The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Let us consider a few facts connected with man and his relation to the universe in respect of body, soul and spirit. We have seen that in a certain way man’s experiences between death and a new birth, which were connected with the whole universe, enter his inner life during his earthly existence. We have seen that what we experience before birth or conception in the form of outer experiences, is afterwards contained within us, in our inner life. Let us now consider man’s relation to the universe from another aspect, namely that his experiences between birth and death go with him through the portal of death and become experiences of the new existence through which he passes between death and a new birth. In man we must distinguish what he has (I mean, during his earthly life), to begin with, as his inner life, and what separates from this as a kind of external life.

Inner Life: We may first indicate man’s feelings, the inner content of his feelings between birth and death. This constitutes his real inner life. What he feels in regard to the impressions left upon him by the external world, or in regard to his own inner experiences, his feelings of approval or reproach towards his actions, which are the expressions of his will, all this is something which man more or less settles with his own self during his earthly life. He may allow others to look into it, but the essential thing is the way in which man settles all this with his own self. His experiences in connection with perception are, as we already know from our preceding lectures, not real experiences, but they form a world of semblance which surrounds him. In reality, this world is neither inside nor outside; man participates in it and it becomes his inner world only because he develops thoughts and feelings connected with it and because it stimulates him to this or that action. His attitude towards it is essentially the result of capacities he brings along with him through birth. This attitude towards the external world, also his place in the world, the nation he belongs to by birth, etc., all this depends on his preceding earthly and spiritual life. Consequently it points backwards rather than forwards. But something else must be considered that connects us with the external world. What is rooted in our will and passes over into our actions becomes part of the external world. Everything taking place through our actions brings about a change in the external world. The least thing we do transforms the external world.

We may now say: The external world which we ourselves prepare through our actions is rooted in our will. It is related to us in the same way in which the events during sleep are related to us. With our consciousness, with our ordinary consciousness, we are just as unable to look into the depths of our volitional world, as into the conditions which exist during sleep.

All that really takes place in the sphere of the will thus remains inaccessible to our consciousness. I have often explained this as follows: The whole volitional process which takes place when we move an arm or a hand, the forces which develop in these movements, are not accessible to our consciousness. Yet we see the movement of the hand. We see the changes which we bring about; when we simply move something to another place we see this change through our forces of perception. We may therefore say: Our perceptions enable us to know something about the expressions of our will. The human will and the effects which it produces flow, as it were, into man’s sphere of perceptions.

Let us bear in mind our recent lectures. In these we explained that we have, to begin with, man’s physical body, (see drawing) and then his etheric body. In between lies the weaving world of thought, in so far as it is incorporated in the human organism. Between the etheric and the astral bodies lies the world of feeling, and between the astral body and the sheath of the Ego lies the world of the human will.

Our ordinary consciousness is really unable to distinguish the volitional world from the Ego. For the will is united with the Ego. Everything that takes place in the Ego when it wills or does something, does not enter our ordinary consciousness in a direct way. This lives below the surface of our ordinary consciousness, like the events which take place during sleep.

In our physical body we have sense-organs and these are endowed with perception. This also enables us to perceive the manifestations of our will. The physical body has eyes and ears and through these sense-organs we perceive what comes from the Ego and from the sphere of the will. Man’s perceptions, which constitute his most external part, thus become united with what he experiences through his will and his Ego. (See arrow in drawing.)

Consider the following: The will-processes in the depths of the human organism, which arise whenever we walk a few steps, the forces which induce us to move our legs—all this is not accessible to our ordinary consciousness. After a few steps we see a different environment, or at least we see it from a different standpoint. In this changed aspect, sense-perception gives us something which thought transmits during our ordinary state of consciousness; it gives us a picture of what ordinarily lives in the depths of a waking state of sleep. So that whenever our Ego is filled by will-impulses and these become actions, no matter whether brought about by walking or by taking hold of something, or by any kind of activity, this is experienced through perception. Through our will, we really belong to the external world of our perception. By developing what may thus be observed in connection with the manifestations of our will, we do not reach our real inner being. Although our will streams out of the innermost depths of our being, we grow conscious of it by passing through an external process, or rather a sum of external processes connected with the body. But let us now consider man’s inner life. There is, to begin with, his weaving world of thoughts. The way in which thoughts are active outside in the work does not touch the present subject.

Outwardly, the world of thoughts exists in such a way that it brings certain logical, lawful connections into our perceptions. We classify Nature. We see plants which resemble each other and classify them; we see animals which resemble each other and classify them. We also try to discover the laws of Nature. What we thus unfold, does not really belong to our inner life. All this is science, which we share with every other person. It does not form part of our inner life. Yet we cannot simply assert that everything connected with thought does not form part of our inner life. It suffices to bear in mind that when we see a beautiful landscape (through external perception) and develop thoughts about it, we may recall this picture at any time, even if this memory grows pale. The things connected with the external world therefore become part of our inner world. The same may be said of other experiences connected with the external world, which become thoughts forming part of our inner world. To begin with, these thoughts pervade our etheric body, yet they also unite with feeling, which reaches as far as the astral body.

All this takes place inwardly. The inner side of thought-life, and the life of feeling, really constitute man’s inner world. What we experience in connection with the inner aspect of our thoughts and with our feelings cannot really be sought in an outer world. Whenever we want to know something about the outer world, we must look into us, into our inner life. I have already told you that we may speak with other people and indirectly allow them to look into us, but our inner life is the essential thing. It is possible to distinguish clearly what constitutes external life, through the fact that we constantly bring our inner world into the outer world.

When a train brings us at night from the West to the East of Switzerland, we are in an entirely different environment in the morning and it is our perception which makes us aware of this change. We have brought our inner life with us. It was the same in one place and in the other, perhaps modified by what induced us to turn towards our inner being, by the thoughts which induced us to do so; in fact, by what has become our inner life.

If we want to, we may therefore distinguish quite clearly between that which constitutes man’s real inner life, psychically woven out of thought and feeling and based on reciprocal, rhythmical processes of the etheric and astral bodies, and that which constitutes in a certain sense our external world, psychically woven out of the content of our will and the content of our perception, and bodily woven out of the Ego and the physical body. For we take along with us our physical body, we observe it and see that it enters into different relations with the world. As explained just now, we may distinguish inner and outer life.

This distinction is very important if we want to observe the life which man carries through the portal of death. In a compendious way we may describe how the inner and outer life characterised just now, will behave after death, for we may say that the outside becomes inside, and the inside becomes outside.

In fact, this is the great change which takes place when we die. Outer life becomes inner life. Even as we are now able to feel our soul’s inner being—for we can see that our inner soul-life is woven out of thoughts and feelings and we address this inner being with "I"—so after death all our perceptions connected with our actions become our inner life. But what we now experience as our inner being, the contemplation of everything we did here on earth, is concentrated, as it were, in a point, or rather in a sphere. Everything we did, we carry through death as an inner memory, as pictures of our whole earthly existence. Here we therefore have a complete reversal. For what was outside, what could only be perceived by looking upon our actions, becomes our inner life. Even as now we live in our feelings, in the impressions gained from outside, so after death we live in our actions. Our actions then become our inner life.

After death, we ourselves become what we have done to a person, in the form of good or evil deeds. Such things should not be imagined abstractly, we should not think that a vague kind of Ego slips through death and then changes, or undergoes a slight change, but we ourselves become what we have done, right into the very details. After death, we are each one of our actions. We are each one of our experiences and we address them all with "I".

On the other hand, our inner life becomes an outer life. All our thoughts, the whole life of our feelings, become an external world. Even as we are now surrounded either by the shining sun and the clouds, or at night by the starry sky and its movements, so after death we are surrounded by the external world of our thoughts and feelings; that is, everything that now constitutes our innermost being, becomes part of the external world after death, and we see it outside in mighty pictures. The sky which shines down upon us after death, is our present inner life, our inner human essence. If I were to describe this in detail I would have to say: I have explained to you just now that our actions become a sphere, that we experience them as our inner being. We experience again and again all our activities here on earth; we again walk as we have walked. After death we change, as it were, into something that experiences its own actions in an ever growing sphere. We always look back upon the earth. Even as now we look out into the world’s spaces and behold the sun and the stars, so then we look back upon the earth. And we see the earth surrounded by the pictures of our preceding inner world.

We do not only experience the semblance of our inner world, but from the site we abandoned, and sending a reflexion after our own self, we experience all that once constituted our inner world; we experience it in the form of clouds, stars, and so forth, streaming out of this site. We feel ourselves within the former peripheric world, and we experience the earth upon which we once stood, as a centre, but outside. And we always look towards it. We ourselves live in what surrounds it; the earth at the centre is then the object towards which we look, and mighty pictures are unrolled before us, as our whole inner life unrolls. Outer life becomes inner life. Inner life becomes outer life. This takes place right into the very details.

And when we look down towards the earth, from this sphere spreading out more and more, we then behold, streaming back to us from the earth, all the feelings and sensations we had for other people. And all the other feelings we had, besides those in connection with human beings, appear more in form of clouds. But our feelings for others appear like stars. The human beings themselves, whose forms we see during our life between birth and death, these human beings with whom we now come into contact through experiences caused by our deeds, now constitute a world. All the people with whom we were connected, become part of our inner world.

This is of course reciprocal. Even as every person now bears within him his feelings, or his heart and stomach, so between death and a new birth everyone bears within him all that took place outside in space, and also all that occurred between himself and other people. Of two men who were closely connected, A bears within him the picture of B as his inner content, and B the picture of A. What was outside is now inside; our inner life, our feelings, become an external world, they become the content of a cosmos; what we felt for others, what we obtained from others, all this rays out towards us from the earth.

Man thus really becomes almost the creator of the world which surrounds him after death. During our earthly life, matters stand as follows: We always live in a certain place, and by this I do not only mean trivially that we live in Basle, or Dornach, etc., but any point, any standpoint we have in the world, physically as well as morally. We view the world from this standpoint. We may therefore say that we stand at a certain point and see the world perspectively from this point. But this is a subjective view, for every other person has another standpoint.

Things change after death. There, all men already have something in common. This common element is the sphere. Yet each person has had a different inner life, consequently the earth appears to each surrounded by different clouds, by different stars. It is as if we were all standing upon the same point of the earth, yet each one sees another picture. When we die, we discard the physical body. In the lectures I gave during the past weeks, I have already explained that the physical body is dissolved by the earthly kingdom as such. What remains, is the web spun out of our deeds, by what we see when we follow up our deeds, or the manifestations of our will, through perception. Think of all the ways you have gone on earth: As an infant you first crept about, then you began to walk, you made a long journey, and so forth. All this becomes your inner life. Yet this is only its outermost structure.

Every single thing you did is spun together and forms a web. This stretches out and becomes a sphere. This is your inner life and the fact that it becomes inner life is a guarantee for your Ego during your earthly existence. For man obtains his Ego from the earth, or through the earth. Because after death everything is spun together in this picture of perception and memory, we may take our Ego with us through death. But our real inner experiences are lived through again immediately after death, when the etheric body dissolves shortly after we have died.

The etheric body dissolves into the cosmic spaces and this brings about the fact that all the thoughts and feelings woven out of the etheric body, but with an astral influence as well, change into forms of clouds, or—as I have pointed out—into forms of stars which surround the earth. What falls away from us in two directions—towards the earth, and out into the cosmic spaces, into the air, as it were,—constitutes our inner and our outer world, when we pass through the life between death and a new birth.

Imagine quite vividly the world which surrounds you between death and a new birth. There are your actions, in so far as they come from the will, and these constitute your inner life. There is your feeling and thinking life in the form of a cosmos, as an external world. You do not look out into the world’s spaces, but from the cosmic spaces you look towards the earth, and the earth rays back to you your inner thought-aspects.

When we live here on earth, between birth and death, we have on the one hand, the life of the sun. The sun is outside and we stand upon the earth and see the sun. When we die, the sun immediately vanishes. For then we ourselves are the sun and we cannot see what we are. We simply pass over into the life of the sun. And what I have described to you above, is our passage through the life of the sun.

That we ourselves become our actions, is connected with the fact that we pass over into the life of the sun. When we have left the earth, our earthly experiences become something we behold. Here we stand upon the earth and look at the sun and we see the earth below our feet. This is due to the peculiar material structure of the earth. But the sun has no material structure. What physicists say in regard to this, is pure invention. I have often spoken of this. When we ourselves exist, as it were, within the sun and look back, we have the whole spiritual world behind us, the world of the Hierarchies. Even as here on earth we see solid matter when we look down, so between death and a new birth we have behind us the world of the Hierarchies. Thus we ourselves are sun and we behold the real sun, which is spiritual. We may say that the earth is then the sky. But it is a sky which we ourselves prepare through our inner experiences.

This will be the ease in future, this is how the future existence of Jupiter will arise. I have already explained this in detail. Everything we weave around the earth through our feelings and thoughts, will remain. The now existing material earth will vanish, for it will decay. Between death and a new birth, we are able to behold our inner experiences. This will change into reality, when the earth decays, and it will form the new earth, for the old earth will dissolve and all our inner experiences will constitute the future earth.

This is the real process of metamorphosis. When we simply say, the earth will become Jupiter, this is an abstract statement. We can only understand this process by knowing that all earthly, external substance will melt away into the cosmic spaces, it will become dust, whereas the web spun out of our feelings will form the future earth; it will condense more and more and become the planet of Jupiter.

Geologists now dig into the sub-soil of the earth and sometimes discover strata which have arisen in very remote ages; similarly, during the Jupiter existence, it will be possible to investigate the different strata which have thus formed themselves. All kinds of strata formed out of human feelings and thoughts will be discovered, lying one on top of the other. A Jupiter geologist may, for example, discover various strata, and in the same way in which a geologist upon the earth may say, here are the lower strata, the tertiary strata, so a geologist upon Jupiter will one day ascertain: Here is a stratum pointing back to an age which was called upon the earth the 20th century, the early 20th century; this is a stratum formed by the materialists and profiteers, who spread their thoughts and feelings over nearly the whole world. Even as we now speak of a Silurian stratum, so it will in future be possible to speak of a "Profiteer-stratum". Of course, one will also speak of other strata. But these things are realities.

It is not allowed to man to let his inner experiences vanish. They are a developing world; they will one day be a real world. And between death and a new birth, human consciousness may already look upon that which will in future become a world; indeed, this is the only thing man beholds after death.

Among the many different things in our environment, we also observe the Moon when we stand here upon the Earth. But the Moon is there in a very special way. It sends back to us the reflected sunlight. We can only see its surface, as it were, in so far as its garment is woven by the sunlight. So that when the Moon is shining, it is really the Sun that is shining for us; the sun’s rays come to us indirectly. The Moon, the earth’s satellite, is connected with us in a special way.

During the life between death and a new birth we thus have, to begin with, our inner world, the effect of all our actions in so far as these are rooted in the will, and this inner world, this sphere or central kernel, is surrounded by our feelings and thoughts, which ray out into the cosmic spaces. Yet after death there also exists something resembling the Moon. I might say: After death we see the Moon from the other side. Our existence within a sphere is subjected to laws of perspective which differ from those which exist here on Earth and it is, of course, difficult to explain certain things connected with the laws of perspective which exist after death. This is very difficult, because between death and a new birth we are, in a certain sense, inside, not outside the Moon. In a certain way, we are always connected with the Moon’s inner being. We live, as it were, within the Moon. Even as here upon the earth we continually see the reflected sunlight, so between death and a new birth we always see the inside of the Moon.

But as stated, there the perspective changes. Let us assume that here we have the Earth with the Moon circling round it. We must take into consideration the whole sphere, the whole orbit of the Moon if we take the after-death aspect and the conditions which apply to it. We must consider the whole sphere in which the Moon revolves, and this sphere is really perceived from within. To begin with, we go further and further away from the Earth by moving within this sphere. There, we cannot look at the Sun from within. But at the same time we do not see it from outside, because it becomes invisible; we cannot perceive it. The Sun remains as a memory. What we first behold as we move away from the Earth, what becomes, as it were, visible upon the inner wall of the Moon, or the Moon’s sphere, and is retained as a memory, are the effects of a former earthly life in a subsequent one. It is, in fact, the Moon that preserves the events of one earthly life, and these appear in a subsequent earthly life as effects of the former life. For the whole mystery of the Moon in the cosmos is connected with the fact that the content of one earthly life continues and is taken along into the next earthly life.

This is the aspect presenting itself when we stand upon the Earth and look out into the cosmic spaces—the aspect between birth and death. But there is another aspect, the one between death and a new birth, when we live within a sphere and look back upon the central kernel. We then exist in a world which is, in a certain sense, opposed to the one we now live in. Yet we carry through both these worlds that part of our being which has been concentrated, etc. upon the Moon, preserved by the Moon. The Moon is, in a certain sense, highly important to us as a celestial body. The Moon connects our different earthly lives; it is not, of course, that slag shining down upon the Earth; in its whole mysterious cosmic essence it forms a connecting link.

You see, the individual life of men is thus connected with the life of the whole universe. Here, between birth and death, we can see what has been left to us by former worlds, what has remained from the Saturn, Sun and Moon existences and from the past existence of the Earth. We perceive all this when we live here upon the Earth, surrounded by the radiant phenomena above us. This more or less points back to the past.

Everything we bear within us and what we ourselves do upon this Earth points to the future. And we already behold this future during our life between death and a new birth, sending, as it were, a reflexion into the present—we see it, when our inner life becomes outer life and our outer life inner life. If you consider the whole meaning of the descriptions which have just been given to you, if you consider that man carries his after-death life into his earthly life, you will find that this resembles his experiences in connection with the outer world, reaching as far as the stars, the planets; this reappears in his organisation, it rises up again in his inner being. And man’s inner being becomes his outer world. After death, something similar takes place. The external world which man formed for himself, all the actions that went out from him, become his inner world. All his inner experiences, derived either from his surroundings or from his actions, giving rise to feelings of satisfaction or of self-reproach, all this inner world becomes his outer world and it looks towards him like a firmament, but this firmament is now at the centre and it looks towards him, i.e. out into the cosmic spaces.

If we do not misunderstand this, we might also say: Man’s outer life becomes his inner life, his Sun-life, for he becomes an inhabitant of the Sun. Man’s inner being, in so far as he experienced it upon the Earth, becomes his firmament. But he now inhabits the firmament. The Earth becomes sky, the Sun becomes Earth, during the life between death and a new birth.

When true vision adds this other aspect of the world to the intellectual world-conception which modern man gains here on Earth, the only conception which he accepts, only then will a complete picture of the world stand before us. We shall then have entirely different feelings in regard to the world. This other picture of the world is, in reality, the one described in Anthroposophy, it is the picture I have always described to you, in contrast to the world-conception formed through external observation; the picture I have always described to you is the active picture, for we must participate in it actively. Your thoughts must become mobile when you read anthroposophical books. And your thoughts must become mobile whenever you listen to an anthroposophical lecture. But people who are only accustomed to the things offered to them by modern life do not want to be active in their thought, they prefer to obtain everything passively, so that also their thoughts are merely passive pictures of what they obtain, and in doing this they always sleep a little, as it were.

These things arise in this form because during his life between birth and death man has a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body, and an Ego. In regard to earthly life, the Ego is man’s highest part. After death, when he passes over into the Sun-existence, his Ego is the lowest member, and the next one from below is the Spirit-Self, then the Life-Spirit, and then Spirit-Man. Physically, they will exist only in future epochs of evolution, but between death and a new birth they develop spiritually.

The Spirit-Self, in fact, rays out into the cosmic spaces as the image of the Earth. The Ego lives in the Sun, in the life of the Sun, and the Spirit-Self rays back from the earth, as described above. The other members are higher forms, which afterwards come to man from the cosmos, but at first they have nothing to do with his inner being. What rays out towards him appears to him in a new life; through this it becomes "Life Spirit". And man’s deeds are pervaded by a high spiritual substantiality throbbing through them. This will be given to him by the cosmos, he receives it, as it were, outside, in the cosmos. When he comes down to birth, he obtains a physical body and an etheric body, and similarly when he has passed through the portal of death, he obtains a Life-Spirit and Spirit-Man, which are his garments. From man himself comes what constitutes his Ego. And between death and a new birth, all that rays out from the Earth becomes a finely woven planetary existence, something which can only be felt as a trans-formed earth; we look back upon it and we go on weaving it from life to life.

When the Earth will have reached the end of its evolution, man will therefore proceed with the Earth to the Jupiter-stage of existence, and what he has thus woven, will enable him to unfold his Spirit-Self physically upon Jupiter. The foundation for this has been laid during his earthly life, through his inner being.

These are the real processes. This is the true course of development. You see, it is not necessary to combine outer words—Earth-existence, Jupiter-existence, etc.—nor to describe things abstractly from outside, for when we grasp man in his totality it is quite possible to describe the transition from one stage to the other. Our thoughts must only be formed in such a way as to take hold of concepts such as the following: The thoughts and feelings extending within us, ray out from the Earth into the cosmic spaces like planets, like stars, and we ourselves then live with the cosmos; we bear within us the other human beings with whom we were associated.

Human life is complicated. But people who wish to build up a world-conception by setting up a few concepts do not have any real feeling for what is right. We can only build up a world-conception by viewing the totality of life. Life is very complicated even in the smallest bug, and we should not imagine that in the whole universe—and man is connected with it, as a microcosm—life is formed in such a way that we may grasp it by setting up a few thoughts.

Yesterday¹ I spoke about initiation science. Today² I shall describe some aspects of what nowadays gives expression to initiation science. A profound breach now runs through the whole of civilization, a breach which brings much chaos to the world and which people who are fully aware cannot but experience with a sense of tragedy. One expression of this breach is the fact that human beings, when considering human dignity and their worth as human beings, can no longer find any connection with a world to which they look up—that world which gives the human soul religious feelings both profound and uplifting—namely, the world of moral values.

People look instead to the world of nature, to which, of course, they also belong. During the course of recent centuries the world of nature has come to appear before the human soul in such a way that it has absorbed the whole of reality, has absorbed every aspect of actual existence. The world of nature, with its laws which are indifferent to moral values, runs its course in accordance with external necessity, and in their everyday life human beings, too, are tied up in this necessity. However the bounds of this necessity are defined, if human beings feel themselves enclosed within such bounds, it is impossible for them to discover what it is that makes them human. Human beings have to look up from the world of nature to the world of moral values. We have to see the content of this moral world as something which ought to be, something which is the ideal. Yet no knowledge which is current today is capable of showing us how moral ideals can flow into the laws of nature and how necessity can be made to serve moral values.

We have to admit that today's world is divided into two parts which, for modern consciousness, are incompatible: the moral world and the material world. People see birth and death as the boundaries which encompass the only existence recognized by present-day knowledge. On the other hand they have to look up to a world which lies above birth and death, a world which is eternally meaningful, unlike the endlessly changing material world; and they have to think of their soul life as being linked with the eternal meaning of that world of moral values. The Platonic view of the world, containing as it did the last remnants of orientalism, saw the external world perceptible to the senses as a semblance, an illusion, and the world of ideas as the true, real world. But for modern human beings, if they remain within the confines of present-day consciousness, this Platonic world view has no answers.

But now initiation science wants to enter once again into human civilization and show us that behind the world perceived by our senses there stands a spiritual world, a mighty world, powerful and real, a world of moral values to which we may turn. It is the task of initiation science to take away from natural existence the absolute reality it assumes for itself and to give reality back once more to the world of moral values. It can only do so by using means of expression different from those given by today's language, today's world of ideas and concepts.

The language of initiation science still seems strange, even illusory, to people today because they have no inkling that real forces stand behind the expressions used, nor that, whatever kind of speech is used—whether ordinary everyday speech or speech formation—language cannot give full and adequate expression to what is seen and perceived. What, after all, do the words ‘human being’ signify, when only the speech sounds are considered, compared with the abundant richness of spirit, soul and body of an actual human being standing before us! In just such a way in initiation science a spiritual world—behind the world of the senses—living in the world of moral values, storms and flows, working in manifold ways. This initiation science has to select all manner of ways of expressing what, despite everything, will be far richer in its manifestation than any possible means of expression.

Today I should like to speak about certain expressions of this kind with regard to man's immediate existence, expressions which have been discussed here in one connection or another over the last few days and which are well known to those of you who have concerned yourselves over a period of time with anthroposophical spiritual science.

It is both right and wrong to say that the true being of man is beyond understanding. It is right in a certain sense, but not in the sense frequently meant nowadays. Yet the true being of man is indeed revealed to initiation science in a way which defies direct definitions, descriptions or explanations. To make use of a comparison I might say that defining the being of man is like trying to draw a picture of the fulcrum of a beam. It cannot be drawn. You can draw the left-hand and the right-hand portions of the beam but not the fulcrum upon which it turns. The fulcrum is the point at which the right-hand and the left-hand portions of the beam begin. In a similar way the profoundest element of the human being cannot be encompassed by adequate concepts and ideas. But it can be grasped by endeavouring to look at deviations from the true human being. The being of man represents the state of balance poised between deviations that constantly want to go off in opposite directions. Human beings throughout their life are permanently beset by two dangers: deviation in one of two directions, the luciferic or the ahrimanic.³

In ordinary life our state of balance is maintained because only a part of our total, our full being, is harnessed to our bodily form, and because it is not we who hold this bodily form in a state of balance within the world as a whole, but spiritual beings who stand behind us. Thus, in ordinary consciousness, we are on the whole unaware of the two dangers which can cause us to deviate from our state of balance towards one side or the other, towards the luciferic or the ahrimanic side. This is what is characteristic of initiation science. When we begin to comprehend the world in its true nature we feel as though we were standing on a high rock with one abyss on our right and another on our left. The abyss is ever-present, but in ordinary life we do not see this abyss, or rather these two abysses. To learn to know ourselves fully we have to perceive these abysses, or at least we have to learn about them. We are drawn in one direction towards Lucifer and in the other towards Ahriman. And the ahrimanic and the luciferic aspects can be characterized in relation to the body, the soul and the spirit.

Let us start from the point of view of man's physical being. This physical being, which the senses perceive as a unit, is in fact only seemingly so. Actually we are forever in tension between the forces which make us young and those which make us old, between the forces of birth and the forces of death. Not for a single moment throughout our life is only one of these forces present; always both are there.

When we are small, perhaps tiny, children, the youthful, luciferic forces predominate. But even then, deep down, are the ageing forces, the forces which eventually lead to the sclerosis of our body and, in the end, to death. It is necessary for both kinds of force to exist in the human body. Through the luciferic forces there is always a possibility of inclining towards, let me say, the phosphoric side, towards warmth. In the extreme situation of an illness this manifests in a fever, such as a pleuritic condition, a state of inflammation. This inclination towards fever and inflammation is ever-present and is only held in check or in balance by those other forces which want to lead towards solidified, sclerotic, mineral states. The nature of the human being arises from the state of balance between these two polar-opposite forces.

Valid sciences of human physiology and biology will only be possible when the whole human body and each of its separate organs, such as heart, lungs, liver, are seen to encompass polar opposites which incline them on the one hand towards dissolution into warmth and, on the other hand, towards consolidation into the mineral state. The way the organs function will only be properly understood once the whole human being, as well as each separate organ, are seen in this light. The science of human health and sickness will only find a footing on healthy ground once these polarities in the physical human being are able to be seen everywhere. Then it will be known, for instance, that at the change of teeth, around the seventh year, ahrimanic forces are setting to work in the head region; or that when the physical body starts to develop towards the warmth pole at puberty, this means that luciferic forces are at work; that in the rhythmical nature of the human being there are constant swings of the pendulum, physically too, between the luciferic and the ahrimanic aspect. Until we learn to speak thus, without any superstition, but with scientific exactness, about the luciferic and ahrimanic influences upon human nature—just as today we speak without superstition or mysticism about positive and negative magnetism, about positive and negative electricity, about light and darkness—we shall not be in a position to gain knowledge of the human being which can stand up to the abstract knowledge of inorganic nature that we have achieved during the course of recent centuries.

In an abstract way many people already speak about all kinds of polarities in the human being. Mystical, nebulous publications discuss all kinds of positive and negative influences in man. They shy away from ascending to a much more concrete, more spiritual, but spiritually entirely concrete plane, and so they speak in a manner about the human being's positive and negative polarities which is just as abstract as that in which they discuss polarities in inorganic nature. Real knowledge of the human being can only come about if we rise above the poverty-stricken concepts of positive and negative, the poverty-stricken concepts of polarity as found in inorganic nature, and ascend to the meaningful concepts of luciferic and ahrimanic influences in man.

Turning now to the soul element, in a higher sense the second element of man's being, we find the ahrimanic influence at work in everything that drives the soul towards purely intellectual rigid laws. Our natural science today is almost totally ahrimanic. As we develop towards ahrimanic soul elements, we discard anything that might fill our concepts and ideas with warmth. We submit only to whatever makes concepts and ideas ice-cold and dry as dust. So we feel especially satisfied in today's scientific thinking when we are ahrimanic, when we handle dry, cold concepts, when we can make every explanation of the world conform to the pattern we have established for inorganic, lifeless nature. Also, when we imbue our soul with moral issues, the ahrimanic influence is found in everything that tends towards what is pedantic, stiff, philistine on the one hand; but also in what tends towards freedom, towards independence, towards everything that strives to extract the fruits of material existence from this material existence and wants to become perfect by filling material existence.

Both ahrimanic and luciferic influences nearly always display two sides. In the ahrimanic direction, one of these—the pedantic, the philistine, the one-sidedly intellectual aspect—leads us astray. But on the other side there is also something that lies in mankind's necessary line of evolution, something which develops a will for freedom, a will to make use of material existence, to free the human being and so on.

The luciferic influence in the human soul is found in everything that makes us desire to fly upwards out of ourselves. This can create nebulous, mystical attitudes which lead us to regions where any thought of the material world seems ignoble and inferior. Thus we are led astray, misled into despising material existence entirely and into wanting instead to indulge in whatever lies above the material world, into wanting wings on which to soar above earthly existence, at least in our soul. This is how the luciferic aspect works on our soul. To the ahrimanic aspect of dull, dry, cold science is added a sultry mysticism of the kind that in religions leads to an ascetic disdain for the earth, and so on.

This description of the ahrimanic and luciferic aspects of soul life shows us that the human soul, too, has to find a balance between polar opposites. Like the ahrimanic, the luciferic aspect also reveals possibilities for deviation and, at the same time, possibilities for the necessary further evolution of the proper being of man. The deviation is a blurred, hazy, nebulous mysticism that allows any clear concepts to flutter away into an indeterminate, misty flickering of clarity and obscurity with the purpose of leading us up and away from ourselves. On the other hand, a luciferic influence which is entirely justifiable, and is indeed a part of mankind's necessary progress, is made manifest when we fill material existence with today's genuine life principles, not in order to make exhaustive use of the impulses of this material existence—as is the case with ahrimanic influences—but in order to paralyse material existence into becoming a semblance which can then be used in order to describe a super-sensible realm, in order to describe something that is spiritually real, and yet—in this spiritual reality—cannot also be real in the world of the senses merely through natural existence.

Luciferic forces endow human beings with the possibility of expressing the spirit in the semblance of sense-perceptible existence. It is for this that all art and all beauty are striving. Lucifer is the guardian of beauty and art. So in seeking the right balance between luciferic and ahrimanic influences we may allow art—Lucifer—in the form of beauty, to work upon this balance. There is no question of saying that human beings must guard against ahrimanic and luciferic influences. What matters is for human beings to find the right attitude towards ahrimanic and luciferic influences, maintaining always a balance between the two. Provided this balance is maintained, luciferic influences may be permitted to shine into life in the form of beauty, in the form of art. Thus something unreal is brought into life as if by magic, something which has been transformed into a semblance of reality by the effort of human beings themselves.

It is the endeavour of luciferic forces to bring into present-day life something that has long been overtaken by world existence, something that the laws of existence cannot allow to be real in present-day life. If human beings follow a course of cosmic conservation, if they want to bring into the present certain forms of existence which were right and proper in earlier times, then they fall in the wrong way under the influence of the luciferic aspect. If, for instance, they bring in a view of the world that lives only in vague pictures such as were justifiable in ancient cosmic ages, if they allow everything living in their soul to become blurred and mingled, they are giving themselves up in the wrong way to luciferic existence. But if they give to external existence a form which expresses something it could not express by its own laws alone—marble can only express the laws of the mineral world—if they force marble to express something it would never be able to express by means of its own natural forces, the result is the art of sculpture; then, something which cannot be a reality in a sense-perceptible situation of this kind, something unreal, is brought as if, by magic into real existence. This is what Lucifer is striving to achieve. He strives to lead human beings away from the reality in which they find themselves between birth and death into a reality which was indeed reality in earlier times but which cannot be genuine reality for the present day.

Now let us look at the spiritual aspect of the human being. We find that here, too, both luciferic and ahrimanic influences are called upon. In life here on earth the being of man expresses itself in the first instance in the alternating states of waking and sleeping. In the waking state the spiritual part of our being is fully given over to the material world. The following must be said in this connection: In sleep, from the moment of going to sleep to the moment of waking up, we find ourselves in a spirit-soul existence. On going to sleep we depart with our spirit-soul existence from our physical and etheric bodies, and on waking up we enter with our spirit and soul once again into our physical and etheric bodies. In sleep, you could say, we bear our state of soul-spirit within us; but on waking up we keep back our soul state almost entirely in the form of our soul life. Only with our spirit do we plunge fully into our body. So in the waking state in the present phase of human evolution we become with our spirit entirely body, we plunge into our body, at least to a very high degree. From the existence of our sleeping state we fall into that of our waking state. We are carried over from one state to the other. This is brought about by forces which we have to count among the ahrimanic forces.

Looking at the spiritual aspect of the human being, that is, at the alternation between waking and sleeping, which is what reveals our spiritual aspect in physical, earthly existence, we find that in waking up the ahrimanic element is most at work, while falling asleep is brought about chiefly by the luciferic element. From being entirely enveloped in our physical body, we are carried across into the free soul-spirit state. We are carried over into a state in which we no longer think in ahrimanic concepts but solely in pictures which dissolve sharp ahrimanic conceptual contours, allowing everything to interweave and become blurred. We are placed in a state in which to interweave in pictures is normal. In brief we can say: The ahrimanic element carries us, quite properly, from the sleeping to the waking state, and the luciferic element carries us, equally properly, from the waking state into the sleeping state.

Deviations occur when too little of the luciferic impulse is carried over into the waking state, making the ahrimanic impulse stronger than it should be in the waking state. If this happens, the ahrimanic impulse presses the human being down too strongly into his physical body, preventing him from remaining in the realm of the soul sentiments of good and evil, the realm of moral impulses. He is pushed down into the realm of emotions and passions. He is submerged in the life of animal instinct. His ego is made to enter too thoroughly into the bodily aspect.

Conversely, when the luciferic impulse works in an unjustified way in the human being it means that he carries too much of his waking life into his sleeping life. Dreams rise up in sleep which are too reminiscent of waking life. These work back into waking life and push it into an unhealthy kind of mysticism.

So you see, in every aspect of life a state of balance must be brought about in the human being by the two polarities, by the luciferic and the ahrimanic elements. Yet deviations an occur. As I have said, a proper physiology of the body, with a proper knowledge of health and sickness, will only be possible when we have learnt to find this polarity in every aspect of bodily life. Similarly, a valid psychology will only be possible when we are in a position to discover this polarity in the soul.

Nowadays, in the sciences that are regarded as psychology—the science of the soul—all sorts of chaotic things are said about thinking, feeling and willing. In the life of the soul thinking, feeling and willing also flow into one another. However pure our thoughts may be, as we link them together and take them apart we are using our will in our thoughts. And even in movements which are purely instinctive our thought impulses work into our will activity. Thinking, feeling and willing are nowhere separate in our soul life; everywhere they work into one another. If, as is the custom today, they are separated out, this is merely an abstract separation; to speak of thinking, feeling and willing is then merely to speak of three abstractions. Certainly we can distinguish between what we call thinking, feeling and willing, and as abstract concepts they may help us to build up our knowledge of what each one is; but this by no means gives us a true picture of reality.

We gain a true picture of reality only if we see feeling and willing in every thought, thinking and willing in every feeling and thinking and feeling in every act of will. In order to see—in place of that abstract thinking, feeling and willing—our concrete living and surging soul life, we must also picture to ourselves how our soul life is deflected to one polarity or the other—for instance, how it is deflected to the ahrimanic polarity and there lives in thoughts. However many will impulses there may be in these thoughts, if we learn to recognize, at a higher level of knowledge, the special characteristics of the ahrimanic element, then we can feel the polarity of thinking in the soul. And if we see the soul deflected in the other direction, towards the will, then—however much thought content there may be in this will activity—if we have grasped the luciferic nature of the will, we shall have understood the living nature of the will in our soul life. All abstractions, concepts, ideas in us must be transformed into living vision. This we will not achieve unless we resolve to ascend to a view of the luciferic and the ahrimanic elements.

As regards the life of mankind through history, too, the pictures we form are only real if we are capable of perceiving the working and surging of the luciferic and ahrimanic elements in the different periods of history. Let us look, for instance, at the period of history which starts with Augustine⁴ and reaches to the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of modern times, the fifteenth century. Let us look at this period and see how in external life people preferred to allow impulses to work which came from their deepest inner being, out of their emotional life; let us see how people during this period wanted to shape even the external life of society and the state in accordance with what they believed they could discern of the divine impulses within themselves. We feel quite clearly that the luciferic impulse was at work in this period of history.

Now go to more recent times and see how people turn and look outwards towards the mechanical and physical aspects of the world which can only be adequately comprehended in the right way by thinking and by contact with the external world. It is obvious that the ahrimanic element is at work in this period. Yet this must not tempt us to declare the period from Augustine to Galileo to be luciferic and the period from Galileo to the present time to be ahrimanic. This would in turn be an ahrimanic judgement, an intellectualistic interpretation. If we want to make the transition from an intellectualistic to a living interpretation, to a recognition of life as an experience in which we share, of which we are a part, then we shall have to express ourselves differently. We shall have to say: During the period from Augustine to Galileo, human beings had to resist the luciferic element in their striving for balance. And in more recent times human beings have to resist the ahrimanic element in their striving for balance.

We must understand ever more clearly that in our civilization as it progresses it is not a matter of whether we say one thing or another. What matters is being able to decide, in a given situation, whether one thing or another can be said. However true it may be to say, in an abstract way, that the Middle Ages were luciferic and more recent times ahrimanic, what matters is that this abstract truth bears no real impulse. The real impulse comes into play when we say: In the Middle Ages human beings maintained their uprightness by combating the luciferic element; in modern times they maintain their uprightness by combating the ahrimanic element. In an external, abstract sense something that is in reality no more than an empty phrase can be perfectly true. But as regards the particular situation of human existence in question, a thing that is real in our life of ideas can only be something that is actually inwardly present. What people today must avoid more than anything else is to fall into empty phrases. Again and again we come across situations in which people who believe themselves to be standing in anthroposophical life say: So-and-so said something which was in perfect agreement with Anthroposophy. We are not concerned with an outward agreement in words alone. What matters is the spirit, the living spirit, the living reality within which something stands. If we concern ourselves solely with the external, logical content of what people say today, we do not avoid the danger of the empty phrase.

In one circle or another recently I have a number of times given a striking example of how strangely certain statements, which are perfectly correct in themselves, appear when illuminated by a sense for reality. In 1884, in the German Reichstag, Bismarck made a remarkable statement when he felt threatened by the approach of social democracy.⁵ He wanted to dissuade the majority of the working population from following their radical social-democratic leaders, and this is what spurred him to say: Every individual has the right to work; grant to every individual the right to work, let the state find work for everybody, provide everybody with what they need in order to live—thus spoke the German Chancellor—when they are old and can no longer work, or when they are ill, and you will see that the broad masses of the workers will turn tail on the promises of their leaders. This is what Prince Bismarck said in the German Reichstag in 1884.

Curiously enough, if you go back almost a hundred years you find that another political figure said the same, almost verbatim: It is our human duty to grant every individual the right to work, to let the state find work for all, so long as they can work, and for the state to care for them when they are ill and can no longer work. In 1793 Robespierre⁶ wanted to incorporate this sentence in the democratic constitution. Is it not remarkable that in 1793 the revolutionary Robespierre and in 1884 Prince Bismarck—who certainly had no wish to be another Robespierre—said exactly the same thing. Two people can say exactly the same, yet it is not the same. Curiously, too, Bismarck referred in 1884 to the fact that every worker in the state of Prussia was guaranteed the right to work, since this was laid down in the Prussian constitution of 1794. So Bismarck not only says the same, but he says that what Robespierre demanded was laid down in the Prussian constitution. The real situation, however, was as follows: Bismarck only spoke those words because he felt the approach of a threat which arose from the very fact that what stood word for word in the Prussian constitution was actually not the case at all.

I quote this example not because it is political but because it is a striking demonstration of how two people can say the same thing, word for word, even though the reality in each case is the opposite. Thus I want to make you aware that it is time for us to enter upon an age when what matters, rather than the actual words, is our experience of reality. If we fail in this, then in the realm of spiritual life we shall fall into empty phrases which play such a major role in the spiritual life of today. And this transition from mere correctness of content to truth livingly experienced is to be brought about through the entry of initiation science into human civilization, initiation science which progresses from mere logical content to the experience of the spiritual world. Those who view correctly the external symptoms of historical development in the present and on into the near future will succeed, out of these symptoms, in achieving a feeling, a sense, for the justified and necessary entry of initiation science into world civilization. This is what I wanted to place before your souls today by way of a New Year's contemplation.

• 1 . See lecture of 31 December 1921 in Rudolf Steiner, The Rediscovery of Spiritual Reality in Nature and in Man. English text available in typescript only.
• 2 . Rudolf Steiner, Soul Economy and Waldorf Education, Rudolf Steiner Press London and Anthroposophic Press New York, 1986.
• 3 . Regarding luciferic and ahrimanic beings, see the chapter ‘Man and the Evolution of the World’ in Rudolf Steiner, Occult Science—An Outline, Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1979.
• 4 . Aurelius Augustinus 354-430, Bishop of Hippo in North Africa.
• 5 . in a speech on 9 May 1884, ‘I recognize unconditionally the right to work and will defend this so long as I occupy my present position. In doing so, I stand, not on the soil of socialism but on the soil of the Prussian constitution.’ Quoted in Gide and Rist Geschichte der volkswirt schaftlichen Lehrmeinungen, Jena 1921.
• 6 . Maximilien Francois Marie Isidore de Robespierre, 1758-1794. From 1793 a leading member of the Committee of Public Safety. Guillotined in 1794.

Let us recall the main points we considered yesterday. Through conception and birth into the physical, sense-perceptible world, the human being brings down on the one hand something which inwardly still possesses the living spiritual world, but which then becomes shaded and toned down to the thought world he bears within him. On the other hand he brings down something which fills his element of soul and spirit, something which I have described as being essentially a state of fear. I then went on to point out that the living spirit is metamorphosed into a thought element, but that it also sends into earth existence a living remnant of pre-earthly life that lives in human sympathy. So in human sympathy we have something that maintains in our soul the living quality of pre-earthly existence. The feeling of fear that fills our soul before we descend to the physical world is metamorphosed here on earth on the one hand into the feeling of self and on the other into the will.

What lives in the human soul by way of thoughts is dead as far as spirit and soul are concerned, compared with the living world of the spirit. In our thoughts, or at least in the force which fills our thoughts, we experience, in a sense, the corpse of our spirit and soul existence between death and a new birth. But our present experience during physical earthly life, of a soul that has—in a way—been slain, was not always as strong as it is today. The further we go back in human evolution the greater is the role played here in earthly life by what I yesterday described as sympathy—sympathy not only with human beings but also for instance with the whole of nature. The abstract knowledge we strive for today—quite rightly, to a certain extent—has not always been present in human evolution. This abstract inner consciousness came into being in its most extreme form in the fifteenth century, that is, at the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean period. What human beings now experience in their thoughts was, in earlier times, filled with living feelings. In older knowledge—for instance, that of the Greek world—abstract concepts as we know them today simply did not exist. Concepts then were filled with living feelings. Human beings felt the world as well as thinking it. Only at the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean period did people begin to merely think the world, reserving their feelings of sympathy for what is really only the social realm.

In ancient India human beings felt strong sympathy for the whole of nature, for all the creatures of nature. Such strong sympathy in earthly life means that there is a strong experience of all that takes place around the human being between death and a new birth. In thinking, this life has died. But our sympathy with the world around us certainly contains echoes of our perceptions between death and a new birth. This sympathy was very important in the human life of earlier times. It meant that every cloud, every tree, every plant, was seen to be filled with spirit. But if we live only in thoughts, then the spirit departs from nature, because thoughts are the corpse of our spirit and soul element. Nature is seen as nothing more than a dead structure, because it can only be mirrored in dead thoughts. That is why, as times moved nearer to our own, all elemental beings disappeared from what human beings saw in nature.

So what is this kind of spirituality that human beings still feel within themselves—this living spirituality—when, in reality, they ought to experience nothing but dead spirituality? To answer this question we shall have to consider what I have said with regard to the physical organization of the human being as a threefold organism. Here (see diagram) is the organism of nerves and senses, located mainly in the head. The rhythmical organism is located mainly in the upper chest organs. But of course both systems appear in the total organism too. And here is the organism of the limbs and the metabolism, which is located mainly in the limbs and the lower parts of the trunk.

Let us look first at the head organization which is chiefly, though not exclusively, the bearer of our life of nerves and senses. We can only understand it if we look at it pictorially. We have to imagine that our head is for the most part a metamorphosis—not in its physical substance, but in its form—of the rest of the body, of the organism of limbs and metabolism we had in our previous incarnation on the earth.

The organism of limbs and metabolism of our previous earthly life—not its physical substance, of course, but its shape—becomes our head organization in this life. Here in our head we have a house which has been formed out of a transformation of the organism of limbs and metabolism from our former incarnation, and in this head live mainly the abstract thoughts (see next diagram, red) which are the corpse of our pre-earthly life of soul and spirit.

In our head we bear the living memory of our former earthly life. And this is what makes us feel ourselves to be an ego, a living ego, for this living ego does not exist within us. Within us are only dead thoughts. But these dead thoughts live in a house which can only be understood pictorially; it is an image arising out of the metamorphosis of our organism of limbs and metabolism from our former earthly life.

The more living element that comes over from the life of spirit and soul, when we descend into a new earthly life, takes up its dwelling from the start not in our head, but in our rhythmical organism. Everything that surrounded us between death and this new birth and now plays into life—all this dwells in our rhythmical organism. In our head all we have is an image out of our former earthly life, filled with dead thoughts. In our rhythmical, breast organism lives something much more alive. Here there is an echo of everything our soul experienced while it was moving about freely in the world of spirit and soul between death and this new birth. In our breathing and in our blood circulation something vibrates—forces that belong to the time

between death and birth. And lastly, our being of spirit and soul belonging to our present earthly incarnation lives—strange though this may seem—not in our head, and not in our breast, but in our organism of limbs and metabolism. Our present earthly ego lives in our organism of limbs and metabolism (green).

Imagine the dead thoughts to be still alive. These dead thoughts live—speaking pictorially—in the convolutions of the brain. And the brain in turn lives in a metamorphosis of our organism from our former incarnation. The initiate perceives the way the dead thoughts dwell in his head, he perceives them as a memory of the reality of his former incarnation. This memory of your former incarnation is just as though you were to find yourself in a darkened room with all your clothes hanging on a rail. Feeling your way along, you come, say, to your velvet jacket, and this reminds you of the occasion when you bought it. This is just what it is like when you bump into dead thoughts at every turn. To feel your way about in whatever is in your head organization is to remember your former life on earth.

What you experience in your breast organism is the memory of your life between death and a new birth. And what you experience in your limbs and metabolism—this belongs to your present life on earth. You only experience your ego in your thoughts because your organism of limbs and metabolism works up into your thoughts. But it is a deceptive experience. For your ego is not, in fact, contained in your thoughts. It is as little in your thoughts as you are actually behind the mirror when you see yourself reflected in it. Your ego is not in your thought life at all. Because your thought life shapes itself in accordance with your head, the memory of your former earthly life is in your thought life. In your head you have the human being you were in your former life. In your breast you have the human being who lived between death and this new birth. And in your organism of limbs and metabolism, especially in the tips of your fingers and toes, you have the human being now living on the earth. Only because you also experience your fingers and toes in your brain do your thoughts give you an awareness of this ego in your earthly life. This is how grotesque these things are, in reality, in comparison with what people today usually imagine.

Thinking with the head about what happens in the present time is something that only became prevalent at the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean period, in the fifteenth century. But in an ahrimanic way things are forestalled. Things that take place later than they should in the course of evolution are luciferic. Things that come too soon are ahrimanic. Let us look at something which came about in history very much too soon and should not have happened until the fifteenth century. It did happen in the fifteenth century, but it was foreshadowed at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. I want to show you how the ideas of the Old Testament, which I partly described yesterday, were transformed into nothing more than allegories by a contemporary of Christ Jesus, Philo of Alexandria.¹

Philo of Alexandria interprets the whole of the Old Testament as an allegory. This means that he wants to make the whole Old Testament, which is told in the form of direct experiences, into a series of thought images. This is very clever, especially as it is the first time in human evolution that such a thing has been done. Today it is not all that clever when the theosophists, for instance, interpret Hamlet by saying that one of the characters is Manas, another Buddhi, and so on, distorting everything to fit an allegory. This sort of thing is, of course, nonsense. But Philo of Alexandria transformed the whole of the Old Testament into thought images, allegories. These allegories are nothing other than an inner revelation of dead soul life, soul life that has died and now lies as a corpse in the power of thinking. The real spiritual vision, which led to the Old Testament, looked back into life before birth, or before conception, and out of what was seen there the Old Testament was created.

But when it was no longer possible to look back—and Philo of Alexandria was incapable of looking back—it all turned into dead thought images. So in the history of human evolution two important events stand side by side: The period of the Old Testament culminated in Philo of Alexandria at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. He makes allegories of straw out of the Old Testament. And at the same time the Mystery of Golgotha reveals that it is not the experience of dead things that can lead the human being to super-sensible knowledge, but the whole human being who passes through the Mystery of Golgotha bearing the divine being within him.

These are the two great polar opposites: the world of abstraction foreshadowed in an ahrimanic way by Philo, and the world which is to enter into human evolution with Christianity. The abstract thinker—and Philo of Alexandria is perhaps the abstract thinker of the greatest genius, since he foreshadowed in an ahrimanic way the abstractness of later ages—the abstract thinker wants to fathom the mysteries of the world by means of some abstract thought or other which is supposed to provide the answer to the riddle of the universe. The Mystery of Golgotha is the all-embracing living protest against this. Thoughts can never solve the riddle of the universe because the solution of this riddle is something living. The human being in all his wholeness is the solution to the riddle of the universe. Sun, stars, clouds, rivers, mountains, and all the creatures of the different kingdoms of nature, are external manifestations which pose an immense question. There stands the human being and, in the wholeness of his being, he is the answer.

This is another point of view from which to contemplate the Mystery of Golgotha. Instead of confronting the riddle of the universe with thoughts in all their deadness, confront the whole of what man can experience with the whole of what man is.

Only slowly and gradually has mankind been able to find the way towards understanding this. Even today it has not yet been found. Anthroposophy wants to open the gate. But because abstraction has become so firmly established, even the awareness that the way must be sought has disappeared. Until abstraction took hold, human beings did wrestle with the quest for the way, and this is seen most clearly at the turn of the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period. As Christianity spreads externally, the best spirits wrestle to understand it inwardly.

Both streams had come down from the far past. On the one side there was the heathen stream which was fundamentally a nature wisdom. All natural creatures were seen to be inhabited by elemental spirits, demonic spirits, those very demonic spirits who, in the Gospels, are said to have rebelled when Christ came amongst mankind, because they knew that their rule was at an end. Human beings failed to recognize Christ, but the demons recognized him. They knew that he would now take possession of human hearts and human souls and that they would have to withdraw. But for a long time they continued to play a role in the minds and hearts of human beings as well as in their search for knowledge. Heathen consciousness, which sought the demonic, elemental spirits in all creatures in the old way, continued to play a role for a long time. It wrestled with that other form of knowledge which now sought in all earthly things the substance of Christ that had united with the earth through the Mystery of Golgotha.

This heathen stream—a nature wisdom, a nature Sophia—saw the spirit everywhere in nature and could therefore also look at man as a natural creature who was filled with spirit, just as all nature was filled with spirit. In its purest, most beautiful form we find it in ancient Greece, especially in Greek art, which shows us how the spirit weaves through human life in the form of destiny, just as the natural laws weave through nature. We may sometimes recoil from what we find in Greek tragedies. But on the other hand we can have the feeling that the Greeks sensed not only the abstract laws of nature, as we do today, but also the working of divine, spiritual beings in all plants, all stones, all animals, and therefore also in man. The rigid necessity of natural laws was shaped into destiny in the way we find it depicted, for instance, in the drama of Oedipus. Here is an intimate relationship between the spiritual existence of nature and the spiritual existence of man. That is why freedom and also human conscience as yet play no part in these dramas. Inner necessity, destiny, rules within man, just as the laws of nature rule the natural world.

This is the one stream as it appears in more recent times. The other is the Jewish stream of the Old Testament. This stream possesses no nature wisdom. As regards nature, it merely looks at what is physically visible through the senses. It turns its attention upwards to the primal source of moral values which lies in the world between death and a new birth, taking no account of the side of man which belongs to nature. For the Old Testament there is no nature, but only obedience to divine commandments. In the Old Testament view, not natural law, but Jahve's will governs events. What resounds from the Old Testament is imageless. In a way it is abstract. But setting aside Philo of Alexandria, who makes everything allegorical, we discern behind this abstract aspect, Jahve, the ruler who fills this abstraction with a supersensibly focused, idealized, generalized human nature. Like a human ruler, Jahve himself is in all the commandments which he sends down to earth. This Old Testament stream directs its vision exclusively to the world of moral values; it absolutely shies away from looking at the externally sense-perceptible aspect of the world. While the heathen view saw divine spiritual beings everywhere, the god of the Jews is the One God. The Old Testament Jew is a monotheist His god, Jahve, is the One God, because he can only take account of man as a unity: You must believe in the One God, and you shall not depict this One God in any earthly manner, not in an idol, not even in a word. The name of God may only be spoken by initiates on certain solemn occasions. You must not take the name of your God in vain.

Everything points to what cannot be seen, to what cannot come to expression in nature, to what can only be thought. But behind the thought in the Old Testament there is still the living nature of Jahve. This disappears in the allegories of Philo of Alexandria.

Then came the early Christian struggles—right on into the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth centuries—to reach a harmony between what can be seen as the spirit in external nature and what can be experienced as the divine when we look at our own moral world, our own human soul. In theory the matter seems simple. But in fact the quest for harmony, between seeing the spirit in external nature and guiding the soul upwards to the spiritual world out of which Christ Jesus had descended, was an immense struggle. Christianity came over from Asia and took hold of the Greek and Roman world. In the later centuries of the Middle Ages we see the struggle taking place most strongly in those parts of Europe, which had retained much of their primeval vitality. In ancient Greece the old heathen element was so strong that although Christianity passed through Greek culture and assimilated many Greek expressions on the way, it could not take root there. Only Gnosis, the spiritual view of Christianity, was able to take root in Greece.

Next, Christianity had to pass through the most prosaic element of world evolution: Roman culture. Being abstract, Roman culture could only comprehend the abstract, as it were foreshadowing in an ahrimanic way what is later alive in Christianity. A truly living struggle then took place in Spain. Here, a question was asked which was not theoretical but vital, intensely alive: How can man, without losing sight of the spirit in natural creatures and processes, find the whole human being revealed to him by Christ Jesus. How can man be filled with Christ? This question lived most strongly in Spain, and we see in Calderón² a poet who knew how to depict this struggle with great intensity. The struggle to fill the human being with Christ lived—if I may put it like this—dramatically in Calderón.

Calderón's most characteristic drama in this respect is about Cyprianus, a kind of miracle-working magician; in other words he is, in the first instance, a person who lives in natural things and natural processes because he seeks the spirit in them. A later metamorphosis of this character is Faust, but Faust is not as filled with life as is Calderón's Cyprianus. Calderón's portrayal of how Cyprianus stands in the spirit of nature is still filled with life. His attitude is taken absolutely for granted, whereas in the case of Faust everything is shrouded in doubt. From the start, Faust does not really believe that it is possible to find the spirit in nature. But Calderón's Cyprianus is, in this respect, a character who belongs fully to the Middle Ages. A modern physicist or chemist is surrounded in his laboratory by scientific equipment—the physicist by Geissler tubes and other things, the chemist by test tubes, Bunsen burners and the like. Cyprianus, on the other hand, stands with his soul surrounded by the spirit, everywhere flashing out and spilling over from natural processes and natural creatures.

Characteristically, a certain Justina enters into the life of Cyprianus. The drama depicts her quite simply as a woman, but to see her solely as a female human being is not to see the whole of her. These medieval poets are misunderstood by modern interpretations which state that everything simply depicts the material world. They tell us, for instance, that Dante's Beatrice is no more than a gentle female creature. Some interpretations, on the other hand, miss the actual situation by going in the opposite direction, lifting everything up allegorically into a spiritual sphere. But at that time the spiritual pictures and the physical creatures of the earth were not as widely separated as they are in the minds of modern critics today. So when Justina makes her debut in Calderón's drama, we may permit ourselves to think of the element of justice which pervades the whole world. This was not then as abstract as it is now, for now it is found between the covers of tomes which the lawyers can take down from their shelves. Jurisprudence was then felt to be something living.

So Justina comes to Cyprianus. And the hymn about Justina which Cyprianus sings presents another difficulty for modern scientific critics. Modern lawyers do not sing hymns about their jurisprudence, but Cyprianus sensed that the justice which pervades the world was something to which he could sing hymns. We cannot help repeating that spiritual life has changed. Now Cyprianus is at the same time a magician who has dealings with the spirits of nature, that world of demons among whose number the medieval being of Satan can be counted. Cyprianus feels incapable of making a full approach to Justina, so he turns to Satan, the leader of the nature demons, and asks him to win her for him.

Here we have the deep tragedy of the Christian conflict. What approaches Cyprianus in Justina is the justice which is appropriate for Christian development. This justice is to be brought to Cyprianus, who is still a semi-heathen nature scholar. The tragedy is that out of the necessities of nature, which are rigid, he cannot find Christian justice. He can only turn instead to Satan, the leader of the demons, and ask him to win Justina for him.

Satan sets about this task. Human beings find it difficult to understand why Satan—who is, of course, an exceedingly clever being—is ever and again prepared to tackle tasks at which he has repeatedly failed. This is a fact. But however clever we might consider ourselves to be, this is not the way in which to criticize a being as clever as Satan. We should rather ask ourselves what it could be that again and again persuades a being as clever as Satan to try his luck at bringing ruin on human beings. For of course ruin for human beings would have been the result if Satan had succeeded in—let me say—winning over Christian justice in order to bring her to Cyprianus. Well—so Satan sets about his task, but he fails. It is Justina's disposition to feel nothing but revulsion for Satan. She flees from him and he retains only a phantom, a shadow image of her.

You see how various motifs which recur in Faust are to be found in Calderón's drama, but here they are bathed in this early Christian struggle. Satan brings the shadow image to Cyprianus. But Cyprianus does not know what to do with a phantom, a shadow image. It has no life. It bears within it only a shadow image of justice. This drama expresses in a most wonderful way what ancient nature wisdom has become now that it masquerades in the guise of modern science, and how, when it approaches social life—that is, when it approaches Justina—it brings no life with it, but only phantom thoughts. Now, with the fifth post-Atlantean period, mankind has entered upon the age of dead thoughts which gives us only phantoms, phantoms of justice, phantoms of love, phantoms of everything—well, not absolutely everything in life, but certainly in theory.

As a result of all this, Cyprianus goes mad. The real Justina is thrown into prison together with her father. She is condemned to death. Cyprianus hears this in the midst of his madness and demands his own death as well. They meet on the scaffold. Above the scene of their death the serpent appears and, riding on the serpent, the demon who had endeavoured to lead Justina to Cyprianus, declaring that they are saved. They can rise up into the heavenly worlds: ‘This noble member of the spirit world is rescued from evil!’

The whole of the Christian struggle of the Middle Ages is contained in this drama. The human being is placed midway between what he is able to experience before birth in the world of spirit and soul, and what he ought to experience after passing through the portal of death. Christ came down to earth because human beings could no longer see what in earlier times they had seen in their middle, rhythmic system which was trained by the breathing exercises of yoga. The middle system was trained, not the head system. These days human beings cannot find the Christ, but they strive to find him. Christ came down. Because they no longer have him in their memory of the time between death and a new birth, human beings must find him here on earth.

Dramas such as the Cyprianus drama of Calderóndescribe the struggle to find Christ. They describe the difficulties human beings face now that they are supposed to return to the spiritual world and experience themselves in harmony with the spiritual world. Cyprianusis still caught in the demonic echoes of the ancient heathen world. He has also not sufficiently overcome the ancient Hebrew element and brought it down to earth. Jahve is still enthroned in the super-sensible worlds, has not descended through the death on the cross, and has not yet become united with the earth. Cyprianus and Justina experience their coming together with the spiritual world as they step through the portal of death—so terrible is the struggle to bring Christ into human nature in the time between birth and death. And there is an awareness that the Middle Ages are not yet mature enough to bring Christ in in this way.

The Spanish drama of Cyprianus shows us the whole vital struggle to bring in the Christ far more vividly than does the theology of the Middle Ages, which strove to remain in abstract concepts and capture the Mystery of Golgotha in abstract terms. In the dramatic and tragic vitality of Calderón there lives the medieval struggle for Christ, that is, the struggle to fill the nature of the human being with the Christ. When we compare Calderón's Cyprianus drama with the later drama about Faust—this is quite characteristic—we find first in Lessing³ the awareness: Human beings must find the Christ during their earthly life because Christ endured the Mystery of Golgotha and united himself with earthly mankind. Not that this lived in any very clear ideas in Lessing, but he did have a definite sense for it. The fragment of his Faust which Lessing succeeded in getting down on paper concludes when the demons—those who were still able to prevent Cyprianus from finding the Christ during earthly life—receive the call: ‘You shall not conquer!’

This set the theme for the later Faust of Goethe. And even in Goethe the manner in which the human being finds Christianity is rather external. Think of Goethe's Faust: In Part One we have the struggle. Then we come to Part Two. In the Classical Walpurgis-Night and in the drama of Helena we are shown first how Christianity is taken up with reference to the Grecian world. Goethe knows that human beings must forge their links with Christ while they are here on the earth. So he must lead his hero to Christianity. But how? I have to say that this is still only a theoretical kind of knowledge—Goethe was too great a poet for us not to notice that this was only a theoretical kind of knowledge. For actually we find that the ascent in the Christian sense only comes in the final act, where it is tacked on to the end of the whole drama. It is certainly all very wonderful, but it does not come out of the inner nature of Faust. Goethe simply took the Catholic dogma. He used the Catholic cultus and simply tacked the fifth act on to the others. He knew that the human being must come to be filled with Christ. Basically the whole mood that lives in the second part of Faust contains this being filled with the Christ. But still Goethe could not find pictures with which to show what should happen. It is really only after Faust's death that the ascent into Christianity is unfolded.

I wanted to mention all this in order to show you how presumptuous it is to speak in a light-hearted way about achieving a consciousness of the Mystery of Golgotha, a consciousness of Christianity. For to achieve a consciousness of Christianity is a task which entails severe struggles of the kind I have mentioned. It behoves mankind today to seek these spiritual forces within the historical evolution of the Middle Ages and modern times. And after the terrible catastrophe we have all been through, human beings really ought to realize how important it is to turn the eye of their souls to these spiritual impulses.

• 1 . Philo of Alexandria, c.20 B.C. – c.40 A.D. Jewish philosopher and theologian.
• 2 . Pedro Calderön de la Barca, 1600-1681. Greatest Spanish dramatist. The drama about Cyprianus, El mägico prodigioso (The Miracle-working Magician) was written in 1637. The story was taken from a late version of an old tale in the Golden Legend. It is set in Antioch at the time of the Roman Emperor Decius.
• 3 . Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, 1729-1781. German dramatist, critic and writer on aesthetics; one of the great seminal minds in German literature.

In an introductory way, I will touch shortly upon a few facts that have already been considered, because we shall need them in the further course of our considerations. I have said that what we may call the threshold between the usual physical world of the senses and the soul-spiritual world lies in man himself, also psychically. It lies in him in such a way that in the usual everyday consciousness with which man is endowed between birth and death, he is really awake only as far as his sense-perceptions, or his perceptive activity, are concerned; he is awake in all that comes to him in the form of ideas—ideas concerning that which he perceives through his senses, or ideas arising out of his own inner being; they make the world intelligible and alive for him. Even a very ordinary self-recollection teaches us (clairvoyant endowment is in no way necessary for this) that when usual human consciousness is fully awake it cannot embrace more than the sphere of the life of ideas and the sphere of sense perceptions. However, we experience in our soul also the world of our feelings and the world of our will. But we have said that we live through this world of our feelings only as we live through a dream; the life of dream enters the ordinary waking consciousness and, inasmuch as we are feeling human beings, we are, in reality, mere dreamers of life. Things occur in the depths of our feeling life, of which our waking consciousness, contained in our ideas and sense perceptions, knows nothing at all. The waking consciousness knows less still concerning the real processes of the life of our will. Man dreams away his feeling life in his usual consciousness, and he sleeps away the life of his will.

Consequently, beneath the life of our thoughts lives a realm in which we ourselves are embedded, and which is only partly known to us; it is only known to us through the waves that break up through the surface.

We have emphasized further, that in this realm, which we dream and sleep away, we live together with human souls that are passing through the existence between death and a new birth. We are only separated from the so-called dead through the fact that we are not in a position to perceive with our ordinary consciousness how the forces of the dead, the life of the dead, the actions of the dead, play into our own life. These forces, these actions of the dead, continually permeate the life of our feeling and the life of our will. Therefore we can live with the dead. And it is indeed important to realize at the present time that the task of Anthroposophy is to develop this consciousness—that we are in touch with the souls of the dead.

The earth will not continue to evolve in the direction of the welfare of humanity unless humanity develops this living feeling of being together with the dead. For the life of the dead plays into the life of the so-called living in many ways.

During the course of these public lectures I have purposely drawn your attention to the historical course of life—what man lives through historically, what he lives through socially, what he lives through in the ethical relationships between people. All this really has the value of a dream, of sleep; the impulses which man develops when he surpasses his personal existence and is active within the community, are impulses of dream and sleep.

People will consider history in quite another way when this has reached their living consciousness; they will no longer consider as history the fable convenue that is usually called history today; but they will realize that historical life can only be understood when that which is dreamed and slept away in usual consciousness, and contains the influences of the deeds, impulses and activities of the so-called dead, is sought in this historical life. The deeds of the dead are interwoven with the impulses of feeling and will of the so-called living. And this is real history.

When the human being has gone through the Gate of Death, he does not cease to be active
within the human community. He continues to be active, although his activity is of another kind. We live under the illusion that our actions are our own, because they flow out of our feelings, out of our impulses of will; in reality they flow out of the deeds of those who have departed, even in the very moment in which we are carrying out our actions.

In the future development of man it will be of great importance to know that when we do something connected with our life in common with other men, we do this together with the dead. But of course, such a consciousness, which is related essentially to the life of the feeling and of the will, must be grasped also by the feeling and by the will. Abstract and dried-out ideas will never be able to grasp this. But ideas that have been taken from the sphere of spiritual science will be able to grasp this. Indeed, people will have to accustom themselves to form quite different conceptions about many things.

You all know that he who is firmly rooted in the comprehension of spiritual-scientific impulses may undertake to remain connected with those who have passed through the Gate of Death. The thoughts of spiritual science, the ideas that we form about the events in the spiritual world, are thoughts that are intelligible to us on earth, but are also intelligible to the souls of the dead. This may result in what we may call “reading to the dead.” When we think of the dead, and in doing so read to them, especially the contents of spiritual science, this is a real intercourse with the dead. For spiritual science speaks a language common to both the souls of the living and of the dead. But what is essential is to approach these things more and more, particularly with the life of feeling, with the illuminated life of feeling.

Man lives, between death and a new birth in an environment which is essentially permeated through and through, not only with living forces, but with living forces full of feeling. This is his lowest sphere. As the insensible mineral kingdom surrounds us during our sense life, so a realm surrounds the dead, which is of such a nature that, when he comes in contact with anything within it, he calls forth pain or joy. Thus, with the dead it is as if we were forced to realize, during life, that as soon as we touch a stone, or the leaf of a tree, we call forth feelings. The departed one can do nothing that does not call forth feelings of joy, feelings of pain, feelings of tension, relaxation, etc., in his surroundings. When we come into contact with the departed human being—this is the case when we read to him—he himself experiences this communion as already mentioned; he becomes aware of this when we read to him; he experiences it in this particular case. In this way the departed one comes in connection with that soul who reads to him, that soul with whom he is in some way related through Karma. The dead is connected with his lowest realm (which we had to bring in connection with the animal kingdom) in such a way that everything he does calls forth joy, pain, etc; he is connected with all that calls forth a relationship with human souls (whether they are human souls living here on the earth, or souls already disembodied and living between death and a new birth) in such a way that his feeling for life is either increased or diminished through what takes place in other souls.

Please realize this clearly. When you read to a so-called living person, you know that he understands what you read to him, in the sense in which we speak of human understanding; but the departed one lives in the contents, the departed one lives in each word that you read to him. He enters into that which passes through your own soul. The departed one lives with you. He lives with you more intensely than was ever possible for him in the life between birth and death. When this companionship with the dead is sought, it is really a very intimate one, and a consciousness endowed with insight intensifies this existence in common with the dead.

If man enters consciously into the realm that we inhabit together with the dead, the intercourse with the dead is such that when you read or speak to the departed one, you hear from him, like a spiritual echo, what you yourself are reading. You see, we must become acquainted with such ideas as these if we wish to gain a real conception of the concrete spiritual world. In the spiritual world things are not the same as here. Here you can hear yourself speak when you are speaking, or you know that you are thinking when you think. If you speak to the dead, or if you enter into a relationship with the dead, your words, or the thoughts you send to him, come to you out of the departed one himself, if you consciously perceive your connection with the dead.

And when you send a message to the dead, you feel as if you were intimately connected with him. If he replies to this message, it seems at first as if you were dimly conscious that the departed one is speaking. You are dimly conscious that the departed one has spoken, and you must now draw out of your own soul what he has spoken. This will make you realize how necessary it is for a real spiritual intercourse to hear from the other one what you yourself think and conceive, to hear out of yourself what the other one says. This is a kind of inversion of the entire relationship between one being and another being. But this inversion takes place when we really enter the spiritual world.

Because the spiritual world is so entirely different from the physical, and because—since about the fifteenth century—people only wish to form conceptions based on the physical world, they displace and obstruct their entrance to the spiritual world. If people would only realize that a world can exist which is, in certain respects—not in all—the direct opposite of what we call the true world; if people would be willing to form ideas which, perhaps, appear most absurd to those who insist upon living only in a materialistic world—then they will transform their souls and attain the possibility of seeing into the spiritual world, which is always around us. It is not that human beings, through their nature, are separated from the spiritual world; but that through habit, through the circumstances of inheritance, they have become entirely unaccustomed, since the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, to forming other ideas than those borrowed from the physical world. This applies even to art. What other scope has modern art than to copy, from the model, what Nature forms outside? Even in art people no longer attach value to what arises freely out of the spiritual life of the soul, and is also something real. But in the free reality that thus arises, people cannot efface what is effective and active in historical events, in the ethical, moral and social life of the community—except that they dream and sleep away this active element. As soon as man goes beyond his own personal concerns, even in the smallest measure—and in every moment of life he goes beyond these—the spiritual world, the world—I must emphasize this again and again—which we share with the dead works through his arm, through his hand, his word, his glance.

As the departed one grows familiar with the realm I have already spoken of, with the lowest one connected with the animal kingdom (just as we become familiar with the mineral, vegetable, animal, and human physical world in the life between birth and death during our gradual growth)—as the departed one continues to develop in the second region, where companionship with all those souls arises, with whom he is karmically connected either directly or indirectly, he evolves to the point of becoming familiar with the kingdom of the Beings who stand above man, if I may use this expression, although it is merely figurative—with the kingdom beginning with the Angeloi and Archangeloi.

Here in the physical world man is, as it were, the crown of creation—many like to emphasize this; he feels himself as the highest of all beings. The minerals are the lowest, then the plants, then the animals, and then man himself He feels that he belongs to the highest kingdom. It is not thus with the dead in the spiritual realm; the dead feels himself connected with the Hierarchies above him, the Hierarchies of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, etc. As man here in the physical world feels, in a certain sense, that the physical kingdom of man evolves and grows out of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, so the departed one feels himself sustained and carried by the Hierarchies above him, in the life between death and a new birth.

The way in which the human being gradually becomes familiar with this kingdom of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, etc., can be described as follows:—It is like a liberation from Self. Again we must acquire a conception of these things that cannot be won in the physical world of the senses. In this world of the senses, as we grow up from childhood, we gradually become acquainted with things, first with our nearest surroundings, then with what is to be our life experience in a wider sense, etc. We become acquainted with things in such a way that we know—they approach us little by little. This is not the case between death and a new birth. From the moment on, in which we know that we are connected with the Angeloi, we feel as if we had been united with them since eternity, as if we belonged to them, were one with them; yet we are only able to develop our consciousness by reaching the point of separating the idea of the Angeloi from ourselves. Here in the physical world we make our experiences by taking up ideas. In the spiritual world we make our experiences by separating the ideas from ourselves. We know that we carry them within us—and we know that we are entirely filled by them, but we must separate them from ourselves in order to bring them to consciousness. And so we set free the ideas of Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai.

In the lowest kingdom, man is, as it were, connected with the animalic, which he must strive to conquer, as I have already explained. Then he is connected with the kingdom immediately above this one—the kingdom of the souls with whom he is directly or indirectly linked up through Karma. In this kingdom man experiences his relationship with the Angeloi. His relationship with the kingdom of the Angeloi gives rise, at first, to a great deal of that which creates a right connection with the kingdom of human souls. Hence, in the life between death and a new birth, it is difficult to distinguish between the experiences which man has in common with other human souls and those with the Beings belonging to the kingdom of the Angeloi. There are many links between human beings and the Beings belonging to the kingdom of the Angeloi. Although we can speak of these things merely in comparison, and although we can only allude briefly to them, we may however say:—Just as here, in our physical life, memory leads us back again to some event which we have experienced, so does a Being belonging to the kingdom of the Angeloi lead us to something which we must experience in our life between death and a new birth. Beings belonging to the kingdom of the Angeloi are really the mediators for everything that arises in the life of the so-called dead. And the Angeloi help man in everything that he must do between death and a new birth in connection with the conquest of the animalic (he must raise his animal nature into the spiritual part of his being in order to prepare himself for his next incarnation). If you grasp this in its right meaning you will say:—Because man associates with the Angeloi between death and a new birth, he can form the right kind of relationships in connection with the souls with whom he must come into touch. And because man is in contact with the kingdom of the Angeloi, he can prepare rightly the things that must take place during his next incarnation. The tasks of the Archai, or the Beings belonging to the Spirits of the Time, are common both to the dead and to the living. My explanations will show you that the departed one has more to do with the Angeloi, who regulate his connection to other souls, and with the Archangeloi, who regulate his successive incarnations. But in his association with the Beings of the Hierarchy of the Archai, the dead works together with the so-called living, with those who are incarnated here in the physical body. The dead who is passing through the life between death and a new birth, and the so-called living, in his life between birth and death, are embedded alike in something which the Spirits of the Time weave as an unceasing stream of universal wisdom and universal activity of the will. What the Spirits of the Time thus weave is history, is the ethical-moral life of an age, the social life of an age.

We might say that we can look into the spiritual kingdom and realize:—The so-called dead are there; what they experience in this kingdom—inasmuch as these experiences are their own—is regulated by the Angeloi and Archangeloi; what they experience in common with the so-called living is woven by the Beings who belong to the Hierarchy of the Archai. We cannot fulfill any fruitful work in the social, historical, and ethical-moral life unless we realize this work must come from an element that we share with the dead—the element of the Archai, or Spirits of the Time.

These Spirits of the Time do their work alternately. We have often spoken of this. Through several centuries, one of the Time Spirits weaves the events contained in the stream of historical and social life and in the ethical-moral stream of human events; then another Time Spirit relieves him. The moment in which a Time Spirit relieves another one is most important of all, if we wish to observe what really takes place within the evolution of mankind. We cannot understand this evolution unless we bear in mind the living active influence of the Time Spirits and, in general, of the entire spiritual world. We cannot understand what takes place between man and man unless we consider the kingdom of the Spirit.

Very abstract are man's thoughts concerning that which is social, ethical-moral and historical. He thinks that history, or the stream of events taking place in the course of time, is a continuous current, where one event follows upon the other. He asks:—Why did certain events happen at the beginning of the twentieth century?—Because they were caused by events at the end of the nineteenth century.—Why did certain events happen at the end of the nineteenth century?—Because they were caused by events in the middle of the nineteenth century. And events in the middle of the nineteenth century were caused again by events at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and so on.

This way of considering historical events as the result of immediately preceding events is just the same as if a peasant were to say:—The wheat that I shall harvest this year is the result of the wheat of last year. The seeds remained, and the wheat of last year is again the result of the wheat of the year before last. One thing depends on the other—cause and effect. Except that the peasant does not really follow this rule: he must of course interfere personally in the growth of the wheat. He must first sow the seeds in order that an effect may follow the cause. The effect does not come of itself. From a certain point of view this is one of the most terrible illusions of our materialistic age, for people believe that the effect is the result of the cause; they do not wish to form the simplest thoughts concerning the real truth of these things.

I have already given you an example, by relating to you a sensational event in the life of a human being. It is indeed so, that people prefer to contemplate sensational events rather than consider the other events, which are of exactly the same kind and take place every hour and every moment of our life. I have told you how such an event can occur: A man is accustomed to take his daily walk to a mountainside. He takes this walk every day for a long time. But one day during his walk, on reaching a certain spot, he hears a voice calling out to him:—Why do you go along this path? Is it necessary that you should do this? The voice says more or less these words. On hearing them he becomes thoughtful, steps aside and thinks for a while about the curious thing that has happened to him. Suddenly a piece of rock falls down, which would have killed him had he not stepped aside after hearing the voice. This is a sensational event. But one who considers the world calmly, yet spiritually, will see in this event one of the many which take place every moment of our life. In every moment of our life something else, too, might happen, if this or that would occur.

A very clever man—we know that especially modern people are very clever—would say: Why was this man spared? Because he went away. This is the cause. Very well—but suppose he had not gone away; in this case he would have been killed, and a very clever modern man would argue:--the falling stone is the cause of the man's death. Indeed—seen from outside and in an abstract and formal way—it is true that the falling stone is the cause, and the man's death the effect: but the cause has nothing to do with the effect; it is quite an indifferent matter to the falling stone, where the man was standing. This cause has nothing whatever to do with the effect. Ponder this matter and try to understand what is really contained in all this talk of cause and effect. The so-called cause need not have anything to do with the effect.

The stone would have taken exactly the same course had the man been standing elsewhere. As far as the stone is concerned, nothing has been changed owing to the fact that the man was warned and went away. I gave you an example that, even in outer quite formal things, the so-called cause need have nothing to do with the so-called effect. The whole way of looking at cause and effect is based entirely on abstraction. It is only possible to speak of cause and effect within certain limits. Take this example, for instance: Here you have a tree with its roots. What takes place in the roots can certainly be considered, in certain respects, as the cause of the growing tree; what takes place in the branches can, to a certain extent, be designated as the cause of the growing leaves. You see, the tree is, to a certain extent, a whole; and a concrete way of looking at life considers totalities and the aspect of the whole; an abstract way of looking at life always links up one thing with another, without considering the complete whole. But for a spiritual way of looking at things it is important to bear in mind the whole. You see, where the outer leaves end, the tree ceases to exist, as well as the inner causes of its growth. Where the leaves end, also the forces of their growth end; but something else begins there. Where these forces end, the spiritual eye can see spiritual beings playing around the tree, spiritual elementary beings. Here begins, if I may say so, a negative tree, which stretches out into infinity, but only apparently so, because after a while it disappears. An elementary existence meets what comes out of the tree; where the tree ceases, it comes into contact with the elementary existence, which grows toward it. It is thus in Nature.

The plant ceases to exist when it grows out of the soil, and the causes of its growth cease when the plant ceases. But an elementary existence from the universe grows toward the plant.

In the lecture on human life from the aspect of spiritual science, I have mentioned some of these things. The plants grow out of the soil from below. A spiritual element grows toward the plant from above. It is thus with all beings. What you observe in Nature is contained in all existence. Above all, there is a stream of social, ethical-moral and historical life. Events do not consist in a continuous stream, but a Time Spirit reigns for a while; another one replaces him; a third one replaces him; a fourth one replaces him; and so on. When a Time Spirit replaces another one, there is a difference also in the stream of continuous events. When such a new period begins, it is not possible to say that its events are the immediate effect of preceding events. They are not the effect of the preceding ones, in the sense in which we imagine this.

There is indeed an order of law in the successive course of events, but what we generally call necessity is an illusion, if we look upon it as it is often looked upon today. In the course of continuous events, we have something similar to what we find when we look at the tree—where the tree ceases, the elementary tree begins; but in Nature, a being belonging to the visible kingdom of the senses touches a being that remains invisible to the senses, a super-sensible being; the world of the senses and the super-sensible world touch. There is something similar also in the course of Time. Just as the physical tree ceases and an elementary tree begins, so also in the course of Time, something ceases and something new begins. There are epochs in which old events and old impulses cease, as it were, and are replaced by new ones. At such points of time, people like to keep to Lucifer and Ahriman, who help them to maintain what is really dead. It is possible to keep alive in human consciousness impulses and forces that are, in reality, dead. This is not possible in Nature. If someone cultivates exactly the same kind of ideas in 1914 that were justified in 1876, he can do so of course. He can do this because, in the continuous stream of human events, which is seized by Ahriman and Lucifer, the old can be maintained even if it is already dead. It is the same as if someone were to make a tree grow on and on without ceasing, after it had reached its natural limits. In the course of history we generally find that people cannot face a new epoch rightly; in other words, that they cannot place themselves at the service of the new Time Spirit.

In our age this is particularly important. During the last weeks we have spoken of the spiritual events of 1879. This was the end of an epoch. Something died and ceased to exist, just as the tree ceases. From 1879 onward it became necessary (this is of course still necessary today and will be so for a long time) that people should open themselves to the ideas and impulses coming from the spiritual world. Otherwise the old impulses become Ahrimanic or Luciferic.

These remarks contain something very important. The last third of the nineteenth century was an important time in the evolution of humanity. It was necessary, and it is still necessary, that people should become accessible to the influence of inspired ideas. People must open themselves to these. But looked upon from outside (we shall not only look upon this from outside, but study the deeper inner meaning), looked upon from outside, things have a very hopeless aspect. Impulses did come from the spiritual world. They came streaming in and worked in order that men might be led beyond this point, beyond the year 1879, and in order that they might open themselves to inspired ideas. They were impulses that could give men thoughts enabling them to become conscious, even at the end of the nineteenth century, that whenever we fulfill actions of a historical, social or ethical-moral value within the life of the community, we fulfill them together with our dead, and with the Archangeloi, Angeloi, and Archai. These impulses were there; they were there, but went past many people without leaving a trace. I have said that today I will first consider these things from an outer aspect, and it is good if you realize how apparently everything went past without leaving a trace. In the second half of the nineteenth century important things and important impulses already existed, and there were people who proclaimed and wrote significant thoughts. If we look at these thoughts today they may seem abstract. This is indeed so. But they are not abstract thoughts and they should not remain as they were then. (I repeat once more that this is looked upon from outside, tomorrow we shall consider these things from an inner aspect.) This was the case more or less in all spheres of modern civilized life. For instance—who studies the life of this country, Switzerland, in such a way as to say: In the fifties of the nineteenth century a man lived here in Switzerland, a man with great ideas, that were indeed of a philosophical kind. But had they been accepted by two or three, had they been popularized, would they not have had a very fruitful, spiritualizing influence on the entire history of Switzerland? Who considers, for instance, that in the middle of the nineteenth century a high spirit lived in Otto Heinrich Jäger? He is one of the greatest men of Switzerland. But who knows his name now, and who names him? Who is aware of the fact that although his thoughts had an abstract appearance they were only apparently abstract. They might have become concrete, they might have blossomed and borne fruit, because something very great was in this man, who taught at the Zurich University and wrote books on great thoughts, thoughts that should enter the life of the present. He wrote on the idea of human liberty and its connection with the entire spiritual world. Otto Heinrich Jager wrote, here in Switzerland, a kind of “Philosophy of Spiritual Activity,” from another point of view than my own The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, which arose in the nineties.

Innumerable examples like this one could be given. The most fruitful ideas germinated and greened, but what is recounted today as the spiritual history of the nineteenth century leading into the twentieth century is the least significant part of all that really took place, and the most important part, that influenced it most of all, has not been considered at all.

This is how matter stand, from an exterior aspect, to begin with. Perhaps they will look more hopeful when we shall look at them from an inner standpoint.

An Introduction to the Winter's Lectures, 1918

I need not tell you what pleasure it gives me to be with you again at this difficult time so full of trials. As this is the first occasion for a long time that we have had the opportunity of discussing subjects connected with spiritual science, it is obvious that we should call to mind that spiritual science is far from being merely a theory, rather should it be a firm and substantial support, uniting the souls of men; not only the souls of those living here on the physical plane, but also the souls of those living in the spiritual world. This is a question we have very much at heart at the present time when innumerable souls have left the physical plane under circumstances to which we have often alluded, a time when so many are being subjected to the severest trials perhaps ever inflicted on man in the whole history of the world. Besides all the usual ideas which flow through our souls at the beginning of these lectures here and elsewhere, we will to-day try individually to direct our sentiments and feelings to those who are outside, as well as to those who, in consequence of these events have passed through the portals of death.

‘Ye who watch o'er souls on earth,
Ye who weave in souls on earth,
Ye Spirit-guardians of the souls of men
Working lovingly in Cosmic wisdom,
Hear ye our request
Look upon our love
Which with your helping, strengthening rays
Would fain unite
In spiritual devotion, sending forth our love.’

With reference to those too who have passed through the portal of death.

‘Ye who weave in the souls now in the spheres,
Ye spirit-guardians of the souls of men,
Working lovingly in Cosmic Wisdom,
Hear ye our request;
Look upon our love
Which with your helpful, strengthening rays
Would fain unite
In spiritual devotion, sending forth our love.’

May that spirit Whom we have sought to approach by means of the spiritual science we have striven to acquire, He who willed to pass through the Mystery of Golgotha for the salvation of the Earth, and for the freedom and progress of humanity, may He be with you in your heavy tasks.

The severe time of trial through which humanity is now passing may perhaps be one which will bring home to us more and more closely the significance of a spiritual deepening of the human soul. If so it will not have been in vain for the present and future of humanity; but the feeling arises that the time has not yet come, that mankind has not yet learnt lessons enough from the seriousness of the events of the present time. This is not said by way of criticism, but to appeal to right and true feeling. One feels that the Spirit of the Age must speak more and more distinctly to human hearts and souls; for not only do human voices speak to-day, other voices are heard too, ringing forth mysteriously from weighty and significant events as well as from other sources.

I shall endeavour to put before you to-day what has particularly struck me during my recent journey through Switzerland, with respect to the relation of our spiritual movement to the tasks of the age. Anyone who has carefully studied the course of lectures I gave in Vienna before the war, on the experiences of human beings between death and rebirth, and what I said with respect to human life as a whole, will know that reference was being made—before the war—to the deeper causes, the deeper-lying foundations of what has lately worked out in the terrible events of the times. We may say that everything that can be experienced below the surface then, is to-day externally revealed as living proof of the correctness of what was said at that time. The universal disease of the age was then unequivocally described, as you know, as a social cancer. Here and there it can be seen that some few lessons have been learnt from the great events that have occurred; but on the other hand, it is clearly evident, particularly when apparently insignificant things are taken together, how rigid human thought has become on the physical plane during the last few centuries, and how slow men are to arrive at decisions of any weight. By way of introduction I should like to tell you some of my experiences during my Swiss tour, for it seems to me necessary that those who are interested in our Movement should form some idea of its connection as a whole. I shall only give a few points.

It must be regarded as a very satisfactory sign that during my recent stay in Switzerland a number of young students from the High School at Zurich desired a course of lectures referring to and combining the various branches of academic science. I therefore gave four lectures in Zurich; the first of which referred to the relation of our anthroposophical spiritual science to Psychology, the science of the soul; the second referred to the relation of spiritual science to History; the third referred to its relation to Natural Science, and the fourth to its relation to Social Science, to the great social and judicial problems of the people in our day. Though far from being all that we might wish, one cannot but see that a certain interest was shown in this drawing together of the threads of academical sciences. It was evident that these latter were awaiting completion, as one might say awaiting that which can only come from anthroposophical spiritual science, and that the part-sciences of the present day will remain but half or even quarter sciences, unless they can have that completion. Wherever I was allowed to give lectures in Switzerland I did not fail to let it be seen what it is that is lacking in this respect, and what it is our age must acquire for these tendencies to be guided in the right direction. One may say that although at first there was in Switzerland a strong opposition to our endeavours—and certainly this opposition is not growing less but rather increasing—yet side by side with this a lively interest is developing; and it may well be that karma has placed our building in Switzerland because the work may have a special significance for that land; particularly if our work is directed, as I hope it will be, in such a way that our activity will also bear witness to the sources of spiritual scientific investigation, which, alas, are in many respects disregarded and unnoticed in the spiritual life of Germany. That is a feeling which, while on the one hand it stirs one to-day with a certain tragic feeling of sorrow, yet, on the other, fills one with deep satisfaction. We may say that anyone who takes into consideration the fact that in four-fifths of the world the spiritual life, of which Germany is so proud, is to-day much calumniated and really abused, and if he seriously considers the gravity of this fact, as is not always done, while on the one hand he may feel sorrowful, yet on the other he may feel satisfaction in the hope that anthroposophical science may yet render it possible for the German spiritual life to make its voice heard in the other world—as it must, if the development of the world is not to be injured. A way can be found to speak to all men, no matter what their nationality, if one speaks to them in the true meaning of the word, of the spirit, that is, of the true sources of spiritual life.

It may strike a sorrowful note, too, that while the efforts made by spiritual science are successful in winning a little ground in some places, such a country as Switzerland is finding it increasingly difficult to stand up against the attacks made to-day. It is no easy matter in the face of the pressure exercised by four-fifths of the world, to form an impartial opinion; nor indeed is it easy to find the right words in which to say all that must be said, in a country in which, although neutral itself, those four-fifths of the world still play an important part. This has now reached a very acute crisis.

One great advantage to us in that country is that the mere words and teaching are there supported by the forms and creations of our building at Dornach, which place before the outer vision what it is that our spiritual science desires, and how it is able to show that when allowed to intervene in practical life and not crudely rejected, it is capable both of mastering and utilizing life, which at the present time makes such great demands on humanity.

In speaking to-day of the relation between the Spiritual Science of anthroposophy and other knowledge and wants of the world, it is really necessary to place quite new and unaccustomed ideas before one's hearers. In the profoundest depths of their consciousness people are dimly convinced that something new must come from somewhere or other. They are, however, extremely rigid as regards thinking, extremely slow to take in new ideas. Indeed it is a characteristic feature of our age that while life is lived at so rapid a pace, people are so dreadfully slow in thinking. We come across this in the smallest things. For instance, the threads of anthroposophical science were drawn towards the academical sciences in Zurich, although I had spoken publicly in Basel before I did so in Zurich. Just before I had to leave Switzerland, a request came from Basel, asking me to speak in an academical assembly on the relation of anthroposophical Spiritual Science to the other sciences. It was then, of course, too late to do so; the subject could not then be discussed. I mention this for two reasons: First because it would have been of great importance to speak of Spiritual Science in a hall dedicated to academical science and established by the students of Basel; and secondly because those people were so slow as to come to a conclusion only at the eleventh hour. That is characteristic, for elasticity of thought, capacity for quick decision might have brought about an earlier decision. It is necessary to discuss these things among ourselves, so that we may behave accordingly. To-day I need only refer to one of the subjects of which I have been speaking lately, to make clear the significance of what has to come about.

In Zurich I spoke, among other things, of the threads that can unite anthroposophical Spiritual Science and the science of history, the historical life of man. We to-day possess a history, which is taught to children and in college; but what is this history of ours? It is something which has not the remotest idea of the forces governing the historical life of mankind, for the simple reason that the whole object of the intellectual life of the present day is to set man's intelligence in motion, to set the ordinary so-called fully conscious concepts and ideas going, and with the help of these, to understand all things. External perceptible nature can certainly be understood by these means, so too can that thought which has triumphed in the domain of natural science; but if this mode of thought is applied to history, that means making history a natural science. Endeavours were being made in the nineteenth century to regard history in the same way as natural science regards the things perceptible to the senses. This, however, is not possible—for the simple reason that the facts of history are quite differently related to life. What is it that we meet in historical life? What are the impulses at work in history?

Anyone who believes that historical impulses can be grasped by means of the intellect, which can very well serve us in natural science, will never discover the historical impulses; for these work in human evolution in a similar way to the dreams in our own dream-life. They do not enter the ordinary consciousness which we use in everyday life or in natural science; but these impulses work like that which only plays into our dream-life. We may say: Historical becoming is a great dream of mankind, but what plays into our dreams like transient pictures becomes clear and distinct in the imaginations of spiritual science. Therefore there is no history which is not a spiritual science, and the history taught to-day is not history at all.

Hermann Grimm was struck with the fact that the historian, Gibbon, in describing the early days of the Christian era, describes the fall of the Roman Empire, but not the gradual ascent of Christianity, its growth and prosperity.

Of course he did not know the reason why a good historian can always describe a decline, but not a growth and a becoming. The reason is that the present-day method of learning history can only lead to an understanding of what is declining, not of what is growing. Growth plays a like part in the development of mankind as do dreams in the life of man; it can therefore only be described by a person able to have Imaginations. If a man does not possess this power, even though he be a Ranke or a Lamprecht, he can only depict the corpse of history, not the reality of its growth. The impulses of historical growth only enter our consciousness in dreams; if the ordinary consciousness tries to grasp the historical, it can only do so when the historical has already passed into the subconsciousness. Modern times present interesting examples of this. If we follow these up, we see how in the last few decades, interest in the great questions of the world as one coherent whole has practically died out—or become mere pedantry, which is almost the same thing. There is a deep connection between the pedantry of the age and the fact that a schoolmaster, at present at the head of the greatest republic, wants to lay down the law to mankind. If we ask ourselves: Where, during the last few decades, has there been a feeling for a great drawing together of mankind, for ideas having almost a religious character although of a crude kind, when everything else was more or less moribund? The answer, if we look the circumstances in the face, must be: in socialism. Ideas were there, but such as never tended to a spiritual life, only to a crude material life and alas, these ideas encountered no other world of ideas to stand against them. If we really understood the ideas which have come to the surface in socialism, we should find that they are in a sense historical ideas, dreams of humanity;—but what kind of dreams? One must have a feeling for this ‘being dreamt’ of the historical events of humanity. I tried to make this clear to the people in Switzerland by saying: If one seeks as leading and guiding personalities only those who are very clever but are without any understanding whatever for what I call dream impulses, it will be seen how far this leads. In this respect one should try to answer practically the question: How quickly can a commonwealth be systematically ruined? Contrive to set up therein a parliament of scholars! They need not be skilled professors, they might even be socialistic leaders;—in that movement there are professors enough. With a perception for such things, one will ask oneself: How has the whole comprehensive theory of socialism come about? If it could really be put into practice, it could only bring about ruin (and perhaps a sorrowful proof of this may yet be found in the East, if it does not stop, but tries to proceed with it further). How has it come about that these socialistic ideas have taken root in men's minds? What exactly are these theories?

To know this, one must be acquainted with the history of the last four centuries, especially that of the 18th and 19th. One must know that real history is very different from that contained in history books; one must know that such books, especially in regard to the last two centuries form a picture of human class and social contention; Karl Marx, for instance, has simply set up as theories what humanity dreamt in those centuries, something which actually did exist, but which, like a dream, ceased in the new period and gave place to theories. The theories of socialism which arose as soon as the fact of it was lost in dream, show that the intellect uses what has already perished, what has already become a corpse, directly it takes the matter in hand with such means of knowledge as are quite valid—e.g., in natural science. From such cognitions one must see that the world really stands at a turning point in time where the comprehension of the historical development (for the present has also become historical, and as man lives into the future he also experiences historical development) must be understood in the sense of Spiritual Science. One does not obtain a true picture of even the most recent events if Spiritual Science is left out of account. I shall relate an oft-quoted example.

(Among ourselves as members such matters may be discussed; though people outside often laugh at such things—they will not always do so however). An important incident of European life in the Middle Ages is the fact that at that time the knowledge of the Western quarter of the globe was lost to Europe. There was indeed always an inner connection, especially between Ireland and England, and the territory now called America. A certain connection was always kept up between Europe and the West, and only in the century following the “discovery of America,” intercourse with that continent was forbidden by a Papal document (of course it was not called ‘America’ then). This connection with America only ceased with its so-called ‘discovery’ by a Spaniard, but outer history is so inaccurate that people are under the impression that in Europe America was not known at all before the year 1492. Almost everyone believes this. Many similar facts can be brought forward which Spiritual Science has to make valid from its own sources. We are standing at a turning point in time when historical life must be considered from the aspect of Spiritual Science.

Someone might ask: If Spiritual Science as we understand it can only unfold in our time, how then was it in earlier times?

When we look back into earlier times, we find something different, something comparable with what in Spiritual Science is called Imaginations; we find myths and legends, and from their forces, which were pictures, impulses could be derived; even political impulses, which were more real, more in accordance with facts, than the abstract teaching of modern history, social economy, and so forth. It is not necessary to understand in abstract ideas what holds people together and makes the conditions of communal life. In earlier times this was brought to expression in myths. We to-day can no longer produce myths; we must come to Imaginations, and with these comprehend historical life, and from that again coin political impulses which will be truly different from the fantastic impulses of which so many dream to-day, which are, as we might say, impulses of the schoolmaster.

It is certainly very difficult to tell people that historical life is something which, as regards the ordinary ideas, runs its course in the subconsciousness; but on the other hand, this hidden life of mankind knocks at the door of events, at the door indeed of all human impulses. It may be said—as the Zurich lectures have shown—that everywhere to-day one would like to meet this pursuit of knowledge, which also aims at the spirit, though with wholly inadequate means. In Zurich we made acquaintance with psycho-analysis, the analytical psychology, already qualified as academical; and, connected with those very lectures, the most remarkable discussions have taken place on psycho-analysis in relation to anthroposophical Spiritual Science. The psycho-analyst, however, comes to the world of Spiritual Science spiritually blindfold, and can find nothing in it. Yet this world raps at the door which ought now to be opened to man.

In Zurich there is a professor named Jung, who has quite recently written another pamphlet on psycho-analysis and the many problems connected with it. He is the author of many works on the subject: he shows, however, that he can only lay hold of it with inadequate means. One fact will show what is meant. Jung brings forward an example cited by the greater number of psychoanalysts.

The following happened to a woman. She was invited to an evening party. As soon as supper was over, her hostess, not being very well, was to start for one of the spas. Supper came to an end and the hostess started, the guests leaving with her. They walked, as people sometimes do on leaving an evening party, not on the pavement, but in the middle of the road. Presently a cab came round the corner. The guests all beat a retreat to the pavement, except the lady of the story, who ran to the middle of the road just in front of the horse; the driver shouted at her, but she ran on until she came to a bridge across a river. Then, in order to escape from this unpleasant situation, she decided to throw herself from the bridge into the river. This she did, and was rescued by the guests, who ran after her, and the house where the party had been held being the nearest, she was taken back there. She met there her hostess's husband and spent a few hours with him.

Let us reflect what a man with insufficient data can make of such an occurrence. If he approaches the matter with the methods of the psycho-analyst, he discovers those mysterious provinces in the soul which tell us that this soul, in the seventh year of her life, had an experience with horses, so that the sight of the cab horses called up an earlier experience from her subconsciousness and so bewildered the lady that she did not spring to the side but ran on before the cab. Thus to the psycho-analyst, the whole transaction is the result of the connection of a present experience with ‘unsolved riddles of the soul,’ from the domain of education, and so forth. This is a pursuit of the subject with inadequate means, because the psycho-analyst does not know that the subconscious ruling in man has more real existence than is supposed; it is also much more subtle and much more clever than anything man gets from his conscious intellect. This subconsciousness is often much braver and more determined. The psycho-analyst does not know that a ‘daimon’ dwelt in the soul of this lady who started out, from the first, with the unconscious intention of being alone with the husband after his wife had started on her journey. This was all arranged in the most subtle manner by the subconsciousness, for one does everything with far greater certainty if the consciousness has nothing to do with it. The lady ran before the horse simply in order to be intercepted when matters had reached a certain point; and she conducted herself to that end. Into these things the psycho-analyst does not penetrate because he does not suppose that there is a spiritual psychic world everywhere, to which the human soul stands in relation. Jung, however, has some inkling of this. From innumerable things that appear before him, he divines that the human soul stands in relation to numberless others. Still he must remain a materialist, or cease to be one of the clever men of the day. What then does he do? He says that the human soul stands everywhere in connection with spiritual facts outside itself (this is shown, he said, by the things which take place within), it is in connection with super-psychic, spiritual facts. But as a materialist he cannot admit the existence of these facts and therefore falls back upon the following theory:—The soul has a body, derived from other bodies which again are derived from others. Then there is heredity, and Jung construes that the soul in accordance with that conforms to all that has been experienced in relation to the heathen Gods, for instance. Through inheritance these experiences remain in the soul, creating an ‘isolated province of the soul,’ which only needs to be questioned if man desires to be rid of it. Jung even conceives that it is necessary for the human soul to have connection with this isolated province, and that it ruins the nervous system if it is not drawn up into the consciousness. Therefore he enunciates the proposition, which is quite justifiable according to the modern philosophy of life; that unless the soul is in relation to a divine being, it must inwardly perish. He is just as sure of this as he is that there is no divine being at all. The question of the relation of the human soul to God has not the least connection with the question of the existence of God in his mind.

So it is written in his book. Let us think what is really under consideration. It is scientifically proved that the human soul must construct a relation to God, but it is equally certain that it would be foolish to assume the existence of a God. Thus the soul for its own health is condemned to invent a God for itself. Pretend that there is a God, or thou wilt be ill! That is actually stated in the book.

We see from this what great enigmatic problems knock at the door, and how the present time opposes these things. If men were courageous enough, this truth would gradually come to be perceived to-day, but they are not so courageous. I do not say all this in hostility to Jung, for I believe he is more courageous in his thinking than all the others. He says what he has to say according to the assumptions of the present. Others do not say it; they have less courage.

We must reflect on all these things in order to understand the real meaning of the statement, ‘Spiritual science brings forward a truth such as: What takes place in the historical life of man, and consequently in the life of political impulses, has nothing to do with the ordinary consciousness, it can have nothing to do with it; but can only be understood and applied through imaginative consciousness.’ We might even say as regards the most distinctive representatives of the anti-social historic conception, that President Wilson's view must be replaced by an imaginative knowledge of the truth. And Wilson's ideas are very widespread (far more people are of his way of thinking than is supposed). Names are of no moment, only the facts under which men live are of consequence. I may be allowed to be somewhat outspoken about Wilson, because in the course of lectures given in Helsingfors before the war, already then I pronounced my judgment of him and did not need to wait for the war to learn of what spirit he is who sits on the throne of America. At that time fulsome praise of Woodrow Wilson could be heard everywhere; it has not long ceased. The world is now very much wiser, and knows that the man who now occupies the throne of America drafted his most powerful republican document from one issued by the late Emperor of Brazil, Don Pedro, in 1864. Wilson copied this exactly except that the passage, ‘I must intervene in the interests of South America’ is altered to ‘I must intervene in the interests of the United States of America,’ etc., with the necessary recasting.

When in their time Wilson's two books, The New Freedom and Mere Literature appeared in our own country, there was no less fulsome praise. This was only about five or six years ago. In this matter of Wilson's influence people have certainly learned a few things; but as regards many other things they could only be learnt from the incisive events of the present time. For this reason it is necessary that many things which can only flourish on the ground of spiritual scientific cognition, should be taken very earnestly. People lightly reproach anthroposophical Spiritual Science as being merely ‘theoretical;’ and concerning itself with cosmic evolution rather than with love. They do not see that cosmic evolution is the expression of love, but prefer to talk of ‘love,’ of universal love, of how and what man should love, and they have been talking thus thousands of years. Many do not understand that at the present time the fruition of love is to be comprehended through the study of cosmic evolution. Let us for a few moments allow Spiritual Science to take hold of the human soul, and we shall see how love will arise in the human heart. Love cannot be preached; it grows if properly cultivated; it is a child of the spirit. Even among men it is a child of true knowledge—knowledge reaching to the spirit, not to matter only.

In this introductory lecture I have wished to do no more than indicate a few perceptions which will be very significant at this period. All that can awaken power, courage, and hope in the human soul is to be reviewed in these lectures, and I should like especially to speak of all the gifts mankind can receive from Spiritual Science, other than those which have been given during past centuries. I should like to speak of Spiritual Science as something living, as something which is no theory, but which brings to birth in us a second man, a spiritual man who bears and maintains the other in the world. I believe above all that the, present time needs this. There was a time, in the Middle Ages, when many had a fantastic longing to make gold. Why did they wish to make gold? They wanted something which may not be realised under ordinary earthly conditions. Why? Because they perceived that ordinary earthly conditions, unless spiritualised and permeated by spiritual impulses, cannot give man any true satisfaction. In the end that is the content of the teaching of the Gospels also, only people usually overlook the most important points; they criticise the view of the Gospels that the Kingdom of God has come; yet is it not present? It is, but not to outward appearances. It must be understood inwardly. It must not be denied, as is done in our time. We shall speak of this descent of the Kingdom of the Spirit in our next lecture.

To-day I only wished to strike the keynote. Our epoch is directed to build the bridge to the kingdom in which the dead are living. The number of those now passed through the gate of death can be reckoned by millions. They live among us and we can find them. The way in which we can find them will be discussed from another point of view.

Speaking in detail about karma, we must of course distinguish between those karmic events of life which come to a man more from outside, and those which arise, as it were, from within. A human being's destiny is composed of many and diverse factors. To begin with, it depends on his physical and etheric constitution. Then it depends on the sympathies and antipathies with which he is able to meet the outer world, according to his astral and his Ego-constitution; and on the sympathies and antipathies with which others in their turn are able to encounter him according to his nature. Moreover, it depends on the myriad complications and entanglements in which he finds himself involved on the path of life. All these things work together to determine—for a given moment, or for his life as a whole—the human being's karmic situation.

I shall now try to show how the total destiny of man is put together from these several factors. Today we shall take our start from certain inner factors in his nature. Let us observe, for once, what is in many respects of cardinal importance. I mean, his predisposition to health and illness; and, with this underlying basis, all that comes to expression in his life, in the physical strength—and strength of soul—with which he is able to confront his tasks, and so on ...

To judge these factors rightly, we must however be able to see beyond many a prejudice that is contained in the civilisation of today. We must be able to enter more into the true original being of man; we must gain insight, what it really signifies to say that man, as to his deeper being, descends from spiritual worlds into this physical and earthly life.

All that people refer to nowadays as heredity, has even found its way, as you are well aware, into the realms of poetry and art. If any one appears in the world with such and such qualities, people will always begin by asking how he inherited them. If, for example, he appears with a predisposition to illness, they will at once ask, what of the hereditary circumstances?

To begin with, the question is quite justifiable; but in their whole attitude to these things nowadays, people look past the real human being; they completely miss him. They do not observe what his true being is, how his true being unfolds. In the first place, they say, he is the child of his parents and the descendant of his forebears. Already in his physiognomy, and even more perhaps in his gestures, they fondly recognise a likeness to his ancestors emerging. Not only so; they see his whole physical organism as a product of what is given to him by his forefathers. He carries this physical organism with him. They emphasise this very strongly, but they fail to observe the following:

When he is born, to begin with undoubtedly man has his physical organism from his parents. But what is the physical organism which he receives from his parents? The thoughts of the civilisation of today upon this question are fundamentally in error. For in effect, when he is at the change of teeth, man not only exchanges the teeth he first received, for others, but this is also the moment in life when the entire human being—as organisation—is for the first time renewed. There is a thorough-going difference as between what the human being becomes in his eighth or ninth year of life, and what he was in his third or fourth year. It is a thorough-going difference. That which he was—as organisation—in his third or fourth year, that he undoubtedly received by heredity. His parents gave it to him. That which emerges first in the eighth or ninth year of his life is in the highest degree a product of what he himself has brought down from spiritual worlds.

To picture the real underlying facts, we may put it as follows—though I am well aware it will shock the man of today. Man, we must say, when he is born, receives something like a model of his human form. He gets this model from his forefathers; they give him the model to take with him into life. Then, working on the model, he himself develops what he afterwards becomes. What he develops, however, is the outcome of what he himself brings with him from the spiritual world.

Fantastic as it may seem to the man of today—to those who are completely immersed in modern culture—yet it is so. The first teeth which the human being receives are undoubtedly inherited; they are the products of heredity. They only serve him as the model, after which he elaborates his second teeth, and this he does according to the forces he brings with him from the spiritual world. Thus he elaborates his second teeth. And as it is with the teeth, so with the body as a whole.

A question may here arise: Why do we human beings need a model at all? Why can we not do as indeed we did in earlier phases of earth-evolution? Just as we descend and gather in our ether-body (which, as you know, we do with our own forces, and bring it with us from the spiritual world), why can we not likewise gather to ourselves the physical materials and form our own physical body without the help of physical inheritance?

For the modern man's way of thinking, it is no doubt an grotesquely foolish question—mad, I need hardly say. But with respect to madness—let us admit it—the Theory of Relativity holds good. To begin with, people only apply the Theory to movements. They say you cannot tell, from observation, whether you yourself—with the body on which you are—are moving, or whether it is the neighbouring body that is moving. This fact emerged very clearly when the old cosmic theory was exchanged for the Copernican. Though, as I said, they apply the Theory of Relativity only to movements, yet we may also apply it (for it certainly has its sphere of validity) to the aforesaid ‘madness.’ Here are two people, standing side by side: each one is mad as compared to the other ... The question only remains, which of the two is absolutely mad?

In relation to the real facts of the spiritual world, this question must none the less be raised: Why does the human being need a model? Ancient world-conceptions answered it in their way. Only in modern time, when morality is no longer included in the cosmic order but only recognised as human convention, these questions therefore are no longer asked. Ancient world-conceptions not only asked the question; they also answered it. Originally, they said, man was pre-destined to come to the earth in such a way that he could form his own physical body from the substances of earth, just as he gathers to himself his ether-body from the cosmic ether-substance. But he then fell a prey to the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences, and he thereby lost the faculty, out of his own nature to build his physical body. Therefore he must take it from heredity. This way of obtaining the physical body is the result of inherited sin.

This is what ancient world-conceptions said—that this is the fundamental meaning of “inherited sin.” It signifies the having to enter into the laws and conditions of heredity.

We in our time must first discover and collect the necessary concepts so as to take these questions sincerely, in the first place; and in the second place, to find the answers. It is quite true: man in his earthly evolution has not remained as strong as he was pre-disposed to be before the onset of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences. Therefore he cannot form his physical body of his own accord when he comes down into the earthly conditions. He is dependent on the model, he needs the model which we see growing in the first seven years of human life. And, as he takes his direction from the model, it is but natural if more or less of the model also remains about him in his later life. If, in his working on himself, he is altogether dependent on the model, then he forgets—if I may put it so—what he himself brought with him. He takes his cue entirely from the model. Another human being, having stronger inner forces as a result of former lives on earth, takes his direction less from the model; and you will see how greatly such a human being changes in the second phase of life, between the change of teeth and puberty.

This is precisely the task of school. If it is a true school, it should bring to unfoldment in the human being what he has brought with him from spiritual worlds into this physical life on earth.

Thus, what the human being afterwards takes with him into life will contain more or less of inherited characteristics, according to the extent to which he can or cannot overcome them.

Now all things have their spiritual aspect. The body man has in the first seven years of life is simply the model from which he takes his direction. Either his spiritual forces are to some extent submerged in what is pressed upon him by the model; then he remains quite dependent on the model. Or else, in the first seven years, that which is striving to change the model works its way through successfully.

This striving also finds expression outwardly. It is not merely a question of man's working on the model. While he is doing so, the original model gradually loosens itself, peels off, so to speak—falls away. It all falls away, just as the first teeth fall away. Throughout this process, the forms and forces of the model are pressing on the one hand, while on the other hand the human being is trying to impress what he himself has brought with him to the earth ... There is a real conflict in the first seven years of life. Seen from the spiritual standpoint, this conflict is signified by that which finds expression—outwardly, symptomatically—in the illnesses of childhood. The typical diseases of childhood are an expression of this inward struggle.

Needless to say, similar forms of illness often occur later in life. In such a case—to take only one example—it may be that the patient did not succeed very well in overcoming the model in the first seven years of life. And at a later age an inner impulse arises, after all to rid himself of what has thus karmically remained in him. Thus in the 28th or 29th year of life, a human being may suddenly feel inwardly roused, all the more vigorously to beat against the model, and as a result, he or she will get some illness of childhood.

If you have an eye for it, you will soon see how remarkable it is in some children—how greatly they change in physiognomy or gesture after the 7th or 8th year of their life. Nobody knows where the change comes from. The prevailing views of heredity are so strong nowadays that they have passed into the everyday forms of speech. When, in the 8th or 9th year, some feature suddenly emerges in the child (which, in real fact, is deeply, organically rooted) the father will often say: “Anyhow, he hasn't got it from me.” To which the mother will answer: “Well, certainly not from me.” All this is only due to the prevailing belief which has found its way into the parental consciousness—I mean of course, the belief that the children must have got everything from their parents.

On the other hand, you may often observe how children grow even more like their parents in this second phase of life than they were before. That is quite true. But we must take in earnest what we know of the way man descends into the physical world.

Among the many dreadful flowers of the swamp which psycho-analysis has produced, there is the theory of which you can read on all hands nowadays, namely that in the hidden sub-conscious mind every son is in love with his mother and every daughter with her father; and they tell of the many conflicts of life which are supposed to arise from this, in the sub-conscious regions of the soul. All these are of course amateurish interpretations of life. The truth however is, that the human being is in love with his parents already before he comes down into earthly life. He comes down just because he likes them.

Of course, the judgment of life which people have on earth must differ in this respect from the judgment they have outside the earthly life between death and a new birth. On one occasion, in the early stages of our anthroposophical work, a lady appeared among us who said: “No,” when she heard of reincarnation. She liked the rest of Anthroposophy very well, but with reincarnation she would have nothing to do; one earthly life, she said, was quite enough for her. Now we had very well-meaning followers in those days, and they tried in every imaginable way to convince the good lady that the idea was true after all, that every human being must undergo repeated lives on earth. She could not be moved. One friend belaboured her from the left, and another from the right. After a time, she left; but two days later, she wrote me a post-card to the effect that, after all, she was not going to be born again on earth!

To such a person, one who wishes simply to tell the truth from spiritual knowledge can only say: No doubt, while you are here on earth, it is not at all to your liking that you should come down again for a future life. But it does not depend on that. Here on earth, to begin with, you will go through the gate of death into the spiritual world. That you are quite willing to do. Whether or no you want to come down again will depend on the judgment which will be yours when you no longer have the body about you. For you will then form quite a different judgment.

The judgments man has in physical life on earth are, in fact, different from the judgments he has between death and a new birth. For there the point of view is changed. And so it is, if you say to a human being here on earth—a young human being, perhaps-that he has chosen his father, it is not out of the question that he might make objection: “Do you mean to say that I have chosen the father who has given me so many thrashings?” Yes, certainly he has chosen him; for he had quite another point of view before he came down to earth. He had the point of view that the thrashings would do him a lot of good ... Truly, it is no laughing matter; I mean it in deep earnestness.

In the same way, man also chooses his parents as to form and figure. He himself has a picture before him—the picture that he will become like them. He does not become like them by heredity, but by his own inner forces of soul-and-spirit—the forces he brings with him from the spiritual world. Therefore you need to judge in an all-round way out of both spiritual and physical science. If you do so, it will become utterly impossible to judge as people do when they say, with the air of making an objection: “I have seen children who became all the more like their parents in their second phase of life.” No doubt; but then the fact is, that these children themselves have set themselves the ideal of taking on the form of their parents.

Man really works, throughout the time between death and a new birth, in union with other departed souls, and with the beings of the Higher Worlds; he works upon what will then make it possible for him to build his body.

You see, we very much under-estimate the importance of what man has in his sub-consciousness. As earthly man, he is far wiser in the sub-conscious than in the surface-consciousness. It is indeed out of a far reaching, universal, cosmic wisdom that he elaborates within the model that afterwards emerges in the second phase of life—what he then bears as his own human being, the human form that properly belongs to him. In time to come, people will know how little they really receive—as far as the substance of the body is concerned—from the food they eat. Man receives far more from the air and the light, from all that he absorbs in a very finely-divided state from air and light, and so on. When this is realised, people will more readily believe that man builds up his second body quite independently of any inherited conditions. For he builds it entirely from his world-environment. The first body is actually only a model and that which comes from the parents—not only substantially, but as regards the outer bodily forces—is no longer there in the second period of life. The child's relation to his parents then becomes an ethical, a soul-relationship. Only in the first period of life—that is until the seventh year—is it a physical, hereditary relationship.

Now there are human beings who, in this earthly life, take a keen interest in all that surrounds them in the visible cosmos. They observe the world of plants, of animals; they take interest in this thing and that in the visible world around them. They take an interest in the majestic picture of the starlit sky. They are awake, so to speak, with their soul, in the entire physical cosmos. The inner life of a human being who has this warm interest in the cosmos differs from the inner life of one who goes past the world with a phlegmatic, indifferent soul.

In this respect, the whole scale of human characters is represented. There, for example, is a man who has been quite a short journey. When you afterwards talk to him, he will describe with infinite love the town where he has been, down to the tiniest detail. Through his keen interest, you yourself will get a complete picture of what it was like in the town he visited.

From this extreme we can pass to the opposite. On one occasion, for instance, I met two elderly ladies; they had just traveled from Vienna to Presburg, which is a beautiful city. I asked them what it was like in Presburg, what had pleased them there. They could tell me nothing except that they had seen two pretty little dachshunds down by the river-side! Well, they need not have gone to Presburg to see the dachshunds; they might just as well have seen them in Vienna. However, they had seen nothing else at all.

So do some people go through the world. And, as you know between these outermost ends of the scale, there are those who take every kind and degree of interest in the physical world around them.

Suppose a man has little interest in the physical world around him. Perhaps he just manages to interest himself in the things that immediately concern his bodily life—whether, for instance, one can eat more or less well in this or that district. Beyond that, his interests do not go; his soul remains poor. He does not imprint the world into himself. He carries very little in his inner life, very little of what has radiated into him from the phenomena of the world, through the gate of death into the spiritual realms. Thereby he finds the working with the spiritual beings, with whom he is then together, very difficult. And as a consequence, in the next life he does not bring with him, for the up-building of his physical body, strength and energy of soul, but weakness—a kind of faintness of soul. The model works into him strongly enough. The conflict with the model finds expression in manifold illnesses of childhood; but the weakness persists. He forms, so to speak, a frail or sickly body, prone to all manner of illnesses. Thus, karmically, our interest of soul-and-spirit in the one earthly life is transformed into our constitution as to health in the next life. Human beings who are “bursting with health” certainly had a keen interest in the visible world in a former incarnation. The detailed facts of life work very strongly in this respect.

No doubt it is more or less “risqué” nowadays to speak of these things, but you will only understand the inner connections of karma if you are ready to learn about the karmic details. Thus, for example, in the age when the human souls who are here today were living in a former life on earth, there was already an art of painting; and there were some human beings even then who had no interest in it at all. Even today, you will admit, there are people who do not care whether they have some atrocity hanging on the walls of their room or a picture beautifully painted. And there were also such people in the time when the souls who are here today were living in their former lives on earth. Now, I can assure you, I have never found a man or a woman with a pleasant face—a sympathetic expression—who did not take delight in beautiful paintings in a former life on earth. The people with an unsympathetic expression (which, after all, also plays its part in karma, and signifies something for destiny) were always the ones who passed by the works of art of painting with obtuse and phlegmatic indifference.

These things go even farther. There are human beings (and so there were in former epochs of the earth) who never look up to the stars their whole life long, who do not know where Leo is, or Aries or Taurus; they have no interest in anything in this connection. Such people are born, in a next life on earth, with a body that is somehow limp and flabby. Or if, by the vigour of their parents, they get a model that carries them over this, they become limp, lacking in energy and vigour, through the body which they then build for themselves.

And so it is with the entire constitution which a man bears with him in a given life on earth. In every detail we might refer it to the interests he had in the visible world—in an all-embracing sense—in his preceding life on earth.

People, for instance, who in our time take absolutely no interest in music—people to whom music is a matter of indifference—will certainly be born again in a next life on earth either with asthmatic trouble, or with some disease of the lung. At any rate, they will be born with a tendency to asthma or lung disease. And so it is in all respects; the quality of soul which develops in our earthly life through the interest we take in the visible world, comes to expression in our next life in the general tone of our bodily health or illness.

Here again, some one might say: To know of such things may well take away one's taste for a next life on earth. That again, is judged from the earthly standpoint, which is certainly not the only possible standpoint; for, after all, the life between death and a new birth lasts far longer than the earthly life. If a man is obtuse and indifferent with regard to anything in his visible environment, he takes with him an inability to work in certain realms between death and a new birth. He passes through the gate of death with the consequences of his lack of interest. After death he goes on his way. He cannot get near certain Beings; certain Beings hold themselves away from him; he cannot get near them. Other human souls with whom he was on earth, remain as strangers to him. This would go on for ever, like an eternal punishment of Hell, if it could not be modified. The only cure, the only compensation, lies in his resolving—between death and a new birth—to come down again into earthly life and experience in the sick body what his inability has signified in the spiritual world. Between death and a new birth he longs for this cure, for he is then filled with the consciousness that there is something he cannot do. Moreover, he feels it in such a way that in the further course, when he dies once again and passes through the time between death and new birth, that which was pain on earth becomes the impulse and power to enter into what he missed last time.

Thus we may truly say: in all essentials, man carries health and illness with him with his karma, from the spiritual world into the physical. Of course we must bear in mind that it is not always a fulfilment of karma, for there is also karma in process of becoming. Therefore we shall not relate to his former life on earth, everything the human being has to suffer in his physical life as regards health and illness. None the less we may know: in all essentials, that which emerges—notably from within outward—with respect to health and illness, is karmically determined as I have just described.

Here again, the world becomes intelligible only when we can look beyond this earthly life. In no other way can we explain it; the world cannot be explained out of the earthly life.

If we now pass from the inner conditions of karma which follow from a man's organisation, to the more outward aspect, here once again—only to strike the chords of karma, so to speak—we may take our start from a realm of facts which touches man very closely. Take, for example, our relation to other human beings, which is psychologically very much connected with the conditions of our health and illness, at any rate as regards the general mood and attunement of our soul.

Assume, for example, that someone finds a close friend in his youth. An intimate friendship arises between them; the two are devoted to one another. Afterwards life takes them apart—both of them, perhaps, or one especially—they look back with a certain sadness on their friendship in youth. But they cannot renew it. However often they meet in life, their friendship of youth does not arise again. How very much in destiny can sometimes depend on broken friendships of youth. You will admit, after all, a person's destiny can be profoundly influenced by a broken friendship of youth.

Now one investigates the matter ... I may add that one should speak as little as possible about these things out of mere theory. To speak out of theory is of very little value. In fact, you should only speak of such things either out of direct spiritual perception, or on the basis of what you have heard or read of the communications of those who are able to have direct spiritual vision, provided you yourselves find the communications convincing, and understand them well. There is no value in theorising about these things. Therefore I say, when you endeavour with spiritual vision to get behind such an event as a broken friendship of youth, as you go back into a former life on earth, this is what you generally find. The two people, who in a subsequent earthly life, had a friendship in their youth which was afterwards broken—in an earlier incarnation they were friends in later life.

Let us assume, for instance: two young people—boys or girls—are friends until their twentieth year. Then the friendship of their youth is broken. Go back with spiritual cognition into a former life on earth, and you will find that again they were friends. This time, however, it was a friendship that began about the twentieth year and continued into their later life. It is a very interesting case, and you will often find it so when you pursue things with spiritual science.

Examine such cases more closely and to begin with, this is what you find: If you enjoyed a friendship with a person in the later years of life, you have an inner impulse also to learn to know what he may be like in youth. The impulse leads you in a later life actually to learn to know him as a friend in youth. In a former incarnation you knew him in maturer years. This brought the impulse into your soul to learn to know him now also in youth. You could no longer do so in that life, therefore you do it in the next.

It has a great influence when this impulse arises—in one of the two or in both of them—and passes through death and lives itself out in the spiritual world between death and a new birth. For in the spiritual world, in such a case, there is something like a “staring fixedly” at the period of youth. You have an especial longing to fix your gaze on the time of youth, and you do not develop the impulse to learn to know your friend once more in maturer years. And so, in your next life on earth, the friendship of youth—pre-determined between you by the life you lived through before you came down to earth—is broken.

This is a case out of real life, for what I am now relating is absolutely real. One question, however, here arises: What was the older friendship like in the former life, what was it like, that rouses the impulse in you to have your friend with you only in youth in a new life on earth? The answer is this: for the desire to have the other being beside you in your youth and yet not to develop into a desire to keep him as your intimate friend in later life as well, something else must also have occurred. In all the instances of which I am aware, it has invariably been so: If the two human beings had remained united in their later life, if their friendship of youth had not been broken they would have grown tired and bored with one another: because, in effect, their friendship in maturer years in a former life took a too selfish direction. The selfishness of friendships in one earthly life avenges itself karmically in the loss of the same friendships in other lives.

These things are complicated indeed; but you can always get a guiding line if you see this, for it is so in many cases: Two human beings go their way, each of them apart, say, till their twentieth year; thenceforward they go along in friendship (I). Then in the next earthly life, correspondingly, we generally get this second picture (II)—the picture of friendship in youth, after which their lives go apart.

This too you will find very often: If, in your middle period of life in one incarnation, you meet a human being who has a strong influence on your destiny (these things, of course, only hold good as a general rule—not in all cases), it is very likely that you had him beside you by forces of destiny at the beginning and at the end of your life in a previous incarnation. Then the picture is so: In the one incarnation you live through the beginning and ending of life together; in the other incarnation you are not with him at the beginning or at the end, but you encounter him in the middle period of life.

Or again it may be that in your childhood you are united by destiny with another human being; in a former life you were united with him precisely in the time before you approached your death. Such inverse reflections often occur in the relationships of karma.

For those of you who are able to be here today I wish to give a kind of interlude in the studies we have been pursuing for some time. What I shall say today will serve to illustrate and explain many a question that may emerge out of the subjects we have treated hitherto. At the same time it will help to throw light on the mood-of-soul of the civilisation of the present time.

For years past, we have had to draw attention to a certain point of time in that evolution of civilisation which is concentrated mainly in Europe. The time I mean lies in the 14th or 15th century or about the middle of the Middle Ages. It is the moment in the evolution of mankind when intellectualism begins—when men begin mainly to pay attention to the intellect, the life of thought, making the intellect the judge of what shall be thought and done among them.

Since the age of the intellect is with us today, we can certainly gain a good idea of what intellectualism is. We need but experience the present time, to gain a notion of what came to the surface of civilisation in the 14th and 15th century. But as to the mood of soul which preceded this, we are no longer able to feel it in a living way. People who study history nowadays generally project what they are accustomed to see in the-present time, back into the historic past, and they have little idea how altogether different men were in mind and spirit before the present epoch. Even when they let the old documents speak for themselves, they largely read into them the way of thought and outlook of the present.

To spiritual-scientific study many a thing will appear altogether differently. Let us turn our gaze for example to those historic personalities who were influenced on the one hand from the side of Arabism, from the civilisation of Asia—influenced by what lived and found expression in the Mahommedan religion, while on the other hand they were influenced by Aristotelianism. Let us consider these personalities, who found their way in course of time through Africa to Spain, and deeply influenced the thinkers of Europe down to Spinoza and even beyond him. We gain no real conception of them if we imagine their mood of soul as though they had been like men of the present time with the only difference that they were ignorant of so and so many things subsequently discovered. (For roughly speaking, this is how they are generally thought of today). The whole way of thought and outlook, even of the men who lived in the above described stream of civilisation as late as the 12th century A.D., was altogether different from that of today.

Today, when man reflects upon himself, he feels himself as the possessor of Thoughts, Feelings, and impulses of Will which lead to action. Above all, man ascribes to himself the ‘I think,’ the ‘I feel’ and the ‘I will.’

But in the personalities of whom I am now speaking, the ‘I think’ was by no means yet accompanied by the same feeling with which we today would say ‘I think.’ This could only be said of the ‘I feel’ and the ‘I will.’ In effect, these human beings ascribed to their own person only their Feeling and their Willing. Out of an ancient background of culture, they rather lived in the sensation ‘It thinks in me’ than that they thought ‘I think.’ Doubtless they thought ‘I feel,’ ‘I will,’ but they did not think ‘I think’ in the same measure. On the other hand they said to themselves—and what I shall now describe was an absolutely real conception to them:—In the Sublunary Sphere, there live the thoughts. The thoughts are everywhere within this sphere, which is determined when we imagine the Earth at a certain point, and the Moon at another, followed by Mercury, Venus, etc. They not only conceived the Earth as a dense and rigid cosmic mass, but as a second thing belonging to it they conceived the Lunar Sphere, reaching up to the Moon. And as we say, ‘In the air in which we breathe is oxygen,’ so did these people say (it is only forgotten now that it ever was so):—‘In the Ether which reaches up to the Moon, there are the thoughts.’ And as we say ‘We breathe-in the oxygen of the air,’ so did these people say—not ‘We breathe-in the thoughts’—but ‘We perceive the thoughts, receive them into ourselves.’ They were conscious of the fact that they received the thoughts.

Today, no doubt, a man can also familiarise himself with such an idea as a theoretic concept. He may even understand it with the help of Anthroposophy, but as soon as it becomes a question of practical life he forgets it. For then at once he has this rather strange idea, that the thoughts spring forth within himself—which is just as though he were to think that the oxygen he receives in breathing were not received by him but sprang forth from within him.

For the personalities of whom I am now speaking, it was a profound feeling and an immediate experience: ‘I have not my own thoughts as my own possession. I can not really say, I think. Thoughts exist, and I receive them unto myself.’

Now we know that the oxygen of the air circulates through our organism in a comparatively short time. We count these cycles by the pulse-beat. This happens quickly. The men of whom I am now speaking did indeed imagine the receiving of thoughts as a kind of breathing, but it was a very slow breathing. It consisted in this: At the beginning of his earthly life, man becomes capable of receiving the thoughts. As we hold the breath within us for a certain time—between our in-breathing and out-breathing—so did these men conceive a certain fact, as follows: They imagined that they held the thoughts within them, yet only in the sense in which we hold the oxygen which belongs to the outer air. They imagined that they held the thoughts during the time of their earthly life, and breathed them out again—out into the cosmic spaces—when they passed through the gate of death.

Thus it was a question of in-breathing—the beginning of life; holding the breath—the duration of earthly life; outbreathing—the sending-forth of the thoughts into the universe.

Men who had this kind of inner experience felt themselves in a common atmosphere of thought with all others who had the same experience. It was a common atmosphere of thought reaching beyond the earth, not only a few miles, but as I said, up to the orbit of the moon.

This idea was wrestling for the civilisation of Europe at that time. It was trying to spread itself ever more and more, impelled especially by those Aristotelians who came from Asia into Europe along the path I have just indicated. Let us suppose for a moment that it had really succeeded. What would then have come about?

In that case, my dear friends, that which was destined after all to find expression in the course of earthly evolution, could never have come to expression in the fullest sense: I mean, the Spiritual Soul. The human beings of whom I am now speaking, stood in the last stage of evolution of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul. In the 14th and 15th century, the Spiritual Soul was to arise—the Spiritual Soul, which, if it found extreme expression, would lead all civilisation into intellectualism.

The population of Europe in its totality, in the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries, was by no means in a position merely to submit to the outpouring of a conception such as was held by the men whom I have now described. For if they had done so, the evolution of the Spiritual Soul would not have come about. Though it was determined in the councils of the Gods that the Spiritual Soul should evolve, nevertheless it could not evolve out of the mere independent activity of European humanity even in its totality. A special impulse had to be given towards the development of the Spiritual Soul itself.

And so, beginning in the time which I have now described, we witness the rise of two spiritual streams. The one was represented by the quasi-Arabian philosophers who, working from the West of Europe, influenced European civilisation very strongly—far more so than is commonly supposed. The other was the stream which fought against the former one with the utmost intensity and severity, representing it to Europe as the most heretical of all.

For a long time after, this conflict was felt with great intensity. You may still feel this if you consider the pictures in which Dominican Monks, or St. Thomas Aquinas alone, are represented in triumph—that is to say, in the triumph of an altogether different conception which emphasised above all things the individual and personal being of man, and worked to the end that man might acquire his thoughts as his own property. In these pictures we see the Dominicans portrayed, treading the representatives of Arabism under foot. The Arabians are there under their feet—they are being trodden underfoot.

The two streams were felt in this keen contrast for a long time after. An energy of feeling such as is contained in these pictures no longer exists in the humanity of today, which is rather apathetic. We need such energy of feeling very badly, not indeed for the things for which they battled, but for other things we need it.

Let us consider for a moment what they imagined. The in-breathing of thoughts as the cosmic ether from the Sublunary Sphere—that is the beginning of life. The holding of the breath—that is the earthly life itself. The out-breathing—that is the going-forth of the thoughts once more, but with an individually human colouring, into the cosmic ether, into the impulses of the sphere beneath the Moon, of the Sublunary Sphere.

What then is this out-breathing? It is the very same, my dear friends, of which we speak when we say: In the three days after death the etheric body of man expands. Man looks back upon his etheric body, slowly increasing in magnitude. He sees how his thoughts spread out into the cosmos. It is the very same, only it was then conceived—if I may say so—from a more subjective standpoint. It was indeed quite true, how these people felt and experienced it. They felt the cycle of life more deeply than it is felt today.

Nevertheless, if their idea had become dominant in Europe, only a feeble feeling of the Ego would have evolved in the men of European civilisation. The Spiritual Soul would not have been able to emerge; the Ego would not have grasped itself in the ‘I think.’ The idea of immortality would have become vaguer and vaguer. Men would increasingly have fixed their attention on that which lives and weaves in the far reaches of the Sublunary Sphere as a remnant of the human being who has lived here on this earth.

They would have felt the spirituality of the earth as its extended atmosphere. They would have felt themselves belonging to the earth, but not as individual men distinct from the earth. Through their feeling of “It thinks in me,” the men whom I described above felt themselves intimately connected with the earth. They did not feel themselves as individualities in the same degree as the men of the rest of Europe were beginning to feel themselves, however indistinctly.

We must, however, also bear in mind the following. Only the spiritual stream of which I have just spoken, was aware of the fact that when man dies the thoughts he received during his earthly life are living and weaving in the cosmic ether that surrounds the earth. This idea was violently attacked by those other personalities who arose chiefly within the Dominican Order. They on their side declared that man is an individuality, and that we must concentrate above all on his individuality which passes through the gate of death, not on what is dissolved in the universal cosmic ether. This was emphasised paramountly, albeit not exclusively,—emphasised representatively, I would say,—by the Dominicans. They stood up sharply and vigorously for the idea of the individuality of man, as against the other stream which I characterised before. But precisely as a result of this a certain condition came about. For let us now consider these representatives—shall we say—of individualism.

After all, it was the individually coloured thoughts which passed into the universal ether. And those who fought against the former stream—just because they were still vividly aware that this was being said, that this idea existed,—were troubled and disquieted by what was really there.

This anxiety, notably among the greatest thinkers,—this anxiety as a result of the forces expanding and dissolving and passing on the human thoughts to the cosmic ether,—did not really come to an end until the 16th or 17th century.

We must somehow be able to transplant ourselves into the inner life of soul of these people,—those especially who belonged to the Dominican Order. Only then do we gain an idea, how much they were disquieted by what was really left as an heritage from the dead,—which they, with their conception, no longer could nor dared believe in.

We must transplant ourselves into the hearts and minds of these people. No great man of the 13th or 14th century could have thought so dryly, so abstractly or in such cold and icy concepts as the men of today. When the men of today are standing up for any ideas or theories, it seems as though it were a recognised condition for so doing that one's heart should first be torn out of one's body. At that time it was not so. At that time there was deep feeling, there was heartiness in all that men upheld as their ideas. But in a case such as I am now citing, this heartiness also involved the presence of an intense inner conflict.

That philosophy, for instance, which proceeded from the Dominican Order was evolved under the most appalling inner conflicts. I mean that philosophy which afterwards had such a strong influence on life—for life at that time was still far more dependent on the authority of individual men. There was no such popular education at that time. All culture and education—all that the people knew—eventually merged into the possession of a few. And as a consequence, these few reached up far more to a real philosophic life and striving. And in all that then flowed out into civilisation, these inner conflicts which they lived through, were contained.

Today one reads the works of the Schoolmen and is conscious only of the driest thoughts. But it is the readers of today who are dry. Those who wrote these works were by no means dry in heart or mind. They were filled with inner fire in relation to their thoughts. Moreover, this inner fire was due to the striving to hold at bay the objective influence of thoughts.

When a man of today thinks on philosophic questions or questions of world-outlook, nothing is there, so to speak, to worry him. A man of today can think the greatest nonsense—he thinks it in perfect calm and peace of mind. Humanity has already evolved for so long within the Spiritual Soul, that no such disquieting occurs, as would occur, for instance, if individuals among us felt how the thoughts of men appear when they flow out after death into the ethereal environment of the earth. Today, such things as could still be experienced in the 13th or 14th century, are quite unknown. Then it would happen that a younger priest would come to an older priest, telling of the inner tortures which he was undergoing in remaining true to his religious faith, and expressing it in this wise: ‘I am pursued by the spectres of the dead.’

Speaking of the spectres of the dead, they meant precisely what I have just described. That was a time when men could still grow deeply into what they learned. In such a community—a Dominican community for instance,—they learned that man is individual and has his own individual immortality. They learned that it is a false and heretical idea to conceive, with respect to Thought, a kind of universal soul comprising all the earth. They learned to attack this heresy with all their might. And yet, in certain moments when they took deep counsel with themselves, they would feel the objective and influential presence of the thoughts which were left behind as relics by the dead. Then they would say to themselves, ‘Is it quite right for me to be doing what I am doing? Here is something intangible, working into my soul. I cannot rise against it—I am held fast by it.’

The intellects of the men of that time,—of many of them at any rate,—were still so constituted that they were quite generally aware of the speaking of the dead, at least for some days after death. And when the one had ceased to speak, another would begin. With respect to such things too, they felt themselves immersed in the all-pervading spiritual—or at the very least, ethereal—essence of the universe.

Coming down into our own time, this living feeling with the Universal All has ceased. In return for it we have achieved the conscious life in the Spiritual Soul, while all the spiritual reality that surrounds us (surrounds us as a reality, no less so than tables or chairs, trees or rivers) works only upon the depths of our subconsciousness. The inwardness of life, the spiritual inwardness, has passed away. It must first be acquired again by spiritual-scientific knowledge livingly received.

We must think livingly upon the knowledge of spiritual science, and we shall do so if we dwell upon such facts of life as lie by no means very far behind us. Imagine a Scholastic thinker or writer of the 13th century. He writes down his thoughts. Nowadays it is easy work to think, for men have grown accustomed to think intellectualistically. At that time it was only at the beginning, and was still difficult. Man was still conscious of a tremendous inner effort. He was conscious of fatigue in thinking even as in hewing wood, if I may use the trivial comparison. Today the thinking of many men has become quite automatic. We of today are scarcely overcome by the longing to follow up every one of our thoughts with our own human personality! We hear a man of today letting one thought arise out of another like an automaton. We cannot follow, we do not know why, for there is no inner necessity in it. And yet so long as a man is living in the body he should follow up his thoughts with his own personality. Afterwards they will soon take a different course; they will spread out and expand, when he is dead.

So could a man be sitting there at that time, defending with every weapon of sharp incisive thought the doctrine of individual man, so as to save the doctrine of individual immortality. So could he be rising in polemics against Averroes, or others of that stream of thought which I described at the beginning of this lecture. But there was another possibility. For especially in the case of an outstanding man like Averroes, that which proceeded from him, dissolving after his death like a kind of spectre in the Sublunary Sphere, might well be gathered up again by the Moon itself at the end of that Sphere, and remain behind. Having enlarged and expanded, it might even be reduced again, and shape and form be given to it, till it was consolidated once again into a being built, if I may say so, in the ether. That could well happen. Then would a man be sitting there, trying to lay the foundations of individualism, carrying on his polemic against Averroes; and Averroes would appear before him as a threatening figure, disturbing, putting off his mind.

The most important of the Scholastic writings which arose in the 13th century were directed against Averroes who was long dead. They made polemics against the man long dead, against the doctrine which he had left behind. Then he arose to prove to them that his thoughts had become condensed, consolidated once again and thus were living on.

There were indeed these inner conflicts, before the beginning of the new age of consciousness. And they were such that we today should see once more their full intensity and depth and inwardness. Words after all are words. The men of later times can but receive what lies behind the words, with such ideas as they possess. But within the words there were often rich contents of inner life. They pointed to a life of soul such as I have now described.

These, then, are the two streams, and they have remained active, fundamentally speaking, to this day. The one—albeit now only working from the spiritual world, yet all the stronger there,—-would fain impress it upon man that a universal life of thoughts surrounds the earth, and that in thoughts man breathes-in soul and spirit. The other stream desires above all to point out that man should make himself independent of such universality. The former stream is more like a vague intangible presence in the spiritual environment of the earth, perceptible today to many men (for there are still such men) when in peculiar nights they lie there on their beds and listen to the void, and out of the void all manner of doubts are born in them as to what they are asserting today so definitely and so surely in their own individuality.

Meanwhile in other folk, who always sleep soundly because they are so well satisfied with themselves, we have the unswerving emphasis on the individual principle.

This battle, after all, is smouldering still at the very foundations of European culture. It is there to this day; and in the things that are taking place outwardly at the surface of our life, we have after all scarcely anything else than the beating of the surface-waves from that which is still present in the depths of souls,—a relic of the deeper and intenser inner life of yonder time.

Many souls of that time are here again in present earthly life. In a certain way they have conquered what then disquieted them so much in their surface consciousness—disquieted them at least in certain moments of their surface consciousness.

But in the depths it smoulders all the more, in many minds and hearts today. Spiritual science, once again, is here to draw attention also to such historic facts as these.

But we must not forget the following. In the same measure in which men become unconscious, during earthly life, of what is there none the less, namely the thoughts in the ether in the immediate environment of the earth—in the same measure, therefore, in which they acquire the ‘I think’ as their own possession—their human soul is narrowed down. Man passes through the gate of death with a contracted soul.

The narrowed soul has carried untrue, imperfect, inconsistent earthly thoughts into the cosmic ether, and these work back again upon the minds of men. Thence there arise such social movements as we see arise today. We must understand these too as to their inner origin. Then we shall recognise that there is no other cure, no other healing for these social ideas, destructive as they often are, than the spreading of the truth about the spiritual life and being.

Call to mind the lectures we have given here, especially the historic ones taking into account the idea of reincarnation and leading to so many definite examples. These lectures will have shown you how things work beneath the surface of external history. You will have seen how that which lives in one historic age is carried over into a later one by men returning into earthly life. But everything spiritual plays its part, between death and a new birth, in moulding what is carried by man from one earth-life into another.

Today it would be good if many souls would attain for themselves that objectivity to which we can address ourselves, awakening an inner understanding, when we describe the men who lived in the twilight of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul age.

Some of the men who lived at that time are here again today. Deep in their souls they underwent the evening twilight of an age, and through the constant attacks they suffered from the spectres of which I have now spoken, they have, after all, absorbed deep doubts as to the unique validity of what is intellectualistic.

This doubt can well be understood. For about the 13th century there were many men—men of knowledge, who stood in the midst of the life of learning, almost entirely theological as it then was—men for whom it was a deep conscience question: What will now become?

Such souls had often carried with them into that time mighty contents from their former incarnations. They gave it an intellectualistic colouring; but they felt this all as a declining stream. While at the rising stream—pressing forward as it was to individuality—they felt the pangs of conscience. Until at length those philosophers arose who stood under an influence which has really killed all meaning. To speak radically, we will say: those who stood under the influence of Descartes! For many, even among those who had their place in the Scholasticism of an earlier time, had already fallen into the Cartesian way of thought. I do not say that they became philosophers. These things underwent many a change. When men begin to think along these lines the strangest nonsense becomes self-understood. To Descartes, as you know, is due the saying ‘I think, therefore I am.’

Countless clever thinkers have accepted this as true: ‘I think, therefore I am.’ Yet the result is this: From morning until evening I think, therefore I am. Then I fall asleep. I do not think, therefore I am not. I wake up again, I think, therefore I am. I fall asleep, and as I now do not think, I am not. This then is the consequence: A man not only falls asleep, but ceases to be when he falls asleep. There is no less fitting proof of the existence of the spirit of man than the theorem: ‘I think.’ Yet this began to be the most widely accepted statement in the age of evolution of Consciousness (the age of the Spiritual Soul). When we point to such things today, it is like a sacrilege—we cannot help ourselves!

But over against all this, I would now tell you of a kind of conversation. Though it is not historically recorded, by spiritual research it can be discovered among the real facts that happened. It was a conversation that took place between an older and a younger Dominican, somewhat as follows:—

The younger man said, ‘Thinking takes hold of men. Thought, the shadow of reality, takes hold of them. In ancient times, thought was always the last revelation of the living Spirit from above. But now, thought is the very thing that has forgotten that living Spirit. Now it is experienced as a mere shadow. Verily, when a man sees a shadow, he knows the shadow points to some reality. The realities are there indeed. Thinking itself is not to be attacked, but only the fact that we have lost the living Spirit from our thinking.’

The older man replied, ‘In Thinking, through the very fact that man is turning his attention with loving interest to outer Nature, (while he accepts Revelation as Revelation and does not seek to approach it with his thinking),—in Thinking, to compensate for the former heavenly reality, an earthly reality must be found once more.’

‘What will happen?’ said the younger man. ‘Will European humanity be strong enough to find this earthly reality of thought, or will it only be weak enough to lose the heavenly reality?’

This dialogue truly contains all that can still hold good with regard to European civilisation. For after the intermediate time, with the darkening of the living quality of thought, mankind must now attain the living thought once more. Otherwise humanity will remain weak, and with the reality of thought will lose its own reality. Therefore it is most necessary, since the entry of our Christmas impulse, that we in the Anthroposophical Movement speak without reserve in forms of living thought. For otherwise it will come about, more and more, that even the things we know from this source or from that—as for instance, that man has a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body,—will only be taken hold of with the forms of dead thinking.

These things must not be taken hold of with the forms of dead thinking. For then they become distorted, misrepresented truth, and not the truth itself.

So much I wanted to describe today. We must attain a living, sympathetic interest, a longing to go beyond the ordinary history and to attain that history which must and can be read in the living Spirit, which history shall more and more be cultivated in the Anthroposophical Movement. Today, my dear friends, I wished to place before your souls, as it were, the concrete outline of our programme in this direction.

Much has been said today in aphorism. The inner connection will dawn upon you if you attempt, not so much to follow up with intellect, but to feel with your whole being, what was desired to be said today. You must attempt to feel it knowingly, to know it feelingly, in order that not only what is said but what is heard within our circles may be sustained more and more by real spirituality.

We need education to spiritual hearing, spiritual listening. Only then shall we develop the true spirituality among us. I wanted to awaken this feeling in you today; not so much to hold a systematic lecture, but to speak to your hearts, albeit calling to witness, as I did so, many a concrete spiritual fact.

For those of you who are able to be here today I wish to give a kind of interlude in the studies we have been pursuing for some time. What I shall say today will serve to illustrate and explain many questions that may emerge out of the subjects we have treated until now. At the same time it will help to throw light on the mood of soul of the civilisation of the present time.

For years past, we have had to draw attention to a certain point of time in that evolution of civilisation which is concentrated mainly in Europe. The time I mean lies in the 14th or 15th century or around the middle of the Middle Ages. It is the moment in the evolution of humanity when intellectualism began—when people began mainly to pay attention to the intellect, the life of thought, making the intellect the judge of what shall be thought and done among them.

Since the age of the intellect is with us today, we can certainly gain a good idea of what intellectualism is. We need but experience the present time to gain a notion of what came to the surface of civilisation in the 14th and 15th centuries. But as to the mood of soul which preceded this, we are no longer able to feel it in a living way. People who study history nowadays generally project what they are accustomed to see in the present time back into the historic past, and they have little idea how altogether different people were in mind and spirit before the present epoch. Even when they let the old documents speak for themselves, they largely read into them the way of thought and outlook of the present.

To spiritual-scientific study many things will appear differently. Let us turn our gaze for example to those historic personalities who were influenced on the one hand by Arabism, the civilisation of Asia—influenced by what lived and found expression in the Mohammedan religion, while on the other hand they were influenced by Aristotelianism. Let us consider these personalities, who found their way in the course of time through Africa to Spain, and deeply influenced the thinkers of Europe down to Spinoza and even beyond him. We gain no real conception of them if we imagine their mood of soul as though they had been like people of the present time with the only difference that they were ignorant of so and so many things subsequently discovered. (Roughly speaking, this is how they are generally thought of today). The whole way of thought and outlook, even of the people who lived in the above described stream of civilisation as late as the 12th century A.D., was altogether different from that of today.

Today, when man reflects upon himself, he feels himself as the possessor of thoughts, feelings, and impulses of will which lead to action. Above all, man ascribes to himself the ‘I think,’ the ‘I feel’ and the ‘I will.’

But in the personalities of whom I am now speaking, the ‘I think’ was by no means yet accompanied by the same feeling with which we today would say ‘I think.’ This could only be said of the ‘I feel’ and the ‘I will.’ In effect, those human beings ascribed to their own person only their feeling and their willing. Out of an ancient background of culture they rather lived in the sensation ‘It thinks in me’ than that they thought ‘I think.’ Doubtless they thought ‘I feel,’ ‘I will,’ but they did not think ‘I think’ in the same measure. On the other hand they said to themselves—and what I shall now describe was an absolutely real conception to them: The thoughts live in the Sublunary Sphere. The thoughts are everywhere within this sphere, which is determined when we imagine the earth at a certain point, and the moon at another, followed by Mercury, Venus, etc. They not only conceived the Earth as a dense and rigid cosmic mass, but as a second thing belonging to it they conceived the Lunar Sphere, reaching up to the moon. And as we say, ‘In the air in which we breathe is oxygen,’ so did these people say (it is only forgotten now that it ever was so):—‘In the ether which reaches up to the Moon, there are the thoughts.’ And as we say ‘We breathe in the oxygen of the air,’ so did these people say—not ‘We breathe in the thoughts’—but ‘We perceive the thoughts, receive them into ourselves.’ They were conscious of the fact that they received the thoughts.

Today, no doubt, a person can also familiarise himself with such an idea as a theoretical concept. He may even understand it with the help of Anthroposophy, but as soon as it becomes a question of practical life he forgets it. For then at once he has the rather strange idea that the thoughts spring forth within himself—which is just as though he were to think that the oxygen he receives in breathing were not received by him but sprang forth from within him.

For the personalities of whom I am now speaking, it was a profound feeling and an immediate experience: ‘I have not my own thoughts as my own possession. I cannot really say, I think. Thoughts exist, and I receive them unto myself.’

We know that the oxygen of the air circulates through our organism in a comparatively short time. We count these cycles by the pulse-beat. This happens quickly. The people of whom I am now speaking did indeed imagine the receiving of thoughts as a kind of breathing, but it was a very slow breathing. It consisted in this: At the beginning of his earthly life, man becomes capable of receiving the thoughts. As we hold the breath within us for a certain time—between our in-breathing and out-breathing—so did those people conceive a certain fact, as follows: They imagined that they held the thoughts within them, yet only in the sense in which we hold the oxygen which belongs to the outer air. They imagined that they held the thoughts during the time of their earthly life, and breathed them out again—out into the cosmic spaces—when they passed through the gate of death.

Thus it was a question of in-breathing—the beginning of life; holding the breath—the duration of earthly life; out-breathing—the sending forth of the thoughts into the universe.

People who had this kind of inner experience felt themselves in a common atmosphere of thought with all others who had the same experience. It was a common atmosphere of thought reaching beyond the earth, not only a few miles, but as I said, up to the orbit of the moon.

This idea was wrestling for the civilisation of Europe at that time. It was trying to spread itself ever more and more, impelled especially by those Aristotelians who came from Asia into Europe along the path I have just indicated. Let us suppose for a moment that it had really succeeded. What would then have come about?

In that case, my dear friends, that which was destined after all to find expression in the course of earthly evolution could never have come to expression in the fullest sense: I mean the Consciousness Soul. The human beings of whom I am now speaking stood in the last stage of evolution of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul. In the 14th and 15th century, the Consciousness Soul was to arise, which, if it found extreme expression, would lead all civilisation into intellectualism.

The population of Europe in its totality, in the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries, was by no means in a position merely to submit to the outpouring of a conception such as was held by the people whom I have now described. For if they had done so, the evolution of the Consciousness Soul would not have come about. Though it was determined in the councils of the Gods that the Consciousness Soul should evolve, nevertheless it could not evolve out of the mere independent activity of all European humanity. A special impulse had to be given towards the development of the Consciousness Soul itself.

And so, beginning in the time which I have now described, we witness the rise of two spiritual streams. One was represented by the quasi-Arabian philosophers who, working from Western Europe, influenced European civilisation very strongly—far more so than is commonly supposed. The other was the stream which fought against the former one with the utmost intensity and severity, representing it to Europe as the most heretical of all.

For a long time after, this conflict was felt with great intensity. You may still feel this if you consider the pictures in which Dominican Monks, or St. Thomas Aquinas alone, are represented in triumph—that is to say, in the triumph of an altogether different conception which emphasised above all things the individual and personal being of man, and worked to the end that man might acquire his thoughts as his own property. In these pictures we see the Dominicans portrayed, treading the representatives of Arabism under foot. The Arabians are there under their feet—they are being trodden underfoot.

The two streams were felt in this keen contrast for a long time after. An energy of feeling such as is contained in these pictures no longer exists in the humanity of today, which is rather apathetic. We need such energy of feeling very badly, not only for the things for which they battled, but for other things as well.

Let us consider for a moment what they imagined. The in-breathing of thoughts as the cosmic ether from the Sublunary Sphere—that is the beginning of life. The holding of the breath—that is the earthly life itself. The out-breathing—that is the going forth of the thoughts once more, but with an individually human colouring, into the cosmic ether, into the impulses of the sphere beneath the Moon, of the Sublunary Sphere.

What then is this out-breathing? It is the very same, my dear friends, of which we speak when we say: In the three days after death the etheric body of man expands. Man looks back upon his etheric body slowly increasing in magnitude. He sees how his thoughts spread out into the cosmos. It is the very same, only it was then conceived, if I may say so, from a more subjective standpoint. It was indeed quite true, how these people felt and experienced it. They felt the cycle of life more deeply than it is felt today.

Nevertheless, if their idea had become dominant in Europe, only a feeble feeling of the I would have evolved in the people of European civilisation. The Consciousness Soul would not have been able to emerge; the I would not have grasped itself in the ‘I think.’ The idea of immortality would have become vaguer and vaguer. People would increasingly have fixed their attention on that which lives and weaves in the far reaches of the Sublunary Sphere as a remnant of the human being who has lived here on this earth.

They would have felt the spirituality of the earth as its extended atmosphere. They would have felt themselves belonging to the earth, but not as individuals distinct from the earth. Through their feeling of “It thinks in me,” the people whom I described above felt themselves intimately connected with the earth. They did not feel themselves as individualities in the same degree as the people of the rest of Europe were beginning to feel themselves, however indistinctly.

We must, however, also bear in mind the following. Only the spiritual stream of which I have just spoken was aware of the fact that when a person dies the thoughts he received during his earthly life are living and weaving in the cosmic ether that surrounds the earth. This idea was violently attacked by those other personalities who arose chiefly within the Dominican Order. They declared that man is an individuality, and that we must concentrate above all on his individuality which passes through the gate of death, not on what is dissolved in the universal cosmic ether. This was emphasised, albeit not exclusively,—emphasised representatively, I would say,—by the Dominicans. They stood up vigorously for the idea of the individuality of man, as against the other stream which I characterised before. But precisely as a result of this a certain condition came about. For let us now consider these representatives of individualism.

After all, it was the individually coloured thoughts which passed into the universal ether. And those who fought against the former stream—just because they were still vividly aware that this was being said, that this idea existed,—were troubled and disquieted by what was really there.

This anxiety, notably among the greatest thinkers,—this anxiety as a result of the forces expanding and dissolving and passing on the human thoughts to the cosmic ether,—did not really come to an end until the 16th or 17th century.

We must somehow be able to transplant ourselves into the inner life of soul of these people, especially those who belonged to the Dominican Order. Only then do we gain an idea of how much they were disquieted by what was really left as an heritage from the dead,—which they, with their conception, no longer could nor dared believe in.

We must transplant ourselves into the hearts and minds of these people. No great man of the 13th or 14th century could have thought so dryly, so abstractly or in such cold and icy concepts as the people of today. When the people of today are defending ideas or theories, it seems as though it were a recognised condition for so doing that one's heart should first be torn out of one's body. At that time it was not so. At that time there was deep feeling, there was heart in all that men upheld as their ideas. But in a case such as I am now citing, this heart also involved an intense inner conflict.

That philosophy, which proceeded from the Dominican Order, evolved under the most appalling inner conflicts. I mean that philosophy which afterwards had such a strong influence on life—for life at that time was still far more dependent on the authority of individual men. There was no such popular education at that time. All culture and education—all that the people knew—eventually merged into the possession of a few. And as a consequence, these few reached up far more to a real philosophic life and striving. And in all that then flowed out into civilisation, these inner conflicts which they lived through were contained.

Today one reads the works of the Scholastics and is conscious only of the driest thoughts. But it is the readers of today who are dry. Those who wrote these works were by no means dry in heart or mind. They were filled with inner fire in relation to their thoughts. Moreover, this inner fire was due to the striving to hold at bay the objective influence of thoughts.

When a person of today thinks on philosophic questions or questions of worldview, nothing is there, so to speak, to worry him. A man of today can think the greatest nonsense—he thinks it in perfect calm and peace of mind. Humanity has already evolved for so long within the Consciousness Soul that no such disquieting occurs, as would occur, for instance, if individuals among us felt how the thoughts of men appear when they flow out after death into the ethereal environment of the earth. Today such things as could still be experienced in the 13th or 14th century are quite unknown. Then it would happen that a younger priest would come to an older priest, telling of the inner tortures which he was undergoing in remaining true to his religious faith, and expressing it in this wise: ‘I am pursued by the ghosts of the dead.’

Speaking of the ghosts of the dead, they meant precisely what I have just described. That was a time when people could still grow deeply into what they learned. In such a community—a Dominican community for instance,—they learned that man is individual and has his own individual immortality. They learned that it is a false and heretical idea to conceive, with respect to thought, a kind of universal soul comprising all the earth. They learned to attack this heresy with all their might. And yet, in certain moments when they took deep counsel with themselves, they would feel the objective and influential presence of the thoughts which were left behind as relics by the dead. Then they would say to themselves, ‘Is it quite right for me to be doing what I am doing? Here is something intangible working into my soul. I cannot rise against it—I am held fast by it.’

The intellects of that time, many of them at any rate, were still so constituted that they were generally aware of the speaking of the dead, at least for some days after death. And when one had ceased to speak another would begin. With respect to such things too, they felt themselves immersed in the all-pervading spiritual—or at the very least, ethereal—essence of the universe.

Coming into our own time, this living feeling with the Universal All has ceased. In return for it we have achieved conscious life in the Consciousness Soul, while all the spiritual reality that surrounds us (surrounds us as a reality, no less so than tables or chairs, trees or rivers) works only upon the depths of our subconscious. The inwardness of life, the spiritual inwardness, has passed away. It must first be acquired again by spiritual-scientific knowledge livingly received.

We must think livingly upon the knowledge of spiritual science, and we shall do so if we dwell upon such facts of life as lie by no means very far behind us. Imagine a Scholastic thinker or writer of the 13th century. He writes down his thoughts. Nowadays it is easy work to think, for people have grown accustomed to think intellectually. At that time it was only at the beginning, and was still difficult. Man was still conscious of a tremendous inner effort. He was conscious of fatigue in thinking even as in hewing wood, if I may use the trivial comparison. Today the thinking of many people has become quite automatic. Today we are scarcely overcome by the longing to follow up every one of our thoughts with our own human personality! We hear a person of today letting one thought arise out of another like an automaton. We cannot follow, we do not know why, for there is no inner necessity in it. And yet so long as a man is living in the body he should follow up his thoughts with his own personality. Afterwards they will soon take a different course; they will spread out and expand when he is dead.

So a person could be sitting there at that time, defending with every weapon of sharp incisive thought the doctrine of individual man in order to save the doctrine of individual immortality. He could be arguing with polemics against Averroes, or others of that stream of thought which I described at the beginning of this lecture. But there was another possibility. For especially in the case of an outstanding person like Averroes, that which proceeded from him, dissolving after his death like a kind of ghost in the Sublunary Sphere, might well be gathered up again by the Moon itself at the end of that Sphere, and remain behind. Having enlarged and expanded, it might even be reduced again, shape and form be given to it, till it was consolidated once again into an essence built, if I may say so, in the ether. That could well happen. Then the man would be sitting there, trying to lay the foundations of individualism, carrying on his polemic against Averroes; and Averroes would appear before him as a threatening figure, disturbing his mind.

The most important of the Scholastic writings which arose in the 13th century were directed against Averroes, who was long dead. They made polemics against the man long dead, against the doctrine which he had left behind. Then he arose to prove to them that his thoughts had become condensed, consolidated once again and thus were living on.

There were indeed these inner conflicts before the beginning of the new age of consciousness. And they were such that we today should see once more their full intensity and depth and inwardness. Words after all are words. The people of later times can but receive what lies behind the words with such ideas as they possess. But within the words there were often rich contents of inner life. They pointed to a life of soul such as I have now described.

These, then, are the two streams, and they have remained active, basically speaking, to this day. The one—albeit now only working from the spiritual world, yet all the stronger there,—would like to convince man that a universal life of thoughts surrounds the earth, and that in thoughts man breathes in soul and spirit. The other stream desires above all to point out that man should make himself independent of such universality. The former stream is more like a vague intangible presence in the spiritual environment of the earth, perceptible today to many people (for there are still such people) when in certain nights they lie on their beds and listen to the void, and out of the void all manner of doubts are born in them as to what they are asserting today so definitely and so surely in their own individuality.

Meanwhile in others, who always sleep soundly because they are so well satisfied with themselves, we have the unswerving emphasis on the individual principle.

This battle is smouldering still at the very foundations of European culture. It is here to this day; and in the things that are taking place outwardly on the surface of our life, we have scarcely anything other than the beating of the surface-waves from what is still present in the depths of souls—a relic of the deeper and intenser inner life of earlier times.

Many souls of that time are here again in present earthly life. In a certain way they have conquered what then disquieted them so much in their surface consciousness—disquieted them at least in certain moments of their surface consciousness.

But in the depths it smoulders all the more in many minds and hearts today. Spiritual science, once again, is here to draw attention also to such historic facts as these.

But we must not forget the following. In the same measure in which people become unconscious during earthly life of what is there none the less, namely the thoughts in the ether in the immediate environment of the earth—in the same measure, therefore, in which they acquire the ‘I think’ as their own possession—their human soul is narrowed down. Man passes through the gate of death with a contracted soul.

The narrowed soul has carried untrue, imperfect, inconsistent earthly thoughts into the cosmic ether, and these work back again upon the minds of men. Thence there arise such social movements as we see today. We must understand these too as to their inner origin. Then we shall recognise that there is no other cure, no other healing for these social ideas, destructive as they often are, than the spreading of the truth about the spiritual life and being.

Call to mind the lectures we have given here, especially the historic ones taking into account the concept of reincarnation and leading to so many definite examples. These lectures will have shown you how things work beneath the surface of external history. You will have seen how what lived in one historic age is carried over into a later one by people returning into earthly life. But everything spiritual plays its part between death and a new birth in moulding what is carried by man from one earth-life into another.

Today it would be good if many souls would attain for themselves that objectivity to which we can address ourselves, awakening an inner understanding, when we describe the people who lived in the twilight of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul age.

Some of the people who lived at that time are here again today. Deep in their souls they underwent the evening twilight of an age, and through the constant attacks they suffered from the ghosts of which I have now spoken, they have absorbed deep doubts about the validity of intellectualism.

This doubt can well be understood. For around the 13th century there were many people—men of knowledge who stood in the midst of learning, almost entirely theological as it then was—people for whom it was a deep question of conscience: What will happen now ?

Such souls had often carried with them into that time mighty contents from their former incarnations. They gave it an intellectual colouring; but they felt this all as a declining stream. While at the rising stream—pressing forward as it was to individuality—they felt the pangs of conscience. Until at length those philosophers arose who stood under an influence which has really killed all meaning. To speak radically: those who stood under the influence of Descartes! For many, even among those who had their place in the Scholasticism of an earlier time, had already fallen into the Cartesian way of thought. I do not say that they became philosophers. These things underwent many changes. When people begin to think along these lines the strangest nonsense becomes self-evident. To Descartes, as you know, is due the saying ‘I think, therefore I am.’

Countless clever thinkers have accepted this as true: ‘I think, therefore I am.’ Yet the result is this: From morning until evening I think, therefore I am. Then I fall asleep. I do not think, therefore I am not. I wake up again, I think, therefore I am. I fall asleep, and as I now do not think, I am not. This then is the consequence: A person not only falls asleep, but ceases to be when he falls asleep. There is no less fitting proof of the existence of the spirit of man than the theorem: ‘I think.’ Yet this began to be the most widely accepted statement in the age of evolution of consciousness (the age of the Consciousness Soul). When we point to such things today it is like a sacrilege, but we cannot help ourselves!

But over against all this I will now tell you of a kind of conversation. Though it is not historically recorded, by spiritual research it can be discovered among the real things that happened. It was a conversation that took place between an older and a younger Dominican, somewhat as follows:

The younger man said, ‘Thinking takes hold of men. Thought, the shadow of reality, takes hold of them. In ancient times thought was always the last revelation of the living Spirit from above. But now thought is the very thing that has forgotten that living Spirit. Now it is experienced as a mere shadow. Verily, when a man sees a shadow, he knows the shadow points to some reality. The realities are there indeed. Thinking itself is not to be attacked, but only the fact that we have lost the living Spirit from our thinking.’

The older man replied, ‘In thinking, through the very fact that man is turning his attention with loving interest to outer Nature, (while he accepts Revelation as Revelation and does not seek to approach it with his thinking),—in thinking, to compensate for the former heavenly reality, an earthly reality must be found once more.’

‘What will happen?’ said the younger man. ‘Will European humanity be strong enough to find this earthly reality of thought, or will it only be weak enough to lose the heavenly reality?’

This dialogue truly contains all that still holds good with regard to European civilisation. For after the intermediate time, with the darkening of the living quality of thought, humanity must now attain to living thinking once more. Otherwise humanity will remain weak and the reality of thought will lose its own reality. Therefore it is most necessary, since the our Christmas Conference impulse, that we in the Anthroposophical Movement speak without reserve in forms of living thought. For otherwise it will come about more and more that even the things we know from this source or from that—for instance that man has a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body—will only be grasped with the forms of dead thinking.

These things must not be grasped with the forms of dead thinking. For then they become distorted, misrepresented truth, and not the truth itself.

That is what I wanted to say today. We must attain a living, sympathetic interest, a longing to go beyond ordinary history and to attain that history which must and can be read in the living Spirit, the history which shall more and more be cultivated in the Anthroposophical Movement. Today, my dear friends, I wished to place before your souls the concrete outline of our programme in this direction.

Much has been said today in aphorism. The inner connection will dawn upon you if you attempt not so much to follow up with the intellect, but to feel with your whole being what has been said today. You must attempt to feel it knowingly, to know it feelingly, in order that not only what is said but what is heard within our circles may be sustained more and more by real spirituality.

We need education to spiritual hearing, spiritual listening. Only then shall we develop true spirituality among us. I wanted to awaken this feeling in you today; not so much to give a systematic lecture, but to speak to your hearts, albeit calling to witness, as I did, many a concrete spiritual fact.

I have frequently referred recently to the connection the course of the year has with various aspects of human life, and during the Easter days I pointed especially to the connection with the celebration of festivals. Today I should like to go back to very ancient times and say more on this subject, just in relation to the ancient Mysteries. This can perhaps deepen in one way or another what we have spoken of before.

To the people of very ancient periods on Earth, the festivals that took place during the year formed a very significant part of their lives. We know that in those ancient times the human consciousness worked in an entirely different way from that of later times. We might ascribe a somewhat dreamy nature to this old form of consciousness. And indeed it was out of this dream condition that those insights arose in the human soul, in the human consciousness, which then took on the form of myths and in fact became mythology.

Through this dreamy, or we can also say instinctively clairvoyant consciousness people saw more deeply into the spiritual environment. But precisely through this more intensive kind of participation, not just in the sensible workings of Nature, as is the case today, but also in the spiritual events, people were all the more involved with the phenomena connected with the cycle of the year, with the differing aspects of Nature in spring and in autumn. I have pointed to this just in recent days.

Today I want to share something entirely different with you in this regard, and that is, how the festival of Midsummer, which has become our St. John's festival, and the Midwinter festival, which has become our Christmas, were celebrated in connection with the old Mystery teachings. To begin with, we must be quite clear that the humanity of the ancient times of which we are speaking did not have a full ego-consciousness, as we do today. In the dreamlike consciousness, a full ego-consciousness was lacking; and when this is the case, people do not perceive precisely that which present-day humanity is so proud of. Thus the people of that period did not perceive what existed in dead nature, in the mineral nature.

Let us keep this firmly in mind, my dear friends: It was not a consciousness that flowed along in abstract thoughts, but it lived in pictures; yet it was dreamlike. These people entered into, for example, the sprouting, burgeoning plant-life and plant-nature in spring far more than is the case today. Again, they felt the shedding of the leaves, their drying up in autumn, the whole dying away of the plant world; felt deeply also the changes the animal world lived through during the course of the year; felt the whole human environment to be different when the air was filled with butterflies fluttering and beetles humming. They felt their own human weaving in a certain way as being alongside the weaving and being of the plants and animal existence. But they not only had no interest, they had no proper consciousness for the mineral realm, for the dead world outside them. This is one side of the earlier human consciousness.

The other side is this: that no interest existed among this ancient humanity for the form of man in general. It is very difficult today to imagine what the human perception was in this regard, that people in general took no particular interest in the human figure as a space-form. They had, however, an intense interest in what pertains to race. And the farther back we go into ancient cultures, the less do we find people with the common consciousness interested in the human form. On the other hand, they were interested in the color of the skin, in the racial temperament. This is what people noticed. On the one side man was not interested in the dead mineral world, nor, on the other, in the human form. There was an interest, as we have said, in what pertains to race, rather than in the universally human, including the outer form of man.

The great teachers of the Mysteries simply accepted this as a fact. How they thought about it, I will show you graphically in a drawing. They said to themselves: “The people have a dreamlike consciousness by means of which they perceive very clearly the plant life in their environment.”—In their dream-pictures these people indeed lived with the plant life; but their dream consciousness did not extend to the comprehension of the mineral world. So the Mystery teachers said to themselves: “The human consciousness reaches on the one side to the plant life [see drawing], which is dreamily experienced, but not to the mineral; this lies outside human consciousness. And on the other side, men feel within them what still binds them with the animal world, that is, what pertains to race, what is typical of the animal. [See drawing]. On the other hand, what makes man really man, his upright form, the space form of his being, lies outside of human consciousness.”

Thus, the specifically human lay outside the interest of these people of ancient times. We can characterize the human by thinking of it, in the sense of this ancient humanity, as enclosed within this space [shaded portion in drawing], while the mineral and the specifically human lay outside the realm of knowledge generally accessible to those people who carried on their lives outside the Mysteries.

But what I have just said applies only in general. With his own forces, with what man experienced in his own being, he could not penetrate beyond this space [see drawing], to the mineral on the one side, to the human on the other. But there were ceremonies originating in the Mysteries which brought to man in the course of the year something approximating the human ego-consciousness on the one side and the perception of the general mineral kingdom on the other.

Strange as it may sound to people of the present time, it is nevertheless true that the priests of the ancient Mysteries arranged festivals by whose unusual effects man was lifted out above the plant-like to the mineral, and thereby at a certain time of year experienced a lighting up of his ego. It was as if the ego shone into the dream-consciousness. You know that even in a person's dreams today, one's own ego, which is then seen, often constitutes an element of the dream.

And so at the time of the St. John's festival, through the ceremonies that were arranged for those among the people who wanted to take part in them, ego-consciousness shone in just at the height of summer. And at this time of midsummer people could perceive the mineral realm at least to the extent necessary to help them attain a kind of ego-consciousness, whereby the ego appeared as something that entered into dreams from outside. In order to bring this about, the participants in the oldest midsummer festivals—those of the summer solstice which have become our St. John's festival—the participants were led to unfold a musical-poetic element in round dances having a strong rhythmic quality and accompanied by song. Certain presentations and performances were filled with distinctive musical recitative accompanied by primitive instruments. Such a festival was completely immersed in the musical-poetic element. What man had in his dream-consciousness he poured out into the cosmos, as it were, in the form of music, in song and dance.

Modern man can have no true appreciation of what was accomplished by way of music and song during those intense and widespread folk festivals of ancient times, which took place under the guidance of men who in turn had received their guidance from the Mysteries. For what music and poetry have come to be since then is far removed from the simple, primitive, elemental form of music and poetry which was unfolded in those times at the height of summer under the guidance of the Mysteries. For everything the people did in performing their round-dances, accompanied by singing and primitive poetic recitations, had the single goal of bringing about a soul mood in which there occurred what I have just called the shining of the ego into the human spirit.

But if those ancient people had been asked how they came to form such songs and such dances, by means of which there could arise what I have described, they would have given an answer highly paradoxical to modern man. They would have said, for example: “Much of it has been given to us by tradition, for those who went before us have also done these things.” But in certain ancient times they would have said: “One can learn these things also today without having any tradition, if one simply develops further what manifests itself. One can still learn today how to make use of instruments, how to form dances, how to master the singing voice”—and now comes the paradox in what these ancient people would have said. They would have said: “It is learned from the songbirds.”—For they understood in a deep way the whole import of the songbirds' singing.

My dear friends, mankind has long ago forgotten why the songbirds sing. It is true that men have preserved the art of song, the art of poetry, but in the age of intellectualism in which the intellect has dominated everything, they have forgotten the connection of singing with the whole universe. Even someone who is musically inspired, who sets the art of music high above the commonplace, even such a man, speaking out of this later intellectualistic age, says: “I sing as the bird sings who dwells in the branches. The song that issues from my throat is my reward, and an ample reward it is.” Indeed, my dear friends, the man of a certain period says this. The bird, however, would never say such a thing. He would never say: “The song that issues from my throat is my reward.” And just as little would the pupils of the ancient Mystery schools have said it. For when at a certain time of year the larks and the nightingales sing, what is thereby formed streams out into the cosmos, not through the air, but through the etheric element; it vibrates outward in the cosmos up to a certain boundary... then it vibrates back again to Earth, to be received by the animal realm—only now the divine-spiritual essence of the cosmos has united with it.

And thus it is that the nightingales and the larks send forth their voices into the universe (red) and that what they thus send forth comes back to them etherically (yellow), for the time during which they do not sing;

but in the meantime it has been filled with the content of the divine-spiritual. The larks send their voices out over the cosmos, and the divine spiritual, which takes part in the forming, in the whole configuration of the animal kingdom, streams back to the Earth on the waves of what had streamed out in the songs of the larks and the nightingales.

Therefore if anyone speaks, not from the standpoint of the intellectualistic age, but out of the truly all-encompassing human consciousness, he really cannot say: “I sing as the bird sings who dwells in the branches. The song that issues from my throat is my reward, and an ample reward it is.” Rather, he would have to say: “I sing as the bird sings who dwells in the branches. And the song which streams forth from his throat into the cosmic expanses returns to the Earth as a blessing, fructifying the earthly life with divine spiritual impulses which then work on in the bird world and which can only work in the bird world because they find their way in on the waves of what has been ‘sung out’ to them into the cosmos.”

Now of course not all creatures are nightingales and larks; also of course not all of them send out song; but something similar even though it is not so beautiful, goes out into the cosmos from the whole animal world. In those ancient times this was understood, and therefore the pupils of the Mystery-pupils were instructed in such singing and dancing as they could then perform at the St. John's festival, if I may call it by the modern name. Human beings sent this out into the cosmos, of course not now in animal form, but in humanized form, as a further development of what the animals send out into cosmic space.—And there is something else yet that belonged to those festivals: not only the dancing, the music, the song, but afterward, the listening. First, there was the active performance in the festivals; then the people were directed to listen to what came back to them. For through their dances, their singing, and all that was poetic in their performances, they had sent forth the great questions to the divine spiritual of the cosmos. Their performance streamed up, as it were, into cosmic spaces as the water of the earth rises, forming clouds above and dropping down again as rain. Thus, the effects of the human festival performances arose and came back again—of course not as rain, but as something which manifested itself to man as ego-power. And the people had a sensitive feeling for that particular transformation which took place in the air and warmth around the Earth, just about the time of the St. John's festival. Of course the man of the present intellectualistic age disregards anything like this. He has something else to do than people of olden times. In these times, as also in others, he has to go to five o'clock teas, to coffee parties; he has to attend the theater, and so on; he simply has something else to do which is not dependent on the time of year. In the doing of all this, man forgets that delicate transformation which takes place in the Earth's atmospheric environment.

But these people of olden times did feel how different the air and warmth become around St. John's time, at the height of summer, how these take on something of the plant nature. Just consider what kind of a perception that was—this sensitive feeling for all that goes on in the plant world. Let us suppose that this is the Earth, and everywhere plants are coming out of the Earth.

The people then had a subtle feeling awareness of what is developing there in the plant, of what lives in the plant. They had in the spring a general feeling of nature, of which an after-echo is still retained in our language. You will find in Goethe's Faust the expression “es gruenelt” (It is beginning to get green). Who notices nowadays when it is growing green, when the greenness rising up out of the Earth in the spring, wells and wafts through the air? Who notices when it grows green and when it blossoms? Well, of course people see it today; the red and the yellow of the flowers please them; but they do not notice that the air becomes quite different when the flowers bloom, and again when the fruit is formed. Such living participation in the plant world no longer exists in our intellectualistic age, but it did exist for the people of ancient times.

Hence they were aware of it in their perceptive feeling when the “greening,” blooming and fruiting came toward them—not now out of the Earth, but out of the surrounding atmosphere; when air and warmth themselves streamed down from above like something akin to plant nature (shaded in drawing). And when air and warmth became thus plant-like, the consciousness of those people was transported into that sphere in which the “I” then descended, as answer to what they had sent out into the cosmos in the form of music and poetry.

Thus the festivals had a wonderful, intimate, human content. This was a question to the divine-spiritual universe. Men received the answer because—just as we perceive the fruiting, the blossoming, the greening of the Earth today—they felt something plant-like streaming down from above out of the otherwise merely mineral air. In this way there entered into the dream of existence, into the ancient dreamy consciousness also the dream of the ego.

And when the St. John's festival was past and July and August came again, the people had the feeling “We have an ego, but this ego remains up there in heaven and speaks to us only at St. John's time. Then we become aware that we are connected with heaven. It has taken our ego into its protection. It shows it to us when it opens the great window of heaven at St. John's time. But we must ask about it. We must ask as we carry out the festival performances at St. John's time, as in these performances we find our way into the unbelievably close and intimate musical and poetic ceremonies.”—Thus these ancient festivals already established a communication, a union, between the earthly and the heavenly.

You see this whole festival was immersed in the musical, in the musical-poetic. I might say that in the simple settlements of very ancient peoples, suddenly, for a few days at the height of summer, everything became poetic—although it had been thoroughly prepared beforehand by the Mysteries. The whole social life was plunged into this musical-poetic element. The people believed that they needed this for life during the course of the year, just as they needed daily food and drink; that they needed to enter into this mood of dancing, music and poetry, in order to establish their communication with the divine-spiritual powers of the cosmos. A relic of this festival remained in a later age, when a poet said, for example; “Sing, O Muse, of the wrath of Achilles, the son of Peleus,” because he still remembered that once upon a time the great question was put before the deity, and the deity was expected to give answer to the question of men.

Just as these festivals at St. John's time were carefully prepared in order to pose the great question to the cosmos so that the cosmos might assure man at this time that he has an ego, which the heavens have taken into their protection, so likewise was prepared the festival at the time of the winter solstice, in the depths of winter, which has now become our Christmas festival. But while at St. John's time everything was steeped in the musical-poetic, in the dance element, now in the depths of winter everything was first prepared in such a way that the people knew they must become still and quiet, that they must enter into a more contemplative element. And then there was brought forth—in these ancient times of which outer history provides no record, of which we can only know through spiritual science—all that during the summer had been in the forming and shaping and imaging elements which reached a climax in the festivals in music and dance. During that time these ancient people, who in a certain way went out of themselves in order to unite with the ego in the heavens, were not involved in learning anything. Besides the festival, they were occupied in doing what was necessary for their subsistence. Instruction waited for the winter months, and this reached its culmination, its festival expression, at the time of the winter solstice, in the depth of winter, at Christmas time.

Then began the preparation of the people, again under the guidance of pupils of the Mysteries, for various spiritual celebrations which were not performed during the summer. It is difficult to describe in modern terms what the people did from our September/October to our Christmas time, because everything was so very different from what is done now. But they were guided in what we would perhaps call riddle-solving, in answering questions that were put in a veiled form so that people had to discover a meaning in what was given in signs. Let us say that the Mystery-pupils gave to those who were learning in this way some kind of symbolic image, which they were to interpret. Or they gave what we would call a riddle to be solved, or some kind of incantation. What the magic saying contained, they were to apply to Nature, and thus divine its meaning.

But especially there was careful preparation for what later took on the most varied forms among the different peoples; for example, for what was known in northern countries at a later time as the throwing of the runic wands so that they formed shapes which were then deciphered. People devoted themselves to these activities in the depth of winter; but above all, those things were cultivated that then led to a certain art of modeling, in a primitive form of course.

Among these ancient forms of consciousness was a most singular one, paradoxical as it sounds to modern people, and it was as follows: With the coming of October, an urge for some sort of activity began to stir in people's limbs. In the summer a man had to accommodate the movements of his limbs to what the fields demanded of him; he had to put his hands to the plough; he had to adapt himself to the outer world. When the harvest had been gathered in, however, and his limbs were rested, then a need stirred in them for some other form of activity, and his limbs took on a longing to knead. Then people derived a special satisfaction from all kinds of plastic, moulding activity. We might say that just as an intensive urge had arisen at the time of the St. John's festival for dancing and music, so toward Christmas time an intensive urge arose to knead, to mould, to create, using any kind of pliant substance available in nature. People had an especially sensitive feeling, for example, for the way water begins to freeze. This gave them the specific impulse to push it in one direction and another, so that the ice-forms appearing in the water took on certain shapes. Indeed people went so far as to keep their hands in the water while the shapes developed and their hands grew numb! In this way, when the water froze under the waves their hands cast up, it assumed the most remarkable artistic shapes, which of course again melted away.

Nothing remains of all this in the age of intellectualism except at most the custom of lead-casting on New Year's Eve, the Feast of St. Sylvester. In this, molten lead is poured into water, and one discovers that it takes on shapes whose meaning is then supposed to be guessed. But that is the last abstract remnant of those wonderful activities that arose from the impelling force in Nature experienced inwardly by the human being, which expressed itself for example as I have related: that a person thrust his hand into water which was in process of freezing, the hand then becoming numb as he tested how the water formed waves, so that the freezing water then “answered” with the most remarkable shapes. In this way the human being found the answers to his questions of the Earth. Through music and poetry at the height of summer, he turned toward the heavens with his questions, and they answered by sending ego-feeling into his dreaming consciousness. In the depth of winter he turned for what he wanted to know not now toward the heavens, but to the earthly, and he tested what kind of forms the earthly element can take on. In doing this he observed that the forms which emerged had a certain similarity to those developed by beetles and butterflies. This was the result of his contemplation. From the plastic, formative element that he drew out of the nature processes of the Earth, there arose in him the intuitive observation that the various animal forms are fashioned entirely out of the earthly element. At Christmas man understood the animal forms. And as he worked, as he exerted his limbs, even jumped into the water and made certain movements, then sprang out and observed how the solidifying water responded, he noticed in the outer world what sort of form he himself had as man. But this was only at Christmas time, not otherwise; at other times he had a perception only of the animal world and of what pertains to race. At Christmas time he advanced to the experience of the human form as well.

Just as in those times of the ancient Mysteries the ego-consciousness was mediated from the heavens, so the feeling for the human form was conveyed out of the Earth. At Christmas time man learned to know the Earth's form-force, its sculptural shaping force; and at St. John's time, at the height of summer he learned to know how the harmonies of the spheres let his ego sound into his dream-consciousness.

And thus at special festival seasons the ancient Mysteries expanded the being of man. On the one side the environment of the Earth extended out into the heavens, so that man might know how the heavens held his “I” in their protection, how his “I” rested there. And at Christmas time the Mystery teachers caused the Earth to give answer to the questioning of man by way of plastic forms, so that man gradually came to have an interest in the human form, in the flowing together of all animal forms into the human form. At midsummer man learned to know himself inwardly, in relation to his ego; in the depth of winter he learned to feel himself outwardly, in relation to his human form. And so it was that what man perceived as his being, how he actually felt himself, was not acquired simply by being man, but by living together with the course of the year; that in order for him to come to ego-consciousness, the heavens opened their windows; that in order for him to come to consciousness of his human form, the Earth in a certain way unfolded her mysteries. Thus the human being was inwardly intimately linked with the course of the year, so intimately linked that he had to say to himself: “I know about what I am as man only when I don't live along stolidly, but when I allow myself to be lifted up to the heavens in summer, when I let myself sink down in winter into the Earth mysteries, into the secrets of the Earth.”

You see from this that at one time the festival seasons with their celebrations were looked upon as an integral part of human life. A man felt that he was not only an earth-being but that his essential being belonged to the whole world, that he was a citizen of the entire cosmos. Indeed he felt himself so little to be an earth-being that he actually had first to be made aware of what he was through the Earth by means of festivals. And these festivals could be celebrated only at certain seasons because at other times the people who experienced the course of the year to some degree would have been quite unable to experience it at all. For all that the people could experience through the festivals was connected with the related seasons.

Mark you, after man has once achieved his freedom in the age of intellectualism, he can certainly not come again to this sharing in the life of the cosmos in the same way that he experienced it in primitive ages. But he can nevertheless come to it even with his modern constitution, if he applies himself once more to the spiritual.

We might say that in the ego consciousness which mankind has had for a long time now, something has been drawn in which could be attained only through the windows of heaven in summer. But just for that reason man must be learning to understand the cosmos, acquire for himself something else which in turn lies beyond the ego. It is natural today for people to speak of the human form in general. Those who have entered into the intellectual age no longer have a strong feeling for the animalistic-racial element. But just as this feeling formerly came over man, I should like to say as a force, as an impulse, which could be sought only out of the Earth, so today, through an understanding of the Earth which cannot be gained by means of geology or mineralogy but only once more in a spiritual way, man must come again to something more than the mere human form.

If we consider the human form we can say: In very ancient times man felt himself within this form in such a way that he felt only the external racial characteristics connected with the blood, but failed to perceive as far as the skin itself (red in drawing); he did not notice what formed his outline.

Today man has come so far that he does notice his outline, his bodily limits. He perceives his contour indeed as the typically human feature of his form (blue). Now, however, man must come out beyond himself; he must learn to know the etheric and astral elements outside himself. This he can do only through the deepening of spiritual science.

Thus we see that our present-day consciousness has been acquired at the cost of losing much of the former connection of our consciousness with the cosmos. But once man has come to experience his freedom and his world of thought, then he must emerge again and experience cosmically.

This is what Anthroposophy intends when it speaks of a renewal of the festivals, even of the creating of festivals like the Michael festival in autumn of which we have recently spoken. We must come once more to an inner understanding of what the cycle of the year can mean to man in this connection; it can then be something even loftier than it was for man long ago, as we have described it.

Also known as: Archangels and the Living Source of Speech Lecture 2 of 13 from the lecture series: The Human Soul in its Connection with Godly-Spiritual Individualities.

If you will remind yourselves of some of the things I have said in recent lectures, you will, I think, be able to call up a picture of the relationship of man's faculty of speech to those Beings in the spiritual world whom we are accustomed to assign to the Hierarchy of the Archangels. You will remember I explained to you the difference it makes to man whether the words he speaks are formed in such a way as to refer only to material things, in which case speech assumes a materialistic character, or whether in his speaking he unfolds a certain idealism, so that every time he utters a word, the feeling is present in him that he belongs to a spiritual world and that the words that ring in his speaking, coming as they do from the soul, must have some relation to Spirits. According as the one or the other is true, so does man come, between falling asleep and awakening, into a wrong or right relation with the Archangels. If he allows idealism to disappear altogether from his speaking, then he gradually loses the connection, which is so essential to him, with the Archangels. I am reminding you of this, because I want to speak to-day more particularly of one aspect of this relationship of human speech with the hierarchy of the Archangels. Speech, like everything else in evolution that has to do with man, as we have had full opportunity of realising in our study of his being, has had its history. What I want to bring forward does not refer to any one language in particular. The periods of time we have to take into view when we are studying some deep-seated change in speech are so long that even primitive languages show the same character as civilised ones in respect of such matters as we shall be considering. To-day therefore we shall not concern ourselves with the differences that exist between the several languages, but rather with those metamorphoses which human language in general has undergone in the course of the evolution of mankind on Earth.

If we consider the relationship man has to-day to language, we find that the words he speaks are nearly all of them signs for things that are round about him. As you will know, we have in the course of our studies alluded to a more intimate relationship between word and object. In our day however there is hardly any feeling left for this; words are very little more than mere outward signs for the objects indicated. Who is there who still feels, when the word Blitz (lightning) is uttered, something of the same experience he has when lightning actually flashes through space? To-day we are inclined to look on the word merely as a combination of sounds that is a sign for the phenomenon of the flash of lightning. It was not always so. If we go no farther back than to the earlier part of the Greek civilisation, we find that man's relation to language was not then one of thought, where the word is for him a sign and a symbol. The man of olden time entered with heart and soul into the sounds of his words and into the whole way the sounds were formed and arranged. And in the case of the languages of Northern Europe we do not even need to go back so far before we come to a time when the word Pflug (plough) gave man the same inner experience as did the activity of ploughing. This has been lost, and the word has become no more than a sign. But it is scarcely more than 1500 years or so since words were still felt in this way in the Northern parts of Europe. The feeling a man had when he was ploughing was similar to the feeling he had when he heard the word which in those days designated the plough. When anyone was listening to or speaking a word, it was not so much his thinking that partook in the experience as his feeling.

If now we go back into more remote ages, we find something different again; the will takes an intense and active part in the forming of words. But in order to study the times when man's relationship to external Nature was pre-eminently one of will, we must take our thoughts right back to Atlantis. For we have to reckon with long epochs of time when we are considering the evolution of language.

Within language lives the Genius of language. Language is not dependent for its evolution on the decision of man. In language lives the Genius of language. And the Genius of Language belongs to the hierarchy of the Archangels. When man speaks—when, that is, an atmosphere is prepared around the Earth within which can live man's utterances articulated into speech, then that atmosphere of speech and language is the element of the Archangels. Hence are the Archangels the Spirits of the different peoples—the Folk Spirits as we call them. You will know of this from the lectures I gave on the Mission of the Folk-Souls.

The evolution of language on Earth has thus a deep and intimate connection with the evolution of the Archangels. We can go so far as to say that in the evolution of speech and language we are beholding the evolution of the Archangels themselves. For even when we are studying something that has to do with the Earth, it is by no means impossible in the course of that very study to come to a knowledge of the evolution of higher spiritual Beings. We need only learn how to relate particular facts and phenomena to particular higher spiritual Beings, and we can arrive at a clear perception of how the continuous evolution of the Archangels is expressed and revealed in the changes that are to be observed in man's faculty of speech.

Now in those far-off times when an element of will came to expression in man's speech—that is, in the later part of the Atlantean evolution—it was not the same Beings of the Hierarchy who lived in his language as in more recent times. The whole relationship moreover was different. In those remote times man was not yet so interested in the feelings aroused in him at the sight, for example, of the blossoming of flowers or by changes in weather. These feelings interested him, it is true, in another connection, but not in respect of the faculty whereby the word welled up from the depths of his soul. Whether danger threatened him from this or that fact in Nature, summoning him to defend himself, or whether something else had a kindly and favourable influence and he would fain bring it into the orbit of his life, or again whether another object of perception were good or bad for his health,—in effect, how his will was aroused to activity, what he was induced to do under the influence of some fact or other,—this was the aspect of experience that interested him, and he formed his words accordingly. So that in those older times we find words that express how man reacts, what he finds himself impelled to do under the influence of the world around him. The most ancient language of all consisted almost entirely of expressions of will. How do we account for this? It was due to the fact that the Archangels came to language by way of Intuition. Read the descriptions I have given in my books of the nature of Intuition, and you will have a picture of the activity exercised by the Archangels in the later part of the Atlantean evolution, when they bestowed upon man the language of will.

Later, these Archangels moved forward in their own evolution. In my little book, “The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind,” I spoke about the evolution of the Leaders and Guides of humanity who live in the spiritual world. To-day we will extend this into a realm to which on that occasion we gave little attention,—the realm of speech and language. The advance made by the Archangels in their relation to language may be described in the following way. In the older faculty of Intuition they were standing within the world of still higher Hierarchies, giving themselves up in devotion to these worlds, so that together with speech they received something of the very being of higher Hierarchies than themselves. So long as it all depended upon Intuition, the Archangels surrendered themselves to the next higher Hierarchy,—Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai. They were within the worlds of this higher Hierarchy, and it was the experience of standing intuitively within this higher Hierarchy that enabled them to put the speech-forming power into human life on Earth.

In the next epoch the Archangels make, as it were, a step forward and then their speech-forming power flows no longer out of Intuition but out of Inspiration. They are not now completely surrendered to the next higher Hierarchy. (What they did still receive through their devotion to this Hierarchy underwent a change; it ceased to be something they could then communicate to man as speech or language). Now they hearken to the Inspirations of the First Hierarchy,—Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim,—and from out of this Inspiration they pour down to Earth the speech-forming power.

If we go back to the earliest times of Post-Atlantean evolution, or even only as far as ancient Egypt and Chaldea, we find in every land that the source from which the Archangels drew, in order to communicate speech to man, is Inspiration. Language itself is metamorphosed. Words become an expression before all else of sympathy and antipathy, of every shade of human feeling. Instead of a language of will, as in former times, we have now a language of feeling. We have come to a stage where this feeling, which is called forth in man by an external process or being is the very same as is experienced when the sounds issuing forth from the depths of his being are uttered by the speech organs and articulated into the word.

We have reached a significant phase in the evolution of mankind. The Hierarchy of the Archangels is at first the receiver of Intuitions; and the language of will, brought down as it were out of these Intuitions, is created by these Beings. The Archangels move on further and become the receivers of Inspiration. And what they receive through the inspiration of Beings of the First Hierarchy, gives rise to the language of feeling.

It was out of an extraordinarily deep perception that the well-known scholar and writer on the history of Art, Hermann Grimm, drew a clear line of division between the Greeks and the Romans. When we learn history at school or at the university, we are, he said, exhorted to take pains to understand what we learn; but as we go back over the evolution of mankind, we can only understand history as far back as Roman times. Cicero and Caesar we can still understand, for up to a point they are similar to the man of the present day,—although it must be said that the understanding generally brought to a study of Caesar is far from being free and natural. If we were not so thoroughly drilled and trained to it, we would never take much interest in Caesar! We would leave it to the pupils in military schools. Generally speaking, however, it is possible to trace a continuous stream back from our own day to Rome. A certain element of pedantry, which has gradually been creeping into man's life and has to-day reached a kind of culmination, first began to show itself in Rome. But, thinks Hermann Grimm, if we are honest with ourselves, we cannot claim to understand Pericles or Alcibiades. We understand them in the same way as we understand characters in fairy tales. As a matter of fact, it is only through a deeper study of Anthroposophy that one can come again to an understanding of the soul life of such figures; as you know, we have sought here again and again to enter into the whole way in which a Greek thinks and forms his ideas. Hermann Grimm is aware of the distance that lies between the inner life of a Greek and the inner life of a man of the present day. To the Roman we can still feel ourselves near; then comes a great gulf. The way the Greeks are described in the schools to-day is really deplorable! They are made out to be just like ourselves. They were not so at all, their whole life of soul was of a different character altogether. We need to look round for quite other methods to describe the Greeks. You could not have more striking evidence of this than when the learned Wilamowitz undertakes to translate the Greek tragedians. The whole affair is simply a disgrace. I need hardly say, there is nothing of the Greek tragedies left in his translations, not a trace! And yet people are immensely pleased, quite enchanted with them. Their dramatis personae simply do not exist in the tragedies themselves.

Hermann Grimm showed a true and sure instinct, when he said that we come into an entirely different world when we come to Greece—to say nothing of the Orient. It is really no more than a ridiculous mockery for modern man to imagine he can understand anything of the true Orient out of Deussen's translations. The first thing necessary is to be able to comprehend the change that has come about since then in the very being of man's soul.

And now when we come to consider our particular sphere, the sphere of speech or language, then we find that the language of feeling still prevailed in Greece among the philosophers up to the time of Plato. The first philosophical pedant is Aristotle, the great and universal spirit.¹ It will surprise you that I give him these two appellations, one after the other, but we do not understand Aristotle unless we see in him the first philosophical pedant and at the same time the universal spirit. He is great in a certain aspect but he is in another aspect the first pedant philosopher, for he made out of words categories of thought. It would never have occurred to the Greek of an older time to take words and force them, as it were, to yield categories of thought; he still felt the words as something that is inspired into man, still felt the presence of higher Spirits in speech and language.

Well on into the Greek epoch and—for the man in the street, as we say—as late as the Mystery of Golgotha, we can still detect in the speech-forming power of man the element of Inspiration, as it lives in the soul of the Archangel. True, the ordinary person lags behind the philosopher in certain respects; but in spiritual matters he is often less behind, and in the matter of the speech-forming faculty, he retains the Inspirations longer. Dates can of course be no more than approximate. In one region of the earth Inspiration lasts a longer, in another a shorter, time. In one region, men still feel how the word pulsates in them as the blood pulsates in the body; they feel it in the power of the breath. In the power of the breath as it enfills and surges through the body, they feel the presence of the Archangel, who is himself subject to Inspiration.

Then we come into a time when it is no longer so that the Archangel is yielding to Inspiration when he communicates to man the power of speech, but to Imagination. And language becomes the language of thought. Man begins to speak more out of thoughts; language approaches the abstract. And behind this lies a fact of great significance.

The Archangels, who belong to the Third Hierarchy, received Intuitions from the Second Hierarchy, and Inspirations from Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones—the First Hierarchy. Whence do they receive Imagination? There is no Hierarchy beyond the First! The Imaginations cannot at any rate come to them from any one of the Hierarchies named in the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite. For he tells of no Hierarchy beyond the first. Certain Archangel Beings were therefore obliged to turn to the past for Imaginations, to find in the past the pictures of the speech-forming power,—for that is what the Imaginations are. What came from an earlier time had to be carried on into the future. There was no longer any immediate and present flow of the speech-forming power. And inasmuch as speech now took its source from an earlier stage, into it crept an Ahrimanic element. This is a fact of incalculable significance. And what the Archangels felt above them came to expression in the world of man in a deadening of speech and language. Language became polished and at the same time paralysed, it no longer retained the livingness it had in earlier days.

Try to understand the significance of this change. Something enters into the life of man that in reality requires a higher hierarchy than the First. If we have a right understanding for this event in human development in all its tremendous significance, we shall come to see that a time had arrived when the Gods had to grow out beyond what is contained in the First Hierarchy. There is one thing that up to that time had not yet been achieved by the Gods, and was already present here on Earth in picture. What the Gods had not yet achieved is the passage through Death. You have often heard me speak of this. The Gods who stand above man in the various Hierarchies knew only of changes from one form of life into another. The actual event of death in life had not, up to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, been an experience of the Gods. Death came as a result of Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences; it came, that is, through the agency of Divine Beings who had either remained behind in evolution or pressed forward too quickly. Death had no place in the life-experience of the higher Hierarchies. It enters into their experience in the moment when the Christ passes through the Mystery of Golgotha—passes, that is, through Death, uniting Himself so deeply with the destiny of Earth Man as to have this also in common with him,—that He passes through Death. The event of Golgotha is accordingly more than an event of the life of Earth, it is an event of the life of the Gods. The actual event that took place in that moment on Earth, and the knowledge of the Event that finds its way into the hearts and minds of men—all this is an image of the infinitely more lofty and sublime and far-reaching Event that took place in the worlds of the Gods themselves. Christ's passing through death on Golgotha is an event whereby the First Hierarchy reached up into a still higher realm. Therefore have I always had to speak to you of the Trinity as standing above the First Hierarchy. In reality It only came there in the course of evolution. Everywhere there is evolution.

And so, if we are speaking of the Hierarchies as described in Dionysius the Areopagite, we have to say that the Archangels lose the possibility of forming Imaginations from above. Consequently Man loses the possibility of continuing to build and fashion his language in a living manner. In the world of the Gods an event takes place of which the Mystery of Golgotha is an earthly reflection. Therefore the Event of Golgotha contains among its many implications also this,—that as men gradually receive into themselves more and more of the Christ Impulse, they receive again through the Christ Impulse the living spring and fountain of language.

We have to-day the various languages that run their course like diverging streams. And if we look at these various languages in a free and unbiassed way, we cannot fail to observe how they carry in them—and more especially, the farther we go Westward—an element of death, how they tend to become mere empty husks. In Asia things have not yet gone so far, but as we go West we find increasingly how the languages show signs of dying.

There is only one way whereby the speech-creating power can be quickened into life,—and that is through men coming to realise the Christ Impulse as a living Impulse. Then the Christ Impulse can become a power in man that can create speech. And among all the facts to be noted if we want to form a true picture of the significance of the Christ Impulse in the whole evolution of mankind, this must also have place, that at the time when man went forward into freedom, he came right out of the Divine and spiritual stream in which he had been steeped hitherto. Had speech remained as it was in the time of ancient Greece, man would not have been able to evolve to freedom. That speech serves the purpose merely of a sign,—this absurdity (for so I must call it) had to come about when the Archangels lost the possibility of forming Imaginations from the present and had to resort to the past. During the time since the Christ first made Himself known to men, during all this time while He has let the Mystery of His Being and His activity be there on record in the Gospels, the knowledge of Christ has not come in its fullness, the knowledge men have had of Him has not been sufficiently spiritual, it has often been merely traditional. But when the word of the Gospel is quickened to life by an understanding of the Christ, an understanding that derives from the Christ Himself as He still works on in the world, continuing to have influence always upon man, then—and only then—will proceed from the Christ Impulse, from the living Christ Impulse, the speech-forming power.

Let us now set down on the blackboard what I have been indicating. Here up above, the Gods grow more and more exalted. Down below an evolution goes on among men. On the one hand they receive more and more of the Christ Impulse, on the other hand they move further and further forward in the direction of freedom.

And when man rises to a higher stage, the higher Hierarchies also reach a higher stage. The Archangels gradually receive more and more of the Christ Impulse, on the other hand they move further and further forward in the direction of freedom. And when man rises to a higher stage, the higher Hierarchies also reach a higher stage. The Archangels gradually receive more and more of the Christ, Who has found His home in the hearts of men on Earth; He enters with His Impulse right into the Imaginations of the Archangels, and these become alive, become quick with immediate present life.

We shall in the future have an altogether different kind of language-forming power. A quite new kind will begin to work. I have spoken of this from other points of view in earlier lectures.

We can describe the evolution that goes on above in the Heavens at the same time as mankind evolves on the Earth below. And we can also describe its copy or reflection on Earth,—the progress from the language of will to the language of feeling and thence to the language of thought or symbol. And we can know that amidst it all Archangels are ascending—or shall we rather say descending—from Intuition to Inspiration and to Imagination. We behold first the evolution of the Archangels and all that takes place in connection therewith among the higher Hierarchies, and when we turn from that to man in his evolution, it is on the evolution of language and of the word that we have to fix our attention. We will consider one particular stream in the whole history of mankind, into which a divine stream was interwoven. It goes back to the origin of all things, the far beginning of all things. “In the Beginning was the Word” where was the word in those distant ages, when mankind had a language of the will? The Word was with God, it had to be sought there by means of Intuition. “The Word was with God ”.

The Archangels had to transpose themselves by means of Intuition into the Being of the Second Hierarchy. The Being that flowed over into Them was the Word. “And a God was the Word”.

In the Beginning was the Word
And the Word was with God
And a God was the Word.

We see how intimate is the connection of that stream in evolution which finds its culmination in the Mystery of Golgotha with the Logos, the Word. And it is all bound up with the great cosmic event of man's “becoming” and the passage of Christ through death. When those great sentences were uttered: “In the Beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and a God was the Word ”—in those days the Word was felt as moving and weaving in the soul of man. With the Advent of the Mystery of Golgotha came a time when Christ was present in a human body—men beheld Him through the Word. The Word had entered into physical man. “ And the Word became flesh ”.

Deep truths, deep facts of evolution, lie hidden in the ancient writings, but earnest and persistent work is needed to find them again. We must first be able to observe in the spiritual world. Above all, we must approach these ancient writings with reverence, knowing that we shall only be able to deepen our understanding of their content by learning to investigate these sublime matters for ourselves. And as we are able to enter into their deeper meaning we enter also into spiritual life itself.

Well indeed would it be for us in this age, had we a Michael civilisation, a culture and a civilisation fired by what I recently called the Michael thought! This Michael thought should be alive, above all, in the autumn time. The festival of autumn should be filled with it. The leaves have withered and are falling from the branches of the trees, the plants are fading away, life is being mineralised. All the fresh young sprouting life that we saw in the earlier part of the year is receiving death into itself, death and decay, and is fast undergoing mineralisation. Now must the Michael power well up from man's inner being; now must man recognise how, just where the physical and material grows weak and faint and tends to die away,—just there the spiritual enters in! The Autumn Festival of Michaelmas at the end of September should become a festival filled with life and impulse. It has to express how man, while he stands right within the decaying processes of Nature, grows correspondingly active in his soul. When the Michael Festival shall have this character, then all human activity will be fructified from it. And how sore is the need to-day for such fructification! Let me give you an instance.

A short while ago, we heard a great deal about a resolve some people had made to study language. Nothing came of it, nothing at all. All manner of facts about language were collected, but the whole effort was completely lacking in spirituality. It was really so. There you had a group of young people, straight from school. At school of course, they had not yet woken up, but now—they are going to “study language”! They begin to plan it all and think how it will be when they have gone on studying for some time; a dazzling picture floats before their eyes of the fruit of all their labours. Actually all the preliminary steps are there; they could quite well have gone on to a recognition of the great miracle that unfolds before us when we look away from the present-day language of thought, through the language of feeling, to the language of will, and behold there the wonderful working and weaving of the Divine Archangels, behold too how their working and weaving stirs even yet in the language corpses of to-day. Were the life of the First Beginnings to flow again in language, what a sublime greatness were there revealed!

You must understand that the Michael thought is not a thing to be taken easily. You cannot simply say: Let us inaugurate a Michael Festival; it will be wonderful, and we shall then be in the very forefront of progress. The Michael thought has relation to the strongest and deepest impulses of the human will. It must reckon with these innermost impulses, and a Michael Festival cannot be other than a festival which gives a tremendous urge to human life, much as in those olden times, when man had the power to create festivals, the institution of the Christmas Festival or of the Easter Festival gave a new urge and impetus to the whole life of man on Earth.

• 1. Pedant’ seems to be, in this connection, the nearest rendering for ‘Philinter.’ (Note by Translator).