld in intuition must all be clothed in thoughts. In ancient times it was known that medical knowledge must be clothed in thoughts. But by clothing it in thoughts it is deprived of some of its efficacy. I am touching here upon deep matters. It cannot be denied that the knowledge of remedies in a sense takes away their power and a really serious physician must deny himself the use of these therapeutic measures which he uses for his patients; he must deny himself and use, for himself, other kinds of healing. Please think about this last sentence and you will realize, in a much deeper sense than before, that the physician must personally cultivate the mood of helping. He must deny himself the healing forces which he applies to his patients. If a man ascribes the efficacy of a remedy merely to the chemical forces, if he imagines that remedies work like steam in a locomotive, he is not submitting to these spiritual laws. But the moment it is realized that the human being reaches up into the spiritual, it will never be doubted that spiritual laws are at the basis of what is contained in the different remedies. In its real essence, medicine is the most wonderful means of education towards selflessness. To demand that therapy should be taught as mechanics or similar subjects are taught is a crude and coarse misunderstanding. The laws of mechanics can, of course, be applied to the human being, but that is valid then to humanity as a whole. And the physician's work is entirely individual. If a physician has a really profound knowledge of some remedy, it is necessary for him, to a certain extent, to deny healing himself by means of this remedy. This is the great education towards selflessness. I will indicate sometime how the physician can help himself. But you must understand in your hearts what underlies these facts. If you take seriously and earnestly what I have said, it will become a world necessity to introduce into medicine not egoism but altruism. Altruism, selflessness, is the basic principle of medicine. Medical morality is not something that has been invented but proceeds from heavenly laws, from laws which the cosmos itself has formed in order to create remedies which follow its own laws.

The more earnestly a communication like this is taken, the more it will be able to contribute to an understanding of the real basis of all remedies.

Today I shall again insert a kind of episode into our reflections, which will serve to further the actual theme tomorrow. I shall be obliged to use a somewhat more aphoristic mode of presentation today in order to discuss certain things with you. We have, of course, taken the most diverse symptoms and phenomena from current events in order to recognize how these events are leading humanity to a grasp of spiritual realities. And it was my endeavor to make clear that this taking hold of spiritual realities cannot be merely a matter of man's continuing to take hold of the spiritual world in the future, so to speak, in order to have something from it, I might say, for his Sunday hours. That was precisely the pernicious thing in the civilization that has developed in recent centuries, that spiritual life has gradually become something so detached and abstract. In answer to the question that I posed in a public lecture in Basel some time ago: What connects the world view, the view of the spiritual or the unspiritual, that someone has as a civil servant, lawyer, factory owner, or merchant, with what one does every day? One could say: The thoughts that he has as a worldview have no influence on his professional and everyday affairs, or rather, on how he conducts them. On the one hand, one is a person of external practical life, and on the other, one has a purely abstract worldview, whether it is more or less religious or more or less scientifically colored. This has become common practice in the course of the last few centuries and has reached a climax in our so ominous time. And what underlies this is expressed in another, even more fatal circumstance, that people who have the good will to acquire a spiritual worldview are virtually absorbed in the content of this spiritual worldview, that this spiritual worldview has nothing to do with their practical life. Because practical life is the real thing, it is what one devotes oneself to externally; one has spirituality for Sundays, it is set apart from life, and life is not worthy of absorbing this spirituality. I have always endeavored to make it clear that the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science referred to here, while seeking to ascend to the highest heights of spiritual life, should then cultivate in man, through this ascent into the spiritual worlds, a way of thinking, a way of imagining, that makes him suitable, adept, and practical in every aspect of everyday life. One should have something for one's business, for daily practical life, from what one also works for spiritually in the higher worlds.

This work for the spiritual world should not tempt one to say: This spiritual world is the other world, it must not be touched by the coarse everyday life; the coarse everyday life is separate, it is despised, the spiritual world is the high, the exalted. I have often pointed these things out very sharply in earlier years and have said that, over the years, many a person has come to me and said: Oh, I have such a prosaic profession, I want to leave this prosaic profession and devote myself to more ideal things. That is the worst maxim one can have in life. I have often said that anyone who, by fate or karma, is a postal worker, and a decent postal worker at that, certainly serves the world more by properly fulfilling their profession than someone who is a bad poet or even a bad journalist or the like, which one sometimes craves. The point is, when one approaches the spiritual, to take this spirituality into one's mind in such a way that it does not make one unskillful, but skillful for the outer life.

Because this maxim has disappeared from life since the 15th century and, to a certain extent, life has split into these two currents, into the outer practical life despised by idealists and mystics, and into the mystical, religious, idealistic life regarded by practical people as somewhat dreamy and starry-eyed, we now find ourselves in the deadlock of life described to you yesterday. That is the deeper reason why we are stuck in this impasse. As a result, on the one hand, in practical life, each individual stands in a small circle, as I said yesterday, working without an overview and also without a warm interest in the whole, and on the other hand, if one is idealistic enough to devote oneself to a spiritual world-view, one then wants to have this spiritual world-view in such a way that one is not educated in this spiritual world-view, for example, in practical leadership, let us say, of a proper ledger or a proper journal. There are people who consider it an advantage if someone does not understand and cannot grasp how to keep a journal or a cash book. This is the great damage that has gradually become more and more widespread over the past few centuries.

It is not an advantage to have no idea of how to keep ledgers and cash books, and it is not a blessing for humanity when there are as many people as possible who want to be idealists by not understanding anything practical and only wanting to devote themselves to spiritual contemplation. The only healthy thing in life is when these two maxims in life go so far together that one supports the other. But what has gradually emerged more and more as a life-damage in the smallest circles over the past few centuries is also expressed in the great affairs of life, in that no one, really, one can say, no one except a few people who have done it quite impractically, has actually worried about it: How can something really healthy arise from the structures that are outdated – I characterized them for you yesterday in terms of how they look on the map – that were used before the war, until 1914, to describe the states of the world? – Yes, even after the trials of the last four to five years, unfortunately we have not yet come far enough to think about these things in a healthy way. Take just one thing. When we have a cool head to consider the more distant causes of the terrible catastrophe of the last four and a half or five years, we will find that these causes lie in the industrial and commercial conditions between Central Europe and the western regions, including America, in those industrial and commercial conditions that have long since come into conflict with national borders. The state structures, which have developed out of quite different conditions and which are a relic of medieval conditions, have been used artificially as a framework for what are only commercial and industrial interests. They were not suited for that purpose at all, but they could be used for it. And today one notices that so little that a social-democratic movement, which is hopeless for longer periods of time but extremely disruptive for shorter periods, does not do it any differently. We are experiencing today that socialist theories are emerging everywhere, even in the Asian world, and they are becoming particularly radical. These socialist theories want to create something practical. Before the war they wanted to use the framework of the old states, now they want to use the framework of what has emerged from the catastrophe of war, that is to say, we say Russia, as it has emerged from the war, should be used as a framework for Bolshevik theories. If you can think according to reality, you cannot think of anything more nonsensical than this attempt. There is no greater nonsense than this construct, which initially arose out of purely medieval forces, combined then with the unnatural results that arose more and more in the war that had come to Versailles, that is, to an unpeaceful state. That this structure in the east of Europe should now take up the fantasies of Lenin and Trotsky is nonsense in the long term, and in the short term it is a tumult that must enormously delay the healthy development of Europe's humanity. This is the result if one has a sense of reality.

But this sense of reality is lacking today, one might say, in the whole of humanity's public judgment. The whole of humanity's public judgment is not formed out of a sense of reality, but actually out of abstractions, out of abstract theories. And when something arises that is not based on abstract theories, such as threefolding, something that is taken from life and, because one cannot write thirty volumes about it, which people would not read anyway, one has to summarize it briefly, then people do not recognize the spirit of reality in it, but, because they are completely filled with theories today, they consider it to be a theory all the more. One no longer has any sense of what is taken from reality, because one has become completely estranged from reality.

It must happen that people today can become practical in the most eminent sense and yet still look up to the spiritual world. For only in this way will the human mind develop healthily into the future, that these two elements in the human mind can go side by side. When the time comes that he who says: Over in the East live souls who, due to the special historical circumstances of Asia, have developed in such a way that today they have little sense for the outer world and could easily become the prey of the Europeans, who are attached to the mere material world, but that they have been able to preserve their gaze into the spiritual world. Then one will see that in the Orient we have such souls. I have often mentioned Rabindranath Tagore as an especially important representative. But this Rabindranath Tagore, who is not even an initiate but merely an Asian intellectual, has within him, I might say, the whole spirit of Asia, and you can learn much about this striving Asian spirit from his collection of lectures, 'Nationalism'.

But the souls that are over there lack any inner relationship to what has been achieved in Europe and America in relation to the outer life. Let me remind you once again of something that I have already said before you. It is only in the last few centuries that we have developed what can be called a purely mechanistic culture. Even today you will find in geography books that the entire earth is populated by about fifteen hundred million people. But that is not true if you take into account the work that is done on the earth. If, let us say, a Martian were to come down to Earth and assess the Earth's population in the following way, first asking: How much does a person work on Earth, taking into account the amount of labor they can apply? – and then asking: How much work is done altogether? — let us take the figures that existed before the war, the current figures cannot be used for this, they are not yet available either, then if we were to note how much work is done by people on earth, not fifteen hundred million would come out, but two thousand million or even two thousand two hundred million people as the earth's population. Why? Because the work done by machines on earth is actually so great that it is the equivalent of about seven hundred million human workers. If the machines did not work and if what the machines do were to be done by human labor, there would have to be seven hundred million more people on earth. I have calculated this from the amount of coal used on earth, based on an eight-hour working day. What I have said applies approximately to the coal consumption at the beginning of the 20th century and to an eight-hour working day, so that one can say: judging by what is being done on the earth, there are actually two thousand two hundred million people on the earth. But what is achieved by purely mechanical instruments of labor is more or less done entirely in Europe and America; not much of it is done in Asia today. It has begun there, but it is still in its early stages, because the Asian has no sense of this mechanization of the world. He completely lacks the sense for what has been absorbed in the Occident since the last century or even since the middle of the 15th century. But we must not just think about the fact that mechanical work is being done; we must also think about the fact that people's entire way of thinking is turning to this mechanization of the world. Today, someone can say: So-and-so many workers were needed to build the Gotthard tunnel. But today you can't build a Gotthard tunnel without knowing differential and integral calculus, and that comes from Leibniz, the English say from Newton; we won't argue about that. So the Gotthard tunnel or the Hauenstein tunnel near here could not have been built if Leibniz had not discovered differential and integral calculus in his study one day. All of European thought since Copernicus and Galileo is directed towards this mechanization of the world. Read up on Rabindranath Tagore and how much he hates this mechanization of the world.

But what will this have to lead to? In the mirror of the spiritual world view, it can be said: All those souls that are embodied today in the East, in what we call the East, will seek their next embodiment in the West. Western people will seek their next embodiment more in the East. The middle will have to form a mediation. But if you say something like a cultural-historical demand, that the whole education system and the like should be designed so that this intersecting wave of souls passes over the earth, you say something like that to the very clever people of the present, let us take the cleverest, those who are chosen by the nations to come into parliaments, then you will hear that you are a fool, that this is quite mad! But the recognition of these truths must also move people as much as what is now called anthropological truths moved people in earlier times; the mixing of races, the mutual distribution of races and so on. We must begin to look at everything from a spiritual point of view, instead of regarding it merely from an external physiological point of view, as we have done in the past. There are, of course, good Theosophists who, in moments of solemnity in their lives, think that man lives in repeated lives on earth; it is a creed for them. But that is not enough. If one merely believes in reincarnation and karma as an article of faith, it is no more valuable than making a laundry list. These things only take on value when they are integrated into the whole way of thinking about the world and also into the way of acting and behaving in the world. These things only have value when they are considered in terms of cultural history. And if you do not see these things as something you only devote yourself to in the festive moments of life, but as something you permeate with life, and if you really have such thoughts in earnest - theosophically you can of course play with these thoughts a lot with these thoughts, then one will also have a sense for the proper keeping of a cash book or a ledger, for the shaping of a proper workbench; one will also not disdain it if one is put in the position of having to do cobbling work oneself. For only in the case of someone who is able to engage practically in life, who can be dexterous in circumstances where it comes down to taking hold everywhere, in the case of such a person the whole human organism is so imbued with inner skill that this inner skill also finds expression in truly viable thoughts.

This is what should penetrate our minds. It will permeate our culture if we familiarize ourselves with what people today fear most.

One could say that there are two things today that point to two states of fear in contemporary humanity – I do not think that you, if you look at the situation with an inner sense of truthfulness, can refute me. The first is that, throughout the civilized world, there is a terrible fear of getting to the real causes of war. They do not want to look into it, or even stick their nose into it, at most with the opponent, but certainly not at home! With a few exceptions, people avoid dealing with the actual causes of the terrible human catastrophe of recent years, they are terribly afraid of it. During the war, this was even idealized. There were people who took the view: From this war will emerge a new human life, a new fertilization of the ideals of humanity and so on. - One will be able to study the events of recent times a lot to get behind the real cause of this horror catastrophe. But then nothing positive will arise as the content of this war, but it will arise that the old forms of culture and civilization have become rotten, that they have led themselves ad absurdum in this war catastrophe, that this war means nothing more than the leading ad absurdum of civilization as it was until this war. That is one thing that people are terribly afraid of, afraid of an external event. They are so afraid that today they have generally given up even thinking in terms of tomorrow. Because no reasonable person, from either side, could believe that what is called the Treaty of Versailles could ever give birth to reality. And yet, because people think only for today, not for tomorrow, this strange instrument has come into being. That is an external event.

But there is something else, and that is the fear people have of advancing into ever greater and greater awareness of the soul life. If it seems to people somehow justified to flee from consciousness into the unconscious, then they are glad. When a world view such as this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science comes along, which strives for a complete development of consciousness and wants to arrive at its truths from this complete development of consciousness, then people do not want to approach it. It is too difficult for them. It requires activity, it requires that one really engages in flexible spiritual life. That is too difficult.

But people strive for revelation in their lower states of consciousness: first, of what spiritual life is, and second, of what lives within the human being. How many people, much more than you think, do not want to engage with spiritual truths grasped with a healthy soul sense today. But if something from the spiritual worlds is proclaimed to them by a medium, then they fall for it. One does not need to make an effort to understand it. It comes about unconsciously, and one wants to believe the unconscious. The other thing that follows directly from this is the blatant spread of psychoanalysis. It is hard to believe how this psychoanalysis has taken root in people's minds with breakneck speed. What does it consist of? It consists of the fact that all kinds of medical people are opening up today and – it's hard to say in a nutshell, I've often analyzed psychoanalysis here – setting up something that brings what is subconscious in the human psyche up into consciousness. People are made to tell their dreams, and they explore earlier experiences of disappointment, of unfulfilled desires and so on, which have then been forgotten and formed islands in the soul and so on. In this way, they try to get a clear picture of what actually lives in the human being. Particularly clever people have found out that a great deal lives in the human soul, which takes root in the soul during early childhood in the form of unnatural feelings and sensations, which are then pushed down into the subconscious; but they continue to live in the human being, the human being is their slave. These people trace the Oedipus myth back to the unnatural feelings that every child is supposed to have towards its mother and so on. These people are clear in their view that every little girl is actually jealous of her mother because she loves her father, and every little boy is jealous of his father because he loves his mother. From this arises a complex of feelings, which, transformed into myth, appears in the Oedipus myth and the like. People do not want to believe that spiritual things play a role, but spiritual things that must be permeated with the light of consciousness, people are afraid of that. They are afraid of bringing these things into the light of consciousness. They would prefer to keep everything shrouded in a nebulous darkness. I have already pointed out to you a splendid example, which keeps cropping up time and again when psychoanalysis is discussed: a lady is invited to an evening entertainment at a house where the lady of the house is ailing and the farewell party is being celebrated because she has to travel to a spa. The master of the house stays at home, the lady of the house has to go to the spa. The evening entertainment is over. The lady of the house has already been sent to the train station, the evening party is leaving and is on its way home. A cab, not a car, is driving around the corner, and the evening party is moving out of the way to the left and right. But the one lady I am actually eyeing does not move to the left or to the right, but remains in the middle of the street and runs in front of the horses. The coachman naturally makes a terrible din, but the lady runs and runs, and the coachman has the greatest difficulty in holding the horses back, because he could run over the lady. They come to a bridge. The lady, quite an object for the psychoanalysts, throws herself into the stream, and of course the evening party follows suit to save her. What do you do with her? Well, of course, take her back to the host's house, that's the next step.

The psychoanalyst now has this lady in front of him. He lets her tell him everything she went through in her youth, and he now also happily comes to the conclusion that when she was a very little girl, she was crossing the street and a horse came around the corner; she was very frightened. That has sunk down into the subconscious. It is down there. Since then she has been so afraid of horses that she ran away from them on the street, not dodging to the right or to the left. That is the isolated province of the soul that she has, the fear of horses, which dwells in the subconscious.

There is something in this subconscious, but one must penetrate this subconscious with the light of spiritual research. Then one comes to the conclusion that this subconscious is very clever under certain pathological conditions, that under the ordinary individual human consciousness, however, it is not exactly the foundations of the Oedipus myth, not exactly the fear of the horse that once crossed one's path, but rather a certain sophistication. Because the lady who was invited to that evening party naturally wanted nothing more than to spend the night in that house after the lady of the house had been sent off to the bath, and the best way for the subconscious to arrange things was to seize the next best opportunity – had it not been the steed, had it been something else – that the evening party would have to bring her back to the house. That is how she had achieved her goal. Of course, according to her upbringing, according to what she had absorbed, she would never have violated her morality to such an extent as to do something like that. In the superconscious, she is not that clever; but in the subconscious, there are many sophisticated impulses that can be very clever.

This whole spreading psychoanalysis, which takes on such blatant forms today, in which, more than you think, today in particular the more hopeful intellectuals believe - I say this not in a derogatory sense, but even with the tone of truth -, in which even today theologians would like to base religion, this psychoanalysis is the other fear product of the present. People are afraid of consciousness. They do not want things to be seen in the clear light of consciousness, but they want the most important thing to dwell down there in the subconscious, and for man to be dominated in regard to his most important things, especially in regard to his religious feelings. Read about this in William James, the American. Because whether it is called psychoanalysis in some areas of Europe or whether it is called it as William James, the American, expresses these things, it is all the same. There is a fear of the conscious. One does not want the most important thing that lives in man to be in his consciousness. After all, man would have to think more if he were to direct himself with his conscious will. It is important that the human being has justified that he thinks less.

Our eurythmy is worked out entirely from the consciousness. It is the opposite of everything dreamy. People are afraid that it is less artistic because they associate the artistic with the dreamy. But that is nonsense. In the artistic, it does not matter whether it comes from this or that region, but that it is artistic in its forms and in its development. This eurythmy, which is based entirely on the superconscious, on the opposite of the subconscious, was recently appraised by a gentleman, as I was told, who is now also a doctor: He noticed a lot of unconsciousness in it. — Of course, this is proof that the gentleman did not understand eurythmy at all. Precisely that which is the lifeblood of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has been noticed very little. And it will only be fully noticed when one can really undergo such an inner education of thinking, feeling and will through this spiritual science that it makes one more skillful for life, not less. I do not want to claim that today all those who have made anthroposophy their creed are skilled in life. A creed does not mean much in this respect. I really dare not claim that all anthroposophists are skilled in life. But you see, what is expressed in the real movement of the Anthroposophical Society is often what is brought into it from outside. And only then will anthroposophically oriented spiritual science be able to be what it should be for the world, not only when mystical tendencies, unworldliness, false idealism, and a kind of spiritualism — I could also say “uncleism”; no, I mean similar things — are brought into it , but when what can be gained in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is carried out: a stimulation of the soul life that passes into the limbs, that takes hold of the whole human being - not just the creed - and thereby enables people to intervene in the affairs of the world. That is what it is mainly about. In this one should seek the whole seriousness of life.

We shall now have to describe how the individual anthroposophist can come to experience his karma through the simple fact that he has placed himself into the Anthroposophical Society, or at any rate into the Anthroposophical Movement, through all the previous conditions of which we have already spoken. To this end it will be necessary for me to add a few explanations to what I set forth last Monday. I told you of the deeply important super-sensible School at the beginning of the 15th century. To characterise it we can say: Michael himself was the great Teacher in that School. Numbers of souls, human souls who were then in the life between death and a new birth, and numbers too of spiritual beings who do not have to enter earthly incarnation, but spend the aeons, during which we live, in an ethereal or other higher form of higher existence,—all these human, super-human and sub-human beings, belonged at that time to the all-embracing School of the Michael Power. They were, so to speak, disciples of Michael. And you will remember, last Monday I told you a little of the content of the teaching given at that time.

Today we will begin by emphasising this one point: the previous Michael dominion, having lasted three centuries and finding its culmination in the Alexandrian epoch of pre-Christian time, was withdrawn from the earth, and the dominions of the other Archangeloi followed. At the time when on earth, within the earthly realm, the Mystery of Golgotha took place, the Michael community were united in the Spirit, with all the spiritual and human-spiritual beings who belonged to them. How did they feel and perceive the Mystery of Golgotha? Christ at that time was taking His departure from their realm—the realm of the Sun. Such was their experience; while the human beings who were then living upon earth had to experience the Mystery of Golgotha quite differently. For Christ was coming down to them to the earth.

Now this is an immense, far-reaching and gigantic contrast in experience, as between the one kind of human soul and the other,—a contrast which we need to penetrate and understand with all our heart and mind.

Then there began the time when the Cosmic Intelligence, that is to say, the essence of Intelligence that is spread out over the great universe, which had been subject to the unlimited rulership of Michael until the end of the Alexandrian epoch, gradually passed into the possession of man on earth and fell, so to speak, out of the hands of Michael.

You must realise, my dear friends: the evolution of mankind with respect to these things took place as follows. Till the end of the Alexandrian time, nay even afterwards,—and for certain groups of human beings long, long afterwards,—when a man was intelligent there was always the consciousness, not that he had evolved the Intelligence within him, but that he was gifted with it from the spiritual worlds. If a man thought a clever thought, the cleverness of it was ascribed to the inspiration of spiritual Beings. It is indeed of fairly recent date that man ascribes his cleverness, his intelligence, to himself. This is due to the fact that the rulership of Intelligence has passed from the hands of Michael into the hands of men. When Michael at the end of the eighteen-seventies again assumed his regency in the guidance of earthly destinies, he found the Cosmic Intelligence, which had fallen away from him entirely since the 8th or 9th century A.D.,—he found it again in the realm of mankind below.

Thus it was in the last third of the 19th century, when the Gabriel dominion was over and the Michael dominion began to spread. It was as though Michael, coming to the intelligent human beings, arrived at a point where he could say: Here do I find again that which has fallen away from me, which I administered in times long past.

Now in the Middle Ages there was a great conflict between the leading men of the Dominican Order and those who, in a continuation of Asiatic Alexandrianism, had found their way over into Spain,—Averroes, for example. What was the substance of this conflict? Averroes and those on his side—the Mohammedan followers of Aristotelian learning—said: “Intelligence is universal, common to all.” They only spoke of a pan-Intelligence, not of an individual human Intelligence. To Averroes the individual human Intelligence was but a kind of mirrored reflection in the single human head. In its reality it had only a general, universal existence.

I will draw a mirror, thus (drawing on the blackboard). I might equally well have drawn a mirror not with nine parts only, but with hundreds, thousands and millions. Over against it is an object which will be reflected. So it was for Averroes, who was attacked so vigorously by Thomas Aquinas. For Averroes—in the tradition of the old Michael epoch—Intelligence was pan-Intelligence, one Intelligence and one only, which the several human heads reflected. As soon as the human head ceases to work, the individual Intelligence is no more. Now was this really true?

The fact is this. That which Averroes conceived had been true till the end of the Alexandrian age. It was simply a cosmic and human fact until the end of that age. But Averroes held fast to it while the Dominicans received into themselves the evolution of mankind. They said, “It is not so.” They might of course have said, “It was so once, but it is not so today.” But they did not say this. They simply took the actual and true condition at that time (the 13th century) which became even more so in the 14th and 15th centuries. They said: “Now everyone has his own intellect, his own intelligence.”

This was what really happened, and to bring these matters to full clearness of understanding was the very task of the super-sensible School of which I spoke last Monday. It was repeated in that School again and again in many metamorphoses, inasmuch as the character of the ancient Mysteries was again and again described. Wonderfully clearly and visibly, not in super-sensible Imaginations, (these only came at the beginning of the 19th century) but in super-sensible Inspirations, there was described what I have often been able to give here in a reflected radiance—the essence of the ancient Mysteries.

Then too they pointed to the future, to what was to become the new life of the Mysteries. They pointed to all that was to come, though not in the way of the old Mysteries which had come to human beings who did not yet possess Intelligence on earth, and who, accordingly, still had a dream-like experience of super-sensible worlds. They pointed to that new life of the Mysteries which we must now begin to understand in the realm of Anthroposophy, and which is absolutely compatible with the full Intelligence of man—the clear, light-filled Intelligence.

Let us now enter a little into the more intimate details of the teachings of that super-sensible School. For they led to a knowledge of something, of which only a kind of shadowy reflection has existed in the world-conceptions of men upon the earth since the old Hebrew time and in the Christian era. It exists, to this day (when a far deeper insight ought already to prevail) in the large majority of men only as a dim reflection out of old traditions. I mean the teaching about Sin, about the sinful human being, the teaching about man, who at the beginning of human evolution was predestined not to descend so deeply into the material realm as he has actually descended.

We can still find a good version of this teaching in St. Martin, the ‘Unknown Philosopher.’ He still did teach his pupils that originally, before human evolution on the earth began, man stood upon a certain height from which he then sank down through a primeval Sin which St. Martin describes as the Cosmic Adultery. By a primeval Sin man descended to that estate in which he finds himself today.

St. Martin here points to something that was inherently contained in the doctrine of Sin during the whole of human evolution, I mean, the idea that man does not stand at that high level at which he could be standing. All teachings about inherited Sin were justly connected with this idea, that man has descended from the height which originally was his.

Now by following this idea to its conclusion, a world-conception of a very definite shade or colouring had gradually been evolved. This kind of world-conception said in effect: Man has become sinful (and to become sinful means to fall from one's original height). And since man has in fact become sinful, he cannot see the world as he would have been able to see it in his sinless condition before the Fall. Man, therefore, sees the world darkly and dimly. He sees it not in its true form. He sees it with many illusions and false fantasies. Above all, he sees what he sees in outer Nature, not as it really is or with its true spiritual background. He sees it in a material form which is not there in reality at all. Such was the meaning of the saying: Man is sinful. Such was its meaning in ancient time and—in the traditions—frequently even to this day. Thus upon earth too, those who had kept the tradition of the Mysteries continued to teach: Man cannot perceive the world, he cannot feel in the world, he cannot act in the world as he would think and feel and act if he had not become sinful,—if he had not descended from the height for which his Gods originally predestined him.

Now we may turn our gaze to all the leading Spirits in the kingdom of Archangeloi who follow one another in earthly rule, so that this earthly dominion is exercised by the several Archangeloi in turn through successive periods of three to three-and-a-half centuries. In the last three or four centuries it has been the dominion of Gabriel. Now it will be that of Michael, for three hundred years to come. Let us turn our gaze therefore to the whole series of these Archangel Beings: Gabriel, Raphael, Zachariel, Anael, Oriphiel, Samael, Michael. As we look to all these Beings, we can characterise the relation that exists between them and the loftier Spirits of the Hierarchies, somewhat as follows.

I beg you not to take these words lightly or easily. We have but human words to express these sublime realities. Simple as the words may sound, they are not lightly meant. Of all these Angels, the number of whom is seven, six have to a very considerable extent (not entirely—Gabriel most of all—but even he not altogether)—six, as I said, have to a very considerable extent resigned themselves to the fact that man is faced with Maya, with the great illusion, because, in his quality which no longer accords with his original pre-destination, he has in fact descended from his first stature. Michael alone, Michael is the only one (I say again, I am forced to use banal expressions) Michael is the only one who would not give in. Michael, and with him those who are the Michael spirits even among men, continues to take this stand: I am the Ruler of the Intelligence. And the Intelligence must be so ruled that there shall not enter into it any illusion nor false fantasy, nor anything that would restrict the human being to a dark and vague and cloudy vision of the world.

My dear friends: to see how Michael stands there as the greatest opponent in the ranks of the Archangels, is an unspeakably uplifting sight,—overpowering, magnificent. And every time a Michael Age returned, it happened upon earth too that Intelligence as a means to knowledge became not only cosmopolitan as I have already said, but became such that men were filled through and through with the consciousness: We can after all ascend to the Divinity.

This consciousness: “We can after all ascend to the Divine,” played an immense part at the end of the last Michael Age, the Michael Age before our own. Starting from ancient Greece, the places of the ancient Mysteries everywhere were in a state of discouragement; an atmosphere of discouragement had come over them all. Discouraged were those who lived on in Southern Italy and Sicily. The successors of the ancient Pythagorean School of the sixth pre-Christian century had been well-nigh extinguished. They were filled with discouragement.

Once again, those who were initiated in the Pythagorean Mysteries saw how much illusion, illusion of materialism, was spreading over the whole world.

Discouraged too were those who were the daughters and sons of ancient Egyptian Mysteries. Oh, these Egyptian Mysteries! It was only like the slag from wonderful old veins of precious metal, when they still handed down the deep old teachings, such as were expressed in the legend of Osiris, or in the worship of Serapis. And where were those mighty and courageous ascents to the spiritual world that had taken their start, for example, from the Mysteries of Diana at Ephesus? Even the Samothracian Mysteries, the wisdom of the Kabiri, could now only be deciphered by individuals who bore deep within them the impulse of greatness to soar upward with might and main. By such souls alone could the clouds of smoke that ascended from Axieros, etc., from the Kabiri, be deciphered.

Discouragement everywhere! Everywhere a feeling of what they sought to overcome in the ancient Mysteries as they turned to the secret of the Sun Mystery, which is in truth the secret of Michael. Everywhere a feeling: Man cannot, he is unable.

This Michael Age was an age of great trial and probation. Plato, after all, was but a kind of watery extract of the ancient Mysteries. The most intellectual element of this extract was then extracted again in Aristotelianism, and Alexander took it on his shoulders.

This was the word of Michael at that time: Man must reach the Pan-Intelligence, he must take hold of the Divine upon earth in sinless form. From the centre of Alexandria the best that has been achieved must be spread far and wide in all directions, through all the places of the Mysteries, discouraged as they are. This was the impulse of Michael. This is indeed the relation of Michael to the other Archangeloi. He has protested most strongly against the Fall of man.

This too was the most important content of his teaching, the teaching with which he instructed his own in the super-sensible School of which I spoke last Monday. It was as follows: Now that the Intelligence will be down among men upon the earth, having fallen from the lap of Michael and from his hosts,—now in this new Age of Michael, men will have to become aware of the way of their salvation. They must not allow their Intelligence to be overcome by sinfulness; rather must they use this age of Intelligence to ascend to the spiritual life in purity of Intelligence, free from all illusion.

Such is the mood and feeling on the side of Michael as against the side of Ahriman. On Monday last I characterised this great contrast. Already the very strongest efforts are being made by Ahriman, and more still will be made in the future—the strongest efforts to acquire the Intelligence that has come into the hands of men. For if men once became possessed by Ahriman, Ahriman himself, in human heads, would be possessing the Intelligence.

My dear friends, we must learn to know this Ahriman, these hosts of Ahriman. It is not enough to find the name of Ahriman contemptible or to give the name of Ahriman to so many beings whom one despises. That is of no avail. The point is that in Ahriman there stands before us a cosmic Being of the highest imaginable Intelligence, a cosmic Being who has already taken the Intelligence entirely into the individual, personal element. In every conceivable direction Ahriman is in the highest degree intelligent, over-intelligent. He has at his command a dazzling Intelligence, proceeding from the whole human being, with the single exception of the part of the human being which in the human forehead takes on a human form.

To reproduce Ahriman in human Imaginations we should have to give him a receding forehead, a frivolously cynical expression, for in him everything comes out of the lower forces, and yet from these lower forces the highest Intelligence proceeds. If ever we let ourselves in for a discussion with Ahriman, we should inevitably be shattered by the logical conclusiveness, the magnificent certainty of aim with which he manipulates his arguments. The really decisive question for the world of men, in the opinion of Ahriman, is this: Will cleverness or stupidity prevail? And Ahriman calls stupidity everything that does not contain Intelligence within it in full personal individuality. Every Ahriman-being is over-endowed with personal Intelligence in the way I have now described; critical to a degree in the repudiation of all things unlogical; scornful and contemptuous in thought.

When we have Ahriman before us in this way, then too we shall feel the great contrast between Ahriman and Michael. For Michael is not in the least concerned with the personal quality of Intelligence. It is only for man that the temptation is ever-present to make his Intelligence personal after the pattern of Ahriman. Truth to tell, Ahriman has a most contemptuous judgment of Michael. He thinks Michael foolish and stupid,—stupid, needless to say, in relation to himself. For Michael does not wish to seize the Intelligence and make it personally his own. Michael only wills, and has willed through the thousands of years, nay through the aeons, to administer the Pan-Intelligence. And now once more, now that men have the Intelligence, it should again be administered by Michael as something belonging to all mankind—as the common and universal Intelligence that benefits all men alike.

We human beings shall indeed do rightly, my dear friends, if we say to ourselves: the idea that we can have cleverness for ourselves alone is foolish. Certainly we cannot be clever for ourselves alone. For if we want to prove anything to another person logically, the first thing we must presume is that the same logic holds good for him as for ourselves. And for a third party again it is the same logic. If anyone were able to have a logic of his own it would be absurd for us to want to prove anything to him by our logic. This after all is easy to realise; but it is essential in the present age of Michael for this realisation also to enter into our deepest feelings.

Thus behind the scenes of existence is raging the battle of Michael against all that is of Ahriman. And this, as I said last Monday, is among the tasks of the anthroposophist. ... He must have a feeling for the fact that these things are so at the present time. He must feel that the cosmos is as it were in the very midst of the battle.

You see, this battle was already there in the cosmos, but it became significant above all since the 8th or 9th century, when the Cosmic Intelligence gradually fell away from Michael and his hosts and came down to men on earth. It only became acute when the Spiritual Soul began to unfold in humanity, at the point of time which I have so often indicated, at the beginning of the 15th century. In individual spirits who lived on earth at that time, we see, even upon earth, some sort of reflection of what was taking place in the great super-sensible School of which I spoke last Monday. We see something of it reflected in individual men on the earth.

In recent lectures we have said much of heavenly reflections in earthly schools and institutions. We have spoken of the great School of Chartres, and others. But we can speak of this in relation to individual human beings too. Thus at the very time when the Spiritual Soul began to evolve in civilised mankind—when Rosicrucianism, genuine Rosicrucianism, was nurturing the early beginnings of the impulse to the Spiritual Soul,—something of the impulse which was at work above the earth struck down like lightning upon a spirit living in that age. I mean Raymond of Sabunda. What he taught at the beginning of the 15th century is almost like an earthly reflection of the great super-sensible doctrine of Michael which I have characterised.

He said: men have fallen from the vantage-point that was given to them originally by their Gods. If they had remained upon that point, they would have seen around them all that lives in the wondrous crystal shapes of the mineral kingdom, in the amorphous mineral kingdom, in the hundred-and-thousand fold forms of the plant kingdom, in the forms of the animal, all that lives and moves in water and air, in warmth and in the earthly realm. All this they would have seen as it really is, in its true nature.

Raymond of Sabunda called to mind, how the Tree of Sephiroth, or the Aristotelian categories (those generalised concepts that look so strange to one who cannot understand them) contain what is meant to guide us through Intelligence, up into the universe. How dry, how appallingly dry do these categories seem as they are taught in the textbooks of Logic. Being, having, becoming, here, there—ten of these categories, ten abstract concepts, and people say: it is too dreadful, it is appalling to have to learn such abstractions. Why should anyone grow warm with enthusiasm for ten generalised concepts—being, having, becoming and so forth?

But it is just as though someone were to say: here is Goethe's Faust. Why do people make so much fuss of it? It only consists of A, B, C, D, E, F, ... to Z. Nothing else is there in the book, only A, B, C, D ... Z in various combinations and permutations. Certainly one who cannot read, and takes Goethe's Faust in hand, will not perceive the greatness that is contained in it. He will only see A, B, C, D ... to Z. One who does not know how the A, B, C, D, are to be combined, who does not know how they are related to one another, cannot read Goethe's Faust.

So it is, in relation to the reading of words, with the Aristotelian categories. There are ten of them, not so many as the letters of the alphabet, but they are indeed the spiritual letters. And anyone who knows how to manipulate ‘being,’ ‘having,’ ‘becoming,’ etc., in the right way,—just as we must know how to treat the several letters so that they produce the Faust of Goethe,—anyone who knows how to do this, may still be able to divine what Aristotle for example said of these things in his instruction of Alexander.

Raymond of Sabunda was one who still drew attention to such things. He had knowledge of them. He said: Look for instance at what is still contained in Aristotelianism. There we find something that has still remained of that old standpoint from which man fell at the beginning of human evolution on earth. Originally, men still preserved some memory of it. It was the reading in the Book of Nature. But men have fallen; they can no longer truly read in the Book of Nature. Hence God in His Compassion has given them in the Bible, the Book of Revelation, in order that they may not entirely depart from the Divine and Spiritual. Thus Raymond of Sabunda still taught, even in the 15th century, that the Book of Revelation exists for sinful man because he is no longer able to read in the Book of Nature. And in the way he taught these things, we can already perceive his idea that man must find once more the power to read in the great Book of Nature.

This is the impulse of Michael. Now that the Intelligence administered by him has come down to men, it is his impulse to lead men again to the point where they will read once more in the Book of Nature. The great Book of Nature will be opened again. Men will read once more in the Book of Nature.

In reality, everyone who is in the Anthroposophical Movement should feel that he can only understand his karma when he knows that he personally is called to read once more, spiritually, in the Book of Nature—to find the spiritual background of Nature, God having given His Revelation for the intervening time.

Read the inner meaning that is contained in my book Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Spiritual Life (Modern Mysticism).¹ On the last page you will see (in the form, of course, in which I could and had to write it at that time), you will see that the whole point was to guide the Anthroposophical Movement in this direction—to awaken once more the faculty to read not only in the Book of Revelation, in which I said that Jacob Boehme was still reading, but in the Book of Nature. The blundering, inadequate, and frequently repulsive attempts of modern natural science must be transmuted by a spiritual world-conception, till there arise from them a true reading of the Book of Nature. I think even this expression, ‘the Book of Nature,’ is to be found at the end of my book Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Spiritual Life. From the very beginning, the Anthroposophical Movement had this ‘Shibboleth.’ From the very beginning it was an appeal to those who should now listen to the voice of their own karma, and hear more or less dimly and subconsciously the call: ‘Behold, my karma is somehow moved and taken hold of by this Michael message which is sounding forth into the world. I, through my own karma, have to do with this.’

There are the human beings after all, who have been always there. They are always there. They have come, and they will come ever and again. There are those who are prepared in some sense to depart from the world and come together in this which is now called the Anthroposophical Society. As to the sense in which this ‘departure from the world’ is to be conceived—whether it be more or less real, or outwardly formal or the like—that is another matter. For the individual souls it is a kind of departure—a going away from the world and into something different from the world in which they have grown up. All manner of karmic experiences come to the individual, each in his own way. The one will have this or that to undergo through the fact that he must tear himself loose from old connections and unite with those who are seeking to cultivate the message of Michael. There are some who feel this union with the mission of Michael as a kind of salvation. There are others who feel it in a different way, finding themselves in this position: ‘I am drawn to Michael on the one hand and to Ahrimanism on the other. I cannot choose. Through my life I stand in the midst of these things.’ There are some whose inner courage tears them away, albeit they still preserve the outward connections. There are some who still find the outer connections easily. And this perhaps is best for the present condition of the Anthroposophical Society. But in every case, those human beings who are within the Anthroposophical Movement stand face to face with others who are not in it, including some with whom they are deeply, karmically connected from former earthly lives. Here we can look into the strangest of karmic threads.

My dear friends, we shall only be able to understand these karmic threads if we remember all the preceding conditions that we have now set forth. We shall only understand them when we have really seen how the souls who today, out of their unconscious Being, feel impelled to the Anthroposophical Movement, have undergone experiences together. For they have undergone much together in former lives on earth. Moreover the great majority of them belonged to the hosts who heard the Michael message in the super-sensible in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, and who took part at the beginning of the 19th century in the great Imaginative ceremony of which I have here spoken. Thus we behold a mighty Cosmic and Tellurian call, addressed to the deep karmic relationship of the members of the Anthroposophical Society. We heard last Monday, how this call will continue throughout the 20th century, and how the culmination will come at the end of this century. Of these things, my dear friends, I will speak again next Sunday.

• 1. Mysticism and Modern Thought. Anthroposophical Publishing Co.

It is significant that the Christian calendar places the festival of Adam and Eve on 24 December, the festival of the birth of Christ Jesus in the night between 24 and 25 December. In the Christian view, the beginning of the world, that is, the beginning of our immediate earthly existence, and the greatest event of earthly existence, that event which gives meaning to earthly evolution, are thus brought together. They are brought together for the reason that it is to be indicated through this how the way man's relationship to the spiritual universe has undergone such a significant change through the entrance of the Mystery of Golgotha that everything that preceded it, while important for the understanding of this mystery itself, can be left out of consideration for the time being for the immediate Christian consciousness with regard to the reception of the impulses of the will.

We are aware that the greatest turning-point in the evolution of earthly existence occurred through the Mystery of Golgotha. It stands before the soul of him who understands that through his understanding the meaning of earthly evolution is revealed. One can say: If one looks at the way in which the ancients related to world wisdom as an impulse for man himself in the time before the Christ entered into the development of mankind on earth, and compares this behavior of the pre-Christian time with the attitude of the Christian consciousness towards world wisdom as an impulse for human activity, one is given, when one is then in a position to develop the corresponding thought, a deeply impressive meaning.

One need only recall a figure – which one is reminded of when the feast occurs that is, so to speak, under the motto: “Et incarnatus est de spiritu sancto ex Maria virgine” – the image of the virgin Pallas Athena, the goddess of wisdom in ancient Greece, who is the daughter of Zeus herself, and the goddess who is considered the goddess of prudence. Zeus, the lord of lightning, of illuminating light, of the light that works in earthly existence, begets with Prudence the virgin Pallas Athena, the guardian of human wisdom before the mystery of Golgotha.

There is a deep meaning in the poetic invention of this figure of the virgin Pallas Athena. As the goddess of wisdom, she herself is a virgin. What does this actually mean in the higher sense? What did the Greek mystery guides mean when they spoke of the virgin Pallas Athena? They meant the wisdom through which man works in the historical context of the world. This wisdom was born out of what is not the world itself, but a reflection of the world, in the fourth period of time into which the development of Greek culture had just entered. Let us grasp this well: a reflection of the world, Maya. In the previous periods, the wisdom of the mystery priests was not presented as a virgin power because, as human wisdom, it was always fertilized by the ancient atavistic power of clairvoyance in the first, second, and third post-Atlantic periods. It was only in the fourth post-Atlantean period that the possibility arose of also knowing something from mere observation of what is not driven by those forces that underlie atavistic clairvoyance, by the affects, by the passions, by all that glows as fire in the human being, but by the virgin, by atavistic clairvoyance unfertilized mirror image of the world. The wisdom that is meant when its representative is depicted comes from Maja: Pallas Athena.

Pallas Athena is also a Maja, a Maria; but Pallas Athena is the Maja who still reflects the wisdom out of herself, who allows the wisdom to reveal itself to the human being out of herself. The great progress consists in the fact that this same Maja, this same Maria, is fertilized by the Cosmos, and a new wisdom is now born. Pallas Athene was the representative of wisdom. The Christ impulse is the son of Maja, of Maria, of the virgin representative of wisdom, and of the cosmic-divine, the cosmic-intelligent world power. Therefore, the ancient wisdom, as represented by Pallas Athena, was well suited to dissect and comprehend the mineral world up to the plant world, but not yet suited to grasp the human being himself, to comprehend the human being himself in his personality.

If one wanted to understand the human being in his personality in those days, one could do so in the mysteries, but one then had to attain atavistic clairvoyance in the mysteries. What is meant by Pallas Athene, the virgin representative of wisdom, denotes a beginning that was suitable as such for understanding the periphery of the earthly world. But only through the entrance of the Mystery of Golgotha, only through the union of the power of divine, intelligent love with the power of Maya, with the reflection of the world, is the human evolution confronted with the God of Man, the God who is no longer attainable only by transcending the physical plane, but the God who, in His essential being, can be found on the physical plane itself. The progress in the evolution of humanity that is meant by the Christmas mystery presents itself to the human soul when one composes the right legend of Pallas Athena with all that can be grasped in true form about the nature of the virgin Maja, from whom the Christ impulse for the evolution of the earth emerges.

In connection with such insights into human events, with such demands on human volition as we have discussed in order to grasp the Christmas mystery, it befits our very serious time – this time, for which it is so urgently needed – to gain insights that lie within the meaning of the thirty-three-year orbit, of which we spoke yesterday. Just as the ancients tried to unravel the stars and determine from their constellations what they wanted to do here on earth, so man should realize that he must now enter an age that can only bring hardship and misery and misfortune to mankind on earth if they do not decide to read the constellations of the stars of time in the development of humanity. With the achievements of which the materialistic age is so proud, nothing more will be attained in earthly existence in the future than what has already been achieved in this catastrophic time. Humanity must find the courage to make such a vow to its own soul as a sacred Christmas vow: to turn its gaze to the spiritual truths that are emerging in our time. Our time must find the courage to look unflinchingly, undaunted by weakness, into what is. Our humanity must acquire a new sense of truth if it is to follow again in the footsteps of the One Whose birth it celebrates at Christmas, but Who is not understood if His words are not grasped in sufficient depth: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”

In such a solemn time, it is not enough merely to desire to give soothing speeches about the festival of peace, as it is most certainly done in these times from many pulpits; in such a solemn time, it is necessary to grasp the thought of how little creativity there actually is in our time. For the great things that seek to enter it can only be served if people develop creativity in their own souls. Consider this: the Mystery of Golgotha has entered the development of humanity at the beginning of our era; but could it not have passed without a trace if the people of that time had not had the creative power in their own souls to grasp it, to conceptualize it, to imagine it, to talk about it at all? Externally, a personality was born in an unknown province of the Roman Empire, of whom the Gospels speak. The people of that time had the creative power to grasp what lived in this personality. That is what it takes when the greatest divine powers unite with human events: that people can muster the will to creative power within themselves. That is why the question should be raised yesterday: In what way was this 19th century, this haughty 19th, 20th century, able to develop creative power to understand what has now been recognized by humanity for centuries as the content of the idea of redemption?

Let us add – we could cite hundreds and thousands of examples – some voices from this nineteenth century, to show how they tried to speak about Jesus Christ. I said I wanted to quote the best, most profound people, to show what was in their souls. It is not so important to me to answer the question: What influence do people have like those whose voices about the Christ Jesus I have quoted to you? – but rather to show how time affects the best. For these are the ideas that dominate the minds of even the most honest. The others talk about Christ Jesus, but without really coming close to the impulse of truth in their own intuitive perception. Let us add something more.

In the 19th century, when people began to develop free-thinking ideas, one of those who tried to absorb these new ideas in a morbidly profound way was Karl Gutzkow. In his book “Wally, the Doubting Thomas,” he included more or less the ideas that occurred to him about Christ Jesus:

An even more characteristic voice, because a voice that has emerged from the science of the soul in our time, is the following. It is a summary of the content of the book “Jesus. A Comparative Psychopathological Study” by Emil Rasmussen, a Danish book. The content can be summarized in the following way:

"Neither the apostles nor the three synoptic gospels regarded Jesus as God. He himself considered himself to be the ‘Son of Man’ (Daniel VII, 13) announced and, without ever claiming to be the Messiah, thought he was fulfilling a part of the prophecies that were particularly important to him. The Nazarene belongs to the category of prophets. The religious heroes or proclaimers, alias prophets, are aberrations from the normal type of the race. For their inner experiences or experiences can only be compared in degree and kind with the paroxysms of the epileptic or hystero-epileptic. The “men of God” present a picture of illness that the psychiatrist can diagnose precisely as epileptic mental illness; the stigmata are: hallucinations or visual illusions, fits of rage, convulsive merriment, absence of mind (absence), stupor, twilight state or dream-like subconscious, speech disorders, delirium, melancholy, sudden changes of mood , exaggerated religiosity, the idea of suffering for others and of having to reform the world, megalomania, obsessive ideas, the delusion of romantic family trees, vagabond-like restlessness, abnormal sex life, whether on the side of debauchery or asceticism. A series of outstanding religious seers, both ancient and modern, such as Ezekiel, Paul, Muhammad, Sören Kierkegaard and so on, can be used to test the example, whereby common characteristics can be identified, such as the terrible terrible threats and curses, the manifold forms and disguises of the sense of cruelty, the paroxysms of rage, the imagined suffering for humanity, asceticism, thoughts of resurrection and much more.

All these symptoms observed in ancient and modern prophets are also displayed by Jesus: He has an unparalleled experience of fear, falls into a rage when exorcising the temple, suffers from hallucinations, reveals an excessive sense of self in his contradictory character and an abnormal life of the senses, indulges in the delusion that he is suffering for humanity and can atone for it, and through his violence, unsteadiness and the increasing narrowing of his mind, which no longer absorbs and processes new ideas, he provides new confirmation of his elective affinity with the prophetic type, which has remained the same at all times and under all skies. His ethics, which are based on hating one's family, living on charity and in the all-blissful faith, have not been accepted by humanity. If one understands genius to mean a creator, then one must also give up this position with regard to Jesus, since, as scientific research has established, he is only an imitator in the content and form of his teaching. His promise, namely his return, which earned him world domination, has failed completely. Jesus was a person worthy of deep sorrow, who, in his tragic, magnificent fate, deserves our heartfelt compassion.

There could be hundreds, thousands of such voices, and the fact that they can be raised in this way is not the essential point. The essential point is something quite different, namely that people who speak in this way are speaking truly and correctly in terms of present-day science, and that from the point of view of present-day science, one cannot speak differently if one is honest and sincere. The question that arises is: Do you have enough courage and willpower to hold up this mirror to science, which only spiritual science can hold up? - Those cowardly compromises, which are made over and over again and again every day a hundredfold between materialistic science and between religious traditions, these are the dishonest ones, these are the sins against what people claim to celebrate in the Christmas mystery and in the Easter mystery. That is what it is about.

There is an either/or in the present: either a commitment to spiritual life or the continuation of the life that led to the events of 1914/17 and so on. Each person must allow what underlies this to arise in their heart as their own realization of Christ, and also allow the will to want, the impulse for the courage not to seek some kind of salvation in partial compromises, but to go straight the way that must be gone: the way that must be shown through the realization of the spiritual life of humanity. Concrete impulses that can be linked to something like the Christmas mystery must be connected with this will.

What has been said about the thirty-three-year cycle of events – just as the realization that under certain conditions oxygen and hydrogen combine and that water cannot be recognized other than through electrolysis , which chemically examines the behavior of oxygen and hydrogen, so should the awareness come that one can only find social laws if one is able to see through such constellations in the course of time. To think into the day, to see only what is immediately around us, that is what humanity has gradually come to regard as salutary in the last four centuries. But to recognize the process of becoming in such a way that one says to oneself: What is happening now will arise again after thirty-three years, it is my responsibility to do the present thing under the responsibility that wells up out of this idea — that is what must be demanded in the future by those who want to intervene in life from any point of view of life.

Our time should completely dispense with the old phrases of Christmas. The Romans, who had the courage to make a god of war - Janus - only close the Temple of Janus when there was peace. It was closed only twice in the time of Numa Pompilius, under whose reign it was completely closed, for the entire 724 years until the time of Emperor Augustus. But the Romans had the courage to distinguish between war and peace in their service for one of the most important gods. One wonders whether today's world would have the same courage to perhaps close the places of peace, the places that were supposed to serve peace when the whole world is engulfed in war? One would only be able to speak of courage if there were so much creativity in the present that one could see a real difference at the places where peace is talked about, if this happens in such times as the present ones.

It is very instructive to look back in the sense of the thirty-three-year cycle: the catastrophic events that we are facing today began in 1914. I have already mentioned some events that are connected with the three- to four-year catastrophic events following the thirty-three-year cycle. Many others could be mentioned. One need only think that thirty-three years before 1914, that is, in 1881, Alexander II came to power in St. Petersburg, the tsar under whom the persecutions began in the Baltic provinces, the tsar who is the incarnation of so much European misfortune. One could also look at more internal events, I do not mean “internal” in a spiritual sense. If you study the role that Gambetta played in 1881 during his two-month presidency at the time, you will find in it the signature of what was preparing at the moment when these catastrophic events broke out and what, as I have said here before, is now in the mood between northern and southern Russia, in the unleashing of the Russian-Ukrainian enmity, a symptom that shines much more meaningfully when one takes the events that are being prepared than all the things that people today, in their complacency, are so willing to accept as important events.

Much more could be said in this way. The question can be raised: How should a person, when he is in an important position, go about arriving at such conclusions that can bear fruit thirty-three years later? He should only try to understand the events of the past thirty-three years under the influence of such an idea, and out of the true understanding will arise what he has to do in the present: then it will be able to arise in a worthy way in thirty-three years. That such a thing is in vain should only be asserted when it has happened. But where has it happened? Where in the exoteric life of today is world evolution considered in accordance with its inner laws? Official representatives of what is often called Christianity today are always objecting, especially in contrast to spiritual science oriented towards anthroposophy, that revelations from the spiritual world were possible in the time of Christ, but that the “fatal Gnosis” must not be allowed to resurface. Such things must not be interpreted with leniency. That these people mean well is something that unfortunately all too often crops up again and again as a fateful saying, even in our circles. It is a matter of really facing up to the truth. And above all we must have the will and the courage to take a stand against everything that is asserted today out of weakness against spiritual science.

There is one characteristic of spiritual science that is particularly not loved. It brings a concrete, real spiritual factual material, and speaks of the spiritual worlds as of real spiritual factual material. How often do we hear the words: Yes, that is difficult to understand, it is hard to find one's way into it. Such talk can still be understood by someone who, under the influence of the present school system, has not been able to learn how to think. However, such talk must be incomprehensible to those who claim to be taken seriously scientifically. Admittedly, something has gradually become scientific that makes the smallest possible demands on human thinking. Today, you can be a graduate with all kinds of diplomas and still be unable to grasp the simplest things with your mind, or tire quickly when you really need to think. People still prefer watered-down talk about all kinds of general spiritual things, pan-idealism and all that stuff. That relieves one of the effort of having to approach concrete spiritual facts. However, spiritual science must make demands on those who come to it. The good will must be there to use a little more of one's spirit than is necessary to further dilute general phrases about Panidealism and the like with one's watered-down heartfelt feelings. It is no longer time to revel in all kinds of “pan” and in all kinds of general, sentimental phrases. Today it is time to seriously face the concrete spiritual facts. Today it is time to muster the will to really think. Therefore, words must be spoken at the beginning of these Christmas celebrations that also sound serious in our time. For we will connect our souls all the more with what has entered into the evolution of the earth as the Christ impulse, the more we have the will to do so in a serious, dignified and urgent way.

For thousands of years, mankind has regarded space as that which is to be worshipped, the content of space, not the space of the earth, the space of heaven. It directed its gaze up to the constellations of the stars, to read in the stars what was to happen here on earth. It knew, this humanity: the dead read and must read in the stars, the dead must participate in earthly events. - So man must also learn to read that writing, which is the writing that the dead must read continuously. What happens here on earth, it was seen in these ancient times before the Mystery of Golgotha, that it was said: Up there, there are the Sun, Moon and Aries; or Sun, Moon and Taurus; or Sun, Moon and Gemini; or Gemini and Venus or the like, in such a constellation. It is a sign that certain impulses are coming in from the cosmos. When these impulses are present, then this or that must be done, because whatever happens here happens in time, and time delivers the Maya, time delivers the course of the great deception. In this sense, this deception only applied until the Mystery of Golgotha. Out of this Maja the Christ Impulse was born, as I explained at the beginning, out of the virgin Maja, that which is no longer fertilized by old atavistic clairvoyance, that which directly confronts the world powers untouched by the earth.

The veneration of that which passes in time, the recognition of that which passes in time, becomes a duty, just as in ancient times it was considered a duty to see the constellations in space. The old magician, whose representative appeared before the babe in the manger, looked up at the gold of the heavens, at the stars, and he said to himself: “As the stars are arranged, so it is written, and therein is to be read what must come to pass here on earth; for what is written in the stars is the result of the past. In the gold of the stars rests what the Ancient of Days, with his hosts, has written throughout the past, that it may come to pass in the present. The present has to carry out what can be seen in the gold of the stars; the present, which passes away at the moment it arises. The present is the continually flaming fire, represented by the incense; the present in the imagination of the incense. And the future rests in the present, fertilized by the past, under the imagination of myrrh.

The secrets of the ancient magicians were how the past, present and future are connected. But in this past, present and future they saw the veil of Maya, the veil of Pallas Athena herself, which only reflected the constellations of the stars. And the three magi who appeared before the manger understood that out of the content of time, out of that which is the mirror image of the constellation of space, out of the Maya of time, a new thing must develop, to which one must add past, present and future: gold, frankincense and myrrh. Insight into the Divine-Spiritual: gold; sacrificial service, human virtue: incense; the connection of the human soul with the Eternal, the immortal: myrrh.

So enormous is the turning point that lies between the time before the Mystery of Golgotha and the time after it, that one can say that the Holiest of Holies, which lay before, descended, united in love with Maja and gave birth to the impulse that will continue to carry the evolution of the earth: the Christ Jesus. To understand Christ Jesus – how the divine-cosmic love conceived Christ in the womb of Maya – means to understand a world-God who abolishes all those differentiations that must necessarily arise from looking up at mere spatial constellations. The star constellation is different for one spot on earth than for another. The old legends also depict how the initiated heroes move around, how the most diverse regions of the earth have the most diverse views of the gods. Thus, what originates in space as worthy of worship passes into time. Then time is the same for all human children of the earth, then a universal God will arise, a God to whom no narrower community has the right to claim him for itself, no human community may say for its interests that it does so in his name, but only the community of all people.

These are the thoughts with which we can turn our soul to grasp the meaning of the saying “Et incarnatus est de spiritu sancto ex Maria virgine”: “And was incarnated by the Holy Spirit out of the Virgin Mary”. “ The voices of those who live in the physical body are joined by the voices of those who, in these times, pass through the gate of death, who know how the constellations of time are connected in the modern sense, just as the constellations of space are connected in the ancient sense.

In addition to the many things that could be said to build a bridge to the souls that live between death and a new birth, this too should be added, for in those thoughts that are linked to the Mystery of Golgotha, the so-called living and the so-called dead understand each other best. For the Christ has truly descended from heaven to earth and must be sought on earth ever since. Here man gets to know his secret in the fleshly body, just as the Christ Himself sought His mission on earth in the fleshly body. The dead person looks down from the spiritual realm on what he has experienced here as the basis for his impulses for the Mystery of Golgotha. Souls who live here on the physical plane and souls who live on the spiritual plane understand each other best in all that is connected with the Mystery of Golgotha. But it is not only what this mystery of Golgotha brings up at every opportunity that is linked to the mystery of Golgotha, but also everything that is researched in the sense of the word: “I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” He, whose birth we celebrate in the splendor of Christmas candles, is truly He who should not reveal Himself only once, and then only to serve as a convenient basis for those who do not want to learn anything new and rejects everything new, but He who may be celebrated alone under the glow of the Christmas candles, is He who wanted to reveal Himself to people in the entire time that follows the Mystery of Golgotha.

If, in this time, enough people make the decision to understand Christ Jesus under the signs that appear so meaningfully on the spiritual horizon today, then this is a Christmas thought, a thought that consecrates the night and will resurrect in a good way after thirty-three years, that will live as the power of humanity in the time from today until his resurrection. Let us take strong, courageous, and wisdom-filled Christmas thoughts and imbue ourselves with them for this Christmas, then we will live through it in a dignified way.

That is what I would like to convey to your souls as a Christmas greeting today. And I know that this Christmas greeting is in line with the impulse that one may truly and worthily celebrate only under the sign of the Christmas lights.