The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Report in the “Mitteilungen für die Mitglieder der Deutschen Sektion der Theosophischen Gesellschaft (Hauptquartier Adyar), herausgegeben von Mathilde Scholl”, No. 10/1910

After the opening of the eighth General Assembly of the German Section of the Theosophical Society by the General Secretary Dr. Rudolf Steiner, the first item on the agenda was the determination of the voting ratio and, in connection with this, the presentation of the delegates of the individual branches.

Fräulein von Sivers read out the number of members of the various branches and then the number of delegates was determined.

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The official welcoming address to the assembly by the chairman, Dr. Rudolf Steiner, was followed by the following opening speech, the essential content of which is reproduced here:

"My dear Theosophical friends!

Just as I was able to point out at last year's general assembly that we are entering the seventh year of the existence of our German Section, we can say at the opening of this year's assembly that we have now completed the seventh year of our existence as the German Section. On this occasion, it may be assumed from the outset that the Theosophists have a feeling for what is called the cyclical development of events. Accordingly, our gathering today, after the first seven-year cycle has ended, signifies a special kind of celebration and consecration. On such an occasion, it may perhaps happen that not only what you may take for granted, namely that you are warmly welcomed by the Secretary General, but it is probably appropriate at the end of our seventh year to point out many other things. Truly, such a seven-year cycle, as it has just expired, can teach us many things. It will therefore not be superfluous to take this opportunity to point out some of the lessons that events have taught us.

Those of you who have participated in the Theosophical life in our German Section in various places will have noticed that this life has undergone an evolution and experienced a transformation. Those who can do so, through their long membership, may remember the way we started the Theosophical Society here in Germany seven years ago. Those who have followed different lecture cycles and have drawn comparisons between how we could speak in the last cycles and how we had to speak at the beginning of the movement will notice a big difference. It was necessary to ascend gradually from the contemplation of lower spheres of knowledge to higher ones. Years ago, one had to speak more abstractly and schematically than is the case now. The rudiments of theosophy had to be presented in such a way that everyone could understand them. Now, however, we can also acquire such intimate teachings as those presented to us in Munich or Basel a few months ago. At the beginning of the movement, many members would have still regarded what was said there as wild fantasy. So there must have been a significant change, which everyone is able to notice. This is a thoroughly justified thing; because the theosophical movement would not progress if it could not grow not only in number but also in inner content. This fact must make it clear to us that the Theosophical movement is not something that is based on a dogmatic book or a doctrine that is available only once, but is something that, like an organism, is constantly adding new members. But we can also look back on a certain fertility of the movement. What can be said about this can be seen from certain figures that relate to our working conditions. I have noted the number of members who do direct work, through lectures and so on, and this number has risen to twenty, and that includes only those members who are already expanding their activities to different locations. In addition to this, there is the extensive and important work in the individual lodges. Hardly any of the twenty collaborators was already active through oral lectures seven years ago. This shows that we have achieved something, that the Theosophical movement has been fruitful since its inception. But this has also happened in many other directions. For example, we have been able to expand our activities by setting up the so-called art halls. Mr. Wagner will probably tell us something about this new institution, as far as it concerns Berlin. These events are intended to present art imbued with theosophical ideas to people who are still distant from theosophy. Myths and legends are told, and those who come from the small life of everyday life are given a brief outline of the theosophical teachings in the most popular form, and so on. Without doubt, this kind of laborious, spiritual work can be imitated and further developed. It is very gratifying when ordinary people come in from the street to absorb the basic principles of Theosophy with joy. This is also a proper way of spreading the theosophical work, but it must be done in a thoroughly unpretentious way. If it were done in a pretentious way, it would not be fruitful. But as it is, it is a truly practical institution. The point is that what is to be done in the spirit of the present really does happen.

Finally, it was also possible to realize an intention in which one can really feel the essence of what lies in a seven-year cycle. Seven years ago, I gave a lecture in Berlin about Schur's drama The Children of Lucifer. At that time the idea of a later performance was already in the background of this lecture. Now, in the seventh year of our existence, this idea could be realized in Munich. Thus, after seven years, a movement like the theosophical one returns to its beginning, as it were. Then, under certain circumstances, what had once been conceived as a mere intention can be realized. But it takes patience to allow such intentions to mature. It would have been premature to realize the idea of a performance of the aforementioned drama before now. These are the kinds of things that must pass through our souls when we experience the sacred moment of the completion of a seven-year cycle. These are, of course, only the bright sides of development, from which we can learn that, if they really prove to be bright sides, they should be continued in a calm manner. But much more can be learned from the dark sides. The growth in the number of members of the Society is very easily associated with a misunderstanding of the innermost nerve of the forces that are to play within the movement. The members themselves have the necessary task of ensuring that misunderstandings do not arise too strongly within the Theosophical Society, and that, on the other hand, the spiritual research is exposed to as few misunderstandings as possible in the world. We truly have a sacred spiritual treasure to guard, which can very easily be misunderstood; the symptoms of such misunderstandings are evident everywhere. For example, an article appeared recently in a Berlin morning newspaper that must have seemed extremely boring and banal to the true Theosophist, in which occultism is presented as encompassing areas such as somnambulism, clairvoyance, thought transfer and so on. The writer of this article is indeed a famous man within the journalistic world, but basically he knows as little about occultism as a bookbinder knows about the content of the books he binds. But that man had to speak as one would speak when considering what is today called Theosophy or occultism in public. The task of the Theosophical movement is to appeal, in the first instance, not to ill-informed humanity, but to the better-informed human heart and human reason. But to do that, the theosophist must gradually acquire the right tact. The man who wrote the article said that he had met a nanny in a family who took the children to the zoo every day and occasionally met a lady there who began telling her about the nature and significance of the astral body, and eventually convinced this servant girl completely. I would not dream of believing that this could happen to a member of the Theosophical Society, for Theosophists are gradually acquiring a sense of tact in such matters. It is also completely improper to propagandize for Theosophy in this way; anyone who does so will cause the most intense harm to the Theosophical movement. It is a different matter if Theosophy is systematically introduced to people like the housemaid in the sitting room. If a naive person is presented with Theosophical facts in such a fragmentary way, it will only confuse him; it may even do great harm to his soul.

This also leads us to speak in an even more serious way about a point that is already important today, but will become even more so in the future. We will also learn a great deal from this! This point concerns the relationship between those who teach and work within society and those who want to learn. We are in a difficult place here. It can easily happen that precisely through such a movement, what is called blind faith, faith based on mere authority, gets out of hand. It is in this direction that sins take the greatest revenge. Let us take this opportunity to refer to a saying of Lessing. He found that all the people around him sang the highest praises of Klopstock. But when he delved into what people really knew about Klopstock, it turned out that they had hardly read him. In Theosophy, understanding is the only thing that matters. Those who want to understand within this from the very source of spiritual life will probably grasp Lessing's word, somewhat modified: “We want to be praised less, but understood more diligently.” This saying should be deeply engraved in our hearts as a salutary lesson that has emerged in recent years. We have seen how a truly estimable teacher in the theosophical field has received undivided praise; but we have also had to experience how a fierce opposition to her has gradually emerged, admittedly outside the German Section. If one were to examine the matter, one would find that the following applies here: There were many who in the past admired and marveled at the leading personality of the Theosophical Society. If these admirers had more often written in their hearts: We want to understand less than admire, the subsequent opposition would not have asserted itself. It is not outward worship and admiration that we should show to the Teachers, but we should strive for their understanding. Those who are well versed in true occultism know how pernicious uncomprehending admiration can be. They will say to themselves: if someone makes an effort not just to admire and venerate a personality, but to make that personality's cause their own, and to embrace that cause not just for the sake of the personality it represents, but for its own sake, then they are on the right path. Mere personal admiration can easily turn into its opposite. This is where the true reasons for the change of so many attitudes within the Theosophical movement to their opposite are to be found. You would do better to always listen to the words of those who are truly working in the spirit of our movement, then it will also become clear to you that they actually want to be understood rather than admired. But there is an even more serious side to this! Those who begin to hear the teachings of Theosophy from this or that source are not immediately able to understand everything. This understanding does not require clairvoyance, but rather the mere application of sound reason. Only those who have the will to do so, who apply their reason to the matter, will understand. Nothing has been said on my part, no matter how lofty the heights of spiritual science it may come from, that cannot be grasped or at least examined with reason, if it is applied in an all-round and unbiased enough manner. We must realize that not everyone can be a spiritual scientist, but what has been communicated must in all cases be able to be tested in a reasonable way. Admittedly, certain things often make such a test difficult, for example the high truths of the Gospel of Luke; but even here we can see an example of how it can be done. First of all, what has been investigated by the clairvoyant is taken as a mere communication. This information, without any documentary evidence, is then checked against the available documents, in our case the Gospel of Luke, because the writer of this gospel has said the same thing in his own way as is revealed by the direct research. This is only an approximate verification for the time being, but with simpler things it can become more accurate. Thus we will see that over time the testimonies will multiply. The doctrine of reincarnation and karma should be proved in life; for only in this way can we properly introduce it to a larger public. When the reproach is made that what the spiritual researcher says cannot be accepted otherwise than on mere authority, such a principle is quite wrong, and one should not let it arise at all, but rather say to oneself: I will gather up all my reason and test what is communicated with it in life. So, for example, we should go and study what has been said about Zarathustra, what is given to us by spiritual research as broad guidelines, and compare it with what history and life have to say about it. I am quite calm with those who really take the whole of history to verify what has been said. Newly discovered facts can only provide new evidence. Even what was said yesterday as a brief sketch about anthroposophy can only be confirmed by physiology, biology and so on. The more one uses such sciences in the right way, the stronger the evidence will be. Apparent contradictions should be resolved, for they are only contradictions if the investigation is inaccurate. This principle has been particularly adhered to in my forthcoming book, Occult Science.

Nothing is more harmful than when a teacher is shown unfounded admiration. The blind believer does himself harm by not developing; but even more harm does he do to the one in whom he blindly believes, whom he blindly admires. Everything that is shown as blind admiration for the spiritual researcher takes itself out like a drag shoe for the spiritual researcher, whereas the teacher has to fight against it in the most terrible way. There is nothing he has to fight against more than precisely such blind admiration, through which stones are literally thrown in his way. This should be entrusted to you as a secret after the seventh year! Those who want to test you are willing students with whom you can make progress. The others, however, constantly throw obstacles in your way, which you have to defend yourself against.

They can only be overcome if the teacher is absolutely honest. Blind admiration is the most dangerous pitfall in Theosophy. The theosophist must educate himself to be honest and strict with himself. Such things must be considered very seriously. The teachers must, of course, to some extent accept what has been characterized here, for they are able to examine everything that is brought to them. Personal followers will always exist; but they should not affect the teacher at all. He must strengthen himself against them. Blind followers are his tempters and seducers.

This way of thinking must gradually become a guiding principle in the Theosophical Society. We must come to the conviction that we are representing a sacred cause. Only under this principle will we make progress. No one need be deterred from wanting to teach on a larger or smaller scale if such a principle is recognized by them.

This is something we should learn from our great experiences. On the one hand, we should be impartial and unprejudiced people; on the other hand, however, we should exercise the utmost care in absorbing what is given to us. The past seven years have taught us this.

This is not to say, however, that everyone should hold back from teaching until they have verified something themselves. We must always make a strict distinction between what can be grasped through reason alone, and what can only be grasped later through further development. It is bad when we simply accept things on the basis of authority for the sake of convenience. Why do so many mediums become frauds? They are not solely to blame for this, but so are the blind listeners and believers. One thing is indispensable for anyone who studies occult phenomena, namely, a constantly deepening inwardness of one's own self. The more blind faith, which arises only from convenience, is hurled at a medium, for example, the more likely it is that the medium will become a fraud. It cannot be emphasized enough

strongly enough emphasize how important it is in this field to set the right path as an ideal."

With this the chairman concluded his opening speech and then gave a short summary of the external work of the past few years, his various visits to lodges, his various travels, especially to Austria. On this occasion, he mentioned a beautiful experience that is particularly symptomatic of the character of the theosophical movement. He recalled a public lecture in Prague, where members of both the Czech and German nationalities were present and sat together in the most wonderful harmony. At the end, an old gentleman told the lecturer that what Theosophy had achieved here would otherwise have been impossible in Prague. But Theosophy was able to unite those who were otherwise hostile to each other so harmoniously on that beautiful evening.

The journey then continued via Vienna to Klagenfurt. In Vienna, too, the work proceeded in the most peaceful manner. And that was in the days when the Italian and German students were fighting, with shots being fired; it was also the time when the fierce disputes between Germans and Czechs were taking place. From this it can be seen that Theosophy has a mission, namely to bring harmony, peace and unity to people. Through Theosophy, such a thing can be achieved.

Then reference was made to the remarkable fact that seven lecture cycles have taken place in the past year: In Rome, Düsseldorf, Kristiania, Budapest, Kassel, Munich and Basel. Furthermore, those members who have repeatedly worked in a wide variety of places were gratefully remembered; but the many others, whose names cannot all be mentioned, may accept as thanks the success that their work has had within the Theosophical Society, and draw from it inspiration for further hard work. The chairman also emphasized the Budapest Congress as an important external event and mentioned that at this congress he was awarded the Grand Subba Row Medal by the Adyar headquarters for the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, which was available in English translation. This is a sign that there can also be harmony between the various teachers of Theosophy when independence prevails. Besant and Steiner are apparently getting along quite well, even though they are going different ways. It was necessary to unite the old stream of the Theosophical movement with a new current, to bring in new life blood from a certain direction. Nothing fruitful will come from empty talk of harmony. Those who are there as teachers are working together on the one great work, each in his own way.

The founding of a “Philosophical-Theosophical Publishing House” was also mentioned, which is under the direction of Miss Mücke and in which an outline of anthroposophy is also to appear from time to time.

In a very solemn manner, the Secretary General then named those of our dear members who had left the physical plane during the year, and in each case gave a brief description of the deceased's relationship to Theosophy, especially the three ladies from Stuttgart who had passed away, Mrs. Lina Schwarz, Mrs. Cohen and Mrs. Aldinger.

“Even in such a case,” the chairman continued, “we can place ourselves in the soul of the deceased, in particular, to understand the importance of what Theosophy can offer us. We do not want to try to console the bereaved of our dear friends who have passed away with banal phrases, but we want to point out that although we are only at the beginning of our movement, the overall karma of it must gradually come to that which should be achieved in the individual karma. Theosophists must ultimately feel obliged to actively support each other in certain cases. In this way the popular phrase of general philanthropy is replaced by a true understanding of individual real love for one's neighbor. If philanthropy does not address individual cases and become active there, it remains a mere phrase. Such thoughts must arise in us when we see from time to time this or that of our dear members leave the physical plan."

After these words of the Chairman, Mr. Bedrnicek from Prague took the floor on behalf of the Prague Section to express his warmest thanks to the Secretary General for his efforts on behalf of the Prague Lodge before the General Assembly.

Mr. Günther Wagner, on behalf of the Besant branch, proposed that the reading of the minutes of the last General Assembly be dispensed with, since anyone could have sufficiently informed themselves about their content in the printed “Mitteilungen”. The motion that the minutes of the last General Assembly not be read was unanimously approved, and the minutes were declared approved.

A report on membership trends is given by Miss von Sivers, according to the most recent lists:

The current number of branches is 44, compared to 37 in the previous year, and one center. Seven newly established branches can be named: the Wroclaw branch, the Cusanus branch in Koblenz, the Essen branch; the Paulus branch in Mulhouse; the Novalis branch in Strasbourg; the Dante branch in Dresden; the Goethe branch in Munich.

Mr. Seiler presents the cash report with the annual accounts and balance sheet:
According to this, the total income was 5817.69 marks
and the total expenditure was 5499.53 marks
. This leaves a surplus of 318.16 marks
, to which bank deposits of 2020.45 marks
338 Marks, which results in total assets of 2676.61 Marks.

Following on from this, Mr. Ahner from Dresden proposed that a more detailed cash report be published in the “Mitteilungen” in the future, so that outsiders could also gain a more precise insight into income and expenditure.

Mr. Werner proposed that this motion be rejected outright.

Mr. Elkan proposed closing the debate, which was accepted.

The previous motion to publish a more detailed cash report in the “Mitteilungen” was rejected by an overwhelming majority. The report of the cash auditors, Mr. Tessmar and Ms. Motzkus, was then read out. Mr. Tessmar explained that the cash books had been checked in three ways: firstly, in terms of external cleanliness and clarity; secondly, in terms of the arithmetic; and thirdly, in terms of the accuracy of the individual entries. The result of this was that the two auditors were able to report that the cash management was entirely proper. The financial statements also match the accounting records, and the positive cash balance is also factual.

Now the proposals from the plenary session were discussed. No written proposals had been submitted to the chairman.

Pastor Wendt asks for the floor and proposes that the “announcements” occasionally sent to members should no longer be sent in an open cross-band, but in a sealed envelope.

Ms. von Sivers replies that this would cause a huge increase in postage costs. It would be better for individual members to ensure that, through their own carelessness, information does not fall into the wrong hands.

Mr. Ahner suggests sending the various communications as a postal package to the individual board members and having them distribute them.

Mr. Pastor Wendt then withdraws his proposal in favor of this second one.

Mr. van Leer suggests that another type of cruciate ligament might be used.

The chairman now points out that voting is only possible on motions that are compatible with the statutes; however, since the statutes state that the lodges are autonomous, the General Assembly cannot decide what the individual lodges should do. It would have been best, the chairman continues, to have kept the original mode; where everything was sent to the members in sealed envelopes, but the financial aspect made the change necessary due to the rapid growth of the society. “Besides,” he says, “we are not doing anything that should be kept secret, and it is not a big deal if a postman occasionally reads such a message.” Pastor Wendt had based his proposal on such an actual case.

Pastor Wendt proposes to increase membership fees to cover the additional postage costs; but the chairman also replies that the general assembly does not have a quorum to decide on this in accordance with the statutes. This matter was thus settled.

Mr. Oscar Grosheintz proposes to create an address book of all members of the German section, to be sent to the boards of the lodges, if not to all individual members, in order to improve contact among members.

Fräulein von Sivers replies that on a previous occasion it had been decided, for various reasons, to no longer include the names of those entering the “Mitteilungen”.

Mr. Ahner believes that a list of exact addresses would be useful after all, and particularly important for the lodge boards, because it would in every way facilitate communication among the members.

Fräulein von Sivers points out the dangers associated with the creation of such address material, which could then be used for any other purpose. Besides, she says, members could, if they visit a place where there is a Theosophical branch, turn to the local chairman in question.

Dr. Steiner explained that this would be a matter of principle, which, in addition to its advantages, would also have a downside, since there are people who work honestly within the Theosophical Society but who, due to their position or other circumstances, cannot go public with their name as Theosophists.

Such important matters should be left to the well-founded discretion of the leadership of the Section. The Chairman pointed out further problems that would arise from publicly disclosing the addresses of members. He also did not feel called upon to reveal the names of members, as these were sacred to him. After Mr. Ahner had again taken the floor on the same matter, Mr. Kiem finally moved to end the debate, which was accepted.

The previous motion to forward the names and addresses of all members of the German Section to the lodge committees was rejected by a large majority.

No further motions were put forward by the plenary assembly.

The representatives of the branches then reported: Apart from Fräulein von Sivers, who read a report from the Karlsruhe branch on behalf of this lodge, no one wished to speak on this matter.

Mr. Günther Wagner then gave a brief report on the work in the Berlin art room and followed it up with a general consideration of the usefulness of such events within the Theosophical movement. He also encouraged similar attempts to be made elsewhere, as has already happened in Berlin and Munich.

No one requested the floor under the item “Miscellaneous”.

The eighth general assembly of the German Section was declared closed by the chair.

Dornach, 22nd June, 1924

The study of problems connected with karma is by no means easy and discussion of anything that has to do with this subject entails—or ought at any rate to entail—a sense of deep responsibility. Such study is in truth a matter of penetrating into the most profound relationships of existence, for within the sphere of karma, and the course it takes, lie those processes which are the basis of the other phenomena of world-existence, even of the phenomena of nature. Without insight into the course which karma takes in the world and in the evolution of humanity it is quite impossible to understand why external nature is displayed before us in the form in which we behold it.

We have been studying examples of how karma may take its course. These examples were carefully chosen by me in order that now, when we shall try to make the transition to the study of individual karma, we can link on to them. To begin with I will give a general introduction, because friends are present to-day who have not attended the lectures on karma given during the last few weeks and months.

It is very essential to realise the importance and seriousness of everything connected with our Christmas Foundation Meeting. We must be deeply conscious of the fact that this Christmas Meeting constituted an entirely new foundation of the Anthroposophical Society. And there must be no returning to old customs, to old habits of thought in relation to the fundamental changes that have come about in the method of handling the truths of Anthroposophy. The contents of the lectures given here since Christmas should not really be passed on to any audience otherwise than by reading an exact transcript of what has been said here. A free exposition of this particular subject matter is not possible at the present stage. If such a course were proposed I should have to take exception to it. These difficult and weighty matters entail grave consideration of every word and every sentence spoken here, in order that the limits within which the statements are made shall be absolutely clear. If anyone proposes to communicate the subject-matter to an audience in some different way, he must first get in touch with me and enquire whether this would be possible. For in future a united spirit must prevail through the whole Anthroposophical Movement. Otherwise we shall fall into the same mistakes that were made by a number of members who thought it their duty to elaborate anthroposophical truths in terms of modern science, and we have experienced to the full how much harm was done to the Movement by what was then “achieved”—I say the word with inverted commas!

These conditions do not, of course, apply to entirely private communications; but even in such cases the person who makes them must be fully alive to his responsibility. For the moment things are spoken of in the way we are speaking of them here, there begins, in the fullest meaning of the words, a sense of responsibility in regard to communications from the spiritual world. It is difficult to speak of such matters here in view of the limitations of our present organisation which do not, however, admit of any other arrangement. It is difficult to speak about these matters because such lectures ought really to be given only to listeners who attend the series from beginning to end. Understanding will inevitably be difficult for anyone who comes in later. If, however, friends are fully conscious that such difficulties exist, a certain balance can be established. Provided this consciousness is present, then all will be well. But it is not always there ... Nor will it ever be possible to think in the right way about these matters—which are among the most delicate in our Movement—if, as is still the case even since the Christmas Foundation, the same habits persist—jealousies, mutual rancour and the like. A certain attitude of mind, a certain earnestness are absolutely essential for anthroposophical development.

Before I assumed the office of President I spoke of such matters as a teacher. But now I must speak of them in such a way that they actually represent what proceeds from the Executive at the Goetheanum and must come to life within the Anthroposophical Society. I think that the meaning of what I have said will be understood. I have spoken as I have in order that the necessary earnestness may prevail in regard to lectures of the kind now being given.

Karma is something that is in direct operation through the whole course of man's life but lies concealed in the unconscious and subconscious regions of the human soul, behind the outer experiences.

Now a biography should evoke experiences of a very definite kind in the reader if he follows the narrative with genuine, warm-hearted interest. If I were to describe what the reading of a biography can awaken in us, it is this.—Whoever reads a biography with alert attention will find description after description of events and phenomena which are not really in keeping with an uninterrupted flow of narrative. When reading a biography we have before us a picture of the life of a man. But truth to tell it is not only the facts experienced in his waking consciousness that play into his life. Time takes its course thus.—First day, then night; second day, then night; third day, then again night, and so on. But in ordinary consciousness we are aware only of what has happened during the days—unless we write an anthroposophical biography which, in the circumstances of present-day civilisation, is an utter impossibility. Biographies give an account of what has happened during the days, during the hours of waking consciousness of the one whose biography is being written.

But that which actually shapes life, gives it form and implants into it the impulses that are connected with destiny—this is not visible in the events of the days but comes into operation between the days, in the spiritual world, when man himself is in the spiritual world from the time of falling asleep to that of waking. These impulses are at work in life but are not indicated in biographical narratives. To what, then, does a biography amount? In regard to the life of a man it is as if we were to hang Raphael's Sistine Madonna on a wall and paste strips of white paper over certain places so that only portions of the surface remain visible. Anyone looking at the picture would be bound to feel that there must be something more to be seen if it is to be a complete whole.

Everybody who reads a biography dispassionately ought in truth to feel this. In view of the conditions of culture to-day it can be indicated only by means of style, but that should be done. The whole style and manner of writing should indicate that impulses are flowing all the time into the life of a man from impersonal levels of the life of soul and spirit. If that is achieved we shall gradually come to feel that in a biography, karma itself is speaking. It would of course be pure abstraction to narrate some scene in a man's life and then add: This comes from a previous earthly life; at that time it took such and such a form and now it takes this. Such a way of speaking would be sheer abstraction, although a great many people would probably find it highly sensational! Actually, however, it would contain no higher spirituality than is to be found in the conventional biographies written in our time, for everything that is produced in this domain to-day is so much philistinism.

Now it is possible to cultivate the attitude of soul that is needed here by learning, shall I say, to love the diaries or daily notes written by individuals. If such diaries are not read (or written), thoughtlessly ... some diaries, of course, are very humdrum and prosaic, but even so, as he follows the transitions from one day to another, a man who is not a philistine will be aware of feelings and perceptions which lead on to an apprehension of karma, of the connections of destiny.

I have known people—and their number is by no means small—who out of blissful ignorance thought themselves capable of writing a biography of Goethe. But the fact is that the more deeply one looks into the connections of existence, into the karmic connections of existence, the more do the difficulties increase.

Try to recall what I have been telling you here recently, and especially the lecture in which I urged you expressly to understand me with your hearts rather than with your intellects, and when I should speak again, to receive that too with your hearts. Remember the emphasis I laid upon this. For the fact of the matter is that an intellectual approach cannot lead to a real apprehension of karma. Anyone who is not inwardly shaken by many of the karmic connections disclosed here shows that any real perception of karma is beyond him and that he is incapable of pressing on to the perception of individual karmic connections.

But let us try now to find the transition from the studies hitherto pursued, to what can lead us to say of some happening in the life of a man that this is karma, in a definite form of manifestation.

When I recall all that I experienced in relation to Goethe during the seven years I was working in the Goethe and Schiller Archives in Weimar—in narrating the story of my life I am having to review it all in thought—I say to myself in reference to karma that one of the most difficult problems in any presentation of the subject is to describe the experiences through which Goethe passed between the years 1782 and 1800. To write this chapter in a biography of Goethe is one of the most difficult of all tasks.

Now we must learn to perceive, even if it has to be with higher, occult vision, how and where karma is working in the life of a man.

Between the moment of falling asleep and that of waking, man lives in his astral body and his ego, outside his physical and etheric bodies. With his ego and astral body he lives within the spiritual world. Again, it is one of the most difficult of all investigations that can be undertaken in spiritual science to make an accurate survey of what happens between falling asleep and waking. I shall describe it in outline to-day.

If you review all that has been brought before you in Anthroposophy, you will feel that it gives the impression of being comprehensible; but the discovery of it is a matter of extraordinary difficulty in anthroposophical investigation.

If I were to draw a kind of sketch of the human being, this outline or boundary-line indicates his physical body. In this physical body is the etheric body, within that the astral body, and within that again, the ego, the ‘I’.

Now think of man as he falls asleep. The physical and etheric bodies lie in the bed. What happens to the astral body and the ego? The astral body and the ego go out through the head and, in reality, through the whole senses-system, that is to say, they pass out through the whole body but mainly through the head, and are then outside. Thus, leaving aside the ego, we can say: At the moment of falling asleep the astral body leaves the human being through the head. Actually, the astral body leaves him through everything that is a sense organ, but because the sense organs are concentrated chiefly in the head, the main part of the astral body goes out through the head. But as the sense of warmth, for example, is distributed over the whole body, and the sense of pressure too, weaker radiations also take place, in every direction. The whole process, however, gives the impression that at the moment of falling asleep the astral body passes out through the head.

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The ego, which—speaking in terms of space—is rather more extensive than the astral body and not entirely enclosed within it, also passes out.—Such is man as he falls asleep.

Now let us turn to man as he wakes. When we observe him at the time of waking we find that the astral body approaches through the limbs, actually through the tips of the fingers and toes first, and then gradually spreads through the limbs. Thus at the moment of waking the astral body comes in from the opposite side. So too, the ego, only now the ego does not envelop the astral body but on returning is enclosed by the astral body.

We wake from sleep and as we do so the astral body and the ego stream into us through the tips of the fingers and toes. In order to fill the human being entirely, as far as his head, they really need the whole day; and when they have reached the head the moment has come for them to go out again. You will realise from this that the ego and astral body are in constant, perpetual flow.

At this point you may raise the question: Yes, but if that is so, half an hour after waking from sleep we have in us only a small part of our astral body (and here I include the ego as well) as far as the wrists above and as far as the ankles below. And that is actually so.—If somebody wakes at 7 o'clock—I will assume him to be a person of decorum and stays awake, then at 7.30 his astral body will have reached about as far as his ankles and possibly his wrists. And so it goes on, slowly, until the evening.

You may say: But how is it, then, that we wake up as a whole man? We certainly feel that we wake as a whole man, all at once ... yet properly speaking, only our fingers and toes were awake at 7.15, and at mid-day most people are within the astral body only as if they are sitting in a hip bath. This is really so.

The question that arises here must be answered by pointing to the fact that in the spiritual realm other laws prevail than in the physical world. In the physical world a body is exactly where it is—nowhere else. In the spiritual world it is not so. In the spiritual world our astral body works through the whole space taken up by the body, even when it has actually occupied only the fingers and toes. That is the strange fact. Even when the astral body is only approaching it can already be felt throughout the body. But its reality, its substantiality spreads out only slowly.

Understanding of this phenomenon is of the greatest importance, above all in enabling a true judgment to be formed of the human organisation in health and disease. For think of it: throughout the hours of sleep, in what lies in the bed and is not man in the full sense but only the physical and etheric bodies, a kind of plant-mineral activity is going on, albeit within a human organisation. And this activity can be either normal or abnormal, healthy or unhealthy.

It is precisely in the morning hours, when the astral body begins to rise upwards from the limbs, that the unhealthy phenomena become manifest to a special faculty of perception. Therefore in forming a judgment of illnesses it is of the utmost importance to know what feelings the patient has when he wakes from sleep, when his astral body is forcing upwards what is unhealthy within him.

And now let us proceed.—On falling asleep, our ego and astral body pass out of our physical and etheric bodies into the spiritual world. The after-effects of what we have experienced during the day still remain. But thoughts do not remain in the form in which we harboured them, neither do they remain in the form of words. Nothing of this remains. Remnants, vestiges, still adhere to the astral body when it passes out, but no more than that.

Immediately the astral body has passed out of the human being, karma begins to take shape, although at first in the form of pictures only. Karma begins to take shape. What we have done through the day, whether good or bad, viewing it to begin with in accordance with customary ideas—directly we fall asleep, all this begins immediately to be translated, integrated, into the stream of karmic development.

This process continues for a time after we fall asleep and overshadows everything else that happens to us during sleep. As sleep continues, however, a man begins to dive down into the experiences undergone in his preceding earthly life (see arrows in diagram), then into those of the life before that, and so on, backwards. And when the time of awakening comes he has reached and passed his first, most distant earthly life as an individual. Then he reaches the state of being when he was not yet separate from the cosmos, a state of existence in reference to which one cannot speak of an earthly life as an individual. Only when he has reached thus far can he return again into his physical and etheric organisation.

Still another question arises here, moreover a very important one.—What happens when we have a very short sleep—for example an afternoon nap? Or indeed when we have a brief forty winks during a lecture, but really do go to sleep; the whole thing may last only two or three minutes, perhaps only a minute or half a minute. What happens then? If the sleep were real, we were in the spiritual world during that half minute.

The truth is, my dear friends, that for this short nap even during a lecture, the same holds good as for the all-night sleep of a lie-a-bed—I mean, of course, a human lie-a-bed! As a matter of fact, whenever a man falls asleep, even for a brief moment, the whole sleep is a unity and the astral body is an unconscious prophet; it surveys the whole sleep up to the point of waking ... in perspective, of course. What is remote may lack clarity, as when a short-sighted person looks down an avenue and does not see the trees at the farther end of it. In the same way the astral body may be short-sighted, figuratively speaking, in the subconscious. Its perception does not reach the point where the individual earth-lives begin. But broadly speaking, the fact is that even during the briefest sleep we rush with tremendous, lightning-like rapidity through all our earthly lives. This is a matter of extraordinary significance. Naturally it is all very hazy; but if somebody falls asleep during a lecture, then the lecturer or those who share his power of observation have it in front of them. Think of it: the whole of earth-evolution, together with what the sleeper has experienced in previous earthly lives! When somebody falls asleep during a lecture everything lacks clarity because it happens with such terrific rapidity; one thing merges quickly into another, but it is there, nevertheless. From this you will understand that karma is perpetually present, inscribed as it were in the World-Chronicle. And every time a man falls asleep he has opportunity to approach his karma. This is one of the great secrets of existence.

One who can survey these things from the vantage-point of Initiation Science, with unimpeded vision, looks with deep reverence, a reverence of knowledge, upon what can live in a human memory, upon the memory-thoughts that can arise in the human soul. These memories tell only of the earth-life now being undergone, yet within them lives a human ego. And did these memories not exist—I have spoken of this previously—then the human ego would not be fully present. Deep down within us there is something that can ever and again evoke these memories.

But inasmuch as we are in communication with the external world through our senses and our mind, we form ideas of this external world, ideas that give us pictures of what is outside.

Drawing this diagrammatically, we say: here (a) man looks out into the world. Pictures arise in his thoughts, representing to him what he perceives in the external world. Here (b) man lives within his body. Thoughts well up, containing their own store of memories. Of our store of memories we say that it presents, as faithfully as our organisation of spirit-soul-body allows, what we have experienced in this present life on earth.

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But now let us think about what lies on the other side, outside man. We do not as a rule reflect upon the fact that what we see there is but a section of earth-existence, in the first place, the surrounding earth and sky. If a man is born in Danzig, his eyes and other senses perceive different processes and phenomena from those of one born in Hamburg or in Constantinople. We can say: The world presents ‘sections’ of itself in infinite variety; for no two human beings are these sections identical, even though the two may have been born at the same place and die at the same place, living their lives in close proximity. The section of the world presented to the one is completely different from that presented to the other.

Let us be quite clear what this means. The world presents to us a certain part of itself and this we see. The rest we never see. It is extremely important to reflect upon how the world presents to a human being a sum-total of impressions upon which the experiences of his life depend. This will mean very little to a shadowy thinker, but one who thinks deeply will not put it lightly aside. As he ponders it all he will say: ‘This fact is so puzzling that I am at a loss how to put it into words.—The cosmos, the world, presents to each human being only a portion of itself, a more or less coherent portion; therefore in this sense the cosmos particularises human beings. How am I to put this into words? In speaking of it as abstractly as this I am merely stating a bare fact which does not really amount to anything. I must be able to express the facts clearly, to formulate them. How am I to do so?’

Now we shall arrive at a way of formulating these facts if we again consider memory. What is it that wells up from the depths when we recall something in memory? What is it that rises up? It is what our own human being has experienced. Our real human being is somewhere deep down where we cannot take hold of it. It streams up in our memory-thoughts, streams up into our consciousness from our inmost being. What is it that streams into us from outside? Man himself is still so minute when all this is welling up from within him and everything in the cosmos out yonder is so vast, of such immensity! But these ‘sections’ of the cosmos are always entering into man. And the fact of the matter is that here too, thoughts arise.

We know that our memory-thoughts derive from what we have actually experienced. But thoughts also come into us from outside, just as memory-thoughts come from below. Here below (see diagram) is our own human being; and here, outside, is the whole world of the Hierarchies.

An impression of greatness and majesty comes to us when with Initiation-Science we begin to realise that these ‘sections’ of cosmic intelligence are outspread around us and that behind all this that makes an impression upon us from outside live the Hierarchies, as truly as our own individual being lives behind the memories that well up from within.

It all depends upon the vividness of some experience whether or no we can call it forth again in memory, whether or no there is any reason why one thought rises up from our store of memories, and another, or all the others, lie dormant. And it is the same here. Those who learn to know the true facts realise that at one time a Being from the Hierarchy of the Angeloi is appearing, at another, a Being from the Hierarchy of the Exusiai, and so forth.

Thus we arrive at the following formula.—During our earthly existence we behold that which it pleases the Spirit-Beings to reveal to us.

Inasmuch as a particular portion of the world is revealed to us during our life on earth, we learn to recognise that it is just this portion of the infinite range of possibilities contained in the cosmos that certain Beings of the Hierarchies have selected in order to disclose it to us from our birth until our death. One human being has this portion revealed to him, another that. Exactly what is revealed to individual men lies in the sphere of the deliberations of the Hierarchies.

The Hierarchies remember, just as man remembers. What is it that provides the basis for the memory of the Hierarchies? They look back upon our past earthly lives—that is what gives them the basis for their memory. And according to what they behold in these past lives they bring the appropriate section of the cosmos before our soul. In what we see of the world—even in that lies karma, karma as apportioned by the world of the Hierarchies.

Within: remembrance of the present brief life in our human memory. Out yonder: memory of the Hierarchies of all that men have ever done. Memory-thoughts rise up from within; memory-thoughts from the world of the Hierarchies enter in the form of what a man beholds of the cosmos ... and human karma takes shape. This thought is startling in its clarity, for it teaches us that the whole cosmos, working in the service of the Hierarchies, is related to man. Viewed in this aspect, to what end is the cosmos there? In order that the gods may have the means whereby to bring to man the primary form of his karma. Why are there stars, why clouds, why sun and moon? Why are there animals on the earth, why plants, stones, rivers, streams, why rocks and mountains, and all that is in the cosmos around us? It is there as a reservoir upon which the gods may draw in order to bring to our vision the primary form of our karma, according to the deeds we have wrought.

Thus are we placed into the world and thus can we relate ourselves to the secrets of our existence.

And so we shall be able to consider the various forms of karma. In the first place it is karma in its cosmic aspect that is being brought before us, but it will come to be more and more individual. We shall discover how karma works in its inmost depths.

Today I shall have to say some more of how the karmic forces of preparation undergo their further course of evolution when man has passed through the gate of death. So far as the ordinary consciousness is concerned, the forming of karma, and indeed that whole intercourse with the world which we call ‘karmic,’ takes place in the human being in a more instinctive way. We see the animals act ‘instinctively.’ Words like ‘instinct,’ which are used so frequently in science and every-day life, are generally applied in a vague and undefined way. People make no real effort to associate them with clear conceptions. What is it that we call instinct in the animals? We know that the animals have a Group-soul. The animal, such as it is, is not a self-contained being. The Group-soul is standing there behind it. Now to what world does the Group-soul belong? We must first answer this question: Where do we find the Group-souls of the animals? They are certainly not to be found here in the physical world of sense. Here we have only the single individual animals. We do not find the Group-souls of the animals until, by Initiation or in the ordinary course of human evolution between death and a new birth, we come into that altogether different world which man passes through between his successive earthly lives. There indeed we find, among the beings with whom we are then together, including above all those of whom I have been speaking to you, those with whom we elaborate our karma,—there we find the Group-souls of the animals. And the animals that are here on the earth, when they act instinctively, they act out of the full consciousness of the Group-souls.

You may conceive it thus, my dear friends. (Dr. Steiner here made a drawing on the blackboard). Here we have the realm in which we live between death and a new birth; and out of it there work the forces which proceed from the Group-souls of the animals. And here upon this earth we have the single animals which act and move about, guided as it were by threads which pass to the Group-souls—the beings whom we ourselves discover in the realm between death and a new birth. Such in truth is instinct.

It is obvious that a materialistic world-conception cannot explain instinct, for instinct is:—to act out of that sphere of being which you will find described as Spirit-land in my Theosophy for example, and in my Occult Science.

For man however it is different. Man too has instinct, but when he acts through his instinct, he is not acting out of yonder Spirit-realm, but out of his own former lives on earth. He is acting across time, out of his former earthly lives, out of a whole number of former lives on earth.

As the spiritual realm works upon the animals, causing them to act instinctively, so do the former incarnations of man work on his later incarnations in such a way that he instinctively lives out his karma. But this is a spiritual instinct—an instinct that works within the Ego.

It is just by understanding this, that we shall come to understand the absolute consistency of this instinctive working with human freedom. For the freedom of man proceeds from the very realm out of which the animals act instinctively, namely the realm of the spirit.

Today we will concern ourselves especially with the way in which this instinct is gradually prepared when man passes through the gate of death. Here in earthly life, as we have seen, the inner experience of karma is instinctive. It takes its course beneath the surface of consciousness; but the moment we pass through the gate of death we become objectively conscious, during the first few days, of all the experiences which we first underwent on earth. We have them before us in ever expanding pictures; and what we thus behold as a great tableau of our life contains, in addition, all that took place instinctively in the working of our karma.

When man passes through the gate of death, and his life, expanding ever more and more, is unfolded before his eyes, there goes with it all that was instinctive, of which he was not conscious in his life—the web of karma. He does not actually see it in the first days after death. But what he would otherwise perceive only in pale images of memory, this he now beholds vividly as a living configuration, nor does he fail to perceive that something more is contained in it than ordinary memory. And if we look with the vision of Initiation on all that the human being has before him at this stage, we can describe it as follows:

The man himself, who has passed through the gate of death having possessed the ordinary consciousness during his earthly life, sees his life spread out before him as a mighty panorama. But he sees it only ‘from in front.’ The vision of Initiation sees it also from the other side—‘from behind,’ as it were. The human being himself sees it only from the one side. With the vision of the Initiate we can see it ‘from behind,’ and then the whole web of karmic relationships springs forth from it. We behold this web of karmic relationships arising to begin with from the Thoughts, that lived within the Will during the man's earthly life. But immediately something else enters into it, my dear friends.

I have often emphasised the fact:—The thoughts we experience consciously during our earthly life are dead thoughts. But the thoughts that are woven into our karma, the thoughts that now emerge, are living. Thus—on the ‘other side,’ as it were, of the panorama of our life—the living thoughts spring forth. And now, (this is a fact of untold significance)—now the Beings of the Third Hierarchy draw near, and receive what is springing forth from the ‘other side’ of the panorama. Angels, Archangels and Archai draw it into themselves, they breathe it in!

This takes place during the time when man ascends on his way upward, after death, to the end of the Moon Sphere. Thereafter he enters the Moon Sphere, and his backward journey through his life begins, lasting—as we know—a third of the time he spent on earth, or—to speak more accurately—lasting for the same length of time as the periods of sleep which he spent while he was on the earth.

I have often described how this backward journey through life takes place. We may now ask ourselves: What is man's condition in ordinary sleep, in relation to the condition in which he finds himself directly after death? Normally when he goes to sleep, man as a being of soul and spirit is only in his astral body and his Ego. He has not his etheric body with him, for this has remained behind in the bed. Hence his thoughts remain unliving; they have no active power, they are mere pictures. But when he passes through the gate of death, to begin with he takes his etheric body with him, and the etheric body begins to expand. Now the etheric body has a life-giving quality, not only for the physical existence, but for the thoughts themselves. By this means the thoughts can become alive, inasmuch as man has taken his etheric body with him. The etheric body, as it frees itself, carries forth the living thoughts from man to the Angels, Archangels and Archai, who in their Divine Grace receive the thoughts.

This, if I may so describe it, is the first Act that is unfolded in the life between death and a new birth. Beyond the threshold of death, the Beings of the Third Hierarchy approach that which loosens itself from the human being—which is entrusted to his etheric body as it dissolves away. The Beings of the Third Hierarchy receive it into Their care. And we as human beings on the earth utter a simple and good, a wonderful and beautiful prayer, when we think of the connection of life and death, or of one who has passed through the gate of death, in this way, saying:—

Angels, Archangels and Archai in the Ether-weaving
receive the human being's Web of Destiny.

For as we say these words we turn our eyes to a real spiritual fact. Much depends upon it, whether human beings on the earth think the spiritual facts or not: whether they merely accompany the Dead with thoughts that remain behind on the earth, or accompany them on their further path with thoughts which are a true image of what takes place in yonder realm which they have entered.

This, my dear friends, appears so infinitely desirable to Initiate Science:—That thoughts shall be within the earthly life, which are a true image of real spiritual happenings. By merely thinking in theories—enumerating so many higher members of the human being, and the like,—we achieve no union with the spiritual world. We can only do so by thinking the realities that are enacted there.

Therefore, human hearts should be ready to hear once more, what human hearts did hear in the old ages of Initiation, in the ancient Mysteries, when they called out impressively, again and again, to those who were about to be initiated:—‘Accompany the Dead in their further Destinies!’ ‘Memento mori’ is all that is left of it now, a more or less abstract exhortation which no longer affects the human being deeply. For it no longer expands his consciousness into a life more living than this life in the world of the senses.

Now the reception of the human web of destiny by Angels, Archangels and Archai, unfolds before us in this wise:—we have the impression: it lives and moves and has its being in the bluish-violet ethereal atmosphere. It is a living and weaving in the bluish-violet atmosphere of the ether.

When the etheric body is dissolved, that is, when the thoughts have been breathed-in by the Angels, Archangels and Archai, then, after a few days, man enters into that backward course of life which I have described to you. There he experiences his deeds, his impulses of will, his tendencies of thought, in the way in which they worked on other men, to whom he did either good or evil. He enters right into the minds and feelings of other men. He does not live in his own mind. With the clear consciousness that it is his concern, he undergoes all that took place in the depths of other human beings' souls, with whom he entered into any kind of karmic relationship,—to whom he did anything whatever good or ill. And once again it shows itself, how that which the human being thus experiences is received. He experiences it in fullness of reality—a reality, which I had to describe not long ago as a reality more real than that of the senses between birth and death. He experiences a reality in the midst of which he stands more fully, more glowingly than in any reality of this earthly life down here.

But if we look at it once more with the vision and insight of Initiation from the ‘other side,’ we see all this, which the human being experiences, received into the essence, into the reality and being of the Kyriotetes, Dynamis and Exusiai. They draw into themselves, as it were, the ‘Negative’ of the human deeds. This wondrous process unfolds before the vision of the Initiate. The consequences of man's actions, transformed in righteousness and justice, are taken up into the Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes.

Now the vision of all this transplants him who has it into such a consciousness that he knows himself to be in the centre of the Sun and with it of the whole Planetary system. From the aspect of the Sun he beholds what is now taking place. He sees a lilac-coloured living and weaving; he sees the Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes absorbing the human deeds, transformed into righteousness, in the living and weaving of a pale violet, lilac-coloured astral atmosphere.

Here, you see, we have the truth:—the aspect of the Sun as it appears to earthly man is only the one side, it is seen here from the periphery. From the centre the Sun is seen as the field of action for the living spiritual deeds of Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes. There it is all spiritual action, spiritual happening. There we find as it were the ‘other side’ of the pictures of that earthly life which we experienced consciously here between birth and death.

Once again we can think truly of what is happening there. We must think of the word ‘verwesen’ which is ordinarily used for the fading, dying, destroying process, the passing out of existence,—in its true and original meaning, which is: ‘to carry the real Being away.’ (As when we say ‘to forgive’ or ‘to forego,’ which means in reality a ‘giving away’ in devotion).

Thinking thus we may say:

In Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes, in the astral
feeling of the Cosmos the righteous consequences of
the earthly life of man die into the realm of Being.

At length, this too has been accomplished. Man after death has lived through a third of the time of his earthly life. Journeying backward, he feels himself once more at the starting point of his earthly life—in the spaces of the Spirit—at the moment before his entry into his past earthly life. And now, we may say, he enters through the centre of the Sun into the essential Spirit-land, and in the Spirit-land his earthly deeds—transformed into the Divine Righteousness—are received into the activity of the first Hierarchy. They come into the domain of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. Man feels, as he steps out into this new kingdom:—‘All that took place through me on earth is now being received by Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, into their own active Being.’

Consider well what this means, my dear friends. We are thinking truly of what happens to the Dead in his further life after death, if we cherish the thought: The web of destiny which he wove here on earth, is caught up, to begin with, by the Angels, Archangels and Archai. In the next part of the life between death and new birth, They bear it into the kingdom of Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes. These in turn are gathered in and woven around by the Beings of the first Hierarchy. And in the process, ever and again, man's action upon earth is received into the Being—into the Deeds of Being, into the living Action—of Thrones and Cherubim and Seraphim.

Once again we are thinking rightly if to the first and the second saying we now add the third, which is as follows:—

In Thrones and Cherubim and Seraphim, as their
Deeds of Being, the justly transmuted ‘fruits of the
earthly life’ of man are resurrected.

Thus we can turn the gaze of Initiation upon what is going on perpetually in the spiritual world. Here on earth we have the unfolding life and action of men with their instinct of karma, their ceaseless weaving of destiny—a weaving more or less similar to the weaving of thought. Looking up into the spiritual worlds, we see there what were once the earthly deeds of man—having passed through Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes—received by the Thrones and Cherubim and Seraphim, expanding as their heavenly Deeds above.

1. Es empfangen Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai im Aetherweben das Schicksalsnetz des betreffenden Menschen.

   Angels, Archangels and Archai in the Ether-weaving receive his Web of Destiny.

2. Es verwesen in Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes—im Astralempfinden des Kosmos—die gerechten Folgen des Erdenlebens des Menschen.

   In Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes, in the astral feeling of the Cosmos, the righteous consequences of his earthly life die into the realm of Being.

3. Es auferstehen in Thronen, Cherubim, Seraphim—als deren Tatenwesen—die gerechten Ausgestaltungen des Erdenlebens des Menschen.

   In Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim, as their Deeds of Being, the justly transmuted fruits of his earthly life are resurrected.

This is a succession of spiritual facts infinitely sublime and significant especially for our present age. For the dominion of Michael has now begun, and in this world-historic moment it is as though we could behold the deeds of those who lived upon earth before the end of Kali-Yuga, in the 1880's and 90's. That which was then enacted among men on earth, has now been received by Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim. Yet never was the spiritual contrast-of-light so great as it is to-day, in the realm of these spiritual facts.

In the 1880's one could look upward and see how the people of the Revolution period of the middle of the 19th century, were received as to their deeds by Thrones and Cherubim and Seraphim. But as one looked, a kind of darkling cloud settled over the middle of the 19th century. What one then saw passing into the realm of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, lighted up only a very little.

But today, when we look back to all that took place at the end of the 19th century—the deeds of men, their relations to one another,—having seen it clearly still, only a short time ago, it vanishes away ... We saw it clearly still, a moment since,—all that took place in that declining age of Kali-Yuga,—like thought-masses wafted away before our eyes ... We saw what was worked out in destiny among the human beings of the end of Kali-Yuga. And then it vanishes, and we behold in clear, radiant light what became of it as it passed heavenward.

This fact bears witness to the immense importance of what is taking place at the present time in the transmutation of the earthly deeds of men into the heavenly deeds of souls.

What man experiences as his destiny or karma takes place for him, within him and about him, from earthly life to earthly life. But in the heavenly worlds the consequences of what he did and experienced on earth go working on—and they work on even into the historic shaping of this earthly life. For there are many things which are not grasped or controlled by the individual human being here upon earth.

My dear friends, you must take this statement in its full weight and importance. The individual man experiences his destiny. But as soon as two human beings are working together, something more arises,—more than the working out of the individual destinies of the one and of the other. Something takes place as between the two, transcending the individual experiences of either. Ordinary consciousness perceives no connection of what happens between man and man, with what goes on in the spiritual worlds above. For ordinary consciousness the connection is at most established when sacred spiritual actions are brought into this physical world of sense,—as when in sacred cult or ritual men consciously transform their physical actions so as to make them actions of the spiritual world at the same time.

But in a far wider sphere, all that happens between man and man is more than what the individual man experiences as his destiny. All that is not merely the destiny of individual men, but that is brought about by the feeling-together and working-together of men on earth, is for ever in connection with the deeds of Seraphim and Cherubim and Thrones above. Into the latter there flow the deeds of men in their mutual connection with one another, as well as the individual earthly lives of men.

Most important at this point is the wider range of vision that opens out for the Initiate. For today as we look upward we behold the heavenly deeds and consequences of what took place on earth in the late 70's, the 80's and 90's of last century. And it is as though a fine spiritual rain were falling, falling to the earth, moistening the souls of men, impelling them to many things that arise historically in our time, in the relations between man and man.

Once more we can see, how there lives again today in living mirror-images of thought—through Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones—what was enacted here on earth by men of the 1870's, 80's and 90's.

When one sees through these things, again and again one must say to oneself:—Here you are speaking to a human being of today. What he says to you out of the commonly accepted opinion—not from his own emotions or inner impulses but simply as a person of this age—seems often as though it stood in connection with human beings who lived in the 70's, 80's and 90's of last century. It is so really. We see many a human being of today as though he were in a meeting of departed spirits, surrounded by human beings who are busily at work upon him. But in reality they are only the after-images, rained down from heaven, of what lived through human beings upon earth in the last third of the 19th century.

Thus in a spiritual sense the shades—the real ghosts, I would say,—of a former age are roaming about in a later age. This is one of the more intimate workings of karma which are indeed widely present in the world, though they frequently remain unnoticed even by the most occult of occultists. To many a man of today, when he utters some opinion not individual but stereotyped, one would fain whisper in his ear: ‘That was said to you by this man or that, of the last third of the 19th century.’

Only so does life become a real totality. And in this respect once more we must say of the present age—the age that began with the end of the Kali-Yuga—that it is different from all historic ages preceding it. It is different in this sense, that in very truth the human deeds on earth in the last third of the 19th century have the greatest imaginable influence on the first third of the 20th.

My dear friends, I am saying something far removed from any superstitious use of words. I say it with the full consciousness of voicing an exact and scientific fact:—Never before did the ghosts of the preceding age move about among men so palpably as they do in this present time. And if men fail to perceive them, it is not because we are living in an age of darkness. Rather is it that they are still dazzled by the light of the new Age of Light. But as a consequence, what is done among us by the shades of the past century is an all the more fruitful field for the people of Ahriman. Though man is unaware of it, the people of Ahriman are working today in a more than usually evil way. They are at pains—if I may so describe it—to galvanize into Ahrimanic life as many as possible of these ghosts of the past century and bring them to bear upon the human beings of today. This Ahrimanic quality of our age is fostered most of all when societies are formed to popularise erroneous ideas of the 19th century—Ideas which, for all men of insight, are out of date and discarded. There never was a time when amateurish persons popularised the outlived errors of the past to the extent they do today. Indeed we have opportunities on all hands today, to acquaint ourselves with the essential nature of the deeds of Ahriman. We need only visit many a meeting where people are working out of the ordinary consciousness. We have many an opportunity to learn to know the Ahrimanism in the world today, for it is at work most strongly. By the very path which I have now described, it hinders people from receiving into their hearts and souls what must come forth anew, what was not there before,—what is coming to the light of day in Anthroposophy.

How happy men are when they can somehow contrive to cover up the New, that is coming forth in Anthroposophy today, with some old saying. How contented they are, if in some lecture that I give something occurs of which they can subsequently prove: ‘Look, here it is in an old book!’ In reality, of course, it is there in quite a different form, coming out of altogether different foundations of consciousness. The people of today have so little courage to receive what grows on the soil of the living present. Their minds are set at rest as soon as they can bring something forward out of the past.

It shows, my dear friends, how powerfully the impulses of the past work upon the men of the present time,—how contented they feel under these influences. It is due to the fact that the 19th century is working still so strongly into the 20th. Future historians—who will write their descriptions spiritually, as we write ours today by reference to outer documents,—future historians will have to describe this feature above all, and they may well express it in some such words as these:—‘Look at the first three decades of the 20th century. Nearly everything appears as though it were being done by the shades, the images of deeds of men of the end of the 19th century.’

At this point I may perhaps say a word that is truly not intended in any political sense. Politics must be eliminated altogether from our Society. May I say this word, my dear friends, simply as a characterisation of the facts:—We can look back on the stupendous, revolutionising actions—or rather, happenings, I should have said, for they were not really active deeds,—which took place notably in the second decade of the 20th century. It has been said so often that it has become a truism. Since time has been, since men have written history, such world-shaking events have not happened. But are not men standing in the midst of them as though they were not there at all? We see it everywhere,—it is as though the revolutionising events were taking place outside the human beings, and the latter had no part in them at all. Almost every man we meet today, we would fain ask of him: ‘Did you really live through the second decade of this century?’ And how much more do we feel it when we look at it from a somewhat different point of view! How helpless, how infinitely helpless do the human beings seem today—helpless in judgment, helpless in action. Never were there such difficulties as there are today in filling the ministerial benches—the Cabinets! Consider only how curious this is,—how helpless men are in the midst of the events. At long last we are impelled to raise the question, who then is doing anything? Who is playing an active part? My dear friends, more than any of the men of the present time, it is the men of the last third of the 19th century! Their shadow-forces are to be seen at work in everything.

This is the very secret of our time. Never were the Dead so powerful as are the Dead of the last third of the 19th century. This too is a world-aspect of realities.

When we enter into the spiritual content of these things in a single instance, we often come to strange conclusions. I recently had to consider whether I would alter this or that in the new edition of my books, written in the 70's, 80's and 90's of last century. The pedants of today declare: Everything has altered, the scientific theories and hypotheses of that time are out-of-date and long ago discarded. But when we look at it from a standpoint of reality, we can alter nothing at all! For in reality, behind everyone who writes a book today, or lectures from a professional chair, there stands the shade, the shadow-picture of another. There they still are,—the Du Bois Reymonds, the Helmholtzes, the Haeckels,—all those who were the spokesmen of that time, (in medicine the Obholzers, the Billroths and the rest)—they are still speaking.

Here we are lifting a corner of the veil, a secret of the present time. Initiate Science says in all truth: ‘Never were the Dead so mighty as in our age!’

This is what I wish to insert today in the course of our studies on karma.

I want to speak in a rather aphoristic way this evening about a subject which I consider of importance, especially at the present time.

Many of our studies have been concerned with the Christ Impulse, with the Impulse which since the Mystery of Golgotha has been working in the evolution of humanity. And this evening I want to speak of the Impulse itself and of its significance for evolution. It must be emphasised at the outset that the Christ Impulse is a difficult subject because if even an approximately adequate conception of it is to be acquired, the teachings still being given in the various Christian denominations must be left out of account. Perhaps you will ask: How can the Christ Impulse be studied at all if such teachings are to be entirely disregarded? How can we learn about the working of this Impulse from any sources other than the beliefs that have been held for centuries? The answer must be this.—Everyone will admit that it would be unfortunate if the effects of the Sun upon human beings living on the Earth were dependent upon some generally accepted teaching about the nature of the Sun. No matter what hypotheses are put forward, the effects of the Sun are quite evident. Science admits that it does not yet know precisely what electricity is, yet electricity is put to innumerable practical uses. Therefore it is certainly justifiable to speak of the effects of the Christ Impulse without believing that the study is in any way dependent upon what has been thought about Christ in the different centuries.

The Mystery of Golgotha, the penetration of the Christ impulse into the Earth sphere, into the evolution of humanity, took place in a particular epoch. The point of time at which it occurred has been determined with at least approximate accuracy, for our time-reckoning in the West is based upon it. What kind of epoch was it? We know that different civilisations have taken their course in the process of evolution—in the post-Atlantean era, the ancient Indian, ancient Persian, Egypto-Chaldean, Graeco-Roman and our own. One of the characteristics distinguishing these culture-epochs is that a different form of human understanding, human wisdom, existed in each of them. In the ancient Indian epoch, for example, men were possessed of penetrating insight into certain cosmic mysteries. In those times the etheric body was the most active member of man’s constitution. Then, as evolution proceeded, the etheric body receded more into the background and in the ancient Persian epoch the sentient body, the astral body, became predominantly active. In the Egypto-Chaldean epoch the sentient soul was predominant, in the Graeco-Latin epoch the intellectual or mind-soul, in our own epoch the spiritual or consciousness soul, and the epoch of the Spirit-Self lies in the future. Because different members of man’s constitution are predominantly active during the several epochs, individuals confront the world in each epoch with a different kind of understanding.

Now there is a certain striking and very illuminating fact in connection with the Graeco-Latin epoch. This was the epoch of the intellectual or mind-soul, and it lasted from the eighth century B.C., approximately from the time of the founding of Rome, until the fifteenth century A.D. Because the intellectual or mind-soul was developing during that epoch, the forces in individuals who were essentially typical of this function of soul-life became particularly important. This province of the soul was undergoing a special process of development for a little more than two millennia. Since the fifteenth century mankind has been living in the epoch of the development of the consciousness-soul. Not very much of this epoch has passed as yet, for not until the present century and two more centuries have taken their course will a third of the time appointed for the development of the consciousness-soul have elapsed. Quite different faculties will develop in man’s soul during the following epochs. Seven such epochs constitute the post-Atlantean age.

Let us now ask: Which of those epochs was least qualified to understand the Christ Being? Conceptions of the nature of man differed in all of them. The epoch least qualified to form adequate conceptions of the nature of Christ was the epoch of the intellectual or mind-soul, from the eighth century B.C. to the fifteenth century A.D. And the remarkable fact is that this is the very epoch when the Mystery of Golgotha took place!

If, to speak hypothetically, the Christ had appeared on the Earth in the days, let us say, of the holy Rishis of ancient India, there would have been widespread understanding of who He was. So too in ancient Persia, where men had been taught of the Sun Spirit. Had the Christ descended into a human body during that epoch men would have known that the Sun Spirit had come down into the body of a man on the Earth. And in the epoch of the Egyptian Temple Wisdom, something equivalent might still have been possible. But in the epoch when understanding of the nature of Christ was farthest from men’s reach—in that very epoch the Christ appeared on Earth.

It is not easy to add anything to this strange fact by way of illustration, for the conclusion to be drawn is that obviously hardly anything about the real nature of the Christ Being is to be found in the teachings formulated in that epoch and that understanding can therefore be expected only in later centuries.

Since the fifteenth century men may have begun to pride themselves on their intellectual acumen and to believe that in respect of an understanding of Christ better times have come with the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. In a certain sense it is so, but in another sense it is not.

What is there to be said about the intellectual faculties of men of the present age, since the fif-teenth century? Generally speaking these faculties have in no sense become more spiritual than they were in earlier times. In a certain respect man’s life of soul has sunk still more deeply into matter—as indeed was necessary in order that the stage of the consciousness-soul might be attained. So we find that Spiritual Science—which before the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries was still a matter of remembrance, of recollection—fell into the background and materialism steadily increased. Spiritual Science blossomed in certain personages of the Middle Ages, reached a certain height as it were through the elemental forces working in individual mystics, and then receded. But from the eleventh and twelfth centuries onwards it is obvious that something else is beginning to appear. A symptom is that men attempt to ‘prove’ the existence of God. Only people with very strange ideas about the world could fail to recognise what that means. As a rule we try to ‘prove’ what we do not know or understand. We try to prove that someone has stolen when we did not actually see him commit the theft. And when men lost all inner experience of God, when they no longer knew by what paths to seek for the Divine, they set about trying to ‘prove’ the existence of the Divine. This is irrefutable proof that men were beginning to lose all knowledge of God. The fifth post-Atlantean epoch must necessarily be the epoch of materialism because since it began man has been obliged to view nature as presented to the senses and intellect; for only so can the Ego in its full power become conscious.

To understand what I mean, let us think back to the epoch of ancient Persia. In the epoch of ancient India it would have been still more clearly in evidence, and even in the Egyptian epoch it was still apparent to a certain extent. A man belonging to the ancient Persian civilisation would have been astonished that a cosmological system such as that of Copernicus should be derived from observation of the planetary movements.—I must here say something highly paradoxical.—A man in ancient Persia would have been very surprised if attempts had been made to teach him astronomy in anything faintly resembling its modern form. He would have said: Am I supposed to be so stupid that if I want to walk about, someone must show me how to do it? When the Sun is moving along its path through cosmic space, my soul accompanies it.—He knew this just as a man today knows which way he is going when his body moves. Out of his innate knowledge the ancient Persian drew a spiral corresponding exactly with the course of the Sun through cosmic space. In that epoch the human soul felt united with the Earth-soul and the path taken by the Earth was indicated by the Caduceus, the Staff of Mercury. Not until later was man thrust out of his spiritual environment so drastically that he was obliged to plan and calculate the path of the Earth, his own planet.

On the other hand, if man’s relation to the external world had remained at the earlier stage, he would never have been able to develop full self-consciousness. He would have lived through the Graeco-Latin civilisation-epoch, when intellect and soul-life in general would have been left to their own resources, as it were smouldering inwardly; a condition would have come about in which the soul has no longer any direct knowledge of its relation to the world but makes progress only in itself. It was necessary for the human soul to emerge from that condition too, and pass into the epoch of the consciousness-soul. Man was to learn to live altogether in his ‘I’, in his Ego. He was to disassociate everything external from his ‘I’ and cognise the world through logic alone. He was thrust out of the spiritual content of the world.

In the Graeco-Latin epoch the soul still contained the active intellectual principle which although it no longer experienced the happenings in the external spiritual world directly, nevertheless did still experience the Divine. In the modern age men lost the Divine! It would never have occurred to Aristotle to attempt to ‘prove’ the existence of the Divine. The intellectual or mind-soul still experienced the indwelling Divine, although it could offer no proof of Christ. Then from the fifteenth /sixteenth century onwards even that experience was lost. Nevertheless when this stage too is over man will be capable with his own powers of evolving a conception of the Divine.

From the fifteenth century, for four hundred years, the self-dependent human intellect has been unable to penetrate to the idea of the Divine. Something very strange has happened—and the fact that we commented upon it caused great offence. Immanuel Kant, the philosopher, lived in the eighteenth century. What happened to him was that he confused the particular nature of the human soul since the fifteenth century with the nature of the human soul in general. Hence he came to the conclusion that it is impossible for man, by means of his own powers, to acquire knowledge of the Divine. What he ought to have said was that this had been impossible only since the beginning of the fifteenth century. But as Lucifer had Kant firmly by the collar and had made him an arrogant individual, he believed that what he said applied to the whole human race!

It might be thought from this that the prospects of understanding the Christ Being are even less hopeful than in the previous centuries. But it is not so. Men have faculties of knowledge other than those they possessed in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, and different, too, from the only faculties that are used today for grasping the nature of the Ego. The other powers of cognition lie more in the underground province of the soul and have to be drawn up from there. But a modern man does this only under coercion. As long as it was possible for the human soul at surface level to cognise the Divine, men did not make efforts to bring their deeper forces into action. But now, in our present time, as man can make no real approach to the Divine, reaction compels him to delve to greater depths within himself and to summon into activity forces other than those operating on the surface of the soul. Connected with this is the fact that we are approaching an age when an understanding of the Christ Being through the deeper forces in man’s nature is beginning-to take root.

A few days ago in Oslo I ventured to speak of a Fifth Gospel.¹ Through the Fifth Gospel information is given in addition to what is contained in the other four Gospels. The Fifth Gospel tells us still more of the nature of Christ. There can be no question of presumptuousness when this apparently new information about the nature of the Christ Being is given, for communications of this kind are made only when the times demand it. What has been said about the Christ Being here in Copenhagen, for instance, and printed in the booklet The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind, and in various lecture-courses—this too belongs in a certain way to the Fifth Gospel. Such communications are made when the times demand that they shall come to the knowledge of men. If you think only of what was said in that booklet about the two Jesus children, you will agree that all the intelligence of our present age—consisting as it does of the forces operating on the surface of man’s soul—not only does not understand these things but rages against them when they are communicated.

We are on the threshold of a new conception of Christ. It will not be an intellectual understanding. People will certainly be able to grasp its meaning but it will be discovered through the more deeply lying forces of soul. When the eye of clairvoyance desires to have any prevision of the future of humanity in the next centuries, also of the next incarnations of individuals now living, it must be remembered that the forces operating on the surface of soul-life will become increasingly less effective. Mankind will feel more and more drawn to the revelations of the deeper forces of the soul.

Of the Graeco-Latin epoch it is rightly said that the nature of the human beings then living was inwardly whole, inwardly complete. Fundamentally speaking, this can no longer be said of even healthy souls today and will in future be less and less the case. If humanity in the future were to be taught only of matters accessible to the superficial forces of cognition, the life of soul would become increasingly barren, barren in a remarkable respect.

We have not yet reached the point when religious teaching is no longer given in schools, but already there are demands that only what is authenticated by science shall be taught. The demands made by people of this mentality will become so powerful an influence in outer life that very soon mankind will become dangerously superficial. Human beings today still learn to write, but in a future not far distant people will have to remind themselves of the fact that once upon a time hand-writing was a custom! A kind of mechanical stenography will become general—executed, furthermore, on machines. Mechanisation of life! I will indicate it by just one symptom. Think of a civilisation at its prime, when the historic truth will be unearthed that once upon a time there were human beings who wrote by hand. This historic truth will be unearthed just as we today unearth the contents of the Egyptian temples. Handwritten texts will be excavated as we excavate the hieroglyphs of the Egyptians. But a reaction of the life of soul against mechanisation will also take place. True as it is that in future times our handwriting will be no less a wonder than the Egyptian hieroglyphs are a wonder to us, it is also true that the souls of men will long once again for the direct revelations of the spirit. Outer life will become more and more superficial but the inner life will claim its rights.

People may scoff today at Spiritual Science but the materialists will eventually be forced to retreat before man’s cry of longing for the spiritual world. And so a real understanding of Christ will begin in times when the doors are open for spirituality, although admittedly through reaction against the conditions prevailing in external life.

Let us now consider still another aspect of the subject. Maybe the following picture will evoke an echo in your souls. We can think of the women who, according to the Gospels, seek for the body of Christ and find the grave empty. The Angel says to them: He whom ye seek is not here; He is risen! That is, He lives in the Spirit. The One for whom they were seeking in the physical world appeared subsequently to the Apostles, teaching them for a time as exceptional individuals who had responded to Him with a certain measure of understanding. Christ appeared to them as a spiritual figure. And in the spirit He moved through Greece, Rome, to the Germanic peoples, moved from East to West and then to the North. We shall not look for an intellectual, abstract or scientific interpretation of the Christ Being among the great Roman philosophers who speak of Him without understanding. Nor among the somewhat inarticulate Germanic peoples shall we find evidence of understanding. The souls of men are drawn to Christ but without intellectual understanding. He lives in their hearts, only in their hearts.

In the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries the picture is not of the women who go to the grave to seek for the body of Christ and do not find it. Whole hosts of European peoples feel urged to seek for the grave of Christ. This is the age of the Crusades. Men journey from the West to the East to find the grave where the women had once sought. And what do these hosts experience?—He for whom ye seek is not here!—Truth to tell they were seeking for something that was living in their souls, but they understood it so little that they journeyed to the East to look for the physical grave, and finally, after many disillusionments and sufferings, were destined to know: He whom ye seek is not here!—Where, then, was the object of their quest?

On the one side there are the journeys to the East and on the other side European Mysticism at its preparatory stages in Tauler and Meister Eckhart, reaching its prime later on in Jacob Boehme. There was the one for whom men had sought in the East and had not found. Thither He had gone, but His Presence took effect in a particular way. What is the most significant characteristic of this medieval Mysticism?

Eckhart, Tauler and the others do not claim to understand the Divine Being, the Christ, but they resolved to lead a life of piety in order to experience Christ in their souls. And the greater the intensity of this experience, the more deeply they longed to be permeated by the Divine, by the Christ, in the way suitable for their time. The Crusaders had experienced no more than this: He whom ye seek is not here!—What they were seeking came to life in the form of European mysticism.

We too are living in an epoch with very definite characteristics. Not only the peoples of Europe but also those of America participate in the remarkable conditions now prevailing. Let me give one striking example—from Berlin. On February 1st, 1910, a famous modern theologian came out with the following ‘ingenious’ utterance: “Ladies and Gentlemen, I challenge you to bring me a single sentence attributed to Christ Jesus which I cannot prove to have been current in pre-Christian spiritual life.”—That is an entirely typical attitude today. Evidence is brought forward in attempts to prove that the content of Christianity, including even the Lord’s Prayer, was previously in existence. The words of the theologian quoted are in complete conformity with the current attitude, and similar utterances will become more and more common. What kind of impression is made by the statement that all Christ’s sayings were already current before His coming?—I was once listening to an address by a very erudite scholar and a child happened to be present. Someone asked the child: “What have you been told?” His answer was: “He has told me nothing new. I already knew all the words!”—Theologians too are familiar with the words and detect nothing new resounding through them.

These things should really be self-evident but nowadays are invariably met with resistance. The attitude that a cultured individual may still have something to learn is seldom present but it is widely held that everyone is capable of judging according to his own standard. We have witnessed a striking exhibition of this attitude. When materialism came to the fore, theology began to eliminate all divinity from Christ Jesus and to speak only of the man Jesus, although acknowledging his superiority. This view became widespread in the nineteenth century and was given grotesque expression in Ernst Renan’s famous book, The Life of Jesus, published in 1863. He spoke of Jesus in wonderfully beautiful language but his description of the Lazarus miracle suggests that in reality no awakening of a dead man had taken place, that Jesus had simply allowed His followers to spread reports to this effect; hence the so-called miracle was in the nature of a swindle! Thus something resembling a chapter from a cheap novel has been inserted into an otherwise genuinely fine work. There seems to be no reason for Renan having written any words of reverence, for the figure he describes merits no particular veneration. But for half a century this was all accepted without thought and it is only one example from literature in which tribute is paid to Christ Jesus as a man—but simply as a man.

Now, however, it has been realised that a great deal of what is reported of Jesus Christ would be impossible if He had been a mere man—especially the assertion made by Jesus that He himself was the Christ—therefore more than a man. Many contradictions were found. Then, more recently, God—an imaginary God—was again substituted for man. Christ Jesus became a phantom, a fetish—but a limited fetish. This was a truly remarkable state of things! For centuries men had eliminated Divinity from Christ Jesus and had made Him a man, and now the Divinity made the manhood an impossibility. Such arguments will go on ad infinitum and there is ample evidence that we are taking a path along which understanding is beyond the reach of the forces at the surface of human nature. To put it differently.—In the twentieth century men have attempted a kind of crusade in search of the historical Christ Jesus. And once again the answer will be: He whom you seek is not to be found here!—Those who seek in this way for the historical man Jesus will no more be able to find Him than could the women at the tomb or the Crusaders who thronged thither. The Crusaders could not find Christ because they were not seeking for Him inwardly; nor can the modern crusaders find Him because they do not seek with the inner forces of the soul by which alone Christ can be found.

Within the stream of spiritual life a deepening of the forces of soul-and-spirit is in process. And whereas the spiritual forces lying at the surface will deny the Christ more and more insistently, deeper forces of soul will rise up and seek for Christ. Increasing numbers of people will see the Christ, who will appear in the etheric realm and will be found by those who are sensitive to this experience. We therefore speak of an etheric appearance of Christ in the twentieth century. Those who have this experience will have direct knowledge that at the moment when the Mystery of Golgotha was fulfilled the Christ Being entered in very truth into the Earth sphere and in ever greater numbers individuals will know with certainty who the Christ is.

Knowledge of Spiritual Science will deepen souls to such an extent that men’s vision will be awakened and the Christ revealed. A wonderful prospect opens for the eye of prophetic clairvoyance. The forces belonging to the superficial activities of the soul will become more and more ineffective and human beings born as time goes on will comparatively soon have finished with these surface-forces of their souls. An epoch reminiscent in a remarkable way of the Christ Event is approaching.

In the thirtieth year of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, Christ entered into him. A new life of soul began in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, for the Christ had taken the place of the Zarathustra-Ego which had departed from that body. That was at the beginning of our era. An epoch is now approaching when into increasing numbers of men from their thirtieth year onwards, knowledge of Christ—not Christ in His full reality—will penetrate as though through enlightenment. In the thirtieth year of the life of these men a new, all-embracing soul-life will begin because they will have vision of the Christ in His etheric form.

We understand our epoch in the sense of Spiritual Science when we realise what this prospect signifies. When the souls now living are again incarnated—and this will happen to many sooner than the normal period—numbers of individuals, from a particular age onwards, will feel through actual experience that something has penetrated into them of which they could previously have known only by having been informed of it. They will be able to say: I myself know through actual vision who Christ is; vision has enabled me to understand. When that time comes, efforts to prove the existence of Christ will cease, for the number of those who can testify to direct experience of Christ moving over the Earth as it Spirit Being, will constantly increase. Men will no longer search for the historic Christ.

There are two aspects to the picture of the future: On the one side barrenness will become more and more widespread owing to the activity of the superficial soul-forces; on the other side, as reaction against the barrenness, the soul-forces lying in the depths of man’s being will be evoked. We spread Anthroposophy in order that this shall be made known.

Men should not heedlessly allow impressions however faint to pass them by, for strong impres-sions are rare. As a result of the spread of true Anthroposophy the souls of men will not allow enlightenment, when it comes, to elude them, for if they do it would be beyond their reach for several incarnations. Other people, however, who make use of the superficial soul-forces will speak of those who have known enlightenment as fools or lunatics. A terrible beginning in this direction has already been made. Psychiatrists have already begun to investigate the problem of Christ Jesus. The Gospels are studied with the aim of discovering in Him symptoms of insanity! Such phenomenal occurrences should not be ignored; they should rather lead to the insight that Christ, who came into humanity in an age when He could least be understood, is working perpetually to prepare the understanding that will come in future ages.

A person who looks into the future should not generalise about it in abstract phrases. The future reveals two aspects: the aspect of barrenness of soul, of complete absorption in materialism, but also the aspect of the birth of a new spiritual world, not only in thoughts or in vision but in existence itself. For Christ will come to the side of men and be their counsellor. This is not a mere image. In actual reality men will receive the counsels they need from the Living Christ who will be their adviser and friend, who will speak to their souls just like someone who is physically near. If men needed a prophetic proclamation at the time when He was to appear in a human body, they need such a proclamation even more at this time, when He will come in an etheric form. What has now been said should be regarded as a preparatory announcement of what will and indeed must come to pass.

Have no illusion about the future. We are not giving way to illusion when we picture what outer, material life will be like in a future when handwriting will be spoken of in the same sense as we today speak of the hieroglyphs of the Egyptians. The last vestiges of a spiritual culture still survive, even today, for writing still expresses characteristics of the soul; but the traces of soul will soon have disappeared from external culture as completely as Egyptian culture has vanished from our ken. People will speak of many things which in our time are still imbued with soul, as of something belonging to a far distant past. But the same voice that will proclaim the existence in the past age of a kind of hand-writing, will proclaim out of spiritual knowledge that in the spirit the living Christ is again moving among humanity. Men will have to exchange the spirit of mere intellectual conjecture for the spirit of direct vision, of direct feeling and experience of the Living Christ moving as a reality in the spirit by the side of the souls of men.²

• 1. See, The Fifth Gospel. Seven lectures given in Oslo and Cologne in 1913. (Rudolf Steiner Press.)
• 2. See also The True Nature of the Second Coming. Rudolf Steiner. (Rudolf Steiner Press.)

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 again. This is a token 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 our work today because we know that the fruits of our work are assured for tomorrow; that after the night's rest the Sun will reappear, and the fruits of our labor will ripen.

We turn our eyes to the Earth's covering of plants; we admire its display; we know the world-order ordains that the plants and fruits for next year will arise from the seeds of this year. If asked why we live on with such a sense of security, we should reply that the reality of the world-order seems to us assured; we feel certain that from the ripening of the old seeds a new flowering will emerge into full reality.

But if we are thinking of this kind of reassurance from external reality, there is something in face of which we need a support. It is something of quite special significance for our soul-life. And only one phrase need be uttered—”our ideals”—to make us feel the need for assurance, since to those who truly think and feel it will be obvious that the phrase carries no such assurance in itself. When we think and feel in a higher sense, our ideals belong to those things that are more important to our souls than external reality. It is our ideals which fire our souls, and in many connections make life valuable and precious. And when we look at the assured reality of external life, we are often troubled by the thought: does this reality include anything that guarantees the most precious thing in life—the realization of our ideals?

Innumerable conflicts in the human soul proceed from the fact that people doubt more or less strongly in the realization of their ideals, although it is precisely on this that they would like to rely with every fiber of their being. 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 conflicts because they are unable to bring to fulfillment their cherished ideals. For we cannot conclude from the course of evolution that our ideals in life will prove to be the seeds of a future reality in the same way as the plant-seeds of this year foretell next year's flowering. These plant-seeds, we know, bear within them a potential which next year will yield a manifest reality on the widest scale. But if we consider our ideals, we may indeed cherish the belief that they will have some significance, some value for life; but certainty in the same sense we cannot have. As human beings we should like our ideals to be the seeds of a later future, but we look in vain for anything that can give them assured reality. When we look at the physical plane, we find that our souls, with their idealism, are often in a state of despair.

Let us pass from the world of the physical plane into the world of the occult, 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 revealing to look with the eyes of the spirit at those souls who in their earthly life were imbued through and through with high ideals, with ideals born from the fire and light of their hearts.

A man who has passed through the gate of death 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 might be expressed as follows: “These ideals, which have fired and illumined my inmost heart, have been my dearest, most intimate treasure; they now wear a strange, unfamiliar aspect. They look as though they did 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 though he were under their spell. 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 from what is connected with 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 events. To some of those sitting here they will be known already, but this evening they require to be specially illumined from a certain aspect, that they may be brought into connection with what I have said concerning the nature of human souls. Of recent years, a man of poetic nature joined us [Christian Morgenstern]. Coming from a life that was dedicated to the purest idealism and had already undergone a mystical deepening, this man joined our Anthroposophical Movement. Although his soul dwelt in a failing body, he devoted himself heart and soul to our spiritual Movement. In the spring of this year we lost him from Earth-life; he passed through the gate of death. He left to mankind a series of wonderful poems, published in a volume that came out shortly after his death.

Owing to the difficulties of his bodily life he was separated in space from our Movement for long periods, either in a lonely spot in the Swiss mountains, or in some other place recommended for his health. But he remained attached to our Movement, from however far away, and his poems, which in certain anthroposophical circles have lately been recited over and over again, are the poetic reflection, as it were, of what we have been developing in Anthroposophy for more than ten years.

Now he has passed through the gate of death, and something very remarkable comes from occult observation of this soul. The significance of the soul's life in that ailing body has become apparent only since death. While working faithfully with us for the progress of our Movement, this soul absorbed something that developed very great strength below the surface of the gradually dying body. This strength was concealed by the ailing body as long as the soul dwelt within it; but now, when one comes into the presence of this soul after death, there shines forth, as it can shine forth only in the spiritual life, the content of the life which this soul absorbed. The cloud-like sphere in which our friend now lives, after having passed through the gate of death, presents itself as a mighty cosmic tableau. For the occult observer this is a most striking sight.

It might 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, and quite another to see, separated out from a particular human soul, something that has the appearance of a mighty tableau, like a painting of what would otherwise be there on its own account 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 a Michelangelo, so is it in the spiritual world in the case we are speaking of. Just as one never says in the presence of a picture by Michelangelo or Raphael, “Oh, this picture has nothing to give me, for I have all the real world to look at”—so, in observing the tableau that mirrors in a soul what can otherwise be seen in contemplating spiritual reality, one does not say that this soul tableau is not an endless 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 we have described from out of the spiritual world in 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 our friends in other places, and I have now taken from it elements that will be important for our considerations today. And this occult fact, as it presents itself in Christian Morgenstern, shows me something else. Anyone who sees how much opposition there still is to the promulgation of occult teaching, as we give it, will often ask questions—I will not call it doubt, but the questions are asked: “What progress will this occult teaching make in human hearts and souls?”, and “Is there any guarantee, any assurance, that the work of the Anthroposophical Society will have a continuing influence on 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? Our friend, who has left behind him the poems, Wir fanden einen Pfad (“We found a Path”) lives in the immense cosmic tableau that is like a kind of soul-body for him after death; 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 soul until it became the very spiritual heart-blood of his soul; he received it in such a way that for him it was enfilled with the substance of the Christ. The Christ Being flowed into him in the teaching. The Christ, as He lives in our Movement, passed over likewise into his soul.

In contemplating this occult fact, the following presents itself. The man who goes through the gate of death can 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. It will work and be embodied in his whole being, or rather it will “ensoul” his whole being, and it will permeate his new Earth-life when he again descends to a life on Earth. Moreover, 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 such a soul has absorbed the teaching into his being. But this particular soul accepted all the teaching, steeped through and spiritualized by the Christ-Being, by the conception of the Christ-Being that 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 everyone, it works back again upon all mankind. And that cosmic tableau which for clairvoyant eyes is being developed in the soul of him who this spring passed through the gate of death—that Christ-enfilled soul-tableau is for me an assurance that what may be spoken today from out of the spiritual world will, through the love of Christ, radiate into souls who will come later. They will be set on fire, inspired by it. Not alone will our friend carry forward the Christ-enfilled anthroposophical teaching for his own greater perfecting, 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. Our souls cannot take in for themselves alone the Christ-filled spiritual science which is their most precious possession, but they will bear it through epochs of civilization yet to come. If you enfill this teaching with Christ, it will stream forth as a seed into the whole of humanity because the Christ Being belongs to all mankind. 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 all 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 cultivate true occultism, undismayed by what the modern world has to say against it. Hence we are able to touch on matter which can come to our knowledge only through investigation in the spiritual.

A second example calls for mention. In recent years we have had occasion in Munich to perform what we call the Mystery Plays, and Swedish friends have often been present. The performances of these Mystery Plays had to differ in many respects from other performances; that 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. Certainly, whatever is accomplished 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 out something through the will of our souls, we have to use our muscular power, which is imparted to us from outside and yet belongs to us. If we lack this muscular power, which comes to us from outside, there are some things we cannot do. In a certain sense muscular forces belongs to us and yet again not to us. So it is with our spiritual faculties, but our physical forces, our muscular powers, are of no help to us if these spiritual 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. It is true that other enterprises somewhat similar in character to our Munich Mystery Plays may be based on a different consciousness, but it was always clear to me that our project could be carried through only in the course of years, that the various impulses might be used only when definite spiritual forces, moving in this direction, flowed into our human forces; when spiritual “Guardian Angel” forces flowed into our human forces.

At the beginning of our spiritual-scientific work, when our very small circle came together at the beginning of this century, it was always 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. [Maria Spettini, actress at the German Imperial Theatre in St. Petersburg.] Even though it was for a short time, the bearer of this soul worked with us, especially in connection with the more intimate spiritual-scientific work that needed to be done at that time. With an inner depth of feeling and an enlightened enthusiasm she worked among us, and absorbed particularly certain cosmological teachings which it was possible to give at that time. And I still remember today how at that time a fact came before my soul which may perhaps seem unimportant, but 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 indicate, in tendency at any rate, the direction in which we wished to work. This article, even if it did not say so in words, laid down the lines which our Anthroposophical Society should follow, and I may say: that article, too, is Christ enfilled. The life-blood of Christianity can flow into those souls who absorb what is in that article. I may now perhaps remark that, at the time, this article met with the most violent opposition in the circle of the few who had joined us from the old Theosophical Movement. By all of them this article was 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 agreement is of more importance for the progress of the Movement than all the opposition put together. In short, this soul was deeply interwoven with all that was to flow into our spiritual stream.

She soon died; in 1904 she passed through the gate of death. For a while after death she had to struggle through in the spiritual world to find her real identity. Not as early as 1907, but from the time of our Mystery Plays in Munich, from 1909 onwards, and then to an increasing degree as time went on, this soul was always there, guarding and clarifying what I was able to undertake in connection with the Munich Festival Plays. All that this soul, owing to her talent for the beautiful, was able to give to the artistic realization of our spiritual ideals, 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, so are they present with us. This was yet another case—and here comes the point I must specially speak about today—this was again a case in which all that the personality had absorbed in the field of Anthroposophy was not used only to assist her own progress, for it clearly flowed back to us again in something that we ventured to do for the whole Movement. Two possibilities existed. This personality had taken in 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. This is right—it ought to happen so—for if the human soul is to attain its divine goal, it must become ever more and more perfect; it must do all it can to help forward this perfecting. But because this soul had taken into herself the whole purpose of what it is to be “Christ-enfilled”, what she had absorbed was able not merely to work for herself but to flow down to us—and to become an effective 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 knowledge represent for an individual, for the Christ died for all souls. When we rise up to that knowledge which must be possessed by all true Earth-men—”Not I, but 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 all 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 all 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 all that 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; 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. They are not rooted in external reality. That is why Lucifer has such power, and it is really the magnetic impulse of Lucifer which we experience in our ideals after death. Lucifer approaches us, and the ideals we have are specially 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 Christ in me”—then, when we pass through the gate of death we do not look back upon our ideals although 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. And the individual can say: “Not I alone can take my ideals upon myself so that they are seeds for humanity on Earth as surely as the plant-seeds of the present summer are seeds for the earthly plant-robe of the summer to come, 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 men we give expression to ideals on Earth, but in us lives the Christ and He takes them upon Himself.” These ideals are true seeds of future reality. Christ-enfilled idealism is permeated with the seed of reality, and he who truly understands Christ looks upon ideals in this way. He says: “Ideals have not yet in themselves that guarantee of their own reality, their own actuality, which inheres in the plant-seeds for the coming year; but when our ideals are committed to the Christ within us, they are real seeds.” Whoever has a true Christ-consciousness and makes his life-substance St. Paul's words “Not I, but Christ in me—He 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 then it is like the seeds of the future world in the world of the present, for the Christ bears our ideals on into the future 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 from the feeling: What becomes of the world of ideals that are inwardly bound up with external reality and with all that I most value? He who takes the Christ Impulse into himself perceives that everything which ripens in the human soul as idealism, as wisdom-treasure, is permeated, saturated through and through with reality. And I have brought the two examples before you in order to show you, out of the occult world, how different is the working of that which is entrusted, Christ-enfilled, to the soul, from that which is entrusted to it only as wisdom which is not Christ-enfilled. What the soul has permeated with Christ in this Earth-life flows down to us quite differently from that which is not Christ-enfilled.

A terrible impression is received when with clairvoyant consciousness one 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 power over them, which enables him to separate them from the fruits, the real fruits, 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. These souls work down into our bodies in this life; they kindle warmth and vitality in our souls. Permeation with the Christ Impulse can be felt as most precious inner soul-warmth, as comfort in the most difficult circumstances, as support in the worst abysses of life. And why? Because he who is truly permeated with the Christ Impulse finds that in whatever conquests his soul achieves, however imperfect they may appear in earthly life, there lies this Christ impulse as the assurance and guarantee of fulfillment for them. That is why Christ is such a consolation in the doubts of life, such a support for the soul. How much for the souls on Earth remains unfulfilled in life! How much seems to them precious, although in relation to the outer physical world they cannot but regard it as resembling vain hopes of spring. But anything we honestly feel in our soul, anything we can unite with our soul as a valued possession—all this we can commit to Christ; and whatever may be its prospects of 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, feels the warmth, the promise of realization in this Christ Impulse in respect of all that cannot be realized in the external world, although the soul, with perfect justification, longs for it to be realized.

The fact that clairvoyant consciousness sees these things when it surveys souls after death is a proof of how justifiable is the feeling of the human soul when in all that a man does, in all that he thinks, he feels himself Christ-enfilled, takes the Christ into his soul as comfort, as support, saying in Earth-life: “Not I, but Christ in me!” For a man may indeed say that in this Earth-life! Recall a passage at the beginning of my book, Theosophy, which is meant to indicate one of these points where, at a certain stage of the spiritual life, there is a realization of what fills the soul in this earthly life. In a certain place in this book I have drawn attention to the fact that Tat twam 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 way that is of immense human significance in relation to St. Paul's words, “Not I, but Christ in me”, which the Christ-enfilled soul may say in this life. If a man knows how to experience as inner truth this “Not I, but Christ in me”, it comes to powerful fulfillment after death. For what we receive through the words “Not I, but Christ in me” becomes our endowment, 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 receive it under the aspect of “Not I”, Christ makes into a common possession for all humanity. What I receive under the aspect of “Not I”, of this I may dare, after death, to say and feel, “Not for me alone, but for all my human brethren!” And then only may I say the words: “Yes, I have loved Him above all, even above myself,” and therefore I have hearkened to the command, “Love thy God above all.” “Not I, but Christ in me.”

And I have fulfilled that other commandment, “Love thy neighbor as thyself”, for whatever I have attained for myself will become through the fact that Christ carries it into reality, the common property of all mankind.

We must allow such things as these to work upon us, and then we experience what Christ has to signify in the human soul—how Christ can be the bearer and supporter, the comforter and illuminator of the soul of man. And so we gradually come to enter through our feelings into that which may be called the relation of Christ to the human soul.

One spring day in 1860, an autocratic Hungarian magnate, a certain Count Hoyos, who owned several large estates in Austria, dismissed his game-keeper, because this game-keeper, Johannes Steiner wanted to marry Franziska Blie, one of the Count's innumerable housemaids. Perhaps the old Count had a foreboding as to what a great spiritual revolution would be born of this marriage. (The baroque palace of Hom, where it happened, is still in the possession of the Hoyos family, and stands today just as it was one hundred years ago.) So Johannes Steiner had to look for another occupation, and got himself accepted as a trainee telegraphist and signalman by the recently opened Austrian Southern Railway. He was given his first job in an out-of-the-way request stop called Kraljevic (today in Yugoslavia), and there his first child, Rudolf, arrived on February 27, 1861. On the same day the child was taken for an emergency baptism to the parish Church of St. Michael in the neighboring village of Draskovec. The baptismal register was written in Serbo-Croat and Latin, and the entry still can be read today as of one Rudolfus Josephus Laurentius Steiner. “Thus it happened,” Rudolf Steiner writes in his autobiography, “that the place of my birth is far removed from the region where I come from.”

In later life, particularly in his lectures on education, Steiner frequently made the point that the most prodigious feat any man achieves at any time is accomplished by him in the first two or three years of his life, when he lifts his body into the upright position and learns to move it in perfect balance through space, when he forms a vital part of his organism into an instrument of speech and when he begins to handle and indeed to fashion his brain as a vehicle for thought. In other words, when the child asserts his human qualities which set him dramatically apart from the animals.

This initial achievement the boy Rudolf performed in Kraljevic. Kraljevic (meaning King's Village) is situated in the western outskirts of the vast Hungarian plain, the Puszta. Even today endless fields of maize and potatoes extend in every direction, and the solemn monotony of the country is more enhanced than relieved by the lines of tall poplars flanking the primitive, dead straight roads. It is basic three-dimensional space at its severest, domed over by the sky, which local people say is nowhere else so high nor so blue as over the Puszta. One might almost say that nature provided laboratory conditions in which the boy learned to stand, to walk, to speak and to think. One could justifiably say of Rudolf Steiner what the biographer, Hermann Grimm, said of Goethe: “It seems as if Providence had placed him in the simplest circumstances in order that nothing should impede his perfect unfolding.”

From the severity of the Puszta the family moved, when the boy was two years old, into one of the most idyllic parts of Austria, called “the Burgenland” since 1921. Comprising the foothills of the eastern Alps, it is of great natural beauty, very fertile, and drenched in history. It takes its name from the many Burgen, i.e. castles which at different times of history were erected on nearly every hill. During recent excavations coins bearing the head of Philip of Macedonia, the father of Alexander the Great, have been found near Neudörfl, where the Steiners now settled, and where a daughter and a younger son were added to the family.

The management of the Austrian Southern Railway seems to have taken a sympathetic view toward the promising boy, and agreed to move father Steiner as stationmaster to several small stations south of Vienna, so that the eldest son was able to attend good schools as a day student, and finally in 1879 could matriculate at the Technical University of Vienna, then one of the most advanced scientific institutions of the world. Until then Rudolf Steiner's school life had been fairly uneventful, except that some of his masters were rather disturbed by the fact that this teen-ager was a voracious reader of Kant and other philosophers, and privately was engrossed in advanced mathematics.

In his first year at the University Rudolf Steiner studied chemistry and physics, mathematics, geometry, theoretical mechanics, geology, biology, botany, and zoology; and while still an undergraduate two events occurred which were of far-reaching consequence for his further development.

In the train in which the young student travelled daily to Vienna he frequently met a curious personality, an herb-gatherer, who turned out to be a latter-day Jacob Boehme. He was filled with the most profound nature lore to which he had first-hand access. He understood the language of plants, which told him what sicknesses they could heal; he was able to listen to the speech of the minerals, which told him of the natural history of our planet and of the Universe. In the last winter of his public life, in December 1923, Steiner provided something of a historic background for this wisdom, notably in his lectures on the Mysteries of Eleusis. Steiner immortalized the herb-gatherer in his Mystery Dramas, in the figure of “Father Felix.” But “Father Felix” was instrumental in bringing Steiner together with a still more important and mysterious personality.

“Felix was only the intermediary for another personality,” Steiner tells us in his autobiography, “who used means to stimulate in the soul of the young man the regular systematic things with which one has to be familiar in the spiritual world. This personality used the works of Fichte in order to develop certain observations from which results ensued which provided the seeds for my (later) work ... This excellent man was as undistinguished in his daily job as was Felix.”

While these fateful meetings occurred on the inward field of life, a very consequential relationship developed on the outward field. The Technical University of Vienna provided a chair for German literature, which was held by Karl Julius Schröer, a great Goethe enthusiast and one of the most congenial interpreters of Goethe. Schröer recognized Steiner's unusual gifts, and anticipated that he might be capable of doing some original research in the most puzzling part of Goethe's works, i.e. his scientific writings.

Only two years ago, Dr. Emil Bock, of Stuttgart, Germany, one of the most eminent Steiner scholars, discovered the correspondence between Professor Schröer, Steiner, and the German Professor Joseph Kürschner, who was engaged in producing a monumental edition of representative works of German literature from the 7th to the 19th century. In the first letter of this correspondence, dated June 4, 1882, Schröer refers to Steiner as an “undergraduate of several terms standing.” He says that he has asked him to write an essay on Goethe and Newton, and if this essay is a success, as he thinks it will be, “we have found the editor of Goethe's scientific works.” Steiner was then twenty-one years of age. Schröer's letter is reminiscent of the letter Robert Schumann wrote to the great violinist Joachim, after he had received the first visit of the then twenty-one year old Brahms: “It is he who was to come.”

The introductions and explanatory notes to the many volumes of Goethe's scientific works which Steiner was now commissioned to write were much ahead of their time. They blazed a trail into the less familiar regions of Goethe's universal genius which only today begins to be followed up by other scholars.

The young Steiner wrote these, his first works, in outward conditions of great poverty. The family lived in two rooms, which are still shown today. The larger one of the two was kitchen, dining, sitting and bedroom for the parents and his younger brother and sister, and off this larger room a few steps led into a narrow, white-washed, unheated cubicle where the young Steiner worked as in a monk's cell. No wonder that a Viennese celebrity of the time refers to him in his memoirs as one “who looked like a half-starved student of theology.”

However, this first literary success led to Steiner's call to the central Goethe Archives at Weimar, where despite his youth he now became one of the editors of the great Standard Edition (Sophien Ausgabe) of Goethe's Complete Works. This concentrated occupation with Goethe, continued for seven years in Weimar, from 1889 to 1896, had a profound effect upon the unfolding of Steiner's own mind and philosophical consciousness. Goethe was the catalyst which released new mental and spiritual energies in Steiner s own personality. It was during these years that Steiner's fundamental philosophical works were conceived and written.

In 1886 he published An Epistemology of Goethe's World Conception. In 1891 his small concentrated thesis on Truth and Science earned him his Ph.D. In 1896 his comprehensive Philosophy of Spiritual Activity opened a completely new approach to the understanding of the human mind and the nature of thought. It represents the first really fresh step in philosophic thought and in the philosophic interpretation of the human consciousness since Kant. It is no wonder that in those years Steiner began to be looked upon in Germany as “the coming philosopher” upon whom before long the mantle of the dying Nietzsche would fall. But his genius led him a different way.

In his thirty-sixth year—“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,” as Dante calls it, Steiner moved to Berlin, and the next seven years were perhaps the most dramatic period in his life. His new position in Berlin was that of editor of the weekly, Das Magazin für Litteratur, founded in 1832 (something equivalent to the London Saturday Review). He wrote the leading article and the dramatic reviews, occupying in Berlin a position somewhat similar to that of Bernard Shaw (who was five years his senior), with his weekly dramatic criticism in the Saturday Review. This assignment brought Steiner into close social contact with the intellectual and artistic élite of Berlin at the time, and for some years he pitched his tent among them. In the last years of his life, during rare moments of relaxation, he would at times tell stories of this exciting and often amusing period.

Side by side with these literary circles, or perhaps in polarity to them, Steiner was also drawn by objective interest and personal attraction into the camp of Haeckel and the militant monists. To move in this manner abreast of the spirit of the time would be a most interesting experience for anyone. For Steiner it was more. And I must now touch upon that side of his life about which I shall have to speak presently in greater detail. From childhood while for others such “being involved in this or that fashion of thought would be no more than an ideology,” for anyone standing in the spiritual world it means, as Steiner says in his autobiography, that “he is brought close to the spirit-beings who desire to invest a particular ideology with a totalitarian claim.” Steiner refers to his experience as a “Soul's Probation” which he had to undergo. (He later chose The Soul's Probation as the title of one of his Mystery Dramas.) He speaks of the “tempests” which during those years in Berlin raged in his soul, a rare expression in the otherwise very even and dispassionate style of his autobiography. At the end of those “forty days in the wilderness”—which were in fact four years—the thunderclouds lifted, the mist cleared, and he stood, to use his own phrase. “in solemn festival of knowledge before the Mystery of Golgotha.” He had come to a first-hand experience of Christ and His active presence in the evolution of the world.

We have now reached the point where we must venture into the great unknown: Steiner the seer, the Initiate.

It is a plain fact that in some form or other spiritual knowledge has existed throughout the ages. Secret wisdom has never been absent from human history. But in Steiner it assumed a totally new form. In order to appreciate this revolutionary novelty, we must first have a picture of the old form.

The faculty of spiritual perception and secret wisdom is obtained through certain organs in the “subtle body” of man, to borrow a convenient term from Eastern Indian medicine. In Sanscrit these organs are called “chakrams,” generally translated into English as “lotus flowers.” They fulfill a function in the “subtle body” similar to our senses in the physical body. They are usually dormant today, but can be awakened. We can disregard for the moment the rites of Initiation which were employed in the Mystery Temples of the ancient world, and confine ourselves to the survival of more general methods which today are still practiced in many parts of the world. They all have one thing in common: they operate through the vegetative system in man, through bodily posture, through the control of breathing, through physical or mental exercises which work upon the solar plexus and the sympathetic nervous system. I realize that I am presenting a somewhat crude simplification. But nevertheless I am giving the essentials.

Steiner broke with all this. He began to operate from the opposite pole of the human organism, from pure thought. Thought, ordinary human thought, even if it is brilliant and positive, is at first something very weak. It does not possess the life, say, of our breathing, let alone the powerful life of our pulsating blood. It is, shall we say, flat, without substance; it is really lifeless. It is “pale thought,” as Shakespeare called it.

This relative lifelessness of our thoughts is providential, however. If the living thoughts filling the Universe were to enter our consciousness just as they are, we would faint. If the living idea in every created thing simply jumped into our consciousness with all its native force, it would blot us out. Fortunately, our cerebro-spinal system exerts a kind of resistance in the process; it functions like a resistor in an electric circuit; it is a sort of transformer, reducing the violence of reality to such a degree that our mind can tolerate it and register it. However, as a result, we see only the shadows of reality on the back wall of our Platonic cave, not reality itself.

Now one of the magic words in Steiner's philosophy with which he attempts to break this spell, is “Erkraftung des Denkens.” It means putting force, life into thinking, through thinking, within thinking. All his basic philosophic works, notably the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, and many of his exercises, are directed to this purpose. If they are followed, sooner or later the moment arrives when thinking becomes leibfrei, i.e. independent of the bodily instrument, when it works itself free from the cerebrospinal system.

This is at first a most disturbing experience. One feels like a man who has pushed off from the shore and who must now strive with might and main to maintain himself in the raging sea. The sheer power of cosmic thought is such that at first one loses one's identity. And perhaps one would lose it for good, if it were not for a fact which now emerges from the hidden mysteries of Christianity. One does not finally lose one's identity because He Himself has walked the waves and extended a helping hand to Peter who ventured out prematurely. Gradually the waves seem to calm down, and a condition ensues which Steiner expresses in a wonderful phrase: “Thinking itself becomes a body which draws into itself as its soul the Spirit of the Universe.”

This is a stage which, broadly speaking, Steiner had attained at the point of his biography which we have reached. Now he made a discovery which was not known to him before. He discovered that this “living thinking” could awaken the chakrams from “above,” just as in the old way they could be stimulated from “below.” Thought which at first in the normal and natural psychosomatic process “died” on the place of the skull, but which through systematic exercises had risen again to the level of cosmic reality, could now impart life to the dormant organs of spiritual perception which have been implanted into man by Him who created him in His image. From about the turn of the century Steiner began to pursue this path with ever greater determination, and gradually developed the three forms of Higher Knowledge which he called Imagination: a higher seeing of the spiritual world in revealing images; Inspiration: a higher hearing of the spiritual world, through which it reveals its creative forces and its creative order; Intuition: the stage at which an intuitive penetration into the sphere of Spiritual Beings becomes possible.

With these unfolding powers Steiner now developed up to his death in 1925, in twenty-five momentous years, that truly vast and awe-inspiring body of spiritual and practical knowledge to which he gave the name “Anthroposophy.” (Incidentally, this word was first coined by Thomas Vaughan, a brother of the English mystical poet, Henry Vaughan, in the 17th century.) Anthroposophy literally means wisdom of man or the wisdom concerning man, but in his later years Steiner himself interpreted it on occasion as “an adequate consciousness of being human.” In this interpretation the moral achievement of Steiner's work, his mission, his message to a bewildered humanity which has lost “an adequate consciousness of being human,” to which Man has become “the Unknown,” is summed up. This monumental work lies before us today and is waiting to be fully discovered by our Age—in some 170 books and in the published transcripts of nearly 6,000 lectures.

Three characteristic stages can be observed in Steiner's anthroposophical period. In a lecture given at the headquarters of the German Anthroposophical Society at Stuttgart (on February 6, 1923) he himself described these stages. Stage one (approximately 1901-1909): to lay the foundation for a Science of the Spirit within Western Civilization, with its center in the Mystery of Golgotha, as opposed to the purely traditional handing down of ancient oriental wisdom which is common to other organizations such as the Theosophical Society. Stage two (approximately 1910-1917): the application of the anthroposophical Science of the Spirit to various branches of Science, Art and practical life. As one of the milestones for the beginning of this second stage Steiner mentions the building of the Goetheanum, that architectural wonder (since destroyed by fire) in which his work as an artist had found its culmination. Stage three (approximately 1917-1925): first-hand descriptions of the spiritual world. During these twenty-five years of anthroposophical activity, Steiner's biography is identical with the history of the Anthroposophical Movement. His personal life is entirely dedicated to and absorbed in the life of his work.

It was during the last of the three phases that Steiner's prodigious achievements in so many fields of life began to inspire a number of his students and followers to practical foundations. Best known today are perhaps the Rudolf Steiner Schools for boys and girls, which have been founded in many countries and in which his concept of the true human being is the well-spring of all educational methods and activities. There are some seventy Steiner schools in existence with well over 30,000 pupils. A separate branch are the Institutes for Curative Education which have sprung up both in Europe and Overseas, and whose activities have been immensely beneficial to the ever increasing number of physically and mentally handicapped children and adults. Steiner's contributions to medical research and to medicine in general are used by a steadily growing number of doctors all over the world, and his indications are tested and followed up in a number of research centers and clinics. Another blessing for humanity flowed from his method of Biodynamic Agriculture, by which he was able to add to the basic principles of organic husbandry just those extras which, if rightly used, can greatly increase both fertility and quality without those chemical stimulants which in the long run poison both the soil and its products.

In the field of Art there is hardly an area he did not touch with the magic wand of creative originality. The second Goetheanum which replaced the first one destroyed by fire shows the massive use of reinforced concrete as a plastic material for architecture a generation before this use was attempted by others. Steiner's direct and indirect influence on modern painting with the symphonic use of color, on sculpture, on glass-engraving, on metal work and other visual arts is too far-reaching for anyone even to attempt to describe in condensed form. Students and graduates of the Steiner schools for Eurythmy and for Dramatic Art have performed before enthusiastic audiences in the cultural centers of the world, ably directed by Marie Steiner, his wife.

To those who have been attracted to this present publication by its title and its reference to Christianity, it will be of particular interest to hear that among those foundations which came into being during the last phase of Steiner's anthroposophical work was a Movement for Religious Renewal, formed by a body of Christian ministers, students and other young pioneers who had found in Rudolf Steiner “a man sent from God,” able to show the way to a true reconciliation of faith and knowledge, of religion and science. This Movement is known today as “The Christian Community” and has centers in many cities in the Old and New World. Apart from the inestimable help this Movement received from him in theological and pastoral matters, Rudolf Steiner was instrumental in mediating for this Movement a complete spiritual rebirth of the Christian Sacraments for the modern age and a renewal of the Christian priestly office.

Christianity as Mystical Fact and the Mysteries of Antiquity holds a special place in the story of his remarkable and dedicated life. The book contains the substance of a series of lectures Rudolf Steiner gave in the winter of 1901–1902 in the “Theosophical Library” of Berlin at the invitation of the President, Count Brockdorff. This series had been preceded by another on the German mystics from Master Eckhardt to Jacob Boehme (published in the Centennial Edition of the Written Works of Rudolf Steiner under the title Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age) in which Steiner had ventured for the first time to present publicly some measure of his spiritual knowledge.

After these lectures on the mystics which was something of a prelude, Christianity as Mystical Fact now ushered in a new period in the understanding of the basic facts of Christianity as well as in Steiner's own life.

Compared with the free flow of spiritual teaching on Christianity offered by Steiner in his later works, the book may appear somewhat tentative and even reticent in its style. But it contains as in a nutshell all the essential new elements he was able to develop and unfold so masterfully in his later years.

Steiner considered the phrase “Mystical Fact” in the title to be very important. “I did not intend simply to describe the mystical content of Christianity,” he says in his autobiography. “I attempted to show that in the ancient Mysteries cult-images were given of cosmic events, which occurred later on the field of actual history in the Mystery of Golgotha as a Fact transplanted from the cosmos into the earth.”

It will not be out of place to round off this biographical sketch with a few personal reminiscences of the last four years of his life when I met Steiner as man and Initiate among his friends and students, and saw quite a good deal of him.

What was Rudolf Steiner like?—In the first place there was nothing in the least pompous about him. He never made one feel that he was in any sense extraordinary. There was an astonishing matter-of-factness about him, whether he spoke at a business meeting of the Anthroposophical Society, presided over faculty meetings of the Waldorf School^*, lectured on his ever increasing discoveries in the spiritual field, or spoke in public discussions on controversial subjects of the day.

I attended small lecture courses of less than fifty people, heard him lecture in the large hall of the first Goetheanum, was present at large public meetings when he expounded his “Threefold Commonwealth” ideas in the electric atmosphere of the Germany of 1923, during the occupation of the Ruhr and the total collapse of the German Mark. He was always the same: clear, considerate, helpful, unruffled. In those days he could fill the largest halls in Germany, and his quiet voice was strong enough to be heard without artificial amplification in the last rows of the gallery.

His hair remained jet black to the end; I cannot remember a strand of grey in it. His brown eyes, they sometimes had a shimmer of gold in them, looked with sympathy upon everything. And he possessed a wonderful buoyancy of carriage.

From 1913 Steiner lived permanently at Dornach, near Basel, Switzerland, in a house known locally as “Villa Hansi.” However, he spent most of his time in his studio, which was really nothing but a simple wooden building adjoining the large carpentry-shop where much of the woodwork of the first Goetheanum was prefabricated. In this studio he received an unending stream of callers. One would, perhaps, be shown into the room by a helping friend, but at the end he would always conduct one to the door himself. He put one at ease with such courtesy that one was in danger of forgetting who he was. And he gave the impression that he had no other care nor interest in the world than to listen to one's immature questions.

He would sit on a simple wicker chair, his legs crossed, perhaps occasionally moving one foot up and down. On the lapel of his black coat one might see a slight trace of snuff, because he indulged in the Old-World pleasure of taking snuff, but he neither drank nor smoked. I have never met anyone, and I am sure I shall never meet anyone who seemed so constantly at rest and in action simultaneously, all the time perfectly relaxed and absolutely alert.

The last summer of his life, in 1924, was the most prolific of all. He gave specialized courses on agriculture, on curative education, on Eurythmy. Then followed a summer school in August at Torquay in England; and when he returned to Dornach in early September, he increased his activities still further and gave as many as five, sometimes six different lectures each day. There was a daily course on the New Testament Book of Revelation for the priests of the Christian Community, another on pastoral medicine for priests and doctors combined, another on dramatic art, where I remember him one morning acting singlehanded the whole of Dantons Tod, a drama of the French Revolution by the German writer, Buchner. On another morning he acted the Faust fragment by Lessing. And in addition to all this, he also held lectures for the workmen of the Goetheanum.

Besides these specialized courses, the general lectures and other central activities of the Goetheanum School for the Science of the Spirit continued without interruption.

But the inevitable moment approached when even his resilient body showed the strain of his immense work. Sometimes for the period of a whole week he would hardly sleep more than two hours each night. I believe that he knew what he was doing. He well knew why he burned the candle not only at both ends but also in the middle.

My last memory of him is of the night when I was privileged, together with another friend, to keep vigil at the foot of his bed on which his body was laid out. It was the night before his funeral. The bed stood in his simple studio where he had been confined during the last six months of his life. Looking down on him was the great wooden statue of Christ which he had carved and nearly finished. Even in the literal sense of the word he had laid down his life at the feet of Christ.

The dignity of his features was enhanced by the marble whiteness of death. In the stillness of the night, with only a few candles burning, it was as if ages of human history converged to do homage. With a deep sense of reverence I wondered who he was. I am wondering still.

ALFRED HEIDENREICH

London, England
August 1961

• *. The first Rudolf Steiner School was called the “Waldorf School” because it was sponsored hy the Waldorf Astoria Cigarette Factory in Stuttgart, Germany, and its managing director, Dr. Emil Molt.

Meeting you today with New Year Greetings, I should like to express the wish that each one of you may realize in the depth of his soul how great and insistent are the demands of the present moment as regards the evolution of mankind, and that, as a result of this realization, each one in his own place may co-operate as far as he can, in bringing to fulfilment that of which mankind stands in such need. At this time of year, expressing as it does symbolically the meeting of past and future, I should like, by way of introduction to our New Year contemplation, which rightly is also a contemplation of the whole course of time, to recall some passages from essays which I wrote more than thirty years ago and which are shortly to be published. Although connected with personal experiences, these essays have a definite significance if we want to look into the whole spiritual condition of the present day. My purpose in writing them was, as you will notice, to rouse the conscience of the German people, to give expression to that which could be perceived even then, as fundamentally lacking in the spiritual life of the German nation. I will read to you some passages from one of these essays entitled “The Spiritual Mark of the Present Day”. These passages refer to what was taking place more than thirty years ago, to a past which was then the present. I wrote in the very midst of the spiritual life prevailing at that time, amid symptoms which showed themselves most markedly in the life of thought of the German nation. I wrote: “It is with a shrug of the shoulders that our generation recalls the period when a philosophic current ran through the whole spiritual life of the German people. The mighty impulse of the times, seizing men's minds at the end of last century (i.e., the eighteenth century) and the beginning of this one, and boldly facing the highest imaginable tasks, is now looked upon as a regrettable aberration. If anyone dares to raise an objection when the conversation turns upon Fichte's fantasies, or Hegel's insubstantial play of thoughts and words, he is regarded by his listeners as a mere amateur, who has as slight an idea of the spirit of modern scientific investigation, as he has of the thoroughness and seriousness of philosophic methods. Kant and Schopenhauer at best are tolerated by our contemporaries. It is apparently possible to trace back to Kant the somewhat scanty philosophic crumbs used by modern science as foundational; and Schopenhauer, besides his strictly scientific works, also wrote a few things in a light style, on subjects accessible to people with a limited spiritual horizon. An open mind for that striving towards the loftiest heights of the world of thought, an understanding for that soaring of the spirit which in the realms of science went parallel with our classic period of culture—this is lacking now. The serious side of this phenomenon only appears when we take into consideration that a persistent turning away from that spiritual goal implies for the German people the loss of their own Self, a breaking away from the Spirit of the Nation. For that striving sprang from a deep need in the German nature. It does not enter our mind to wish to deny the manifold mistakes and one-sided fallacies which Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, Oken, and others, committed in their bold inroads into the kingdom of idealism. But the impulse which in all its grandeur inspired them should not be misunderstood. It is the impulse most fitting for a nation of thinkers. The German nation is not characterized by that living sense for immediate reality, or the outward aspect of Nature, which enabled the Greeks to create their wonderful and imperishable works of art. Among the Germans there is instead, an unceasing urge of the spirit toward the cause of things, toward the apparently hidden, deeper origins of the Nature which surrounds us. Just as the Greek spirit found expression in its wonderful world of plastic forms, so the German, more concentrated within himself, less open to Nature but on that account more with his own heart, cherishing intercourse with his own inner world, sought his conquests in the world of pure thought. The way, therefore, in which Fichte and his successors looked upon the world and life was truly German. This is why their teachings were so enthusiastically received; this is why, for a time, they held the whole life of the nation enthralled. This is why we must not break with their spiritual leading. Our solution of the difficulty should be to overcome mistakes, while continuing the natural course of development on the lines laid down at that time. Not what these spirits found or thought to find, is of lasting value, but how they faced the problems.”

At the time when this essay was written the German nation had to be shown these truths, which were threatening to disappear from their field of vision. We were living then in another age than the present, an age in which, had we willed it, it might still have been possible for certain circles to unite with the spirit, then at the beginning of its decline, and thus to prepare the way for an all-pervading and lasting development of the human impulse. Indeed, at that time it ought to have been possible to find such people, amongst those who called themselves leaders of the nation, amongst those who prepared the younger generation for later life. There were no experiments, then, of the kind now coming to the fore in Russia. At that time (in Germany) those who educated the young, still had the chance of turning back to the aims and intentions of the old spiritual life, causing it to rise again in the new form. But no one was willing to listen in the least to any voice urging that a real, spiritual striving should rise to life again amongst men. Every opinion that had taken firm hold amongst the lower or higher ranks of the nation's teachers during the preceding thirty years, was an attack directed against the aims and intentions of a spiritual world-conception.

I should recall that when I wrote this essay, I had already published my views on Goethe's World Conception, on Goethe's scientific ideas. I had pointed out two great dangers in the domain of thought, in the field of active scientific investigation. I coined at that time two expressions defining the two great foes of human spiritual progress. On the one hand I spoke of the “Dogma of Revelation”, and on the other hand of the “Dogma of mere Experience”. I wished to show that the one-sided cultivation of the dogma of revelation, as it had developed in the religious confessions, was just as pernicious as the continual hammering upon the so-called dogmas of experience, i.e., continually insisting only upon all that the external sense-world, the world of material facts, offers to scientists and sociologists. In the course of time the task arose of rendering these thoughts more concrete, of pointing out the real forces behind this or that phenomenon.

What, then, lies behind in everything brought to our notice when the dogma of revelation is mentioned? Today, in an all-embracing sense, all that lies behind what we term Luciferic influences in the course of mankind's evolution. And behind the dogma of experience, lies everything that we term, again in an all-embracing sense, the Ahrimanic influences in human evolution. In the present age, he who wishes to lead men only under the influence of the dogma of revelation, leads them in the Luciferic direction; he who wishes instead to lead men, as scientists would do, only according to the dogma of external sense-experience, leads them in the Ahrimanic direction. Is it not a fitting New Year's contemplation in these serious times of ours, to review the last thirty or forty years, and to point out how necessary it still is today to repeat the call of that time, to raise it anew, but far more strongly? The outward course of events during these last thirty or forty years has shown clearly the justification of that call; for he who without prejudice looks at what has happened, must say to himself: “There would not be today's misery and want, had that call become a reality in the hearts of the people of Central Europe at that time.” At that time it sounded in vain. Today the Holy Roman Congregation meets it with the Decree of the 18th July, 1919, and the chief clergy announce from their pulpits that Anthroposophy is not to be read in my books because the Pope forbids it. Information concerning it can be obtained from the writings of my opponents. This pronouncement takes place simultaneously with negotiations for the establishment of a Roman Catholic Nuntiate in Berlin under the auspices of a Berlin Government with socialistic leanings! Here, again, is something that shows the spiritual mark of the age. Would that today one could really appeal to the innermost heart-forces of those who are still capable of feeling something of the spiritual impulses in human evolution, so that they may wake up, so that they may see how things really stand. The all-important thing today is that man should be able to find himself. But to find our own Self requires confidence in our own strength of soul. Little is attained amongst men today, by appealing to this confidence in their own strength of soul. People want, on the one hand, the support of something which constrains them from within to think and to will what is right, or, on the other hand, the support of something which constrains them from without to think and to will what is right. In some way we always find these two extremes in men; they never wish to pull themselves together, to strive with active forces towards the balance between these two extremes.

Let us reconsider this spiritual mark of the present day, about to become the social and material mark. Let us reconsider it to some extent. We hear the old Marxist call rising in the East of Europe: “A social order must be established among men, where everyone can live according to his individual capacities and needs; a social order must be evolved where the individual capacities of each man can be taken into full consideration and where the justifiable needs of every single person can be satisfied.” Taken in the abstract, no objection whatever can be raised against this saying. But on the other hand, we hear a personality like Lenin saying: “Among people of today such a social order cannot be founded; it is only possible to establish a transitory social order; it is only possible to establish something which is injustice”—of course in the widest sense of the word. Injustice is indeed present to an absurd extent in everything that Lenin and his followers establish. For Lenin and his followers believe that only by passing through a transitory social order, can a new human race be produced, a race not yet in existence; only when the race is there, will it be possible to introduce the social order where everyone will be able to employ his capacities, where everyone will be able to live according to his needs. This, then, is what they are aiming at: the formation of a race of men not yet in existence, in order to realize an ideal which, as I have said, can be justified in the abstract.

Ought not enough people, when they hear of such a thing as this, be able to find themselves, and to grasp the whole seriousness of the present world-situation? Is it not time for this drowsiness to cease, when something of this kind appears before us pointing most significantly to the mark of the present day—this drowsiness which causes us to close our eyes a little, so that we do not grasp the whole significance of such a matter? Nothing will help us to reach a concrete insight into these things, except to abandon the paths of abstraction in the Spiritual life. And for this we must first really acquire the feeling that where there is only a flow of words and phrases about spirit and soul, there the talk is mere abstraction. We must be able to feel when spirit and soul are spoken of as reality. For example, speaking of human capacities: These arise as manifestations from out of man's inner being as the individual grows up. Through some of its leaders, mankind feels itself induced to develop accordingly these capacities and forces, which come to light in the growing human being. But in this domain our feelings are to be trusted only if we definitely perceive in the manifestation of these forces and capacities, a manifestation of the Divine; if we can say to ourselves: Man has come into this World of sense-realities out of a spirit-soul World of Being, and that which externalizes as human forces and capacities, and which we develop in ourselves and in others, comes from a spiritual world and is now placed in a physical human body. Now, consider the spiritual meaning of that which has been explained in this place for decades; it will show you that with the incorporation of human capacities and forces in the physical human body, Luciferic beings were given the possibility of approaching these human capacities and forces. No work whatsoever can be done in the sphere of human capacities and forces, be it in the form of self-activity or in the teaching of others, or in the furtherance of general culture, without coming into contact with the Luciferic forces. In that region which man has to go through before he enters physical existence through birth or conception, the Luciferic Power cannot directly approach the human capacities and forces. Embodiment in a physical human frame, is the means by which the Luciferic Powers are able to reach human capacities and forces. It is only if, without prejudice we look this fact in the face, that we assume a right attitude in life towards everything that surges up from human nature as individual capacities and forces. If we close our eyes to what is Luciferic, if we deny that it exists, then we succumb to it. Then the soul falls into that mood which desires above all to deliver itself up to some coercion from within, so that through all kinds of mystic or religious forces it can unburden itself of the necessity of calling upon its own free Self, or of seeking for the Divine in the world, within the development of its own free Self. Men do not want to think for themselves, they want some indefinite force from within to manifest itself, according to which they can argue logically. They do not want to experience truth; they only want to experience that inner force compelling them from within, manifesting itself in proof which does not appeal to experience, but appeals instead to a Spiritual Power which over-rules man, which compels him to think in this or in that way about Nature or about mankind himself. Men deliver themselves over to the Luciferic Powers, by calling up within themselves this inner compulsion, this inner power.

The means which can be used so that man shall appeal to this inner compulsion, so that he shall not rise to the free, upright position in the spiritual world, is to force him to think that there are no such three members of human nature as Body, Soul and Spirit; to forbid him, as actually happened in the Eighth Ecumenical Council in Constantinople, to think that man consists of Body, Soul and Spirit, and bid him to put away all thoughts concerning the Spirit. These are inner connections which may not be overlooked any longer. We must face them today clearly and without prejudice. In the year 869 A.D., it was decided to forbid the belief in the Spirit in man. It was in that year that the downward slope towards Lucifer began in European civilization. And today we have the full result. Long enough has mankind yielded to the inclination not to experience truth, but to allow the compulsion of argument, of impersonal argument, to work upon him. As a result, mankind has fallen into the other extreme. There has been no real comprehension of human capacities and forces, no one wanted to own that, as I have just explained, Luciferic forces live in human capacities and forces, when these are embodied in a physical human frame. That false point of view—the ruling one in humanity today, concerning individual capacities and forces in human nature—has been the outcome.

Human needs, needs arising first out of his purely physical nature, constitute the other pole of man. In his Letters on aesthetics, Schiller has characterized these needs very finely, contrasting them with man's abstract logical power. He calls them the basic needs (“Notdurft”), whereas he characterizes logical compulsion as the other power, a power straying into spiritual regions. During that great period of German evolution, a personality such as Schiller, was on the point of grasping rightly the polaric contrasts in man. The time was not yet ripe for saying more than what Schiller, Goethe, and others like-minded had said. The necessity of building further upon this beginning has been laid upon our present age. If we continue to build, Anthroposophical Spiritual Science will arise. He who is only acquainted with the one-sided power of proof in the spiritual sphere, only learns to know in life the one-sided power of natural instincts in human needs. It is easy to imagine that when man with his capacities and powers enters the physical sense-world through conception or birth, and Lucifer hovers over him and from that which man himself ought to possess takes something on one side, the head-side of the man's being, there remains in man an inferior kind of power for the exercise of his independence in the sphere of his needs. Through that which Lucifer on the one hand takes for his own, Ahriman on the other hand attains the possibility of making his own that which works in the needs of human nature. The dogma of mere external sense-experience has paved the way for the complete Ahrimanization of mankind's sense-life of instinct during the last third of the nineteenth century. Modern man stands before a terrible fact today because he does not recognize that salvation lies in the state of balance between the two extremes, between capacities on the one side, and needs on the other side. The materialistic spirit in man makes him look on the body alone as that which produces capacities i.e., man looks merely on the Luciferic primal force of capacities. The capacities become Luciferic owing to their entrance into a human body. If man believes that capacities spring from the body, then man believes in Lucifer, and if man believes that needs spring from the human body, then man believes only in the Ahrimanic side of such needs.

And what experiment is being made in the East of Europe today under the guidance of the West? (This guidance is not only evident through the fact that Lenin and Trotsky are the spiritual disciples of the West, but also through the fact that Lenin was dispatched into Russia in a sealed railway carriage by Dr. Helphand, the German official who accompanied him. So that what is termed Bolshevism, is an article transported into Russia by a German Administration and the German military command.) What are they trying to attain in the civilization of Eastern Europe? An attempt is being made to do away with everything human, with everything embodied in a human body as human, and to harness together Lucifer and Ahriman, with the civilization they represent. Were this to be realized in the East, then the Manufacturing Company of Lucifer and Ahriman would create a world excluding everything beneficial to the individual human being, and man himself would be dovetailed into this Luciferic-Ahrimanic civilization as part of a machine in the complete working of the machine. But the parts of a machine are lifeless and allow themselves to be fitted in, whereas human nature is inwardly alive, permeated by soul, permeated by spirit. It cannot fit into a merely Luciferic-Ahrimanic organization, but will perish in it. Only an understanding of Spiritual Science can grasp what is really taking place today in this materialistic world which has but the haziest notions of spirit. It is only the insight of Spiritual Science and its living earnestness which can explain what the fact implies that, during the last thirty to forty years, the essential nature of the German people would not turn back to that German spirituality pointed out in my essay, but that in this German world of culture, we have at last come to this, that men of authority have felt it to be the right thing to send to Russia (in a sealed railway carriage), through a man who stood in their service, the inaugurators of Lucifer and Ahriman. In our days, it will not do simply to look around and then go to sleep peacefully, in the presence of what is actually taking place in the depths of the spirit of the present time. We ought to feel that we must say: “We have forsaken and trodden under foot that which in the age of Schiller and of Goethe was created within the Spiritual life of Germany. And we have the task of beginning where they left off and of building on further.” No better New Year's thought can enter our souls than the resolution to make this our starting point.

I told you the following some years ago: In the sixties and seventies of last century an educationist, Heinrich Deinhardt, lived in Vienna, the place where my essays were put together. This man's spirit led him from the standpoint of Schiller's Letters on Aesthetics to take an active part in pedagogics, a science that was then under full sail, following the materialistic lead of his day. In some fine letters, printed at the time, explanatory of Schiller's Letters on Aesthetics, Deinhardt wrote that man should be educated to recognize the compelling necessity of logic, and of the basic needs (“Notdurft”), which only live in instinct. Deinhardt was one of those who raised the warning cry: “We must prevent by means of education what is bound to happen otherwise.” He could not yet speak with the concepts of Spiritual Science, but he did point out in his own words the inevitable coming of the Luciferic-Ahrimanic culture if the Science of Education, the Art of Education were not determined by this balance. Heinrich Deinhardt had the misfortune to be knocked down in the street and to break his leg. Quite a simple operation might have put it right again, but the doctors found he was so undernourished that the injured parts would not heal. So this man, who could look so deeply into the events of his day, died owing to a slight accident. Yes, in Central Europe, men whose will was directed to bring forth something out of the spiritual, were left to starve! This example could be multiplied many times. Those who write like the Jesuit, Father Zimmermann, whom I mentioned yesterday, will probably not die of hunger. Those will not die of hunger who wrote the following: “In No. 6 of the weekly paper, Dreigliederung des Sozialen Orgaeismus (The Threefold Social Organism) it is boasted that the ‘new impulse’ (a pet phrase of the Anthroposophists and of the Dreigliederung people) rests upon the fullness of Steiner's spiritual knowledge. The head of the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart founded the ‘Free Waldorf School’ for the children of employees and managers, a school founded on the impulses of all the thoughts that had come from Dr. Steiner's Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. In that school ‘Anthroposophy is to be the artistic method of education’.” Those who mock and tread into the dust what is being willed out of the spirit will surely not die of hunger, even in these hard days.

But it is indeed necessary to receive into our souls New Year impulses that prevent us from passing by sleepily and heedlessly, what is actually going on, impulses that make us accept sternly the stern intention of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. In our own ranks, too, I see many who would like to doze over things that reveal themselves out of full compassion, out of compassion for that which is happening in our times and which, left to itself, must lead to downfall! There are persons lacking courage who join the Anthroposophical Society and then say: “Yes, Spiritual Science is something I like, but I do not want to have anything to do with social activity; it has no place in it.” Such members might take an example from our adversaries. The Jesuit, Father Zimmermann, follows everything we do. He concludes the article mentioned above, with the sentence, “The weekly paper, The Threefold Social Organism—e.g., No. 8, of course holds the opinion that the ‘Church is conspiring’ against the historical task of the self-determination of the individual.” In other articles, too, the Jesuit, Father Zimmermann, shows how seriously he takes all we do.

It would be well if those who are in our Society would also take things seriously, in the right way. The spies who are on the outlook for any weak spot which they can expose in Anthroposophical Spiritual Science, and in all that proceeds from it, are not few in number. I think you know that I am not so foolish as to tell you what follows, out of mere vanity, and so I venture to refer to it. On the side of our adversaries the wish naturally arises to find a point of attack here or there. It is well, therefore, to read the following passage in Dr. Rittelmeyer's essay: ‘Steiner, War and Revolution’: “I happened to have a talk recently with a young Swedish scientist in economics, who had had the strict schooling of the economists of Cassel. He told me that he had read Steiner's book very carefully, from end to end, with the expectation of unmasking him as an amateur; but he had been unable to find any mistake.” In our circles we ought to consider such matters more seriously. The foundation on which we ought to build is the knowledge: Here something is willed, something that has nothing to do with the rambling talk of Theosophy, current elsewhere. Here we build upon the same strict insight into things as is demanded from any other accepted science. Were this really felt, then we should understand why the event took place which Father Zimmermann terms a defection. You know that it was no defection, but that we were thrown out because it was impossible to bring any earnestness into that society of mystic wishy-washy talk, no real earnestness was wanted there. They only wished to go on chattering in the same way they had chattered for years, particularly in connection with subjects about which all possible things can be said with no knowledge of the spiritual world. What our age most sorely needs is the greatest earnestness in the sphere of Spiritual life.

Today, New Year's day, with my visit drawing to an end, I wished to speak to you again of this deep earnestness. My most heartfelt desire is that into our ranks may come the New Year wish—it is a wish each one can shape for himself—that through the souls and hearts of our friends, eyes may in some degree be opened to that which is needed so sorely, to that which, out of the Spirit alone, is able to help humanity. No salvation is to be found in any external organization. Something new must be stamped upon human evolution. These facts must become known, and to feel that these facts must become known is indeed the most worthy New Year's thought that could rise in your hearts. This year, 1920, will hold in store many an important decision, if enough people can be found who are able to recognize the needs of mankind, as I have pointed them out today. 1920 will bring misery and suffering if such men cannot be found, if those only take the lead who wish to work on in the old way.

When social questions are discussed from a spiritual scientific point of view, this is not done out of any subjective motive or impulse. Everything is based upon observation of the evolution of humanity and of what the forces underlying that evolution demand of us now and in the immediate future.

To reveal the deeper impulses working at the present time is not a congenial task, for there is little inclination to enter into such matters with any real earnestness. But our age calls for this earnestness wherever the affairs of humanity are concerned, above all for the discarding of prejudices and preconceptions. Today, therefore, I shall put before you certain deeper aspects of matters to which reference has often been made.

Once again it is necessary to survey a rather lengthy period in the life of humanity. As you know, we distinguish the present epoch from other epochs, reckoning that it began in the middle of the fifteenth century A.D. We speak of it as the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, distinguishing it from the previous epoch which began in the eighth century B.C. and is called the Greco-Latin epoch after the peoples responsible for its culture. It was preceded by the epoch of Egypto-Chaldean civilization.

When we come to consider the Egypto-Chaldean epoch we find that the records of ordinary history break down. Even with the help of accessible Egyptian and Chaldean lore, external evidence does not carry us very far back in the history of humanity.

But it is not possible to grasp what is of importance for the present time unless we understand the intrinsic characteristics of that third post-Atlantean epoch of culture.

You are certainly aware that in the ordinary history of that ancient time, all civilization, all culture in the then-known world, goes by the name of paganism. Like an oasis, Hebraic culture arises in its midst as a preparation for Christianity. But disregarding for the moment this Jewish culture, which differed so fundamentally from the other forms of pre-Christian civilized life, let us turn our attention to paganism. Its special characteristic may be said to lie in its wisdom, in its deep insight into the things and processes of the world. The knowledge contained in paganism had its source in the ancient Mysteries and although according to modern scholarship it bears a mythical, pictorial character, it must be emphasized that all the imagery, all the pictures which have come down to posterity from this ancient paganism are the fruits of profound insight.

Recalling the many treasures of this super-sensible lore which we have been endeavoring to bring to light, it will be obvious that here we have to do with a primeval wisdom, a wisdom underlying all the thinking, all the perceptions and feelings of those ancient peoples. A kind of echo of this primeval wisdom, a tradition in which it was enshrined, survived here and there in secret societies, actually in a healthy form, until the end of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth. In the nineteenth century the source ran dry and such vestiges as remain have passed into the hands of isolated groups belonging to certain, nationalities. And what is in the possession of ordinary secret societies today can no longer be regarded as wholesome or as a genuine tradition of the old pagan wisdom.

Now this ancient wisdom has one particular characteristic of which sight must never be lost. It has one characteristic on account of which Judaism, the smaller stream then making preparation for Christianity had to be introduced as a kind of oasis.

If this ancient paganism is rightly understood, it will be found to contain sublime, deeply penetrating wisdom, but no moral impulses for human action. These impulses were not really essential to humanity, for unlike what now passes as human knowledge, human insight, this old pagan wisdom gave one the feeling of being membered into the whole cosmos. People moving about the earth not only felt themselves composed of the substances and forces present around them in earthly life, in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms, but they felt that the forces operating, for example, in the movements of the stars and the sun were playing into them. This feeling of being a member of the whole cosmos was not a mere abstraction, for from the Mysteries they received directives based on the laws of the stars for their actions and whole conduct of life. This ancient star-wisdom was in no way akin to the arithmetical astrology sometimes considered valuable today, but it was a wisdom voiced by the initiates in such a way that impulses for individual action and conduct went forth from the Mysteries. Not only did human beings feel safe and secure within the all-prevailing wisdom of the cosmos, but those whom they recognized as the initiates of the Mysteries imparted this wisdom in directives for their actions from morning till evening on given days of the year. Yet, neither Chaldean nor Egyptian wisdom contained a single moral impulse from what had been imparted by the initiates in this way. The moral impulse in its real sense was prepared by Judaism and then further developed in Christianity.

Inevitably the question arises: Why is it that this sublime pagan wisdom, although it contained no moral impulse, was able, for example in ancient Greece, to come to flower in such beauty of art and grandeur of philosophy?

If we were to go much farther back, to a time more than three thousand years before the Christian era, we should find that together with the promptings of wisdom there did come a moral impulse, that the moral principles, the ethics needed by these people of old were contained in this wisdom. But a specific ethos, a specific moral impulse such as came with Christianity was not an integral part of paganism. Why was this? It was because through the millennia directly preceding Christianity, this pagan wisdom was inspired from a place far away in Asia, inspired by a remarkable being who had been incarnated in the distant East in the third millennium before Christ—namely, Lucifer.

To the many things we have learned about the evolution of humanity, this knowledge too must be added: that just as there was the incarnation which culminated in Golgotha, the incarnation of Christ in the man Jesus of Nazareth, there was an actual incarnation of Lucifer in far-off Asia, in the third millennium B.C.And the source of inspiration for much ancient culture was what can only be described as an earthly incarnation of Lucifer in a man of flesh and blood. Even Christianity, even the Mystery of Golgotha as enacted among human beings, was understood at first by the only means then available, namely the old luciferic wisdom. The one-sidedness of the gnosis, for all its amazing profundity, stems from the influence that had spread from this Lucifer incarnation over the whole of the ancient world. The significance of the Mystery of Golgotha cannot be fully grasped without the knowledge that rather less than three thousand years previously, there had been the incarnation of Lucifer.

In order that the luciferic inspiration might be lifted away from its one-sidedness, there came the incarnation of Christ and with it the impulse for the education and development of European civilization and its American offshoot. But since the middle of the fifteenth century, since the impulse for the development of individuality, of personality, has been at work, this phase of evolution has also contained within it certain forces whereby preparation is being made for the incarnation of another super-sensible Being. Just as there was an incarnation of Lucifer in the flesh and an incarnation of Christ in the flesh, so, before only a part of the third millennium of the post-Christian era has elapsed, there will be, in the West, an actual incarnation of Ahriman: Ahriman in the flesh. Humanity on earth cannot escape this incarnation of Ahriman. It will come inevitably. But what matters is that people shall find the right vantage point from which to confront it.

Whenever preparation is being made for incarnations of this character, we must be alert to certain indicative trends in evolution. A being like Ahriman, who will incarnate in the West in time to come, prepares for this incarnation in advance. With a view to his incarnation on the earth, Ahriman guides certain forces in evolution in such a way that they may be of the greatest possible advantage to him. And evil would result were people to live on in a state of drowsy unawareness, unable to recognize certain phenomena in life as preparations for Ahriman's incarnation in the flesh. The right stand can be taken only by recognizing in one or another series of events the preparation that is being made by Ahriman for his earthly existence. And the time has now come for individual human beings to know what tendencies and events around them are machinations of Ahriman, helping him to prepare for his approaching incarnation.

It would undoubtedly be of the greatest benefit to Ahriman if he could succeed in preventing the vast majority of people from perceiving what would make for their true well-being, if the vast majority of people were to regard these preparations for the Ahriman incarnation as progressive and good for evolution. If Ahriman were able to slink into a humanity unaware of his coming, that would gladden him most of all. It is for this reason that the occurrences and trends in which Ahriman is working for his future incarnation must be brought to light.

One of the developments in which Ahriman's impulse is clearly evident is the spread of the belief that the mechanistic, mathematical conceptions inaugurated by Galileo, Copernicus, and others, explain what is happening in the cosmos. That is why anthroposophical spiritual science lays such stress upon the fact that spirit and soul must be discerned in the cosmos, not merely the mathematical, mechanistic laws put forward by Galileo and Copernicus as if the cosmos were some huge machine. It would augur success for Ahriman's temptings if people were to persist in merely calculating the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, in studying astrophysics for the sole purpose of ascertaining the material composition of the planets—an achievement of which the modern world is so proud. But woe betide if this Copernicanism is not confronted by the knowledge that the cosmos is permeated by soul and spirit. It is this knowledge that Ahriman, in preparing his earthly incarnation, wants to withhold. He would like to keep people so obtuse that they can grasp only the mathematical aspect of astronomy. Therefore he tempts many people to carry into effect their repugnance to knowledge concerning soul and spirit in the cosmos. That is only one of the forces of corruption poured by Ahriman into human souls. Another means of temptation connected with his incarnation—he also works in cooperation with the luciferic forces—another of his endeavors is to preserve the already widespread attitude that for the public welfare it is sufficient if the economic and material needs of humanity are provided for. Here we come to a point that is not willingly faced in modern life. Official science nowadays contributes nothing to real knowledge of the soul and spirit, for the methods adopted in the orthodox sciences are of value only for apprehending external nature, including the external human constitution. Just think with what contempt average citizens today regard anything that seems idealistic, anything that seems to be a path leading in any way to the spiritual. At heart they are always asking: What is the good of it? How will it help me to acquire this world's goods? They send their sons to a private school, having perhaps been to one themselves; they send them on to a university or institute of advanced studies. But all this is done merely in order to provide the foundations for a career, in other words, to provide the material means of livelihood.

And now think of the consequences of this. What numbers of people there are today who no longer value the spirit for the sake of the spirit or the soul for the sake of the soul! They are out to absorb from cultural life only what is regarded as “useful.” This is a significant and mysterious factor in the life of modern humanity and one that must be lifted into the full light of consciousness. Average citizens, who work assiduously in their offices from morning till evening and then go through the habitual evening routine, will not allow themselves to get mixed up with what they call the “twaddle” to be found in anthroposophy. It seems to them entirely redundant, for they think: that is something one cannot eat! It finally comes to this—although people will not admit it—that in ordinary life nothing in the way of knowledge is considered really useful unless it helps to put food in the mouth!

In this connection people today have succumbed to a strange fallacy. They do not believe that the spirit can be eaten, and yet the very ones who say this, do eat the spirit! Although they may refuse to accept anything spiritual, nevertheless with every morsel that passes through the mouth into the stomach they are devouring the spiritual, but dispatching it along a path other than the path which leads to the real well-being of mankind.

I believe that many Europeans think it is to the credit of their civilization to be able to say: We are not cannibals! But these Europeans and their American affinities are, none the less, devourers of soul and spirit! The soulless devouring of material food leads to the side-tracking of the spirit. It is difficult to say these things today, for in the light of such knowledge just think what would have to be said of a large section of modern culture! To keep people in the state of being devourers of the soul and spirit is one of Ahriman's impulses in preparation for his incarnation. To the extent to which people can be roused into conducting their affairs not for material ends alone and into regarding a free and independent spiritual life, equally with economic life, as an integral part of the social organism—to that same extent Ahriman's incarnation will be awaited with an attitude worthy of humanity.

Another tendency in modern life of benefit to Ahriman in preparing his incarnation is all that is so clearly in evidence in nationalism. Whatever can separate people into groups, whatever can alienate them from mutual understanding the whole world over and drive wedges between them, strengthens Ahriman’s impulse. In reality we should recognize the voice of Ahriman in what is so often proclaimed nowadays as a new ideal: “Freedom of the peoples, even the smallest,” and so forth. But blood relationship has ceased to be the decisive factor and if this outworn notion persists, we shall be playing straight into the hands of Ahriman. His interests are promoted, too, by the fact that people are taken up with the most divergent shades of party opinions, of which the one can be justified as easily as the other. A socialist party program and an anti-socialist program can be supported by arguments of equal validity. And if people fail to realize that this kind of “proof” lies so utterly on the surface that the No and the Yes can both be justified with our modern intelligence—useful as it is for natural science but not for a different kind of knowledge—if people do not realize that this intelligence lies entirely on the surface in spite of serving economic life so effectively, they will continue to apply it to social life and spiritual life irrespectively. One group will prove one thing, another it’s exact opposite, and as both proofs can be shown to be equally logical, hatred and bitterness—of which there is more than enough in the world—will be intensified. These trends too are exploited by Ahriman in preparation for his earthly incarnation.

Again, what will be of particular advantage to him is the short-sighted, narrow conception of the Gospel that is so prevalent today. You know how necessary it has become in our time to deepen understanding of the Gospels through spiritual science. But you also know how widespread is the motion that this is not fitting, that it is reprehensible to bring any real knowledge of the spirit or of the cosmos to bear upon the Gospels; it is said that the Gospels must be taken “in all their simplicity,” just as they stand. I am not going to raise the issue that we no longer possess the true Gospels. The translations are not faithful reproductions of the authentic Gospels, but I do not propose to go into this question now. I shall merely put before you the deeper fact, namely that no true understanding of Christ can be reached by the simple, easy going perusal of the Gospels beloved by most religious denominations and sects today. At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha and for a few centuries' afterward, a conception of the real Christ was still possible, because accounts handed down by tradition could be understood with the help of the pagan, luciferic wisdom. This wisdom has now disappeared, and what sects and denominations find in the Gospels does not lead people to the real Christ for whom we seek through spiritual science, but to an illusory picture, at most to a sublimated hallucination of Christ.

The Gospels cannot lead to the real Christ unless they are illumined by spiritual science. Failing this illumination, the Gospels as they stand give rise to what is no more than hallucination of Christ's appearance in world history. This becomes very evident in the theology of our time. Why does modern theology so love to speak of the “simple man of Nazareth” and to identify the Christ with Jesus of Nazareth—whom it regards as a man only a little more exalted than other great figures of history? It is because the possibility of finding the real Christ has been lost, and because what people glean from the Gospels leads-to hallucination, to a kind of illusion. An illusory conception of Christ is all that can be` gleaned through the way in which the Gospels are read today—not the reality of Christ. In a certain sense this has actually dawned on the theologians and many of them are now describing Paul's experience on the way to Damascus as a “vision.” They have come to the point of realizing that their way of studying the Gospels can lead only to a vision, to hallucination. I am not saying that this vision is false or untrue, but that it is merely an inner experience, unconnected with the reality of the Christ being. I do not use the word “illusion” with the side-implication of falsity, but I wish only to stress that the Christ Being is here a subjective, inner experience, of the same character as hallucination. If people could be brought to a standstill at this point, not pressing on to the real Christ but contenting themselves with a hallucination of Christ, Ahriman's aims would be immeasurably furthered.

The influence of the Gospels also leads to hallucinations when one Gospel alone is taken as the basis of belief. Truth to tell, this principle has been forestalled by the fact that we have been given four Gospels, representing four different aspects, and it does not do to take each single Gospel word-for-word on its own, when outwardly there are obvious contradictions. To take one single Gospel word-for-word and disregard the other three is actually dangerous. What you find in sects whose adherents swear by the literal content of the Gospel of St. Luke alone or that of St. John alone is an illusory conception arising from a certain dimming of consciousness. With the dimming of consciousness that inevitably occurs when the deeper content of the Gospels is not revealed, people would fall wholly into Ahriman's service, helping in a most effective way to prepare for his incarnation, and adopting toward him the very attitude he desires.

And now another uncomfortable truth for humankind today! Living in the arms of their denominations, people say: “We do not need anthroposophy or anything of the kind; we are content with the Gospels in all their simplicity.” They insist that this is said out of “humility.” In reality, however, it is the greatest arrogance! For it means that such persons, making use of ideas which have been presented to them through their birth and surge out of their blood, are deigning to rule out the deeper treasures of wisdom to be discovered in the Gospels. These “humblest” of human beings are generally the most arrogant of all, especially in the sects and denominations. The point to remember is, however, that the people who do most to prepare for the incarnation of Ahriman are those who constantly preach. “All that is required is to read the Gospels word-for-word-nothing more than that!”

Strange to say, in spite of their radical differences, the two parties play into each other's hands: those whom I called “devourers of soul and spirit” and those who demand the literal, word-for-word reading of the Gospels. Each party plays into the hands of the other, furthering the preparation of Ahriman's incarnation. For if the outlook of the “devourers of soul and spirit” on the one side and that of professed Christians who refuse to enter into the deeper truths of the Gospels on the other were to hold the day, then Ahriman would be able to make all human beings on the earth his own. A good deal of what is spreading in external Christianity today is a preparation for Ahriman's incarnation. And in many things which arrogantly claim to represent true belief, we should recognize the preparation for Ahriman's work.

Words nowadays do not really convey the innermost reality of things. As I have often told you, far too much store is set upon words—for words do not necessarily lead to that reality; nowadays indeed it is rather a case of words separating people from the real nature of things in the world. And this they do most of all when people accept ancient records such as the Gospels with “simple understanding”—as the saying goes. But there is a far truer simplicity in trying to penetrate to the in dwelling spirit of things and to understand the Gospels themselves from the vantage ground of the spirit.

As I told you, Ahriman and Lucifer will always work hand in hand. The only question is which of the two predominates in human consciousness at a particular epoch of time. It was a preeminently luciferic culture that persisted until after the Mystery of Golgotha—a culture inspired by the incarnation of Lucifer in China in the third millennium B.C. Many influences of this incarnation continued to radiate and were still powerful in the early Christian centuries; indeed they are working to this day.

But now that we are facing an incarnation of Ahriman in the third millennium after Christ, Lucifer's tracks are becoming less visible, and Ahriman's activities in such trends as I have indicated are coming into prominence. Ahriman has made a kind of pact with Lucifer, the import of which may be expressed in the following way. Ahriman, speaking to Lucifer, says: “I, Ahriman, find it advantageous to make use of ‘preserving jars.’ To you I will leave people's stomachs, if you will leave it to me to lull them to sleep—that is to say to lull their consciousness to sleep where their stomachs are concerned.”

You must understand what I mean by this. The consciousness of those human beings whom I have called devourers of soul and spirit is in a condition of dimness so far as their stomachs are concerned; for, by not accepting the spiritual into their human nature, they drive straight into the luciferic stream everything they introduce into their stomachs. What people eat and drink without spirituality goes straight to Lucifer!

And what do I mean by “preserving jars?” I mean libraries and institutions of a similar kind, where the various sciences pursued by human beings without really stirring their interest are preserved; these sciences are not really alive in them but are simply preserved in the books on the shelves of libraries. All this knowledge has been separated from human beings. Everywhere there are books, books, books! Themselves students, when they take their doctor's degree, have to write a learned thesis which is then put into as many libraries as possible. When the students want to take up some particular post, again they must write a thesis! In addition to this, people are forever writing, although only a very small proportion of what they write is ever read. Only when some special preparation has to be made do people resort to what is moldering away in libraries. These “preserving jars” of wisdom are a particularly favorable means of furthering Ahriman's aims.

This kind of thing goes on everywhere. It could only be to some purpose if people took a really live interest in it, but they do not, its existence is entirely separate and apart. Just think—if one were so disposed one might well despair—just think, for example, of a lawsuit where a lawyer has to be engaged to plead the case. The time comes when one has to discuss the matter. Documents pile up! The lawyer has them all there in a dossier, but when one starts talking, this lawyer has no inkling of the circumstances. The papers are turned over and over without getting anywhere; the lawyer has no connection at all with the documents. Here is one portfolio full of them, there another. The number of documents grows and grows but as for interest in them—that is simply nonexistent! These professional people make one despair when one has dealings with them; they really know nothing about the matter at issue, have no connection with it, for everything remains in the documents. These are the little preserving jars and the libraries are the big preserving jars of soul and spirit. Everything is preserved in them but human beings do not want to connect themselves with it, to permeate it with their interest. And finally there arises the mood which does not want the head to play any part in a professed view of the world. But after all, the head, or some element of the head, is necessary for any understanding! What people like is to base their religious faith, their view of the world, on the heart alone. The heart must play a part, of course; but the way in which people today often speak of their religion reminds me of a saying much quoted in the district where my youth was spent. It was to this effect: “There is something very special about love. If you buy it, you buy the heart only and the head is thrown in gratis.” This is more or less the attitude which people today like to adopt in their view of life; they would like to take in everything through the heart, as they say, without exerting the head at all. The heart cannot beat without the head, but the heart is well able to take things in if by “heart” here one really means the stomach! And then, what ought to be achieved through the head is supposed to be thrown in gratis, especially where the most important things in life are concerned. It is very important indeed to pay heed to these matters, because in observing them it becomes evident what earnestness must be applied to life at this juncture, how necessary it is to learn from the illusions to which even the Gospels may give rise, and how dearly humankind today loves those illusions.

Truth is beyond the reach of the kind of knowledge for which people aspire today. They feel on secure ground when they can reckon by means of figures, when they can prove things by statistics. With statistics and figures Ahriman has an easy game; it suits him admirably when some erudite scholar points out, for example, that conditions in the Balkans are due to the fact that the population of Macedonia consists of so many Greeks, so many Serbs, so many Bulgarians. Nothing can stand up against figures because of the faith that is reposed in them; and Ahriman is only too ready to exploit figures for his purposes. But later on one begins to see just how “reliable” such figures are! Admittedly, figures are sometimes a means of proof, but if one goes beyond them and investigates more closely, one often notices things like the following. In the statistics of Macedonia, for example, a father may be put down as a Greek, one son as a Serb, another son as a Bulgarian; so the father is counted in with the Greeks, one son with the Serbs, and the other with the Bulgarians. What would really help one to get at the truth, however, would be to discover how it has happened that in the same family one is said to be Greek, one Serbian, and one Bulgarian, and how this affects the figures—rather than simply accepting the figures that people find so satisfactory today. If the father is Greek then naturally the sons are Greek too. Figures are means whereby people are led astray in a direction favorable to Ahriman for his future incarnation in the third millennium A.D.

We shall speak of these things again in the lecture tomorrow.

When social questions are discussed from a spiritual scientific point of view, this is not done out of any subjective motive or impulse. Everything is based upon observation of the evolution of humanity and of what the forces underlying that evolution demand of us now and in the immediate future.

To reveal the deeper impulses working at the present time is not a congenial task, for there is little inclination to enter into such matters with any real earnestness. But our age calls for this earnestness wherever the affairs of humanity are concerned, above all for the discarding of prejudices and preconceptions. To-day, therefore, I shall put before you certain deeper aspects of matters to which reference has often been made.

Once again it is necessary to survey a rather lengthy period in the life of humanity. As you know, we distinguish the present epoch from other epochs, reckoning that it began in the middle of the fifteenth century A.D. We speak of it as the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, distinguishing it from the previous epoch which began in the eighth century B.C. and is called the Greco-Latin epoch after the peoples responsible for its culture. It was preceded by the epoch of Egypto-Chaldean civilisation.

When we come to consider the Egypto-Chaldean epoch we find that the records of ordinary history break down. Even with the help of accessible Egyptian and Chaldean lore, external evidence does not carry us very far back in the history of humanity. But it is not possible to grasp what is of importance for the present time unless we understand the intrinsic characteristics of that Third Post-Atlantean epoch of culture.

You are certainly aware that in the ordinary history of that ancient time, all civilisation, all culture in the then known world, goes by the name of Paganism. Like an oasis, Hebraic culture arises in its midst as a preparation for Christianity. But disregarding for the moment this Jewish culture which differed so fundamentally from the other forms of pre-Christian civilised life, let us turn our attention to Paganism. Its special characteristic may be said to lie in its wisdom, in its deep insight into the things and processes of the world. The knowledge contained in Paganism had its source in the ancient Mysteries and although according to modern scholarship it bears a mythical, pictorial character, it must be emphasised that all the imagery, all the pictures which have come down to posterity from this ancient Paganism are the fruits of profound insight.

Recalling the many treasures of this super-sensible lore which we have been endeavouring to bring to light, it will be obvious that here we have to do with a primeval wisdom, a wisdom underlying all the thinking, all the perceptions and feelings of those ancient peoples. A kind of echo of this primeval wisdom, a tradition in which it was enshrined, survived here and there in secret societies, actually in a healthy form, until the end of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth. In the nineteenth century the source ran dry and such vestiges as remain have passed into the hands of isolated groups belonging to certain nationalities. And what is in the possession of ordinary secret societies to-day can no longer be regarded as wholesome or as a genuine tradition of the old Pagan wisdom.

Now this ancient wisdom has one particular characteristic of which sight must never be lost. It has one characteristic on account of which Judaism, the smaller stream then making preparation for Christianity, had to be introduced as a kind of oasis.

If this ancient Paganism is rightly understood, it will be found to contain sublime, deeply penetrating wisdom, but no moral impulses for human action. These impulses were not really essential to man, for unlike what now passes as human knowledge, human insight, this old Pagan wisdom gave him the feeling of being membered into the whole cosmos. A man moving about the earth not only felt himself composed of the substances and forces present around him in earthly life, in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, but he felt that the forces operating, for example, in the movements of the stars and the sun were playing into him. This feeling of being a member of the whole cosmos was not a mere abstraction, for from the Mysteries he received directives based on the laws of the stars for his actions and whole conduct of life. This ancient star-wisdom was in no way akin to the arithmetical astrology sometimes considered valuable to-day, but it was a wisdom voiced by the Initiates in such a way that impulses for individual action and conduct went forth from the Mysteries. Not only did man feel safe and secure within the all-prevailing wisdom of the cosmos, but those whom he recognised as the Initiates of the Mysteries imparted this wisdom in directives for his actions from morning till evening on given days of the year. Yet neither Chaldean nor Egyptian wisdom contained a single moral impulse from what had been imparted by the Initiates in this way. The moral impulse in its real sense was prepared by Judaism and then further developed in Christianity.

Inevitably the question arises: Why is it that this sublime Pagan wisdom, although it contained no moral impulse, was able, for example in ancient Greece, to come to flower in such beauty of art and grandeur of philosophy?

If we were to go much farther back, to a time more than three thousand years before the Christian era, we should find that together with the promptings of wisdom there did come a moral impulse, that the moral principles, the ethics needed by these men of old were contained in this wisdom. But a specific ethos, a specific moral impulse such as came with Christianity was not an integral part of Paganism. Why was this?—It was because through the millennia directly preceding Christianity, this Pagan wisdom was inspired from a place far away in Asia, inspired by a remarkable Being who had been incarnated in the distant East in the third millennium before Christ—namely, Lucifer.

To the many things we have learned about the evolution of humanity, this knowledge too must be added: that just as there was the incarnation which culminated in Golgotha, the incarnation of Christ in the man Jesus of Nazareth, there was an actual incarnation of Lucifer in far off Asia, in the third millennium B.C. And the source of inspiration for much ancient culture was what can only be described as an earthly incarnation of Lucifer in a man of flesh and blood. Even Christianity, even the Mystery of Golgotha as enacted among men, was understood at first by the only means then available, namely the old Luciferic wisdom. The one-sidedness of the Gnosis, for all its amazing profundity, stems from the influence that had spread from this Lucifer-incarnation over the whole of the ancient world. The significance of the Mystery of Golgotha cannot be fully grasped without the knowledge that rather less than three thousand years previously, there had been the incarnation of Lucifer.

In order that the Luciferic inspiration might be lifted away from its one-sidedness, there came the incarnation of Christ and with it the impulse for the education and development of European civilisation and its American off-shoot. But since the middle of the fifteenth century, since the impulse for the development of individuality, of personality, has been at work, this phase of evolution has also contained within it certain forces whereby preparation is being made for the incarnation of another super-sensible Being. Just as there was an incarnation of Lucifer in the flesh and an incarnation of Christ in the flesh, so, before only a part of the third millennium of the post-Christian era has elapsed, there will be, in the West, an actual incarnation of Ahriman: Ahriman in the flesh. Humanity on earth cannot escape this incarnation of Ahriman. It will come inevitably. But what matters is that men shall find the right vantage-point from which to confront it.

Whenever preparation is being made for incarnations of this character, we must be alert to certain indicative trends in evolution. A Being like Ahriman, who will incarnate in the West in time to come, prepares for this incarnation in advance. With a view to his incarnation on the earth, Ahriman guides certain forces in evolution in such a way that they may be of the greatest possible advantage to him. And evil would result were men to live on in a state of drowsy unawareness, unable to recognise certain phenomena in life as preparations for Ahriman's incarnation in the flesh. The right stand can be taken only by recognising in one or another series of events the preparation that is being made by Ahriman for his earthly existence. And the time has now come for individual men to know which tendencies and events around them are machinations of Ahriman, helping him to prepare for his approaching incarnation.

It would undoubtedly be of the greatest benefit to Ahriman if he could succeed in preventing the vast majority of men from perceiving what would make for their true well-being, if the vast majority of men were to regard these preparations for the Ahriman-incarnation as progressive and good for evolution. If Ahriman were able to slink into a humanity unaware of his coming, that would gladden him most of all. It is for this reason that the occurrences and trends in which Ahriman is working for his future incarnation must be brought to light.

One of the developments in which Ahriman's impulse is clearly evident is the spread of the belief that the mechanistic, mathematical conceptions inaugurated by Galileo, Copernicus and others, explain what is happening in the cosmos. That is why anthroposophical spiritual science lays such stress upon the fact that spirit and soul must be discerned in the cosmos, not merely the mathematical, mechanistic laws put forward by Galileo and Copernicus as if the cosmos were some huge machine. It would augur success for Ahriman's temptings if men were to persist in merely calculating the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, in studying astrophysics for the sole purpose of ascertaining the material composition of the planets—an achievement of which the modern world is so proud. But woe betide if this Copernicanism is not confronted by the knowledge that the cosmos is permeated by soul and spirit. It is this knowledge that Ahriman, in preparing his earthly incarnation, wants to withhold from men. He would like to keep them so obtuse that they can grasp only the mathematical aspect of astronomy. Therefore he tempts many men to carry into effect their repugnance to knowledge concerning soul and spirit in the cosmos. That is only one of the forces of corruption poured by Ahriman into the souls of men. Another means of temptation connected with his incarnation—he also works in co-operation with the Luciferic forces—another of his endeavours is to preserve the already widespread attitude that for the public welfare it is sufficient if the economic and material needs of men are provided for. Here we come to a point that is not willingly faced in modern life. Official science nowadays contributes nothing to real knowledge of the soul and spirit, for the methods adopted in the orthodox sciences are of value only for apprehending external nature, including the external constitution of man. Just think with what contempt the average citizen to-day regards anything that seems to him idealistic, anything that seems to be a path leading in any way to the spiritual. At heart he is always asking: What is the good of it? How will it help me to acquire this world's goods? He sends his sons to a public school, having perhaps been to one himself; he sends them on to a university or institute of advanced studies. But all this is done merely in order to provide the foundations for a career, in other words, to provide the material means of livelihood.

And now think of the consequences of this.—What numbers of people there are to-day who no longer value the spirit for the sake of the spirit or the soul for the sake of the soul! They are out to absorb from cultural life only what is regarded as “useful”. This is a significant and mysterious factor in the life of modern humanity and one that must be lifted into the full light of consciousness. The average citizen who works assiduously in his office from morning till evening and then goes through the habitual evening routine, will not allow himself to get mixed up with what he calls the “twaddle” to be found in Anthroposophy. It seems to him entirely redundant, for he thinks: that is something one cannot eat! It finally comes to this—although people will not admit it—that in ordinary life nothing in the way of knowledge is considered really useful unless it helps to put food in the mouth!

In this connection men to-day have succumbed to a strange fallacy. They do not believe that the spirit can be eaten, and yet the very ones who say this, do eat the spirit! Although they may refuse to accept anything spiritual, nevertheless with every morsel that passes through the mouth into the stomach they are devouring the spiritual, but dispatching it along a path other than the path which leads to the real well-being of mankind.

I believe that many Europeans think it is to the credit of their civilisation to be able to say: We are not cannibals! But these Europeans and their American affinities are, none the less, devourers of soul and spirit! The soulless devouring of material food leads to the side-tracking of the spirit. It is difficult to say these things to-day, for in the light of such knowledge just think what would have to be said of a large section of modern culture! To keep men in the state of being devourers of the soul and spirit is one of Ahriman's impulses in preparation for his incarnation. To the extent to which men can be roused into conducting their affairs not for material ends alone and into regarding a free and independent spiritual life, equally with economic life, as an integral part of the social organism—to that same extent Ahriman's incarnation will be awaited with an attitude worthy of humanity.

Another tendency in modern life of benefit to Ahriman in preparing his incarnation is all that is so clearly in evidence in nationalism. Whatever can separate men into groups, whatever can alienate them from mutual understanding the whole world over and drive wedges between them, strengthens Ahriman's impulse. In reality we should recognise the voice of Ahriman in what is so often proclaimed nowadays as a new ideal: “Freedom of the peoples, even the smallest”, and so forth.—But blood-relationship has ceased to be the decisive factor and if this outworn notion persists, we shall be playing straight into the hands of Ahriman. His interests are promoted, too, by the fact that men are taken up with the most divergent shades of party opinions, of which the one can be justified as easily as the other. A socialist party programme and an anti-socialist programme can be supported by arguments of equal validity. And if men fail to realise that this kind of “proof” lies so utterly on the surface that the No and the Yes can both be justified with our modern intelligence—useful as it is for natural science but not for a different kind of knowledge—if men do not realise that this intelligence lies entirely on the surface in spite of serving economic life so effectively, they will continue to apply it to social life and spiritual life irrespectively. One group will prove one thing, another its exact opposite, and as both proofs can be shown to be equally logical, hatred and bitterness—of which there is more than enough in the world—will be intensified. These trends too are exploited by Ahriman in preparation for his earthly incarnation.

Again, what will be of particular advantage to him is the short-sighted, narrow conception of the Gospel that is so prevalent to-day. You know how necessary it has become in our time to deepen understanding of the Gospels through spiritual science. But you also know how widespread is the notion that this is not fitting, that it is reprehensible to bring any real knowledge of the spirit or of the cosmos to bear upon the Gospels; it is said that the Gospels must be taken “in all their simplicity”, just as they stand. I am not going to raise the issue that we no longer possess the true Gospels. The translations are not faithful reproductions of the authentic Gospels, but I do not propose to go into this question now. I shall merely put before you the deeper fact, namely that no true understanding of Christ can be reached by the simple, easy-going perusal of the Gospels beloved by most religious denominations and sects to-day. At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha and for a few centuries afterwards, a conception of the real Christ was still possible, because accounts handed down by tradition could be understood with the help of the Pagan, Luciferic wisdom. This wisdom has now disappeared, and what sects and denominations find in the Gospels does not lead men to the real Christ for Whom we seek through spiritual science, but to an illusory picture, at most to a sublimated hallucination of Christ.

The Gospels cannot lead to the real Christ unless they are illumined by spiritual science. Failing this illumination, the Gospels as they stand give rise to what is no more than an hallucination of Christ's appearance in world-history. This becomes very evident in the theology of our time. Why does modern theology so love to speak of the “simple man of Nazareth” and to identify the Christ with Jesus of Nazareth—whom it regards as a man only a little more exalted than other great figures of history? It is because the possibility of finding the real Christ has been lost, and because what men glean from the Gospels leads to an hallucination, to a kind of illusion. An illusory conception of Christ is all that can be gleaned through the way in which the Gospels are read to-day—not the reality of Christ. In a certain sense this has actually dawned on the theologians and many of them are now describing Paul's experience on the way to Damascus as a “vision”. They have come to the point of realising that their way of studying the Gospels can lead only to a vision, to an hallucination. I am not saying that this vision is false or untrue, but that it is merely an inner experience, unconnected with the reality of the Christ Being. I do not use the word “illusion” with the side-implication of falsity, but I wish only to stress that the Christ Being is here a subjective, inner experience, of the same character as an hallucination. If men could be brought to a standstill at this point, not pressing on to the real Christ but contenting themselves with an hallucination of Christ, Ahriman's aims would be immeasurably furthered.

The influence of the Gospels also leads to hallucinations when one Gospel alone is taken as the basis of belief. Truth to tell, this principle has been forestalled by the fact that we have been given four Gospels, representing four different aspects, and it does not do to take each single Gospel word-for-word on its own, when outwardly there are obvious contradictions. To take one single Gospel word-for-word and disregard the other three, is actually dangerous. What you find in sects whose adherents swear by the literal content of the Gospel of St. Luke alone or that of St. John alone, is an illusory conception arising from a certain dimming of consciousness. With the dimming of consciousness that inevitably occurs when the deeper content of the Gospels is not revealed, men would fall wholly into Ahriman's service, helping in a most effective way to prepare for his incarnation, and adopting towards him the very attitude he desires.

And now another uncomfortable truth for mankind to-day! Living in the arms of their denominations, people say: “We do not need Anthroposophy or anything of the kind; we are content with the Gospels in all their simplicity.” They insist that this is said out of “humility”. In reality, however, it is the greatest arrogance! For it means that such persons, making use of ideas which have been presented to them through their birth and surge out of their blood, are deigning to rule out the deeper treasures of wisdom to be discovered in the Gospels. These “humblest” of men are generally the most arrogant of all, especially in the sects and denominations. The point to remember is, however, that the people who do most to prepare for the incarnation of Ahriman are those who constantly preach: “All that is required is to read the Gospels word-for-word—nothing more than that!”

Strange to say, in spite of their radical differences, the two parties play into each other's hands: those whom I called “devourers of soul and spirit"” and those who demand the literal, word-for-word reading of the Gospels. Each party plays into the hands of the other, furthering the preparation of Ahriman's incarnation. For if the outlook of the “devourers of soul and spirit” on the one side and that of professed Christians who refuse to enter into the deeper truths of the Gospels on the other, were to hold the day, then Ahriman would be able to make all human beings on the earth his own. A good deal of what is spreading in external Christianity to-day is a preparation for Ahriman's incarnation. And in many things which arrogantly claim to represent true belief, we should recognise the preparation for Ahriman's work.

Words nowadays do not really convey the innermost reality of things. As I have often told you, far too much store is set upon words—for words do not necessarily lead to that reality; nowadays indeed it is rather a case of words separating men from the real nature of things in the world. And this they do most of all when men accept ancient records such as the Gospels with “simple understanding”—as the saying goes. But there is a far truer simplicity in trying to penetrate to the indwelling spirit of things and to understand the Gospels themselves from the vantage-ground of the spirit.

As I told you, Ahriman and Lucifer will always work hand in hand. The only question is which of the two predominates in man's consciousness at a particular epoch of time. It was a preeminently Luciferic culture that persisted until after the Mystery of Golgotha—a culture inspired by the incarnation of Lucifer in China in the third millennium B.C. Many influences of this incarnation continued to radiate and were still powerful in the early Christian centuries; indeed they are working to this day.

But now that we are facing an incarnation of Ahriman in the third millennium after Christ, Lucifer's tracks are becoming less visible, and Ahriman's activities in such trends as I have indicated, are coming into prominence. Ahriman has made a kind of pact with Lucifer, the import of which may be expressed in the following way.—Ahriman, speaking to Lucifer, says: “I, Ahriman, find it advantageous to make use of ‘preserving jars’. To you I will leave man's stomachs, if you will leave it to me to lull men to sleep—that is to say to lull their consciousness to sleep where their stomachs are concerned.”

You must understand what I mean by this.—The consciousness of those human beings whom I have called devourers of soul and spirit is in a condition of dimness so far as their stomachs are concerned; for by not accepting the spiritual into their human nature, they drive straight into the Luciferic stream everything they introduce into their stomachs. What men eat and drink without spirituality goes straight to Lucifer!

And what do I mean by “preserving jars”? I mean libraries and institutions of a similar kind, where the various sciences pursued by man without really stirring his interest, are preserved; these sciences are not really alive in him but are simply preserved in the books on the shelves of libraries. All this knowledge has been separated from man himself. Everywhere there are books, books, books! Every student, when he takes his doctor's degree, has to write a learned thesis which is then put into as many libraries as possible. When the student wants to take up some particular post, again he must write a thesis! In addition to this, people are forever writing, although only a very small proportion of what they write is ever read. Only when some special preparation has to be made do people resort to what is mouldering away in libraries. These “preserving jars” of wisdom are a particularly favourable means of furthering Ahriman's aims.

This kind of thing goes on everywhere. It could only be to some purpose if men took a really live interest in it, but they do not; its existence is entirely separate and apart. Just think—if one were so disposed one might well despair—just think for example, of a lawsuit where a barrister has to be engaged to plead the case. The time comes when one has to go into matters with him. Documents pile up! He has them all there in a dossier, but when one starts talking to him he has no inkling of the circumstances. He turns the papers over and over without getting anywhere; he has no connection at all with his documents. Here is one portfolio full of them, there another. The number of documents grows and grows but as for interest in them—that is simply non-existent! These professional people make one despair when one has dealings with them; they really know nothing about the matter at issue, have no connection with it, for everything remains in the documents. These are the little preserving jars and the libraries the big preserving jars of soul and spirit. Everything is preserved in them but human beings do not want to connect themselves with it, to permeate it with their interest. And finally there arises the mood which does not want the head to play any part in a professed view of the world. But after all, the head, or some element of the head, is necessary for any understanding! What people like is to base their religious faith, their view of the world, on the heart alone. The heart must play a part, of course; but the way in which men to-day often speak of their religion reminds me of a saying much quoted in the district where my youth was spent. It was to this effect: “There is something very special about love. If you buy it, you buy the heart only and the head is thrown in gratis.” This is more or less the attitude which people to-day like to adopt in their view of life; they would like to take in everything through the heart, as they say, without exerting the head at all. The heart cannot beat without the head, but the heart is well able to take things in if by “heart” here one really means the stomach! And then, what ought to be achieved through the head is supposed to be thrown in gratis, especially where the most important things in life are concerned. It is very important indeed to pay heed to these matters, because in observing them it becomes evident what earnestness must be applied to life at this juncture, how necessary it is to learn from the illusions to which even the Gospels may give them and how dearly mankind to-day loves those illusions.

Truth is beyond the reach of the kind of knowledge for which people aspire to-day. They feel on secure ground when they can reckon by means of figures, when they can prove things by statistics. With statistics and figures Ahriman has an easy game; it suits him admirably when some erudite scholar points out, for example, that conditions in the Balkans are due to the fact that the population of Macedonia consists of so many Greeks, so many Serbs, so many Bulgarians. Nothing can stand up against figures because of the faith that is reposed in them; and Ahriman is only too ready to exploit figures for his purposes. But later on one begins to see just how “reliable” such figures are! Admittedly, figures are sometimes a means of proof, but if one goes beyond them and investigates more closely, one often notices things like the following.—In the statistics of Macedonia, for example, a father may be put down as a Greek, one son as a Serb, another son as a Bulgarian; so the father is counted in with the Greeks, one son with the Serbs and the other with the Bulgarians. What would really help one to get at the truth, however, would be to discover how it has happened that in the same family one is said to be Greek, one Serbian and one Bulgarian, and how this affects the figures—rather than simply accepting the figures that people find so satisfactory to-day. If the father is Greek then naturally the sons are Greek too. Figures are means whereby men are led astray in a direction favourable to Ahriman for his future incarnation in the third millennium A.D.

We shall speak of these things again in the lecture tomorrow.

The event I have been referring to in the preceding lectures, the occasion when certain spirits of darkness were cast out of the spiritual realm and down into the human realm in the autumn of 1879, holds great importance. We have to reflect again and again what it really means to say that a battle raged for decades in the spiritual realms. The battle started in the early 1840s and ended when certain spiritual entities, which had been acting like rebels in the spiritual world during those decades, were vanquished in the autumn of 1879 and cast down as dark spirits into the realm of human evolution. They are now among us and the effect of this is that they send their impulses into our view of the world, not only into the way we think about the world, but also into our inner feelings, our will impulses and even our temperaments. Human beings will be unable to get even a partial understanding of the significant events of the present time and the immediate future, unless they are prepared to recognize the relationship which exists between the physical world and the spiritual world and take as much account of important events like this as they do of natural phenomena. At the present time people generally give validity only to natural phenomena, phenomena of the physical world which are part of historical evolution. They will have to give validity again to spiritual events, which can be perceived with the aid of spiritual science, for only then can the events in which human beings are caught up be really understood.

With reference to this important event it is quite easy to establish how seriously people are in error if they base themselves only on concepts and definitions when considering the world and not on direct observation of reality. One always has the feeling one ought to base oneself on defined concepts—what is Ahriman, what is Lucifer, what are the particular spirits in one hierarchy or another? Those are the questions we ask, and we believe that having got the definitions we have also understood something about the way these entities work. An extreme example of the inadequacy of definitions is the following, which I have quoted before. It may not have been the ideal way of defining the human being, but it is the definition which was given in a school in Greece: A human being is a creature who walks on two legs and does not have feathers. The next time the pupil came to school he brought a plucked cockerel: a creature who walked on two legs and had no feathers. This is a human being, he said, according to the definition.

Many definitions of this kind are generally accepted, and many of our scientific definitions are therefore more or less in accord with the truth. We must not base ourselves on such definitions in anthroposophy, however. Perception will be poor if we base ourselves on abstract definitions. Yes, it is possible to define the term ‘spirits of darkness’, but this will not get us far. Spirits of darkness were cast down from heaven to earth in 1879. This may give a general idea of the spirits of darkness, but it does not get us far in understanding the real issue. The spirits of darkness now walking among us are of the same kind as the spirits of darkness which had been cast down from the spiritual world, that is from heaven to earth, in earlier times; they had specific tasks to perform during the whole of the Atlantean age and right into Graeco-Latin times.

Let us try to use the different insights we have gained and determine the task those spirits of darkness had to perform through millennia, through the whole Atlantean age and on into Graeco-Latin times. It has to be kept in mind that the great scheme of things will only work if higher spiritual entities who have the task of guiding human evolution make use of such spirits, putting them in the right place, as it were, to enable them to do what is necessary. As you will remember, the ‘luciferic temptation’ of old held major significance for human evolution. It did, of course, arise from Lucifer's specific aims—and from Atlantean times onwards Lucifer was in league with Ahriman. These aims gave rise to counter-aims of, let us call them ‘good spirits’, the spirits of light. Fundamentally speaking, the spirits of darkness also wanted the best for humanity in those early times, they wanted human beings to have the capacity for absolute freedom; but humanity was not ready for this at the time. They wanted to provide humanity with impulses which would make every human being an independent individual. It was not to be, however, for humanity was not yet ready.

A counter-force had to be set up by the spirits of light; this was done by taking human beings from the heights of the Spirit and putting them on to the earth, which is symbolically described in the expulsion from Paradise. In reality, human beings were being placed in the stream of hereditary traits. Lucifer and the ahrimanic powers wanted every human being to be an independent individual. This would have meant that people would have become spiritual very rapidly while still immature, but it was not to happen. Human beings were to be educated on earth, brought to full development through the forces of the earth. This was achieved by placing them in the stream of heredity, where they would physically descend from others. In this way they were not independent, but inherited certain traits from their forebears. They were weighed down with earthly qualities which Lucifer did not want them to have. Anything to do with physical heredity was given to humanity by the spirits of light to counterbalance the luciferic stream. A weight was attached to human beings, as it were, and this connected them with the earth. In everything connected with heredity, with the begetting of children, procreation, with love in the earthly sense, we must therefore see ourselves connected with the entities which are under the leadership of Yahveh or Jehovah.

This is the reason why we find so many symbols of procreation and earthly heredity in the ancient religions. The laws of Judaism—which was to prepare the way for Christianity—as well as those of pagan religions, clearly show the importance attached to regulating everything to do with the laws of heredity here on earth. People had to learn to live together in tribes, nations and races, with blood relationship as the signature for the way affairs were ordered on earth.

This had been in preparation during the Atlantean age and was to be repeated in the fourth epoch of civilization, the Graeco-Latin epoch, mainly on account of the measures taken in the third, Egypto-Chaldean epoch. We can see that specifically during epochs which were to recapitulate the Lemurian and Atlantean ages, account was taken of race, nation and tribal connections in all the ways in which human affairs were ordered; in short, account was taken of hereditary traits arising from blood bonds. The priests of the ancient Mysteries were mainly responsible for the ordering of affairs—today we would say for affairs of state—and they took care to observe the way in which customs, inclinations and habits had to develop in various places to take account of blood relationships, of people belonging to a particular nation or tribe. Their laws were based on this. We shall not be able to understand what issued from the Mysteries of the third and fourth post-Atlantean ages unless we consider the careful study of racial, national and tribal relationships on which the priests based the laws they made for different regions of the earth. What really counted in each individual region was to establish order in the blood relationships.

In those times, when the spirits of light made it their concern to order human affairs on the basis of blood relationships, the spirits of darkness which had been cast down from heaven to earth with humanity, made it their concern to work against anything connected with heredity through blood relationship. They were the source of all rebellion against ordinances based on blood relationship in those ages, and of all teachings of rebellion against heredity and against tribal and racial relationships, insisting on the independence of the individual and seeking to establish laws based on this, laws which did, of course, come from human beings but were inspired by the spirits of darkness. Those ages extended as far as the fifteenth century. Echoes still persist, of course, for systems do not come to an abrupt end when there is a major break in evolution. Up to the fifteenth century in particular, we see teachings come up which rebel against purely natural bonds, against the bonds of relationship, family, nationality, and so on.

Thus we have two streams: the ‘protector’ of everything to do with blood relationship, which is the stream of light; it is opposed by the stream of darkness as the ‘protector’ of everything which wants to abandon the bonds of blood relationship and help people to be free of the bonds of family and heredity. All this does not, of course, come to an abrupt halt any more than it does in the natural world, and in 1413, the year when the break occurred which marks the boundary between the fourth and fifth post-Atlantean ages, the old ways did not stop immediately. We can see the influence of the two streams continuing right into our own time. For from the nineteenth century onwards, from the time of the significant events I have described to you, we see something entirely different emerge—I have already made some mention of this. Angelic spirits, members of the hierarchy of the Angels have been active among us since 1879. They follow on after the old spirits of darkness, are related to these and are of a similar kind, but have only been cast down from heaven to earth because of the event which occurred in 1879. Until then they had their function up above, whilst their relatives, who acted in the way I have just described, have been among human beings from Lemurian and Atlantean times.

Thus there was a break in evolution in about 747 before the Mystery of Golgotha; another one came in 1413 after the Mystery of Golgotha, and the break which is particularly important to us, in 1879.

Throughout the whole of this time spirits of darkness were active on earth, whilst certain other spirits of darkness, which are related to those down on earth, were still in the spiritual world. 1841 saw the beginning of the mighty battle of which I have spoken. Then the spirits which are related to those others descended to join them below. The power of the old rebels, of the continuing stream of spirits of darkness who had their tasks to perform from Lemurian and Atlantean times, is gradually dying down as the powers of their brothers begin to take effect. This means that from the last third of the nineteenth century the situation has been completely reversed. The spirits of light who have been continuing in their activities have done enough where the establishment of blood, tribal, racial and similar bonds is concerned, for everything has its time in evolution. In the general and rightful scheme of things, enough has been done to establish what needed to be established through blood bonds in humanity. In more recent times, therefore, the spirits of light have changed their function. They now inspire human beings to develop independent ideas, feelings and impulses for freedom; they now make it their concern to establish the basis on which people can be independent individuals. And it is gradually becoming the task of the spirits who are related to the old spirits of darkness to work within the blood bonds.

The function which was right in the past or, better said, belonged to the sphere of the good spirits of light, was handed over to the spirits of darkness during the last third of the nineteenth century. From this time onwards, the old impulses based on racial, tribal and national relationships, on the blood, became the domain of the spirits of darkness, who had previously been rebels in the cause of independence. They then began to instil ideas in human minds that affairs should be ordered on the basis of tribal relationships, of blood bonds.

You can see that definition is impossible. If you define the spirits of darkness on the basis of the function they had in the past, you get exactly the opposite of their function in more recent times, that is from the last third of the nineteenth century. In the past, it was the function of the spirits of darkness to work against hereditary traits in humanity; from the last third of the nineteenth century they have been lagging behind, wanting to lag behind, wanting over and over again to make people aware of their tribal, blood and hereditary bonds and to insist on these.

These things simply are the truth, though it is a truth which people today find extremely unpalatable. For millennia, human beings have instilled the insistence on blood bonds into themselves, and out of sheer inertia they are letting the spirits of darkness take control of these habitual ideas. We therefore see insistence on tribal, national and racial relationships particularly in the nineteenth century, and this insistence is considered idealistic, when in reality it is an early sign of decline in humanity. Everything based on dominance of the blood principle meant progress for as long as it was under the authority of the spirits of light; under the authority of the spirits of darkness it is a sign of decline. The spirits of darkness made special efforts in the past to implant a rebellious feeling of independence in human beings at the time when hereditary traits were passed on in a positive sense by the progressive spirits. In the three ages of human evolution which now follow and will continue until the time of the great catastrophe, the spirits of darkness will make extreme efforts to preserve the old hereditary characteristics and inculcate human beings with the attitudes which result from such preservation; in this way they introduce the necessary signs of decline into human evolution.

Here is another point where we have to be watchful. In particular, it is not possible to understand the present time unless one knows the change of function which came in the last third of the nineteenth century. A fourteenth-century person who spoke of the ideals of race and nation would have been speaking in terms of the progressive tendencies of human evolution; someone who speaks of the ideal of race and nation and of tribal membership today is speaking of impulses which are part of the decline of humanity. If anyone now considers them to be progressive ideals to present to humanity, this is an untruth. Nothing is more designed to take humanity into its decline than the propagation of ideals of race, nation and blood. Nothing is more likely to prevent human progress than proclamations of national ideals belonging to earlier centuries which continue to be preserved by the luciferic and ahrimanic powers. The true ideal must arise from what we find in the world of the spirit, not in the blood.

The Christ, who is to appear in a specific form in the course of the twentieth century, will know nothing of the ‘ideals’ proclaimed by people today. In earlier times Michael, the spirit from the hierarchy of Archangels was the representative of Yahveh; thanks to the functions given to him in 1879, he will be the earthly representative, the vicar, of the Christ, of the Christ impulse to create spiritual bonds between human beings which will take the place of the purely physical blood bonds. For only the bonds of spiritual communion will bring a progressive element into the entirely natural element of decline. Please note, the element of decline is natural. Human beings cannot remain children as they get older, and their bodies then follow a downward curve of development. In the same way the whole of humanity has entered into a downward trend of development. We have passed the fourth post-Atlantean age and are now in the fifth; this, together with the sixth and seventh, will be old age in the present stage of world evolution. To think that old ideals can live on is no more intelligent than to think people should continue to learn their letters throughout the whole of their lives just because it is good for children to learn their letters. It would be equally unintelligent for people in the future to speak of a social structure for the whole world based on the blood bonds of nations. It is Wilsonianism, of course, but also ahrimanism—of the spirits of darkness.

It is no doubt far from easy to accept the truth of this; it is easier today to share in the phraseologies in common use all over the world. Reality takes no account of phrases; it follows the true impulses. We shall not be able to change the labels on things which no longer hold true for the fifth, sixth and seventh periods, even if they are still being poured into Wilsonian world programmes in a form which still has power to convince a humanity that likes to take the easy way.

There are still enough people, even today, who simply do not want to get to the point where they are prepared to accept such universal human truths, which are independent of all blood bonds. These are universal human truths because they have not come from the earth but have been brought down from the spiritual worlds. How terrible is the reaction already occurring as almost the whole world is resisting the true progress of humanity, and the phrase ‘freedom of nations’ is used for something which goes against the stream of evolution. It has always been the destiny of Mystery-truths that they have had to go against the stream of comfortable ease and with the stream of evolution. And we shall have to see if there will not be at least a small group of people free of all blood prejudices who are able to recognize the phraseology that goes round the world today, phrases signifying that something which in spiritual terms presents itself as the event of November 1879 is now coming to the surface with might and main.

The events of the present time have been foreseen by the initiates of all nations. They were foreseen and forecast, and it was said that a highly reactionary mood would bubble up from the blood and people would believe it to be highly idealistic. We must be able to observe on the large scale, as in small things; we must not allow ourselves to be deflected by the opinions and phrases one hears in the world today. We have to be able to rise a little above ourselves to understand the signs of the times. Yes, you may choose the other road and continue in your blood-prejudices; you will then join the streams which lead downwards. These are coming. You need to know how to be watchful where they are concerned and oppose them with elements which follow the upward trend. The downward trend comes of its own accord.

We must have a feeling for life on the upward and life on the downward trend. Do not fall prey to the foolish inclination to escape from the downward trend, saying, ‘I will have nothing to do with Lucifer, nor with Ahriman.’ I have often censured this foolish inclination, for we must certainly take account of the Spirits which serve the great cosmic scheme of things. Our failure to do so, assuming an attitude where they remain outside our conscious awareness, make them all the more powerful. We shall only be able to judge human affairs if we are able to take a broader view of the impulses of life in the ascendant and also in the descendant. It is important, however, to keep clear of sympathies and antipathies.

Two streams have arisen in modern science; one of these I have called Goetheanism, the other Darwinism. If you study everything I have written, from the very beginning, you will see that I have never failed to recognize the profound significance of Darwinism. Some people were foolish enough to think I had fallen under the spell of materialism, and so on, when I wrote anything in favour of Darwin. We know, of course, that this was not from conviction, but had quite different reasons; and the people who say such things only need to think about it and they will know better than anyone else that they are not true. But if you really study everything I have written you will see that I have always done justice to Darwinism, but have done so by contrasting it with Goetheanism, the view of the evolution of life. I have always sought to see such things as the theory of descent in the Darwinian sense on the one hand and the Goethean on the other, and I have done so because Goetheanism presents the ascending line, with organic evolution raised above mere physical existence.

I have often referred to the conversation between Goethe and Schiller.¹ Goethe drew a diagram of his archetypal plant and Schiller said, ‘That is not empiricism—learning from experience—it is an idea.’ Goethe's reply was: ‘In that case I have my idea in front of my eyes!’² For he saw the spiritual element in everything. Goethe thus initiated a theory of evolution which holds the potential for elevation to the highest spheres, for being applied to soul and spirit. Goethe may only have made a start with organic evolution in his theory of metamorphosis, but we have the evolution of the spirit to which humanity must attain from this fifth post-Atlantean age onwards—for human beings are becoming more inward, as I have shown. Goetheanism can have a great future, for the whole of anthroposophy is on those lines. Darwinism considers physical evolution from the physical side: external impulses, struggle for survival, selection, and so on, and in this way outlines an evolution which is dying down—everything you can discover about organic life if you give yourself up to impulses which came up in earlier times. To understand Darwin, one merely has to make a synthesis of all the laws discovered in the past. To understand Goethe, one has to rise above this to laws which are ever new in earth existence. Both are necessary. It is not Darwinism which is the problem, nor Goetheanism, but the fact that people want to follow one or the other rather than one and the other. This is what really matters.

In future, human beings, the older they get, will need to take in spiritual impulses if they want to be able to grow younger and younger and really develop their inner life. If they do so, they may have grey hair and wrinkles and all kinds of infirmities, but they will get younger and younger, for their souls are taking in impulses which they will take with them through the gate of death. People who relate only to the body cannot grow younger, for their souls will share in everything the body experiences. Of course, it will not be possible to change the habit of going grey, but it is possible for a grey head to gain a young soul from the wellsprings of spiritual life. This is how human evolution will proceed in the fifth, sixth and seventh post-Atlantean ages in terms of Darwin's grey-haired theory, if you will forgive the expression. But in order to go through the catastrophe which is comparable to the earth's death—the catastrophe lying ahead—people must gain the power of youth which lies in Goetheanism, in the theory of metamorphosis and of spiritual evolution. This has to be taken through the future catastrophe, just as in the case of the individual the rejuvenated soul is taken through the gate of death.

Humanity was able to unite with the earth because when it came down from heaven to earth, if we may put it like this, the spirits of darkness which came down with it laid an adequate foundation for human independence during the time when the laws of heredity, nationality and race prevailed. What Lucifer and Ahriman had done became a good thing in so far as humanity was enabled to unite with the earth. To show this in diagrammatic form, we may put it like this: before Lucifer took action, humanity was united with the whole cosmos including the earth (see diagram, violet); human beings united with the earth (yellow) because hereditary traits—original sin in biblical terms, hereditary traits in scientific terminology—were implanted into them. This made human beings—I am using crosses to indicate them—part of the earth. You see, therefore, that Lucifer and Ahriman are servants of the progressive powers.

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Evolution then continued. We are now at the time when human beings live on earth and are united with it. Luciferic and ahrimanic spirits, spirits of darkness, have been cast down from heaven to earth. Because of this, human beings must be released from the earth, torn away from it, with part of their essential nature taken back into the spiritual world. Humanity must develop awareness of not being of this earth, and this must grow stronger and stronger. In future, human beings must walk on this earth who say to themselves: ‘Yes, at birth I enter into a physical body, but this is a transitional stage. I really remain in the spiritual world. I am conscious that only part of my essential nature is united with the earth, and that I do not leave the world where I am between death and rebirth with the whole of my essential nature.’ A feeling of belonging to the spiritual world must develop in us.

In earlier years this merely cast a false shadow in so far as people did not want to understand physical life and practised a false asceticism, believing this to consist in mortifying the physical body in all kinds of ways. It has to be understood that it is not through false asceticism, but by uniting themselves with things of the Spirit, with the essence of things, that people will be able to perceive themselves as not merely earthly creatures but belonging to the whole cosmos. Gaining knowledge of the physical world has merely been a preparation for this. Just think how dependent people were on the soil where they had grown, as it were, right into the fifteenth century, the end of the Graeco-Latin epoch, and how much their development depended on the soil. This was good, but it must not dominate our lives now.

Physical science has torn human beings away from the earth in the physical sense with Copernicanism, and soul awareness must also be torn away from the earth. The earth has become a small body in space; but initially this is only in terms of space. Through Copernicanism human beings were shifted out into the cosmos, as it were, though in entirely abstract terms. This must continue, but it should not be applied to physical life in the wrong way. The physical will take its own course. Take America, for instance, though not the population native to its soil for centuries. As you know, a new population consisting entirely of Europeans has arrived there in recent times. Careful observation shows that physical life continues to be bound to the soil. The Americans who are Europeans transplanted to America are gradually acquiring traits which recall the old Indian population—this has not yet progressed very far, but it is true nevertheless. The arms are a different length from what they were in Europe because these people have been transplanted to America. The physical human being does adapt to the soil. It even goes so far that there is now a considerable difference in physical form between Americans who live in the West and those who live in the East. This is adaptation to the soil. If the soul were to go along with this physical process the American Indian culture would be revived in time, though in a European form. This sounds paradoxical, but it is true. In future, humanity cannot be bound to the soil; the soul has to become independent. All over the world people may then assume the physical characteristics given by the soil, and the bodies of Europeans may become indianized when they go to America, but in their souls human beings will tear themselves away from the physical and earthly element and be citizens of the worlds of the spirit. And in those worlds there are no races or nations, but relationships of a different kind.

These things must be understood today when great, tremendous events happen in the world, unless you are going to be mulish—excuse the expression—and present old-established prejudices as new ideals.

• 1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), German poet, dramatist, scientist and statesman. His scientific writings were edited by Rudolf Steiner in the 1880s and provided with introductions and commentaries.
  
  Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805), German dramatist, poet and historian. Schiller and Goethe had an interesting correspondence on aesthetics and collaborated in writing for a literary magazine called Die Horen, which was against bourgeois attitudes.
• 2. For instance, in Goethe's World View (GA 6), translated by W. Lindemann, Mercury Press, Spring Valley, NY, 1985. Goethe's account of the conversation appears in Steiner's Goethean Science (GA 2), translated by W. Lindemann, Mercury Press, Spring Valley, NY, 1988.