The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I am somewhat anxious about what I have to say today, for if I could spare three months in which to develop the aspects of my subject, it could not easily be dismissed as fantasy. But I must offer you a mere cursory introduction, within the limits of an hour, in order to make the following special problems of healing quite clear. Therefore much will seem without foundation. Nevertheless I will try to show in the presentation of the subject, that these matters are indeed well-founded—even better-founded than those on which the natural science of today has been built.

Let us first consider the formative process of plants as such, in its relationship to the cosmos. We have already pointed out that in man the opposite process to that of plant formation is active in a functional sense. Therefore, in order to find the direct correspondence in man, we must at least indicate in outline the formative process of plants As is apparent, there are two distinct and quite opposite tendencies in this process. One tendency is earthwards, and I have already suggested that in trees the main stem forms a sort of excrescence of the earth, so that the flowers and leaves are rooted in the trunk, just as herbs and plants of lower types are rooted in the earth. There is this tendency of the plant towards the earth; but on the other hand, the plant has an impulse upwards, away from the earth. The plant strives to escape from the earth, not merely mechanically by virtue of a force opposed to the pull of gravity but also in its whole formative process, internal as well. The processes in the flower become different from those in the root; they become far more dependent on extra-terrestrial or extra-telluric forces than the root. This dependence of the flower formation upon forces originating outside the earth must first be considered and we shall find that the same forces utilised by the plant to initiate the formation of flower and seed are also necessary to the human hypogastrium, because of the functional reversal of the plant process in man. They are utilised through the abdomen as well as in all functions of evacuation secretion and the physical base of sex. So if we examine the complementary relationship of man and the plant, we find special correspondences to the extra-telluric as well as to the telluric.

Please notice here that what I maintain has not been derived from the medical works of the past, but is based entirely on contemporary spiritual-scientific research. I only try to use sometimes the terms of the old literature of medicine, as modern literature contains no suitable vocabulary. But it would be a complete mistake to suppose that any item of my course here is simply derived from archaic sources.

Observe the growth of the plant as it rises upwards out of the earth. You must take note of the spiral sequence in the actual formation of the leaves and of the flower. You might say that the formative forces follow a spiral course around the central stalk. This spiral course cannot be explained by internal forces of tension in the plant. No; its origin is to be sought in the influence that works from the extra-telluric sphere, and chiefly in the influence of the sun's apparent path through the heavens. (Let us say “apparent,” for the respective motions of earth and sun can only be taken relatively.) There are indeed points of view better than the mathematics of Galileo, from which to study the paths of the heavenly bodies; they trace themselves in the sequence of formative processes in the plant. For what the stars do is faithfully copied by the plant.

It would be quite mistaken, however, to reckon only with the vertical upward impulse in plants, that depends upon the sun. The stars co-operate in a resultant with movements caused by the sun. If the sun's action were the sole operating force, it would take complete possession, so to speak, and the plant would be drawn upwards into the infinite. (See Diagram 9). The solar force is, however, counteracted to some degree by that of the outer planets, in their spiral courses. For planets as a matter of fact, do not move in an ellipse; their orbits are spiral. It is time today that the whole Copernican system was re-examined and superseded by another. The so-called outer planets are Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. (Uranus and Neptune are only members of the solar system in an astronomical sense; they do not really belong to it by origin; they are foreign bodies that have become attracted and attached to our system. They are guests, invited to our planetary system, and we are right to omit them.) The forces of the superior planets deflect the plant's upward tendency, so as to bank up the formative forces which cause the formation of flower and seed. So if you consider the plant's upward development, from the region of formation of the foliage, you must ascribe it to the combined action of of the Sun's influence and that of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

There are not only these two elements in co-operation. Marshalled against them are the influences from the Moon and the so-called inferior planets, Mercury, and Venus. The Moon, Mercury and Venus cause the earthward, downward tendency in the plant, which manifests itself most characteristically in the formation of the root. Thus all that seems essentially earthy is really a joint product of the action of the Moon, and that of the inferior planets. So I would say that the plant expresses and bears the imprint of our whole planetary system. Until we know this, and learn also how to recognise the planetary manifestations in man as well we cannot thoroughly understand the relationship between the plant structure and the human structure.

Now consider the fact that plants with a prevailing tendency towards root-formation leave much more ash when they are burnt than is left by plants that tend towards the formation of blossoms or even by mistletoe and, tree-plants. This difference is caused by the greater influence of the inner heavenly bodies, Moon, Mercury and Venus, on plants with great root development. And if you search in their ashes, iron, manganese, and silicon will be found, all of them substances with direct remedial qualities, as is shown when any portion of the plant is used.

But if plants of the opposite type are exposed to the action of fire, there is but little ash. And in these different results of the same process of incineration, we have something I would describe as an external document of the plant's relation to the whole cosmic order, and not to forces ruling on earth alone.

Now consider the plant world more closely. In the case of annual plants, growth stops abruptly at a certain season of the year with the formation of seed. As we have seen, seed formation is mainly governed by extra-terrestrial forces. But its course is interrupted and it is given over to the earth again. It must, as it were, continue at a lower stage in the new year, what had reached a higher stage in the old year The course of plant life and growth is a remarkable one. Take the earth's surface; the plant emerges from the soil, reaching out to its fullest extent towards the extra-terrestrial spheres. But then what has developed extra-terrestrially is sown again in the soil, and the cycle begins anew. (See Diagram 10). Thus every year the heavenly forces sink into the ground, mingle with the forces of the earth, and again complete their course. Year by year the seed of the flower is returned again to the root region, to complete the rhythmic cycle to which all plant life is subject.

This rhythmic cycle is proof that what we term the flora of earth is in truth a manifestation of the whole earth's interaction with the extra-terrestrial cosmos. This interaction, therefore, is not restricted to the form of our planet, but extends to its internal chemistry and its whole system of organic life. Just as what is earthly in the mechanism in the form is overcome by the cosmic forces, so also is the terrestrial chemistry in plants overcome by the forces outside the earth; and when this overcoming has reached a certain point, the process must return again to earth and display earthly chemistry. From these facts it is not a farfetched conclusion that the specific chemistry of the earth is revealed in the ashes; it is represented in the refuse, the dross of the living sphere. This dross and ash is subject to gravity, whereas the upward urge and growth of the plant is a continual conquest of gravity, and of other earth-bound forces, so that we may properly speak of a polar opposition between gravity and light. Light is that which continually overcomes gravity. And the plant is so to speak set into the tension of this combat between light and weight, between that which strives towards ashes and that which strives towards fire. And this polar contrast between what becomes ashes and what is revealed in flame, is the opposition of ponderable and imponderable elements. There we have revealed the cosmic place and role of plant life.

What of man? We have already maintained that we shall not understand him aright, unless we recognise his polar orientation also. I have pointed out that the part that grows upwards from below, in man grows downwards from above; the sexual and excretory processes in man correspond to the flowers and seed vessels, whereas his root formation points upwards. In man, however, it remains in the realm of functions; in plants it becomes a material process.

So man presents us with manifestations that are the direct opposite of those of the plant. In him we have not only the manifestations, but the bearer of them. So you must distinguish in man the functions sending their roots upwards, and the functions tending downward; and as surrounding sheath of both, his material body, which in its turn has an upward tendency. That which happens artificially and externally in respect of plants—the removal from the upper sphere and implanting into the lower level—in man becomes a continuous process. In him there is a constant double current in every process from above downwards and from below upwards, and the relationship of these currents is the core of health and disease. We cannot begin to understand the complex processes in man, if we do not consider the facts I have just described. On the one hand is a material carrier working upwards from the earth, and on the other, something else, working from above downwards, is inserted into the carrier.

It is easy to see that the interaction of these forces determines health or disease in man, especially when, half in despair, so to say, one meets the most important fact, that the human organism has to be treated quite differently according to whether the upper region or the “sub-cardiac” regions are affected. They must be viewed according to quite different principles.

Let us cite an example; the relationship of common rickets to cranio-tabes, which to many people is quite mysterious. These two afflictions seem so closely related if the human individual is viewed as a unity, whereas in truth they should be considered in the in the light of perfectly different principles, as they originate in regions of man that are polar to one another. This has an important bearing upon the healing process. Medical men who obtain certain favourable results in cases of rickets, through some form of phosphoric application, will probably fail completely in cases of cranio-tabes, which require an opposite therapeutic method, probably an application of some form of carbonate of lime. But this is a mere illustration of a truth that is quite general; though its statement is apt to be unwelcome. Where the treatment of human beings is in question in the domain of medicine, it is a fact that whatever remedy is prescribed, and whatever rule is laid down, their exact opposites may also be true and efficacious in certain cases. A very annoying circumstance! It is perfectly possible to prescribe a thoroughly sound and effective method of treatment for such and such a case; and then if it is applied to what appear to be the very same symptoms, to find that it proves no remedy, and that the exact opposite must be applied. Thus it is always possible to meet, and even beat, one theory of treatment with another on the medical field; for most people are not aware that only one part of man can be treated remedially according to any one method, and that another region requires a different method, this is the point we must grasp here.

Now let us carefully examine the sphere that in plants appears visibly separated in two, whereas in man it forms one aspect of his whole constitution. I referred to the three formative impulses which are in some degree inherent in external nature; the impulse to saline formation the impulse to mercurial formation and the tendency peculiar to certain substances such as phosphorus and sulphur to conserve within themselves the imponderable forces to become their carriers.

What is the difference between these formative impulses of external nature, in so far as our present subject is concerned? All that is saline in its process tends to saline formation, leading our internal processes in to the realm of gravity. Those who study the medical works of the past would do well to keep in mind, wherever they find references to the “salification” of substances, that by this process the substance in question is subjected to the force of gravity, and by the opposite process, the light process, it is liberated from gravity; that is, the imponderables are so liberated. Accordingly if we accept light as the representative of all other imponderable forces, we must conceive the whole of external nature as involved in the struggle between light and gravity, between the force that strives towards the extra-terrestrial and the force that makes earth's substances tend towards the centre. We have here the polarity between light and gravity; and in between, that which perpetually seeks the balance between the two and manifests mercurially For the mercurial element is simply something that continually seeks to maintain a state of equilibrium between light and gravity.

We have to visualise the place and office of the imponderables working between the saline, the phosphoric, and the mercurial elements in the whole cosmic scheme, i.e., in gravity, in the light forces, and in that which ever seeks an equilibrium midway between them. Now into the very centre of these mighty forces and tensions is placed in a remarkable way the whole activity of our human heart. It is an appalling feature of the current natural scientific view, that quite apart from the pump-theory, which is untenable, as I have already demonstrated, all heart functions are thought to be enclosed within the limits of the individual being's skin. It is assumed that the heart is somehow connected with the substances that pulsate rhythmically within the limits of the body. But in truth, man with his organic system is inserted into the whole process of the universe, and the human heart is not merely an organ pertaining to his organism, but belongs to the whole world process. That tension of opposite forces which we have traced in the plant, that alternation and interplay of super-solar and infra-solar forces, is also manifest in man in the movements of the heart. The heart movements are not only an imprint of what takes place in man, they are also an imprint of extra-human conditions. For in the human heart you may see reflected as in a mirror, the whole process of the universe. Man is individualised merely as a being of soul and spirit. In other aspects of being, he is inserted into the universal process, so that, for instance, the beats of his heart are not only an expression of what takes place within man, but also of that contest between light and gravity that fills the whole cosmic stage.

I have often had occasion to put this cosmic-human interaction before laymen, in a rough and obvious way, by means of the following calculation. Let us assume that the human being draws breath eighteen times in the course of one minute. In one day of twenty-four hours, this will amount to 25,920 breaths. Now take one day of human life and note further that there are 360 or 365 days in the year assume that the human individual attains average old age, that of seventy-one years (one may, of course, become much older). In that case we shall find as many days in the course of life, as there are breaths in one day of twenty-four hours: namely 25,915. Now take the path of the sun through the constellations of the Zodiac, the platonic year, namely, the time necessary for the point of sunrise to return to Aries at the Vernal Equinox; this amounts to 25,920 of our terrestrial years. Here you have a remarkable example in numbers of the human relation to the whole universe. The course of the sun through the heavens in the platonic year is expressed by the same number as the days of a human life. This is easily reckoned, but it points the way into profound depths of the foundations of the world. Bear in mind—as we have had occasion to stress in Anthroposophy—that in sleep the ego and the astral body of man leave the physical and etheric bodies, and that on awakening, they return to them again. Visualise these exits and re-entries as exhalations and inhalations of the soul and spiritual element by the physical body; you will find that there are 25,915 or 25,920 of such “breaths” in the course of a normal life (the difference of five is due to leap-year days), which obviously must represent a “day” in relation to some other rhythm. And again there must be something in the cosmos which is inserted according to the same numerical terms into the solar revolution. Here is a rhythm in world occurrences that manifests on a large scale; it manifests also in an individual human life, and in the function of respiration during the day. You will no longer find it unaccountably strange that the ancient world, out of their old clairvoyance, spoke of the days and nights of Brahma, the in-breathing and out-breathing of the world; for these ancients had found the breathing of heaven reflected in the mirror of the everyday life-process of man.

Because of these concrete facts, and not because of any sympathies or antipathies, we arrive at a true reverence for primeval wisdom. I can assure you that I should not reverence the ancient wisdom, had I not had the proof in countless cases, that we can re-discover today things already contained in it, things that had been lost and forgotten between the knowledge accumulated of old and that which we are now able to attain. The reverence for ancient wisdom that grows on the seeker after real knowledge is not the result of any vague general inclination, but springs from the comprehension of certain quite concrete conditions and facts.

If we are in quest of the forces akin to light, we must turn to the outer planets of our system, to Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. And as all that happens on earth is in some degree the effect of extra-terrestrial agents, we must look here for the effects of what happens in the cosmos. This leads us to examine the various substances in the earth, but not to look for the causes of their configuration or general consistency in the abstract and fantastic manner of the molecular physics and molecular atomic chemistry of today. This atomic chemistry which looks, as it were, into what is impenetrable to our vision, into the inmost recesses of the constitution of matter. devises all kinds of fine guesswork about atoms and molecules. It then proudly talks of “astronomical recognition” of what goes on in the interior of material structure: or rather, it did so twenty years ago, and does so perhaps less often today. That was a subject of discussion some time ago; today these processes are photographed, as I mentioned in a recent public lecture, and in spiritualistic circles photography is also called in to depict spirits!

Just as scientific investigators are disinclined to believe in “spirit” photography, so must they permit us, who see through these things from another angle, to reject their atomic photography as well. For the same delusion is at work here also.

In plants, it is not forces bound to atoms and molecules that we have to consider, but those that affect the earth by their impact from without, and permeate its substances. Not those tiny demons, the molecules and atoms, but the cosmic forces, shape the internal and external structure of matter. Let us take an example. Suppose that a planet in extra-terrestrial space is in an especially favourable position for working on a certain portion of our sphere. Assume Saturn to be the planet in question and that Saturn can best exercise its full influence when the direction of other planetary influences strike the earth as far away as possible from its own, and do not mingle with nor deflect them; (See Diagram 11) i.e., when the Sun, Mars, and other bodies are not in or near a line from Saturn to the earth. Then the Saturnian force impinges directly on our planet. And if conditions are favourable in the portion of earth directly under Saturn's influence, that Unmixed and undeflected Saturnian influence causes a structure to he formed there differing from that due to the action of Mars under similar conditions.

Earth's substances are the combined result of forces from the stars In the case cited as illustration, the effect of such action is shown in the production of lead. This is why we must associate certain substances in the earth—especially metals—with certain planetary positions in the extra-telluric universe. What the ancient wisdom of mankind offers us, can only be truly understood when it is discovered afresh. It is impossible for anyone accustomed to think in modern chemical and physical terms to read the ancient writings. This is shown by the following example. In a history of alchemy an extremely clever Norwegian scholar described a process, which, as he quite truly remarks, is mere nonsense according to modern chemical concepts, for it gives no result. It is a process concerned with lead. But he failed to see that this process explained the process of seed formation! He referred the statements to a laboratory experiment, which, of course, made nonsense. He did not realise that the terminology of archaic alchemy must be transferred, so to speak, to another plane, and that many of its expressions must be read in a wholly different sense. Therefore he made nonsense of the passage. His opinion was, of course, both right and wrong. Thus we cannot but assume a relationship between terrestrial substances and the forces impinging on the earth from the surrounding world.

The study of metals in particular, on the lines indicated, leads to concrete relationships, so that we must ascribe their formations as follows. Lead results from the unimpeded action of Saturn, tin from that of Jupiter, iron from Mars, copper from Venus, and what is now termed quicksilver from Mercury. Similarly we must recognise a relationship between everything of the nature of silver, all that is silvery—I use this term with intention—and the unimpeded action of the Moon. It is pleasantly amusing to read in contemporary books that the reason why the ancient world associated silver with the Moon, was because of the Moon's silvery radiance—merely because of this external appearance! Anyone who is aware how careful and minute were the studies made of old as to the properties of the various metals—along their own lines, naturally—will not fall into such error. Moreover, the conception I have given leaves, as you will perceive, ample room for other substances than the six most distinctive metals (lead, tin, iron, copper, quicksilver and silver) to come into being through the combination of planetary forces. This joint action of planetary forces means that various other planetary influences combine with the typical ones which we indicated. In this manner, the less representative metals originate. And in any case, earth's wealth of metals is the result of forces acting on the earth from without. Here is the link between the workings of metals and the formation of plants. If you summarise the agencies contained in lead, tin and iron, you have there everything connected with flower and seed formation in plants; inasmuch as these processes take place extra-terrestrially above the surface of the earth. And all that is of the nature of copper, silver or mercury, must be related to everything connected with the formation of plant roots.

As on the one side, the mercurial element acts as an equalising agent, you will certainly look for a corresponding equilibrium on the other side. The mercury element is the balancing factor between the telluric and that which is to some degree supra-telluric. But our whole universe is permeated with spirit. Thus another polarity arises. The terrestrial and extra-terrestrial poles represent the polar opposite of gravity and light. This offers only one possibility—the existence of a state of balance between the terrestrial and the extra-terrestrial elements. But there is another state of equilibrium between that which permeates all matter equally, whether it be terrestrial or extra-terrestrial, and matter itself; an equilibrium between the spiritual and the material, whether the latter be ponderable or imponderable. At every point of the material world, the balance must be held between it and the spiritual, and equally so in the universe. For us, the first and nearest agency that holds the balance in the universe, is the Sun itself. The Sun holds the balance between the spiritual in the universe and the material in the universe. Thus the Sun has a twofold aspect; as a heavenly body it establishes order in the planetary system, but at the same time it maintains order among the forces that permeate the material system. Just as we are able to link the individual planets with the metals as I have already described, so can we also establish the relationship of the Sun to gold. The ancients actually prized gold, not for its material value, but on account of its relationship with the Sun, and with the balance between spirit and matter.

We should recognise that all that we divide and separate on earth, both in our thoughts and in our actions, in nature is actually united in some way or another. In our thoughts we separate what is subject to gravity, and therefore tends to salt formation, from that which bears the light and is therefore akin to the workings of light; and we separate both these categories from what is contained in the state of equilibrium between the two. But in nature there are no such absolute divisions. All these ways of working are connected one with another, adjusted to one another, so that they form highly intricate constructions, and one of these intricate structural systems is shown in the lustre of the metal gold; for it is through gold that the spiritual realm looks, as it were, right into the external world. This directs your attention to possibilities with which I will deal parenthetically—for you may be able to do fruitful work, by utilising in contemporary literature suggestions obtainable from ancient literature. In doing the scientific papers suggested yesterday, you will be able to make use of indications in the ancient literature, if you can understand it aright. Thus it is most important to notice how in old writings all these primary principles, salt, mercury and phosphorus, were seen to be in every substance in different combinations, and to note the diligence with which it was sought to liberate and extract these three principles from a given substance. The ancients believed that lead was formed in the manner described above, but lead—like gold or copper—contains all three principles, salt, mercury and phosphorus. So, in order that we may be able to treat man with one or all of these, we must be able to extract or separate it in some way, from the substances with which it is united. In the chemistry of ancient times, the most meticulous care was devoted to this process. It was found to be particularly difficult in the case of gold, hence the Roman proverb which may well lead us to reverence the ancients: “Facilius est aurum facere quam destruere” (It is easier to make gold than to destroy it). For they held that in this metal, the three primary natural constituents, salt, mercury and phosphorous, were so firmly united that to extract them from gold was hardest of all.

Now we must readily admit that we should not get much further in the matter today, if we took the very same measures as the men of old times. But let us leave them, for we are dealing with the methods and medicine of today, and only occasionally referring to the light thrown by the past. Consider what we are now in a position to investigate. In order to extract the requisite amount of the three primary principles characterised yesterday and today, from the raw materials of nature, it will be necessary to subject these to combustion, in order first, to isolate the fire-bearing, light-bearing parts, then to try to extract the mercurial portions so that the portions with a saline tendency remain. These can be treated with some acid substance, which extracts them and produces an effective saline therapeutic remedy, whether of vegetable or mineral derivation. I shall give further details later on. Thus we shall either have to seek for the light-bearing substances in nature, in order to get extra-terrestrial factors, or try to remove the extra-terrestrial from earthly substances, and to retain the telluric; then we shall have a genuinely saline residue. Or finally we can try to attain something midway between the two poles.

Here we have a choice of two paths, each different in kind, and each taking us part of the way to our goal. We can take the standpoint of the ancient physicians, who always began by extracting the essentially phosphoric, saline or mercurial from various substances, and then made use of the result. In the opinion of these physicians, the specific action of the remedies they obtained depended on the matrix from which they had been extracted. What was obtained from lead acted differently from what was obtained from copper, for example. They laid most stress on origin: salt derived from lead was essentially different from salt derived from copper. So that when they spoke of salt, they knew that in it they had something common to all salts. Because it was salt, it was of the earth, yet because salt derived from the various metals is something extra-telluric, it has relationships to the most diverse parts of man. This we can consider in more detail in the next lecture.

This method is a possible choice, for instance, for the production of saline material in therapeutics. But there is the other way, chosen after the ancient method had ceased to work, and chosen in definite awareness of the fact that man is something more than a chemical apparatus. This way simply tries to take the substances as found in nature and to make available through “potentising” the forces hidden in them. This is the way chosen by Hahnemann's school, representing a new departure in the whole of man's medical researches. It left the archaic way, now blocked because of the ignorance concerning the extra-telluric and other relationships.

This is what causes—I would almost say—the despair of modern medicine; that people have ceased to pay attention to the extra-terrestrial that is really the basis of the earthly elements. The extra-terrestrial sphere is ignored and the earthly sphere is treated as all-sufficient. The homeopathic system strives to get beyond this; so does the “open-air treatment,” which uses light and air directly, because it has lost the secret of how to make right use of the light-bearer, phosphorus, and the air-carrier mercury. That of course is a third possibility. But a genuinely favourable and hopeful way will only be found when mankind has learnt, through spiritual science, the respective inter-relationships of the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms to extra-telluric forces. And as I indicated yesterday, the animal sphere is near—dangerously near to mankind. The ancients, knowing this, set a boundary which we will investigate anew in the light of our later knowledge. They thought as follows: plants remain within the realm of the planetary system; minerals are also within that sphere: but with the animal kingdom we leave the planetary system, and deal with something much more serious. We may not deal here with things as though we were still within the planetary extra-telluric domain. Those forces that lead to the formation of animals, and further to that of mankind, lie scattered farther and wider in the universe than do those that shaped minerals and plants. And so the ancients, knowing this, set a boundary which we will investigate anew in the light of our later knowledge. They thought as follows: plants remain within the realm of the planetary system; minerals are also within that sphere: but with the animal kingdom we leave the planetary system, and deal with something much more serious. We may not deal here with things as though we were still within the planetary extra-telluric domain. Those forces that lead to the formation of animals, and further to that of mankind, lie scattered farther and wider in the universe than do those that shaped minerals and plants. And so the ancients traced the Zodiac in the heavens as a warning not to seek remedial forces beyond the boundary of minerals and plants; or at least to be aware that beyond is perilous ground.

But this perilous ground has been entered upon, as I have already begun to tell you in outline. This must be elaborated when we come to deal with pathology and serotherapy. The methods in question often bring startling results in individual cases, and arouse illusory hopes, completely masking the danger in the background.

If you recall the talks we had in connection with the evolution of the Earth through the Saturn, Sun and Moon periods, you will know that at each of these evolutionary stages, one particular kind of being from among what we would now call the higher hierarchies, attained their human level, as it were. We know that during the ancient Saturn period the Spirits of Personality, the Primal Beginnings, the Archai reached their human level, during the Sun period the Archangels, during the Moon period the Angels and during the Earth period, mankind.

You will also have seen from our talks on evolution, that each level of beings that reaches a certain stage of development, received preparation in advance. We know that the human being was being prepared throughout the Saturn, Sun and Moon periods, and that what we nowadays call man's completed physical body has been evolving since the Saturn period, the etheric body since the Sun period, the astral body since the Moon period, and that the ego was only added to these during the Earth period; that is, all the beings that are at a certain level are prepared as a whole.

Now you may be anxious to know whether, in our present period of evolution, beings are being prepared to attain their human level in the Jupiter period. Another thing you know is that during the Saturn, Sun and Moon periods—you can look it up in my book Occult Science—the spirits of the higher hierarchies took part in the preparation of humanity. There is a description of how the Angels, Archangels and Archai were involved in the development of human beings, and therefore an obvious question is whether human beings, during their Earth existence, are possibly involved in preparing the beings who will reach their human level during the Jupiter period?

This question is certainly a vital one for every feeling person, if his feelings have been inspired by spiritual science, as we have been describing. For it could be the case that human behaviour in general during the course of Earth evolution could either help, or omit to help, the beings who might attain their human level on Jupiter. We might say, ‘What could be worse than behaving in such a way during Earth evolution as to make it impossible for proper Jupiter beings to arise through our deeds?’ We must of course take it for granted, if we want to talk about these things, that there is a certain goodwill, for these are truly important secrets of initiation, the kind of initiation secrets that modern science detests as a matter of course. One certainly has to prepare one's feeling to be able to look at the attitude modern science is bound to have to the real truths of life.

In the previous lectures I have already tried to say a little about the way modern science necessarily relates to life. It cannot make direct contact with the secrets of life. It cannot even want to; it must not even pretend to want to reach these secrets of life. It is surely a good thing to make hard-boiled eggs for the people who like eating eggs when they are hard-boiled, and hard-boiled eggs are useful for those who like them. But if someone wanted to go and say that he takes the eggs away from the hens to hard-boil them, and then lets them hatch them after that, he would be doing something absurd. A person does exactly the same thing as far as the cosmos is concerned, if he sets out to solve the secrets of the cosmos and wants to use modern science for it; this is the same attitude as wanting to hatch hard-boiled eggs that have nothing left in them to be hatched out.

I will show you by means of a comparison just how misleading this science is that is bound up with the whole way of modern thinking, particularly when it approaches the real riddles of life. If somebody wants to hold forth about whether science is helpful or harmful he will usually start off by asking, ‘Is science right about this or that?’ And if he can prove that it is right in one or another instance, he will swear by it as a matter of course.

But this is just what we have to get away from, this attaching so much importance to the question of whether what science says is right or not. We must reach the point of seeing that this is not the main thing when it comes to the solving of riddles of life. If someone sees a horse-drawn cart with a man in it, he will be quite right in saying that the horses are pulling this person in the cart, and drawing him along behind them. This is correct, of course. And anyone who wanted to say that the horses were not drawing the cart and the man sitting in it, would obviously be wrong. But it is also true that the man sitting in the cart, through the way he guides the horses, is controlling the direction in which they should pull him; and that is surely the more important aspect from the point of view of the destination. Modern science can be compared to the statement of the person who denies that the man in the cart is guiding the horses, and insists that the horses are drawing the man in the cart.

If you think the comparison through in detail, you will get the right idea about the relation of modern science to modern research into truth. I have to say these things over and over again, because a person who bases himself on our world outlook, must come more and more into the position where he can defend and protect our spiritual-scientific outlook against the attacks of the modern world outlook. But you will be able to do this only if you enlighten yourself as to the relation of modern external science to a genuine research into truth. You must always approach spiritual-scientific questions with a certain attitude and a certain kind of feeling, otherwise you will not make the proper connection with them.

Now our question concerning the beings who will reach the human level on Jupiter is connected in very truth with the deepest questions of man's Earth evolution. There is something in our Earth evolution that has always been a philosophical problem, namely the relation between man's moral behaviour and his natural existence. As an earthly being, man has to decide to what extent he is the kind of being who is ruled by his instincts, has to obey and satisfy them, and is at the mercy of his instincts and their satisfaction, because the laws of nature simply insist on their being satisfied. That is one side of human nature. In this respect we say, ‘We do these things because we have to. We have to eat and we have to sleep.’ But there is another realm of human conduct on this earth, a realm in which we cannot say ‘must’, for it would lose its whole significance if we were to say ‘must’ here. This is the wide realm of ‘shall’, a realm where we feel that we have to follow a purely spiritual impulse as distinct from instinct and everything arising out of ourselves on a natural level. ‘You shall’ never speaks to us from out of our instincts but directs us in a purely spiritual way. ‘You shall’ comprises the realm of our moral obligations.

There are some philosophers who cannot find any connection between what is implied by the ‘you shall’ and ‘you must’. And our present age that is almost bogged down in materialism, especially where moral life is concerned, and will get more and more bogged down, would like to turn all the ‘you shalls’ into ‘you musts’. We are heading for times where, in this respect, the turning of ‘you shall’ into ‘you must’ will be blazoned forth with a certain amount of pride, and actually called psychology. Terrible aspects present themselves if we look at what has begun to develop in the field of criminal psychology. It is already evident that the human being is being conceived of in such a way that people do not ask whether he has overstepped a ‘you shall’, but try to prove that he was driven to one or another destructive act out of the necessity of his nature. Strange experiments are on the increase to define crime merely as a particular case of illness. All these things arise out of a certain materialistic lack of clarity in our times, regarding the relation of ‘you shall’ to ‘you must’.

What does this ‘you shall’, or in other words the categorical imperative, actually signify within the whole framework of human existence? Whoever obeys the ‘you shall’ is known to carry out a moral action. Whoever does not obey the ‘you shall’ commits an immoral action. This is of course a trivial truth. But now let us attempt to look at ‘moral’ and ‘immoral’, not only with regard to the external maya of the physical plane, but with regard to the truth and what is actually behind physical maya. Here the moral element corresponding to the ‘you shall’ appears to initiation science as something that hits you in the eye, spiritually, to put it rather crudely. If you look at a person—these truths which the materialistic outlook detests have to be told sometime—if you look at someone in certain temperature and weather conditions—you see this even better in horses, but we are not speaking about horses now—you will see him breathing out, and the breath becoming visible as vapour in the air. Obviously as far as materialistic science is concerned, this breath a person exhales, disperses and dissolves and has no further significance. But it has significance for a person who follows up the phenomena of life with initiation science, for he sees in the patterns of the breath the exact traces of the moral or immoral conduct of the person. A person's moral or immoral behaviour can be seen in the steamy breath, and the breath of a person who is morally inclined is quite different from the breath of a person who is inclined to immorality. You know, with regard to various things in the human being, the more delicate qualities can only be seen in the more delicate parts of the etheric and astral aura. But man's moral and immoral nature in the ordinary sense of the word is actually visible in the etheric-astral content of the steamy breath. The physical part of it dissolves. But what is incorporated in it does not dissolve; for it contains a genie, which, in the case of steamy breath, has a physical, an etheric and an astral part, only the physical is not earthly, just watery. Something that has an extremely differentiated form can be seen in this breath.

Deeds which arise out of love show something quite different from deeds which are done out of enthusiasm, a creative urge or the urge for perfection, for instance. But in every case the form in the breath reminds one of beings that do not exist on earth at all as yet. These beings are a preparation for the ones that will reach their human stage on Jupiter. Their forms are very changeable and will pass through further changes in the future, for these beings are the first advance shadow images of the beings who will reach the human level on Jupiter.

In a certain way we also owe our existence to the exhalation of the Angeloi on the Moon, and it is one of the moving experiences of spiritual life to know that Jupiter human beings of the future will evolve out of what we breathe out in present ages. If we turn to the Bible with such knowledge in mind, and read the opening words, we can tell ourselves, ‘Now we begin to understand what is meant when it says that the Elohim formed earthly man by breathing into him.’

I will confess that I would never have understood the part about the Elohim breathing the living being of man into his mouth and nose, if I had not known beforehand that the breath of earthly human beings also contains the first germinal beginnings of the beings who will become human on Jupiter. But Jupiter human beings can only arise from the kind of breath that owes its existence to deeds that obey the ‘you shall’, and which are therefore moral actions.

Thus we see that through our earthly morality we take a creative part in the whole cosmic order. It is indeed a creative power, and we can see that spiritual science gives us a strong impulse for moral action by telling us that we are working against the creation of Jupiter human beings, if we do not act in a moral way on earth. This gives morality a very real value and makes its existence worthwhile. Our human conduct is very strongly formed by what we acquire through spiritual science, especially as we become acquainted with real secrets regarding the cosmos.

I have already made references to similar things and mentioned at various times that language also symbolises man's own future creativity. I do not wish to dwell on this today though, but just wanted to show you, to begin with, what significance moral behaviour has in the whole of the cosmos.

You could now ask, ‘What about immoral behaviour?’ Immoral behaviour also comes to expression in the formation of the breath. But immoral behaviour imprints a demonic form on it. Demons are born through man's immoral conduct. Let us look at the difference between the demons that arise through immoral behaviour and the spiritual beings—spiritual in so far as they only have a watery existence on earth—the spiritual forms that are created by moral actions.

These beings that incarnate as far as a transitory watery existence and arise from moral conduct, are the kind of beings that have an astral, an etheric and finally a physical body condensed to the level of wateriness, just as, in the Moon period, we had an etheric, an astral and a physical body, and this physical body was also only condensed to a wateriness. We were more or less like that, even if not exactly the same. And this creature, with a physical body, etheric body and astral body that arises out of moral actions, is predestined to receive an ego, just as in the Moon period our physical, etheric and astral body were predestined to receive an ego. They have the basis for receiving an ego, and beings of this kind are qualified to undergo a regular progressive evolution in the cosmos. The other beings, the demons created out of immoral actions, also have an astral body, an etheric body and a physical body, at the watery stage, of course, but they do not have the basis for developing an ego. They are born without heads, as it were. Instead of taking up the basis for progressing along a regular evolutionary path to the Jupiter existence, they reject this basis. By doing so they fall victim to the fate of dropping out of evolution. But this only increases the hordes of luciferic beings, for they come under their power. As they cannot progress in a regular way they have to become parasites. This is what happens to all the beings that reject their normal path; they have to attach themselves to others in order to move on. These beings that arise through immoral actions have the particular inclination to be parasites in human evolution on earth under Lucifer's leadership, and to seize hold of the evolution of the human being before he makes his physical entry into the world. They attack man during the embryonic period and share his existence between conception and birth. Some of these beings, if they are strong enough, can continue to accompany the human being after birth, as seen in the phenomena of children who are possessed.

What is brought about by the criminal demon parasites attached to unborn children is the cause of the deterioration of the generation succession, which are not as they would be if these demons did not exist. There are various reasons for the decline of families, tribes, peoples and nations, but one of them is the existence of these criminal demon parasites during man's embryonic period.

These things play a great part in Earth evolution as a whole, and they bring us into contact with deep secrets of human existence. This is often the cause of people acquiring certain prejudices and points of view before they are born into earth existence. And people are tormented by doubts and uncertainties in life and all kinds of other things, because of these demonic parasites.

There is not much more these beings can do with the human being once his ego has entered and made itself felt, but they prey on him all the more before he is born or during his earliest years. Thus we see that evil actions have a significant effect in the cosmos, too, and work creatively, but their creativity works in the direction of the ancient Moon existence. For what man passes through in the embryonic period when these demonic beings can prey on him, is basically the heritage of the old Moon period, which makes its appearance in subconscious, instinctive behaviour. Something that even physical science preserves an instinct for is that, in older and better times, man's embryonic period was not calculated according to ordinary months but lunar months, therefore it speaks of ten lunar months, and knows certain other things, too, concerning the connection of embryonic development with the phases of the moon.

So we see that our Earth evolution contains two tendencies: good deeds that contain the impulse to work creatively on Earth in preparation for Jupiter, so that man's successor on the human level can come into being. But evil deeds have also brought into our evolution the tendency to drag the Earth back again to the ancient Moon period and make it dependent on everything to do with the subconscious. If you think about it, you will find a great number of things that are connected with these subconscious impulses; in fact, there are far more of these subconscious impulses in materialistic humanity of modern times, than there were in bygone ages when people were less materialistic.

I believe that the kind of things I have been telling you about again today will make you feel what a deep impression spiritual science can make on your outlook on life, and that it really and truly will not only give you theoretical knowledge but will be capable of giving human life a new direction. A time will come when life will become quite chaotic if people do not use the chance of giving it a new direction out of spiritual-scientific knowledge. Man must get beyond a knowledge that is restricted to the physical body. Our materialistic age does not want knowledge of any other sort than the kind that is restricted to the physical body. But man has to lift his knowledge out of the physical body. And what we know today as the first exercises in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds will gradually—though ‘gradually’ will be quite a long time—they will gradually turn into something he does naturally, something he will feel to be second nature. Particularly what we call thought concentration will come naturally to people.

People will more and more feel the need really to concentrate their thoughts, to focus their whole soul activity on sharply defined thoughts which they place in front of their consciousness. Whilst they would otherwise let their senses roam from one thing or fact to another, they will more and more often direct their thought life to certain things of their own choosing; even if only for a short time, they will concentrate on a definite thought, so as to focus their soul activity on this thought. They will then discover something that a lot of you know very well. Everyone makes a certain discovery in the course of concentrating. If we place a thought in the centre of our consciousness and focus all our soul activity on it, we shall notice the thought growing stronger and stronger. Certainly it does. But then there comes a point where it does not get stronger any more but gets weaker and fades away. This is an experience lots of you will have had. The thought has to fade away, it has, as it were, to die away inside. For the kind of thoughts we have to begin with and the way we think, are through the instrument of the physical body, and we concentrate the kind of thinking we do by means of the instrument of the physical body until the moment the thought dies, then we slip out of the physical body.

We would go into the unconscious altogether if, parallel with this concentration exercise, we did not attempt to do something else to maintain our consciousness when we have slipped out of our physical body. What we have to do to maintain our consciousness when we are outside, is what we call leading a calm and composed life and accepting the things of the world calmly. We can do even more than accept things calmly. We can take seriously a theory we know so well, namely the concept of karma. What do I mean?

A person is not at all inclined, to start with, to take the idea of karma really seriously. If he has only a small mishap that hurts him, or anything at all happens to him, he sometimes gets furious, but at any rate he has antipathy for it. We encounter what we call our destiny with sympathy or antipathy. It cannot be any different in ordinary life, as it is absolutely essential that we feel sympathy for some of the occurrences of destiny and antipathy for others. To us, destiny is something that meets us from outside.

If we take the idea of karma seriously, we must really recognise our ego in our destiny and realise we ourselves are active in what happens to us through destiny; that we are the actual agents. When someone offends us it is certainly difficult to believe we are hidden behind the offender. For it may be necessary in physical life to punish the offence. But we must always keep a corner within us where we admit to ourselves, ‘Even when someone offends you it is you offending yourself, when someone hits you it is you hitting yourself, when unpleasant blows of destiny hit you, it is you, yourself, dealing yourself these blows.’ We forget that we are not only within our skin but are in our destiny; we forget we are within all the so-called chance happenings of our destiny.

It is very difficult really to acquire the attitude that one's own ego brings one one's destiny. But it is true that with our own ego we bring ourselves our destiny, and we get the impulses for this in the life between death and a new birth according to our earlier incarnations, so that we can bring ourselves our destiny. We have to unite with our destiny and, instead of warding off hard blows of destiny with antipathy, tell ourselves more and more often, ‘Through having this blow of destiny, that is, through meeting yourself in this blow of destiny, you are making yourself stronger, more vigorous and robust.’ It is more difficult to form a union with your destiny in this way than to resist it, but what we lose when our thought passes away can only be regained by drawing into ourselves, like this, what is outside us. We cannot stay in what is within our skin if the thought fades when we concentrate on it, but it will carry us out of ourselves if we have taken hold of our destiny, our karma, in the true sense. We thus awaken ourselves again. The thought dies, but we carry forth the identification we have grasped between our ego and our destiny, and it carries us about the world.

This composure with respect to our destiny, this sincere acceptance of destiny, is what gives us existence when we are outside our body. Obviously this does not need to alter our life on the physical plane. We cannot always do that. But the attitude we have to acquire in a corner of our soul must be there, for the moments when we really want to be able to live consciously outside our body.

Two maxims can be our guiding principles and can mean a very great deal to us. The first of these to impress upon our minds is:

Strive for the dying away of the thought in the universe.

For the thought becomes a living force outside, only when it dies away in the universe. Yet we cannot unite ourselves with this living force unless we work at the content of the second maxim:

Strive for the resurrection of destiny in the ‘I’.

If you achieve this, you unite what has been reborn in the thought with the resurrected ego outside you.

There is a great deal in human nature, though, which makes it difficult to progress in the spirit of these maxims. It is particularly hard to look at the relationship between inner and outer in the right way. The more ethics we can learn from spiritual science in this connection, the better. And we can learn ethics from it in so far as certain ethical concepts acquire life and blood for the first time through what spiritual science can bring to them.

For instance, there are people who are perpetually complaining about other people and the awful things they do to them. They go as far as to say that other people persecute them. Everything of this kind is always connected with the other pole of human nature, you only have to observe life in the right way, which means according to spiritual science as properly understood. Of course there is good reason to complain about unkindness, but in spite of this you will always find, if you go through life with vision that has been made somewhat clairvoyant by spiritual science, that most of these complaints come from egoists, and that the suspicion that everyone wants to be nasty to them arises most often in egoistic natures, whereas a loving disposition will not readily suspect persecution, nor that people are trying to harm them in all kinds of ways, and so on.

When it is put into words like this it is easy to agree with it in theory. I am actually convinced that most people will admit to it theoretically, if they stop to think about it. But to live accordingly is what matters.

Now you may ask, ‘How do we live accordingly?’ And again the answer must be, ‘You must actually live with the spiritual science you are striving for, live with it as much as you can.’ That is the point. That is why spiritual science is not given in compendiums or short sketches, but we are trying to make spiritual science a force of life in which we can live, and from which we can constantly draw stimulating impulses.

This was the main reason that led us to make the Goetheanum building a kind of focal point for this living anthroposophical striving, for as I mentioned yesterday, the Goetheanum building, in its form, and in the whole way it has been built, has a bodily, a soul and a spiritual nature in a spiritual-scientific sense. It is itself a token of the fact that we are striving according to impulses from the spiritual world to bring into human evolution what it so badly needs, if the immediate future is to go the way it should. The very fact that you can perceive the being of spiritual science in the forms of the Goetheanum building makes it a sort of centre, a focal point around which the kind of anthroposophical striving can crystallise, that has to become an essential part of the evolution of humanity.

We probably often say that we live in troubled times and that many things exist today which stand out in stark contrast to spiritual science. Yet our karma has allowed us to come so far as to overcome, as it were, the material basis out of which our Goetheanum is built, so that it can be a token of spiritual science even in its external form.

Each one of us can acknowledge this to himself, as I often do, especially in the difficult times we are going through in face of the strong attacks being made on anthroposophy at present. Some people can question how much personal progress we have made on our part towards what ought to be crystallising around the Goetheanum. Even if one or another individual cannot be physically present any more in the work being done on the physical plane, the fact that the building is there, and that our karma has brought it to us, is an important step forward. And if we bear in mind that people with as deep an understanding of spiritual science as Christian Morgenstern, for example, remain united, even after physical death, with what the Goetheanum is intended to be, then our building can also be a token in our time of the kind of activity within our spiritual movement that is not concerned with boundaries between what is usually called life and death.

We can really feel united with this building, and therefore it can stimulate us to think the kind of serious thoughts which it is quite natural for us to think at a time like ours, when materialism is at its peak. Even if this building finds one or another individual co-operating only as a spiritual being, the building will be important for the continuation of our movement. This, you will understand, is said only to show you that our movement has a seriousness that goes beyond life and death.

We have encountered this seriousness to a special degree this week. And if one thing happens, why should not other things be able to happen soon, too? It is extraordinarily difficult to achieve what I have spoken about and mentioned again this time. I have stressed that I give the strictest attention to choosing and finding exactly the right words for which I can be fully answerable to the spiritual worlds. So it is to be desired that these words shall be heard and received in the same spirit.

Times will certainly come when people will be able to be more light-hearted with regard to the anthroposophical movement. But now, right at the beginning, we must get used to taking things very, very seriously. A while ago I talked here about occult research, among other things, because I thought it would be of use to some of you. I was mainly describing facts. I thought these would be of help to one or another of you in understanding our present difficult times. But that which I presented with this intention has not been treated with sufficient caution—there are one or two exceptions, of course, but I am right in saying that not everyone has treated it with the necessary discretion and regard, and it has transpired that it was repeated here and there in a form that conveyed exactly the opposite of what I said here.

If I just think of what has been made out of something that cannot have been misunderstood because it is already in print, regarding the classification of the peoples of Europe according to sentient soul, intellectual or mind soul, consciousness soul and the ego, which was truly not meant to express a superiority; if I think of the statements that have gone out into the world and the opposition and bad feeling they have aroused, it is easy to see that the principle of taking things quite exactly, even in such difficult cases, has not been given due consideration. If, for instance, I have ever said that the ego activity which is there among the European peoples ought to be effective in organising the European population, I would have been talking nonsense. Yet this is one of the things that has been made public, and it creates the most fearful misunderstandings and bad feelings.

So I am duty-bound not to say a word about these things in my lectures for the time being. I must desist from any mention of them, and whereas everybody else is free to speak about it, it has become impossible for me to do so because of the way people have misconstrued what I said.

All these things go to show that we should look at ourselves and see if we cannot take the anthroposophical movement absolutely seriously. For sometimes we completely fail to notice how much feeling of responsibility there is for each sentence of the communications of genuine spiritual research, when the matter is taken seriously. To stir up emotions is certainly not what spiritual science is for, nor to oppose or pacify them. And if anyone says these things are communicated in order to oppose somebody, he ought to ask himself whether the right or wrong use has been made of that which has been communicated with the utmost objectivity and reverent love of truth. These are things which add even more pain to my occult experiences, which are already painful enough. Even if I cannot mention certain important things, and a lot has to be omitted which I thought we could investigate soon, there are still some important and substantial matters left for us to discuss during our time together.

Man in his earthly existence varies in his conditions of consciousness; he varies in the conditions of full wakefulness, of sleep, and of dreaming.

Let us first put the question to ourselves: is it an essential part of man to live as earthly being in these three conditions of consciousness?

We must clearly realize that of earthly beings only man lives in these three conditions. Animals live in an essentially different alternation. They do not have that deep, dreamless sleep which man has for the greater part of the time between falling asleep and awaking. On the other hand, animals do not have the complete wakefulness of man between awaking and going to sleep. Animal “wakefulness” is somewhat like human dream; but the experiences of the higher animals are more definite. On the other hand, animals are never so deeply unconscious as man is in deep sleep.

Therefore animals do not differentiate themselves from their surroundings so much as man. They have not got an outer and an inner world, as man has. The higher animals, (Dr. Steiner means by higher animals, the warm-blooded vertebrates, birds and mammals. – Ed.) subconsciously, feel themselves, with their whole inner being, like a part of the surrounding world.

When an animal sees a plant, his first feeling is not: that is outwardly a plant, and I am inwardly a separate being—but the animal gets a strong inner experience from the plant, a direct sympathy or antipathy. It feels as it were, the plant's nature inwardly. The circumstance that people of our time are not able to observe anything that is not obvious, prevents them from seeing in the impulses and behaviour of animals that it is as I have said.

Only man has the clear and sharp differentiation between his inner world and the outer world. Why does he recognize an outer world? How does he come at all to speak of an inner and an outer world? Because every time he sleeps, his ego and his astral body are outside his physical and etheric body: he abandons, so to speak, his physical and etheric bodies and is among those things which are outer world. During sleep we share the fate of outer things. As tables and benches, trees and clouds are during wakefulness outside our physical and etheric bodies and are therefore described as outer world, so, during sleep, our own astral bodies and our ego belong to the outer world. And here something happens.

In order to realize what happens here, let us first start from what happens when we face the world in a perfectly normal condition of wakefulness. There are the various objects outside us. And the scientific thought of man has gradually brought it to the point of recognizing such physical things as belonging certainly to the outer world as can be weighted, measured and counted. The content of our physical science without doubt is determined according to weight, dimension and number.

We reckon with the calculations which apply to earthly things, we weigh and measure them, and what we ascertain by weighing, measuring and counting really constitutes the physical. We would not describe a body as physical unless we could somehow put it to the proof by means of scales. But those things like colours, and sounds, the feeling even of warmth and cold, the real objects of sense-perceptions, these weave themselves about the things that are heavy, and measurable and countable. If we want to define any physical object, what constitutes its real physical nature is the part that can be weighed or counted, and with this alone the physicist really wants to be concerned. Of colour, sound and so on he says: Well, something occurs from outside with which weighing or counting is concerned—he says even of colour-phenomena: there are oscillating movements which make an impression on man from outside, and he describes this impression, when it concerns the eye, as colour, when it concerns the ear, as sound, and so on. One could really say that the modern physicist cannot make head or tail of all these things—sound, colour, warmth and cold. He regards them just as properties of something which can be ascertained with the scales or the measuring rod or arithmetic. Colours cling, as it were, to the physical; sound is wrung from the physical; warmth and cold surge up out of the physical. One says: that which has eight has redness, or, it is red.

You see, when a man is in the state between going to sleep and waking up, his ego and his astral body are in a different condition. Then the things of dimension, number and weight are not there at all, at any rate not according to earthly dimension, number and weight. When we sleep there are no things around us which can be weighed, however odd it appears, nor are there things around us which can be counted or measured. As an ego and an astral body one could not use a measuring rod in the state of sleep.

But what is there are—if I may so express it—the free-floating, free-moving sense-perceptions. Only in the present state of his development man is not capable of perceiving the free-floating redness, the waves of free-moving sound and so on.

If we wish to draw the thing diagrammatically, we could do it like this. We could say: Here on earth we have solid weighable things (red) and to these are attached, as it were, the redness, the yellow, in other words, what the senses perceive in these things. When we sleep, the yellow is free and floating, and also the redness not clinging to such weight-conditions, but floating and weaving freely. It is the same with sound. It is not eh bell which rings, but the ringing floats in the air.

When we go about in our physical world and see something or other, we pick it up; only then is it really a thing, otherwise it might be an optical illusion. Weight must come in. Therefore, unless we feel its weight, we are apt to consider something that appears in the physical, as an optical illusion, like the colours of the rainbow.

If you open a book on Physics today you will see the explanation given—the rainbow is an optical illusion. Physicists look upon the raindrop as the reality; and then they draw lines which really have no meaning for what is there, but they seemingly imagine them there in space. They are then called rays. But the rays are not there at all, but one is told the eye projects them. Remarkable use indeed is made of this projection in modern Physics. Thus I assume we see a red object. In order to convince ourselves that it is no optical illusion, we lift it up—and it is heavy; thereby it guarantees its reality.

He who now becomes conscious in the ego and the astral body, outside the physical and etheric bodies, comes in the end to the conclusion that there is something like this in this free-floating, free-moving colour and sound; but it is different. In this free-floating coloured substance there is a tendency to scatter to the uttermost parts of the Earth. It has a contrary weight. (See Diagram 1) These things of the earth want to go down there to the earth's center (downward arrow); these (upward arrow) want to escape into universal space.

And there is something there similar to a measurement. You get it, for instance, if you have, let us say, a small reddish cloud, and this small reddish cloud is hemmed in by a mighty yellow structure; you then measure, not with a measuring-rule, but qualitatively, the stronger-shining red with the weaker-shining yellow. And as the measuring-rule tells you: that is five yards, the red tells you here: (see Diagram 1): if I were to spread myself out, I should go into the yellow five times. I must expand myself. I must become bigger, then I, too, should become yellow. Thus are measurements made in this case.

If it still more difficult to be clear about counting, because after all in earthly counting we mostly count only peas or apples, which lie side by side indifferently, and we always have the feeling that I we place as second one by the one, this one doesn't mind a bit that another one lies next to it. In human life it is of course different. There is sometimes the case that the one is directed to the other. But this is already verging on the spiritual.

In physical mathematics it is a matter of indifference to divisions what is added to them. But here it is not the case. When a one is of a definite kind, it demands—let us say—some three or five others, according to its kind. It has always an inner relationship to the others. Here number is a reality. And if a consciousness of it begins, as is the case when you are out there with your ego and your astral body, you also get to the point of ascertaining something like dimension, number and weight, but of an opposite kind.

And then, when sight and hearing out there are no longer a mere chaotic mingling of red and yellow and sounds, but you begin to feel things are ordered, then arises the perception of the spiritual beings, who realize themselves in these free-floating sense-experiences. Then we enter the positive spiritual world, and the life and doings of the spiritual beings. As here on earth we enter the life and doings of earthly things, ascertaining them with the scales and the rod and our calculations, so, by adapting ourselves to the purely qualitative, opposite weight-condition, i.e. by wanting to expand imponderably into the world-spaces and by measuring colour by colour, etc.—we come to the understanding of spiritual beings. Such spiritual beings also permeate all the realms of nature.

Man with his waking consciousness sees only the outside of minerals and plants and animal; but in sleep he is with all that is spiritual in all these beings of nature's realms. And when on awakening he returns again to himself, his ego and his astral body keep as it were the inclination and affinity towards the outward things and cause him to recognize an outer world. If man had an organization which was not designed for sleep, he could not recognize an outer world.

It is not a question of insomnia, for I did not way, “if a man does not sleep,” but “if man had an organization which was not designed for sleep.” The point is the being designed for something. Therefore, of course, man becomes ill if he suffers from insomnia, because his nature is not suited to it. But things are so arranged that man attains an outer world and to a vision of it, just because in sleep he passes the time in the outer world with the things he calls, when awake, the outer world.

And you see, this relationship of man to sleep gives the earthly concept of truth. How? Well, we call it truth when we can correctly reproduce inwardly something external, when we can accurately experience inwardly something external. But for this we require the arrangement of sleep. Without it we should have no concept of truth, so that we have to thank the state of sleep for truth. In order to surrender ourselves to the truth of things, we must pass our existence for a certain time with those tings. The things tell us something about themselves only because during sleep they are appreciated by us through our soul's presence with them.

It is different in the case of the dream-state. The dream is related, of course, with the memory, with the inner soul-life, with what preferably lives in the memory; when the dream is free-floating sound-colour world, it means we are still half outside our body. If we go completely down, the same forces which we unfold as moving and living in dream become forces of memory. Then we no longer differentiate ourselves in the same way from the outer world. Our inner being coincides with it. Then we live in it with our sympathies and antipathies so strong that we do not feel things as sympathetic or antipathetic, but that the sympathies and antipathies themselves show themselves pictorially.

If we had not the possibility of dreaming, nor the continuation of this dream-force in our inner life, we should have no beauty. That we have a disposition for beauty is due to the fact that we are able to dream. For prosaic existence we have to say: we have to thank the power of dreaming that we have a memory. For the art life of man we have to thank the power of dreaming that there is beauty. The manner in which we feel or create beauty is namely very similar to the weaving, creating power of dreaming.

We behave in the experience of beauty and to the creation of it—through the help of our physical body—as we behave outside our physical body or half bound to it, when we dream. There is really only a slight jump from dreaming to living in beauty. And only because in these materialistic times people are of such coarse temperament that they do not notice this jump, is so little consciousness to be found of the whole significance of beauty. Man must necessarily give himself up in dream in order to experience this free movement and life, whereas when one gives oneself up to freedom, to apparent inner compulsion, that is, if one experiences this jump one has no longer the feeling that it is the same as dreaming, that it is the same except that use is made of the powers of the physical body. This generation will long ponder what “chaos” meant in former times. There are most diverse definitions of “chaos.” Actually it can only be characterized by saying: when man reaches a state of consciousness in which the experience of weight, of earthly dimension just ceases, and things begin to become less heavy, but as yet with no tendency to escape into the universe, but maintain themselves still—let us say—horizontally, in equilibrium, when the fixed boundaries get blurred, when the swaying indefiniteness of the world is seen with the physical body still, but already also with the soul-constitution of dreaming, then you see chaos. And the dream is merely the shadowy approach of chaos towards man.

In Greece one still had the feeling that one cannot really make the physical world beautiful; it is half a necessity of nature; it is as it is. One cannot set up the Cosmos—which means the beautiful world—out of earthly things, but only out of chaos, by shaping the chaos. And what one makes with earthly things is merely an imitation in matter of the molded chaos.

This is always the case in Art; and in Greece, where the mystery-cults still had a certain influence, one had a very vivid image of this relation of chaos to Cosmos.

But when one looks round in all these worlds—the unconsciousness of sleep, the half-consciousness of dream—one does not find the Good. The beings who are in these worlds are predestined with all wisdom from the very beginning to run their life's course there. One finds in them controlling, constructive wisdom. One finds in them beauty. But there is no sense in speaking of goodness among these beings when as earth-man it is a question of our meeting them. We can only speak of goodness when there is a distinction between inner and outer world, so that the good can follow the spiritual world or not. As the state of sleep is apportioned to truth, the dream-state to beauty, so is the condition of wakefulness apportioned to goodness, to the Good.

This does not contradict what I have been saying during these days, that when one leaves earthly things and emerges into the Cosmos, one is induced to abandon also earthly concepts so as to speak of the moral world-order. For the moral world-order is necessarily as much foreordained in the spiritual world as causality is on this earth. Only there the predestination,—that which is appointed,—is spiritual; there is no contradiction.

But as regards human nature we must be clear: if we want to have the idea of truth, we must turn to the state of sleep; if we want to have the idea of beauty, we must turn to the state of dreaming, and if we want to have the idea of goodness, we must turn to the state of waking consciousness.

Man has thus, when awake, no vocation to his physical and etheric organization as regards truth, but as regards goodness. In this state we must most certainly arrive at the idea of goodness.

What does modern science achieve when it attempts to explain man? It refuses to rise from truth, through beauty to goodness; it wants to explain everything in accordance with an external causal necessity which corresponds only to the idea of truth. And here one entirely fails to reach that element in man which weaves and lives when he is awake. One reaches at the most only what man is when asleep. Therefore if you read anthropologists today with an alert eye, alert for the psychic peculiarities and forces of the world, you get the following impression. You say to yourself: Yes, that is all very nice, what we are told about man by modern science. But what sort of a fellow is this man really, about whom science tells us? He lies the whole time in bed ... he cannot apparently walk ... he cannot move. Movement, for example, is not in the least explained. He lies the whole time in bed.

It cannot be otherwise. Science explains man only when asleep. If you want to set him in motion, it would have to be done mechanically; wherefore, also, it is a scientific mechanism. One has to insert machinery into this sleeping man, to set this dummy in motion when he is to et up, and to put him to bed again in the evening.

Thus this science tells us absolutely nothing about the man who wanders about the world, who lives and moves and is awake; for what sets him in motion is contained in the idea of goodness, not in the idea of truth, which we gain chiefly from external things.

Now this is something which is not much thought about: one has the feeling, when a physiologist or anatomist of today describes man, that one would like to say: Wake u-p. Wake up! You are asleep, you are asleep! These people accustom themselves, under the influence of this way of looking at things, to the state of sleep. And as I have always said, people sleep through all sorts of things just because they are obsessed by science. Today, because the popular papers circulate everything everywhere, even the uneducated are also obsessed by science. There never were so many obsessed minds as today. It is remarkable with what words one must describe the real relationships of the present day. One must lapse into quite different epithets from those which are in common use today.

It is the same when the materialists try to place man in his surroundings. At the time of materialistic high-tide, people wrote books like one, for example, which stated in a certain chapter: Man is really of himself nothing. He is the product of the oxygen in the air, the product of the cold or warm temperature in which he is. He is really—so ends this materialistic description pathetically—a product of every air-current.

If one investigates such a description and imagines the man as he really is, as pictured thus by the materialist, he turns out to be a neurasthenic in the highest degree. The materialists have never described any other kind of man; if they did not notice that they described man when he is asleep, if they overdid their part and wanted to go further, they have never described him as anything but an extreme neurasthenic, who would die next day of his neurasthenia, who could not live at all, for this age of science has never grasped the idea of a living man.

Here lie the great tasks which must lead man out of present-day circumstances into such conditions in which the further life of world-history is alone possible. What is needed is a penetration into spirituality. The opposite pole must be found to that which has been attained. What was achieved during the nineteenth century7, so glorious for materialistic philosophy? What has been achieved?

In a wonderful way—we can say it sincerely and honestly—it succeeded in defining the outer world according to dimension, number and weight. In this, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries achieved an extraordinary and mighty work. But finer feelings of the senses, colours, sounds, flutter about as it were in the indefinite. Physicists have entirely ceased to talk about colours and sounds. They talk of airwaves and ether waves. But those are after all not colours or sounds. Air-waves surely are not sounds, but at most the medium by which sounds are continued. There is no grasp of sense-qualities. We have to return to that. In fact one sees today only what can be determined by scales and measuring-rod and arithmetic. All else has escaped one.

And now when the theory of Relativity introduces a grand disorder into the measurable, the weighable, and the countable, everything is split asunder and falls to pieces. But ultimately this theory of Relativity founders at certain points. Not with regard to concepts: one does not get away from the theory of Relativity with earthly concepts, as I have had occasion to explain already in another place, but with reality one always gets away form the Relativity-concepts, for what can be measured or counted or weighed enters through measure, number and weight into quite definite relationships in outer sensible reality.

It is a question of seeing how colours, sounds, etc., are broken in Reality through consideration of weight, i.e. of that which really makes physical bodies. But with this tendency something extraordinarily important is overlooked. We forget namely Art. As we get more and more physical, Art departs further from us. No one will find a trace of Art in the books on Physics today. Nothing remains of Art—it must all go. It is ghastly studying a book on Physics at all today if one has an atom of feeling for beauty. Art is overlooked by man just because everything out of which colour and sound weave beauty, is, and is only recognized when it is attached to a weighty object. And the more physical people become, the more inartistic they become. Just think. We have a wonderful Physics; but it lives in denying Art; for it has reached the point of treating the world in such a manner that the artist takes no more heed of the physicist.

I do not think, for example that the musician lays much value on studying the physical theories of Acoustics. It is too wearisome, he doesn't bother. The painter will also not study this awful colour-theory which Physics contains. As a rule, if he bothers at all about colours, he turns still to Goethe's colour-theory. But that is false in the physicist's eyes. The physicists shut one eye and say: Well, well, it doesn't matter very much if a painter has a true or a false theory of colour.

It is a fact that Art must collapse under the physical philosophy of today. Now we must put the question to ourselves: Why did Art exist in older times?

If you go back to quite ancient times in which man still had an original clairvoyance, we find that they took less notice of dimension, number and weight in earthly things. They were not so important to them. They devoted themselves more to the colours and sounds of earthly things.

Remember that even Chemistry calculates in terms of weight only since Lavoisier; something more than a hundred years. Weight was first use din a world-philosophy at the end of the eighteenth century. Ancient mankind simply was not conscious that everything had to be defined according to earthly measure, number and weight. Man gave his heart and mind to the coloured carpet of the world, to the weaving the welling of sounds, not to the atmospheric vibrations.

But what was the possibility that came from living in this—I might say—imponderable sensible perception? By it one had the possibility, when for instance, one approached a man, of seeing him not as we se him today, but one regarded him as a product of the whole universe. Man was more a confluence of the Cosmos. He was more a microcosm than the thing inside his skin that stands where man stands, on this tiny spot of earth. He thought of man more as an image of the world. Then, colours flowed together, as it were, from all sides, and gave man colours. There was world-harmony, and man in tune with it, receiving his shape from it.

Moreover, mankind today can scarcely understand anything of the way in which ancient mystery-teachers spoke to their pupils. For when a man today wants to explain the human heart, he takes an embryo and sees how the blood-vessels expand, a utricle or bag appears and the heart is gradually formed. Well, that is not what the ancient mystery-teachers told their pupils. That would have appeared to them no more important than knitting a stocking, because after all the process looks much the same. On the contrary they emphasized something else as of paramount importance. They said: the human heart is a product of gold, which lives everywhere in light, and which streams in from the universe and shapes the human heart. You have had the representation. Light quivers through the universe, and the light carries gold. Everywhere in light there is gold. Gold lives and moves in light. And when man lives on earth—you know already that it changes after seven years—his heart is not composed of the cucumber and the salad and the roast veal the man has in the meantime eaten, but these old teachers knew that the heart is built of light's gold, and the cucumbers and the salad are only the stimulus for the gold weaving in the light to build up the heart out of the whole universe.

Yes, those people talked differently and you must be aware of this difference, for one must relearn to talk thus, only on another plane of consciousness. In painting, what once was there, but then disappeared, when one still painted by cosmic inspiration, because weight did not yet exist,—this painting has left its last trace in, let me say, Cimabue, and the Russian Icon-painting. The Icon was still painted out of the macrocosm, the whole outer world. It was so to speak a slice out of the macrocosm. But then one began in a blind alley, one could not get further, for the simple reason that this world-philosophy no longer existed among mankind. If one had wanted to paint the Icon with inner sympathy, not merely by tradition and prayer, one would have to have known how to handle gold. The treatment of gold on the picture was one of the greatest secrets of ancient painting. It consisted in bringing out the human figure from the gold background.

There is a vast abyss between Cimabue and Giotto. Giotto began what Raphael later brought to perfection. Cimabue had it still from tradition. Giotto became already half a naturalist. He noticed that tradition was no longer alive inwardly in the soul. Now one must take the physical man, now one has no longer the universe. One can paint no longer out of the gold; one is compelled to paint from the flesh.

This has gone so far that painting has practically reverted to what it had so much of in the nineteenth century. Icons have no weight at all; they were snowed in out of the world; they are weightless. The only thing is, one cannot paint them any more today. But if they were to e painted in their original form, they would have no weight at all.

Giotto was the first to begin painting objects so that they have weight. From which it arose that everything one paints has weight, even in the picture, and then one paints it from the outside, so that the colours have a relation to what is painted, as the physicist explains it, that the colour appears there on the surface by means of some special wave-vibration. Art has finally also had to be reckoned with weight, which Giotto began in an aesthetic-artistic way and Raphael brought to its highest point.

Thus we may say: there the universal slipped out of man, and heavy man became what one can now see. But because the feelings of the ancient times were still there, the flesh became, so to speak, heavy only to a minimum degree, but still it became heavy. And then arose the Madonna as counter to the Icon—the Icon which ahs no weight, the Madonna which has weight, even if she is beautiful—beauty has survived. But Icons are no longer paintable at all, because man does not feel them. If men today think they can feel Icons, it is an untruth. Therefore also the Icon-cult was steeped in a certain sentimental untruth. It is a blind-alley in Art. It becomes dependent on a scheme, on tradition.

Raphael's painting, built as it is on Giotto's development fro Cimabue, can remain Art only so long as the light of beauty streams upon it. To a certain extent it was the sunny Renaissance painters who still sensed something of the gold weaving in the light, and at least gave their pictures the luster of gold, making it irradiate them from outside.

But that came to an end. And thus naturalism came into being, and in Art mankind sits between two stools on the ground, between the Icon and the Madonna and is called upon to discover what pure vibrating colour and pure vibrating sound are, with their opposite weight, opposed to measurableness, and ponderable countability. We must learn to paint out of colour itself. However elementary and bad and tentative, it is our job to paint out of colour, to experience colour itself; freed from weight, to experience colour itself. In these things one must be able to proceed consciously, even with artistic consciousness.

And if you look at the simple attempts of our programs, you will see that there a beginning is made, if only a beginning, to release colours from weight, to experience colour as an element per se, to cause colours to speak.

If that succeeds, then, as against the inartistic physical world-philosophy which lets all Art die out, an Art will be created out of the free element of colour, of sound, which once more is free from weight.

We also sit between two stools, between the Icon and the Madonna, but we must get up. Physical Science does not help us to do it. I have told you, one must stay on the ground if one applies only physical science of man. But we have to get up now; and for this we need Spiritual Science. That contains the life-element which carries us from weight to imponderable colour, to the reality of colour, fro bondage even in musical naturalism to free musical Art.

We see how in all provinces it is a question of making an effort, of mankind waking up. It is this we ought to take up—this impulse to awake, to look round and see what is and what is not, and to advance ever onwards wherever the summons calls.

These things already touch the nerve of our time.

I have described how the modern philosopher comes to admit to himself: where does this intellectualism lead? To build a gigantic machine, and place it in the centre of the earth, in order to blow up the earth into all corners of the universe—he admitted it is so. The others do not admit it!

And so I have tried in different places to show how the ideas of only thirty or forty years ago are dissolved through the theory of Relativity—simply melted away like snow in the sun—so I have tried to show you how the summons is to be found everywhere really to strive towards Anthroposophy. For the philosopher, Eduard von Hartmann says: if the world really is as we imagine it—i.e. as he imagined it in the sense of the nineteenth century—then we really must blow it up into space, because we cannot endure any longer on it; and it is only a question of progressing far enough till we are able to do it. We must sigh for this future time when we can blow the world into universal space.

But the Relativists, before that, will see to it that mankind has no concepts left. Space, Time, Movement are abolished. Even apart from this, one can reach such profound despair, that in certain circumstances one sees the highest satisfaction in that explosion into the whole universe.

One must, however, make oneself clearly acquainted with the meaning of certain impulses in our time.

My dear sisters and brothers,

Since the Christmas Conference an esoteric breath flows through the whole Anthroposophical Society. And those members of the Anthroposophical Society who have taken part in the general members' lectures will have noted how this esoteric breath flows through all the work within the anthroposophical movement now, and should do so in the future.

This was a necessity which, above all, flows from the spiritual world, from where the revelations come which should live in the anthroposophical movement.

Therefore, the necessity arose to create a certain nucleus for anthroposophical esoteric life, to create real esoteric life, and therewith the necessity arose to build a bridge to the spiritual world itself.

In a certain sense the spiritual world had to manifest the will for the creation of such a School. For an esoteric school cannot be created by human arbitrariness, nor from that human arbitrariness called “human ideals”; rather must this esoteric school be the body for something which flows out of spiritual life, so that everything that occurs in such a school presents the outer expression of an activity which in reality occurs in the spiritual world itself. Therefore, this esoteric school could not have been created without first asking the will of Michael, which since the last third of the nineteenth century has been guiding human affairs - something which I have often mentioned here in members' lectures.

In the course of time this will of Michael again and again cyclically intervenes in human affairs from the spiritual world. And when we look back in the evolution of time, we find that this same Michael-Will - which we can also call the Michael Reign - was active in the spiritual affairs of humanity, in the great questions of civilization before the Mystery of Golgotha, in the time of Alexander in Greece through the Chthonian and Celestial mysteries, and which was to spread to Asia and Africa. Where the Michael-Will reigns, there is always cosmopolitanism. What differentiates people on earth is overcome during the Michael age.

The most important influence, related to Aristotle and to Alexander, which was under the impulse of Michael, was followed by that of Oriphiel, and after Oriphiel came the Anael impulse, the Zachariel impulse, then the Raphael impulse, then the Samael impulse, then the Gabriel impulse, which extended into the 19^th century. And since the seventies of the nineteenth century we are again under the sign of Michael's reign. It is in its beginnings. But Michael's impulses must flow into all legitimate esoteric activities in a conscious manner - what can be clear to you, my sisters and brothers, through the general lectures for members.

And everything connected with the Christmas Conference leads to what is constituted as the basis of the anthroposophical movement's formation of this Esoteric School inspired and guided by Michael. It therefore rightfully exists in our times as a spiritual institution. All those who want to be rightful members of this School must accept this in their lives with the deepest sincerity. They must feel that they don't merely belong to an earthly community, but to a supersensible community, whose guide and leader is Michael himself. Therefore, everything communicated here is not to be understood as my words, insofar as they are the content of the lessons, but rather as what Michael communicates in an esoteric manner to those who feel they belong with him in this age. Therefore, what these lessons contain will be Michael's message for our age.

And it is because of this that the anthroposophical movement will receive its true spiritual strength. For this it is necessary that what membership in this School means be taken with the utmost earnestness. It is really necessary, my dear sisters and brothers, truly and deeply necessary, that it be indicated in the utmost earnest manner the sacred earnestness with which the School must be taken.

And here within the School it must be repeatedly said: in anthroposophical circles there is much too little earnestness for what really flows through the anthroposophical movement, and at least the esoteric members of the Esoteric School must be in the forefront of what humanity can gradually develop as the necessary earnestness. Therefore, it is necessary that the leadership of the School retain for itself the right to allow only those to enter as rightful, worthy members of the School who, in every aspect of their lives, want to be worthy representatives of anthroposophy; and the decision about whether this is the case or not must lie with the School's leadership.

Do not consider this, my sisters and brothers, as a limitation of freedom. The School's leadership must also have its freedom and be able to recognize who belongs to the School and who does not, just as each one is free to decide whether to belong to the School or not. So, a free, ideal-spiritual contract, so to speak, between each member of the School and the leadership must be agreed upon. In no other way could esoteric development be called healthy, especially not one which is worthy of the fact that this Esoteric School exists under the direct force of the Michael impulse itself.

Conscientious care of the mantric verses so that they do not fall into unauthorized hands is the first requisite; but also, to really be a worthy representative of the anthroposophical cause.

I only need to mention a few things to show how little the anthroposophical movement is still grasped with complete earnestness. It has happened that members of the School have reserved their seats by placing on them the blue membership certificates, which gives them the right to participate in the School. [1] It has happened in the Anthroposophical Society that whole piles of the News Sheets, only intended for members, have been found on the trolley cars that run from Dornach to Basel. And I could add many other examples to this list. And amazing things happen as a result of this lack of earnestness. Even with things that in everyday life are taken seriously, at the moment when those within the anthroposophical movement are expected to do so, they do not take them seriously.

These are things which must be considered in connection with the firm structure that this School must have. Therefore, these things must be said, because if they are not observed, one cannot worthily receive what is given here in the School as revelations from the spiritual world. At the end of each lesson, your attention is expressly drawn to the fact that the being of Michael is present while the revelations from the spiritual world are given, and are confirmed by Michael's sign and seal.

All these things must live in the members' hearts. And worthiness, profound worthiness must reign in all that is bound even in thought to the School. For only in this way what today is to be carried through the world as an esoteric stream can live. And that includes the duties incumbent on each individual.

The mantric verses written here on the blackboard can only be possessed, in the strictest sense of the word, by those who have the right to be present. And if a member of the School is unable to attend a lesson during which mantric verses are given, another member, who has the verses, may give them to him; but it must be for each individual case, that is, for each person to whom the verses are to be given, that permission must be requested, either from Dr. Wegman or from me. Once permission is granted in respect to a person, it remains valid. But permission must again be requested for each other individual. This is not an administrative rule, it is an occult rule that must be strictly adhered to. For every act of the School must be connected to the School's leadership: and that begins with having to request permission from the School's leadership for acts having to do with the School. Not the one who is to receive the mantras may ask, but only the one who is to give them, using the modality that I have just described. If someone takes notes on what is said here, except for the mantras, he is obliged to keep them for only one week, and then to burn them.

All these things are not arbitrary rules, but they relate to the occult fact that esoteric matters are only effective if they are embraced by the School members' attitude. The mantras lose their effectiveness if they fall into the wrong hands. And it is a rule so firmly inscribed in the cosmic order, that the following once happened and a whole group of mantras, which had been in effect within the anthroposophical movement, have been rendered ineffective.

I was able to give mantric verses to a number of people; I also gave them to a certain person, who had a friend. The friend was somewhat clairvoyant. And it happened that while the two friends were sleeping in the same room, the clairvoyant friend, when the other one merely repeated the mantra in thought, surreptitiously copied it and then did mischief with it by giving it to others as coming from himself. It was necessary to look into the matter, which revealed why the mantra became ineffective for all those who possessed it.

Therefore, my dear sisters and brothers, you must not take these things lightly, for esoteric rules are strict; and when someone has made such an error, he should not excuse himself by claiming that he was unable to avoid it. Of course, if someone runs through a mantra in his mind, and someone else copies it clairvoyantly, he certainly can do nothing about it. Nevertheless, the rules are applied with an iron necessity. [2]

I mention this so that you can see how little arbitrariness is involved, and how these things are being read from the spiritual world and that the practices of the spiritual world apply. Nothing is arbitrary in what occurs in a rightly existing esoteric school. And the earnestness from this esoteric school should stream out to the whole anthroposophical movement. For only then will this School be what it should be for the anthroposophical movement. But when something is done which only springs from personal motives and then it is pretended that it is because of devotion to the anthroposophical movement- well, I don't mean to say that it should not happen, because obviously, people today must be personal - but then it is also necessary that truth lives in what is personal, that for instance if someone comes here to Dornach for personal pleasure he should admit it and not pretend otherwise. There's nothing wrong with coming to Dornach for personal pleasure, in fact it is good. But one should admit it and not sidestep it by declaring pure dedication to spiritual life.

I mention this; I could just as well mention another example, which is more real, for it is really the case that when most of our friends come to Dornach, a will to sacrifice is involved, and that only in the least of cases is untruthfulness involved. But I've chosen this example because it is the least applicable and thus the least harmful. If I had mentioned other examples, what I would like to have as a calm prevailing mood in the hearts and souls of all who are sitting here now could not exist in the necessary degree.

After that introduction, I would like to start with the verse that is the beginning and end of Michael's proclamation to all unbiased human beings, and which contains what all entities in the world are saying, if one listens to them with the soul. For from all that lives in the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms, what sparkles down from the stars, what acts into our souls from the domains of the hierarchies, from all that crawls under and on the earth as worm-life, from what speaks in rocks and springs and fields and thunder and clouds and lightning; all these spoke to unbiased human beings in the past, speak at the present and will speak in the future:

O man, know thyself!
So resounds the Cosmic-Word.
You hear it strong in soul,
You feel it firm in spirit.

Who speaks with such cosmic might?
Who speaks with such depth of heart?

Does it work through distant radiant space
Into your senses' sense of being?
Does it ring through weaving waves of time
Into your life's evolving stream?

It's you yourself who,
In feeling space, in experiencing time,
The Word create, feeling foreign
In space's soulless void,
Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destroying flow.

The previous lesson ended, my dear sisters and brothers, with the Guardian of the Threshold giving the last admonitions before one passes over the yawning abyss of being; the Guardian of the Threshold spoke the weighty, moving words:

Come in,
The gate has opened;
You will become
A true human being.

Our souls and hearts have been exposed to the important, weighty, meaningful words spoken by the Guardian of the Threshold on behalf of Michael. And everything he said was to prepare us for the attitude we must have when we come over after the gate has been opened - over the yawning abyss of being, where one does not come walking with earthly feet, where one flies with the spiritual wings that grow when the soul is imbued with a spiritual attitude, with spiritual love, with spiritual feeling.

And now, now, my dear sisters and brothers, will be described what the human being experiences when he stands on the other side of the yawning abyss of being. The Guardian of the Threshold indicates to him: turn around and look back! Until now you have been looking at what appeared to you as black, night-cloaked gloom, about which you had to say that it will become inner light and will illumine your own Self. With the last admonitions—the Guardian of the Threshold says—I let it become lighter, at first most gently. You feel now the first light around you. But turn around, look back!

And now, when he who has crossed over the yawning abyss of being and turns around and looks back, he sees himself as an earthly human being, what he is during his physical incarnation, over there in the part of his being that he has left behind and which now lies in the earthly sphere. He observes his own human self there. He has embodied himself in spiritual being with his spirit-soul. The earthly environment is over there now. He stands there in the region, in which we first were with all our humanity, where we saw what crawls beneath and flies above, where we saw the sparkling stars, the warmth-giving sun, where we saw what lives in the wind and weather, and where, knowing that despite all its majesty, how the sun blazes and illumines, despite all the beauty and greatness accessible to the senses, we said to ourselves: our own humanity is not here; we must seek it on the other side of the yawning abyss of being, in what seems at first, to the senses, to be black, night-cloaked gloom.

The Guardian of the Threshold has shown, by the three beasts, what we actually are. Now will be described how in the gloom that is beginning to be light, we should begin to look back on what we as humans are in the sensory world, together with what was our only world in sensory earthly existence.

And now the Guardian of the Threshold points directly back there to the earthly man, which we ourselves also are during earthly existence, and to which we must continually return, into which we must always penetrate when we leave the spiritual world and return to our earthly duty. For we may not become dreamers and go into raptures, we must return completely to earth life. Therefore the Guardian of the Threshold directs us to look at the person who stands over there, who we ourselves are, in a way that at first draws our attention to what this person is. [An outline of a human being is drawn on the blackboard.]

He knows that he perceives the outer world through the senses, which are mostly situated in the head, and that he perceives his thinking through the impulse of the head.

But the Guardian of the Threshold now says: Look into this head. It is like looking into a dark cell, for you do not see the creative light within it. The truth is that what you had as thinking over there in the sensory world is mere seeming, mere images, not much more than mirror-images.

The Guardian of the Threshold admonishes us to be very aware of this, but also to be aware that what is only appearance in earthly thinking is the corpse - as we have heard in previous lessons - of a living thinking in which we were immersed in the soul-spiritual world before we descended to this earthly life. There thinking lived! Now thinking rests as dead thinking, as seeming thinking in the coffin of our bodies. And all the thinking we use in the sensory world is dead thinking. It was alive before we descended.

And what has this thinking accomplished? It has created everything that is within the head, within this dark cell - as it appears to the senses - that is light-creating essence. The brain, which rests within as thinking's support, has been created by living thinking. [The interior of the head, yellow, is drawn on the blackboard.] It is living thinking that creates the support for our earthly semblance of thinking.

Observe the brain's convolutions, observe what you carry within the dark cell that enables you to think, my sisters and brothers, observe the semblance of thinking in the dark cell, then you will find in what is felt above as thinking [drawing: red arrows] from out of which streams the force of will into thinking, so that each thought is streamed through with will. How the will streams into thinking can be sensed.

And now we look back from the other side of the threshold at how that other person, who we ourselves are, has waves of will streaming out of his body into the head, which create the will, and finally, when we follow them back to the turning points of time which lead to our previous incarnations, how they create the waves of thought from worlds past into our present incarnation and form our heads, all of which makes the semblance of thinking in this incarnation possible.

Therefore, we must be strong, the Guardian of the Threshold tells us, and imagine dead thinking being cast out into the cosmic nothingness, for it is only seeming. And the willing that then arises we should consider as what comes over from previous incarnations and interweaves and works, making us thinkers. Within [drawing: yellow] are the creating cosmic thoughts. These creating cosmic thoughts enable us to have human thoughts.

Therefore, the first words the Guardian of the Threshold speaks after he has let us cross the threshold, and after he has announced that the gate has opened, that we can become true human beings, the first words he speaks are:

See behind thinking's sensory light,
How in the gloomy spirit-cell
Willing arises from the body's depths;
Let be cast, through your strength of soul,
Dead thinking into the cosmic void;
And willing, it will arise
As cosmic thought's creation.

The first words we hear on the other side, as we look back at the figure, which we ourselves are:

[The first mantra is written on the blackboard, together with a heading. Blackboard writing is always in italics.]

The Guardian is heard in the brightening darkness:

I

See behind thinking's sensory light,
How in the gloomy spirit-cell
Willing arises from the body's depths;
Let be cast, through your strength of soul,
Dead thinking into the cosmic void;
And willing, it will arise
As cosmic thought's creation.

And then the Guardian of the Threshold adds - and one must strain to hear him: Now imagine that you are observing that figure on the other side who you yourself are; you turn around again and look into the darkness and try with all your inner imaginative force of remembrance - as one does when retaining a physical after-image in the eye. Try with all your strength to draw before you something like a gray outline of what you saw over there, but avoid drawing anything except the outline of the figure. [It is drawn.]

Then, if one succeeds in seeing this gray outline of a figure, behind it appears an image of the moon [a sickle moon, yellow, is drawn], the gray figure before it.

If one is able to keep inner calm, one sees the moon in the distance. The gray figure outline is also there, but it is active in us. And if we practice this over and over, we feel we have arrived at the spiritual figure of the head that we had over there, not the physical human figure, but at the spiritual figure of the head that we had over there, if we can feel what karma brings to us from previous earthly incarnations. [yellow arrow at the right of the sickle moon.]

Therefore, you should meditate on this picture that I have drawn here, the sickle moon with this arrow; let the mantra unfold, with this picture as the marker for the gradual familiarization with what forcefully comes over from previous earthly existences.

And secondly, the Guardian of the Threshold points with a stronger gesture to what feeling is to the person over there, who we ourselves are, and he admonishes that we are to see this feeling as a dim dream. In fact, we see feeling - which makes the person over there more real than thinking, for thinking is illusion, whereas feeling is half reality - we see the person's feeling enfold in numerous dream-pictures during the day. We learn by observing it that feeling, for the spirit and in the spirit, is dreaming.

But what kind of dreaming is feeling? In this feeling, not only the individual dreams, but within it the whole surrounding world dreams. Our thinking is our own. That's why it's illusion. The world lives in our feeling. The world's existence is within it.

Now we must achieve, to the extent possible, tranquility of heart, the Guardian warns, so that we can extinguish what lives and interweaves as feeling in the dream-pictures, just as dreams are extinguished in deep sleep. Then we can reach the truth of feeling, and we can see human feeling interwoven with the cosmic life that is present in spirit in all our surroundings. And then the real spiritual human being appears to us, who in his body lives at first in his half-existence. The human being appears to us from out of sleeping feeling. We feel ourselves to be on the other side of the threshold, on the other side of the yawning abyss of being, for feeling has fallen asleep and the cosmic creative powers, which live in feeling, have appeared around us.

See in feeling's weaving in the soul,
How in sleep's dim-like dawning
Life streams in from cosmic distance;
Let in sleep through tranquil heart
Human feeling waft away hushed;
And cosmic life spiritualizes
As the human being's power.

[This second part is written on the blackboard.]

II

See in

(Before it was “behind”, here it is “in”; all the words in a mantric verse are important.)

feeling's weaving in the soul,

(Before it was “thinking”, here “feeling”; there “sensory light”, here “weaving in the soul”; “weaving” is much more real than merely semblance of light.)

[In the first part “thinking” and “sensory light”, and in the second part “feeling's” are underlined.

How in sleep's dim-like dawning
Life streams in from cosmic distance;

(There it was “Willing arises from the body's depths;”, here “Life streams in from cosmic distance;”)

[In the third line of the first part “Willing” is underlined, and in the second part “Life”.]

Let in sleep through tranquil heart
Human feeling waft away hushed;

It is enhanced: Here [in the first part] it involved letting flow through the soul's force; here [in the second part] one must waft away human feeling. [the word “waft” is underlined.]

And cosmic life spiritualizes

—here [in the first part] it was the willing that is still in the human being; here it is cosmic

As the human being's power.

—the enhancement relative to cosmic thought's creation.—

[In the first part “cosmic thought's creation” and in the second part “human being's power” are underlined.]

The Guardian of the Threshold indicates to us that we should look back once again at the gray figure that stands over there, which we are ourselves in earthly life, but this time after having turned away, in our minds we turn it around in a circle. We will find, when we rotate the figure, that the sun appears behind it and rotates with it. [It is drawn - left, red]. And we will realize that at the moment we are brought into physical existence from the spiritual world, our etheric body has been compressed from the cosmic ether. Therefore, just as the first verse belongs to this [the drawing of the gray figure and the first verse are numbered “I”], this second verse belongs to this. [The drawing of the red rotating form and the second verse are numbered “II”.]

Then the Guardian of the Threshold refers us to our will, which is active in our limbs. And he strongly draws our attention to the fact that whatever relates to the will is in a sleeping state, even when we are awake. He explains how as the thought works downward - I explained it last time, so may say it now -, how as the thought carries warmth downward into our limbs' movement so that it becomes will: this becomes clear in spiritual cognition and spiritual seeing. Normal consciousness hides this when we are sleeping, as it hides life in general during sleep. Now we should observe the will in the limbs as though sunken in deep sleep. The will is asleep. The limbs are asleep. We should see this as a firm mental image. Then, when it is firm, we realize how thinking, the source of willing in earthly man, sinks down into the limbs. Then it becomes light in him. The will becomes bright. It wakes up. When we first see it in its sleeping state, we find that it wakes up when thinking sinks downward and light from below streams upward, which is the force of gravity. Feel the force of gravity in your legs and arms when you let them relax: that is what streams upward, and which meets with the downward streaming thinking. We observe human will transformed into its reality and thinking appearing as what ignites the will in man in an enchanting, magical way. That is the truly magical effect of thinking on the will. It is magic. Now we become aware of it. The Guardian of the Threshold says:

See above the bodily effects of will,
—in the aura—
How into sleeping fields of activity
Thinking sinks down from head forces;
Let through the soul's vision of light
human will transform itself;
And thinking, it appears
As the magical essence of will.

[This third verse, with underlining, is written on the blackboard.]

III

See above the bodily effects of will,

Now we imagine that the Guardian of the Threshold again points to the person over there, who we are ourselves, telling us to look and retain the picture, but not to turn around, but to let this picture sink below the surface of the earth beneath where the figure is standing. We look over there. There stands the one who we ourselves are. We make the picture and develop the strong force to look below, as though a lake were there and we were looking at this image as now being within the earth, but not as a mirror-image, but as an upright figure. [Draws.]

We imagine this picture: the earth [A white arc is drawn.] belonging to the third verse [This drawing and the third verse are given the number III.] We imagine: how the earth's gravitational forces rise, how the gravitational forces illuminate the limbs, feet and arms [white arrows]. In later observation, we acquire an idea of how gods and humans cooperate between death and a new birth to arrange karma.

That is what the Guardian of the Threshold admonishes us about when he speaks to us for the first time after we have crossed over the yawning abyss of being.

See behind thinking's sensory light,
How in the gloomy spirit-cell
Willing arises from the body's depths;
Let be cast, through your strength of soul,
Dead thinking into the cosmic void;
And willing, it will arise
As cosmic thought's creation.

See in feeling's weaving in the soul,
How in sleep's dim-like dawning
Life streams in from cosmic distance;
Let in sleep through tranquil heart
Human feeling waft away hushed;
And cosmic life spiritualizes
As the human being's power.

See above the bodily effects of will,
How into sleeping fields of activity
Thinking sinks down from head forces;
Let through the soul's vision of light
human will transform itself;
And thinking, it appears
As the magical essence of will.

The circle always closes. We are looking again at the starting point, listening to all the beings and all the processes of the world:

O man, know thyself!
So resounds the Cosmic-Word.
You hear it strong in soul,
You feel it firm in spirit.

Who speaks with such cosmic might?
Who speaks with such depth of heart?

Does it work through distant radiant space
Into your senses' sense of being?
Does it ring through weaving waves of time
Into your life's evolving stream?

It's you yourself who,
In feeling space, in experiencing time,
The Word create, feeling foreign
In space's soulless void,
Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destroying flow.

By this affirmation, Michael is present in this, his rightfully existing School. His presence is confirmed by his sign, which should loom over everything given in this School:

[Michael Sign - in red]

It is confirmed by his seal, that he has impressed on the esoteric striving of the Rosicrucian School, and which lives on symbolically in the threefold verse:

Ex deo nascimur

In Christo morimur

Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus

And as Michael impresses his seal, the first sentence is spoken with this gesture:

[draws: Image 1, the lower seal gesture, yellow]

The second sentence with this gesture:

[draws: Image 1, the middle seal gesture, yellow]

The third sentence with this gesture:

[draws: Image 1, the upper seal gesture]

The first gesture means:[3]

I esteem the Father

It lives mutely as we say: “Ex deo nascimur”.

[lower seal gesture]

The second gesture means:

I love the Son

It lives mutely as we say: “In Christo morimur”.

[middle seal gesture]

The third gesture means:

I unite with the Spirit

It lives mutely in the Sign, which is Michael's Seal, as we speak: “Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus”.

[upper seal gesture]

Thus, today's Michael affirmation is confirmed by means of his Sign and Seals:

[Michael's Sign]

[spoken with the seal gestures:]

Ex deo nascimur

In Christo morimur

Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.

Translator's notes:

[1] It is a fairly common practice in Germany and Switzerland for people who come early to a function to place a paper, notebook, or hat on a chair to reserve their places.

[2] It seems to me, although the editors of the German original say nothing about it, that Rudolf Steiner was being ironic here, that a School member gave the mantra to his unauthorized friend, who then passed it on to others, and that the member then used the “clairvoyant” story as an excuse.

[3] The Michael Sign and Seals: From the stenographic notes of the seven recapitulation lessons, it is not possible to determine when Rudolf Steiner only wrote the words on the blackboard or when he spoke the words and wrote them, or only spoke them.

---

This was the last Lesson for the Esoteric School. Rudolf Steiner was unable to continue because of illness. He died on March 30, 1925.

In several lecture-courses given over the years in the different Groups and attended by many of the friends here to-day, we have endeavoured to study the Gospels of St. John, St. Luke and St. Matthew and the great event in Palestine, the Mystery of Golgotha, from three different points of view.

One result of these studies should have been to establish in our souls a growing realisation of the greatness of this unique event. We have understood that the reason why there are four Gospels is that their authors, writing as inspired occultists, each wished to describe the great event from a special angle, just as a photograph of an object is taken from a particular side. By combining the pictures, each taken from a different angle, an idea of the reality can be obtained. Each of the Evangelists makes it possible for us to study one aspect in particular of the great event in Palestine.

The Gospel of St. John gives us insight into the great events in Palestine by opening out a vista of the highest human goals and at the same time of the sublime realities of the spiritual worlds.

The Gospel of St. Luke unveils the mysteries connected with the personality of Jesus of Nazareth, with the Solomon Jesus and the Nathan Jesus, until the moment when the Christ descends into him.

The Gospel of St. Matthew, as those of you who heard the lectures will know and others will be able to read, shows how the bodily nature in which the Christ was to incarnate for three years was prepared by mysterious processes connected with the racial stock of the ancient Hebrew people.

In a certain respect the Gospel of St. Mark can lead us to supreme heights in our study of Christianity and give us insight into many matters communicated by the other Gospels but in a less dramatic way. And so this evening I will take the opportunity of saying something in reference to the Gospel of St. Mark.

We must realise how necessary it is to study many subjects with which superficial modern thought has no inclination to concern itself. If we are to understand the Gospel of St. Mark in its depths we must acquaint ourselves to some extent with the very different character of the language in which men expressed themselves at the time when Christ Jesus was on the Earth. Let me try to convey to you what I mean by using contrasts as it were of light and shadow.

We make use of language to express what we want to say and to reveal what lives in our souls. It is in the way in which language is used as a means of expressing the inner life of soul that the several epochs in the evolution of humanity differ radically from one another. If we go back to the ancient Hebrew epoch and to the wonderful modes of expression used in the temple-language, we find that there was a quite different way of clothing the secrets of the soul in words—a way undreamed of nowadays. In the old Hebrew language only the consonants were written, the vowels being inserted afterwards; and when a word was uttered the echoes of a whole world reverberated in it—not, as is the case to-day, some more or less abstract concept. The reason why the vowels were not written was that they were an indication of the speaker's inmost being, whereas the consonants were intended to depict external objects or conditions. For example, whenever an ancient Hebrew wrote the letter B—or what corresponded to our present B—it always evoked in him a sense of warmth and a picture of some outer condition, in this case something in which one could be enclosed, as in a shelter or a house. The sound B could not be uttered without this feeling as an accompaniment. Again, the sound A (ah) could not be uttered without conveying the impression or image of something inwardly powerful, of a radiating force. The content of the soul thus projected into words streamed out into space and into other souls. Language was therefore much more alive, much more related to the secrets of existence than is the case nowadays.

This is one side—the light side I wanted to convey. But there is also the other side—the shadow side—constituted by the fact that in the use of our language we have to a great extent become utterly shallow. Our language expresses only abstractions, generalisations. People no longer have any feeling about this but it could not be otherwise in times when language is used, even for literary purposes, before writers have any spiritual content to convey, when enormous masses of printed matter circulate everywhere, when everyone feels that he must write something and nothing is considered unsuitable as subject-matter. When our Society was founded I discovered that certain authors were attaching themselves to it simply out of curiosity, in the hope of finding material for their novels. Why, they thought, should they not find characters among the Members who could be portrayed in their stories? So it behoves us to realise that our language nowadays has become abstract, commonplace and vacuous and there is neither a sense of its holiness nor, as was once the case, a feeling of responsibility towards its use. That is why it is so extraordinarily difficult to put into modern words the great facts proclaimed by the Gospels. People cannot understand that our modern language is empty when compared, for example, with the fulness of meaning implicit in a word of the ancient Greek language. When we read the Bible to-day we are reading something that in comparison with the original wording has been sifted not once but two or three times, and it is not the best but the worst that has remained. It does, of course, seem natural to quote from modern versions of the Bible, but we go astray most disastrously of all when we quote the Gospel of St. Mark in its modern rendering.

You know that at the very beginning of the Gospel of St. Mark, in Weizsacker's supposedly excellent translation—although as might be guessed from the high reputation it enjoys to-day, it is anything but excellent!—these words are found:

“As it is written in the prophet Isaiah: Behold I send my messenger before you who shall prepare the way before you. Listen how the voice is heard in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”
[The words in the English Authorised Version are: ‘As it is written in the Prophets, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee. The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’]

When we read a passage like this it would be self-deception to pretend that we understand it; if we are honest we shall admit that it is utterly incomprehensible to us. The passage is either of no significance or it says something we cannot understand. The first thing to do, then, is to assemble concepts enabling us to grasp the meaning of this saying of Isaiah. Isaiah was referring to the event which was to be of supreme significance for the evolution of humanity. What has already been said gives some indication of what Isaiah was foretelling in these words.

In ancient days man was endowed with a kind of clairvoyance and through the forces of his soul was able to rise into the divine-spiritual world. When this happened he was not using his Ego, his ‘I’, at the stage of development it had then reached; he was using his astral body which contained the powers of seership, whereas the forces rooted in the Ego were only gradually being awakened by perception of the physical world. The ‘I’ uses physical instruments, but in earlier times, if a man were seeking revelation, he used his astral body, seeing and perceiving through it. The process of evolution itself consisted in the transition from use of the astral body to use of the ‘I’. The Christ Impulse was to be the most powerful factor in the development of the ‘I’. If the words of St. Paul: ‘Not I but Christ in me’ are fulfilled in the ‘I’, then the ‘I’ is able to grow into the spiritual world through its own forces, whereas formerly this was possible only for the astral body.

This, then, is how evolution proceeded: Man once used his astral body as an organ of perception, but the astral body became less and less able to serve that purpose. When the time of Christ's coming was drawing near, it was losing its power to see into the spiritual world. Man could no longer be united with that world through his astral body and the ‘I’ was not yet strong enough to reveal it. That was the state of things when the time of Christ's coming was approaching.

In the course of human evolution the important steps which are eventually to take place have always to be prepared in advance. This was so in the case of the Christ Impulse too; but there was necessarily a period of transition. There could be no sudden change from the time when man felt his astral body becoming unreceptive to the spiritual world, becoming barren and desolate, to a time when the ‘I’ was kindled into activity through the Christ Impulse. What happened was that as the result of a certain influence from the spiritual world a few human beings were able to experience in the astral body something of what was later to be seen and known by the ‘I’. Egohood was prepared for, anticipated as it were in the astral body. It was through the ‘I’ and its development that man became Earth-Man in the real sense. The astral body properly belonged to the evolutionary period of the Old Moon, when the Angels were at the human stage. Man is at the human stage on the Earth. On the Old Moon it was appropriate for man to use his astral body. Everything else was merely preparation for the development of the ‘I’. The earliest stages of Earth-evolution proper were a recapitulation of the Old Moon-evolution, for man could never become fully man in the astral body; on the Old Moon it was only the Angels who could reach the human stage in the astral body. And just as the Christ lived in earthly man in order to inspire his ‘I’, so there were Angels who, having reached the human stage on the Old Moon, prophetically inspired man's astral body as a preparation for Egohood. A time was to come in human evolution on the Earth when man would be ready for the development of the ‘I’. On the Old Moon the Angels had developed to the highest stage, but as we have heard, only in the astral body. Now, in order that man might be prepared for Egohood, it was necessary that in exceptional conditions, and through grace, certain individuals should be inspired to work on the Earth as Angels; although they were men, the reality was that Angels were working in and through them.

This is a concept of great importance, without which there can be no understanding of human evolution in line with that of occultism. It is easy enough to say simply that everything is maya, but that is a mere abstraction. We must be able to say: Yes, a man is standing in front of me, but he is maya—indeed who knows if he is really a man? Perhaps what seems to be a human figure is only the outer sheath; perhaps some quite other being is using this sheath in order to accomplish a task that is beyond man's capacity.—I have given an indication of this in The Portal of Initiation.

Such an event in the history of humanity actually took place when the Individuality who had lived in Elijah was reborn as John the Baptist. An Angel entered into the soul of John the Baptist in that incarnation, using his bodily nature and also his soul to accomplish what no human being could have accomplished. In John the Baptist there lived an Angel whose mission was to herald in advance the Egohood that was to be present in its fulness in Jesus of Nazareth. It is of the greatest importance to realise that John the Baptist was maya and that an Angel, a Messenger, was living in him. This is indeed what the Greek says: Lo, I send my Messenger. The Messenger is an Angel. But nobody pays attention to what is actually said here. A deep mystery, enacted in the Baptist and foretold by Isaiah, is indicated. Isaiah foretold that the future John the Baptist would be maya—in reality he was to be the vehicle for the Angel, the Messenger who was to proclaim what man will become if he takes the Christ Impulse into himself. Angels announce in advance what man will later become. The passage in question might therefore be translated: Lo, the bestower of Egohood sends his Messenger (Angel) before you to whom Egohood is to be given.

Let us now see if we can discover the meaning of the third sentence. We must first try to picture the conditions prevailing in man's inner life when the astral body had gradually lost the power to send out its forces like feelers and to see clairvoyantly into the divine-spiritual world. Formerly, when the astral body was activated, man was able to look into that world, but this faculty was disappearing and darkness spreading within him. He had once been able to expand his astral body over all the beings of the spiritual world, but now he was inwardly desolate, inwardly isolated—the Greek word is ἔρημος. At that time the human soul lived in isolation, in desolation. This is what the Greek text tells us: Lo, a voice seems to speak in the desolation of the soul—call it ‘wilderness’ of the soul if you like—when the astral body can no longer expand into the divine-spiritual world. Hear the cry in the wilderness, in the desolation of the soul!

What is it that is being proclaimed in advance? First of all we must be clear about the meaning of the word Kyrios, when it was used in Hebrew but also still in Greek in reference to manifestations of the soul and spirit. To translate it simply as ‘the Lord’, with the usual connotation, is sheer nonsense. In ancient times everyone using the word Kyrios knew perfectly well that its meaning was connected with the development of man's soul-life and its mysteries. In the astral body, as we know, are the forces of thinking, feeling and willing; the soul thinks, feels and wills. These are the three forces working in the soul but they are actually its servants. In earlier times man was under their domination and he obeyed them, but as his evolution progressed these forces were to become the servants of the Kyrios, the Ruler, the Lord—in short, of the ‘I’. Used in relation to the soul, the word Kyrios actually meant the ‘I’. At this stage it would no longer be true to say: ‘The Divine-Spiritual thinks, feels and wills in me’, but rather: ‘I think, I feel, I will.’ The passage should be rendered more or less as follows.—Prepare yourselves, you human souls, to move along those paths that will awaken the Kyrios, the powerful ‘I’ within you; listen to the cry in the solitude of the soul. Make ready the path (or way) of the ‘I’, the Lord of the soul. Open the way for his forces so that he may no longer be the slave but the Ruler of thinking, feeling and willing. Lo, the power that is the ‘I’ sends his Angel before you, the Angel who is to give you the possibility of understanding the cry in the solitude of the astral soul. Prepare the paths of the ‘I’, open the way for the forces of the ‘I’.—Such is the meaning of these significant words of the prophet Isaiah; they point to the greatest of all events in the evolution of humanity. You will now understand the sense in which he speaks about the future John the Baptist, indicating how man's soul in its solitude longs for the coming of its Lord and Ruler, the ‘I’. Such is the real meaning of this passage and in this sense it is to be understood.

Why was John the Baptist able to be the bearer of the Angel? It was because he had received a particular form of Initiation. Initiations are not all identical in character and individuals who have a definite mission to fulfil must undergo a special form of Initiation. Now the writing of the stars in the heavens is so ordered as to reveal the nature and facts of happenings in the spiritual world. Thus a man may receive the Sun-Initiation, which means that he is initiated into the mysteries of the spiritual world of Ahura Mazdao—the spiritual world of which the Sun is the outer expression. But there are twelve forms of the Sun-Initiation, each of which differs from the other eleven. A man will receive a particular form of Initiation according to the mission he is to fulfil for humanity. His Initiation, though still a Sun-Initiation, may be of such a kind that the forces stream in as they do when the Sun is standing, for instance, in the constellation of Cancer; and these forces will be very different in the case of an Initiation connected with the Sun in Libra. These are the expressions used to indicate specialised Initiations. Individuals chosen for a mission as lofty as that of John the Baptist must receive Initiation in the form that can give the strength necessary for the fulfilment of their mission. And so in order that he might become the bearer of the Angel, John the Baptist received the Sun-Initiation originating from the constellation of Aquarius. The Sun in Aquarius is the symbol for the form of Initiation received by John the Baptist in order that he might become the bearer of the Angel. He received the Sun-forces which flow when the Sun is standing in Aquarius—the Waterman. The sign was the symbol indicating that John the Baptist had received this particular Initiation. In actual fact the name Aquarius, or Waterman, was given to the zodiacal sign because those who had received that Initiation acquired the faculty which enabled John the Baptist, for example, to achieve what he did. When men were plunged under water, their etheric bodies were momentarily loosened and in that condition it was possible for them to perceive what action was of the greatest importance at that particular time. Baptism in the Jordan revealed to those who underwent it the momentous significance of that period in history. It was to this end that John had received the baptismal Initiation and because this was connected with the rays of the Sun streaming from its position in a particular constellation, the constellation too was known symbolically as the Waterman. The name of the constellation was derived from the human faculty connected with it, and not vice versa.

Nowadays many learned ignoramuses try to explain spiritual happenings of this character by bringing Heaven down to Earth, saying that such things are simply indications of the movement of the Sun through the Zodiac. These learned gentlemen, who fundamentally know nothing, explain events in humanity by reference to the heavens. In the case of John the Baptist, actually the opposite was true: the zodiacal sign was used to express something that had occurred on Earth and was then transferred to the Heavens.

John the Baptist could therefore rightly say: ‘I baptise you with water.’ This was the same as saying to his intimate disciples, as he might well have done, that he had received the Aquarius Initiation. The movement of the Sun through the Zodiac as seen with physical eyes is in the direction from Leo to Virgo; the spiritual movement is from Aquarius to Pisces. Consequently John the Baptist was able to proclaim something that would work as the forces of the Sun in Pisces and not in Aquarius; also that the Being who was to come would give a higher kind of Baptism than he himself was able to give. The spiritual Sun progresses from Aquarius to Pisces and when this happens the Aquarius Baptism becomes a Baptism with spiritual water—Pisces, the Fishes. Hence the ancient symbol of fishes for the Being who was the bearer of the Christ. Just as John, through very special influences, had received the Aquarius Initiation, so all the mysteries enacted around and in Jesus of Nazareth belonged to a Pisces Initiation. The Sun had moved forward, spiritually, from one zodiacal constellation to another, indicating that Jesus of Nazareth had passed through a Pisces Initiation.

All this is hinted at in St. Mark's Gospel but such things have to be presented in pictures. Christ Jesus draws to Himself those who are seeking that of which Pisces is the symbol. Hence His first disciples are all of them fishermen. The indication of the Sun's progression into Pisces is clear when we read the words of John the Baptist: ‘I have baptised you with water, but He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit.’ And as Christ passes along the shore of the Sea of Galilee, that is to say, when the Sun has moved so far that its counterpart could be seen rising in Pisces, the fishermen known as Simon and Simon's brother, James and James's brother, are inspired to follow Him.

How can we understand all this? We shall not understand it unless we go more deeply into the linguistic expressions used in those times. Our modern way of expressing ourselves is slovenly and banal. Thus when a human being is standing in front of us, we say: Here is a man—similarly when there are two or three. But what is there in front of us is only maya; if we see a being with two legs and a human face the only way of expressing what we see in our modern language is to say: That is a man. But what does occultism take this ‘man’ to be? In the form in which he stands before us he is nothing but maya—approximately as real as a rainbow in the sky. A rainbow is a reality only as long as the necessary conditions of rain and sunshine are present; as soon as the relation between sunshine and rain changes, the rainbow vanishes. It is exactly the same in the case of a man. He is only a confluence of forces of the Macrocosm; we must look for forces in the heavens, in the Macrocosm. For the occultist, what we assume on Earth to be a man is simply nothingness. The truth is that forces are streaming from above downwards and from below upwards, and they intersect. And just as a particular combination of rain and sun produces a rainbow, so do forces streaming together from above and from below out of the Macrocosm create a phenomenon, an illusory image, which we take to be a man. But the man we see before us is really nothing but maya. Where we think we see a man there are intersecting cosmic forces. You must take this quite seriously. The man as he stands before us is merely a shadow of many forces. But the being who manifests in the man may well be at a different place altogether from the point where the man with his two legs is standing.

Now think of three human beings. One is a peasant in ancient Persia, working his plough in the Persian countryside. He looks like a man, but in reality he is a soul whose forces are sustained by some world from above or from below, and if we are to have real knowledge of him we must ascend to the realm of these forces. The second man is possibly some kind of official in ancient Persia. He too is formed from another world through intersecting forces and again, if we are to know him in the real sense, we must ascend to the realm of those forces. Finally, think of a third Persian, or one of whom we should have to say even more emphatically: he is a veritable illusion, a phantom. To discover the truth about him we should have to ascend to the Sun to find the forces sustaining this phantom figure. There above, among the mysteries of the Sun, we should find what we might call the Golden Star—Zarathustra. Rays are sent down and on the Earth there lives the being we call Zarathustra, though his essential being is not there at all.

The important thing is to realise that in ancient times men were well aware of the significance of names. Names were not given as they are to-day but according to what was really living in a human being, apart altogether from the outer appearance. An old man at the time of Christ would have understood very well what was meant if someone had pointed to John the Baptist, saying: There is the Angel of God! The outer appearance would have been disregarded as a secondary consideration and attention paid only to the inner reality.—And now suppose the same mode of expression had been used in connection with Christ Jesus. What would have been said of Him in times when such things were understood? Nobody would have so much as dreamed of giving the appellation Christ Jesus to the body of flesh moving about the land; the body was regarded merely as the sign that what was streaming down spiritually from the Sun had gathered together at this particular point. And when this body—the body of Jesus—moved from one place to another it was simply that the Sun-force was being made visible. This Sun-force was able of itself to move from place to place, independently of a physical body. Occasionally, Christ Jesus was said to be ‘in the house’, that is to say, in the flesh; but the Being in the flesh also moved about without a body. In the Gospel of St. John, above all, the Evangelist often writes exactly as if the Sun-force were present in a body of flesh when in reality the Christ is moving from place to place purely in the spirit.

That is why it is so important for the deeds of Christ Jesus always to be brought into relationship with the physical Sun—which is the outward expression for the spiritual world when gathered together at the point where the physical body is present. For example, when Christ Jesus performs an act of healing, it is the Sun-force that heals, but the Sun must be in the right position in the heavens. Thus: ‘At even, when the sun did set they brought unto Him all that were diseased ...’ and so on. It was important to indicate that this healing force can flow down only when the physical Sun has set and is working in a purely spiritual way. Again when Christ Jesus needs special power in order to do His works, He must draw it from the spiritual Sun, not from the physically visible Sun. ‘And in the morning, rising up a great while before day, He went out ...’ The path of the Sun and the power of the Sun are expressly indicated, furthermore that it is the Sun-force that is working, that Jesus is simply the external sign and that this path taken by the Sun-force could also become visible to the naked eye. Wherever St. Mark's Gospel speaks of the Christ, what is meant is the Sun-force which, in that epoch of Earth-evolution, worked with special strength upon the land called Palestine. Moreover the Sun-force, gathered into a focus, was moving from place to place, and the body of Jesus was the outward sign making the movement of the Sun-force visible to physical sight. The paths of Jesus in Palestine were the paths of the Sun-force that had come down to the Earth. If you trace the paths of Jesus to form a kind of chart you will have before you the indication of a cosmic happening—the Sun-force had penetrated into the land of Palestine. It is a macrocosmic process—that is the essential point. This is made especially evident by the writer of St. Mark's Gospel, who was well aware that a body which was the bearer of a principle such as the Christ-Principle must be entirely subservient to it. The Gospel therefore directs attention to the world so gloriously proclaimed by Zarathustra—the world which lies behind the material world and influences the life of man. Through Christ Jesus it was again made clear how the forces of this spiritual world work into the Earth. Hence in the body—the body of the Nathan Jesus as we have heard [See Lecture-Course on the Gospel of St. Luke, lectures IV–VII.]—which was influenced in a particular way by the Zarathustra-Individuality, it was inevitable that a kind of repetition should take place of happenings connected with Zarathustra.

We know some of the beautiful legends about Zarathustra. Almost immediately after his birth occurred the first miracle, that known as the ‘Zarathustra smile’. The second miracle was when Duransurun, the King ruling the district where Zarathustra was born, determined to murder the child about whom retrograde Magi had made certain statements. But when the King was on the point of stabbing the child his arm was paralysed. Finding that he could not use his dagger to do away with the child, he ordered him to be taken out into the wilderness and left among the wild beasts. This is the expression used to indicate that already in earliest childhood Zarathustra was destined to see what everyone is bound to see if his gaze has not been cleansed of impurities. Instead of the majestic Group-Souls and the higher spiritual Beings, he sees the emanations of his untamed fantasies. This is what is meant when we are told that Zarathustra was left in the wilderness among the wild beasts, but remained unharmed. This was the third miracle; the fourth was again connected with wild beasts. And always it was the good spirits of Ahura Mazdao who ministered to him.

These miracles are to some extent repeated in St. Mark's Gospel. ‘And immediately the Spirit driveth him into the wilderness’ (the word really means solitude). ‘And he was there in the wilderness forty days, tempted of Satan; and was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto him.’

It is made clear to us here that the body was being prepared to become a focus of macrocosmic processes. What had happened to Zarathustra had to be repeated in the encounter with the wild beasts. The body became the bearer of macrocosmic processes.

In its very first lines the Gospel of St. Mark presents us with a vista of majestic grandeur and my aim in this lecture has been to show you how this Gospel acquires new life and power if only the words are understood in their right sense—not in that of our commonplace modern speech but in the sense of ancient language, when whole worlds lay behind each word. Our modern language needs to be recast in many ways before it is possible to discover what the words of ancient languages contained. When we say that man lives on the Earth and develops his ‘I’, or that he was present on the Old Moon when it was the Angels who reached their human stage—all this must be borne in mind when we read: Behold, I send my Angel before men. These words cannot be understood without the preliminary knowledge communicated by Spiritual Science.

If people were really honest to-day they would admit that the words at the beginning of St. Mark's Gospel are unintelligible to them. But instead they adopt an arrogant attitude and maintain that Spiritual Science is so much fantasy and puts all kinds of complications into what would otherwise be quite simple. But the fact of the matter is that people to-day have no real knowledge; they no longer recognise the principle adopted, for instance, in ancient Persia, when the sacred records were re-written from epoch to epoch in order to be clothed in a new form suited to every period. In this way the divine Word was recast in the form of the Zend Avesta, then again recast, and what we have to-day is its latest form. The Persian scriptures were, in fact, re-written seven times. One of the tasks of Anthroposophy is to teach men how necessary it is that records in which sacred mysteries are clothed in words should be re-written from epoch to epoch. For if we want to preserve the sublime language of the ancient writings we should not attempt in our re-writing to adhere pedantically to the old words; we should rather try to translate them into words that are immediately intelligible in the present age. An attempt to do this was made in the summer in the lecture-course on Genesis, and you will have realised then how many of the words must be re-cast. The lecture today may have given you some idea of how the same principle applies to the Gospel of St. Mark.

The character of Spiritual Science is such that the truths and data of knowledge contained in it increase in difficulty the farther we descend from universal principles to concrete details. You may already have noticed this when attempts have been made in different groups to speak about historical details, for example about the reincarnations of the great leader of the ancient Persian religion, Zarathustra, or about his connection with Moses, with Hermes, and also with Jesus of Nazareth.¹ On other occasions too, concrete questions of history have been touched upon. As soon as we descend from the great truths concerning the universe as pervaded and woven through by Spirit, from the great cosmic laws to the spiritual nature of a particular individuality, a particular personality, we pass from matters where the human heart will still accept, comparatively easily, this or that questionable point, into realms teeming with improbabilities. And, as a rule, those who are insufficiently prepared become incredulous when they confront this abyss between universal and specific truths.

Our study is intended to be an introduction to lectures which belong to the domain of occult history and will present historical facts and personalities in the light of Spiritual Science. In these lectures I shall have many things to say to you that will seem strange. You will hear many things that will have to reckon upon the will-for-understanding promoted by all the spiritual-scientific knowledge brought before you in the course of the years. For, after all, the finest, most significant fruit of the spiritual-scientific conception of the world is that, complicated and detailed as the knowledge is, we finally have before us not a collection of dogmas, but within us, in our hearts and feelings, we possess something that carries us beyond the standpoint we can reach through any other world-view. We do not imbibe so many dogmas, tenets, or mere information, but through our knowledge we become different human beings. In a certain respect, the aspects of Spiritual Science we shall now be considering call for more than a purely intellectual understanding—for an understanding by the soul, which at many points must be willing to listen to and accept intimations that would become crass and crude if pressed into too sharp outlines.

The picture I want to call up in your minds is that behind the whole evolutionary and historical process, through the millennia up to our own times, spiritual Beings, spiritual Individualities, stand as guides and leaders behind all human evolution and human happenings, and that in the greatest, most significant events in history, this or that human being appears with his whole soul, his whole being, as an instrument of spiritual Individualities standing and working with set purpose behind him. But we must familiarise ourselves with many a concept unknown in ordinary life if we are to gain insight into the strange and mysterious connections between earlier and later happenings in the course of history

If you will remind yourselves of many things that have been said through the years, you will be able to picture that in ancient times—and in Post-Atlantean times, too, if we go back only a few thousand years before what is usually called the historic era—men fell into more or less abnormal states of clairvoyance. Between our matter-of-fact waking consciousness, limited as it is entirely to the physical world, and the unconscious sleeping state, there was once a realm of consciousness through which man penetrated into spiritual reality. And we know that what is nowadays explained as poetic folk-fantasy by scholars who are themselves the originators of so many scientific myths and legends, is to be traced back to ancient clairvoyance, to clairvoyant states of the human soul which in those times gazed behind physical existence and expressed what it saw in the pictures contained in myths, fairy-tales and legends. So that in old, genuinely old myths, fairy-tales and legends, more knowledge, more wisdom and truth are to be found than in the abstract erudition and science of the present day. Therefore when we look back to very ancient times, we-find men who were clairvoyant; we know too that this clairvoyance faded away more and more among the various peoples in the different epochs. In the Christmas lecture to-day² I told you how in Europe, at a comparatively very late time, abundant remains of this ancient clairvoyance still survived. The extinguishing of clairvoyance and the advent of consciousness limited to the physical plane occur at different times among the different peoples.

You can conceive that through the culture-epochs after the great Atlantean catastrophe—through the ancient Indian, ancient Persian, Egypto-Chaldean, Greco-Latin culture-epochs and an into our own—the effects produced in the plan of world-history by the activities of men have been very diverse—inevitably so, because the peoples all stood in different relationships to the spiritual world. In ancient Persian and also in ancient Egyptian times, what man inwardly felt and experienced extended upwards into the spiritual world, and spiritual Powers played into his very soul. Not until the Greco-Latin epoch did this living connection between the human soul and the spiritual world cease in essentials; nor did it disappear completely until our own times. As far as outer history is concerned, the connection exists in our time only when, with the means that are accessible to man to-day, the link between the human soul and the realities of the spiritual worlds is sought consciously. Thus in ancient times, when man looked into his own soul, this soul enshrined not only what it had learnt from the physical world, had pictured according to the pattern of the things of the physical world, but the spiritual Hierarchies ranging above man up into the spiritual worlds were experienced as immediate realities. All this worked down to the physical plane through the instrument of the human soul, and men knew themselves to be connected with these individual Beings of the higher Hierarchies. When we look back, let us say, into the Egypto-Chaldean epoch—but it must be the earlier periods of it—we find men who are, so to say, historical personalities; but we do not understand them if we think of them as historical personalities in the modern sense.

When as men of the materialistic age we speak of historical personalities, we are convinced that it is only the impulses, the intentions, of the actual personalities in question that take effect in the course of history. But with this conception we can in reality understand only the men of the last three thousand years: that is—approximately of course—the men of the millennium which ended with the birth of Christ Jesus, and those of the first and the second Christian millennia in which we ourselves are living. Plato, Socrates, possibly also Thales and Pericles, are men who can still be understood as having at any rate some resemblance to ourselves. But farther back than that it is not possible to understand human beings if we attempt to do so merely by analogy with those living to-day. This applies, shall we say, to Hermes, the great Teacher of the Egyptian epoch, also to Zarathustra, and even to Moses. When we go back before the thousand. years preceding the Christian era we must reckon with the fact that wherever we have to do with historical personalities, higher Individualities, higher Hierarchies stand behind and take possession of these personalities—in the best sense of the word, of course. And now a strange phenomenon comes to light, without knowledge of which the process of historical evolution cannot really be understood.

Five culture-epochs including our own, have been enumerated. Many, many thousands of years ago we come to the first Post-Atlantean culture-epoch, the ancient Indian; this was followed by the second, the ancient Persian; this by the third, the Egypto-Chaldean; this by the fourth, the Greco-Latin; and this by the fifth, our own epoch. When we go back from the Greco-Latin to the Egyptian epoch we must change our whole way of studying history: instead of looking at the purely human aspect—which it is still possible to do in connection with the figures of the Greek world as far back as the age of the Heroes—we must now apply a different criterion by looking behind the single personalities for the spiritual Powers which represent the super-personal and work through the personalities as their instruments. We must have These spiritual Individualities always in mind, so that working behind some human being an the physical plane we can discern discern a Being of the higher Hierarchies who, as it were, takes hold of him from behind and Sets him at the appropriate place in evolution.

From this point of view it is highly interesting to perceive the connections between the really significant happenings—those which were determinative factors in the course of history—in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch and in the Greco-Latin epoch. These two culture-epochs follow one another, and to begin with we go back, let us say to the years from 2800 to 3200–3500 B.C.—which comparatively speaking is not so very far. Nevertheless we shall not understand happenings then—of which ancient history is already able to tell something to-day—unless behind the historical personalities we discern the higher Individualities. But then it also becomes evident to us that in the fourth, the Greco-Latin epoch, there is a kind of repetition of the really important happenings of the third epoch. It is almost as if things that in the earlier epoch an be explained through higher laws, must be explained in the following age through laws of the physical world, as if everything had sunk down, had become a stage more material, more physical. There is a kind of reflection in the physical world of great events of the preceding period.

By way of introduction, I want to draw your attention to how one of the most important happenings of the Egypto-Chaldean epoch is presented to us in a significant myth, and how this event is reflected, but at a lower stage, in the Greco-Latin epoch. I shall therefore be speaking of two parallel happenings which in the occult sense belong together, the one taking place half a plane higher, as it were, and the other entirely on the physical earth but like a kind of shadow-image on the physical plane of a spiritual event of the earlier epoch. Outwardly, it is only in the form of myths that humanity has ever been able to tell of events behind which stand Beings of the higher Hierarchies. But we shall see what lies behind the myth which describes the most significant event of the Chaldean epoch.³ We will look only at the main features of this myth.

There was once a great king, by name Gilgamesh. From the name itself, one who understands such matters will recognise that here we have to do not merely with a physical king, but with a divinity standing behind him, a spiritual Individuality by whom the king of Erech is inspired, who works and acts through him. Thus we have to do with one who in the real sense must be called a god-man.⁴ The story narrates that he oppresses the city of Erech. The city turns to its deity, Aruru, and she causes a helper to arise out of the earth. These are pictures of the myth. We shall see what deeply significant historical events lie behind it. The Goddess of the City produces Eabani out of the earth. Eabani is a kind of human being who, in comparison with Gilgamesh, seems to be of an inferior nature, for we are told that he was clothed in the skins of animals, was covered with hair, was like a wild man. Nevertheless in his wild nature there was divine Inspiration, ancient clairvoyance, clairvoyant knowledge, clairvoyant perception.

Eabani comes to know a woman of Erech and is attracted by her into the City. He becomes the friend of Gilgamesh and this brings peace to the city. Gilgamesh and Eabani together are now the rulers. Then Ishtar, the Goddess of Erech, is stolen by a neighbouring city. There upon Eabani and Gilgamesh go to war with the marauding city, conquer the king and bring the Goddess back again to Erech. Gilgamesh lives near her, and here we come to the strange fact that he has no understanding of the essential nature of the Goddess. A scene takes place, directly reminiscent of a Biblical scene described in the Gospel of St. John. Gilgamesh confronts Ishtar, but his conduct is very different from that of Christ Jesus. He upbraids the Goddess for having loved many other men before she had encountered him, reproaching her particularly for her most recent attachment. Thereupon the Goddess carries her complaints to that deity, that Being of the higher Hierarchies, to whom she belongs. She goes to Anu. And now Anu sends a bull down to the earth; Gilgamesh has to engage in combat with it. Those who recall Mithras's fight with the bull will see a resemblance here. All these events—and when we come to explain the myth we shall see what depths it contains—have led meanwhile to the death of Eabani. Gilgamesh is now alone. A thought comes to him that gnaws at the very fibres of his soul. Under the impression of what he has experienced, he becomes conscious for the first time of the thought that man is mortal; a thought to which he had previously paid no heed comes before his soul in all its terror. And then he hears of the only man of earth who has remained immortal, whereas all other human beings in the Post-Atlantean epoch have become conscious of mortality: he hears of the immortal Xisuthros far away in the West. And because he is resolved to fathom the riddle of life and death, he sets out on the perilous journey to the West.⁵—I can tell you at once that this journey to the West is nothing else than the search for the secrets of ancient Atlantis, for happenings prior to the great Atlantean catastrophe.

Gilgamesh sets out on his journey. The details are interesting. He has to pass through an entrance guarded by giant scorpions; the spirit leads him into the realm of death; he enters the kingdom of Xisuthros and there learns that in the Post-Atlantean epoch all men will inevitably be more and more penetrated with the consciousness of death. Gilgamesh now asks Xisuthros whence he has knowledge of his eternal being; how comes it that he is conscious of immortality? Thereupon Xisuthros says to him: “You too can have this consciousness, but you must undergo all that I had to experience in overcoming the terror, anxiety and loneliness through which it was my lot to pass. When the god Ea had resolved to let perish” (in what we call the Atlantean catastrophe) “that part of humanity which was to live no longer, he bade me to withdraw into a kind of ship. I was to take with me the animals that were to remain, and those Individualities who are truly to be called the Masters. By means of this ship I outlived the great catastrophe.” Xisuthros then tells Gilgamesh: “What was there undergone, you can experience only in your innermost being; but you can attain the consciousness of immortality if for seven nights and six days you refrain from sleep.” Gilgamesh wishes to submit to the test but soon falls asleep. Then the wife of Xisuthros baked seven mystic loaves which by being eaten are to be a substitute for what would have been attained in the seven nights and six days without sleep. With this “life-elixir” Gilgamesh continues his journeying, bathes as it were in a fountain of youth, and again reaches the borders of his own country in the region of the Euphrates and the Tigris. A serpent deprives him of the power of the life-elixir and so he reaches his country without it, but all the same with the consciousness that there is indeed immortality, and filled with longing to see the spirit at least, of Eabani. The spirit of Eabani appears to him, and from the discourse which then takes place we can glean how, for the culture of the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, a consciousness of the link with the spiritual world could arise.—This relationship between Gilgamesh and Eabani is very significant. I have now outlined pictures from the significant myth of Gilgamesh which, as we shall see, will lead us into the spiritual depths lying behind the Chaldean-Babylonian culture-epoch. These pictures show that two individualities stand there: the individuality of one—Gilgamesh—into whom a divine-spiritual being has penetrated; and an individuality who is more of a human being, but of such a nature that he may be called a young soul, who has had few incarnations and for that reason has carried over ancient clairvoyance into later times—Eabani.

Eabani is depicted as being clothed in skins of animals. This is an indication of his wild nature; but because of this very wildness he is still endowed with ancient clairvoyance an the one hand, and an the other hand he is a young soul who has lived through far, far fewer incarnations than other souls who have reached a high level of development. Thus Gilgamesh represents a being who was ready for initiation but was not able to attain it, for the journey to the West is the journey to an initiation that was not carried through to the end. On the one side we see in Gilgamesh the actual inaugurator of the Chaldean-Babylonian culture, and working behind him a divine-spiritual Being, a kind of Fire-Spirit.⁶ And beside Gilgamesh there is another individuality—Eabani—a young soul who descended late to earthly incarnation. If you read the book Occult Science, you will find that the individualities returned only gradually from the planets.—The exchange of the knowledge possessed by these two is the root of the Babylonian-Chaldean culture, and we shall see that the whole of this culture is an outcome of what proceeds from Gilgamesh and Eabani. Clairvoyance from the divine man, Gilgamesh, and clairvoyance from the young soul, Eabani, penetrate into the Chaldean-Babylonian culture. This process, enacted by two beings working side by side, each of whom is necessary to the other, is then reflected in the later, fourth culture-epoch, the Greco-Latin, and in fact reflected on the physical plane. We shall of course only very gradually reach complete understanding of such a process. A more spiritual process is thus reflected on the physical plane when humanity has descended very far, when men no longer feel the relation of human personality to the divine-spiritual world.

These secrets of the divine-spiritual world were preserved in the places of the Mysteries. So, for example, many of the ancient, holy secrets which proclaimed the connection of the human soul with the divine-spiritual worlds were preserved in the Mysteries of Diana of Ephesus and in the Ephesian temple. A great deal in these Mysteries was no longer comprehensible in an age when human personality had come into prominence. And like a token of how little the purely external personality understood what had remained spiritually, there stands the half-mystical figure of Herostratus, who has eyes only for the superficial aspect of personality—Herostratus who flings the burning torch into the temple of Ephesus. This deed is like a token of the clash between the personality and what had survived from ancient spirituality. And on the very same day when a man, merely in order that his name might go down to posterity, throws the burning brand into the sanctuary of Ephesus, there is born the man who has achieved more than all others for the culture of personality—and on the very soil where the culture of were personality was meant to be overcome. Herostratus flings the burning torch on the day when Alexander the Great is born—the man who is all personality! Alexander the Great stands there as the shadow-image of Gilgamesh.⁷ A profound truth lies behind this. In the Greco-Latin epoch, Alexander the Great stands there as the shadow image of Gilgamesh, as a projection of the spiritual on to the physical plane. And Eabani, projected on to the physical plane, is Aristotle, the teacher of Alexander the Great.

Here indeed is a strange circumstance: Alexander and Aristotle standing, like Gilgamesh and Eabani, side by side. And we see how in the first third of the fourth Post-Atlantean epoch there is carried over, as it were, by Alexander the Great but transformed into the laws of the physical plane—that which had been imparted to the Babylonian-Chaldean culture by Gilgamesh. This comes to wonderful expression in the fact that, as a result of the deeds of Alexander, there was established an the scene of Egypto-Chaldean culture Alexandria itself, the city founded by Alexander in 332 B.C. in order that the great achievements of the Egypto-Babylonian-Chaldean culture-epoch might be brought together in one centre. And gradually all the streams of Post-Atlantean culture that were intended to come together did indeed converge on Alexandria, the city established an the scene of the third culture-epoch but with the character of the fourth.

Alexandria outlasted the beginnings of Christianity. Indeed it was in Alexandria that the factors of greatest significance in the fourth culture-epoch developed, when Christianity was already in existence. There the great scholars were working; there the three most important streams of culture flowed together: the ancient Pagan-Grecian stream, the Christian stream and the Mosaic-Hebrew stream. They interpenetrated one another in Alexandria. And it is impossible to conceive that the culture of Alexandria which was built entirely on the foundation of personality—could have been inaugurated in any other way than through the being who was inspired by personality—Alexander the Great. For now, through the very existence of this centre of culture, everything that formerly was super-personal, extending from the human personality upwards into the spiritual world, assumed a personal character. The personalities we find in Alexandria have, as it were, everything within themselves; the Powers from higher Hierarchies who guide the personalities and set them in their allotted places, are very little in evidence. All the sages and philosophers working in Alexandria seem to be embodiments of ancient wisdom transformed into human personality; it is the personal element that speaks out of them. The singular fact is that everything in ancient Paganism that could be explained only by the teaching of how gods came down and united with daughters of men in order to bring forth heroes—all this is transformed into personal forcefulness in the men in Alexandria. And the forms which Judaism, the Mosaic culture, assumed in Alexandria can be described from what is in evidence precisely during the period when Christianity was already in existence. Nothing is to be found of those deep conceptions of a link between the world of men and the spiritual world which were present in the age of the prophets and are still to be found in the last two centuries before the beginning of our era. In Judaism too, everything has become personality. There are gifted, able men in Alexandria, men possessed of extraordinarily deep insight into the secrets of the ancient occult teachings ... but everything has become personal; personalities are working in Alexandria. And it is there that to begin with, Christianity appears, shall we say, in a distorted, debased state of infancy. Christianity, whose real function is to lead the personal element in man upwards into the impersonal, made its appearance in Alexandria in a very ruthless form. Christian personalities, in particular, acted in such a way that we often have the impression: their deeds are anticipations of later actions by bishops and archbishops working on a purely personal basis. This applies both to Archbishop Theophilus in the fourth century and to his kinsman and successor, St. Cyril.⁸ We can judge them only an the basis of their human failings. Christianity, which was to give to mankind the greatest of all gifts, reveals itself to begin with in its greatest failings and from its personal side. But in Alexandria a sign and token was to stand before the whole evolution of humanity.

There again we have a projection on the physical plane of earlier, more spiritual conditions. In the Orphic Mysteries of ancient Greece there was a wonderful personality, one who was initiated in the Mystery-secrets and was among the most loveable, most interesting pupils of these Mysteries, well prepared by a certain Celtic occult training undergone in earlier incarnations. This individuality sought with deepest fervour for the secrets of the Orphic Mysteries. The pupils of these Mysteries had to live through in their own soul what is described in the myth of Dionysos Zagreus, who was dismembered by the Titans but whose body was carried away by Zeus into a higher life. How, as the result of a certain path taken in the Mysteries, man's life is surrendered to the outer world, how his whole being is torn in pieces so that he can no longer find his bearings within himself—this was to become an actual, individual experience in the pupils of the Orphic Mysteries.

When in the ordinary way we study animals, plants and minerals, what we learn is merely abstract knowledge because we remain outside them; but anyone who wishes to obtain knowledge in the occult sense must train himself to feel as if he were actually within the animals, plants and minerals, in air and water, in springs and mountains, in stones and Stars, in other human beings—as if he were one with them. all. Nevertheless, a pupil of the Orphic Mysteries had to develop the inner strength of soul which would enable him, re-established as a self-based individuality, to triumph over the disintegration of his being in the external world. When all this had become an actual human experience, it represented in a certain sense one of the very highest secrets of Initiation. And many pupils of the Orphic Mysteries had undergone such experiences, had lived through this disintegration in the world and, as a kind of preparation for Christianity, had therewith attained the highest experience within reach in pre-Christian times.

Among the pupils of the Orphic Mysteries was the loveable personality of whom I am speaking, whose earthly name has not come down to posterity, but who stands out clearly as a pupil of these Mysteries. Already in youth and then for many years, this person was closely connected with all the Greek Orphics during the period preceding that of Greek philosophy—a period of which no account is given in books an the history of philosophy. For what is recorded of Thales and Heraclitus is an echo of what the Mystery-pupils had accomplished in their way at an earlier period. And one of the pupils of the Orphic Mysteries was the individual of whom I have just spoken, whose pupil in turn was Pherecydes of Syros, referred to in the lecture-course given at Munich last year: The East in the light of the West⁹

Investigation of the Akasha Chronicle reveals that the individuality of that pupil of the Orphic Mysteries was reincarnated in the 4th century A.D. We find this individuality amid the activity and life of those gathered together in Alexandria, the Orphic secrets now transformed into personal experiences of the loftiest kind. It is very remarkable how all the Orphic secrets were transformed into personal experiences in this new incarnation. At the end of the 4th century, A.D., we find this individuality reborn as the daughter of a great mathematician, Theon. We see how there flashes up in her soul all that could be experienced of the Orphic Mysteries through vision of the great mathematical, light-woven texture of the universe. All this was now personal talent, personal genius. These faculties had now to be of so personal a character that it was necessary even for this individuality to have a mathematician as father in order that something might be received from heredity.

Thus we look back to times when man was still in living connection with the spiritual worlds, as was this Orphic pupil; and we see the shadow-image of this pupil among those who taught in Alexandria at the end of the 4th and the beginning of the 5th century A.D. This individuality had as yet experienced nothing that enabled men at that time to see beyond the shadow-sides of Christianity at its beginning. For all that had remained in this soul as an echo of the Orphic Mysteries was still too powerful to enable any Illumination to be received from that other Light, the new Christ Event. What arose round about as Christianity, represented by men of the type of Theophilus and Cyril, was in truth of such a nature that this Orphic individuality, working now with personal faculties, had things far greater, far richer in wisdom to say and to give than those who represented Christianity in Alexandria at that time.

Theophilus and Cyril were both filled with the deepest hatred of everything that was not Christian in the narrow ecclesiastical sense in which these two bishops, in particular, understood it. Christianity had assumed in them such an entirely personal character that these two patriarchs levied hirelings in their service; men were collected from far and near to form bodyguards for them. Their aim was power in its most personal sense. They were utterly obsessed by hatred of what originated in ancient times and yet was so much greater than the new that was appearing in caricatured shape. The deepest hatred was directed by the dignitaries of Christianity in Alexandria against the individuality of the reborn Orphic pupil. The fact that she was branded as a black magician will not therefore surprise us. But that was enough to incite the whole mob of hirelings against the noble, unique figure of the reborn pupil of the Orphic Mysteries. She was still young, but in spite of her youth, in spite of the fact that she was obliged to undergo much that in those days, too, imposed great hardships an a woman during a long period of study, she found her way upwards to the light that outshone all the wisdom, all the knowledge existing in those days. And it was wonderful how in the lecture halls of Hypatia—for such was the name of this reincarnated Orphic pupil—the purest, most luminous wisdom in Alexandria was presented to the enraptured listeners. She drew to her feet not only the Pagans, bat also Christians of deep and penetrating insight, such as Synesius. She was an influence of outstanding significance, and the revival of the old Pagan wisdom of Orpheus transformed into personality could be experienced in Alexandria in the figure of Hypatia.

World-karma was working in the truest sense symbolically. What had constituted the secret of her Initiation was now projected, mirrored, on the physical plane. And here we come to an event that is symbolically significant in the case of many things that have taken place in historical times. We come to one of those events that is seemingly only a martyrdom, but is in reality a symbol in which spiritual forces, spiritual intimations are coming to expression.

On a day in March in the year 415 A.D., Hypatia fell victim to the fury of these who formed the entourage of the patriarch of Alexandria. They resolved to rid themselves of her power, of her spiritual power. The utterly uncivilised, wild hordes were rushed in from the environs of Alexandria as well, and the chaste young sage was fetched away under false pretences. She mounted the chariot, and at a given sign the enflamed rabble fell upon her, tore off her clothing, dragged her into a church, and literally tore the flesh from her bones. The fragments of her body were then scattered around the city by these hordes, completely dehumanised by their rapacious passions. Such was the fate of the great woman philosopher, Hypatia.

Symbolically, so to say, there is indicated here something that is deeply connected with the founding of Alexandria by Alexander the Great—although it happened a long time after the actual founding of the city. In this event, important secrets of the 4th Post-Atlantean epoch are reflected. This epoch, destined as it was to represent the dissolution, the sweeping-away, of the old, contained so much that was great and significant, and with paradoxical grandeur placed before the world a most pregnant symbol in the slaughter—one can call it nothing else—of Hypatia, the outstanding woman at the turn of the 4th-5th centuries of our era.

• 1. See among other lectures by Rudolf Steiner: Deeper Secrets of Human History in the Light of the Gospel of St. Matthew, lectures II and III; The Gospel of St. Matthew, notably lectures I, II, III; The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind, lecture III; From Jesus to Christ, lecture VIII.
• 2. The lecture, not yet printed in English, was entitled: Yuletide and the Christmas Symbols. Stuttgart, 27.12.1910.
• 3. See Rudolf Steiner, World-History in the light of Anthroposophy, notably lectures III, IV, V.
• 4. See also: Jastrow (Mords), Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, Chapter XXIII. (Boston, 1898.) Budge (E. A. Wallis), The Babylonian Story of the Deluge and the Epic of Gilgamesh. (London, 1920. Revised by C. J. Gadd, 1929.) Thompson (Reginald Campbell), The Epic of Gilgamesh (London, 1928.) Contains a fairly full text.
• 5. See Budge, op. cit., p. 50:
  
  "I myself shall die, and shall not I then be as Enkidi (Eabani)
  Sorrow hath entered into my soul,
  Because of the fear of death which hach got hold of me do I wander over the country ..."
  
  Xisuthros, said to mean "the exceedingly wise," is a Greek corruption of an earlier designation. He is the same being as Uta-Napishtim in the versions of the Epic mentioned abovc, and is the Babylonian Noah. He tells the story of the Deluge to Gilgamesh. Cp. Cory (Isaac Preston), Ancient Fragments, p. 49; also Enc. of Religion and Ethics, Vol. VI, pp. 642—3; and Budge, op. cit., PP. 25—40.
• 6. See Langdon, op. cit., pp. 207—8. The name Gilgamesh is said to mean: " The Fire-god is a commander."
• 7. Cp. Jastrow, op. cit., pp. 516–17
• 8. Theophilus, patriarch of Alexandria, 385–412. Persecuted the followers of Origen. Cyril, patriarch of Alexandria. Played a prominent patt at the Council of Ephesus in 431.
• 9. The passage on Pherecydes of Syros occurs in lecture 4 of the Course entitled The East in the Light of the West, pp. 67—71 in the English edition.

Since we spoke yesterday of the differentiation of the soul life of the human being into three parts—the realm of concepts, or of thought, the realm of emotions, and the realm of will impulses—it should be interesting to us now to raise the question: How can self-discipline, the nurture of the soul life, set to work in the appropriate way to develop and to cultivate these three parts of the soul life? Here we shall begin with our life of will, our will impulses, and shall ask ourselves: What characteristics must we specially cultivate if we wish to work in a beneficial way on our will life?

Most beneficial of all in our will nature is the influence of a life directed in its entire character towards a comprehension of karma. We might also say a soul life which strives to develop, as its primary characteristic, serenity and acceptance of our destiny. And what better way can one find of developing this acceptance, this calmness of soul in the presence of one's destiny, than by making karma an actual content in one's life?

What do we mean by this? It means that—not merely theoretically but in a living way—when our own sorrow or the sorrow of another comes upon us, when we experience joy or the heaviest blow of fate, we shall really be fully aware that, in a certain higher sense, we ourselves have given the occasion for this painful blow of fate: this means developing such a mood that we accept an experience of joy with gratitude, but are also clearly aware, especially in regard to joy, that we must not go to excess, since this is perilous. If we desire to progress in our development, we can conceive joy in the following way. For the most part, joy is something which points to a future destiny, not to one already past. In human life joy is usually something one has not deserved through previous actions. When we investigate karma by occult means, we always discover that in most cases joy has not been earned, and we should accept it gratefully as sent to us by the gods, as a gift of the gods, and to say to ourselves: The joy which comes to meet us today ought to kindle in us the will to work in such a way as to take into ourselves the forces streaming to us through this joy, and to apply these usefully. We must look upon joy as a sort of prepayment on account for the future.

In the case of pain, on the other hand, we have usually merited this, and we always find the cause in our present life or in earlier lives. And we must then realise with the utmost clarity that we have often failed to conduct ourselves in our external life in accordance with this karmic mood. We are not able to conduct ourselves always in external life in the presence of what causes us pain in such a way that our conduct shall seem to be an acceptance of our destiny. We do not generally have an insight into such a thing at once—into the law of destiny. But, even though we are not able to conduct ourselves outwardly in such a way, yet the principal thing is that we shall do this inwardly.

And even if we have conducted ourselves outwardly in accordance with this karmic mood, yet we should say to ourselves in the depths of our souls that we ourselves have been the cause of all such things. Suppose, for instance, that someone strikes us, that he beats us with a stick. In such a case it is generally characteristic for a person to ask: ‘Who is it that strikes me?’ No one says in such a case: ‘It is I that beat myself.’ Only in the rarest cases do people say that they punish themselves. And yet it is true that we ourselves lifted the stick against another person in days gone by. Yes, it is you yourself who then raised the stick. When we have to get rid of a hindrance, this is karma. It is karma when others hold something against us. It is we ourselves who cause something to happen to us as recompense for something we have done. And thus we come to a right attitude toward our life, to a broadening of our self, when we say: ‘Everything that befalls us comes from ourselves. Our own action is fulfilled outwardly even when it seems as if someone else performed it.’

If we develop such a way of viewing things, then our serenity, our acceptance of our karma in all occurrences, strengthens our will. We grow stronger in facing life with serenity, never weaker. Through anger and impatience we become weak. In the face of every occurrence we are strong when we are serene. On the contrary, we become continually weaker in will through moroseness and an unnatural rebellion against destiny.

Of course, we must view within a broad compass what we consider as destiny. We must conceive this destiny of ours in such a way that we say to ourselves, for instance, that the development of precisely one power or another at a certain period of one's life belongs also to a person's karma. And mistakes are often made just here in the education of children. Here karma comes into contact with the problem of education, for education is destiny, the karma of the human being in youth.

We weaken the will of someone when we expect him to learn something, to do something for which his capacities are not yet adequate. In educating one must come to see clearly in advance what is suitable for each stage of life in accordance with the universal karma of humanity, so that the right thing may be done. Doing the wrong thing is raising a rebellion against destiny, against its laws, and is associated with enormous weakening of the will. It is not possible to discuss here how a weakening of the will is associated with all premature awakening of the sensual appetites and passions. It is the prematurely awakened appetites, instincts and passions which are especially subject to this law. For making premature use of the bodily organs is contrary to destiny. All that is directly against the karma of humanity, all actions opposing the existing arrangements of nature, are associated with a weakening of the will.

Since people have been for a long time without any true fundamental principles of education, there are many persons in the world now who did not pass through their youth in the right way. If humanity does not determine to direct what is most important of all, the education of youth, according to Spiritual Science, a race will arise with ever weaker wills—and this not in a merely external sense. This takes a deep hold of the life of the human being. Ask a number of people how they came into their present occupations. You may be sure that most of them will answer: ‘Well, we don't know; we have in some way been pushed into this situation.’ This feeling that one has been pushed into something, has been driven into it, this feeling of discontent, is also a sign of weakness of will.

Now, when this weakness of will is brought about in the manner described, still other results follow from this for the human soul, especially when the weakness of will is evoked in such a way that states of anxiety, of fear, of despair are produced at a youthful age. It will be increasingly necessary for human beings to have a fundamental understanding of the higher laws in order to overcome states of despair, for it is precisely despair which is to be expected when we do not proceed in accordance with knowledge of the spirit.

By means of a monistic and materialistic world view it is possible to maintain only two generations of persons with strong wills. Materialism can satisfy just two generations: the one that founded the conception and the pupils who have received it from the founders. This is the peculiarity of the monistic and materialistic world view: the one who works in the laboratory or the workshop and who founded the view, whose powers are fully occupied and activated by what he is building up in his mind, experiences an inner satisfaction. But one who merely associates himself with these theories, who takes over a materialism ready-made, will not be able to achieve this inner satisfaction; and then despair will work back upon the culture of the will, and evoke weakness of will. Weakening of the will, human beings lacking energy, will be the results of this world view.

The second of the three aspects of the super-sensible life we mentioned yesterday is that of the emotions. What affects the emotions favourably?

If we take the utmost pains to acquire an attentive attitude of mind, a marked attentiveness to the events in our surroundings—and do not imagine that this attentiveness is very generally and strongly developed by people—this can be of great value to us. I must repeatedly mention a single illustration. In a certain country the order of the examinations for teachers was once altered, and for this reason all the school teachers had to sit the examinations again. The examiner had to test both old and young teachers. The young ones could be tested on the basis of what they had learned in the teachers' colleges. But how should he test the old teachers? He decided to ask them about nothing except the subjects which they had themselves been teaching year after year in their own classes, and the result showed that very many of them had no notion of the very subjects they themselves had been teaching!

This attentiveness, this habit of following with vital interest the things that occur in one's environment, is most beneficial especially in the cultivation of the emotions.

Now, the emotions, like everything else in the soul, are connected in a certain way with the will; and, when we influence our emotional life unfavourably, we may thus indirectly influence our will impulses. We nurture our emotions favourably when we place ourselves under the law of karma in connection with our anger and our passions, when we hold fast to karma. And this we find in what occurs in our environment. We find it, for example, when anyone does the opposite of what we had expected. We may then say to ourselves: ‘All right; that is simply what he is doing!’ But we may also become angry and violent, and this is a sign of weakness of will.

Outbursts of violent temper hinder the right development of the emotions and also the will, and also have a far more extensive influence, as we can see at once. Now, anger is something that a person does not by any means have under his control. Only gradually can he master the habit of becoming angry, and one must have patience with oneself. To anyone who believes he can achieve this with a turn of the hand I must repeat the story of a teacher who took very much to heart the task of ridding his pupils of anger. When he was faced by the fact, that after constant efforts, a boy still became angry, he himself became so angry that he threw the ink bottle at the child's head. A person who permits himself to do such a thing must think for many, many weeks about karma.

What this signifies will become clear to us if we take this occasion to look a little more deeply into the life of the human soul. There are two poles in the soul life, the life of will on the one hand and that of thoughts, of conceptions, on the other. The emotions, the feelings of the heart, are in the middle. Now, we know that the life of man alternates between sleeping and waking; and, while the human being is awake, his life of thoughts and conceptions is especially active. For the fact that the will is not very wide awake can become clear to anyone who observes closely, how a will impulse comes about. We must first have a thought, a concept; only then does the will thrust upward from the depths of the soul. The thought evokes the will impulse. When the human being is awake, he is awake in thought, not in will.

But occult science teaches us that when we sleep, everything is reversed. Then the will is awake and is very active, and thought is inactive. This cannot be known by the human being in a normal state of consciousness, for the simple reason that he knows things only by means of his thoughts and these are asleep. Thus he does not observe that his will is active. When he attains clairvoyance and arrives at the world of imaginative representations, he then observes that the will awakes the moment thinking falls asleep. And the will slips into the pictures he perceives and awakens these. The pictures are then woven out of will. Thus the thoughts are then asleep but the will is awake.

But this being awake in our will is connected with our total human nature in a manner entirely different from the way our thoughts are connected. Depending on whether the person works or does not work, is well or ill, is serene or hot-tempered, the will becomes healthy or unhealthy. And according as our will is healthy or unhealthy it works in the night on the condition of our life, even into the physical body. Very much depends upon whether one develops a mood of serenity during the day, acceptance of his destiny, and thus prepares his will so that this will may be said to develop a pleasant warmth, a feeling of well-being, or whether, on the other hand, he develops anger. This unhealthiness of the will streams into the body during the state of sleep at night and is the cause of numerous illnesses, whose causes are sought for but not found because the resulting physical illnesses appear only after the lapse of years or even decades. Only one who surveys great stretches of time can see in this way the connection between conditions of the soul and of the body. Even for the sake of bodily health, therefore, the will must be disciplined.

We can also influence our emotions through serenity and acceptance of our karma so that they work beneficially even upon our bodily Organisation. On the other hand, in no other way do we injure this Organisation more than through apathy, lack of interest in what is occurring around us. This apathy is spreading more and more; it is the reason why so few persons take an interest in—spiritual things. It may be supposed that objective reasons lead to the adoption of a materialistic view of life. There are really by no means such great objective reasons for a materialistic view of life. No, it is apathy; no one can be a materialist without being apathetic. It is a lack of attention to our surroundings. Anyone who observes his environment with alert interest is confronted on all sides with what can only be harmonised by spiritual knowledge. But apathy deadens the emotions and leads to weakness of will.

Furthermore, special significance attaches to the characteristic called obstinacy—the attitude of mind that insists inflexibly upon one thing or another. Unhealthy emotions can also bring about obstinacy. These things are often like the serpent that bites his own tail. All that we have mentioned may be caused by obstinacy. Even persons who go through life very inattentively may be very obstinate. Persons who are altogether weak-willed are often discovered to be obstinately persisting in something when we had not expected it, and the weakness of will becomes constantly more marked if we do not strive to overcome obstinacy. It is precisely in persons with weak wills that we find this quality of obstinacy. On the other hand, when we endeavour to avoid the development of obstinacy, we shall see that in every instance we have improved our emotions and strengthened our wills. Every time that we actually are goaded by an impulse to be obstinate but refuse to yield to it, we become stronger for the task of confronting life. We shall observe the fruits if we proceed systematically against this fault; through struggling to overcome obstinacy we attain to inner satisfaction. The nurturing of our emotions specially depends upon our struggling in every way to overcome obstinacy, apathy, lack of interest. In other words, interest and attentiveness in relation to the environment foster both the feelings and the will. Apathy and obstinacy have the opposite effect.

For a sound emotional life, we have the fine word ingenuity. * [Sinnigkeit, the gift or capacity of inventive or creative fantasy.] Being creatively fanciful means that something ingenious occurs to one. Children ought to play in such a way that the fantasy is stimulated, that the spontaneous activity of their souls is stimulated, so that they have to reflect about their play. They ought not to arrange building blocks according to patterns: this merely develops pedantry, not creative fantasy. We are developing creative fantasy when we let children do all sorts of things in sand, when we take them into the woods and let them form little baskets out of burs, and then stimulate them to make other things of burs stuck together. Things which cause a certain inventive talent to expand nourish creative fantasy. Strange as it may seem, such cultivation of creative fantasy brings serenity of soul, inner harmony, and contentment,

Moreover, when we go for a walk with a child, it is good to leave him free to do whatever he will, provided he does not behave too badly. And, when the child does anything, we should show our pleasure, our participation and interest; we should not be unresponsive or lacking in interest in what the child produces out of his own inner nature. Even when instructing a child, we should connect what we teach him with the forms and processes of nature. When children reach an older stage, we should not then occupy them with riddles or puzzles taken from newspapers; this leads only to pedantry. On the contrary, observation of nature offers us the opposite of what is afforded by the press for the cultivation of the emotional life. A serene heart, a harmonious life of feeling, determines not only mental health but also bodily health, even though long stretches of time may intervene between cause and effect.

We come now to the third aspect of the super-sensible life, to thinking. This, we nurture and sharpen, especially by the development of characteristics which seem to have nothing whatever to do with thinking, with concepts. The best method of developing good thinking is by complete absorption and insight, not so much through logical exercises but by observing one thing and another, using for this purpose processes in nature, in order to penetrate into hidden mysteries. Through absorption in problems of nature and of humanity, through the endeavour to understand complex personalities, through the intensifying of attentiveness, we grow wise. Absorption means striving to unravel something by thinking, by conceiving. In this connection, we shall be able to see that such mental absorption has a wonderfully good effect in later life.

The following example is taken from life. A little boy showed his mother remarkable aspects of his observation, which were associated with extraordinary absorption and capacity for insight. He said: ‘You know, when I walk on, the streets and see persons and animals, it seems as if I had to enter into the persons and the animals. It happened that a poor woman met me, and I entered into her, and this was terribly painful to me, very distressing.’ (The child had not seen any sort of destitution at home, but lived in altogether good circumstances.) ‘And then I entered into a horse and then into a pig.’ He described this in detail, and was stimulated to an extraordinary degree of compassion, to special deeds of pity, through feeling union with the life of others. Whence does this come, this expansion of one's understanding for other beings? If we think the matter over in this case, we are led back into the preceding incarnation, when the person in question had cultivated absorption in things, in the secrets of things, as we have described.

But we do not have to wait till the next incarnation for the results which follow the cultivation of absorption. These manifest themselves even in a single life. When we are induced in earliest youth to develop all of this, we shall develop in later life a clear, transparent thinking, whereas otherwise we develop a scrappy, illogical thinking. It is a fact that truly spiritual principles can advance us in our course of life.

During recent decades there have been few truly spiritual fundamental principles of education, almost none at all. And now we are experiencing the results. There is an extraordinary amount of wrong thinking in our day. One can suffer the pains of martyrdom from the terribly illogical life of the world. Anyone who has acquired a certain clairvoyance does not simply feel that one thing is correct and another incorrect, but he suffers actual pain when confronted by illogical thinking, and a sense of well-being in connection with clear, transparent thinking. This signifies that he has acquired a feeling for such things, and this enables him to make decisions. And this brings far truer differentiations when one has actually reached this stage. It gives a far truer discrimination between truth and untruth. This seems incredible, but it is true. When something erroneous is said in the presence of a clairvoyant person, the pain which rises in him shows him that this is illogical, erroneous. Illogical thinking is extraordinarily widespread; at no time has illogical thinking been so widespread as precisely in our time, in spite of the fact that people pride themselves so much on their logical thinking. Here is an example that may well seem somewhat crass, but it is typical of the habit of passing through experiences without interest or thought.

I was once traveling from Rostock to Berlin. Into my compartment entered two persons, a gentleman and a lady. I sat in one comer and wished only to observe. The gentleman was very soon behaving in a strange manner, though he was otherwise probably a well-educated person. He lay down, sprang up again in five minutes; then again he groaned pitiably. Since the lady thought he was ill, she was seized by pity, and very soon a conversation was in full course between them. She told him that she had clearly observed that he was ill, but she knew what it meant to be ill, for she was ill also. She said she had a basket with her in which she had everything that was curative for her. She said: ‘I can cure anything, for I have the remedy for everything. And just think what a misfortune has befallen me! I have come from the far interior of Russia all the way here to the Baltic Sea, in order to recuperate and to do something for my ailment, and, just as I arrive, I find that I have left at home one of my important remedies. Now I must turn back at once, and this hope also has been in vain.’

The gentleman then narrated his sufferings, and she gave him a remedy for each of his illnesses, and he promised to do everything, making notes about all. I think there were eleven different prescriptions. She then began to enumerate all of her illnesses one by one; and he began to show his knowledge of what would cure them: that for one ailment she could be helped in a certain sanatorium, and for another in another sanatorium. She, in turn, wrote down all the addresses and was only afraid that the pharmacies might be closed for Sunday when she arrived in Berlin. These two persons never for one moment noticed the strange contradiction that each knew only what might help the other one, but for himself and herself knew no means of help. This experience gave these two educated persons the possibility of bathing in a sea of nonsense that streamed forth from each of them.

Such things must be clearly seen when we demand that self-knowledge shall give insight. We must demand of self-knowledge that it shall develop coherence in thinking, but especially absorption in the matter in hand. All these things work together in the soul. Scrappy thinking has the inevitable result, even though only after a long time, of making the person morose, sullen, hypochondriacal about everything, and frequently we do not know where the causes of this are to be found. Insufficient cultivation of concentration and insight makes one sullen, morose, hypochondriacal. What is so absolutely essential to thinking seems to have nothing to do with it. All obstinacy, all self-seeking, have a destructive effect upon thinking. All characteristics connected with obstinacy and selfishness—such as ambition, vanity all these things that seem to tend in a very different direction make our thinking unsound, and act unfavourably upon our mood of soul. We must seek, therefore, to overcome obstinacy, self-seeking, egoism; and cultivate, on the contrary, a certain absorption in things and a certain self-sacrificing attitude toward other beings. Absorption, a self-sacrificing attitude, in regard to the most insignificant objects and occurrences have a favourable effect upon thinking and upon one's mood. In truth, self-seeking and egoism bring their own punishment because the self-seeking person becomes more and more discontented, complains more and more that he comes off badly. When anyone feels this way about himself, he ought to place himself under the law of karma and ask himself, when he is discontented: ‘What self-seeking has brought this discontent upon me?’

In just this way we can describe how we may develop and how injure the three parts of the soul life, and this is extraordinarily important. We see, therefore, that Spiritual Science lays deep hold upon our life, for true observation of spiritual principles may lead us to self-education, and this is of the most vital importance and will become of ever-increasing significance since the time in man's evolution has passed when human beings were led by the gods from above, from the higher worlds. In ever-increasing measure, men will have to do things for themselves, without being directed and led.

With regard to what the Masters have taught about our working our way upward to Christ, Who will appear even in this century on the astral plane, a greater understanding of this advance for humanity can be achieved only in this way: that the human being shall ever increasingly stimulate himself. Just as we explained to you yesterday that human beings gradually work their way upward to Christ, so must we gradually perfect in freedom our thinking, feeling, and will impulses. And this can be achieved only through self-mastery, self-observation. Just as in earlier times, in ancient clairvoyance, the impulses were given to men from above by the gods, so will man determine his own way in later times through the new clairvoyance. This is why Anthroposophy appears precisely in our time, so that mankind may learn to develop soul characteristics in the right way. In this way man learns to meet what the future will bring. Only in this way can we understand what must one day appear: that is, that those who are shrewd and immoral will be cast out and rendered harmless.

The characteristics mentioned are important for every human being. But they are of such a nature that they are especially important to those who are determined to strive to reach rapidly in rational ways those characteristics which are to become more and more necessary for humanity. For this reason it is the Leaders of human beings who strive to achieve this development in very special measure in themselves, because the highest attainments can be reached only by means of the highest attributes.

To the highest degree of all is this development carried through, for example, by that individuality who once ascended to the rank of a Bodhisattva, when the preceding Bodhisattva became a Buddha, and who has, since then, been incarnated once in nearly every century; who lived as Jeshu ben Pandira, herald of the Christ, a hundred years before Christ. Five thousand years are needed for his ascent to the rank of a Buddha, and this Buddha will then be the Maitreya Buddha. He will be a Bringer of the Good, because (as can be seen by those who are sufficiently clairvoyant) he succeeds, by most intense self-discipline, in developing to the utmost those powers which cause to emanate from him such magical moral forces as enable him to impart to souls through the word itself heart forces and moral impulses. We cannot as yet develop on the physical plane any words capable of doing this. Even the Maitreya Buddha could not do this at present—could not develop such magical words. Today only thoughts can be imparted by means of words.

How is he preparing himself? By developing to the highest possible degree those qualities which are called good. The Bodhisattva develops in the highest degree what we may describe as devotion, serenity in the presence of destiny, attentiveness to all occurrences in one's surroundings, devotion to all living beings, and insight. And, although many incarnations will be needed for the future Buddha, yet he devotes himself during his incarnations primarily to giving attention to what occurs even though what he now does is relatively little, since he is utterly devoted to the preparation for his future mission.

This will be achieved through the fact that a special law exists with regard to just this Bodhisattva. This law we shall understand if we take account of the possibility that a complete revolution in the soul's life may occur at a certain age.

The greatest of such transformations that ever occurred took place at the baptism by John. What occurred there was that the ego of Jesus, in the thirtieth year of His life, abandoned the flesh and another ego entered: the Ego of the Christ, the Leader of the Sun Beings.

A like transformation will be experienced by the future Maitreya Buddha. But he experiences such a revolution in his incarnations quite differently. The Bodhisattva patterns his life on that of Christ, and those who are initiated know that he manifests in every incarnation very special characteristics.

It will always be noted that, in the period between his thirtieth and thirty-third years, a mighty revolution occurs in his life. There will then be an interchange of souls, though not in so mighty a manner as in the case of Christ. The ‘ego’ which has until then given life to the body passes out at that time, and the Bodhisattva becomes, in a fundamental sense, altogether a different person from what he has been hitherto, even though the ego does not cease and is not replaced by another, as was true of the Christ.

This is what all occultists call attention to: that he cannot be recognised before this time, before this transformation. Up to this time—although he will be absorbed intensely in all things—his mission will not be especially conspicuous; and even though the revolution is certain to occur, no one can ever say what will then happen to him. The earlier period of youth is always utterly unlike that into which he is transformed between his thirtieth and thirty-third years.

Thus does he prepare for a great event. This will be as follows: The old ego passes out and another ego then enters. And this may be such an individuality as Moses, Abraham, Elijah. This ego will then be active for a certain time in this body; thus can that take place which must take place in order to prepare the Maitreya Buddha. For the rest of his life he lives with this ego which enters at that moment.

What then occurs is like a complete interchange. Indeed, what is needed for the recognition of the Bodhisattva can occur. And it is then known that, when he appears after 3,000 years, and has been elevated to the rank of Maitreya Buddha, his ‘ego’ will remain in him but will be permeated inwardly by still another individuality. And this will occur precisely in his thirty-third year, in the year in which, in the case of Christ, the Mystery of Golgotha occurred. And then will he come forth as the Teacher of the Good, as a great Teacher who will prepare the true teaching of Christ and the true wisdom of Christ in a manner entirely different from what is possible today.

Spiritual Science must prepare that which will one day take place upon our earth.

Now, it is possible for anyone in our time to cultivate those characteristics which are injurious to the emotional life, such as apathy, etc. But this results in a laxity in the emotions, a laxity in the inner soul life, and such a person will no longer be able to carry out his task in life, will no longer be able to fulfil it. For this reason everyone may consider it a special blessing if he can acquire for himself a knowledge of what is to occur in the future. Whoever has the opportunity today to devote himself to spirit knowledge, enjoys a gift of grace from karma.

For having a knowledge of these things gives a foundation for security, devotion, and peace in our souls, for serenity, confidence and hope in meeting what faces us in the coming millennia of the evolution of humanity. All who can know these things should consider this a special good fortune, something which evokes the highest powers of the human being, which can enkindle everything in his soul that seems at the point of being extinguished or is in a state of disharmony, or approaching destruction. Enthusiasm, fire, rapture become also health and happiness in outer life.

He who earnestly acquaints himself with these things, who can develop the necessary absorption in these things, will surely experience what they can bring to him in happiness and inner harmony. And, if anyone in our Society does not yet find this demonstrated in himself, he should for once accept such knowledge and say:

“If I have not yet felt this, the fault lies in me. It is my duty to steep myself in today's mysteries. It is my duty to feel that as a human being, I am one link in a chain which has to stretch from the beginning to the end of evolution, in which are linked together all human beings, individualities, Bodhisattvas, Buddhas, Christ. I must say to myself: ‘To feel that I am a link in it is to be conscious of my true worth as a human being.’ This I must sense; this I must feel.”

Those of you who have been attending these group lectures for years will perhaps have noticed that the themes have not been haphazardly chosen but have a certain continuity. In the course of each winter, too, the lectures have always had a certain inner connection, even if, on the surface, this has not been immediately apparent. Therefore it will obviously be of the utmost importance to follow up the various courses that are being held here alongside the actual group evenings, and which are intended for the purpose of bringing newer members up to the level, as it were, of these group lectures; for various things said here cannot be immediately understood by every newcomer. But there is something else we should note as well, which will gradually have to be taken into consideration in the various groups of our German section. As there is a certain inner thread in the lectures, it is incumbent upon men to form each lecture so that it is part of a whole. Therefore it is not possible to say the things that can be presented to advanced participants in that kind of single lecture in such a way that they are equally suitable for newcomers. We could speak about the same theme in a very elementary way, of course, but that would not do in face of the progressive path we are planning to take in the anthroposophical life of this particular group. This again is connected with the fact that the further we progress the more we can anticipate in the way of wide-spread lecture publications and reporting of lectures from one group to another. For with regard to these lectures I give in the groups it is becoming less and less immaterial whether you hear the one on one Monday and the next the following Monday. It may not be immediately apparent to the audience why the one lecture succeeds the other, yet it is important nevertheless; and when you lend lectures to one another you cannot take this into account at all. One lecture might get read before the other, and then it unavoidably gets misunderstood and causes confusion. I want to make a special point of this, as it is an essential part of our anthroposophical life. Even the inserting of a phrase here or there, or the over or under emphasising of a word depends on the whole development of the life of the group. Only when the publication of the lectures can be strictly supervised so that nothing is published unless it has been submitted to me, can any good come of this duplicating and publishing of lectures.

This is also a kind of introduction to the lectures about to be held in this group. There will be a certain inner connection in the course of this winter's lectures and all the preparatory material will eventually be directed towards a definite culmination with which the course will then close. Last week's lecture was a small beginning, and today's lecture will be a kind of continuation. But it will not continue like a newspaper serial, where the thirty-eighth installment follows on after the thirty-seventh. There will be an inner connection, even though the subject matter will appear to differ, and the connection will consist in the fact that the whole series will culminate in the final lectures. So, with these concluding lectures in view, we will start today by sketching the nature of illnesses, and next Monday we will talk about the origin, historic importance and meaning of the “Ten Commandments”. These could well appear to have nothing in common; however, you will eventually see that it all has an inner connection, and that these lectures should not be taken as separate ones, as is often the case with those given for a wider public.

We would like to speak today about the nature of illness from the point of view of spiritual science. As a rule people are not concerned about illness, or one or another type of illness at least, until they themselves fall sick with it, and even then their interest does not go much beyond the cure. That is, they are only concerned about their recovery. How this cure is effected is sometimes a matter of complete indifference, and the pleasantest thing is not to have any further responsibility for the “how”. Most of our contemporaries content themselves with the thought that the people who carry out the job have been appointed to do so by the authorities. In our time there exists in this sphere a much more rabid belief in authority than has ever existed in the religious sphere. The papacy of medicine, irrespective of its various forms, still makes itself felt with great intensity and will do so to an even greater extent in the future. Laymen are in no way to blame for the fact that this can and will be like this. For they do not think about these matters or care in the least about them unless it affects them personally and they suffer from an acute case that requires treatment. Thus a large section of the population calmly looks on whilst the papacy of medicine assumes greater and greater dimensions and insinuates itself into things in all manner of ways, like the way it is now speaking out and interfering so horribly in the education of children and the life of the schools, and claiming its right to a particular therapy. People do not care about the deeper significance that is actually behind all this. They look on whilst one or another law is instituted. People do not want to have any insight into these matters. On the other hand there will always be people who are personally affected and cannot manage with ordinary materialistic medicine, the basis of which does not concern them, but only the fact of whether they can be cured or not, and then they will apply to the people who work out of occultism—and there again they only care about whether they can be cured or not. But they do not care whether public life as a whole, with its methods and its way of understanding things, completely undermines a deeper method arising out of the spirit. Who cares whether the public prevents any cures being effected in the method based on occultism, or cares whether the one who applies the method is put in prison? These things are not taken seriously enough except when people are personally affected. However it is just the task of a really spiritual movement to awaken a consciousness of the fact that there has to be more than an egoistic desire for recovery; in fact there has to be knowledge of the deeper foundations in these matters, and this knowledge has to be made known.

In our age of materialism it appears to anyone who can see to the bottom of these matters as only too obvious why just the theory of illness in particular comes under the strongest influence of materialistic thinking. However, if we follow this or that slogan, or give special credit to this or that method, merely criticising what is trimmed with materialistic theories, despite the fact that it arises out of a scientific basis and is useful in many respects, we shall be making just as much of a mistake as if we were to go to the other extreme and put everything under the heading of psychological cures and suchlike, and fall victim in this way to all manner of one-sidedness. Present-day mankind must, above all, realise more and more that man is a complicated being and that everything to do with man is connected with this complexity of his being. If there is a kind of science holding the opinion that man consists merely of a physical body, it cannot possibly work beneficially with the healthy or the sick human being. For health and sickness, have a relationship to man as a whole and not to one part of him only, namely the physical body.

Nor must the matter be taken superficially. You can find plenty of doctors nowadays, properly recognised members of the medical profession, who would never admit to being sworn materialists; they profess to one or another religious faith, and they would staunchly deny the accusation of being materialistic. But this is not the point. Life does not depend on what a man says or believes. That is his personal concern. To be effective it is necessary to know how to apply and make valuable use in life of those facts that are not limited to the sense world but have an existence in the spiritual world. So that however pious a doctor is and however many ideas he has regarding this or the other spiritual world, if he nevertheless works according to the rules that arise entirely out of our materialistic world conception, that is, he treats people as though they only had a body, then however spiritually minded he believes himself to be, he is nevertheless a materialist. For it does not depend on what a person says or believes but on his ability to set in living motion the forces behind the external world of the senses. Nor is it sufficient for anthroposophy to spread the knowledge of man's fourfold nature and for everybody to go repeating that man consists of a physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego, even if people can define and describe them in a certain way. The essential thing is not just to know this, but to understand more and more clearly the living interplay of these members of man's being and the part the physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego play in the healthy and in the sick human being and what their interrelationship implies. Unless you make it your business to know what spiritual science can tell you about the nature of the fourth member of man's being, the ego, then however much you study anatomy and physiology you would not know anything about the nature of blood. That would be quite impossible. And you would never be able to say anything of any value about the illnesses connected with the nature of the blood. For the blood is the expression of the ego nature of man. And if Goethe's words in Faust: “Blood is a very special fluid” [see the lecture: Occult Significance of the Blood, e.Ed] are still quoted today, they do in fact say a very great deal. Present-day science has no inkling of the fact that scientists ought to treat blood, even physical blood, in an entirely different manner from any other organ of man's physical body, because these other organs are the expression of entirely different things. If the glands are the expression, the physical counterpart, of the etheric body, then even physically we have to look for something quite different in the composition of a gland, be it liver or spleen, than we have to look for in the blood that is the expression of a much higher member of man's being, namely the ego. And scientific methods must be guided by this if they are to show us how to work with these things. Now I want to say something which will really only be understood by advanced anthroposophists, yet it is important that it is said.

A materialistically-minded scholar of today takes it as a matter of course that when he makes a prick in the body blood will flow out that can be examined in all the known ways. And blood is described according to the method of investigating its chemical composition in exactly the same way as is done with any other substance, such as an acid. One thing, however, is left out of account, although, needless to say, it is not only bound to be unknown to materialistic science, but it is sure to be considered sheer folly and madness, and yet it is true: the blood flowing in the arteries, and sustaining the living body, is not what flows out when I make the prick and take out a drop. For the moment blood comes out of the body it changes to such an extent that we have to admit it is something quite different; and what flows out as coagulating blood, however fresh it is, is no proof of the living essence within the organism. Blood is the expression of the ego, a member of the human being that is at a high level. Even as physical substance blood is something that you cannot examine physically in its totality at all, because when you are able to see it, it is no longer the blood it was when it flowed in the body. It cannot be looked at physically, for the moment it is exposed to view and can be examined by some method similar to X-ray, you are no longer examining blood but something that is the external image of blood on the physical plane. These things will only gradually be understood. There have always been scientists in the world working out of occultism who have said this, but they have been called things like madmen or philosophers.

Everything to do with man's health or sickness really is bound up with man's manifold nature, with the complicity of his being; hence it is only through a knowledge of man arising out of spiritual science that we can arrive at a conception of man in health and in sickness. There are certain ailments in man's organism which can only be understood when we realise their connection with the nature of the ego, and these ailments also appear in a way—but in a limited way—in the expression of the ego, the blood. Then there are certain ailments in man's organism that point to an illness of the astral body and which therefore affect the external expression of the astral body, the nervous system. Now whilst mentioning this second case I shall have to ask you to be somewhat aware of the subtlety of thought necessary here. When man's astral body has an irregularity that comes to expression in the nervous system, the external image of the astral body, the first thing we notice physically is a certain disability in the functioning of the nervous system. Now when the nervous system cannot do its job in a certain area all kind of symptoms can result, affecting the stomach, head or heart. However, an illness that shows symptoms in the stomach does not necessarily point to a disability of the nervous system in a certain area and originate therefore in the astral body, it can come from something entirely different.

Those types of illnesses connected with the ego itself and therefore also connected with its external expression, the blood, appear as a rule—but only as a rule, for things are not so clear cut in the world, even though you can draw clear lines when you want to make observations—these illnesses appear as chronic illnesses. Various other disturbances appearing to begin with are usually symptoms. One or another symptom may appear, which nevertheless originates in a disturbance in the blood, and that has its origin in an irregularity of that part of the human being that we call the bearer of the ego. I could speak to you for hours about the types of illness that are chronic and which originate from the physical point of view in the blood and from the spiritual point of view in the ego. Those are chiefly the illnesses that are in the proper sense hereditary, and these are the illnesses that can only be understood by those people who look at the being of man from a spiritual point of view. Here and there are people who are chronically ill, who are, in other words, never really fit; they always have one or another thing the matter with them. To get to the bottom of this, we must ask ourselves what the actual basic character of the ego is like. What kind of a person is he? If you understand what life really is, then you will know that definite forms of chronic illnesses are connected with one or another basic soul character of the ego. Certain chronic illnesses will never occur in people who have a serious and dignified attitude to life but only in those of a frivolous nature. This can merely be an indication, to show the way these lectures are leading.

As you see, the first thing you have to ask yourself when somebody comes and says he has been suffering from this or that for years, is what kind of person is he fundamentally? You have to know what basic character type his ego is, otherwise you are bound to go wrong with ordinary medicine, unless you are lucky. The important thing in curing people of these, illnesses which are mainly the really hereditary ones, is to consider their whole surroundings, in so far as they can have a direct or indirect influence on the ego. When you have really got to know this aspect of a person, you may have to advise that he is sent to another natural surrounding, perhaps for the winter, if possible; or, if he has a certain job, to change it and encounter a different aspect of life. The essential thing will be to try to find the setting that will have just the right effect on the character of the ego. To find the right cure, you need, in particular, a wide experience of life, so that you can enter into the person's character and can say: For this person to recover, he must change his job. It is a matter of pinpointing what is necessary from the point of view of his soul nature. Sometimes, perhaps, just in this sphere, no recovery can be achieved at all, because it is impossible to effect a change; in many instances it can be effected, however, if people only know of it. A lot can be done for some people, for example, if they simply live in the mountains instead of the lowlands. These are the things that apply to the kind of illnesses that appear externally as chronic illnesses, and that are connected physically with the blood and spiritually with the ego.

Now we come to those illnesses that have their spiritual origin mainly in irregularities of the astral body and that appear in certain disabilities of the nervous system in one or another direction. Now a large part of the common acute illnesses are connected with what we have just mentioned, in fact most of them. For it is sheer superstition to believe that when someone has a stomach or heart complaint or even a clearly perceptible irregularity somewhere, the right treatment is to deal directly with the symptom. The essential thing could be that the symptom is there because the nervous system is incapable of functioning. Thus the heart can be affected simply because the nervous system has become incapable of functioning in the area where it ought to support the movement of the heart. It is quite unnecessary to maltreat the heart or, as the case may be, the stomach, for they may, in principle, have nothing directly the matter with them, for it is only the nerves that provide for them which are incapable of carrying out their job. If in a case like this the stomach complaint is treated with hydrochloric acid, it would be a mistake comparable to tinkering with an engine that is always running late because you think something is the matter with it—yet it still runs late. For you would find, on closer examination, that the engine-driver always gets drunk before driving; so you would do better to deal with the engine-driver, for the train would be punctual otherwise. So it could well be that with stomach complaints we have to treat the nerves that provide for the stomach instead of the stomach itself. In the domain of materialistic medicine, too, you may perhaps hear various remarks to this effect. But it is not just a matter of saying that with stomach symptoms you have to deal with the nerves first. This achieves nothing. You only achieve something when you know that the nerve is the expression of the astral body and seek for the causes in the irregularities to be found there. The question is, what is the main thing?

The first thing to consider in the treatment of this sort of complaint is diet and finding the right balance between what a person enjoys and what is good for him. What matters is his way of life, not with regard to externalities but regarding what has to be digested and worked through by him, and in this respect nobody can possibly know anything on the basis of purely materialistic science. We need to realise that everything around us in the wide world of the macrocosm has a relationship with our complicated inner world of the microcosm, and every kind of food there is has a definite connection with what is within our organism. We have heard often enough that man has passed through a long evolution, and how the whole of outside nature has been built up out of what has been thrust forth from man. Time and again in our studies we have gone back to the ancient Saturn period, where we found that there was nothing in existence apart from man, who, as it were, thrust forth the other kingdoms of nature: the plants, the animals, and so on. In that evolution man built up his organs in accordance with what they thrust forth. Even when the mineral kingdom was pushed out, certain specific inner organs arose. The heart could not have arisen if certain plants, minerals and mineral possibilities had not arisen externally in the course of time. Now what arose externally has a certain connection with what arose within. And only the person who knows of this connection can prescribe in individual cases how the macrocosmic element outside can be used in the microcosm, otherwise man will experience in a certain way that he is taking in something that is not right for him. So we have to turn to spiritual science for the actual basis of our judgment. It is always superficial to follow purely external laws taken from statistics or chemistry when prescribing dietary treatment. We need quite a different basis, for spiritual knowledge has to be active when we deal with man in health or sickness.

Then there are those types of illness, partly chronic and partly acute, which are connected with the human etheric body, and which therefore come to expression in man's glands. As a rule these illnesses have nothing to do with heredity, but a great deal to do with nationality and race. So that in the case of the illnesses originating in the etheric body and appearing as glandular complaints, we must always ask whether the illness is occurring in a Russian, an Italian, a Norwegian or a Frenchman. For these illnesses are connected with the national character and therefore take quite different forms. Thus for example a great mistake is being made in the field of medicine, for over the whole of Western Europe they have a completely wrong view of spinal consumption. Although they have the right judgment of it for the West [Europeans, they are quite wrong about it where the East European population is concerned, because it has quite a different origin there, as even these things still vary considerably nowadays. Now you will realise that the mixture of peoples affords us a certain survey. Only the person who can distinguish differences in human nature can make any judgment at all. These illnesses are simply treated externally today and lumped together with acute illnesses, whilst they really belong to quite a different field. Above all we must know that the human organs that come under the influence of the etheric body, and which can fall sick as a result of irregularities of the etheric body, have quite definite relationships with one another. There is for instance a certain relationship between a man's heart and his brain which can be described in a somewhat pictorial way by saying that this mutual relationship of the heart and the brain corresponds to the relationship of the sun and the moon—the heart being the sun and the brain the moon. So we have to know, if a disturbance occurs in the heart for instance, that in so far as this is rooted in the etheric body it is bound to have an effect on the brain. Just as when something happens on the sun, an eclipse for instance, the moon is bound to be affected. It is no different, for these things have a direct connection.

In occult medicine these things are also described by applying the images of the planets to the constellation of man's organs. Thus the heart is the sun, the brain the moon, the spleen saturn, the liver jupiter, the gall mars, the kidneys venus and the lungs mercury. If you study the mutual relationships of the planets you have an image of the mutual relationships of man's organs in so far as they are in the etheric body. The gall could not possibly ail—and this would show spiritually in the etheric body—without the illness having its effect on the other organs mentioned, in fact if the gall is described as mars, its effect would be similar to the effect of mars in our planetary system. You have to know the interconnections of the organs when there is an etheric illness, and yet these are principally those illnesses—and from this you will see that any form of one-sidedness must be avoided in the field of occultism—for which specific remedies are to be used. This is the place to use the remedies you find in the plants and minerals. For everything belonging to the plants and minerals has a profound importance for everything to do with the human etheric body. So when we know an illness has arisen in the etheric body, and it appears in a certain way in the glandular system, we must find the remedy that can correctly repair the complex of interconnections. Particularly with those illnesses where the first thing you have to look for is obviously whether they originate in the etheric body, and secondly whether they are connected with the national character, and all the organs are interconnected in a regular way, these illnesses are the first ones for which specific remedies can be used.

Now perhaps what you are imagining is that if it is necessary to send a person to another place, you will not be able to help him as a rule if he is tied to a job and cannot move. The psychological method is indeed always effective. What is called the psychological method works best of all when the Illness is actually in a person's ego being. Thus when a chronic illness of this type occurs, one that is in the blood, psychological remedies are justified. And if they are carried out in the right way, their effect on the ego will entirely compensate for what impinges on him from outside. Wherever you look you will be able to see the subtle connection between what a man experiences in his soul when he is habitually working behind a work bench and when he gets the chance to enjoy country air for a short while. The joy that lends wings to his soul can be called a psychological method in the widest sense. Then, if the therapist is carrying out his method properly, he can gradually exercise his own influence in place of this, and psychological methods have their strongest justification for this form of illness and should not be overlooked, because most of the illnesses came from an irregularity of the ego being of man.

Then we come to the illnesses arising out of irregularities of the astral body. Although purely psychological methods can be used, they certainly lose their greatest value, therefore they are seldom used for these. Dietary remedies apply here. The type of illness we described in third place are actually the first in which we are justified in using external medicines to assist the course of recovery. If we see man as the complicated being he is, the treatment of illnesses will also be a broad-minded one, and one-sidedness will be avoided.

The only illnesses left now are those that actually originate in the physical body itself, having to do with the physical body, and these are the actual infectious diseases. This is an important chapter and will be considered in greater detail in one of the coming lectures, after we have first of all dealt with the real origin of “Ten Commandments”. For you will see that this really has a connection. Today, therefore, I can only just mention that there is this fourth type of illness, and that a deeper understanding of these involves knowing the nature of everything connected with the human physical body. The basis of these illnesses is not physical but very much of a spiritual nature. When we have looked at the fourth type we shall still not have finished with all the important illnesses, for we shall see that human karma also plays in. That is a fifth category to be considered.

Let us say, then, that we shall gradually attain an understanding of the five different forms of human illness, that stem from the ego, the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body, and also from karmic causes. The sphere of medicine will not improve until this whole sphere includes a knowledge of the higher members of man's being. Up to now we have not had a medical practice that has really come to grips with what is at stake. Although, as with many another occult insight, these things have to be brought up to date and put in a modern form, you must realise that this wisdom is, in some respects, not new.

Medicine arose from spiritual knowledge and has become more and more materialistic. And perhaps in no other science can we see so clearly how materialism has overtaken mankind. In earlier times people were at least conscious of the fact that they had to have a knowledge of man's fourfold being in order to understand it. There have been instances of materialism before, of course, and even earlier than four hundred years ago clairvoyants observed materialistic thinking arising all around them in this sphere. Paracelsus, for instance, who is taken for a madman or dreamer and not understood at all today, drew full attention to the increasing materialism of medical science centred in Salerno, Montpellier, Paris and also certain parts of Germany. And just because of his responsible position in the world, Paracelsus felt compelled—as we do today—to draw attention to the difference between medicine based on spiritual knowledge or on materialism. Perhaps it is even more difficult nowadays to achieve anything with paracelsian thinking. For in those days the materialistic approach to medicine was not so rigidly opposed to the paracelsian approach as materialistic science is today to any insight into the real, spiritual nature of man. What Paracelsus said about this, therefore, still applies today, though its significance would be less readily recognised. If we look at the opinions held today by the people working at the dissecting benches and in laboratories, and at the way research is applied to the understanding of man in health and in sickness, we could, to a certain extent, react similarly to the way Paracelsus did. It might not be appropriate, though, to add a plea for understanding and forgiveness, too, perhaps, as Paracelsus did to his local contemporaries in the medical sphere—that is, with any real hope of forgiveness. For Paracelsus himself said he was not a man of good breeding, nor had he moved in high circles; he lacked grace and refinement, therefore he would be forgiven if what he said was not always couched in the best language. Whilst discoursing on the nature of the different illnesses Paracelsus said the following about the foreign and also the German medical doctors: “It is a bad business, all those foreign doctors, to name those in Montpellier, Salerno and Paris, who want to have all the credit and pour scorn on everybody else, yet they themselves know nothing and can do nothing, and it is common knowledge that it is nothing but talk and show. They are not ashamed of their enemas and purgatives, and rely on them even if the patient is dying. They boast about all the anatomy they know, and they cannot even see the tartar on people's teeth, let alone anything else. Fine doctors they are, even without spectacles on their noses. What kind of eyesight and anatomy have you got? You can do no earthly good with them, and see no further than your own noses. They work so hard, too, those German swindlers and thieves of doctors and newly-hatched fools, that when they have seen everything, they know less than they did before. So they choke in filth and corpses and afterwards put on holy airs—they ought to be thrown to the rabble!”

It has already been mentioned here that in the group meetings this winter we want to gather together all the threads as it were that will eventually link up to form a deeper understanding of the being of man and various other things connected with man's whole life and evolution that will lead us deeper and deeper into the secrets of the world. Today I would like to remind you of the group lecture the time before last (21st December 1908) and take our start from there. You will remember that we spoke of a certain rhythm existing in the four members of man's being. We want to start there today and find an answer to the question: How can a knowledge of these things help us understand in a deeper way both the necessity and the object of the anthroposophical movement?

Today we shall have to link up two things apparently very far removed from one another. You will remember that there are certain relationships between man's ego, astral body, etheric body and physical body. What there is to say about the fourth member, the ego, is best seen if we bear in mind the two alternating states of consciousness experienced by the ego in the course of the twenty-four hours of the day. One day with its twenty-four hours, during which the ego experiences day and night, sleeping and waking, will be seen as a kind of unity. So when we say that what the ego goes through in a day is based on the number one, we shall have to say that the number that corresponds in a similar way to our astral body is the number seven. Whereas the ego as it is today comes back as it were to its starting-point in twenty-four hours or a day, our astral body does the same thing in seven days. Let us go into this in greater detail.

Think of waking up in the morning; that is, you rise up out of the darkness of unconsciousness, as people say incorrectly in ordinary life, and the objects of the physical sense world appear round you again. You experience this in the morning and again twenty-four hours later, with the occasional exception. This is the regular course of events, and we can say that our ego returns to its starting-point after a day of twenty-four hours. If we look in the same way for the astral body's corresponding rhythm, we have to say that if the ordered regularity of the astral body is really there, then the astral body returns to the same point after seven days. So whilst the ego goes through its cycle in a day, the astral body goes considerably slower, and carries out its cycle in seven days. The cycle of the etheric body, on the other hand, takes four times seven days; after four times seven days it returns to the same point. And now please bear in mind what was said the time before last. With the physical body it is not as regular as with the astral and the etheric bodies. We can, however, establish a rough figure, and say that it goes through its cycle in about ten times twenty-eight days, and then returns to its starting-point. You know of course that a great difference exists and that the female etheric body is male and the male etheric body female. From this we can see that in a certain respect an irregularity is bound to occur in the rhythm of the etheric bodies. But on the whole the numbers 1:7:(4 x 7):(10 x 7 x 4) are the proportional figures that so to say specify the ‘speeds of rotation’ for the four members of man's being. This is of course speaking figuratively, for they are not really rotations but repetitions of the same conditions; rhythm ratios. A fortnight ago I had to point out that phenomena of daily life are comprehensible only when we know things like this that lie behind the sense perceptible world. And in a public lecture I also indicated a remarkable fact which cannot be denied by even the most materialistic scientist or doctor or be ranked among the ‘spectres of superstition’, because it is an indisputable fact. It is something that really ought to make people think, namely that in pneumonia a special phenomena occurs on the seventh day. A crisis arises, and the patient has to be pulled through this seventh day. The temperature suddenly falls, and if the patient cannot be brought through this crisis then in certain circumstances there is no recovery. This fact is known by most people, but as a rule the starting-point of the illness is not always correctly ascertained, and if you do not know which the first day is then as a rule you do not know which the seventh day is either. But the fact remains, so we have to ask why the temperature drops with pneumonia on the seventh day. Why does a special phenomenon occur at all on the seventh day?

Only a person who sees behind the scenes of existence, behind the physical sense phenomena into the spiritual world, knows of these rhythms, and why phenomena like a temperature arise. What actually is a temperature? Why does it occur? The temperature is not the illness. On the contrary, the temperature is something that the organism calls up to fight against the actual process of the illness. The temperature is the organism's defence against the illness. There is some damage in the organism, in the lungs, say. When the human being is healthy and all his inner activities are working harmoniously, these inner activities are bound to fall into disorder if one particular organ of the human body is upset. Then the whole organism attempts to pull itself together and develop the forces within itself to counterbalance the local upset. There is really a revolution going on in the whole organism, otherwise the organism would not need to gather its forces because there is no enemy to fight. The expressing of this massing of forces in the organism is the temperature.

Now the person who looks behind the scenes of existence knows that the various organs of the human body came into existence and developed at very different periods of human evolution. What from the spiritual scientific point of view is called ‘the study of the human body’ is the most complicated matter imaginable, for the human organism is extremely complex and its individual organs came into existence at quite different times. The rudimentary beginnings of these organs were developed further at a later stage of evolution. Everything in the physical organism is an expression or outcome of man's higher members, so that each physical organ expresses the higher Organisation of the higher members. What we call the lungs today have their origins in the astral body and are to a certain extent connected with it. We will eventually come to talk about what the lungs have to do with the astral body, how the very first, archetype basis of the lungs came into man on the predecessor of our Earth, ancient Moon, and how at that time the astral body was as it were planted into man by higher spiritual beings. But today I want you to look at the fact of the lungs being an expression of the astral body. The actual expression of the astral body is of course the nervous system. But man is complicated, and the development of the various parts always runs parallel. The construction of the lungs began at the same time as the development of the astral body and the incorporation of the present-day nervous system. This in a way includes the lungs in the rhythm of the astral body, that rhythm that is governed by the number seven. The phenomenon of a rising temperature is connected with certain functions of the etheric body. Something must be happening in the etheric body if a temperature runs a certain course. The temperature, then, is somehow within the rhythm of the etheric body. Whenever you have a temperature it has this rhythm, but in what way? We shall have to be clear about the following:

The etheric body, which completes its cycle in four times seven days, moves considerably slower than the astral body with its seven day rhythm. So if we relate the rhythmic course of the etheric body to that of the astral body, we can compare them with the hands of a clock. The clock's hour hand goes round once whilst the minute hand, in the same span of time, goes round twelve times. There you have the relationship of 1:12. Now suppose you look at the clock at noon, when the minute hand lies on top of the hour hand. The two hands coincide. Then the minute hand goes round one, and when it returns to the twelve it can no longer coincide with the hour hand, for this has meanwhile moved on to one. It will be roughly another five minutes before the two hands can coincide, so the minute hand does not point to the same place as the hour hand an hour later but after an hour and just over five minutes later. Now you have a similar relationship between the movement of the astral body and the movement of the etheric body. Imagine that your astral body, that is connected the whole time with the etheric body, were to be in a certain position in relation to the etheric body. Now the astral body begins to rotate. When after seven days it returns to its original position, it does not coincide again with the etheric body, for, after seven days, the etheric body has moved round a quarter of its cycle. So seven days later the position of the astral body does not coincide with the same position of the etheric body but with a position that is a quarter of the cycle behind the original one. Now imagine you have a case of the illness in question. A definite position of the astral body is connected with a definite position of the etheric body. And at this moment, with the co-operation of these two positions working together, the temperature appears, as a summons to fight the enemy. Seven days later the astral body covers an entirely different part of the etheric body. Now in the etheric body there must be not only the power to produce a temperature, for in that case, once it had really got going, it would never drop again; so seven days later this point of the etheric body that is now covered by the part of the astral body that produced the temperature seven days previously has the tendency to counteract the temperature and bring it down. If the patient's disorder has been overcome in seven days, then all is well. But if the disorder has not been overcome, and the astral body has not got the tendency now to push the illness out, the patient comes into the unfortunate position in which the etheric body has the tendency to bring the temperature down. It is important to pay good heed to these two points of coincidence. We could discover points like this for all kinds of phenomena in human life. And just through these rhythms, these mysterious inner workings, man's whole being could be understood. The etheric body really has a tendency that expresses itself in four times seven. In the case of other illnesses you will notice that the fourteenth day is of special importance; that is, two times seven. And we can definitely say that with certain phenomena the paroxysm has to be especially strong after four times seven; The point being that if the trouble decreases then, you can definitely hope for recovery. All these things are connected with rhythms of the kind we touched on three weeks ago and have dealt with in greater detail today. With such things as these, which appear difficult but which can nevertheless be understood, we can begin to penetrate a little way beneath the surface of the physical sense world. And we must penetrate further and further. Now let us enquire into the origin of such rhythms.

We have to look once again to the great cosmic relationships to find the origin of such rhythms. We have often drawn your attention to the fact that what we call the four members of man, physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego have evolved through Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth existence. If we look back to our old Moon we find that it also separated itself from the sun for a certain length of time, though a large part of what is the moon today was then part of the earth. But outside there was a sun, and when such heavenly bodies belong together then their forces, which are the expression of their beings, always have an influence on regulating the life of their creatures. The orbiting of a planet around its sun or of a satellite around its planet is by no means mere chance, nor is it unconnected with life, on the contrary it is regulated by those beings we have learnt about in the hierarchies of spirits. We have seen that it is absolutely untrue that the heavenly bodies rotate by themselves through mere lifeless forces. We have pointed out how grotesquely the modern physicist explains the Kant-Laplace theory by means of his experiment with the blob of fat. A cardboard disc is inserted through the floating blob of farm the direction of the equator and a needle stuck through it from above, and then the whole thing is rotated, whereupon small droplets break off from the large drop and rotate as well. Thus the experimenter shows how a planetary system in miniature arises, and physicists generally draw the conclusion that this is how the large planetary system must have arisen. Although it is usually good to forget yourself, in this particular case it is not. For the good man usually forgets that the miniature planetary system could not arise if he did not turn the handle. It is perfectly permissible to do such experiments, and they are very useful, but you should not forget the most important part. What an infinite number of people fall victim to such suggestions! They overlook the fact that the professor was doing it. There is no gigantic professor out yonder of course, it is the hierarchies of spiritual beings who regulate the rhythms of the heavenly bodies and actually bring about all the ordering of matter in the cosmos, so that the individual planetary bodies revolve around one another. And if we could go into the movements of the planetary spheres that form a correlated system—and a time will come for this—we should recognise the rhythms of our own human members. For the time being, however, we need only point to one thing.

Modern man, with his materialistic mode of thought, laughs at the idea that in earlier times certain conditions in man's life were organised in connection with the four quarters of the moon. Now just with the moon in particular there is in a wonderful way a cosmic reflection of the relationship existing between the astral and the etheric body. The moon moves round its cycle in four times seven days. Those are the positions of the etheric body, and these four times seven positions of the etheric body are exactly mirrored in the four quarters of the moon. It is by no means nonsense to look for a connection between the phenomenon of the rising temperature we described and just these quarters of the moon. Just think, there really is a different quarter of the moon at the end of seven days, just as there is another quarter of the etheric body and the astral body covers a different quarter of the etheric body. Originally the relationship of the human astral body to the etheric body was indeed regulated by spiritual beings bringing the moon into a corresponding orbiting of the earth. And you can see how the things are to a certain extent connected, in that even modern medicine reckons with an ancient heritage of rhythmic knowledge. As the rhythm of the body is ten times twenty-eight and the physical body is as it were back at the same point ten times twenty-eight days later, there are about ten times twenty-eight days between the conception of a human being and his birth, ten lunar months. All these things are connected with the regulating of the great cosmic relationships. Man as microcosm is a true image of the great world relationships, for he is created out of them.

Today we want to turn our thoughts to evolution in the middle of Atlantean times. That was a very important point for earth evolution. Before that time we can distinguish three races in human evolution; the Polarian, the Hyperborean and the Lemurian race. Then comes the Atlantean race. We are now in the fifth race and two races will follow us, so the Atlantean epoch lies right in the middle. The middle of Atlantean times is the most important point in earth evolution. If we were to go back before this time, even then we should have found an exact reflection of cosmic relationships in the relationships of external human life. It would have had a very bad effect on man if he had done the kind of things then that he does now. Nowadays man does not adjust himself very much to the cosmic situation. In town life things often have to be arranged in such a way that people are awake when they would otherwise be asleep and asleep when they ought to be awake. If anything like being awake at night or sleeping in the daytime had occurred in Lemurian times, and man had paid so little attention to the external phenomena that belong to certain inner processes, he would not have survived. Of course such a thing was quite impossible then, because it was a matter of course that man in his inner rhythm conformed with outer rhythm. Man lived as it were with the cycles of the sun and the moon and modeled the rhythm of his astral and etheric bodies on the cycle of sun and moon.

Let us come back to the clock. In a certain respect this also conforms to the great cosmic cycle, when the hour and minute hands coincide at twelve o'clock, that is because there is a certain constellation of the sun and stars. We set our clocks according to this and a clock is unreliable if the two hands do not coincide the following day as soon as this constellation of stars occurs again. In Berlin the clocks are set daily by electricity from the Enckeplatz observatory. So we may say that the movements or rhythms of the clock hands are set every day according to the rhythm of the cosmos. Our clock is correct if it synchronises with the central clock which, in its turn, synchronises with the cosmos. In ancient times man had no need of a clock, for he himself was a clock. His life's course, which he could clearly feel, absolutely conformed to cosmic relationships. Man really was a clock. And if he had not conformed to the cosmic situation, exactly the same thing would have happened to him as happens to a clock if its movement does not correspond to the outer situation: it goes wrong, and he would have gone wrong too. The inner rhythm had to correspond to the outer. And the essential part of man's evolution on earth is that since the middle of Atlantean times the outer situation does not absolutely coincide with the inner one. Something else has come about. Just imagine someone fancying that he could not bear the two hands of his watch coinciding at noon. Supposing he alters them to three o'clock, then when it is one o'clock for other people he makes it four p.m., at two o'clock he makes it 5 p.m., and so on. The inner working of his clock will not have changed, it will only have become displaced compared with the outer situation. Twenty-four hours later he will make it three o'clock again; that it, his clock's movement will not coincide with the cosmic situation but its inner rhythm will still agree with it, for it has only been displaced. Man's rhythm has also been displaced. Man would never have become an independent being if all his activity had remained in cosmic leading strings. The basis of his freedom lies in his having preserved his inner rhythm while severing himself from external rhythm. He has become like a clock that at the nodal points no longer coincides with cosmic occurrences yet is inwardly in harmony with them. Thus in the far distant past a human being could be conceived in one particular stellar constellation only and be born ten lunar months later. This coinciding of conception with a cosmic situation has ceased but the rhythm has remained, just as a clock keeps to its rhythm even though at midday you set it at three o'clock. Of course it is not man's circumstances only though, that have become displaced, the times have become displaced as well. Even if we disregard the last-mentioned cosmic displacement, something very special has occurred in man's inner life, in that he has lifted himself as it were out of the cosmic situation and is no longer a ‘clock’ in the proper sense of the word. He is more or less like a man who has put his clock forward three hours and then, forgetting how much he has put it forward, cannot sort himself out any more. This is what happened to man in earthly evolution once he was free of the situation in which he was like a clock in the cosmos. In certain respects he brought his astral body into disorder. The more the conditions of human life were regulated by the physical, the more the old rhythm was preserved; but the more his life conditions became influenced by thought, the greater the disorder that came into them. I would like to clarify this from another angle.

Men are not the only beings we know of, we also know of beings that are superior to present-day earth man. We know of the sons of life or the angels, and we know that they went through their human stage on ancient Moon. We know of the spirits of fire or the archangels, that went through their human stage on the old Sun condition of the earth, and we also know of the primeval forces, who went through their human stage on ancient Saturn. These beings are in advance of man in their cosmic evolution. If we were to study them today we would find that they are beings of a much more spiritual nature than man. Therefore they live in higher-worlds. But in regard to the particular things we have been mentioning today, their situation is totally different from man's. In spiritual matters they conform absolutely to the cosmic rhythm. An angel would not think in such a disordered way as man, for the simple reason that his thought process is regulated by the cosmic powers which guide him. It is right out of the question for a being like an angel not to think in harmony with the great spiritual processes of the cosmos. The laws of logic for the angels are written in the universal harmony. They need no textbooks. Man needs textbooks because he has brought his inner thought processes into disorder. He no longer knows how to take guidance from the great script of the stars. Angels know the course of the cosmos, and the course of their thought corresponds with the ordered rhythm. When man came on to the earth in his present form he fell out of this rhythm, hence the lack of order in his life of thought and feeling. Regularity still holds sway in the things man has less influence on in his astral and etheric bodies, but in the parts that have been given into man's hands, that is, his sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul disorder and lack of rhythm have entered in. It is one of the least important matters that in our cities man turns night into day. It is of far greater significance that in his inner life of thought man has torn himself away from the great universal rhythm. The way man thinks all day long is in a certain respect in contradiction to the life of the great universe.

Do not imagine though, that all this is being said to encourage a world conception that will bring man back into this kind of rhythm again. Man had to get away from the old rhythm; his progress depends on this: When certain prophets go around today preaching ‘Back to Nature’, they want to bring life into reverse instead of helping it forward. All this chatter about returning to nature contains no understanding of real evolution. When a movement today recommends people to eat certain foods only at certain times of the year because nature herself indicates this by making foods grow only at certain times, this is the abstract talk of the amateur. The essential thing about evolution is that man grows more and more independent of outer rhythm. But we must not lose the ground from under our feet. It is not the best thing for man's progress and salvation to return to the old rhythm and ask himself how he should live in harmony with the four quarters of the moon. For it was essential in olden times for man to be like an impress of the cosmos. But it is important too that man should not believe he can live without rhythm. Just as his inner life was formed from outside inwards he must now create rhythm from inside outwards. That is the essential thing. His inner life must become rhythmic. Just as rhythm created the cosmos, man has to permeate himself with a new rhythm if he wants to share in the creating of a new cosmos. It is characteristic of our age that it has lost the old, external rhythm and has not yet attained a new inner one. Man has outgrown nature—if we call the outer expression of spirit ‘nature’—but has not yet grown into the spirit. He is still floundering today between nature and spirit. This is just what is characteristic of our time. This floundering between nature and spirit reached its climax in the second third of the nineteenth century. Consequently the beings who know and interpret the signs of the times had to ask themselves at that time: What can be done so that man does not lose all trace of rhythm but acquires an inner rhythm?

What you can see today as the characteristic of mental life is its chaotic nature. Today, when you see something that has been thought out, the first thing that is bound to strike you is its chaotic nature, its inner lack of order. This is the case in almost every sphere. Only the spheres that still possess good old traditions have something of the old order left. In new spheres man has first of all to create a new order. That is why men can see facts today, like the fall in temperature on the seventh day of pneumonia, but their explanation of them is an absolute chaos of thoughts. When the human being thinks about it, then—because he does not think in an ordered way—he piles up a medley of thoughts around the fact. All our sciences take an external fact of the world and stir up a mass of thoughts about it with no inner order, because man has gone astray in a kind of mental abyss. He has no guiding principles of thought today, no inner thought rhythm, and humanity would become completely decadent were they not to acquire an inner rhythm. Look at spiritual science from this point of view.

You will see the element you are in when you begin to study spiritual science. To begin with you hear—and gradually understand—that man has four members of his being: physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego. And then you hear that work is done by the ego, and the astral body is changed into manas or spirit-self, the etheric body into buddhi or life-spirit and the principle of physical man into spirit-man or atma. Now just think how much ground we have covered with this basic formula of spiritual science. Think of the many themes that were really fundamental themes, and how we had to build up our whole thought structure time and again out of this basic scheme: physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego. You know, some people actually get tired of hearing these basic facts over and over again in certain public lectures. But this is and remains a reliable thread on which to string our thoughts: these four members of man's being and their inter-working; and then on a higher level, the transformation of the three lower members: the third into the fifth, the second into the sixth and the first into the seventh member of our being. If you count all the members of man's being that we know of physical body, etheric body, astral body, ego, spirit-self, life-spirit and spirit-man, you have seven. And if you count those that form the foundation of these, namely the physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego, you have four. And you are reproducing in thought the macrocosmic rhythm of 7:4 and 4:7 when you follow this train of thought. You are producing the outer, macrocosmic rhythm again from out of yourself You are repeating the rhythm that was once there macrocosmically in the universe and bringing it to birth again. You are laying down the plan or basis for your system of thought, as once the gods laid down the plan for the wisdom of the world. When we bring the inner rhythm of number to life in us again in this way, then out of the chaos of thought life a cosmos of thought is developed out of the innermost being of the soul. Men have freed themselves from external rhythm. By means of what is truly a science of the spirit we return to rhythm again, creating a cosmic structure from within outwards that is inwardly rhythmic. And if we turn to the cosmos and look at the earth's past, at Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth, we find four, then the Moon in spiritualised form at the fifth stage as Jupiter, the Sun at the sixth stage as Venus, and ancient Saturn at the seventh stage as Vulcan. Thus in Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan our evolutionary phases add up to seven. Our physical body as it is today, has developed through the number four, through Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth. In the future it will gradually become completely transformed and spiritualised. So that here too, when we look at the past we have the number four, and when we look to the future the number three: again there is 4:3, or if we include the past in the whole of evolution, 4:7.

We are still only at the beginning of our spiritual scientific activity, even if we have been working at it for many years. Today we could only point out what men meant by the ‘inner number’ at the root of all phenomena. And we see that in order to gain freedom man had to fall away from the original rhythm. But he has to rediscover within himself the laws with which to regulate the ‘clock’, his astral body. And the great regulator is spiritual science, because it is in harmony with the great laws of the cosmos beheld by the seer. The future as created by man will have the same great numerical relationships as the cosmos had in the past, but on a higher level. Therefore men have to bring the future to birth out of number, like the gods created the cosmos out of number.

We can see how spiritual science is connected with the course of the macrocosm. When we grasp what is there in the spiritual world behind man, the number four and the number seven, we shall understand why we must look to the spiritual world to find the impulse to carry forward what we know to be the evolutionary course of humanity. And we shall understand why just in an age when men have reached the greatest chaos in their inner life of thought, feeling and will those individualities who have to interpret the signs of the times had to draw attention to the kind of wisdom that enables man to create his soul life in a regulated way from within outwards. We shall learn to think with inner rhythm in a way that is necessary for the future, when we think in accordance with these basic relationships. And man will take into himself more and more from the world of his origins. At present he is acquiring what we can see to be the ground plan of the cosmos. He will go further and feel himself filled with certain fundamental forces and ultimately with fundamental beings.

All this is just in its beginnings today. And we appreciate the importance and world significance of the anthroposophical mission when we regard it not as an arbitrary act of this or that individual, but rather set about understanding it with all the inner force of our very existence. Then we can reach the point of being able to say that it is not a matter of choice whether we take up the anthroposophical mission or not, for if we want to understand our times we must recognise and fill ourselves with the thoughts of the divine-spiritual worlds which are the basis of anthroposophy. And then we must let them flow out of us again into the world, so that our actions and our being acquire, in place of chaos, the stature of a cosmos, like the cosmos out of which we were born.

This lecture is from the lecture series entitled, Answers to Universal Questions and Life Questions through Anthroposophy. It is lecture 9 of 19 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at various cities throughout Austria and Germany in the years 1908–1909.

As a result of a wish from your chairperson we shall speak today about a theme which sets certain presuppositions to the audience, and is, in a certain sense, aimed at advanced Anthroposophists. We will have the opportunity in the following open lectures to work from the basics of the anthroposophical world view with something which formerly has not been taken into account much, something which perhaps in internal lectures had dared give a solution, and which will at least be partly experienced in an open lecture like this. When we speak about advanced Anthroposophists, don't suppose, my dear friends, it means to have advanced in the spiritual scientific fields, that you have become learned in theory. It doesn't really come to that. What it involves is less of a theoretic world created in the soul, but rather a certain development of our world of impressions, our feeling-world, a certain inclination, we could say, which we gradually acquire when we repeatedly work within anthroposophic circles.

Whoever has worked for many years within these circles, or are inwardly active in such circles, will think back to a time when they had, for the first time, heard something about the anthroposophic occult science of man, and they will remember that some of the first communications not only appeared improbable, but perhaps confused and fantastic—perhaps even worse could be said about them. However, with the passing time you may get used to certain impressions as the anthroposophic world view comes ever closer, and the world of feeling makes it possible to share things which are revealed from Higher Worlds. These revelations become absorbed just like facts on the physical place, taking place in the physical world, they too are taken in. Whatever one can call proof of spiritual statements is not to be sought in the same fields as are the proofs for scientific certainties. With such a line of argument one can't do much. The line of argument which is available for experiences in the anthroposophic world view lies in the complete intimate transformation as experienced within the soul life. Long before we can happily penetrate to perceiving the spiritual worlds through the application of spiritual scientific or occult methods, we can build in ourselves a presentiment, a premonition out of the correctness, from deep legitimacy, that which is shared regarding Higher Worlds. Much of what we can, from an imagination regarding the way we can penetrate the Higher Worlds, how we can with our own spiritual sense organs perceive the Higher Worlds will be brought out in our next lecture: “What is self knowledge?” Today we want to reveal single observations about these Higher Worlds and cultivate the connection between these worlds and our physical world.

You all know by now through anthroposophical work that two other worlds exist beside our own; the so-called astral and devachanic worlds, called, as far as they are known in religion, as the heavenly world, the actual spiritual world. You are familiar with these worlds as areas through which we journey between death and a new birth. You know that after the astral world has been passed through during Kamaloka, you enter the pure spiritual world, Devachan, where you are called again to a new birth, in order to descend again after a certain time into a new earthly life, a life in the physical world.

It's not enough to only imagine the astral and devachanic worlds as distinct areas through which we move between death and a new birth, because these worlds continuously surround us. We live continuously not only in the physical world but also in the astral or soul-world, surrounding us with their beings and truth. We can describe this astral or soul-world as penetrating our physical world just like a sponge is penetrated by water. The only difference between both these worlds as opposed to our physical world is this: our physical world is perceived through the tools of our body, and for us this perception of the Higher Worlds is withdrawn because we haven't developed the organs needed for their perception. As real as they are within our world, just so real their activities play continuously into our world. Much taking place in the physical world can be more easily explained if the spiritual astral and devachanic worlds, behind it all, are made aware regarding beings and realities existing in our surroundings, beings which can't be grasped and understood by our senses. The astral world contains not only realities which play supersensibly into our environment; it contains beings who, if we dare say so, are incorporated in the substance of their world just as we, humans, self conscious beings, are here in the physical world bound to flesh and blood. The distinction of these described beings is namely that they don't possess solid physical bodies which may be seen by our physical eyes. Their major mass is the astral body.

Now we need to immediately make a note when we speak about these beings who have as their lowest member of their organism the astral body, that they are perceptible to whoever has opened their clairvoyant awareness and can also see these beings. They are differentiated substantially from those existing beings on our physical plane which belong to the various kingdoms of nature. We are surrounded by minerals, plants, animals and people. When we determine a single characteristic of all these different kingdoms we conclude that their form is firm, established. When you see a person today, you may well recognize them tomorrow, or even after a year, because their outer form has remained constant. Similarly with the animal, the plant or mineral. This is not at all the situation with the beings which are incorporated on the astral plane. These possess a continuously changing form, a shape which in many of them, from one moment to the next become another, because the form which can be observed in the astral plane is the exact expression of the inner soul experiences and soul activity of these beings.

Just think about yourself, how you may observe your soul in the morning just after you have received a cheerful letter and how the joyful message filled your soul with delight and pleasure and how this feeling lived in the soul. Then think how your soul will express itself in the direct contrary situation, how different the image will be when you receive news of a death in the afternoon, or you are shaken in rage and fear. Consider how your outer expression changes each time as a result of what took place in the soul, then you have an image of what happens on the astral plane. Hence the bewildering scurrying and continuously changing forms of the astral beings. Thus you have to imagine that the clairvoyant awareness, when it is turned away from perceiving the physical plane, is surrounded by the astral image world. Naturally everything that enfolds there can't be depicted; only single sketches can be given.

Life on the astral plane is far richer than on the physical plane. You can imagine light images in the astral world which don't cling to outer objects but flash with a definite form, one moment either light or less luminous, less radiant or misty, changing in every blink of the eye. They are nothing other than expressions for souls, we may call them, which live there on the astral plane. However these light bodies show not mere light and different colour images but also all other physically similar sense impressions, only these are not perceived with outer but with inner spiritual organs of the soul.

There exists a differentiation between the observation of a bright body on the astral plane and a colour or a bright body on the physical plane. In contrast, what meets light there, has an awareness—not a feeling, as if it is beyond that- yet has a sense: “You live in this”.—This is really quite difficult to imagine, because you have to think, that the very moment this clairvoyant awareness rises up in you, you feel something different, as if not only is the space filled with astral truths and beings, but it feels as if it is all growing larger and larger. It stretches your awareness with “This is me”—right over your skin. That is the essential part of clairvoyant consciousness. It senses, as when it spreads itself out into that which is perceived, creeping in, so that it lives within these light bodies and experiences warmth and cold, sensing taste as well.

All these experiences which you know firstly from the sense world and which are integrated in the outer limited body, stream and flash through the realm—and then something else appears. Here in the physical world we have naturally the feeling that all that belongs to a physical being is actually spatially linked to that being. It comes as an extraordinary surprise when some physical being walks into a space and behind him follows another and someone insists the two belong together although no link exists between them. You would insist they are separate beings, because we never consider spatially separate beings as a single being. We would take them as separate beings; because we will never consider separate bodies in the physical world as one being. In the astral world it is throughout applicable that things which in no way connect spatially, comprise one being, and so you have no tool which can help you pin-point a single being when you are within, and has the consciousness, that two quite outstanding members belong to a single being. Confusing it is also, that clairvoyant consciousness is not always the same and that which belong together, can't always be glimpsed again. Yes, it can go further: you could see a single being, which appears to you as a row of separate spheres, here a shining sphere, and far from this a second, then a third, fourth and so on. In conclusion, the astral place basically looks different from here.

Yet there is something which is linked to us and this connection expresses simultaneously all the similarities of the astral world working in us; this is our own astral body. This is the third member of our being, which you experience as having a definite self-contained shape. During our life between birth and death we can definitely see the essential astral body resembling a kind of oval cloud, within which the physical and astral bodies are embedded. A kind of egg shape is this body, the outer boundary existing in a constant surging movement, so that some kind of regularity of form is out of the question. The astral body only appears in a kind of firm, steady form as long as it is contained within the physical body. As long as this is the case, it retains this form. Already at night, when the astral body withdraws, it begins to adapt itself to the soul body. Then you can see how a human being, who lives with evil feelings during the day, appear in quite another form compared with someone who has lived with noble feelings during the day. In general the form of the astral body is steady at night, while the forces of the physical and etheric bodies work very strongly through the night, and the astral body retains its form essentially, but only essentially.

However, when we die, after the end of our physical life, we relinquish our physical body, as well as push away that part of our etheric body which is to be given up, then the astral body takes on a variable form right through the Kamaloka time. This body completely matches its form and image to the soul life, hence a person who has lost a body which had been filled with hateful feelings shows a withered form while a person who died with beautiful feelings, show a sympathetic form as an astral body. It can go so far that people who are totally taken with sensory desires and who can't lift themselves into an exchange towards noble feelings and impulses, after their death for a while really take on the forms of all kinds of grotesque animals—not those living on the physical plane but those who only remind us of animals.

Whoever has had experiences on the astral plane and is able to follow which forms are offered to the clairvoyant consciousness, knows which image speaks nobly and which doesn't contain noble content; they can experience and observe everything from these images. I have already mentioned that these human astral bodies cannot appear in absolute definite inner and outer shape, only within certain boundaries is this the case. Also already in physical life, actually in every part of the body which appear after falling asleep, the astral body matches that which the soul experiences. From here certain images and forms taken up by the astral body can be seen according to what is happening to a person and what he or she is living through.

With regard to some things which the soul may experience, I would like to indicate something to you, namely, how the astral body may be observed. Take for example a person who is a gossip, inquisitive or tend towards temper outbursts or, let's say, similar bad habits. These bad habits will express themselves in a distinct manner through the astral body. If someone is for instance plagued by fury, annoyance and especially if the person is irascible, then we see tuberous formations, thickenings expressed in the astral body. The person becomes polluted. From these thickenings exude evil looking snakelike protuberances, distinguishable in colouring and other substances. Particularly with irascible people this can easily be seen. When a person is talkative, tend to gossip, it appears in the astral body as all kinds of thickenings, which can be characterized by saying the thickenings will exercise pressure in all directions in the astral body. When a person is inquisitive then it shows in the astral body in such a way that folds are created, sections become slack and hang as it were against one another in parts; it shows a general slackness, it seems as if these astral bodies in a certain way participate in the general characteristics of the astral world, matching in form its inner soul experiences.

We discover, on researching the astral world in general, certain beings of which we, who only know the physical, actually can have no inkling. In the physical world these beings appear in quite a different way, than what we have perceived about them before. For example, we find quite extraordinary beings in the group souls of animals. The human being, as he approaches us here, has an individual soul which comes to meet us—a soul for each person, an Ego-Being. The animals don't have the same kind of I or Ego-Being. They have similarly shaped forms, all lions, tigers, all tortoises, which we call a mutual group soul. Just imagine that on the astral plane there is a single I-Being, simultaneously living in the physical animal. All the animals are imbedded in the I-Being, who has a definite personality on the astral plane, and there we can meet this personality, this group soul, just like meeting a person.

An example: take a migration of birds when they all start to move from the northern hemisphere towards the equator. Whoever doesn't consider this extraordinary wise migration superficially, will be amazed how many have what we note as intelligence in such a flight of birds. Various birds come from different regions, one from this, one from another: the danger exists that they land where they need to land. Ordinary physical awareness only sees the massive swarms. The clairvoyant consciousness however, sees the group soul, the action of the personalities who lead and link what is happening. Actually these are such astral personalities who direct and lead. These group souls are the ones we meet as inhabitants of the astral world. The diversity which rules in the group souls of the astral plane, this variegation is endlessly larger. Just to mention aside, the astral plane has space for everything, because there beings interpenetrate; because the law of the impenetrable is only valid on the physical plane. However, there we feel influences, good or bad, when we are penetrated and experience this in our inner life. They could thus go through one another; they can exist in one and the same place. There the law of interpenetration rules.

However, this is only a part of the astral inhabitants, surely one in which we can only fully, in the right sense, understand when we come to grips with it completely. Don't believe that someone already has a concept of a group soul with some or other animal form, how, shall we say, it is observable already in the way it is embedded in the astral world and how this group soul is led into his consciousness. This is not enough. Right here we are reproached vividly by that which is spatially separated but belongs together, so that we, for every animal group soul filled with wisdom and leading the whole, arrive at a counter image, a terrible counter image. Within this exists the animality to which we refer in the astral world, and find, on descending into that part of the astral world where ugliness and adversity rule, where every animal group has a light-form and an ugly form, that which had at one time been separated from the light-form of evil and ugliness, which had been at one time within them, part of them. From this you can see how the old pictures and artworks sprung from a higher knowledge. Today we recognise only that which lives as an individuality. Hence if we want to invoke something higher today, we can only grasp at fantasy. This was not always the case. In the past, most of mankind who worked artistically, had a clairvoyant consciousness or still a remnant of clairvoyance, and they depicted what they actually found in Higher Worlds. Thus they depicted what was known to them in Michael and the Dragon or Saint Georg with the Dragon in a wonderful representation of relationships which the clairvoyant finds as animal forms on the astral plane. The wise lifted them to a higher form, to tower far above the wisdom of people. However the wisdom is acquired through what has been thrown out of the astrality of such beings' ugly side. The ugly side you find in the adverse dragon. When the clairvoyant looks on the living form he sees everything as lively form organised by higher beings who are wise but do not know love. However these expressions of the light soul form can only be acquired through treading the evil qualities underfoot which are in the being's form. Human beings have acquired their current nature through good and bad still being mixed in their karma, while in the animal the moral distinctions of good and bad can't be applied. The concept of light filled being is with an upwards reach while connecting and lifting that which had fallen and had been conquered. Ancient art was mostly produced with meaningful symbols and created through nothing less than with a clairvoyant conscious consideration. They will only be comprehended once we have understood the astral archetypal images.

The plant world also presents something curious on the astral plane. When a clairvoyant considers a plant and how its roots worm their way in the earth and leaves and flower appear, he perceives the plant possessing a physical and ether body. The animal has the astral body in addition. Now the question may surface: do the plants not have any form of an astral body? It would be wrong to hope for this; there is nothing within the plant as there is within the animal. When the plant is looked at with clairvoyant consciousness, the upper part, where the flowers develop, appear as if dipped in an astral cloud, a bright cloud surrounding and wrapping this part of the plant where it blossoms and bears fruit. Thus astrality gradually sinks down over the plant and wraps part of it. The astral body of the plant is embedded in this astrality. What is peculiar is that when the spread of plants cover the earth, it is found that the astral bodies of the plants merge their boundaries and envelop the earth as if by a physical air of plant-astrality. If the plants only had an ether body they would only develop leaves and no flowers because the principle of the ether body is repetition. When a repetition is completed and a conclusion needs to be created, then an astral body must join in.

Likewise the human body may be considered—how the etheric and the astral co-operate. Contemplate how the vertebrae of the spine follow successively. Vertebra upon vertebra they are divided. As long as this happens it is mainly the etheric principle working. At the top, where the bony skull capsule appears, here the astral has the upper hand. The principle of repetition is the principle of the etheric, and the principle of conclusion is that of the astral. The plant would not come to a conclusion in its flower if it's etheric isn't sunk into the astral nature of the plant.

On researching the plant, how it grows through summer and bears fruit in autumn to eventually start wilting, or when the flower starts dying away, the astral withdraws upward from the plant. This is particularly beautiful to observe. While our physical consciousness may experience joy in the blossoms during spring, covering meadow after meadow, yet another joy can be experienced by the clairvoyant. In comparison, when the annual plants die down in autumn, it glows and flashes above it beings, the astral beings withdrawing from the plants, beings which had cared for the plants during summer. Here lies another fact which we discover in poetic images, which are incomprehensible when we can't research this with clairvoyant consciousness. Here we connect to the intimate fields of the astral consciousness. With folk in past times, where clairvoyants with such intimate knowledge were around, these insights existed in autumn. We find in the clairvoyant Indian folk art representations of wonderful phenomena, of a butterfly or a bird flying out of the flower's calyx. Against such an example we see how something of it arises in their art, from a basis of the clairvoyant consciousness since way back; either clairvoyant consciousness of the artist works into it, or inspiration from tradition.

An astral body thus also exists in the plant. An animal has a physical, ether and astral body. The Ego of the animal we find in the group soul. The astral body of the plant we noticed in the beings withdrawing from the wilting plant. Has the plant an Ego? Yes, the same exists for the plants as we called a Group Soul in the animal, only here the extraordinary exists, that the Plant-Ego directs itself towards a single place on earth, namely the centre of the earth. It is as if the earth is being radiated from all sides by the Group Ego of the plant, and therefore the plants grow towards the earth. This Ego however we can't see on the astral plane—here we find the animal group soul. Here we also find every double-being, as we see in the symbol of Michael and the Dragon. We also find what has been depicted, but the plant-Ego will be sought in vain on the astral plane. The actual plant soul, the plant-Ego is only found in the higher, the actual spiritual world, in the greatest, under layers of Devachan, in Rupa-Devachan. Here the plant soul and plant-Ego mingle, their actual centres so intermingled, that they unite in the centre of the earth. Now the question may arise: Surely the physical plane, the astral plane and devachanic plane are within one another, so while the clairvoyant is situated where physical man finds himself, how is one distinguishable from the other? The physical plane is there as long as we can see, hear and taste it and when we develop an inner capability, we can distinguish between the physical and astral worlds. There were such beings entering into our awareness who may not be observable through physical organs, here the astral plane starts. Where then begins the devachanic plane? Now there is the possibility to provide boundaries between the astral and devachanic plane, although they blur into one another; through this is created an outer and inner possibility to recognise the astral from the devachanic plane. The outer possibility is as follows: when you develop a clairvoyant consciousness, you should experience moments in life when you leave the physical worlds to a certain extent. This is already a higher degree of human development when you can so to say simultaneously glance at the physical, then penetrate the astral world, as for example the physical of the animal and the astral body of the animal. This can only be accomplished through specific levels of development, after we have gone through something else, namely that you don't see the physical world when you see the astral world.

This participation of the human being in the development of the astral world from the beginning shows in the following. The human being exists in a certain place. He hears all kinds of things, looks at objects, touches and tastes them. When the human being gradually lives into the astral world, these sensory perceptions start to withdraw further and further away, similar to a sound which moves ever further away until it disappears. Just so it is with sensory perceptions: the human being gradually becomes that which is being touched, not through direct experience but, he or she has a distinct feeling of their body being penetrated as the sensory object senses, stirs into the human body. The same is valid for the world of colour, the world of light: the human being expands, he or she lives into this light world. In this manner the sensory world withdraws from the human being and is replaced by appearances, as mentioned earlier. Next, what has to be observed is what the human being really must go through in the astral world, so to speak the entire perception of tone, of hearing, the world of sound which dissolves tone. This is not available in the astral world for quite a while. The human being must so to speak go through this abyss and live in a soundless world. However it is excellent that through this is found an abundance of impressions in him- or herself, namely a differentiated world of images. When the human being ascends in his development, he or she will meet something which appears as quite new, a spiritual counter-image linked to the world of tone. What is first learnt within the astral world as something new and appears as spiritual hearing. This is of course difficult to describe.

Take for example the following: you see a shining form. Another one approaches, comes closer and merges with it. A third comes, crosses the way and so on. Now, what is appearing before you is not merely seen clairvoyantly, but it evokes in your soul the most diverse feelings. Thus it can happen that these inner feelings tend towards an inclination, then towards reluctance, the most varied feelings appear when you penetrate the being, when you approach or withdraw from them. Thus the acquiring-clairvoyance soul lives into the astral plane cooperation and hence becomes glowing and penetrated by existing or contradictory feelings of a pure spiritual nature. Here spiritual music can be perceived. The moment this happens, you are already in the region of Devachan. Thus Devachan begins its presence from outside, where soundlessness begins to cease, partly a horrific toneless experience on the astral plane. The human being has no idea what it means to live in an endless toneless place where no sound exists but also shows that there is none to be found within. The feeling of hardship in the physical world is trivial compared to feelings in the soul when this impossibility is experienced, that something could sound out of this endless spread out realm. The possibility arises that through cooperation with the Beings and observing their harmony and disharmony, a world of tone is begun. That is Devachan, seen externally through its forms.

The transition from the astral world to Devachan as experienced through the soul can be illustrated in another way. In the physical world we are accompanied in our soul by our character type. One person may pass a picture and experience nothing while another will feel a world filled with bliss as he stands before the image. People pass one another, the one says of the other he could be the right one and sees soul peculiarities that they belong to one another, and experience an enlightening joy. Very soon no more of this will exist in the Higher Worlds. Here the human being demands with inner urgency the experiences of the world of feeling thus not enabling the passing by to have a somewhat cold or sober experience of the astral and devachanic planes, but rather particular experiences demanding dedication, a full penetration, while other experiences are repelled.

Thus if you are not thoroughly prepared it can become dangerous because you experience continuous changes under inwardly disturbing circumstances, inward tearing and as a result undermining your health. Step by step you will realize in which world you find yourself. While you are in the astral world, you will recognise principally two nuances of feeling expressed in a varied manner. The one, which appears most strongly when you enter the astral world directly after death, is the one we call Kamaloka. Here you have, so to speak, not yet freed your feelings from life in the physical and you desire and long for it. Take for example a gourmet, who longs for delicious food. After death and his transition to the astral world he still has desires but no longer the physical organs to satisfy them. Thus he greedily craves for that which only the tongue and palate can provide. As a result he experiences in his soul the most painful sensation, the feeling of deprivation. Deprivation is one of the principal sensations we have when we are in the astral world. Here you become aware, when you have developed your consciousness, not only particular painful feelings of deprivation like in those who have died, but also the feeling of a search for something. The feeling of deprivation will also overtake the clairvoyant when there is no other to balance out the weight. If you enter unprepared or not prepared in the right way for the astral plane, then this applies. Neither rest nor peace will the soul have; anxiety and restlessness shoves the soul from one side to another. To avoid this there is only one possibility: the formation of the opposing nuance of feeling, and in all secret schools this nuance is unanimous: it is renunciation. To prepare yourself for the right existence in the astral world, you need to know that everything, in some way or another, refers to renunciation. When you abstain from the slightest insignificance here, it is totally valid that you are, so to speak, laying a stepping stone in the astral world. The calm observation of the astral world is achieved through your own preparation regarding the feeling world of abstinence. While the feeling of the desire turns the astral world into one of pain and reluctance, the opposite happens through working with renunciation, because the images and beings of the astral world become ever clearer and more distinct to observation and thus you no longer sway between desire and denial. These are the nuances of feelings in the astral plane as long as the foregoing is active in the soul, while you are in the astral plane.

Now new experiences of feeling enter the soul. First of all, at the boundary where the soul crosses into the devachanic world, feelings of bliss and happiness ensue. Even when you enter Devachan in an unworthy manner, through some or other spell or through black magic before death allows this entry, you will soon swim in a sea of happiness in some higher or lower degree. Now you may say it is peculiar that even an unworthy entry of Devachan spoils you with blessedness. Indeed this is the case, but it has certain disadvantages, is the answer. This feeling of outer and inner blissfulness is in the devachanic planes inseparable from something else, namely the loss of self, the power of self consciousness, the inner Ego-force. We will dissolve into it if no other feeling nuance comes to the fore. This feeling is called, in occult science, the feeling of self sacrificing dedication, called the ability to sacrifice.

In the astral plane we find deprivation and renunciation; on the devachanic plane, blessedness and self-sacrifice. It is strange, yet true, that when someone on the devachanic plane doesn't have the feeling:—‘you must dedicate yourself to what surrounds you’—but only wants to enjoy the bliss with the Ego, then he or she will be dissolved by devachanic beings. When he or she however allows the penetrating feeling: ‘I want to offer myself, I will not dissolve into what I've acquired,’—then he or she will be shielded in Devachan from dissolving, passing away. The noblest feeling of love, creative love, must be the second feeling nuance in Devachan. This is something which can be understood in the manner it works in Devachan between death and a new birth. Through the fact that a person coming out of Kamaloka, who lived with deprivation and thus shortened the duration of his sojourn through learning renunciation, upon arrival in Devachan, must immediately begin to work towards his next incarnation. Slowly he builds up the archetypes of his next earthly life. How much better would he create these while experiencing a feeling of blessedness, really entering this bliss, having learnt to add the self sacrificing dedication of his own being to that which surrounds him. In the degree to which he offers himself through his soul, to this degree is the archetype created for his future personality. Should he be unable to do this, then he would either totally pass away or need an enormous length of time until he returns again to an earthly existence. So we see, so to speak, how the soul is formed externally—through transitions from the dumb, radiant astral world into the sounding devachanic world—by finding the boundary; more importantly though is how one lives in this other world within one's soul. Thus we have some indications of the relationships in the Higher Worlds, which one enters through the observation of the ancient Greek words of wisdom: “Know thyself!” Much can still be added, however only a portion of it can be given which is characteristically valid of the Higher Worlds. So we gradually live into that and through the experience, we also start to recognise the working of it into the physical world and hence this world becomes ever more transparent.