The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In meetings on August 25 and 26, 1915, between the Vorstand and the members of the Society, meetings Rudolf and Marie Steiner did not attend, the decision was made to no longer recognize Heinrich and Gertrud Goesch and Alice Sprengel as members of the Society. As a result of these meetings, the following resolution was sent to Marie Steiner:

Dornach
August 27, 1915

Dear Madam:

The Vorstand has presented you with the unanimous request of the assembled members that you be so kind as to retain the office you currently hold within the Anthroposophical Society.

As members, we wish to heartily confirm this oral communication with our signatures.

With deepest respect and thanks for the blessings bestowed on the Society through your work, we are

Devotedly yours,
(ca. 300 signatures)

The series of seven lectures included in this volume on the conditions necessary for the survival of the Anthroposophical Society began on September 10. On September 11, on the basis of discussions among members that had taken place in the meantime—discussions in which Rudolf and Marie Steiner had not taken part—a meeting of the Vorstand was held. It was decided to produce a thorough documentation of the Goesch/Sprengel case for the membership and to postpone the implementation of their expulsion until this document had been completed. On the next day (September 12), a members' meeting was held in place of a General Assembly, since members from other countries were unable to attend due to the war. No transcript exists of this meeting, which was intended to confirm the resolutions of the Vorstand; from the few brief notes available, it seems that Rudolf Steiner did take part in this meeting.

In the course of the days that followed, the document that had been resolved upon was written up; it ran to twenty typed pages. It recounted explicitly the contents of the letter from Heinrich and Gertrud Goesch and included character descriptions of the three people in question as well as a statement that Rudolf and Marie Steiner had not been involved in the decision to expel them from the Society. All significant portions of this document have been taken into account in preparing the documentation included in this volume; in some cases the present reproduction of relevant documents is more complete. It is to be assumed, although it has not been proved, that this document was enclosed with the following letter sent to Heinrich and Gertrud Goesch and Alice Sprengel by the Vorstand of the Anthroposophical Society on September 23:

Due to the fact that you have taken a position that does not lie within the goals and premises of the Anthroposophical Society, the Vorstand of said Society is compelled to revoke your membership.

Michael Bauer for the Vorstand of the Anthroposophical Society Dornach, September 23, 1915

On the following day, September 24, 1915, the women's meeting that had been proposed on September 17 took place. Its purpose was to talk about the position of women in ancient and modern esoteric movements, on the basis of what Rudolf Steiner had presented in his lecture on September 15. Marie Steiner had been asked to chair the meeting. According to handwritten notes she supplied, she spoke as follows:

Address at the Women's Meeting Dornach, September 24, 1915

A number of female members who proposed today's meeting asked me to take the chair. In spite of the fact that I have scarcely had time to collect myself in the past few weeks, I will be glad to fill this role if that is also the wish of the rest of those present.

Not many written contributions were received beforehand. We will go through them in the order in which they were received. I will begin by reading the proposal that led to our gathering today, and will then say a few words.

[Reads the proposal to call this women's meeting]

The basic thought expressed in this proposal is the one that occupies me the most, too: We are a number of women who have been granted something that has been denied the female sex until now, something that shall serve to regenerate humankind—its loftiest spiritual possession. How can we show ourselves to be worthy of it? It is a good thing to take this opportunity to be together to look at the full seriousness of our situation and our task, and to look at where we stand within the women's movement in general.

Out there, women are fighting for equal rights, for the opportunity for free development alongside men. This struggle has been fraught with untold difficulties, and many of us once exhausted our best energies in it, some of us doing battle with mounting material obstacles, others unable to free themselves before collapsing under the weight of conventions and prejudices and the tyranny of traditional attitudes.

All of a sudden, in the midst of this struggle, when it seemed that only certain individuals or future generations would be able to reap the fruits of all our exertions in the present, a door opened into the light and we were given a field of activity that surpassed all our expectations. It pointed out the way to our true goals, raising us up above the level of the unavoidable aberrations of a decadent and stagnating culture whose time is past. Now we could escape the danger of drowning in our desire to imitate, “monkey see, monkey do,” what was going on in this male culture, paying the price of our eternally feminine soul and spirit in our running after outer cultural forms shaped by men.

We had been able to contribute to the stimulation and inspiration of this culture simply by virtue of the fact that we were not its servants, its executive organs. Turned back on ourselves, left to our own devices, we could develop attributes of inwardness, depth, warmth, softness, and reserve that were a necessary counterbalance to what the men were having to achieve. We could tame, enthuse, comfort, support, heal, carry, sustain, and enliven within and without—no small task, to be sure. The men, meanwhile, were conquering the outer world.

Now they had conquered it; it was theirs. They measured its breadths, dissected its parts, became its master. Their intelligence was their downfall. Laughing in scorn, they shoved aside the old gods and the sources of their strength.

Then we, too, began to take notice, because the ground under our feet was beginning to shake. The old gods dead? Outer life the only thing that mattered? Our soul's vital wellspring, which had allowed us to feel instinctively the symbolic nature of all transitory life, mere illusion? Then let us out, too! Then we too must be allowed to break the bonds, to understand and work out of our own initiative and our own conviction. Let us, too, measure ourselves against the standards of this outer world! The life in us demanded its due, and we stormed onto the battlefield.

Two things we met there. On the one hand, the hard, immobile forms created by men. To conquer them, we had to subject ourselves to an iron discipline. Some of us succeeded. Not all of us were satisfied with that.

The second thing we found was outward freedom. There we stood, young and breathing deeply, in the breaking waves of life, the old oppressive chains far behind us. We had to discover our own standards, our own incorruptible guidelines, within ourselves.

Not all of us were able to do that. Many women felt as if they had been caught up in a whirlwind, and the untamed aspect of their nature broke through. Study, hard work, and the dry routine of professional life did not suffice for long; many in the droves of women that followed found them a burden. Freedom to express ourselves, freedom of experience were what we demanded—equal rights with men when it came to the pleasures of life, too.

The wave of materialism crested and broke and swept us women away with it. As our secure sense of the reality of a spiritual world died away, our instinctive life broke through with elemental force, distorted by the aberrations of our intelligence.

The theories of a Laura Marholm ¹ were adhered to by the extremists of a group of female poets represented by people like Marie Madeleine,² Dolorosa,³ Margarete Beutler,⁴ and so on. I am sure every country on the European continent experienced a similar phenomenon.

Literature offered proof that even the wildest erotic fantasies of men failed to unearth such excesses as we witnessed in the products of women's overheated imaginations. We shuddered to watch as women like these, driven by vanity and thirsting for glory, but poor in spirit and in knowledge, forced the products of their goaded sensuality into the long-since fixed forms of our language. They declaimed the results themselves in literary clubs; the men they had asked to do so on their behalf had responded that they would be ashamed.

The outlook was dim—desiccation and desolation on one hand, brutalization and licentiousness on the other. Where was the redeemer who would speak the word of life to help humanity on its further way?

Then a wonderful thing happened: In this age of decadent culture, moral decline, dulled thinking, and crass egotism, teachings appeared from seclusion, teachings that could formerly only be given to a few but could now become the common property of all humankind, teachings that would help humanity find its way out of spiritual desolation into the experience of the spirit. And women were allowed to take part in this work; here, if they so chose and if they made themselves worthy of it, was their new field of activity.

They approached this with a natural inclination toward the ideal, a greater mobility of thinking, and thus a high degree of receptivity. What they were lacking was discipline in thinking, the exactitude and precision, certainty of knowledge and the respect for this certainty, and the sense of reality that men in their professional activity had been forced to maintain. To put it crudely, their weaknesses were gossip, vanity, wishy-washiness, and the tendency to drag everything down to a sentimental and personal level. Their strong points were enthusiasm and readiness to make sacrifices. If women proved able to outgrow their natural level of existence as members of their species, these last two attributes would allow them to breathe life into a rigidifying culture. If they proved able to forget the personal aspects and become objective, they would be able to help build the future and be the equals of men in terms of rights, responsibilities, and significance in the new culture coming about.

Have we been able to meet these two conditions? Has our personal nature, our natural species-nature, stepped back into second place and become objective? I fear we have failed, on the whole.
Only when we bring our failings into the realm of consciousness and develop the will to understand, only then will we be able to overcome these failings and transform destructive forces into productive ones.

The task before us, the field of activity that lies open to us, is greater than any our most far-reaching wishes anticipated. But we cannot allow ourselves to lose the ground under our feet. We must not simply go into raptures, we must understand and work. For the first time since esoteric knowledge was granted to humankind, we women are allowed to receive this knowledge together with men and inaugurate a new era through this work in common.

Let me repeat, however, that in order for this new era in the history of humankind to reach its full potential, women will have to surmount their narrowly personal nature and the level of existence natural to our species. We must keep our spirituality pure and untouched by our desires, drives, and unclean thoughts.

It has been frightening to see that we are not necessarily able to do this. We women have been constantly mixing lower things in with the higher and cloaking sensuality with spirituality to make it seem like something it is not. Again and again, the three evil forces of vanity, eroticism, and falsehood have appeared in intimate connection with each other.

The reason for us being here is that these things have happened among us; we must try to confront our failings head on. We are faced with the question of whether we will be found to be unfit and unready. Will we throw away our chance at what could re-enliven humanity?

What will we do if we are granted a grace period, time to think things over? What can we do so that men and women can work together free of distraction?

These are the questions we have to ask ourselves. Each one of us should contribute to answering them.

In response to the position taken by the Vorstand, expressions of confidence in Rudolf and Marie Steiner flowed in from many branches of the Society in the time that followed. Even Heinrich Goesch's brothers Paul and Fritz and Fritz's wife, all three of whom were members of the Society, dissociated themselves from their brother's actions. In September 1915, Paul Goesch signed a resolution of the members of the Berlin branch of the Anthroposophical Society expressing their “most profound disapproval of and pained indignation at the unheard-of behavior of Mr. and Mrs. Goesch.”

How far Rudolf and Marie Steiner stood above this case is demonstrated by the fact that Marie Steiner still made it possible for Alice Sprengel to receive financial assistance after being expelled from the Society and leaving Dornach, as proven by this letter to a Miss Julia Wernicke,⁵ who had maintained contact with Miss Sprengel:

Dornach
September 29, 1915

Dear Miss Wernicke:

Miss Waller showed me a letter she had received from you in which it was requested that she act on behalf of Miss Sprengel in collecting the money several members allegedly still owe her.⁶ Since you yourself had to assume that not many people would be interested in this situation, which Miss Sprengel brought upon herself through her own excesses, and since Miss Waller has declared that she wants nothing to do with it, ordinary human compassion forces me to assume responsibility for the payment of this debt. I must ask that you not mention my name, however: first of all, that would be unpleasant for Miss Sprengel, and second of all I do not want to encourage any rumors about my having tried to accommodate Miss Sprengel in any way.

Acting on the basis of a letter from Mrs. von Strauss, I take the liberty of covering her debt.⁷ When you send the money to Miss Sprengel, please tell her it is to cover that debt, but that you are not in a position to reveal names.

Yours faithfully,
Marie Steiner

With that, the 1915 case was brought to a temporary close. Although his relationship with Alice Sprengel ended shortly thereafter, Heinrich Goesch remained an unfair adversary, spreading spiteful untruths wherever he could. As late as 1923, he appeared in public in Berlin as a “non-anthroposophical expert on anthroposophy” and again spoke out against Rudolf Steiner. This will be documented in the volume on the history of the Society covering the year 1923.

• 1. Laura Marholm, pseudonym of Laura Hansson, née Mohr, 1854–1928, Swedish author whose books were published in German.
• 2. Marie Madeleine, pseudonym of M. M. von Puttkamer, 1881–? Caused a sensation with books published around the turn of the century because of her advocacy of free love.
• 3. Dolorosa, pseudonym of Maria Eichhorn, 1879–? poet and novelist.
• 4. Margarete Beutler, M. Friedrich-Freska, née Beutler, 1884–1949. Under the pseudonym Margit Friedrich, she wrote lyric poetry and stories on social themes.
• 5. Julia Wernicke, Member of the Anthroposophical Society, no further details known.
• 6. Mieta (Pyle-)Waller, 1883–1954. Since about 1907, a friend and close artistic colleague of Marie Steiner-von Sivers and Rudolf Steiner.
• 7. Mrs. von Strauss, Member of the Anthroposophical Society, no further details known.

From the description contained in my book KNOWLEDGE OF THE HIGHER WORLDS you know that when the human being will be able to look into the spiritual world, he will, to a certain extent have that experience which we designate as the “crossing of the threshold”. In my book I have described this crossing of the threshold by pointing out that the three soul-forces of man, which have a rather chaotic and intermingling activity during his physical life begin to organise themselves; the forces of thought, feeling and of the will become independent. These forces become independent through the fact. that the human being crosses the threshold. In many respects, the whole course of mankind's development resembles the life-course of the individual human being. But things have become displaced. What the individual human being experiences consciously when he strives to attain clairvoyance in the spiritual world, namely, the crossing of the threshold, must be experienced unconsciously by the whole of mankind, during our fifth post-Atlantean epoch, Humanity has no choice in regard to this; it must experience this unconsciously—not the individual human being, but HUMANITY, and the individual human being together with humanity. What does this mean?

What is now a joint activity of thought, feeling and will within man, will in future take on a separate character and this will come to the fore in various spheres. We are just passing through a time in which humanity is unconsciously crossing the threshold of a significant portal, a fact which is clearly evident to the clairvoyant power. Humanity passes through this crossing of the threshold in such a way that the spheres of thought, feeling and will become separated. This imposes duties upon us, the duty of shaping external life in such a way that the great change which takes place in man's inner life may be experienced even in his EXTERNAL life. Through the fact that thinking grows more independent within the life of humanity, we must build up a foundation upon which the activity and influence of thinking can become sounder; we must moreover create a foundation upon which feeling can develop independently, and also a foundation upon which the will can reach its particular development. What has hitherto exercised a chaotic and intermingling activity in public life must now be organised into THREE SPHERES. In public life, these three spheres are: ECONOMIC LIFE, POLITICAL or JURIDICIAL LIFE and CULTURAL or SPIRITUAL LIFE. This need of a three-partition is connected with the mystery of human evolution which pertains to the present time.

Do not think that the “threefold social organism”, which is now being advanced, is just some sort of invention. It has been born out of the most intimate knowledge of human evolution, out of the knowledge of what must occur if the goal of human evolution is not to be renounced. During the past years, we have been involved in the fearful catastrophe of the great war, because of the difficulty which existed in recognising a goal of a spiritual character, and because people withdrew themselves more and more even from the mere act of recognising at least the existence of such goals. We must extricate ourselves from this chaos. The very course of human evolution demands that we should extricate ourselves from this chaos. Indeed, for this reason I think that the necessity of a threefold social organism will only be recognised thoroughly by those who depart from anthroposophical feelings and from a knowledge of the events which are taking place in the evolution of humanity. At present, people do not like to acknowledge such things. The present time likes to turn to tasks connected with the things which lie closest at hand, and it does not like to penetrate into the deeper mysteries of life.

What grieves the heart of one who is able to look into these mysteries, is the fact that humanity has such a strong aversion to the very things which it needs most. Yet it is impossible to abide by the thought which has just been expressed. We may say: every kind of pessimism is wrong. But this does not imply that every kind of optimism is right. Right and justified is, however, the APPEAL TO THE WILL. It is not at all a question of whether something takes place in this or in that way, but that we should WILL things in accordance with the direction of human evolution. We should realise over and over again that the old time has come to an end and that we must close our accounts with it. A real understanding of the present can only be gained if we rightly close our accounts with the old time. For the NEW time can only be taken into account from a SPIRITUAL standpoint! We should not delude ourselves that we can carry over into the new time the things which we have cherished in the past. In our external life, we must begin to turn to the new thoughts, which are now beginning to be active.

Mankind now faces two paths: One of these leads through the mechanization of the spirit. In more recent times, the spirit has become very mechanical, particularly in regard to the abstract laws of Nature, which have also been applied to social life, as ruling laws. Mechanization of the spirit—vegetalization of the soul! Vegetables sleep—and the human soul also tends to sleep. In a sleeping state we pass through the most important events. The most important events of the past years have literally been ‘slept away!’ Even to-day, most important events are being slept away.

Let us now turn our gaze to the East. There we can see that the animalization of the bodies is coming up in a very strong measure. Just as the Americanization of the spirit represents a mechanization of spiritual life, so the Bolshevism which tends to spread out in the East represents an animalization of the bodies. Emotions lead people to reject and criticize this or that, yet they do not wish to grasp real life.

At the present time, humanity has therefore the choice of advancing in a direction where it can find, on the one hand, the mechanization of the spirit, the vegetalization of the souls and the animalization of the bodies, or else it may, on the other hand, seek the path leading to an AWAKENING OF THE SPIRIT, discover this awakening of the spirit in the impulses which correspond to the epoch of the consciousness-soul, discover it in the connection of the human soul with the higher Hierarchies, discover, it in the recognition of the conscious human soul which comes from earlier conditions of earthly existence, discover it in the three-partition of social life! All these things are connected. And the human beings who unite in that movement which we designate as a spiritual-scientific movement oriented towards Anthroposophy, should feel that they are a KERNEL from which the forces ray out that can give rise to a new social structure. Everything which comes from other directions and seeks to transform social life may be very useful; but humanity should strive after the goal of transforming social life in a real and true way, and this can only be the outcome of SPIRITUAL IMPULSES!

At present, the human beings still ignore a secret of life which is intimately connected with the present moment of evolution. In the past, before the middle of the fifteenth century, it was not necessary to attach great importance to this mystery, but to-day it is necessary to bear it in mind. This Secret of life consists therein that man, such as he is constituted to-day, from the aspect of body, soul and spirit, contemplates in a certain way every night the events of the following day, but so that it is not always necessary for him to be fully conscious of these coming events, to have them in his day-time consciousness. The one who, is fully conscious of these coming events, is his angel, his ANGELOS. What we experience during the night in common with that Being whom we call our “angel”, is a FORESIGHT, a prevision of the next day. But. you must not consider this from the standpoint of human curiosity, for this would be quite wrong; you must instead consider it from the standpoint of PRACTICAL LIFE. Only if the human being is intimately pervaded by this feeling, will he be able to make the right decisions and take over thoughts into the course of his day. Let us assume quite concretely that someone wishes to do a certain thing at a definite time, say, at midday. What he thus intends to do, has already been arranged during the preceding night between himself and his Angelos. This is the case with the human being ever since the middle of the fifteenth century, but it is not necessary that he should be conscious of it, for it has nothing to do with his curiosity. Man should instead be pervaded with the feeling that the things which he has arranged with his angel during the preceding night should become fruitful in the course of his day.

Many things of the present can show us in an overwhelming way what I have explained to you just now. Particularly the years of sorrow, the past four or five years, can send a great truth trickling into humanity, namely, that the consciousness of being connected day by day with the higher Beings, through the experiences of the preceding night, unfortunately did not exist. What a different course would the events of the past four or five years have taken, had the human beings been pervaded by the feeling: “Whatever you do, is in agreement with the arrangements which you have made with your Angel, during the past night!” These are the things which must be discussed to-day. We must speak of the fact that the human being should, learn to consider his life between birth and death as a CONTINUATION of his soul-spiritual life before birth. We must speak of the fact that throughout his life the human being should be able to feel the revelations of the god within him, and we must speak of the fact that the human being should carry into the life of daytime the conscious feeling: “Whatever you do, from morning, to night, has been arranged between you and your angel from the time of your falling asleep to the moment of waking up!”

The human beings should turn to these kinds of feelings, which are far more real in the face of the spiritual world than the more abstract feelings of to-day pertaining to religious beliefs; they should turn to feelings which do not depart from selfish, but from unselfish human impulses. Feelings of this kind can give rise to the connection which we need with the Beings that belong to the hierarchy of the Angeloi. These Beings can then once more interest themselves in the human beings. Man's attitude and feelings towards the spiritual world should move in the direction which I have just now indicated.

One more thing should be grasped clearly. You know that the religions of to-day talk a great deal of “God” and of the “Divine”. To WHAT do they really refer? They merely refer to something which at least exists in the human soul as a pale inkling. It is not so important to consider HOW certain things are named, but rather what exists in the human soul. People speak of “God”, they speak of “Christ”—yet they always mean nothing but their ANGEL! They can still turn to their Angel, for this touches a familiar note in their souls. It is quite an indifferent matter whether the religions of to-day speak of God, of Christ, or of anything else, for the THOUGHT-material which gives rise to their talk merely reaches as far as the Angel-beings that belong to man, as far as the Angeloi. At present, people do not rise beyond this hierarchy, for to-day they feel averse to seek a connection with the spiritual world which is more encompassing than the one which rises out of their egoism. The connection with the ARCHANGELOI, with the hierarchy of the Archangels, must be sought in another way. The present field of human interests must be considerably enlarged, so that the human beings may rise in their feelings from their inclination for the Angeloi as far as the Archangeloi.

The human beings should experience in their souls more or less the following and say to themselves: Terrible events have taken place in the whole civilised world, during the past four or five years. Many people have searched for the cause of these happenings; many have accused one another; they have spoken a great deal of “guilt” and “lack of guilt”. Even if we discard the most extreme form of superficiality, we shall soon lose interest in this empty talk of “causes”, “guilt”, or “lack of guilt”, simply because we can see that what has risen to the surface during the past four or five years resembles the waves Of the sea, which are driven to the surface from below by the sea's own forces. The forces of humanity had been stirred up from year to year. One nation after the other began to participate in the great foolishness which had taken hold of humanity during the past few years and one could say: Something which has the nature of elemental forces has been stirred up and has been driven to the surface; the sea of human life has grown restless. What is that?

A clear view of things is impossible unless we extend this fact, that a great restlessness has taken hold of mankind, to that space of time which we designate as “history”. We must say to ourselves: The armed contest of the past four or five years is only the beginning of events which will be enacted upon an entirely different sphere, events of a kind which has not hitherto existed in the development of humanity. We are not facing an end—for to say this, can only result from a superficial observation of human evolution—but we are facing the BEGINNING of the greatest battles, of the SPIRITUAL battles of the civilised world! Let us concentrate our efforts upon the task of being ready to cope with these, battles. In the near future, the East and the West threaten to face one another AS SOULS, in an ever growing measure!

When we pass through birth, we bring along with us into our physical-sensory existence the forces of the super-sensible world, taken from our super-sensible existence. These forces continue to be active. At the present time, this can only be grasped with greatest difficulty. How do these forces continue to be active?—They are active in everything we develop in the physical world in the form of SPIRITUAL LIFE. It would be impossible to have poets among us, it would be impossible to develop a world-conception or a science, it would be impossible to develop impulses for the education of man, and there would be no possibility whatever for the development of a spiritual life, if we would not bring along with us through birth the impulses that come from our pre-natal life.

On the other hand, what we develop within the economic life as impulses of the will—brotherliness, human love, thinking for others and not only for ourselves, working for others and not only for ourselves—what we do, as it were, “on the quiet”, through the fact that we stand within the economic life, gives us the most important impulses for what we then carry along into the spiritual world in the form of impulses. In the same way in which we bring along with us from the spiritual world forces that constitute, above all, our spiritual life upon the earth, so do we bring back again into the spiritual world those forces that we develop through our economic life in the form of love for humanity and brotherliness. These forces accompany us in the spiritual world; there, they are important impulses for us. If we contemplate that which develops from year to year in the life of a child, we can see in it the inheritance coming from the spiritual world, enabling us to develop a spiritual sphere of activity upon the earth; and if we look upon that which occurs through our economic life, namely, that through our will we develop activities for others, we can see therein the impulses which we carry along with us into the spiritual world when we pass through the portal of death.

What we develop ONLY between birth and death, appears to one who is able to contemplate the spiritual world as a contrast to what we develop in the spiritual world between death and a new birth. Read my descriptions of the “Soul-region” and of the “Spirit-region” in the book Theosophy, for there you will find that these things are described in concepts that arise altogether from a living contemplation of those conditions. Everything that constitutes the sphere of law is the, very opposite of the impulses that arise during the life between death and a new birth.

Our spiritual life is based upon the forces that come from the time before our birth, or conception; we develop an economic life in order to carry into the spiritual world forces that we unfold through it; and what we unfold HERE, what pertains exclusively to the earth, is the political, juridical life, the life of the State. This has no connection with the spiritual world.

After a relatively long period of time, I am able to speak to you again today. It came about because of the importance of the General Meeting convening today, and the opportunity of my current brief presence in Germany. It has certainly already occurred to you that there must be a connection between my long absence and the nature of the time in which we find ourselves. The relationship between the events of the times and the very slight activity—if it is even possible to speak of such—that I can afford, particularly for the Berlin Branch, must be obvious to you.

Before entering into the order of business for today's session, I would like to make a few preliminary remarks. First, I wish to remind you of certain words I spoke in the early spring of 1914 in a lecture cycle in Vienna, which were intended to point to what then ensued. It was then that I spoke words which have since been printed. The words I uttered at the time indicated that civilized humanity lives in a kind of social sickness, in a sort of social carcinoma or cancer; that the' whole way in which cultural, political, and economic matters are handled is such that it will undoubtedly lead to an outbreak of this creeping cancer, and that it will be bound to change from a chronic condition into an acute one. Of course, many clever people at that time took this statement, which I made out of a grief-stricken heart with regard to the immediate future, to be mere fantasy, an empty paraphrase of a pessimistic mood. At that time, the majority of people the world over naturally preferred listening to the sound of voices like the one, for example, of an official personage in the German Reichstag a short time after, who said that the relationships of the Central European governments to those of the other European countries were absolutely satisfactory, and that one could count on general lessening of tension in the near future. You may remember another remark made here in Berlin at a public session of the Reichstag—that the friendly, neighborly relations with the court at Petersburg were becoming more and more favorable, and that good relations with London existed as well, and so on. These were the words of “practical men,” while those who spoke of the spiritual world had to speak of a sickness, of a slowly growing carcinoma. Actually those who Claim to be practical men still speak the same way today, in absolutely the same way, although the results of their practicality have brought about the events of the most recent years. Such speaking continues, while what is brought forth from spiritual research and from social insight is either thrown to the winds or, as is the case in Germany, attacked. Furthermore, the worst is that what comes from spiritual research is being secretly persecuted and defamed, defamed in the worst way possible. Thus, anthroposophical spiritual science and everything connected with it today belongs among the most defamed matters in the world. Nevertheless, it can be assumed that today there already are a great number of souls who, out of the totality of the principles of spiritual science, have gained a feeling that only out of this science can arise what can save us from general disaster. One must say this today, even if foolish or malevolent people accuse one of vanity or ambition for saying such things.

I can say—and I wish to keep these introductory words brief—that the whole attitude, the whole manner of discussions that I had to take part in during the actual wartime has not been understood. With the year 1914, a time came when considerations in the ordinary sense had to cease and what was supposed to occur through words had to turn into actions. Humanity, however, is used to taking words in the sense of the journalistic style, not in the style that should enter into mankind particularly through spiritual science. Thus, many things have been misunderstood during the so called war years. Something that was of eminent importance to me was overlooked. It was probably known to most of you that before the first year of the war was over, I had a small book published, Gedanken waehrend der Zeit des Krieges (Thoughts During the Time of War).^T1 It sold out rather quickly. If one would have considered the matter from the viewpoint from which, unfortunately, things are still considered today, despite the fact that the distress has become so great, it would have been a matter of course to publish a new edition. I opposed the printing of a new edition for the simple reason that the pamphlet had not fulfilled its task. This pamphlet—you can get hold of it again insofar as it is still available—was a question addressed to the German nation. It was not intended to be received in such a way as to lead one to assume the same tone which a great many members of the Central European countries had adopted during the war, and which is common today where surreptitious, poisonous defamations are leveled against anthroposophy. Nothing at all materialized of the expectation that I had concerning this pamphlet, the understanding that I had expected. A new edition would have been meaningful only if my expectation had been realized. So, it did not appear, but disappeared from public life, and in my opinion had to disappear. The proof of the lack of understanding given by this fact had to be taken very, very seriously. This was misunderstood in the same way many other utterances have been thoroughly misunderstood, utterances that were meant to elevate and ignite people's spirit in order to bring about what should have been made to prevail directly in Central Europe, namely, a re-enlivening of the spiritual life that had been manifest around the turn of the eighteenth century. Spiritual science is basically the revitalization of this spiritual life in the form it must take in modern humanity.

Take everything that is written in the different kinds of newspapers today, in popular literature and even scientific popular writings; take what is written in Koenigsberg or in Berlin, Vienna or in Graz, in Munich or in Stuttgart, and compare it with what is written today in Paris, Rome, London, Chicago or New York—you will find a great similarity. You will find the same keynote in it, the same spirit that must be overcome. On the other hand, if we seek another similarity and compare what is written today in Berlin, Vienna, Dresden, Leipzig, Stuttgart, Munich, Hamburg, or Bremen with what such great minds as Herder, Goethe, Fichte and Schiller once proclaimed, then we must say that it is fundamentally different. All the declamations using quotations of sentences by Fichte or even Goethe that have taken effect, all that has been produced in this manner, resembles more what has been written in Chicago, New York, London, Paris and Rome than the spirit of Herder, Fichte, Schiller and Goethe. The tidal wave that has flooded Central European life from the West has also swept away what should have lived an in us. Nothing of the old spirit could be detected in what was prevalent in the last decades. This had to be shown to the world when the catastrophe fell upon Central Europe, and wrenched itself from my soul in the form of my “Appeal to the German Nation and the Civilized World” which I wrote then. What was connected with this could not simply be continued, as it was in the earlier form familiar to you, up till 1914.

At that time I could not appeal on the basis of something which one had to believe one could appeal to after 1918. One could not appeal to what is the proof of the decline of the general civilization—distress. Since 1918, one had to believe that the distress which had come over Central Europe would awaken the souls and make them receptive to the language intended in my “Appeal to the German People and the Civilized World.” Certainly, the fostering of the Anthroposophical Movement could not go on as before. Earlier, one had to render the service which, naturally, always has to be rendered in the Anthroposophical Movement, and which has to be rendered today as well as in all future time: to foster the eternal in the human soul, the eternal which goes beyond birth and death and points beyond the merely sensory world into the supersensory world. Now one had to wait and see whether, from among the sleeping souls of the new civilization, souls would emerge here and there who really would have some understanding of what is meant by spiritual science. One could not yet appeal on the basis of circumstances brought about by the distress. Now, however, after 1918, the time had come when a quite different prerequisite had to be placed before the spiritual eye. Mankind could have realized where it had been led by the prevalence of materialism. For what we have experienced, what we continue to experience and will experience with more impact in the future, is the external karma of materialism in the cultural, political, and economic field. It is the consequence of neglect, because people do not wish to discover in themselves the active strength to foster the spiritual life in their souls. After the publication of the Appeal to the German People, the time came when it was, above all, important to work in a positive manner towards something factual. This arose purely out of the possibilities of life. I had to grasp the first hands reaching out to me, for each moment was precious. The first to reach out to me were from Stuttgart. It was a question of protecting and nurturing what could be fostered based on the initiative of some friends there. If mankind had understood at that time what was at stake, had it not failed even under the lesson taught by distress, it would have been enough to do something like this from one center, for it could have had an exemplary effect. But what happened?

In order that you can see how these matters must be understood, I would like to touch upon something else. Before I traveled in the spring of 1919 from Switzerland to Stuttgart for the first lecture tour, a well known pacifist came to me. Although he was willing to sign my Appeal to the German People, he hesitated and asked for more information about it. He asked me, “What are you counting on in Germany?” I believe he put it like this, “You are counting on the second revolution.” This was in the spring of 1919 and people in many quarters in Germany reckoned with a second revolution after the first one in the autumn of 1918. He believed that what was supposed to come into being in the world through the Threefold Social Organism was only a kind of vehicle, a stepping stone, for the impulses of the second revolution. I said, “No! This is not at all my opinion. First, because I do not believe that those people who might bring about a second revolution in Germany will be able to develop the slightest understanding for the true meaning of the Threefold Social Organism, as long as the old leaders are still active. Secondly, because I do not at all believe in a second revolution. Rather, I believe that this second revolution will consist of a kind of chronic infirmity and will not reach an acute outbreak. What I am simply and solely counting upon is that as many souls as possible will associate themselves with what is born out of spiritual depths, souls who will accept it impartially out of the necessity of the times, quite part from the intentions of the old leaders.” So, I did not reckon with those things that many people thought I was counting on. When I then arrived in Stuttgart, it stood to reason in a certain sense that the broad masses of people were addressed first. The broad masses of the people, though also partly paralyzed by the events of the war, were those who initially wished to hear something. In my innermost soul I knew how matters stood. For I knew that as long as the leaders who remain from the old days have the party leadership and the people firmly in hand—be they leaders of the parties to the right or the left, even those of the extreme left—nothing can be done with the people. But imagine what would have happened if I would have said that I was not in favor of addressing the masses. Nobody had to believe me, but if I had not addressed them, one would have said afterwards, “If only Steiner would have turned to the broad masses, everything would have turned out differently!” When one is dealing with realities, one must also give proof by means of realities. It had first to be proven by realities that out of all the left-wing parties, defamers and phrase-mongers would rise up against what was just beginning by means of the concept of three-foldness to be comprehended by the masses of the people. We were well on the way. One could say that within a few days we had won thousands of people. But it was just this comprehension of three-foldness by the great masses of people that drove the old leaders to their defamations and phrase-mongering. So it came about that from this side, seemingly at first, the ground was pulled from under our feet.

What could be hoped for from the other side? Well, it serves no purpose in regard to these matters to cling to illusions; the one and only thing that can help us in the present is to speak the truth. A leading personality who had come up in the party that called itself, by a strange interpretation of the words, "German Democratic Party," a person who had appeared at one of the meetings held at that time, said to me, “You know, if we were in a Position to let more people capable of explaining matters in this manner speak to the broad masses, then well and good—one could go along with it. But one pair of hands is not enough and we therefore rely temporarily more on firearms, on force. For the next fifteen to twenty years, it will still be necessary to keep the masses down.” This was essentially the predominant attitude of the Bourgeoisie; the other was the activity of the proletariat.

So there really remains nothing else but to take what can be drawn out of the spiritual foundations and to represent it in such a way that more and more people can be found who will receive it into their minds. Back of this, we must have something that was born out of this insight and should have been fostered. Before the war, this building was set up on the border of Switzerland, France and Germany in order to look out from Central Europe into the wide world, in particular towards the West, and received the name it must rightfully have, the name Goetheanum. For, in regard to spiritual matters, we are facing worldwide tasks! Today, we cannot face spiritual matters as we would merely personal matters. To do that would lead us into ruin. This is the reason I had to limit my activity during recent times to southern Germany and Switzerland. Truly, I am longing for times when the horizon of my activity can widen again, but this does not depend on myself alone. It depends, above all, on the understanding that people will show toward this activity. I may perhaps find the opportunity in the next few days to point to a number of things which pretend to be “understanding” and which proceed from certain quarters, which work more in an underground manner by means of counterfeiting of letters, falsifying interviews, by defamations and lies.

For the moment, what I have said was merely mentioned in order to point out the reasons why it was necessary for us to abandon our activity in Berlin temporarily; to indicate the circumstances that made it necessary to appeal also in regard to Berlin to what must be appealed to in this age. Have we not been active anthroposophically for almost two decades over a large territory? Were we not justified in hoping that people would be found that could carry on the work independently? Well, they were found. They were found here in Berlin, too. And with the help of these friends the attempt must be made, first of all, to continue the work in Berlin. For this purpose we have gathered together here. In the General Meeting, we shall have to decide how to continue the work here in Berlin.

• T1. Contained in Aufsaetze ueber die Dreigliederung des Sozialen Organismus und zur Zeitlage; GA #24, Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach.

It will be my task to-day to blend into a sort of picture, though naturally only a sketchy one, our reflections of the last few days regarding “occult physiology,” in which the endeavour has been made to present (though in part likewise only sketchily) much that pertains to the processes of the human organisation. Through this picture it will be possible for us to have a vision of the quickening life which weaves and works throughout the human organisation. Here again our best procedure will be to start from the most common and everyday side, the reciprocal relationship between the human organisation and the outer world, our earth, in the process of taking in nutritive substances.

It is these substances, as we know, after they have been taken in and have passed through various stages of change, that are conveyed through the most diverse actions of the organs to the separate members of the human organisation, to all the individual systems constituting the physical being of man. Indeed it requires no special effort to see that, fundamentally considered, what the human organism succeeds in doing with the nutritive substances is what really makes the human being into the physical man as he stands before us in the physical world. To be sure, there is a certain difficulty in taking such a view. But anyone who is serious about the principles that have here been applied in our reflections regarding the human being, must say to himself that everything else to be considered in connection with the human organisation, apart from this impressing of nutritive substances into the organism, is, fundamentally viewed, something super-sensible, invisible, the actions of hidden force. If you banish from your mind for a moment everything by way of nutritive substances which fills out the human organism, you retain as a physical organisation even less than a mere physical sack, if I may be permitted this trivial expression; indeed, you retain nothing whatever of a physical character. For even what exists in the form of skin and outer covering exists solely by reason of the fact that nutritive substances have been driven to particular areas of action of super-sensible forces. Cancel then from your reckoning the nutritive substances and what is produced out of them, and you have to conceive the human organism as a system of super-sensible forces working behind it in such a way that these same nutritive substances may be conveyed in all directions.

If you hold to this thought you will see that one thing must be presupposed before any nutritive substance whatever, even the tiniest particle, is taken in; for these substances could not be taken in from the outer world in just any chance form and conveyed into just any being, in order that those processes should occur which do occur in the human organism. It must be, then, that this human organism confronts the very first nutritive substances taken in with an inner co-ordination of forces coming from the spiritual worlds; the organism must really be “man,” as such, in this inner co-ordination of forces. In all occultism, this which first confronts the purely physical matter that is to fill out the human being and which must, therefore, always be conceived supersensibly) is called, in the most comprehensive sense of the expression, “the human form.” If, therefore, you descend to the nethermost boundary of the human organisation, you have to conceive the primary super-sensible human form which, as a force-system born out of the super-sensible worlds, is destined, not like a sack or a physical bag but as something superphysical, super-sensible, to take in what alone renders possible the physical-sensible manifestation of the human being. Only by reason of the fact that this super-sensible form incorporates the nutritive matter does the human organism become a physical-sensible organism, something that our eyes can behold and our hands can grasp. That which thus confronts the external nutritive substances is called “form” in accordance with the law that is operative throughout the whole of nature, an identical law termed the “principle of form.” Even though you descend to the crystal, you find that the substances which enter into it, if they are to become what is manifest as the crystal, must be seized as it were by form-principles, which in this case are the principles of crystallisation. Take for example kitchen salt or sodium chloride: here you have, according to our present-day physics, the physical substances chlorine and sodium, a gas and a mineral. You will readily see that these two substances, prior to their entrance into the entity which lays hold upon them in such a way that, in their chemical union, they appear crystallised into a cube, have nothing in them that can indicate to us such a form-principle. Before they enter into this form-principle they possess nothing in common, but they are seized upon and yoked together by this form-principle and there is then produced this physical body, kitchen salt. They presuppose this, we may say. And so everything which enters into the human organism as nutritive substance presupposes the nethermost of super-sensible being, the super-sensible form.

Now, when the nutritive substances enter into that sphere which, by means of this form-principle, is externally bounded as the human being, they are first taken in by the alimentary canal. When they are thus taken in, from the moment they enter the mouth, one might say, they at once undergo the very first change, indeed the alimentary canal itself causes a metamorphosis. This could not be produced if there were not present as an integral part of the human organism, something which would so metamorphose these nutritive substances—entirely neutral in relation to each other when first taken in and possessing no living inter-relationship—that they are evoked into life. We must think of the metamorphosis of the nutritive substances in their passage through the human alimentary canal as similar to that of plants when they take their nutritive substances from the soil, although, of course, the process is quite different in the human being because it takes place at a different stage. We must picture to ourselves a nutritional stream, taken in by the life-process, or, as we say in occultism, by the ether-body. The moment the nutritive substances enter the human organism they are worked over by the ether-body: that is, the ether-body first provides for their metamorphosis, for their being made a component part of the inner vital activities of the organism. We thus have to look upon this nearest super-sensible member of the human being, the ether-body, as the stimulator of the first process of metamorphosis in the nutritive substances. After these substances are sufficiently metamorphosed to have been taken up into the life-process, we must understand clearly that they are still further worked over—in just that sense, and in the same way, which we have described in the preceding lectures. They must be still further adapted to the human organism, be so worked over that they are able little by little to serve those organs which are the manifestation of the higher super-sensible principles, the astral body and the ego. In short, the work of the higher processes clearly is to send their own peculiar kind of inner vital activity down as far as these metamorphosed nutritive substances as they are when they have come through the oesophagus, the stomach, the intestines, etc. At this point the nutritional stream, in so far as it has been metamorphosed by the alimentary canal alone, is confronted by those seven inner organs already known to us which represent, as we say, the inner cosmic system of man. To sum up, the nutritive substances are taken in, at once metamorphosed in the most diverse ways in the alimentary canal, and then confronted by the liver, kidneys, gall-bladder, spleen, heart, lungs, etc.

If we further understand that these organs are designed through their corresponding force-systems to work further over the nutritive substances, we may say with regard to the meaning of this metamorphosis that, if the nutritional stream were worked over only to the extent to which this occurs in the alimentary canal, man would have to lead a plant existence; for he would not have attained to the formation of such organs in the physical world as could become the instruments of his higher capacities. Thus the seven organs further metamorphose the nutritional stream, and what they do is prevented by the sympathetic nervous system from entering human consciousness. We have consequently, in the sympathetic nervous system and the seven organs, that which confronts the nutritional stream. We have now gone far in penetrating from the outer into the inner side of the human organism. For everything that goes on within there, as the mutual concern of the seven organs, is something that could never go on anywhere else in our terrestrial world; and it can take place here only because this inner world is shut off from the outer world, and because its activity is provided for beforehand by the alimentary canal. Thus in our reflections we are already in the inner human organism.

And here we must take note of something peculiar. Now that we are within this organism we find that it must again inwardly organise and differentiate itself. For the performance of its manifold undertakings it must work as a multiplicity of organs; and it is precisely for these inner functions that a very great deal is needed. Whatever more is now to be attained can be attained only in the following manner; and we shall understand this if we first imagine how it would be if there were only this metamorphosis of the nutritional stream by means of the seven organs, the inner cosmic system, and imagine also that this process were concealed from our consciousness by the sympathetic nervous system. That would mean that man would never be able to unfold into a being possessed of consciousness; he would never have even the dimmest form of the consciousness which he now possesses. For everything occurring there is withheld from him. A connection must be established between this system of organs, built into him, as it were, from without, and everything else in the interior of the human organism. This connection is actually established through the fact that everything provided by the nutritive process as a whole causes the entire form of the organism to be interwoven with what we call tissue, in the broadest sense of the term. Tissue, one of the very simplest forms of organisation, is woven through all the separate members of the human entity. And out of this tissue the most diverse organs form themselves. Certain kinds of tissue, for instance, change themselves in such a way that when they have added to their composition other special kinds of cells they are transformed into muscles. Then again, other kinds change themselves by hardening and, through the appropriation of suitable substances, by depositing bone-cells. Thus, in the single organs which form themselves so as together to fill out the form of the human organism as a whole, we must think of something as underlying this organism: in other words, we must think of tissues woven throughout the body, and active everywhere, bringing forth out of themselves the individual organs.

But this tissue, no matter how much it might grow, and no matter how many individual organs it might put forth out of itself, would still constitute basically nothing more than something plant-like; for the essential nature of the plant lies in the fact that the plant-entity grows, that it produces organs out of itself and so on. Since however in the case of man we are to go beyond the plant nature, an entirely new element must present itself by means of which man becomes capable of adding to what exists in plant-life, that which elevates him above it. That is, man must add consciousness, the simplest form at first, that dim consciousness by which he is aware of his own inner life. So long as a living being does not consciously share in its own inner life, is not in position to mirror its own inner life and thus share it consciously, we cannot say that it has risen above the plant nature. Only through this fact that it does not merely have “life” in itself, but mirrors the flow of its inner life and raises it to conscious life, does any being rise above the plant-like state. It is at first, then, an inner experience, an experience of the inner life-processes.

How does conscious inner life come about?

We have already forecast a conception of this. In the earlier lectures we have shown that conscious inner life comes about through the processes of secretion.¹ For this reason we shall have to look for the basis of inner experience, of that dim experience of consciousness which permeates the inner life-processes, in the processes of secretion. We shall have to presume that everywhere, out of tissues, out of all that underlies the human organisation, processes of secretion are taking place. And these secretory processes again do manifest themselves when we observe the human body externally and see how substances from all parts of the tissue and the organs are continually being taken up by what we call the lymph vessels, which permeate the whole organism as another kind of system parallel to that of the blood. From all regions of the human organism those secretions which mediate that dim inner experience enter this system. Thus we might in abstract thought banish from our minds for the moment the whole system of the blood, in which case indeed we should conceive the tissue as though it possessed no blood-like character. This is quite conceivable, and the fluids in the lower organisms do actually have such an appearance. We should thus have to imagine our blood-process as one higher than that which takes place when secretions from every region of the organism enter into the lymph-channels which, we know, accompany the blood-channels which join them later. In these secretions the human being dimly feels, as it were, his animal existence in the physical body, dimly mirrors his organisation. And, just as everything is held back by the sympathetic nervous system which comes to life through the digestive and nutritional process as far as the seven organs, just so through the reflection of the activity of the sympathetic nervous system, through the association and reciprocal action between this system and the lymph-channels, there is formed for the present-day human being a dim consciousness which is outshone by the clear day-consciousness of the ego. This dim consciousness is, as it were, the obverse side of that consciousness which utilises the sympathetic nervous system as its instrument. It is outshone, as a powerful light outshines a feeble light, by all that lives in our souls under the influence of the ego.

Now let us suppose for a moment that we had evolved the human organisation only to this point, to the formation of the bodily tissues and the first organs that must be formed in order to render possible all these processes; for you can see that certain muscles have to be incorporated to enable such processes to take place as, for example, the secretions into the lymph-channel. A man thus organised would be able to maintain a dim consciousness of his inner life in the physical world, mediated to him by means of his organism; but he would not be able to attain to that ego-consciousness which can be present only when man does not merely have an inner experience of himself as a being, but also opens himself to the external world. It is this opening again outward, so to speak, to which we must here call attention.

We have already spoken indeed of this reopening outward. We have shown how the human being opens himself again to the outside world in his breathing and so forth, in order to enter into direct contact with the physical world. We may now go even further, since we have seen how hard it is to apply ordinary concepts to these things, and say that, so long as we confine ourselves to the inner man, we can go only as far as the alimentary canal; for, inasmuch as the extensions of the seven organs reach into the alimentary canal and show themselves there (the liver empties through the gall-bladder into the duodenum) and show their influence in the digestion, we at once disclose, through the impact of this inner cosmic system on the alimentary canal, something which amounts to the reopening of ourselves to the outer world. Thus it is really an opening outward when the human being declares himself ready to receive nutritive substances from without; and hence we need reckon the inner man only as far as the boundary of the alimentary canal. Then we have also another opening outward through the breathing, on the one hand, and on the other hand through the higher organs which serve the functions of the soul.

Thus we see how man, in so far as he has the stage of the dimly conscious inner life as something basic in him, so to speak, reopens himself in order to form a connection with the external world. Only in this way can man become an ego-being. For it is not merely in the process of sensing the resistance in his own inner world, in his processes of secretion, but through the fact that he opens his inner world and senses the resistance of the outer world, that he is able to evolve his ego-consciousness. Thus it is really wholly in the fact that man reopens himself outward that we find the basis for his physical egohood. At the same time, however, he must also possess the capacity to develop the organ of this egohood in the most manifold ways. And we have seen how the organ for the ego here fits itself into the circulatory course of the blood, which in fact passes through all these inner organs, in order to serve throughout the whole human organisation as an instrument for the egohood. Just as the egohood permeates soul and spirit in the whole man, so does the circulatory course of the blood physically permeate his entire organisation. And this organisation thereby evolves these two sides, so to speak: the inner human being in the seven organs, the sympathetic nervous system, the system of tissues, and predominantly in the digestive apparatus, etc.; and the other side that again opens outward, coming into connection with the outer world, a real “circulation” in the highest sense of the word.

We must now give still further attention to the individual phases of this circulation. And what concerns us here, first of all, is to follow once more the nutritional process, the taking in of nutritive substances which become a living stream in the human organism through the fact that they are taken up by the ether-body, or, rather, are grasped by the force of the ether-body. The inner cosmic system, consisting of the seven organs, then meets these substances; and it does this because, as we have seen, the human being would otherwise not rise above a plant-existence. The higher stage of man's being requires that these seven organs should go out to meet the digestive process. So that it really is what comes to life in the astral nature of man that works upon the nutritional stream: this stream comes from without, and that which constitutes the inner nature of man goes forth to meet and work upon it. First of all the ether-body meets the nutritional stream, and metamorphoses its substances all along the course of the digestive system; then the astral system goes forth to meet them, metamorphoses them still further, and makes them so much a part of the inner world that they more and more become inner vital activities. And now, since everything in the human organism constitutes a co-operative unity, the entire nutritional stream must in addition be taken hold of by the forces of the ego, by the blood itself. That is, the instrument of the ego must extend its activity down to where the nutritional stream is taken up. Does the blood do this? Can we verify that which occult perception compels us to affirm?

Yes, we can; for the blood is actually driven down into the organs of nutrition, just as it is into all other organs. In this nutritional organisation, as elsewhere, it goes through the entire process whereby it is capable of being the instrument of man's ego in the physical world. We know that the blood, as the instrument of the ego, passes through the transition from red blood to blue, so that here, too, it meets with resistance. Thus the ego, by means of its instrument, reaches down even to the nutritive processes, since this transformed blood, in order to be the expression of the ego, works upon almost the first beginnings of the nutritive process. This occurs through the fact that the system of veins discharges into the liver, and that out of this modified blood the gall is prepared, which then comes into direct contact with the nutritional system.

We thus have a wonderful union of the two extremes of the human organisation. The nutritional stream, on the one hand, is taken into the digestive tract and this represents the external matter which enters our physical organisation. The ego, on the other hand, together with its instrument the blood, constitutes the noblest endowment which man possesses in the terrestrial world. It establishes a direct connection with the nutritional stream in that it comes to the very end of the blood-process, and there, at the end of the blood-process, in turn brings about the preparation of something which, we may say, directly confronts the nutritional stream. In other words, the gall is prepared by the instrument of the ego, the blood, through the roundabout way of the liver; and in the gall the ego opposes the nutritional stream. For at this point the activity of the blood has come to an end and, before acting upon the nutritional stream, it is able to prepare the gall.

Here we see the one working downward, as it were, into the other. And whoever has the will to do so can see in this very fact something that leads in a wonderful way into many, many mysteries of the human organisation. He can follow these processes still further, including abnormal processes, which take their course, for example, in a reverse discharge, a congesting and reverse discharging of the gall into the blood. He might thus quite easily form an opinion about “jaundice,” for example, its cause and effect; but it would take us too far afield if we were also to discuss such things as this to-day.

Thus we see how the seven organs reach as an actual fact down into the action of the ether-body and have taken into themselves, from above, the influence of the ego. In the gall we have the ego setting itself in direct opposition to the nutritional stream. If, now, the gall is to meet this nutritional stream, which has already become a living stream in the alimentary canal, it must itself likewise meet it as a living substance; otherwise a truly continuous process could not come about. The gall must be enabled, as a living substance, to meet the nutritional stream. This occurs through the fact that the very organ in which this gall is formed is one of the seven organs of the inner cosmic system, which vitalise the inner life of man in order that it may as inner life meet the outer life. We pass from the gall-bladder back into the liver itself, and the liver in turn we find connected with the spleen.

When we more closely observe the liver, the gallbladder, the spleen (this follows quite naturally out of our previous reflections, for the spleen has been fairly accurately considered in this connection and used as an example) we must affirm that it is these organs that directly confront the nutritional stream and so metamorphose it that it is capable of advancing to the higher stages of the human organisation, and also of caring for those organs which open themselves to the external world. Those which open outward are the heart (through the lungs) and, of course, the alimentary canal itself; but, most of all, the organs in the head which serve as the organs of the senses.

We must now understand clearly that all inner perception, all inner experience, must have something to do with processes of excretion. It is for this reason that we have given special consideration also to these excretory processes. Liver, gall-bladder, and spleen have nothing to do directly with processes of excretion; the fact that they secrete their own nutritive substances is a different matter; but they do not excrete anything with respect to the organisation as a whole. They signify the ascending life, which turns away from a mere being alive and directs itself to the organisation of consciousness. Since, however, the heart is added as a fourth member to this organisation, and since the heart opens itself to the outer world, man attains through this opening outward his ego-consciousness. Yet he would not be in a position to experience this ego otherwise than merely as something which faces the outer world. He would not be able to bring this outward-looking ego into relationship with what he experiences by means of his inner organs as a dim corporeal life within him. He must add to the secretional processes of the inner organisation still another process which makes possible for him an experiencing of his inner being by that ego which has its instrument in the blood. At first man realises his inner life only in a dim consciousness and we have seen how this manifests itself in the organisation through the fact that the processes of excretion are taken up by the lymph-ducts from the liver, the gall-bladder, and the spleen. In the same way something must be excreted from the blood, if man is to rise to a really conscious ego. And it is in this excretion that he becomes aware that, as an inner entity, he confronts the outer world. If man did not have these inner excretional processes he would, in his realisation of inner life, so face the outer world that he would inwardly lose himself; or he would at most realise dim inner processes but would not know what is outside him, he would not know that what is inhaling the air and taking in nutritive substances is the same as the being which is working in him. It is possible for him to know this through the fact that he excretes the modified blood through the lungs, in the form of carbonic acid gas; and that, through the kidneys, he excretes the metamorphosed substances which must be removed from the blood in order that he may have an inner perception of his own entity.

Thus we find our assertion justified, that the organs which represent an ascending process, the liver, the gallbladder, the spleen, as well as those representing in a certain sense a descending process, the lungs and the kidneys (although the lungs, in that they open themselves to the outer world, are at the same time the means of an ascending process; the individual organs are constantly in living reciprocal relationship, and we must not establish any hard and fast classification) we see how all these seven members of the inner human cosmic system are bound up with man's realisation of inner life, and with his opening of himself to the outer world. These seven members completely metamorphose, on the one hand, the vital activities peculiar to the nutritive substances into inner vital activities; and with these metamorphosed substances they provide for the human organism. They make it possible for man to reopen himself to the outer world. But, in addition to this, they bring it about that what he evolves as an excessively strong inner vital activity, which would not harmonise with the vital activity that penetrates into him from without, is brought into balance with this outer vital activity by being thrown off through the excretional processes of the lungs and the kidneys. So that we have before us the complete and regular control of the inner vital activities in this inner cosmic system of man. And in fact this entire relationship manifests itself in such a way that the best picture occultism can give us is to conceive the heart standing as the sun, at the centre, and caring for the three bodies of the inner cosmic system which signify the upward rising and upward bearing process. In the same way in which the sun is related to Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars in the planetary system, so is the inner sun, the heart, related to Saturn, spleen; Jupiter, liver; and gall-bladder, Mars, in the human organism. I should have to speak, not for weeks but for months, if I were to explain all the reasons why the relationship of the sun to the outer planets of our planetary system may really be declared to be parallel, for an exact and intimate occult observation, to the relationship which the heart sustains in the human organism to the inner cosmic system, i.e., to the liver, the gall-bladder, and the spleen. For it is an absolute fact that the relationship existing in the outer cosmos has been so adopted into the organism that what goes on in the great world or macrocosm, in our solar system, is mirrored in the reciprocal action among these organs. And those processes which go on between the sun and the inner planets, working inwards from the sun to our earth, are again reflected in the relationship of the heart-sun to the lungs as Mercury, and to the kidneys as Venus. Thus we have in this inner human cosmic system something which mirrors the external cosmic system.

We have already indicated, how, when we delve clairvoyantly into our own inner organism we can perceive this interior of ours; and that we then cease to perceive our inner organs in the way they manifest themselves merely to the external observation of the physical eye. We then go beyond the fantastic picture of our organs conceived by external anatomy, for we rise to the observation of the real form of these organs when we bear in mind that they are systems of forces. External anatomy cannot possibly establish what these organs really are, for it sees only the nutritive matter stuffed into them. And no one can doubt, when he goes more deeply into the matter, that external anatomy sees only the stuffed-in nutritive substances. That which lies at the basis of these organs as force-systems can be seen only by clairvoyant observation. And what we see justifies our nomenclature, because we discover the outer cosmic system duplicated in our inner cosmic system.

We stated yesterday that the organism may develop too strong an inner vital activity. Each separate organ may develop too strong an inner vital activity. This is then manifested in the irregularity with which the organism acts. I indicated yesterday that when, by reason of this excessive inner vital activity, there appears in the inner organs a self-willed life of their own, it is important that something should be set in opposition which will subdue these inner vital activities. That is, when the inner organs transfer too vigorously the external vital activities of the nutritional substances, transform them too much, when they provide an inner product too strongly metamorphosed, we must then set in opposition to them from without something which will dam up, as it were, will subdue the inner vital activities.

How can this be brought about? By introducing into the organism something from the external environment which possesses a vital activity contrary to those of the organs and is capable of combating them. That is, we must endeavour to discover those external vital activities which correspond to the peculiar vital activities of these organs. To contemporary man, who sometimes comes upon such things in the mangled writings of the Middle Ages yet cannot look upon them as anything but a jumble of superstition, it sounds quite amazing when he hears that for thousands of years occult science has not only examined, profoundly and thoroughly, the correspondence between the vital activities of these organs of the inner organic system, and certain external substances possessing the opposite vital activities; but that also, through countless observations made with the clairvoyant eye, there has resulted the knowledge, for example, that when the inner “Jupiter” oversteps its limit it can be checked if confronted with that external vital activity manifest in the metallic substance tin. The inner vital activity of the gall-bladder, we combat by what is manifest in the metallic substance iron. And we ought not really to be surprised to learn that the gallbladder is the very organ to be combated by iron. For iron is that metal which we require particularly in our blood, and which therefore belongs to the instrument of the ego; and we have seen that in the gall-bladder we have the very organ which brings about the connection of the ego with the densest matter deposited in the human being through the digestive process. In the same way the spleen (Saturn) has its correlative in lead; the heart (Sun) in gold; Mercury has its own name: that is, the metal mercury (or quicksilver) corresponds with the lungs; and the metal copper corresponds with the kidneys.

Now, when we introduce into the organism such vital activities as exist in these metals, in order to combat the excessive vital activities of the inner organism, we must realise that everything in the organism is more or less interrelated with everything else; and indeed that the individual organ-systems were formed in a mutual parallelism one with the other. For it is not as if there first existed in a finished state what we have here merely sketched in our drawing, i.e., what we may call the headless man; but rather the brain and the spinal cord form themselves simultaneously with the other organs, so that the blood-process extending downward extends also upward. And, just as we have pointed out that there are these two circulatory courses of the blood, so we have similarly an upward action of the lymph-system toward the head, and have, therefore, a dim consciousness apportioned also to the upper parts of the organism. This is true because of the fact that what is incorporated above in the upper blood-stream corresponds in a certain way with what we have described as the incorporated lower blood-stream.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

From this we now see that certain of these metals to be found on the earth have their respective kinship with the organs or members which we find embedded in the upper blood-organisation. That which, in the lungs for example, opens itself upward into the larynx, thus becoming an organ of the higher human organisation, and which otherwise presses down into the gall-bladder as dim life, acts correspondingly as a Mars- or iron-system in the larynx which contains the upper part of the lungs. These things are, of course, hard to differentiate; but I should like, nevertheless, to point out some of them. In the same way the upper part of our head containing the brain-formation corresponds, as regards its position in the upper course of the blood, to the position of Jupiter-liver (tin) in the lower course of the blood; so that we have here a correspondence between the fore part of the head, in the upper course of the blood, and tin, or Jupiter; and, in the same way, between the back of the head and lead, or Saturn. And so it is with the organs which may be looked upon as embedded in the upper cosmic system.

We have been able in this way to extend our reflections to that which is incorporated in the circulatory course of man's blood, as having a connection with this, but also as determining it as the organisation of the seven members of the inner cosmic system. And we have been able to take into consideration the connection with the external world as regards both the normal and the abnormal condition of life. In this correspondence between the metals and the inner organs we have a most interesting fact. And if all that which is contained in manifold form in the statements to be found in our books dealing with therapy is ever assembled and compared, not in chaotic manner but systematically, this picture that we have formed will one day, quite of itself, burst into view as a result of the external facts. We can always affirm, when we work creatively in the right way with the help of occult sources, that we can quietly bide our time, that the facts themselves will one day confirm all this for mankind!

When we introduce into the organism the substances of these principal metals—and they are all metals that pass over at a certain temperature into a sort of vapour in which there is active something resembling little smoke-like globules—the particular quality of the respective metals acts upon what is in these seven organs. And just as the metallic element acts upon these systems of organs, so anything in the nature of a salt acts upon the blood-system. Only, we must introduce the salty substance into the blood in such a way that it enters from outside, through the air, through air with a saline content, or through a salt bath; or again we can introduce from another direction, through the digestive process, what constitutes salt or builds up salt, so that we are in a position to bring about from two directions this process which results in the formation and depositing of salt.

When you recall what I explained yesterday as the physical effects of the inner processes of soul and spirit, you will understand that everything which meets the processes brought about by these metals as metals, processes which embed themselves in these systems, forming tiny globules, as it were, is what I designated yesterday as the physical effect of the feeling-processes.

Thus the dim feeling-processes and the higher feeling-processes are bound up with that which constitutes inner liquefying processes, on the one hand, when it develops the right inner vital activity, but which, on the other side, can be checked if something is introduced from outside, if the appropriate substances which have their external counter-activities embed themselves in these systems from outside.

When, by reason of excessive digestive activity occurring where the nutritional stream is seized by the ether-body, this body develops a too insistent inner vital activity of its own so that it contradicts that from without—when this process of a self-willed inner vital activity gets the upper hand, we can work in opposition to it through the process of introducing salt in so far as salt works as salt. In the case of an intensified inner vital activity of those very processes which go on where the external nutritional substances are seized upon by the ether-body, signifying too intense a taking up, a sucking up of salt out of everything, the process is combated through the external vital activity of salt.

Then we also have processes which occur outside us as processes of combustion or oxydation, when something or other combines with the oxygen in the air. When substances which readily combine with the oxygen in the air are taken into the organism, they radiate their inner activity most extensively throughout the inner organism. Whereas salts act only when introduced into the organism through the digestion or from without into the blood, and hence can get only a limited access to the inner organism; and whereas we can, with metals, work in as far as the inner cosmic system we have, in the external vital activities of the substances that readily unite with the oxygen of the air, something which radiates through the whole organism, even into the blood: something which is capable of radiating through all the systems of organs. We shall thus find it comprehensible that through such processes as develop too strong an inner vital activity in warmth, which is the outward manifestation of the development of the will, we find ourselves inwardly aroused, as it were, in our entire organism. Such is not the case if we direct our attention to those other processes which constitute the organic processes of thought. We feel there that the actions which, in yesterday's lecture, we connected with salt can take place only in certain organs. From this we see how complicated an apparatus the human organism is, and, at the same time, how complicated is its relation to the external world. Moreover, we see that we have now for the first time set the human organisation with its inner vital activities over against a mineral, inorganic Nature which has not yet been given life, into relation with what salts are, what the particular quality of a vaporising metal is, and what readily combustible substances are.

A polarity of the same sort exists between the human organism and what constitutes the vitally active forces in the external plant world. When we take up a plant into us in such a way that it simply gives off some particular substance, which is taken up by us as lifeless matter and acts as such in us, the real plant-nature may then be left out of account in the human being. On the other hand, the plant element may also be taken up by the human organism in such a way that it goes on working in its own peculiar character as plant, that is, the external vital activity of the plant continues to work as the same sort of external vital activity which works in the plant. In this case that process cannot take effect which otherwise always goes on at the border line between the physical nutritional substances and the ether-body. For the ether-body is akin to the plant; and the plant is “plant” precisely by reason of the fact that it has an ether-body. The plant-nature is simply caught up at the point where the nutritional stream is seized upon by the ether-body, so that whatever of the plant-nature works into the human organism cannot be taken into account so long as it is in the alimentary canal, but only in those organs involved in the processes to which the ether-body already has its relationship and into which the astral nature of man also works. For this reason the external plant-activity begins its work only when it reaches the inner cosmic system and the sympathetic nervous system and, in so far as it is involved with these, also the lymph-system. The plant-nature no longer extends to the point where the human being opens himself, through the blood, to the outer world. The plant-element is fitted to the central, more inward part of the human being; so that whatever may be sought in the plant-nature in the way of vital activities, capable of combating the excessively strong inner vital activities of the functions of our organism, cannot have any effect at all upon whatever belongs to the material substance in the seven organs of our inner cosmic system and in the corresponding organs of the head, and which nourishes itself in these organs; it can act only upon whatever pertains to the activities, the functions of these organs. When these functions are disturbed, when they act abnormally, without our being able to say that they are over-nourished or under-nourished, then the vital activity of the plant-nature comes into question. Hence, when an excessive activity of the organs is manifest, we can combat this with something taken out of plant-nature but capable of working in only as far as the seven organs, as far as the boundary of the lymph-system and the blood-system.

It is impossible to go further into the combating of irregularities in the human organism, not so much because we should in any case have insufficient time as because it is better for the Anthroposophist to hold aloof from everything which is at present still involved in partisan strife. What we have thus far set forth is not involved in conflicts where there is far too much fanaticism. For at most people can take it for pure nonsense, in which case it will share the same fate which for many is to be that of Anthroposophy in general: namely, that it has no worth whatever. Anthroposophy would have to keep silent if it wished not to speak about those things which appear nonsensical to people who are not willing at the present time to accept it. But, if it were to proceed further and investigate the effect of the animal element upon the human organism, we should very quickly become involved in strife.

One thing, however, you will have perceived: that this human organism is a complicated system of individual organs and instruments which stand at various stages of evolution, these stages differing very greatly among themselves, and which are connected in the greatest possible variety of ways with the organism as a whole. What it is that works into this physical organisation of man, which we see with our eyes and grasp with our hands, in order that the nutritive substances may organise themselves suitably, may be ordered according to the various organs, this cannot be seen with the external eye but it is disclosed to the spiritual eye of the seer. Everything that has displayed itself before us in the human organism we must look upon as one single system, wherein appears both what is young and what is old. We have brought out this fact in individual examples, for instance, in the fact that the brain shows itself as an older organ and the spinal cord as a younger one; and in the fact that the brain was once a spinal cord and has transformed itself out of that. Then, too, we have seen that our complicated digestive system forms, together with the blood-system, one single system which is old and has been metamorphosed; whereas in the lymph-system which cannot take up substances from without but can as yet open only inwards to the material supplied by the inner tissue, we have a younger system in comparison with the combined digestive and blood-system, just as we have in the spinal cord an organ that is younger than the brain. And this, again, is a very important viewpoint. When we look at our lymph-system and all that goes with it we have before us something which, if it were not embedded there as a lymph-system, and did not remain shut off but opened itself to the more advanced stage of its evolutionary process, would progress to a digestive system and blood-system as the spinal cord evolved to the brain. Thus the digestive-blood-system presents to us a lymph-system that has been metamorphosed out of the substances and tissues of the body, substances and tissues which, as we know, have to be changed in the body before they can take on the form which they have inside the man; whereas the lymph-system, as we have it, is employed to take up the substances that are produced inside. In the lymph-system and what pertains to it, we have a simpler digestive system and a simpler system for mediating consciousness. On the other hand, a system more complicated than the lymph-system, opening not only to the inner but also to the outer world, is what we have in the metamorphosed lymph-system, the digestive and glandular systems.

Everything that appears later, during the course of evolution of any living creature, is laid down beforehand in the germinal plan. What I have here explained to you as the complicated human organisation exists potentially in the germinal plan of the human being as it builds itself up, when once it is produced through the process of impregnation. If we retrace the course, so to speak, from this fully-formed man to the germinal plan, we are able to discover that inside this same life-seed or germ complicated systems of organs in miniature, scarcely visible at first, even to microscopic examination, are present, as the very first plan; present in such a way indeed, that the organs even at that time already reveal just how they are related to one another.

Once we observe that the outermost enclosure of the human being is the boundary of the skin which leads us on to the sense-organs embedded therein, and observe also how these sense-organs are organised so as to extend inward to the nervous system, we shall realise that everything present in the outermost boundary of man must have been transformed out of something else, for this is already very complicated in itself. (The brain, for instance, belongs to this system; to imagine a brain which is not first prepared through other organs, and transformed out of these, is impossible.) We must think therefore of the outer sheath of the human being as it appears to-day, as the product of a transformation from those organs which are its groundwork, as having passed through a transformation similar to that of the brain out of the spinal cord, and to the digestive-blood-system with all its accessories, out of the lymph-system.

Now, it is precisely in everything which we have observed as the brain, that we have a transformed spinal cord system. But here again this spinal cord system shows itself to us at the present time in such a way that we can see that it is an organ in a descending evolution, so to speak. In those organs, accordingly, which represent earlier stages, we have organ-systems formed later and at the same time in a descending evolution. This we must apply also to the lymph-system. In that which confronts us in the human being as the lower man, thought of spatially, we have, in the antithesis, lymph-system and digestive-blood-system, something which transforms the lymph-system into the digestive-blood-system. We must understand clearly, to be sure, that the blood-system itself is such a complicated inward-coursing system that it reveals, even in its very configuration, the fact that it is itself the product of a transformation of a still earlier state, the product of a twofold metamorphosis. On the other hand, that which reveals to us that it has gone through its transformation only once, an opening outward, is the digestive canal. We may therefore say that, if we were to move the digestive canal more inward, we should keep this whole organic system shut up inside, as far as the activity at present characteristic of the lymph-system through which only that is taken up from the inner product which is secreted by the tissues.

Thus in the outer boundary of man, the skin-system, we have the metamorphosis of another system; and in the digestive system likewise we can see the transformation of another organ-system out of which it has developed, and which is itself to-day in a descending process of evolution. According to the whole nature of the organ-systems as they present themselves to us we have to seek, therefore, for their first or primal plan in such a way that we feel everything we see as the germinal design containing the skin- and the sense-organs and nervous system—to be the redisposition of another system which is to-day inside the organism and in a descending evolution, just as the digestive system in its design is a redisposition of another inner system which is now in a descending evolution. Thus we have, at the present time, both an ascending and a descending evolution already indicated in the “life-seed” of man.

And so we may trace the whole human organism back to a scheme or plan where everything in the separate organs is prepared in the germ. And, in fact, we do see in the human germ which comes into existence through the process of impregnation that in the four superimposed germ-layers (the outer germ-layer or exoderm, the inner germ-layer or entoderm, and the outer and inner middle layers or mesoderma) the four principal systems of the human organism are actually already present, pre-modelled in this germinal plan. Furthermore, in accordance with our evolution we shall have to consider the outer germ-layer, which, in contemporary anatomy or physiology is called the skin-sense layer, as the product of a metamorphosis which reveals to us its original plan in the outer middle layer. In the outer mesoderm, that is, we have as an embryonic plan in a descending evolution, what appears at a higher stage in the skin-sense-layer; and in the inner middle layer we have in a younger formation and in a downward evolution, what appears in the inner layer or entoderm as the intestinal glandular-layer. When we observe the human germ in its evolution we have in the two middle germ-layers, in what external physiology calls the mesoderma, the original plan of the human being still recognisable; whereas the two external germ-layers, exoderm and entoderm, are layers which have undergone a metamorphosis. The two middle layers reveal to us the original state, whereas the two others reveal higher evolutionary stages of this state. And it is only an illusion when external microscopic research does not accurately state the facts of the case.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

Now we know that this germinal plan, this life-seed, is formed through the flowing together of two tendencies, the feminine and the masculine, and that the complete germ can only come into being through the living interaction of the two. In both these germinal tendencies, accordingly, there must be included all the processes which, through interaction, form the one single embryonic plan for the complete human organisation.

What does occultism reveal to us regarding the interaction of the male and the female germs?

It shows us that the female organism, under the conditions of our age, is capable of producing only such a human germ as would be unable, if it were to follow a completely isolated evolution, to develop what we call in its broadest sense the “form-principle.” That which leads, therefore, to the final stage of the bony system, thus giving complete firmness to the human being, and which also brings about the final unfolding into a skin-and-sense-system as we have it to-day, could not be supplied through the female contribution. The contribution of the woman is such as to justify one in saying: “What it would bring forth would be too good for this earthly world as it is to-day; for there are not present in our external world all the processes which could serve such an organism, if it were to evolve itself in accordance with the tendency of the woman's contribution to the whole human organism.” It should not be necessary for the human organism derived from the woman to proceed so far as to be of this earth, as we may say, which is the case in the dense deposit of the bony system; it should not be forced to unfold itself in a way that enables it to look out into the present physical world through the senses. On the contrary, it should be enabled to have its inner support in softer material, as it were, than our solid bony system. It ought, furthermore, to be free not to open its eyes so wide toward the outside world, or to open its other senses outward, to the same degree as is the case with the human being of to-day, but to remain with its perceptions more enclosed in its inner life. This represents the female portion of the common human organism: a germinal plan which tends to shoot forward beyond the limit of what is possible in our present earth existence. And this simply because, in the physical earth-conditions of to-day, we have not the requirements essential to so refined an organism, one so little adapted to be of this earth, in the way the bony system is, or to unfold itself outward. Such an organism, under natural conditions, is from the very beginning predestined to death. That is to say: by reason of that which the woman's organism is of itself unable to imprint upon the human embryo, this embryo is from the beginning doomed to death.

The other portion which is added to the germinal plan is the male element, and this is in exactly the reversed situation. If the male germ alone were to bring forth the human being, the progress of that organisation which lives its life in an opening of itself outward, as is the case in the skin-sense-system and in the powerful development of what leads to the solidification of the bony system, would overshoot the mark in the opposite direction. The male organisation would be just as little able as the female to create of itself an embryo capable of living. Of itself alone it would just as certainly create a dead embryo as would the female organisation because that which it could create, which it could contribute to the germ-plan, would be so organised, if it were to unfold its forces of itself, that it would have to vanish in view of the conditions actually existing on the earth at the present time; for it would unfold forces which are simply too powerful for such conditions, so that it could not exist as organic life within the confines of this world. That is to say, the male element of the germ does not really come into existence at all; it can act only through co-operation with the female germ. That which stimulates the female germ-plan too intensely, carrying it too far beyond what is possible on the earth, leads the male germ-plan too far downward, below what is possible on the earth. Whatever is destined to death in this female germ, through the excess of those forces which, if they could find any approach at all to the sense-world, would ultimately lead to a breaking up, a failure to grow together with the external world, this balances itself with the male germ through the process of impregnation. The forces that are compressed into the male germ-plan, if these were ever to accomplish their growth alone, would lead the whole thing immeasurably below the earthly, would bring the human organisation to a far greater terrestrialising of the bony system, and to an entirely different unfolding of the senses and taking up of the outer world, than is the case to-day. These two organic tendencies must in their very first beginning blend and come together; for, under earthly conditions, either one of them alone is from the first predestined to death, and only the living interaction of what otherwise gushes over the limits in both directions gives us that human embryo which alone is suited to earthly life.

Thus we see that we have been able, although only in a sketchy way, to comprehend things as far as this point, where the human being is capable of bringing forth his kind. We could go much further by throwing light also upon all the details of the embryonic process. And the more profoundly we should illuminate these, the more we should see that the most minute as well as the most glaring facts, including what has been said here regarding the super-sensible force-systems in the germinal plans, verify themselves in the outward expression of these force-systems, in what the human being develops in order that his race may live over all the earth so long as it is going through its present processes.

We have seen at the same time, however, that the earth gives us its densest terrestrialising process, so to speak, in what we call the tendency to the bony system, and its most vitally active process in what we call the human blood-system. And it need be added only very briefly that everything which goes on on the earth in the external physical human organism, in so far as this is visible, forces its way up as it were, into those processes which take place in the blood. And these processes are warmth processes. We have, therefore, in these processes the direct expression of the activity of the blood as the instrument of the ego, of the highest level, that is, of the human organism. Below this are the other processes; uppermost is the warming process, and in this there takes hold, directly, the activity of our soul and our ego. It is for this reason that we feel, with regard to so many activities of the soul, what we may call “the transmutation of our soul-activities into a kindling of inner warmth,” and this may extend its effects even to a becoming physically warm in the process of the blood. Thus we see how, from out the soul and spirit by way of the warmth-process, there takes hold down into the organic, into the physiological, what is directed from above. We might show, in connection with many other facts of the external world, how the psychic-spiritual comes into contact in the warmth-process with the physiological, with what occurs behind the physiological. In the warming process, accordingly, we have a transformation of the organic systems in their activities. We find the most manifold transformations in the complicated apparatus of soul and spirit in man; but this physical human organism reaches up as far as the warmth process.

Does this transformation cease at this point? Does that which confronts us as the inheritance of the bony system, proceeding from below upward, extend only thus far? Everywhere, below the warmth process, we have transformation; from below upward it reaches as far as the warmth process. What then follows can here only be indicated and then left to the further reflection and feeling of the listeners.

What the organism produces in the way of inner warmth processes in our blood, warmth processes which it conducts to us through all its different processes, and which it finally brings to expression in a flowering of all other processes, penetrates up into the soul and spirit, transforms itself into soul and spirit. And what is it that is most beautiful about the psychic-spiritual? The most beautiful, the loftiest thing about it, is the fact that, through the forces of the human soul, what is organic can be transformed into what is soul nature! If everything that man can have through the activity of his earthly organism is rightly transformed by him after it has become warmth, it then transmutes itself in his soul into what we may call an inner living experience of compassion, a sympathy for all other beings. If we penetrate through all the processes of the human organism, to the highest level of all, to the processes of warmth, we pass as it were through the door of the human physiological processes, above the uppermost heights which are formed by these processes into that world where the warmth of the blood is given its worth in accordance with what the soul has made out of it: in accordance with the living sympathy of the soul for everything that has being, and its compassion for everything around it. In this way we broaden our life, if our inner life carry us on to a kindling of inner heat, beyond all that is earthly being; we make ourselves one with all earthly being. And we must note the marvellous fact that the whole of Cosmic Being has taken the round about path of first building up our whole organisation, in order finally to give us that warmth which we are called upon to transmute through our ego into living compassion for all beings.

In the Earth's mission, warmth is in the process of being transmuted into compassion.

This is the meaning of the earth process; and it is being fulfilled, since man as a physical organism is embedded in this earth-process, through the fact that all physical processes finally come together in man's organisation as their crown; that everything therein, like a microcosm, in turn, of all earthly processes, opens again into new blossoming. And, as this is transmuted in the human soul, the earth-organism, through man's sympathetic interest and living compassion for every kind of being, attains to that for which warmth had its intended use in the organism allotted to him as Earth-Man. What we take up in our souls through living sympathy, which helps us to broaden our inner soul-life more and more, we shall take with us when we shall have gone through many organisations such as enable us to use to the full, for the spirit, everything that the earth could give us as kindling heat, burning warmth, flame of fire! And when, through innumerable incarnations, we shall have taken up into ourselves all that there is of this fervour of warmth, then will the earth have reached its goal, its purpose. Then will it sink beneath us, a great corpse, into indeterminate cosmic space; and there will arise out of this earth-corpse the united throng of all those earthly human souls who, through their different earthly incarnations, have realised the worth of the outpouring warmth of earth-organisms by transmuting it into living compassion and sympathy, and into whatever can be built upon these. Just as the individual soul, when the human being passes through the portal of death, rises to a spiritual world and gives over the corpse to the forces of the earth, so to the forces of the cosmos will one day be surrendered the earth's corpse, when it shall have given to us that burning warmth we needed for the compassion which was the foundation-stone of all our higher activities of soul. This corpse which will be given over to the cosmic system, just as the individual human corpse is given over to the earth-system, will be able to see rising above it the sum of all the individual human souls, now one important stage nearer perfection as a result of earth existence, and these will then press onward to new stages of existence, to new cosmic systems. Just as in the earth-system the individual human being, after he has passed through the portal of death, advances to new incarnations, so does the throng of all the individual souls, after the earth-corpse has fallen away, advance to new planetary stages of existence.

And so we see that nothing in the cosmic system is lost, but that what is given to us in our organism up to the final blossoming of heat is that “material” which, when we have used it up as burning warmth, helps us to find the way to a new and higher stage leading to eternity. Nothing in the world is lost, but what the earth produces, through human souls, is carried over by them into eternity!

Thus does spiritual science also permit us to connect the physiological processes in the human organism with our eternal destiny. And thus will this science, if we view it as something which must so implant itself within us that it is not mere theory or abstract knowledge, fill us with all those forces which show us that we as human beings do not, after all, stand only upon the earth, but in the whole cosmic system! If we learn to think thus about the lofty and eternal destiny of humanity, how man takes the forces of the earth in order that he may work on into eternity, we then receive through spiritual science what must be wrung out of it, not only what we may attain for the sake of knowledge but for our whole man. And if those human beings who divine or already possess this high ideal of knowledge come together in a true brotherhood, harmoniously united in striving toward the highest of all, who understand each other, that is, in their innermost being, this means that there are present on our earth, in its process of becoming, human beings who have the right to be conscious that they bear within themselves seeds which are developing, which can be fruitful for the further evolution of earth and humanity. In all modesty may anthroposophists come together and unite their feelings with what is highest, most universal, in man. And, when men gather in such a spirit, they understand one another in their deepest being; for they acknowledge one another, not merely as individual earth-men and in their earthly destiny, but rather in their eternal destiny.

It was in this spirit that we came together here; and it is in this spirit that we shall go away again, to live in the outside world and perhaps to pass on to others much of what it has been possible to give here as an incentive, even if only in outline, and thus to bring it to new flower. We shall at the same time strive so to work when we are scattered that, although physically separated, we shall be in harmony with one another in living thought, in feeling, and in all our willing. Then shall we be rightly united in that Spirit which ought to be brought to mankind through Anthroposophy. In this Spirit we are about to separate after having been together for a while; in this Spirit we shall remain united in soul; and in this Spirit we shall meet again when it is meant to be.

• 1. See footnote on p. 79.

Allow me to expand on some of the things I mentioned yesterday. What I will say today can, of course, provide no more than a few pointers and suggestions; while, of course, a wealth of evidence could be provided to support everything that needs to be said from the medical point of view, from the perspective that I hinted at yesterday, which of course cannot be discussed today – and in such a short time anyway.

I already indicated yesterday that through the inner training of the soul, one can actually come to distinguish in the human being the actual physical body, then what I called yesterday – as I said, one must have terminology, and one does not need to bother about it — what I called yesterday the etheric body, which is the first supersensible link in human nature; that one then has to distinguish the astral body, which I also discussed yesterday in terms of its effect on kidney function, and finally the ego organization in the human being. When we speak of a person in a healthy or diseased state, it is always necessary to bear in mind that these four aspects of the human being have distinctly different functions that interact and exert mutual effects on one another in both healthy and diseased states. And only when one is able to visualize the unity of the human being from this confluence of four, I might say separate, levels of function, is one also able to gain a true conception of the healthy or the sick human being. I already mentioned yesterday: disease processes are, after all, natural processes. And with unbiased observation, one cannot really find a boundary between the so-called normal, healthy processes of the human organism and the diseased processes if one does not know this structure of human nature and thus knows: if any of these members interferes with the entire human unit more than it should interfere, then this is precisely how the abnormal, diseased functioning of the human being arises.

But we still cannot arrive at an idea of how the various forces, the sensory and the supersensible, interact in this miracle of the human organism, if we do not know one thing that was actually in my mind when I conceived it more than thirty-five years ago, but which I have only dared to speak out in recent years. Only in recent years have I been able to find the courage to say it, and it will be clear from this that the research meant here is no less conscientious than what is considered research today. The following is at issue.

We must also subdivide the human being according to the nervous-sense system, which is primarily localized in the head. But the human being is not such that one can say anything other than: the nervous-sense system is primarily localized in the head organization. It extends over the whole human being, and what I have to distinguish as three or four elements of human nature interlock; and when we speak of the nerve-sense organization, we can really only say, exactly and precisely, that the human being is most “head” in the head, but the head organization, the nerve-sense organization, extends over the whole human being.

Then, what can be called the rhythmic organization of the human being in the broadest sense plays into this nerve-sense organization. The rhythm of breathing and the rhythm of blood circulation are, of course, the most prominent phenomena within the rhythmic human being; but other rhythms also come into consideration: the rhythm of sleeping and waking, the rhythm that expresses itself in the narrower sense in digestion, and so on. Again, the rhythmic system extends throughout the whole human being and is only preferentially localized in the middle of the human being. And thirdly, we have to distinguish – we can look at it in one way or another – the metabolic-limb system. This is the system that primarily serves the movement of the human being and that in turn extends throughout the whole human being. These two systems, the metabolic system and the locomotor system, are also closely connected, which will perhaps become clear from the inner content of the observation I am about to make.

However, these three systems, although they are interrelated, are strictly distinguished from one another, so that we can say: In the nervous-sensory organization, what is physical, etheric, astral body and I-organization works quite differently than, for example, in the rhythmic organization or in the metabolic-limb organization. These four aspects of human nature – physical body, etheric body, astral body and I – are present in all three systems, so to speak, in separate locations, but they in turn engage with each of these systems in a wide variety of ways. And only when we are able to say, for example, how the ego organization or the astral body intervenes in the head system, are we able to speak of healthy and sick people in an exact and appropriate way. I would like to discuss this for a specific case.

Let us take the head organization, and more specifically how the nerve-sense system is localized in the head. Here too, we are of course speaking of the human being as a whole, because what can be said of the head is also present to a lesser degree in the rhythmic human being, in the middle human being, and in the metabolic-limb human being. But the essential point can be grasped through the head organization: the question here is — as I said, with the restriction I have just made — what is localized first in this head organization. The human being is entirely head, but I discuss the head organization in the head in the narrower sense. First of all, the nervous-sensory organization is localized; the various sensory organs of perception have their continued effects in the inner human organism, so we must say if we want to speak exactly about the senses. Now the question is: What do we actually have before us when we first speak of the sensory organization? — Here, too, I can only give a kind of general idea.

The sense organization is usually discussed in an extremely abstract way, so that one speaks of it as if it were mere concepts. The anatomical and physiological basis is discussed, but – as can be seen from the terribly amateurish discussions that can be found in physiology – the actual functioning within the sensory tract is something that is basically never properly considered. For this is something that behaves in the opposite ratio, so that one can say: The respiratory function is in the reverse proportion to the sense function as the blood circulation system is to the digestive function. So the digestive function, if I may express myself crudely, is, so to speak, a condensed blood circulation. Or the other way around: what circulates in the blood is a refined digestive process. And the sense process is a refined respiratory process. I could also say: the breathing process is a coarsened sensory process. These two processes differ quantitatively, not qualitatively. This, for example, is the reason why the methodology prescribed in Indian yoga philosophy for deeper knowledge is not the mere ordinary nerve-sense process, but a certain modified breathing process. What is to be achieved in the practice of yoga in this modified breathing process is nothing less than a coarser realization. There is actually a great deal of wisdom in this lowering of the process of realization into the breathing process through the yoga philosophy of India. But it is precisely what takes place from the senses inwards, a refined, so to speak spiritualized breathing process. In this refined breathing process, I would like to say, in those places where sensory perception first takes place, the function of the I and the function of the astral body must be present in the greatest possible freedom. They must be able to work in the eye, must be able to work in the ear; but they must be able to work in such a way that the effect is really transmitted to the physical organization.

If we consider the eye, we find the following. In the eye, first of all, is the physical organization of the eye. In it is the etheric body of the eye, which takes care of the vitalistic aspect. But then we have the astral and the I-organization of the human being; these must work independently for the eye, but they must take hold of the physical substance of the eye. Now, in line with what I indicated yesterday, what is found in the human organism is also found in nature outside, only that the natural process is not found in the human organism as a healthy process, but as an unhealthy one; but there is always a healthy process in nature corresponding to a process in the human organism. What the sense organs perceive outside in nature is most outstandingly encountered when you consider the way it functions, which, I would say, is captured in silica, in quartz, in silicic acid, when you therefore perceive as a living process that which appears to you as something that has become solid, as something congealed, so to speak. All solid bodies are only solidified processes, solidified occurrences. If we look at the silicic acid process, we have to say: where we find silicic acid in nature, where we find quartzite – it is also present in other substances in nature, but most prominently in quartz – we have something in what takes place there that corresponds to what takes place in the human being through the human organization, for example in the eye or in another sense organ. There is no justification for the assertion that we have quartz in there in a substantial sense; but what we have in the eye or in another sense organ is functionally, in terms of the process, the same as what is going on outside in quartz. And again, when we observe this process in the sense organs, which proves to be identical with the process in quartz, we come to the conclusion - and this is now also shown by mineralogy in the analogy of external natural , that of all the factors that can be involved in such a process as we have in the quartz process, the one that is least able to interact harmoniously with it is that which is carried by the organization of phosphorus. If you look at what has become fixed in phosphorus in nature outside, as a living process, and take the living interaction of the two, you have the same process that you have in the human eye, as a representative of the sense organization in general. And through this interaction of one process, which is like the phosphorus process, and another process, which is like the silicic acid process, the eye is the organ that can intervene in the physical organization of the eye, which is present as the ego and as the astral body in man. Everywhere the physical organization must create the basis for the spiritual to intervene in the right way.

Now something else is the case. If the process that takes place in the eye through this interaction of the phosphorus process and the silicic acid process, which represents an intimate, harmonious interaction of the two, were to continue into the brain, we would be completely filled with a sensory process, we would be completely given over to nature, we would not be lifted out of nature as human beings. But we have to lift ourselves out of nature as human beings. And for this to happen, a different process must take place in the brain than in the senses, a process that separates the human being from the processes of nature. While something actually takes place in the eye that is only a continuation of an external natural process into vitalization – the sense organs are actually like gulfs that extend into the human being – something must separate in the brain and become independent.

This happens again through a process that we also find in nature. What, if I may express myself in psychological terms, perception turns into an idea with the help of the human organization, is a process within the nerve-sense organization that corresponds to those processes that we find in lead. Therefore, we can say: When that which is perceived by the eye goes back further into the nerve-sense system, then a process must meet it that is the same as the lead process. Only through this can man also think what he perceives. This is what makes the brain a thinking organ; otherwise it would also be a perceiving organ. In this way, man becomes independent.

In saying this, I have indicated something that is characteristic in the organization of the head. I said, therefore, that the same thing that takes place outside in the lead process must take place in the organization of the head in order for the thinking process to come about in man.

Let us now take the lead function and not bring it into the nervous system – when a person is born, the lead is there from nature itself, the lead function is there, without the substance of the lead being able to be detected – but let us now bring the lead function into the digestive system and into the rest; life itself takes care of this, for example sometimes in lead poisoning. If you now observe in all phenomena what lead does to the metabolic limb of man, you get a picture that is presented in various individual symptoms, but which is actually most characteristically summarized in the symptom complex of dementia senilis or cerebral arteriosclerosis: you then get the picture of the human organism decaying in old age. In other words, if I apply the same process that ensures my independence as an organic being in the brain to the other pole of the human being, to the digestive system and to the limb system that is connected to it, then I get a clinical picture; what is a disease process in the metabolic-limb system is a necessary organic function for the nerve-sense human being. If I therefore regard sclerosis as a slow dying, I must also say that in a certain attenuated form it must continually function in the human head, where it is the normal state.

Thus the three members of the human being are distinct from one another: what is the normal state in the nervous-sense organization is a manifestation of disease in the other member of the human organism. But as I said yesterday, how should we approach therapy?

We have to relieve the astral body and the ego organization of the task of dealing with the disease process, when the disease process is allowed to run rampant. So what must we do when we have sclerosis? We must approach it in such a way that we relieve the human astral body of the digestive limb system of what it has to do with the aging, disintegrating, sclerotic body. And we can do that by giving it to the lead, the lead in a certain dosage. And this has led to our finding a remedy for this, which you will find in our list as remedy number 1, as the remedy for arteriosclerosis. It is therefore clear from the outset, through real knowledge of the human being, that the sclerosis can be substantially alleviated by introducing lead into the human being in the appropriate way; only now one must bring the lead to effectiveness. It is not necessarily the case that just because I have introduced the lead into the organism, it is actually effective. Here the further insights of a true knowledge of the human being are of help.

It helps then to be able to distinguish in the human organism between the building up and the breaking down forces. The latter are active, for example, in sclerosis, where the human organism is disintegrating. In the main, in the brain, the human organism is constantly disintegrating, because the brain is constantly filled with a slight sclerosis; this is in its organization. So everything depends on our ability to distinguish between the processes of degeneration and the actual vitalization processes, the anabolic, growth processes. If we can distinguish between these two processes, we can then look at that part of the human organism which carries the anabolic processes in the most eminent sense: in early childhood, the whole human organism. It is not yet overburdened with organs for thinking, with organs for the rest of the soul's activity; it initially lives in the organization of growth. If we now take the relationship between the milk function and the human child organism, we find that the milk function contains the plastic forces that the organism needs in childhood. In later life, we cannot obtain the still-necessary plastic forces in the same way as we do when we consume milk during childhood. Even in very old age, we still need plastic forces, formative forces, that transform the food we take in into the forms of the organism. It turns out that nothing promotes these plastic, formative forces and the assimilation of the absorbed substances into the human organism more than the often quite weak enjoyment of honey. Honey has a similar effect on the metabolism of the limbs of an elderly person as milk has on the brain of a child – and especially on that of a child. This indicates to us that there are special formative forces in honey that we cannot discover by simply analyzing it chemically, but only if we actually recognize in all its vitality the relationships that human beings have with the other substances in the universe. And this formative capacity of honey – for a more precise interpretation, it turns out that honey takes hold of the human organism in such a way that the astral body in particular can exercise its formative forces – these effects of honey can then be supported by adding sugar, provided that the human organism can otherwise tolerate it. Thus you will find that our first remedy for sclerosis, composed and functioning in a particular way, is made of lead, honey and sugar.

But this also indicates that it depends on how you do something like this. Because in a sense, an inner functioning of the forces of lead with the forces of honey and sugar must arise in the preparation itself. This preparation is made in such a way that when it is introduced into the human organism, it takes on the sclerotizing forces there. It takes the sclerotizing forces from the astral body and the ego organization of the person; these are thus released again and can now work for the normal, healthy organization of the person. But what I introduce into the human organism with this preparation is what the ego and the astral body had to do earlier, and which therefore were not free and diverted their functions to the disease process. Now I hand over the disease process to my preparation. The particularly effective element here is the lead; it takes over the sclerotization, because it is, after all, its own nature to have a sclerotizing effect. But I must first seek out the paths through the plasticity of the organism, through which I bring the lead to where it is needed: this is done by combining it with honey and sugar.

Thus our preparations are made in such a way that they contain what can take over a pathological process. But they are also composed and processed in such a way that what I want to introduce into the person to take over the pathological process can spread throughout the organism in the right way. Thus our preparations are absolutely rationally manufactured. As a result, it actually comes about – this could always be observed from step to step by Dr. Wegman at the Arlesheim Institute whenever we applied our preparations – that in healing in this way, what is necessary is to know that the human organism is like this: if I apply something to it, it must cause a corresponding change in it. If I now observe the change as it happens, I observe the process, which is the healing process; I observe what I have presupposed. And this is so important in our method: we do not test externally and determine by statistics, but rationally predict what must happen, and then it can be checked, even at the very first stage of what occurs, whether one is actually producing the corresponding effects.

In this way you can also see how the silicic acid contained in equisetum, which I mentioned yesterday, works. I have already mentioned that the special way in which silicic acid is contained in equisetum has an effect on kidney function. Today, it is no longer observed, anatomically or physiologically, that the nervous-sensory system can only be separated from the circulatory and metabolic system to a certain extent. In a sense, all organs are sensory organs again, and the kidney is already a particularly important organ in the human abdomen. So if, in the sense I explained yesterday, I use silicic acid as it is present in equisetum, I increase the sensitivity of the kidneys and thus act on those processes in the human organism that result from a dulling of the inner sensitivity of the kidneys.

What we see in an outstanding way in the sense organs can be applied to a certain extent to the whole human organism. This becomes particularly clear when we consider the effect of phosphorus in a particularly striking case. It is certainly extremely interesting to observe the physiological and anatomical processes that occur during human embryonic development. Now in human embryonic development we have two interacting processes, which are usually not very well distinguished when viewed anatomically and physiologically today. First of all, there is everything that is grouped around the development of the fertilized egg. Then there is everything that takes place in the chorion from the environment, from the uterus and so on, from the female organs surrounding the embryo. When we study this, we naturally see that everything that is organized is permeated not only by the physical organization but also by the etheric, astral and I organizations. If we now look at this process — I would call it a centrifugal process because it is a radiating process — and consider what starts from the actual fertilized germ cell, develops more and more through differentiation develops more and more, and what becomes the central embryo, then on the one hand in this process we have as the main effect, as the most predominant effect, something that can be found in the process that is recorded in the silver substance. As paradoxical as it may sound, in the silver substance we have something that can increase until excretion takes place – and it is an excretion – which takes place in the secretion of the ovum in the human organism. In silver, in the functional aspect of silver, we have the excretory forces that are at work in the human being, out in nature, in the silver substance. From the fact that silver has such an eminent excretory effect, you can see the tremendous importance of silver in the appropriate dosage for the human abdomen in general. And therefore, if the necessary binders and additives are used to introduce the silver substance in a fine dosage into the digestive process, it is possible to act precisely on the elimination processes. If the elimination processes are blocked, it is possible to act on them in an extraordinarily significant way.

But if we now take that which now has a centripetal effect, which emanates from the uterus, that is, enters from the outside, we have there again, in an eminent sense, in an external substance, namely phosphorus, that which emanates from the walls of the female birth organs inwards, which emanates from there and acts towards the embryo. From this, one can see the significance of the forces contained in the functioning of phosphorus. They work in exactly the opposite sense to silver; they work in such a way that they drive everything into the human being. While silver, for example, develops the tendency to excrete, especially for the lower abdomen, phosphorus develops the tendency to drive into the body. So that in silver we have something that most eminently evokes the forms of the physical body of the human being, whereas in phosphorus we have something that extinguishes these forms, that drives into the human being and extinguishes the physical organization, making this physical organization extinguished for the astral body and the ego. So phosphorus is what drives the astral organization and the ego out of the human being. In this respect, silver and phosphorus are polar opposites.

For the rhythmic and intellectual person, that is, for the circulatory system and for the nerve-sense system, there is another polar opposite to phosphorus: that is lime, or carbonate of calcium. This carbonate of calcium, when introduced into the human organism, has the peculiar tendency to have a secreting effect. Indeed, it is the case with calcium carbonate, with lime, that the centrifugal, radiating forces of the human being actually show up in an outwardly natural way in the lime; whereby, when these radiating forces become too strong and disease formations arise as a result, I can use lime preparations to reduce these disease processes. But what I am trying to say becomes particularly clear if we now consider how the lime supplied to the human organism is something that is excreted everywhere in the human organism. I would like to say: in the lowest human being it has a competitor in silver, but it also has an excretory effect there; so that lime excretes both watery and airy substances from the organism everywhere. The forces of lime localized in the human organism are therefore also everything that underlies human exhalation. Lime has the power within it that acts as an engine for exhalation. And again, it has the forces within it that expel warmth in the nerve-sense organization, causing a kind of cooling of the nerve-sense organization. So in the lower human being, in the metabolic-limb human being, it expels fluids; in the rhythmic human being, it expels the air substances; in the nerve-sense organization, it expels the warmth ether – or warmth, if you prefer.

In each of these relationships, phosphorus has the opposite effect to that of lime. You can see this again in the image of phosphorus poisoning. It introduces the liquid into the metabolic limb-man, or rather, the solid in a dissolved form, so that it is the driving force for inhalation, for all inward respiratory processes. It introduces the airy element into the organism in such a way that it has a warming effect on the nerve-sense organization. — But because lime is the expelling element, it prepares the way in the human organism for the functioning of the astral body and the I organization; these can then enter.

It is precisely through what lime expels that the astral body and the I organization can enter the human being. On the other hand, the physical organization that phosphorus drives in drives the astral body and the ego out. You can study these things in the most superficial way by observing that lime, so to speak, fetters the awakened ego and the awakened astral body to the physical body everywhere. But what does it mean when the astral body and the ego are fettered to the physical body? It means that I suffer from sleeplessness. If I cannot bring the I organization and the astral body out of the human organism, I suffer from sleeplessness. The function of lime, if it is not counteracted by the phosphorus function, is continually a cause for us to suffer from sleeplessness and thus from all the processes associated with it. The moment you introduce the phosphorus process into the human organism, you promote the ability to sleep; so that you promote what brings out the astral body and the ego from the human organism, because these are out during sleep. In the most eminent sense this property belongs to the phosphorus function; to a lesser degree it belongs to the sulphur function. And if we have irregularities in the rhythmical system, we can also apply sulphur instead of phosphorus. If, for example, we are dealing with insomnia, which shows its symptoms in the rhythmical human being, we will have to deal with some sulphur preparation for the healing process.

These can certainly only be indications. But these indications are intended to show that in all that is aimed at here as a rational diagnosis, rational therapy is already included. For if I proceed physiologically, then, for example, in the human head there is a refined process of sclerotization. By using such expressions, which connect the human being with the nature surrounding him, I can now call that which underlies thinking in the human brain as an organic function a lead process. I see this lead process, without the substance of lead, in the human nerve-sense organization; I see it as poison in the other organization, in the metabolic-limb organization. The one picture shows me in a terrible way what always takes place in a more delicate way in the nerve-sense organization. But I can also know now: if I introduce the lead function, the lead process, into the metabolic-limb human being, then I thereby take from this metabolic-limb human being in relation to the astral organization what must be taken away. And in doing so, I have allowed the healing to take place. So I no longer distinguish between diagnosis, pathology and therapy, because they all flow into one another. You recognize the disease and you know the process in the external nature that can take over this disease process in the human organism. You recognize one from the other. It is precisely this, between which today a terrible abyss gapes: pathology and therapy, that is interwoven, made one through this rational anthroposophical basis of medicine.

On the other hand, however, the disease processes themselves are also illuminated in a corresponding way. Let us take an illness that is always laughed at when we mention it because it is considered a very insignificant illness by doctors – at least by doctors in Central Europe; I don't know if this is the case in the Netherlands – only for the patient this illness is quite unpleasant: I am referring to migraine. It is only understood when one knows that it consists of a process that should not be in the nerve-sense organization at all - in the head - namely, a metabolic process that is hypertrophied, so to speak, the fine metabolic process that always takes place in the head. So there is a metabolic process in the head that should not be there, and the task now is to take this metabolic process away from the head. How do you do that? Well, first of all, you are faced with the task of introducing into the person what can take up this metabolic process, what can carry it out itself. From what I said earlier, you will now find that this is silicic acid. I said of it that it must enter into the sensory organization, which is also irritated in migraine. If we bring the silicic acid process into the human sensory organization, then we work in such a way that we take the morbid migraine process out of the head. But we must first bring the silicic acid process into the head. If we want to form the preparation so that it can be taken in through the mouth, we have to make sure that it does not get stuck somewhere in the digestive process. To do this, we have to make the astral body as active as possible, so that it carries the silicic acid up through the entire digestive process in rising waves, which we introduce into the head organization through the preparation. We can only do this if we promote the upward flow of the absorbed silicic acid by doing something to make the astral body as effective as possible. That means that we have to throw out of everything that mediates between the abdomen and the head – namely the rhythm of circulation – everything that could prevent the astral body from working actively. This happens when we apply sulfur. Thus, in our preparation, processed in a certain way, we must find silicic acid and sulphur. But in the human organism it must be so that not only does something work upwards, but especially when we attack the rhythmic system, the rhythm must go up and down. We follow the respiratory rhythm up and down, follow the circulation rhythm up and down. This rising and falling is most essentially promoted by that function which again lies in the substance of iron. And this, what we want: to flood upwards once, but then to prevent it from becoming established at the top, so that only something settles at the top and the whole person is not taken up, this is achieved by preparing a preparation in a certain way, containing iron, sulfur and silicic acid. In this way we obtain our preparation, Biodoron, which serves in the most eminent sense to relieve the patient of the migraine in the head, but then also to reintroduce what we have removed from the head into the right way of organizing the human being as a whole.

What can be said for the subordinate disease, the trivial disease of migraine, will, in principle, be more serious if the opposite is pursued. When, in particular, the process where breathing changes into the – as I said earlier – refined breathing, which then appears as the nerve-sense process, this process, which should actually only take place in the lower part of the uppermost part of the human being, roughly – and this is only an approximation and a rough expression – in the area between the lungs and the lower regions of the face When this process, this particular nuance of the human circulatory process, forces its way through and this process, which has already become a nerve-sense process, namely a nerve-head process, now takes place in the human intestinal tract, then we have a process that must be in the human being; only it does not belong in the intestinal tract, but in the head. There it has its normal place. If it enters the intestinal tract, it becomes typhoid. And we have simply grasped what a natural process is – every disease process is a natural process – that is, what such a disease process can be in the human being: something that is justified in another place is dislocated in this case. At a certain point in the organism, the process that plays a role in typhoid phenomena is normal; in the intestinal tract, it is a disease. It is a disease that presents itself in this way.

We must now have something in the head organization where the external world can have a particularly strong effect. We know that the head is the part of the body we feel least; but we feel the environment through the head. The environment must flood into our head. So we have something in our head with which we live most strongly in the outside world. We have only two such organizational links with which we live so strongly in the outside world: first, the head itself, namely that part that I have just characterized, where breathing passes into the nerve-sense function; and then we have something else that will seem very paradoxical to you. But when we have more thoroughly studied the medical literature on this subject, which we will accomplish in the very near future, then you will take a look at the things that can be found there, and you will see how the liver function, in particular, is something that, in a completely different way, most closely reflects the outside world within the human organism. The outside world acts in the liver as if the other organism were almost not there at all. This is the special nature of the liver function. But if what should be localized in this way as the actual bed for the external effects, if that occurs where it should not be, namely in the intestinal tract, then we have something in this intestinal tract that is functionally alienated from the human organism. If we now look again in the wide expanse of nature for a way to internalize again, so to speak, this externalized mode of action in the intestine and to restore it to human functioning, then we are presented with the process that is solidified in antimony. Antimony is a body that reacts in an extraordinarily fine way to the forces of its surroundings. The antimony structure is like revealed dynamite. Imagine these bundle-shaped radiations, try to feel how it wants to break free from becoming a mineral through the so-called saiger process; then you can see: antimony is, so to speak, mineral-sensitive, it internalizes external influences. This is particularly evident from the fact that under certain conditions antimony can be treated electrolytically. If it is then brought to the cathode, an explosion occurs at the slightest provocation. When all this is recognized, when it is known how antimony relates to the forces that play everywhere in the universe, then it can also be recognized how the antimony process, when properly processed and introduced into the organism, can take up the typhoid process; so that in turn the I and the astral body can be freed from their work on the typhoid process and the person can thus gradually be restored to health. This is how I tried to indicate the principles of what can be called rational medicine. Over time, our preparations, of which there are already almost two hundred, have always been developed in two ways. At first, a fairly large number of doctors came together who had become somewhat skeptical of current therapeutic methods and who asked whether it might not be possible to use anthroposophical knowledge to find relationships between the human being and the environment that could indicate something in the surrounding substances and in their processing and application that could provide a remedy. Now, in anthroposophy, there is a very detailed and exact knowledge of the human being, a knowledge of the human being according to body, soul and spirit, as well as a detailed knowledge of nature according to the different realms of nature and the different ingredients of the natural realms. And so the first thing I was set the task of doing was to go, so to speak, the way of seeking out natural processes and examining the extent to which these natural processes represent disease processes. So I went from the outer nature into the human being. This is how you first find the sclerosis remedy that has taken this path. I have tried to find out how plumbum metallicum and some plastic-dynamic system, as it is in honey, sugar or milk, can work. In this way, a number of remedies have been developed, initially from the outside in.

The question then arose: how can these remedies be brought into the world? I said: I do not want to have a remedy factory without clinics assigned to it. So the clinics came into being. And once a number of remedies were available, the clinics began to use these remedies. That is how the situation I just described came about. And now that I am in Dornach myself, Arlesheim and Dornach form one entity, and the institutes in Arlesheim are affiliated to the Goetheanum, it has been possible for me, through close collaboration with Dr. Wegman, to now go the other way for a further series of remedies, to look for the path from the disease process: where can this natural process corresponding to a disease process be found? In other words, to start with the human being and arrive at the natural substance in question. In this way, everything that can be found as a remedy flows together, especially in Arlesheim, where Dr. Wegman's Clinical Therapeutic Institute is located. What I discussed yesterday, the true courage of healing — is affiliated with the International Pharmaceutical Laboratory, which is concerned with the production of the appropriate remedies, which are to be brought into the world in the most diverse ways and which you can get to know if you are interested. I do not want to be agitational, I just want to discuss the scientific basis of the matter. But something has come about precisely in these two converging paths, which also gives great certainty for these things in purely external-empirical terms. And it is particularly satisfying when one is able to speak to an audience like yours, which has been made possible by Dr. Zeylmans inviting me to do so and invited you to attend, and you again had the kindness to come, which seems to be connected with the fact that Dr. Zeylmans himself wants to orient this institute here in the way it has now been discussed. Because I have to assume that the fact that I was allowed to give these lectures seems to indicate that an institute is to be established here that will serve as proof and evidence of what we are striving for in our clinical-therapeutic institutes, but also of an extraordinarily large number of private physicians. And from the relevant literature, you will be able to see for yourself that we not only have statistical material that is at least as reliable as clinical statistics usually yield, but that in many respects this also leads to the certainty that comes from the accuracy of the predictions, that in addition to this certainty, a particularly large statistical material is available.

However, it will be of particular importance if we can find a cure for those diseases that today can only be treated surgically, such as carcinoma. If one can say that any process can be dislocated, then this must be said of carcinoma in particular. It is a dislocated process, a process that should actually only take place at the outermost periphery, within the sense organization. It is very interesting to observe how this function, which belongs at the periphery of the body – and specifically at the periphery of the body that is prepared for this – can become dislocated and then appear as a carcinoma, which is actually, now not a nervous function, but which is actually a sensory function. In this way, one comes to recognize, in a deeper sense, the peculiar parasitic nature of the carcinoma. And then one comes to the point – not in the simple way that one would usually expect – of being able to produce something in the preparations, which usually consist of the various juices of the Viscum species, that can conquer the carcinoma by medicinal means. We have already achieved at least some good, promising partial successes; but we can only speak of partial successes because we have only recently completed the apparatus that produces the viscum preparation as it should be produced. Nevertheless, the preparations made so far have already led to very good prophylactic cures. In the case of carcinoma, it is particularly important to recognize it at the right time, which patients usually make difficult; but a carcinoma recognized at the right time can be combated medically with such preparations as we make from Viscum. I do not wish to speak here about the value or lack of value of surgical treatment, nor about the fact that it is often necessary; I only want to point out that, based on a true knowledge of the human being, even the most severe cases of illness can be considered in such a way that, based on such knowledge of the human being, one can arrive at healing processes from within.

This is essentially what I wanted to say to you as a matter of principle about our endeavors that have emerged from anthroposophy, what I wanted to say in relation to the path that leads from the external nature to the inner being of man and vice versa. I would just like to point out in conclusion that it is precisely from these methodical observations that something of enormous importance emerges: namely, how to introduce into the human being that which is intended to relieve the disease process in the organism. And if it is the case that the human being is a threefold creature, with a nervous-sensory organization, a rhythmic organization and a metabolic-limb organization, then healing also breaks down into threefold processes. These three processes are as follows: firstly, medications taken internally, which enter the human organism, so to speak, by the same route as the digestive process. The second type is through injections, where we try to bring the process, the function, into the rhythmic organism through the injection. And the third healing method is through the bath, where we work from the outside. The latter is an effect on the nerve-sense process, where we act more coarsely from the outside; but the effect of the bath is a perceptual activity pushed down to a lower level.

Let us follow these three forms in phosphorus. When we use phosphorus as a preparation, mixed with other things, chemically or otherwise processed, per os, internally, then we must be clear about the fact that it primarily promotes the absorption of fluids into the human organism. If we have to relieve the human organism of a disease process that, as it were, forces the fluid out of its own space, as for example in certain inflammatory phenomena at the periphery or in such phenomena that are trivially similar to nosebleeds, when we apply phosphorus internally, it relieves the astral organism and the ego of the disease process, as it were, in the functioning of the fluid. If we prepare a medicine in the appropriate dosage to inject, and we introduce phosphorus into the circulation process, then what we take from the organism must also be connected with abnormal circulation processes. If, for example, we observe accelerated breathing, some intensification of the heart activity, but especially something like an excessive secretion of bile, which also belongs to the rhythmic, then we can – and the same applies to a whole series of other processes, I will mention only the obvious – have an extremely favorable effect by injecting phosphorus. If we encounter something that plays more on the psychic side, the brain functions are such that they involuntarily drive the person to a kind of flight of ideas, the person cannot stop his thoughts, he gushes out his words and this escalates to the pathological, then we can work through appropriate baths in which phosphorus is dissolved, precisely to slow down the flight of ideas.

I mention this only as an example, but what is stated in this example can be multiplied a hundredfold. In this way, the human organism can be helped in three ways. It depends on how it can be realized.

On the other hand, there is the fact that one can approach people directly in a therapeutic way, which now works from the outside into the metabolic system: the dynamics of the world in which the human being can be placed. And we are really doing this with good success through eurythmy therapy. Eurythmy is something like spiritual gymnastics, but it can be developed into an art. Under Dr. Steiner's direction, we have already shown a large part of Central and Northern Europe what can be achieved through the art of eurythmy, and performances of eurythmy art were also given here in The Hague some time ago. In eurythmy, the transformation of human speech into human movement functions is immediately apparent to us in an artistic way. If you consider what science knows about this today, namely how hand and arm functions are related to the organization of speech – right-handed people have their speech center on the left side of the brain, and left-handed people vice versa – you may not completely deny what can be achieved through anthroposophy: that all human speech is actually related to human mobility. We can follow the way in which the legs and feet move when consonants are pronounced, especially palatal sounds. We can follow how the arms move and how this is transmitted through an internal switchover to what then becomes air movement when speaking. But all speech can in turn be traced back to movements of the individual human being or of human groups. This then gives rise to artistic eurythmy. But this can be transformed again in such a way that one develops what is initially presented as an art in such a way that one lets the movements concerned, which arise from the whole human being, from body, soul and spirit — ordinary gymnastics only arises from the physiological nature of the physical organism — be carried out by the human being as a eurythmy therapy gesture in context. We have developed a complete system for this in Arlesheim. When it is applied systematically, it has an effect on the person, and in this way the inner healing process can be supported in an extraordinarily fruitful way through eurythmy therapy, according to the three different types that I have described. This eurythmy therapy works in such a way that the process that comes about in normal human life as a result of walking, running and so on, whereby there are always inner processes that are connected with the breakdown and build-up processes of the human organism, that this process, where the human being is placed in a dynamic, has an effect on the inner processes. There are strict rules for this. So I can have people carry out a eurythmy therapy system of gestures that has such an effect on the organism that, for example, catabolic processes that do not want to take place must take place in the right way; or that another eurythmy therapy system counteracts excessively strong catabolic processes.

So everything comes down to understanding the healthy and sick person in terms of body, soul and spirit. Then you simply see in him what health or illness represents. And then you already have the therapeutic process in what you see.

In this way, we would like to work towards rational therapy in all modesty. I know that today there are still many objections to such rational therapy, that it is perhaps regarded as paradoxical or even worse by those who have now struggled through all the difficulties of what is officially recognized today. But such things have often been around in the world. However, I can assure you: I would find it more comfortable not to talk about these things; because I know how much one still comes up with and falls for today from what one has as a habitual way of thinking and because I can already make all the objections myself, I would find it more comfortable not to talk about it. But there are reasons to talk about what one believes needs to be introduced into the cultural process of humanity. Out of this sense of duty, you take the magnitude of the thanks that I would like to express to you for attentively following my remarks, which could only be suggestions in the two hours.

Question and Answer Session

Question: Do you imagine that there are vibrational differences? About lead,....

Dr. Steiner: I have nothing against interpreting the processes involved in one way or another. However, it seems to me that, for practical purposes, this is a theory of what these processes consist of. Such theories could suffer the same fate as the emission and undulation theories of light. What is important to me is what is qualitative about the matter, what actually aims to show that ultimately the whole functioning, which is actually only localized in the lead substance as I have it before me in physical space, that this whole functioning externally represents the same as internally the processes that make the brain, so to speak, a suitable organ for independent thinking in relation to dependent perception. In this respect, the fact that we are accustomed to thinking of the inner processes of the organism as a schematic continuation of outer processes in nature makes the presentation more difficult. For example, we talk about the fact that carbonic acid is formed in the human organism from carbon through the absorption of oxygen; we call this a combustion process (listeners:... in the state of becoming!) — You are saying the word that I would have had to say later! — It is actually the case that we often speak of combustion in physiology and medicine. But these are just as little combustion processes as they take place on the outside, just as little as it can be a matter of a process that is not ensouled or spiritualized in the case of a human being. The connection between oxygen and carbon is also ensouled and spiritualized. So that the process occurs in the nascency and remains, but is also ensouled and spiritualized. So that I have captured the process in the nascency and the process now becomes a natural process by continuing outside, while if it starts from the nascency and works in the human organism, it becomes a different process.

Take, for example, the processes that I have just described as a kind of lead process that takes place in the human brain. Yes, what are they in the human organism? This brings us to a very delicate chapter. We can study the processes in the human abdomen, for example. There we find that the absorbed substances also undergo a certain metamorphosis, that then something is excreted. Let us now consider these excretory products and compare them in a really meaningful way, not just by proceeding chemically, for that is the least we can do. Proceeding chemically is about as useful as trying to understand a clock by looking at a gold mine, a glass factory, and so on. Of course, these things are all very important, but just as I do not learn anything about the clock in this way, I can learn just as little about the functions of the potato in the human organism if I know that it has so many carbohydrates and so on. I learn more if I know what the potato's function is in the plant itself, how it is actually a stem, a rootstock. If I know the level of its organization, then I begin to understand how I can compare these processes with what happens in humans. It comes down to how the process is different from the process that is fueled by legumes. The process that is fueled by the potato goes further up into the head function than the one that is fueled by legumes. If I can go into all this, then I will finally come to recognize that metamorphoses take place in the digestive tract and that the excretion products are only the processes that have stopped halfway. And where are these processes that go all the way through? These are the processes that take place in the nervous sensory system. The nerve-sense and perception process is a process that is carried to its conclusion. What goes on in the human excretory organs represents a process that has come to a halt. The intestinal contents are a brain that has not fully materialized, as paradoxical as that may sound. It is simply a different process at a different place in the organism, which is half of the process that occurs in the head.

When I consider all this, I am able to look into these process effects of the human interior, and then what presents itself to me is what now first arises for me to compare between the process that is outside, the lead process, and the process that takes place in the human brain. Then I can start, if I want to verify something, to look at what happens in lead. I observe the lead as it oxidizes, melts, what it otherwise does in melting. I go further into the geology and geography of lead. I see how lead binds, how it is connected with other substances. Then I already get images that can confirm what appears to the person who can observe the lead, who in fact sees a kind of aura of the lead, which is similar to the aura that forms the nervous substance of the brain.

And so we can speak of these connections, I attach particular importance to this, while of course leaving it up to everyone to make hypotheses about whether these are vibrational differences. But that is actually the physics of the matter, not what is physiologically important.

Question: I would like to ask whether you can recognize these inner processes that you have mentioned in any other way than we ordinary people.

Dr. Steiner: The inner processes are not observed through the usual external sensory empiricism. They can only be observed in their after-effects on the corpse or in some other way, through conclusions drawn from external events. They cannot be observed there. They only become observable when the methods I spoke of yesterday are applied, and as you can find them in the books mentioned yesterday. You see, for the realization, the human being actually becomes transparent at first. And then you can indeed speak of really, let us say, seeing the liver process. The derivation only refers to the fact that one must also mentally dissect out the liver; but what can be asserted must be looked at. When I look at the whole person, I see a jumble of all sorts of things. I must now remove everything that is not the liver, in my mind also. I must therefore dissect out the liver in the spiritual sense first. This is more difficult for one organ than for another. It is more difficult for the liver, for example, but then it is also more fruitful, because certain liver diseases can, I am convinced, only be understood at all in this way. But it is possible to understand every organ.

A member of the audience: Yesterday we heard a beautifully constructed system, but the foundations are not yet clear to me. You divide the human being into a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and a fourth element. If that is the case, then it is understandable that we also have an etheric kidney, an astral kidney and a fourth kidney. But what if it is not so? You should have first proved this division into four parts of the being.

The therapy was similar. For example, you did not say why you chose Equisetum, since there are many plants that contain silicic acid. As far as I know, Equisetum has no therapeutic powers.

Today you said: We make preparations that are rationally manufactured. You should prove that! We know nothing of these functions you describe.

On the whole, I have not grasped what the main thing is. The whole thing is logically constructed, but I lack the premises.

Dr. Steiner: In such a matter, it is of the utmost importance that one can see two things. Firstly, when something like this occurs and is discussed, as I have said, in two hours one can only point out the things, give directives and so on. Furthermore, I have made it clear through the whole way of presenting it that we are in the process of becoming, but that we are also willing to continue working. Now, when we speak of proofs, it is the case that this is not actually based on a completely scientific concept. And this stems from the fact that today we have become accustomed to only bringing forth proofs from what can actually be observed sensually. In another sense, no medicine has any proofs either, except in the sense that it can be observed sensually and physically.

I have now spoken of the fact that sensory observation can be further developed and modified by something higher. Yesterday I indicated that there are methods by which one can do this and I pointed to writings by which one can arrive at such methods. This, however, constitutes something for the whole so-called system of proof, which I can only make clear by means of a comparison: when we are here on earth, we talk about the fact that something that I place in the air is heavy and falls down, falls to the ground, then it has a basis. So we have to say that for a certain way of thinking that is based on sensual empirical evidence. If you go further, you come to the point – and I happened to experience this once as a boy, when someone told me – that if the earth were floating, it would actually have to fall down. This mutual support and bearing of the cosmic bodies and cosmic spaces is the image for what underlies such a science as I have meant today. The whole thing bears and supports each other. We are dealing here with a completely different area. Of course, you will not be able to support yourself very well if I can only select a few things from something as detailed as medicine in two hours in order to give you an idea of the perspectives. You have to bear in mind that the desirable could only come about if you now had four years of faculty study, built on the aspects that I discussed today. If one started from the medical preparatory studies with the assumption that there is a real, spirit-permeated natural science, and if a physiology were built up in the same way, passing into histology and into pathology-clinical, then, however, because things would approach people in the appropriate detailed way, we would find them just as plausible as the medical system can be plausible today.

Today I can give nothing more for these things than perspectives and suggestions.

The first thing is that today we have become accustomed to mentioning only what can be proven sensually, and that we do not take into account how things support each other. But the other thing is this: when you do, say, mathematics, for example, any science that is done rationally, how do you want to do it otherwise than by having one position supported by the other? Mathematics is something that supports itself reciprocally. If one were to talk about mathematics for two hours, even less would be gained than in today's discussion, although suggestions could also be made there. The moment I build a bridge with the help of mathematics, I speak of verification. And I have simply hinted at this when I said: I do not attach any importance to the remedies if clinics are not attached to them and one cannot see how the remedies work. If one has the diagnosis as I have explained it and comes to heal, and if after two or three days one can already see how things work, then the verification is there. Another method of verifying medical constellations is not known in conventional medicine either. Take the healing method of phenacetin. Statistics are compiled; it is verification that counts.

What I wanted to show is that in empirical medicine today we are at the stage where we only start from statistics. Here it depends on luck whether the connections are found. But this can be transformed by looking at the person in a rational therapy.

If today we say: a function such as that of phosphorus is effective in this or that way on the human organism, then it is a matter of setting about examining the We F'ru ww. mode of action. But I have indicated how the effects of lead and phosphorus can be in the human organism. And when it is said that one cannot speak of a phosphorus function or an equisetum function, then I must point out that what a substance is is in fact only a momentarily captured state. What then is lead? One can find a name by chance because we live in a certain temperature range and in this range lead exists in a fixed state. In other world situations it is something else, it goes through metamorphoses. In fact, we are not dealing with something that is fixed at a particular level, but with processes that only show themselves to be fixed. But one can indicate how the fixation occurs.

You spoke of horsetail. Of course other plants also have these constituents, like horsetail. I am expressing myself very carefully. I said of horsetail: Of course other plants also have these constituents; I quote horsetail as a characteristic because it has ninety percent silicic acid, other plants do not have that; thus the silicic acid effect is the prominent one.

If someone says, “To my knowledge, equisetum is not a medicinal plant at all,” this means no more than that the healing effect of equisetum has simply not yet been observed. We observe it very often. These are things that depend on how experience expands.

I understand every objection and could make it myself. But just think of how many objections were raised against the Copernican system. The Catholic objection was raised until 1827, only from then on was it also introduced in Catholic schools. You really wouldn't get very far in civilization if you only stuck to the objections. Not that I, having said all this, would immodestly present the things. But it all rests on work! It does not rest on carelessness to speak of the effectiveness of the smallest entities. If you look at the writings that lie here: for years, efforts were made to verify the matter in the laboratory. The objections you have raised apply, but everything can be objected to, that goes without saying.

Audience member: As soon as you accept general relativity, you are not referring to states.

Dr. Steiner: Yes, but relativity is also relative. Someone once wanted to make Einstein's theory of relativity plausible to his audience by taking a matchbox and a match. And he said: I can now pass the match past the box, which I am holding still; but I can also hold the match still and pass the box past it: the same effect. It's relative. — I would have liked to shout at the gentleman: Why don't you nail the box to the wall, then it requires a little more. Then we enter into the relativity of relativity. And when we look at the human body in motion, we come to the conclusion that motion is not determined by coordinate systems or reference systems, but also by fatigue and organic changes, which already takes me a step from the relative to the absolute. I would like to say: relativity is again relative and asymptotically approaches absoluteness.

I see the importance of the concept of relativity in something else. We are accustomed, from the point of view of physical assumptions, actually so far in the usual theories, to consider everything in such a way that we relate it to a place in space and to the course of time. We also write the formulas in physics in this way. In fact, we cannot get by with such a way of looking at things in physics. Rather, we have to consider only the spatial relationship of one thing or process a to another b as two properties. This is where we come up with fruitful ideas. This is where we come to regard relativity as something more or less – even for qualities – as something more or less justified, but relatively justified.

The Temptation is presented in the Gospel of St. Matthew as an account of a particular form of Initiation. The story is followed by indications of what Christ Jesus was to mean, firstly to His disciples. Not only was He to be the expounder of the ancient teachings in an entirely new form but a living force—if this word may be used—a health-giving force for men. This is demonstrated in the healings.

In the lecture yesterday we went on to consider a subject which, if it is to be understood, calls for a certain measure of goodwill arising from spiritual-scientific knowledge acquired through the years. We spoke of the unique, living quality of teaching imparted through the transmission of forces from Christ Jesus into the souls of His disciples. An attempt was made to express a great mystery in words of human language and to indicate the nature of the teaching given by Christ Jesus to His disciples. We may think of Christ Jesus Himself as a focal point, a focal centre, as it were, for forces that were to stream from the Macrocosm into the conditions of life on the Earth and into the souls of the disciples. Such forces could be marshalled only by powers that were concentrated in Christ Himself. Through Him, forces which otherwise stream into man unconsciously during sleep, streamed to the disciples as illuminating, life-giving forces of the Cosmos itself. To characterize these forces in any detail is of course only possible by studying the difference in cosmic constellations, and it is this mystery, as presented in the Gospel of St. Matthew, to which we shall give attention to-day. In the first place, however, it must be realised that the disciples had inevitably become wiser in regard to conditions on Earth because thc powers and forces of Christ Jesus had poured upon them. In diverse ways and degrees they had become more mature, had acquired more living wisdom.

A very significant phenomenon in the development of one of the disciples is presented to us, but to be understood it must be contemplated in a vast setting. And here the fact must be kept firmly in mind that the individual man himself progresses together with evolving humanity. In the post-Atlantean era we have passed through incarnation after incarnation in the ancient Indian, the ancient Persian, the Egypto-Chaldean and the Greco-Latin civilization-epochs, in order to receive some-thing from the environment and the prevailing conditions of the times. That is how progress is made.

What does development through the epochs of human evolution really mean? From elementary Anthroposophy we know of the different members of man's being: physical body, etheric body, astral body, sentient soul, intellectual or mind-soul, spiritual or consciousness-soul. The higher members still to be developed are Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit, Spirit-Man. Something quite definite is achieved for each of these members in thc several epochs of post-Atlantean civilization. Thus in the first epoch, forces enhancing the capacities of the etheric body were instilled into man. Such forces had been implanted in his physical body during the last periods of the Atlantean era and the first gifts to be bestowed in the post-Atlantean era were those imparted to the etheric body during the epoch of ancient Indian culture. During the epoch of ancient Persia, forces were implanted in man's astral body, or sentient body; during the Egypto-Chaldean and Greco-Latin epochs in the sentient soul and intellectual or mind-soul respectively; and we are living now in the age when the forces connected with this line of progress are gradually to be instilled into the spiritual or consciousness-soul. No very great advance has yet been made in this respect. In the future sixth post-Atlantean epoch the forces of the Spirit-Self will be implanted in human nature, and in the seventh epoch those of the Life-Spirit. And then we glimpse a far, far distant future, when Spirit-Man, or Atma, is to be inculcated into normal human nature.

We will now think of this process of development in relation to the individual human being. Those who knew the truth of these things from the Mysteries always pictured man as we must picture him now and as the disciples too had to learn to picture him through the enlightenment that had come to them from Christ Jesus. In a human being—either as he is to-day or also as he was at the time of Christ Jesus—there are rudiments or seeds, just as there are in a plant; they are already present when the plant has developed only leaves, and not yet flower and fruit. Looking at such a plant we know that although it now has leaves only, there already lie within it the germinal beginnings of flower and fruit, and that these will develop if growth proceeds in the normal and regular way. As surely as flower and fruit will grow out of the plant although at first it has green leaves only, as surely will the consciousness-soul arise in the human being—who in the days of Christ Jesus had developed only the sentient soul and the intellectual or mind-soul. The consciousness-soul then prepares to receive the Spirit-Self, in order that the highest triad may come as a new divine-spiritual gift to man. Therefore we can say: Through the contents and qualities of his soul, man's development is like that of a plant which, to begin with, has green leaves only but subsequently both flower and fruit. Out of sentient soul, mind-soul and spiritual or consciousness-soul, man unfolds something like a flower of his being, holding it in readiness to receive a divine power that comes down to him from above—this power being the Spirit-Self which enables him to reach further stages along the path leading to the heights of evolution.

In men who were living at the time of Christ Jesus the intellectual or mind-soul had developed in the perfectly normal way as their highest soul-principle; but although the intellectual or mind-soul was not able to receive into itself the Spirit-Self, there was to develop, as the child of the intellectual soul, the spiritual or consciousness-soul into which the Spirit-Self could descend.

What was the expression used in the Mysteries when referring to this flower that was to unfold from man's own nature? How was this growth defined in the environment of Christ Jesus when it was a matter of indicating that the disciples were to make a true advance in their development? Translated into our language, the expression used was ‘Son of Man’. The Greek has by no means the restricted meaning of our ‘son’ as ‘son of a father’ but signifies the successor of a living being, an entity that evolves from a living being like the blossom or flower of a plant on which hitherto there have been leaves only. Hence in the era before normally developed men had unfolded the consciousness-soul as the flower of their nature they had nothing of the ‘Son of Man’ in them. But there must always be some who are in advance of their generation, who already bear within them in an earlier epoch the knowledge and potentialities of a later one. In the fourth epoch—when normally only the intellectual or mind-soul had developed—there would always have been some among the leaders of men who, although their outward appearance was similar to that of others, had already unfolded the seed of the spiritual or consciousness-soul into which the Spirit-Self sends its radiance.—And there were indeed such ‘Sons of Men’. Hence it behooved the disciples of Christ Jesus to recognize and learn to understand the nature of these leaders.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

To test how far this was understood by His intimate disciples, Christ Jesus asked them: Tell me, of which human beings it can be said that they are ‘Sons of Men’ in this generation?—That is approximately how the question would have to be formulated in accordance with the original Aramaic text of St. Matthew's Gospel. (I have already said that although the Greek version, if it is thoroughly understood, is certainly better than that produced by any modern scholarship, a great deal was inevitably obscured in the process of translation from the Aramaic original.) We must picture Christ Jesus standing before His disciples and asking them: Which individuals of the previous generations in the Greco-Latin epoch are held to have been ‘Sons of Men’? The disciples then spoke of Elias, John the Baptist, Jeremias, and other prophets. Through the power transmitted to them by Christ the disciples knew that those leaders of men had been the recipients of forces enabling them to become bearers of the ‘Son of Man’. On the same occasion, the disciple who is usually called Peter, gave still another answer.

To understand this answer we must keep firmly in mind what has been said in these lectures about the mission of Christ Jesus as indicated in the Gospel of St. Matthew, namely that through the Christ Impulse it was possible for men to develop Ego-consciousness in the fullest sense, to bring to blossom what is implicit in the am'. In other words : even in the actual process of Initiation, men were in future to retain all along the paths leading into the higher worlds the full Ego-consciousness normally possessed only on the physical plane. This was made possible through Christ's existence on the Earth. We can therefore say: Christ Jesus is the representative, the embodiment, of the power which imparts to mankind full consciousness of the ‘I am.’

I have already called attention to the fact that the interpretations of the Gospels put forward by rationalists, let alone by declared sceptics, do not usually emphasize the points of real significance. It is insisted that certain phrases in the Gospels and other books of the Bible were in existence previously, for example the Beatitudes. But the shade of meaning that was not there previously—and this is the gist of the whole matter—is that what could not then be attained by the human being in full Ego-consciousness, could now be attained by him through the Christ Impulse! This is of the very greatest significance. I have spoken of each Beatitude and have shown that the words of the first should be: ‘Blessed are they who are beggars for the spirit’—because a man is poor in spirit who on account of the advancing evolution of human consciousness can no longer look into the spiritual world with the old clairvoyance. But to such men Christ gives this consolation and enlightenment: Although they can no longer see into the spiritual world with the organs of the old clairvoyance, vision of the world will now be possible through their own Ego, for through themselves they will find the Kingdoms of Heaven! So too the second Beatitude: ‘Blessed are they that mourn.’ They will no longer be dependent upon the faculty of the old clairvoyance for reaching the spiritual world, for they will now achieve this by developing their own Ego. But in order that this may come to pass the Ego must take into itself more and more of the power that was anchored once on Earth in a unique Being—in Christ.

Men of the modern age ought really to give a little thought to the following.—It is not for nothing that Greek words of vital importance occur in every Beatitude: Thus the first sentence, ‘Blessed are they who are beggars for the spirit’, should be followed by the words: ‘In themselves’—or ‘through themselves’—‘they will find the Kingdoms of Heaven.’ The words, ‘In themselves’ are always accentuated, in the second sentence, in the third, and so on.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

Forgive me if by a trivial analogy I now call attention to something of importance at the present time. People will have to resolve not to apply the word ‘auton’—as in our automobile—to machines only or to take it in an entirely external sense. They will have to understand in a spiritual sense too the quality or activity implied by ‘self-engendered activity’. Our contemporaries would do well to take this admonition to heart. They welcome ‘self-engendered activity’ in machines, but they should also learn what this activity implies in regard to inner experience which in all the Mysteries was beyond the reach of Ego-consciousness until the time of the Christ Event. Through self-engendered activity, man himself is now able by degrees to become a creator. And this is what the men of to-day will learn to under-stand if they fill themselves with the Christ Impulse.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

Keeping this in mind we shall realise that another question put by Christ Jesus to the disciples was of very special importance. He had first asked: Who among the leaders of a former generation could be called a ‘Son of Man’?—and the disciples had spoken of certain individuals. He then put a further question, wishing to bring them gradually to the point of understanding His own nature, of understanding what He represented in regard to Egohood. This is implicit in the other question: ‘But whom say ye that I am?’ (Matt. XVI, 15). (Special importance must in every instance be attached to the words ‘I am’ in the Gospel of St. Matthew.) The answer given by Peter showed that he now recognized Christ not only as a ‘Son of Man’ but as the ‘Son of the living God’—and this translation can well be retained.

What is the difference between ‘Son of the living God’ and ‘Son of Man’? To understand this, certain facts already known to us must be elaborated.

As man evolves, the spiritual or consciousness-soul develops in him; in the consciousness-soul the Spirit-Self can become manifest. But when the consciousness-soul has developed in a man, Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit and Spirit-Man must as it were come towards him, in order that this opening flower of his being may receive the higher triad. This ascent of man can also be likened to the development and growth of a plant.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

Man's being comes to flower in the spiritual or consciousness-soul and Spirit-Self or Manas, Life-Spirit or Budhi, and Spirit-Man or Atma, stream towards him. This may be likened to a process of spiritual fertilization from above. Whereas man grows upwards from below with the other members of his being, unfolding the flower that is the ‘Son of Man’, if he is to progress even further and acquire full Ego-consciousness there must come to him from above the gift of Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit and Spirit-Man. And who is the representative of this gift from above, pointing to what man's nature will be in a far, far distant future? The first gift received is the Spirit-Self. He who receives the Spirit-Self coming from above—of whom is he the representative? He is the representative, the Son, of the God who lives, the Son of the Life-Spirit, the Son of the living God!

And now Christ Jesus asks: What is it that must come to men through my impulse?—It is the life-giving, Spirit-principle from above! Thus a distinction must be made between the Son of Man who has grown upwards from below the Son of God, the Son of the living God, who comes down from above. But the difficulty of this question for the disciples will be apparent to you when you realise that they were the very first to receive what the simplest of men since the time of Christ Jesus have received through the Gospels. It was only the living forces of Christ Jesus that enabled the disciples to assimilate all this teaching. The faculties they had already developed were not capable of answering the question: Of whom am I myself the representative? The Gospel then records that one of the disciples, Peter by name, gave the answer: ‘Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God!’ At the moment of its utterance, this was an answer that did not issue from Peter's normal spiritual faculties.

Let us try to picture the scene vividly.—As He gazed at Peter, Christ Jesus realised the great significance of the fact that there should have come from this mouth an answer pointing to an immeasurably distant future. And then, perceiving the actual range of Peter's consciousness and of powers sufficiently developed to enable him to give such an answer through his intellect or through faculties acquired at stages leading to Initiation, Christ Jesus was bound to affirm: This answer does not spring from Peter's conscious knowledge; it is those deeper powers, only gradually transformed by man into conscious powers, that arc speaking here.

Through transforming the forces of our astral, etheric and physical bodies we rise to Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit and Spirit-Man. This is an elementary teaching of Spiritual Science. The forces We shall eventually unfold in the astral body as Spirit-Self are already within the astral body, but they are there by the grace of divine-spiritual Powers; their development is not due to our own efforts and activity. So too there is divine Life-Spirit within our etheric body. Hence Christ says to Peter: It is not what is in your consciousness at this moment that spoke from your mouth, but something you will develop only in the future, something that is indeed within you but of which as yet you know nothing. What is part of your flesh and blood is not yet capable of uttering the words: ‘Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.’ Divine-spiritual powers lying deeply below the threshold of consciousness—indeed the very deepest powers in human nature—were speaking out of you at that moment.—It was the mysterious higher Powers in Peter—called by Christ the ‘Father in Heaven’—the Powers out of which Peter had indeed been born but of which he was not yet conscious, that spoke out of him. Hence the saying: ‘This has been revealed to you by the Father in Heaven, not by what you are at present as a man of flesh and blood.’

In these circumstances Christ was bound to say to Himself: ‘In Peter I have a disciple whose whole constitution is such that the Father-power within him has not yet been touched by forces already engendered by consciousness, by the operations of spiritual activity; this subconscious power is so strong in Peter that it can be his sure foundation when he surrenders himself to it. This is the important quality in him. It is also present in every human being, but will be raised into the conscious state only in the future. If what I have to impart to mankind, if that for which I am the impulse, is to unfold and lay hold of men, it must be founded upon the utterance made through the mouth of Peter: ‘Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God!’ Upon this rock in human nature, unharmed as yet by the surging waves of consciousness, upon the Father-power voicing itself in those words, I will build what must spring with ever-increasing strength from my impulse.’—

When this foundation is established, the humanity embodying the Christ Impulse will arise.—This is implicit in the words: ‘Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build that which can create a community of men faithful to the Christ Impulse!’

Glib discussions and debates about these words in St. Matthew's Gospel take place to-day, for nearly all over the world they are the subject of controversy. They must indeed not be taken lightly. They can be understood only when their meaning is drawn from the depths of the wisdom that is the wisdom of the Mysteries.

And now something else is indicated, namely that Christ Jesus does indeed build upon the deeper, subconscious power in Peter. Immediately afterwards He begins to speak of what is about to befall, and of the Mystery of Golgotha. The moment has already passed when the deeper nature in Peter was speaking; he now gives utterance to what has already become conscious in him. Now he cannot understand what Christ means, cannot believe that suffering and death are to ensue. And when the Peter who has developed his own conscious faculties is speaking, Christ must reprove him, saying: This is not uttered by a Divinity within you but by faculties you have developed in yourself as a human being; what these faculties have here produced is worthless, for its source is delusion; it comes from Ahriman, from Satan!—This is implied in the words: ‘Get thee behind me, Satan. Thou art an offence unto me; for thou savourest not the things that be of God but those that be of men.’ (Matt. XVI, 23). Christ uses the word ‘Satan’ for Ahriman, whereas elsewhere in the Bible the word ‘Devil’ applies to everything of a Luciferic nature. Christ uses the right word for the delusion to which Peter succumbs.

Such is the truth. But what does modern Bible exegesis make of these episodes? It has realised that Christ Jesus cannot have said to Peter at one minute: ‘You alone have recognized that a God is standing before you!’ and have called him ‘Satan’ the next. So some critics conclude that the word ‘Satan’ must have been interpolated at a later time and is therefore a falsification.—The fact of the matter is that the meaning attributed to this by modern philological research makes current opinion on the subject quite worthless. Only on the basis of a fundamental understanding of the Bible is it possible for any authentic statement to be made about the origins of the texts in question.

But between the two sayings I have quoted there is another, intelligible only in the light of an ancient, yet ever, new Mystery-teaching: that man as he is on Earth—not only the individual but every community of men—is a mirror-image of processes in the Macrocosm. Mention was made of this when we were speaking of the genealogy of Jesus of Nazareth. It was explained that the meaning of the words spoken to Abraham was: ‘Thy descendants shall be an image of the order of the stars in heaven.’ The order of the twelve constellations and of the movement of the planets through the Zodiac was to be repeated in the twelve tribes and in the history of the Hebrew people through three times fourteen generations. Thus in the sequence of the generations and the special heredity resulting from the blood-ties in the twelve tribes, there was to be an image of macrocosmic conditions. Such was the declaration made to Abraham.

At the moment when Peter, whose deeper nature had been able to understand that the Christ Impulse signified the down-flow of spiritual power through the Son of the living God—at that moment Christ knows that He can speak to those around Him of the beginning of something new arising on the Earth. Whereas it had been declared to Abraham that the image of cosmic conditions was to be formed by blood-kinship, this image was now to be replaced by one formed by relationships of an ethical, moral and spiritual character, giving expression to what man can attain through his Ego. When men understand, as the deeper nature in Peter understood, what the Christ truly is, they will not establish communities and institutions based entirely on the blood-tie but communities where the bond of love is woven from soul to soul. Just as in the blood of the Hebrew people and in the threads running through the generations, that which was ordained to be bound together in the human race was bound together and that which was ordained to be loosed was loosed according to the pattern of the Macrocosm, so there was now to arise through the conscious Ego, in the form of ethical, moral and spiritual relationships, the force that either looses the ties between human beings or binds them together in love. Human institutions were now to be created or harmonized by the conscious Ego. This is the meaning of the words spoken by Christ Jesus in continuation of the answer He had given to Peter: ‘Whatever you bind on Earth—whatever thc deeper nature in you binds—that shall be bound in Heaven, and whatever the same deeper nature in you looses on the Earth below, shall also be loosed in Heaven’ (see Matt. XVI, 19).

In ancient times the all-important factor in associations among human beings was blood-relationship. But men must now grow to the stage where the ties of real significance are of a spiritual, moral and ethical character. From this it follows that a community must mean something for an individual who has been a contributory factor in the founding of it. In the sense of Anthroposophy, we can say: the karma of the individual must be merged with the karma of communities. This will be known to you from what has been said in recent years. The idea of karma is not repudiated when I give something to one who is needy, nor when the karma. of an individual is shouldered for him by the community. The community can help to bear the fate of the individual. In other words, the following may happen in the moral sphere. A single member of a community commits a wrong. This will quite certainly be inscribed in his personal karma and be worked out in the great setting of world-existence. But someone else may come forward and say: ‘I will help you to work out this karma!’—The karma must be fulfilled, but the other person can help; whole communities can help the one who has committed a wrong. The karma of an individual may be so interwoven with the community that the community, regarding him as a member, deliberately shoulders§ the burden of his destiny, feeling for him and resolving that his lot shall be ameliorated. The attitude of the community may be: You, as an individual, have done wrong, but we will enter the lists for you; we take upon ourselves whatever will bring about the adjustment of your karma!—If ‘church’ is substituted for ‘community’, this means that the church assumes the obligation to take upon itself the sins of the individual, to share the burden of his karma. It is not a matter of what is to-day called ‘forgiveness of sins’, but of a real bond, an acceptance of the burden of sins. And the essential point is that the community consciously accepts this burden.

If the ‘binding’ and ‘loosing’ are understood in thiS sense, every case of forgiveness of Sins would entail an obligation on the part of the community. Thus a web is spun by the threads of individual karma being woven into the karma of the whole community. And this web, through what Christ brought down from the heights of the Spirit, is to be an image of the order prevailing in Heaven; that is to say, the karma of the individual is not to be bound with the collective karma in any fortuitous way but so that the community as an organism shall become an image of the order prevailing in Heaven.

This scene of Peter's avowal now begins to reveal an infinitely profound meaning to those who have a dawning understanding of it. It denotes the founding of thc humanity of the future—a humanity based upon the Ego-nature in man. What takes place in this intimate conversation between Christ and those who were closest to Him is that Christ transmits the power He Himself has brought from the Macrocosm to what the disciples are to establish. And from this point onwards the Gospel of St. Matthew recounts how the disciples are led upwards, step by step, to the stage where the powers of the Sun and of the Cosmos gathered together in the Christ Being can flow into them. We know that one form of Initiation is an expansion into the Macrocosm. And because Christ Himself is the impulse in this Initiation, He leads His disciples out into the Cosmos. While an individual aspirant is undergoing the process of this Initiation he passes consciously into the Macrocosm, gathering knowledge of it by degrees. Christ descends as it were from the Macrocosm, makes manifest its instreaming forces and conveys them to thc disciples.

In one part of the lecture yesterday I indicated how this takes place. Let us picture the scene as graphically as possible. While a man is asleep his physical and etheric bodies lie in the bed while his astral body and Ego pass out into the Cosmos and the forces of the Cosmos pour into these members of his being. If Christ were now to approach, He would be the One who consciously draws these forces to the sleeping man and illumines him. This is exactly what happens in a scene described in the Gospel. The disciples are in a ship in the fourth watch of the night. Then they see that the figure they had at first taken to be a spirit, is Christ, who enables the forces and power of thc Macrocosm to flow into them. How He leads the disciples to the stage where they can receive the forces of the Macrocosm is clearly portrayed.

The next scenes in St. Matthew's Gospel show how Christ leads the disciples step by step along the path taken by every would-be Initiate. It is as if Christ Himself is treading this path, leading His disciples by the hand to Initiation.—I will now say something that will enable you to realise how the disciples are led stage by stage into the Macrocosm.

Many things previously beyond man's ken become known to him through visions of the spiritual world, through clairvoyant faculties. Thus, for example, he is able to recognize the actual processes operating in the growth of plants. A materialist will say of a plant: Here I have a flower—let us say it is a fruit-bearing plant—and a seed will form in it. The seed can be extracted and laid in the soil; the grain eventually dissolves and a new plant, again bearing seed, appears. And so the process continues. Something passes over from the dissolving grain of seed into the new plant.—A materialist cannot possibly think otherwise than that something material, however minute, passes over. But it is not so. The truth is that in respect of its material, its substance, the old plant is entirely destroyed. A jump (Sprung) takes place and the new plant is an entirely new formation—in respect of material substance an absolutely new formation.

Facts of the very greatest importance are recognized and understood when this remarkable law is grasped. Jumps do actually occur in material conditions. This was expressed in the Mysteries in a very definite way. It was said: In passing into the Cosmos the aspirant for Initiation must at a certain stage acquire knowledge of the forces that bring about these ‘jumps’. Now certain processes in the Cosmos can be understood if the constellations are used as means of indication. The constellations are then like letters of a script. When we pass into the Cosmos in a particular direction we come to know the jumps that occur from forefather to successor—whether it be in the plant, animal or human kingdoms, or even in the realm of planetary existence. At the transitions of Saturn-evolution to Sun-evolution, of Sun-evolution to Moon-evolution, of Moon-evolution to Earth-evolution, everything material passed away. The spiritual remained and it was the spiritual that brought about the jumps. In small things and in great it is the same.

Two symbols have been used for this principle, one ancient and of a more pictorial, imaginative character, and another rather newer. You can find the newer symbol in calendars. As evolution advances, the past curls inwards like a vortex and the new phase emerges as a second vortex, unfolding from within outwards and leading on further. But the new phase is not actually joined to the old; between the end of the old phase and the beginning of the new there is a little ‘jump’ or ‘gap’ and only then does the process of evolution continue.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

In the above figure we have two intertwining vortices and between them a little gap. This is the zodiacal sign of Cancer, symbolizing the process of growing out into the Macrocosm and the birth of a new shoot in some phase of evolution.

This principle was also represented by another symbol. Strange as it may seem to you, the symbol was an ass and its foal, the forefather and his offspring. This was meant to represent the actual transition from one condition to the other. Ancient delineations of the constellation of Cancer often consist of the figure of an ass and its foal. To know this is by no means without importance. It helps us to understand that another significant transition takes place when a man is rising to the stage leading into the spiritual world but must then be prepared for entirely new revelations. The stellar symbol correctly indicates this by portraying how when the physical sun passes through the constellation of Cancer and reaches the zenith, it descends again. And when the aspirant for Initiation first makes the ascent into the spiritual world and has acquired knowledge of its forces, he brings them down again in order to turn them to the service of humanity.

The Gospel of St. Matthew and the other Gospels too, tell how Christ Jesus presents this truth to the disciples. The way in which the story is told indicates that He is not using words alone but is presenting to them the Imagination, the living picture, of what He Himself is accomplishing as He approaches the height to which evolving humanity must in time ascend. He uses the image of the ass and its foal; that is to say, He guides the disciples towards an understanding of what corresponds in the spiritual life to the constellation of Cancer. This is a picture of something that has come to pass in the living, spiritual relationship between Christ and His disciples. So great is its majesty and its splendour that it cannot be expressed in the words of any human language but only through Christ Himself initiating the disciples into the conditions prevailing in the spiritual world and creating in physical conditions images of the Macrocosm He leads them to the point where the powers of one who is initiated become, in turn, of service to mankind. He is standing at the height that can only be indicated by the image of the Sun at the zenith of the sign of Cancer! No wonder that this chapter (XXI) of the Gospel of St. Matthew points to the supreme height now reached in Christ's earthly life, triumphantly proclaimed by the words: ‘Hosanna in the highest!’ Everything is ordained to the end that through what has here come to pass the disciples may grow to the stage where through the powers working in them there may unfold in men what Christ Jesus has brought into the evolution of humanity.

The story of the feast of the Passover is nothing else than an account of the living influx of the power that was to stream into the disciples, first as teaching and then into humanity as if by magic, as an outcome of the Mystery of Golgotha. It is in this light that the continuation of the story, in the Gospel of St. Matthew is to be understood. Then we shall also realise that the writer of the Gospel was perpetually conscious of the need to point to the contrast between the living teaching brought from cosmic heights and imparted to the disciples, and the teaching suitable for those who were not yet ready to receive the forces of Christ Jesus Himself. Hence the utterances in the conversations with the Scribes and Pharisees which we shall be studying tomorrow. To-day, however, we will remind ourselves that after Christ Jesus has guided His disciples as far as possible along the path leading to the goal of all aspirants for Initiation, He holds out thc prospect that if they tread this path they themselves will pass into the spiritual world, into the Macrocosm. He tells them that they have within them the qualities necessary for subsequent Initiation, that Initiation is in store for them and that they will find the way into that world where they will recognize Christ more and more clearly as the Being who fills all spiritual space and was imaged in Jesus of Nazareth. Christ says to His disciples that they are approaching this Initiation, that they will become Initiates of humanity. He reminds them too that individual Initiation can be attained only if by dint of patience and endurance the inner nature is allowed to mature.

What is it that must grow in man's inner nature as its forces increase in strength and he develops a higher form of clairvoyance? His qualities must mature to the stage where he can receive into himself the forces of Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit and Spirit-Man. But when the power that makes him an Initiate, a participant in the Kingdoms of Heaven, will stream into him from above, depends upon the moment when he can become fully mature; it depends upon the karma of the individual. Who knows when the moment has come? It is known only to the very highest initiates, not to those at lower stages of Initiation. For any individuality who is ready to reach the spiritual world, the hour comes when he does so. Assuredly the hour comes, but in such a way that he is not aware of it—it comes like a thief in the night !

How does a man reach the spiritual world? In the ancient Mysteries—and in a certain respect it is so in the new—there were three stages of Initiation into the Macrocosm. When the first stage had been attained by the aspirant, the powers of the Spirit-Self became active in him and now he was not only a new man but had become one whose nature was said to be that of an ‘Angel—that is to say, a Being of the Hierarchy immediately above man. In the Mysteries of ancient Persia, a man possessing the powers of the Spirit-Self was called a ‘Persian’ because he was no longer a separate individual but belonged to the Angel of the Persian people. At the next stage of Initiation the Life-Spirit awakens. A man who had reached this stage was called a ‘Sun Hero’ in the Persian Mysteries, because he had developed to thc stage where he could receive the spiritual forces of the Sun streaming towards the Earth. But such a man was also called a ‘Son of the Father’. And one with whom Atma, or Spirit-Man, had made contact was called ‘Father’ in the ancient Mysteries. The three stages of Initiation were: Angel, Son or Sun Hero, Father.

Only the very highest Initiates, they and they alone are able to judge when the moment of Initiation can be reached. Hence Christ speaks to the following effect.—Initiation will be attained if you go forward on the paths along which I have led you. You will rise into the Kingdoms of Heaven, but the hour is known neither to the Angels in whom the Spirit-Self is working, neither to the Son in whom the Life-Spirit has awakened, but only to the very highest Initiates, those in whom the Father-principle is active.

Here again the words of St. Matthew's Gospel (XXIV, 36) are in absolute conformity with the tradition originating in the Mysteries. And we shall find that the proclamation of the Kingdom of Heaven is nothing else than the prediction to the disciples that they will experience initiation. Christ Jesus indicates this very clearly in the text of the Gospel of St. Matthew. If the relevant passage is correctly interpreted it is quite evident that Christ is referring to certain teachings in circulation at that time on the subject of reaching the Kingdoms of Heaven. Men had taken this in the material sense, believing that it applied to the whole Earth, whereas they ought to have known that the Kingdoms of Heaven are reached by a few individuals only, through their Initiation. In other words, the opinion was held by some that the Earth would be transformed in a material sense into Heaven. And Christ draws special attention to this by speaking of the coming of those who would proclaim it. He calls them false prophets and false Messiahs! How strange it is that even to-day a few so-called Gospel critics spread the fable that the prospect of an approaching material Kingdom of God was a teaching given by Christ Jesus Himself ! Anyone able to read the Gospel of St. Matthew correctly knows that Christ Jesus was referring to a spiritual happening within the eventual reach of one who is approaching Initiation, but in the course of Earth-evolution becoming accessible to all those members of humanity who cleave to Him and in attaining higher stages of development bring about the spiritualisation of the Earth itself.

This aspect too must give us deeper insight into the structure of St. Matthew's Gospel. We shall then feel profound reverence for a Gospel from which, as from no other, we can learn unmistakably how the disciples of Christ Jesus were the first to receive teaching that was directed to the Ego itself. We picture Christ's disciples standing around Him and perceive how the forces of the Cosmos are working through the human body He bore. We picture Him guiding His disciples in a way that enables them to acquire the knowledge accessible to all who are approaching Initiation. We hear of human situations formed around Him. This is what makes St. Matthew's Gospel seem so near to us in a human sense. Through this Gospel we learn to know the man Jesus of Nazareth, the bearer of the Christ; we learn to know what Christ accomplished through His descent into the nature of Man. Even happenings in the heavenly worlds are presented in terms of human situations and relationships in the Gospel of St. Matthew.

In the final lecture tomorrow these things will be considered not only from the aspect of Initiation but from other aspects as well.

We shall encounter again and again, in the course of our reflections, the difficulty of keeping in our mind's eye ever more exactly the exterior organism of man, in order that we may learn to know the transitory, the perishable. But we shall also see that this very road will lead us to a knowledge of the imperishable, the eternal in human nature. Also it will be necessary, in order to attain this goal, to sustain the effort of looking upon the exterior human organism in all reverence, as a revelation of the spiritual world.

When once we have permeated ourselves in some measure with spiritual-scientific concepts and feelings, we shall come quite easily to the thought that the human organism in its stupendous complexity must be the most significant expression, the greatest and most important manifestation, of those forces which live and weave as Spirit throughout the world. We shall, indeed, have to find our way upward ever more and more from the outer to the inner.

We have already seen that external observations, both from the point of view of the layman and from that of the scientific inquirer, must lead us to look upon man in a certain sense as a duality. We have characterised this duality of the human being—only hastily yesterday, to be sure, for we shall have to go into this still more accurately—as being enclosed within the protecting bony sheath of the skull and the spinal vertebrae. We have seen that, if we ascend beyond the exterior form of this part of man, we may gain a preliminary view of the connection between the life which we call our waking life of day, and that other life, in the first place very full of uncertainty for us, which we call the life of dreams. And we have seen that the external forms of that portion of human nature which we have described give us a kind of image, signify in a way a revelation, on the one hand of dream-life, the chaotic life of pictures; and on the other hand the waking day life, which is endowed with the capacity to observe in sharp outlines.

To-day we shall first cast a fleeting glance over that part of the human duality which may be found outside the region we had in mind yesterday. Even the most superficial glance over this second portion of the human being can teach us that this portion really presents a picture in a certain respect the opposite of the other one. In the brain and the spinal cord we have the bony formation as the outer circumference, the covering. If we consider the other portion of man's nature, we are surely obliged to say that here we have the bony formation disposed rather more within the organs. And yet this would be only a very superficial observation. We shall be carried deeper into the construction of this other portion of man's nature if, for the moment, we keep the most important systems of organs apart one from another, and compare them, first, outwardly, with what we learned yesterday.

The systems of organs, or systems of instruments, of the human organism to be considered first in this connection, must be the apparatus of nutrition and all that lies between this apparatus and that wonderful structure the heart, which we readily experience as a sort of central point of the whole human organism... And here even a superficial glance shows us at once that these systems of instruments, especially the apparatus of nutrition as we may call it in everyday speech, are intended to take in the substances of our external, earthly world and prepare them for further digestive work in the physical organism of man. We know that this apparatus of digestion begins by extending downward from the mouth, in the form of a tube, to the organ which everyone knows as the stomach. And a superficial observation teaches us that, from those articles of food which are conveyed through this canal into the stomach, the portions which are to a certain extent unassimilated are simply excreted, whereas other portions are carried over by the remaining digestive organs into the organism of the human body.

It is also well known that, adjoining the actual digestive apparatus in the narrower sense of the term, and for the purpose of taking over from it in a transformed condition the nutritive substances with which it has been supplied, is what we may call the lymph-system. I shall at this point speak merely in outline. We may repeat accordingly that, adjoining the apparatus of nutrition in so far as this is attached chiefly to the stomach, there is this system of organs called the lymph-system, consisting of a number of canals, which in their turn spread over the whole body; and that this system takes over, in a certain way, what has been worked over by the rest of the digestive apparatus, and delivers it into the blood.

And then we have the third of these systems of organs, the blood-vessel system itself, with its larger and smaller tubes extending throughout the entire human organism and having the heart as the central point of all its work. We know also that, going out from the heart, those blood-vessels or blood-filled vessels which are called arteries, convey the blood to all parts of our organism; that the blood goes through a certain process in the separate parts of the human organism, and then is carried back to the heart by means of other similar vessels which bring it back, however, in a transformed condition as so called “blue blood” in contrast to its red state. We know that this transformed blood, no longer useful for our life, is conducted from the heart into the lungs; that it there comes into contact with the oxygen taken up from the outer air; and that, by means of this, it is renewed in the lungs and conducted back again to the heart, to go its way afresh throughout the whole human organism.

If we are to consider these systems in their completeness, in order to have in our external method of observation a foundation for the occult method, let us begin by holding to that system which must, at the very outset, obviously be for everyone the central system of the entire human organism, namely, the blood-and-heart system. Let us, moreover, keep in mind that after the stale blood has been freshened in the lungs, transformed from blue blood into red blood, it returns once more to the heart and then goes out again from the heart as red blood, to be used in the organism. Notice, that everything which I intend to draw will be in mere outline, so that we shall be dealing only with sketches.

Let us now briefly recall that the human heart is an organ which, properly speaking, consists in the first place of four parts or chambers, so separated by interior walls that one can distinguish between the two larger spaces lying below and the two smaller ones lying above, the two lower ones being the ventricles, as they are generally called, and the two upper ones the auricles. I shall not speak about the “valves” to-day, but shall rather call attention, quite sketchily, to the course of the most important organic activities. And here, to begin with, one thing is clear: after the blood has streamed out of the left auricle into the left ventricle, it flows off through a large artery and from this point is conducted through the entire remainder of the organism. Now, let us bear in mind that this blood is first distributed to every separate organ of the whole organism; that it is then used up in this organism so that it is changed into the so-called blue blood, and as such returns to the right auricle of the heart; and that from there it flows into the right ventricle in order that it may go out again from this into the lungs, there again to be renewed and take a fresh course throughout the organism.

When we begin to visualise all this it is important, as a basis for an occult method of study, that we also add the fact that what we may call a subsidiary stream branches out from the aorta very near the heart; that this subsidiary stream leads to the brain, thus providing for the upper organs, and from there leads back again in the form of stale blood into the right auricle; and that it is there transformed, as blood which has passed through the brain, so to speak, in the same way as that blood is transformed which comes from the remaining members of the organism. Thus we have a smaller, subsidiary circuit of the blood, in which the brain is inserted, separate from the other main circuit which provides for the entire remaining organism. Now, it is of extraordinary importance for us to bear this fact in mind. For we can only arrive at an important conception, affording us a basis for everything that will enable us to ascend to occult heights, if at this point we first ask ourselves the following question: In the same way in which the upper organs are inserted in the smaller circuit, is there something similar inserted within the circuit of the blood which provides for the rest of the organism. Here we come, as a matter of fact, to a conclusion which even the external, superficial method of study can supply, that is, that there is inserted in the large circuit of the blood the organ we call the spleen; that further on is inserted the liver; and, still further on, the organ which contains the gall prepared by the liver.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

Now, when we ask about the functions of these organs, external science answers by saying that the liver prepares the gall; that the gall flows out into the digestive canal, and takes part in digesting the food in such a way that this may then be taken up by the lymph-system and conducted over into the blood. Much less, however, does external science tell us with regard to the spleen, the third of the organs here considered as inserted in the main circuit. When we reflect upon these organs, we must first give attention to the fact that they have to occupy themselves with the preparation of the nutritive matter for the human organism; but that, on the other hand, they are all three inserted as organs into the circulatory course of the blood. It is not without reason that they are thus inserted, for, in so far as nutritive matter is taken up into the blood, to be conveyed by means of the blood to the human organism in order to continuously supply this with substances for its up-building, these three organs take part in the whole process of working over this nutritive matter.

Now arises the question: Can we already draw some sort of conclusion, from an external aspect, as to just how these organs take part in the joint activity of the human organism? Let us first fix our attention on this one external fact, namely, that these organs are inserted into the lower circulatory course of the blood in the same way in which the brain is inserted into the upper course; and let us now see for a moment, while first actually holding to this external method of study, which must later be deepened, whether it is possible that these organs really have a task similar to that of the brain. At the same time, wherein may such a task consist?

Let us begin by considering the upper portions of the human organism. It is these that receive the sense-impressions through the organs of sense, and work over the material contained in our sense-perceptions. We may say, therefore, that what takes place in the human head, in the upper part of the organism, is a working over of those impressions which flow in from outside through the sense-organs; and that what we may describe as the cause of everything that takes place in these upper parts is to be found in its essence in the external impressions or imprints. And, since these external impressions send their influences, together with what results from these influences in the working over of the outer impressions, into the upper organs of the organism, they therefore change the blood, or contribute to its change, and in their own way send this blood back to the heart transformed, just as the blood is sent back to the heart transformed from the rest of the organism.

Is it not obvious that we should now ask ourselves this other question: Since this upper part of the human organism opens outward by means of the sense-organs, opens doors to the outside world in the form of sense- organs, is there not a certain sort of correspondence between the working-in of the external world through these sense-organs upon the upper part of the human organism and that which works out of the three interior organs, the spleen, the liver, and the gall-bladder? Whereas, accordingly, the upper part of the organism opens outward in order to receive the influences of the outside world; and whereas the blood flows upwards, so to speak, in order to capture these impressions of the outside world, it flows downwards in order to take up what comes from these three organs. Thus we may say that, when we look out upon the world round about us, this world exercises its influence through our senses upon our upper organisation. And what thus flows in from outside, through the world of sense, we may think of as pressed together, contracted, as if into one centre; so that what flows into our organism from all sides is seen to be the same thing as that which flows out from the liver, the gall-bladder and the spleen, namely, transformed outside world. If you go further into this matter you will see that it is not such a very strange reflection.

Imagine to yourselves the different sense-impressions that stream into us; imagine these contracted, thickened or condensed, formed into organs and placed inside us. Thus the blood presents itself inwardly to the liver, gallbladder and spleen, in the same way as the upper part of the human organism presents itself to the outside world. And so we have the outside world which surrounds our sense-organs above, condensed as it were into organs that are placed in the interior of man, so that we may say: At one moment the world is working from outside, streaming into us, coming into contact with our blood in the upper organs, acting upon our blood; and the next moment that which is in the macrocosm works mysteriously in those organs into which it has first contracted itself, and there, from the opposite direction, acts upon our blood, presenting itself again in the same way as it does in the upper organs.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

If we were to draw a sketch of this, we could do it by imagining the world on the one hand, acting from all directions upon our senses, and the blood exposing itself like a tablet to the impressions of this world; that would be our upper organism. And now let us imagine that we could contract this whole outer world into single organs, thus forming an extract of this world; that we could then transfer this extract into our interior in such a way that what is working from all directions now acts upon the blood from the other side of the tablet. We should then have formed in a most extraordinary way a pictorial scheme of the exterior and the interior of the human organism. And we might already to a certain extent be able to say that the brain actually corresponds to our inner organism, in so far as this latter occupies the breast and the abdominal cavity. The world has, as it were been placed in our inner man.

Even in this organisation, which we distinguish as a subordinate one, and which serves primarily for the carrying forward of the process of nutrition, we have something so mysterious as the fusion of the whole outer cosmos into a number of inner organs, inner instruments. And, if we now observe these organs more closely for a moment, the liver, the gall-bladder, and the spleen, we shall be able to say that the spleen is the first of these to offer itself to the blood-stream. This spleen is a strange organisation, embedded in plethoric tissue, and in this tissue there is a great number of tiny little granules—something which, in contrast to the rest of the mass of tissue, has the appearance of little white granules.

When we observe the relation between the blood and the spleen, the latter appears to us like a sieve through which the blood passes in order that it may offer itself to an organ of the kind which, in a certain sense, is a shrivelled-up portion of the macrocosm. Again, the spleen stands in connection with the liver. At the next stage we see how the blood offers itself to the liver, and how the liver in its turn, as a third step, secretes the gall, which then goes over into the nutritive substances, and from there comes with the transformed nutritive substances into the blood.

This offering of itself on the part of the blood to these three organs we cannot think of in any but the following way: The organ which first meets the blood is the spleen, the second is the liver, and the third is the gallbladder, which has really a very complicated relation to the entire blood system, in that the gall is given over to the food and takes part in its digestion. On such grounds, the occultists of all times have given certain names to these organs. Now, I beg of you most earnestly not to think of anything special for the time being in connection with these names, but rather to think of them only as names that were originally given to these organs and to disregard the fact that the names signify also something else in connection with these organs. Later on we shall see why just these names were chosen. Because the spleen is the first of the three organs to present itself to the blood—we can say this by way of a purely external comparison—it appeared to the occultists of old to be best designated by the name belonging to that star which, to these ancient occultists and their observations, was the first within our solar system to show itself in cosmic space. For this reason they called the spleen “saturnine,” or an inner Saturn in man; and, similarly, the liver they called an inner Jupiter; and the gallbladder, an inner Mars. Let us begin by thinking of nothing in connection with these names, except that we have chosen them because we have arrived at the concept, at first hypothetical, that the external worlds, which otherwise are accessible rather to our senses, have been contracted into these organs and that in these organs inner worlds, so to speak, come to meet us, just as outer worlds meet us in the planets. We may now be able to say that, just as the external worlds show themselves to our senses in that they press in upon us from outside, so do these inner worlds show themselves as acting upon the blood-system in that they influence that for which the blood-system is there.

We shall find, to be sure, a significant difference between what we spoke of yesterday as the peculiarities of the human brain and that which here appears to us as a sort of inner cosmic system. This difference lies simply in the fact that man, to begin with, knows nothing about what takes place within his lower organism: that is, he knows nothing about the impressions which the inner worlds, or planets, as we may call them, make upon him, whereas the very characteristic of the other experience is that the outer worlds do make their impressions upon his consciousness. In a certain respect, therefore, we may call these inner worlds the realm of the unconscious, in contrast to the conscious realm we have learned to know in the life of the brain.

Now, precisely that which lies in this “conscious” and this “unconscious” is more clearly explained when we employ something else to assist us. We all know that external science states that the organ of consciousness is the nerve-system, together with all that pertains to it. Now we must bear in mind, as a basis for our occult study, a certain relationship which the nerve-system has to the blood-system, that is, to what we have to-day considered in a sketchy way. We then see that our nerve-system everywhere enters in certain ways into relation with our blood-system, that the blood everywhere presses upon our nerve-system. Moreover, we must here first take notice of something which external science in this connection holds to be already established. This science looks upon it as a settled matter that in the nerve-system is to be found the sole and entire regulator of all activity of consciousness, of everything, that is, which we characterise as “soul-life.” We cannot here refrain from recalling, although at first only by way of allusion for the purpose of authenticating this later on, that for the occultist the nerve-system exists only as a sort of basis for consciousness. For precisely in the same way that the nerve-system is a part of our organism and comes into contact with the blood-system, or at least bears a certain relation to it, so do the ego and that which we call the astral body make themselves a part of the whole human being. And even an external observation, which has frequently been employed in my lectures, can show us that the nerve-system is in a certain way a manifestation of the astral body. Through such an observation we can see that, in the case of ordinary inanimate beings in nature, we can ascribe only a physical body to that part of their being which they present to us. When, however, we ascend from inanimate, inorganic natural bodies to animate natural bodies, to organisms, we are obliged to suppose that these organisms are permeated by the so-called ether-body, or life-body, which contains in itself the causes of the phenomena of life. We shall see later on that anthroposophy, or occultism, does not speak of the ether-body, or life-body, in the same way that people in the past spoke of “life-force.” Rather does anthroposophy, when it speaks of the ether-body, speak of some thing which the spiritual eye actually sees, that is, of something real underlying the external physical body. When we consider the plants we are obliged to attribute to them an ether-body. And, if we ascend from the plants to sentient beings, to the animals, we find that it is this element of sentiency, of inner life, or, better still, of inner experience, which primarily differentiates the animal externally from the plant. If mere life-activity, which cannot yet sense itself inwardly, cannot yet attain to the kindling of feeling, is to be able to kindle feeling, to sense life inwardly, the astral body must become a part of the animal's organism. And in the nerve-system, which the plants do not yet have, we must recognise the external instrument of the astral body, which in turn is the spiritual prototype of the nerve-system. As the archetype is related to its manifestation, to its image, so is the astral body related to the nerve-system.

Now when we come to man—and I said yesterday that in occultism our task is not as simple as it is for the external scientific method in which everything can, so to speak, be jumbled together—we must always, when we study the human organs, be aware of the fact that these organs, or systems of organs, are capable of being put to certain uses for which the corresponding systems of organs in the animal organism, even when these appear similar, cannot be used. At this point we shall merely affirm in advance what will appear later as having a still more profound basis, that, in the case of man, we must designate the blood as an external instrument for the ego, for all that we denote as our innermost soul-centre, the ego; so that in the nerve-system we have an external instrument of the astral body, and in our blood an external instrument of the ego. Just as the nerve-system in our organism enters into certain relations with the blood, so do those inner regions of the soul which we experience in ourselves as concepts, feelings or sensations, etc., enter into a certain relation with our ego.

The nerve-system is differentiated in the human organism in manifold ways the inner nerve-fibres for example, at the points where these develop into nerves of hearing, of seeing, etc., show us how diverse are its differentiations. Thus the nerve-system is something that reaches out everywhere through the organism in such a way as to comprise the most manifold inner diversities. When we observe the blood as it streams through the organism it shows us, even taking into account the transformation from red into blue blood, that it is, nevertheless, a unity in the whole organism. Having this character of unity, it comes into contact with the differentiated nerve-system, just as does the ego with the differentiated soul-life, for it also is made up of conceptions, sensations, will-impulses, feelings and the like. The further you pursue this comparison—and it is given meanwhile only as a comparison—the more clearly you will be shown that a far-reaching similarity exists in the relations of the two archetypes, the ego and the astral body, to their respective images, the blood-system and the nerve-system. Now, of course, one may say at this point that blood is surely everywhere blood. At the same time, it undergoes a change in flowing through the organism; and consequently we can draw a parallel between these changes that take place in the blood and what goes on in the ego. But our ego is a unity. As far back as we can remember in our life between birth and death we can say: “This ego was always present, in our fifth year just as in our sixth year, yesterday just as to-day. It is the same ego.” And yet, if we now look into what this ego contains, we shall discover this fact: This ego that lives in me is filled with a sum-total of conceptions, sensations, feelings, etc., which are to be attributed to the astral body and which comes into contact with the ego. A year ago this ego was filled with a different content, yesterday it contained still another, and to-day its content is again different. Thus the ego, we see, comes into contact with the entire soul-content, streams through this entire soul-content. And, just as the blood streams through the whole organism and comes everywhere into contact with the differentiated nerve-system, so does the ego come together with the differentiated life of the soul, in conceptions, feelings, will-impulses and the like. Already, therefore, this merely comparative method of study shows us that there is a certain justification in looking upon the blood system as an image of the ego, and the nerve system as an image of the astral body, as higher, super-sensible members of the nature of man.

It is necessary for us to remember that the blood streams throughout the organism in the manner already indicated; that on the one side it presents itself to the outer world like a tablet facing the impressions of the outer world; on the other side, it faces what we have called the inner world. And so indeed it is with our ego also. We first direct this ego of ours toward the outside world and receive impressions from it. There results from this a great variety of content within the ego; it is filled with these impressions coming from outside. There are also such moments when the ego retires within itself and is given up to its pain and suffering, pleasure and happiness, inner feelings and so forth, when it permits to arise in the memory what it is not receiving at this moment directly through contact with the external world, but what it carries within itself. Thus, in this connection also, we find a parallel between the blood and the ego; for the blood, like a tablet, presents itself at one time to the outside world and at another time to the inner world; and we could accordingly represent this ego by a simple sketch [see earlier drawing] exactly as we have represented the blood. We can bring the external impressions which the ego receives, when we think of them as concepts, as soul-pictures in general, into the same sort of relation to the ego as that which we have brought about between our blood and the real external occurrences coming to us through the senses. That is, exactly as we have done in the case of the physical bodily life and the blood, so could we bring what is related to the soul-life into connection with the ego.

Let us now observe from this standpoint the cooperation, the mutual interaction, between the blood and the nerves. If we consider the eye, we see that outer impressions act upon this organ. The impressions of colour and light act upon the optic nerve. So long as they affect the optic nerve, having for themselves an active instrument in the nerve-system, we are able to affirm that they have an effect upon the astral body. We may state that, at the moment when a connection takes place between the nerves and the blood, the parallel process which takes place in the soul is, that the manifold conceptions within the life of the soul come into connection with the ego. When, therefore, we consider this relationship between the nerves and the blood, we may represent by another sketch how that which streams in from outside through the nerves when we see an object, forms a certain connection with those courses of the blood which come into the neighbourhood of the optic nerve.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

This connection is something of extraordinary importance for us, if we wish to observe the human organism in such a way that our observation shall provide a basis for arriving at the occult foundations of human nature. In ordinary life the process that takes place is such that each influence transmitted by means of the nerves inscribes itself in the blood, as on a tablet, and in doing so records itself in the instrument of the ego. Let us suppose for a moment, however, that we should artificially interrupt the connection between the nerve and the circulation of the blood, that is, that we should artificially put a man in such a condition that the activity of the nerve should be severed from the circulation of the blood, so that they could no longer act upon each other. We can indicate this by a diagram in which the two parts are shown more widely separated, so that a reciprocal action between the nerves and the blood can no longer take place. In this case the condition may be such that no impression can be made upon the nerve. Something of this sort can be brought about if, for example, the nerve is cut. If, indeed, it should come to pass by some means that no impression is made upon the nerve, then it is also not strange if the man himself is unable to experience anything especial through this nerve. But let us suppose that in spite of the interrupting of the connection between the nerve and the blood a certain impression is made upon the nerve. This can be brought to pass through an external experiment by stimulating the nerve by means of an electric current. Such external influence on the nerve does not, however, concern us here. But there is still another way of affecting the nerve under conditions in which it cannot act upon the course of the blood normally connected with it.

It is possible to bring about such a condition of the human organism; and this is done in a particular way, by means of certain concepts, emotions and feelings which the human being has experienced and made a part of himself, and which, if this inner experiment is to be truly successful, ought, properly speaking, to be really lofty, moral or intellectual concepts. When a man practises a rigorous inner concentration of the soul on such imaginative concepts, forming these into symbols let us say, it then happens, if he does this in a state of waking consciousness, that he takes complete control of the nerve and, as a result of this inner concentration, draws it back to a certain extent from the course of the blood. For when man simply gives himself up to normal, external impressions, the natural connection between the nerve and the circulation is present; but if, in strict concentration upon his ego, he holds fast to what he obtains in a normal way, apart from all external impressions and apart from what the outside world brings about in the ego, he then has something in his soul which can have originated only in the consciousness and is the content of consciousness, and which makes a special demand upon the nerve and separates its activity then and there from its connection with the activity of the blood. The consequence of this is that, by means of such inner concentration, which actually breaks the connection between the nerve and the blood, that is, when it is so strong that the nerve is in a certain sense freed from its connection with the blood-system, the nerve is at the same time freed from that for which the blood is the external instrument, namely, from the ordinary experiences of the ego. And it is, indeed, a fact—this finds its complete experimental support through the inner experiences of that spiritual training designed to lead upward into the higher worlds—that as a result of such concentration the entire nerve-system is removed from the blood-system and from its ordinary tasks in connection with the ego. It then happens, as the particular consequence of this, that whereas the nerve-system had previously written its action upon the tablet of the blood, it now permits what it contains within itself as working power to return into itself, and does not permit it to reach the blood. It is, therefore, possible purely through processes of inner concentration, to separate the blood-system from the nerve-system, and thereby to cause that which, pictorially expressed, would otherwise have flowed into the ego, to course back again into the nerve-system.

Now, the peculiar thing is that once the human being actually brings this about through such inward exertion of the soul, he has then an entirely different sort of inner experience. He stands before a completely changed horizon of consciousness which may be described somewhat as follows: When the nerve and the blood have an appropriate connection with each other, as is the case in normal life, man brings into relation with the ego the impressions which come from within his inner being and those which come from the outer world. The ego then conserves those forces which reach out along the entire horizon of consciousness, and everything is related to the ego. But when, through inner concentration, he separates his nerve-system, lifts it, that is to say, through inner soul-forces out of his blood-system, he does not then live in his ordinary ego. He cannot then say “I” with respect to that which he calls his “Self,” in the same sense in which he had previously said “I” in his ordinary normal consciousness. It then seems to the man as if he had quite consciously lifted a portion of his real being out of himself, as if something which he does not ordinarily see, which is super-sensible and works in upon his nerves, does not now impress itself upon his blood-tablet or make any impression upon his ordinary ego. He feels himself lifted away from the entire blood-system, raised up, as it were, out of his organism; and he meets something different as a substitute for what he has experienced in the blood-system. Whereas the nerve-activity was previously imaged in the blood-system, it is now reflected back into itself. He is now living in something different; he feels himself in another ego, another Self, which before this could at best be merely divined. He feels a super-sensible world uplifted within him.

If once more we draw a sketch, showing the relation between the blood and the nerve, or the entire nerve-system, as this receives into itself the impressions from the outside world, this may be done in the following way.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

The normal impressions would then image themselves in the blood-system, and thus be within it. If, however, we have removed the nerve-system, nothing goes as far as the tablet of the blood, nothing goes into the blood-system; everything flows back again into the nerve-system; and thus a world has opened to us of which we had previously no intimation. It has opened as far as the terminations of our nerve-system, and we feel the recoil. To be sure, only he can feel this recoil who goes through the necessary soul-exercises. In the case of the normal consciousness, man feels that he takes into himself whatever sort of world happens to face him, so that everything is inscribed upon the blood-system as on a tablet, and he then lives in his ego with these impressions. In the other case, however, he goes with these impressions only to that point where the terminations of the nerves offer him an inner resistance. Here, at the nerve-terminals, he rebounds as it were, and experiences himself in the outside world. Thus, when we have a colour impression, which we receive through the eye, it passes into the optic nerve, images itself upon the tablet of the blood, and we feel what we express as a fact when we say: “I see red.” But now, after we have made ourselves capable of doing so, let us suppose that we do not go with our impressions as far as the blood, but only to the terminations of the nerves; that at this point we rebound into our inner life, rebound before we reach the blood. In that case we live, as a matter of fact, only as far as our eye, our optic nerve. We recoil before the bodily expression of our blood, we live outside our Self and are actually within the light-rays which penetrate our eyes. Thus we have actually come out of ourselves; indeed, we have accomplished this by reason of the fact that we do not penetrate as deep down into our Self as we ordinarily do, but rather go only as far as the nerve-terminals. The effect on a soul-life such as this, if we have brought it to the stage where we turn back at the terminations of the nerves into our inner being, so that we do not go as far as our blood, is that we have in this case disconnected the blood; whereas otherwise the normal consciousness of the inner man ordinarily goes down into the blood, and the soul-life identifies itself with the physical man, feels itself at one with him.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

As a result of these external observations we have to-day succeeded in disconnecting the entire blood-system, which we have thought of as a kind of tablet that presents itself on the one side to the external, on the other side to the internal impressions, from what we may call the higher man, the man we may become if we find release from our Selves and become free. Now, we shall best be able to study the whole inner nature of this blood-system if we do not make use of general phrases, but observe what exists as reality in man, namely, the super-sensible, invisible man to whom we can lift ourselves when we go only as far as the terminations of our nerves, and if we also observe man as he is when he goes all the way into the blood. For we can then advance further, to the thought that man can really live in the outside world, that he can pour himself out over the whole external world, can go forth into this world and view from the reverse standpoint, as it were, the inner man, or what is usually meant by that term. In short, we shall learn to know the functions of the blood, and of those organs which are inserted into the circulatory course of the blood, when we can answer the following questions: What does a more accurate knowledge show us, when that which comes from a higher world, to which man can raise himself, is portrayed upon the tablet of the blood? It shows us that everything connected with the life of the blood is the very central point of the human being, when, without coining phrases, but rather looking only at sensible as well as super-sensible realities, we consider carefully the relationship of this wonderful system to a higher world. For this is in truth to be our task: to learn to see clearly the whole visible physical Man as an image of that other “Man” who is rooted and lives in the spiritual world. We shall thereby come to find that the human organism is one of the truest images of that Spirit which lives in the universe, and we shall attain to a very special understanding of that Spirit.

At the close of yesterday's exposition we indicated the intention to consider next the cardinal issue within the Christ impulse: the Death on the Cross and its significance. But before turning to a delineation of the death of Christ, and thus to the climax of this study cycle, we must discuss today the true meaning and significance of much that we find in the John Gospel itself, as well as its relation to what the other Gospels offer. In the last few days we have been endeavoring to comprehend the Christ impulse and to establish it as an actual event in human evolution by means of quite a different source: by clairvoyant reading of the akashic record; and in a sense we referred only to those passages in the Gospels which appear to confirm what clairvoyant research justifies us in stating as truths.

Today, in order to follow up our studies, we shall consider the John Gospel itself and characterize this important document of mankind from a certain aspect. We said yesterday that the theological research of our time, in as far as it is affected by materialism, can find no points of contact with this John Gospel, is unable to see its historical value; but regarded with the vision of spiritual science this Gospel proves to be one of the most marvelous documents possessed by the human race. It is not too much to say that not only as a religious document but—to use a profane expression—among all purely literary works in existence it is one of the greatest. Let us now approach it from this literary angle.

From the very first chapters—if rightly understood and if one knows what all lies concealed in the words—this Gospel of St. John shows a rounded beauty of style equal to any in the world, although a superficial study does not reveal this fact. What superficial observation discloses first is that in enumerating the miracles the writer of the John Gospel, whose back-ground we now know, mentions precisely seven up to the Lazarus event proper. (The significance of the number seven will be treated in the following lectures.) What were these seven signs?

1. The sign in connection with the Marriage in Cana in Galilee.

2. The sign given in the healing of the nobleman's son.

3. The sign given in the healing of the man who had lain sick for thirty-eight years by the Pool of Bethesda.

4. The sign given in the Feeding of the Five Thousand.

5. The sign given in the vision of Christ walking on the sea.

6. The sign given in the healing of the man born blind. And finally:

7. The greatest of the signs, the initiation of Lazarus, the transformation of Lazarus into the writer of the John Gospel.

These are the seven signs. But now we must ask ourselves, What about these signs, this question of miracles? If you listened attentively to a number of things that were told you in the foregoing lectures you will remember having heard that the state of human consciousness has kept altering throughout the entire course of evolution. We cast our gaze back to remote times and found that men did not issue from a merely animalistic stage of development, but from a form in which they possessed the power of clairvoyance as a congenital endowment. People of that time were clairvoyant, even though their consciousness still lacked the ability to say “I am”. The capacity for self-consciousness was something they had to acquire gradually, and for this they had to forfeit their old clairvoyance. In the future the time will come again when all men are clairvoyant, but without loss of self-consciousness, of the “I am”. Those are the three stages which humanity has in part passed through, in part still has ahead of it.

In Atlantis men still lived in a sort of dream consciousness, but this was clairvoyant. Then they gradually achieved self-consciousness, outer objective consciousness, in exchange for which, however, they gave up the old gift of dim clairvoyance. And finally, what man will have in the future is clairvoyant consciousness coupled with self-consciousness. Thus man traverses the path from an ancient dim clairvoyance through an opaque objective consciousness, finally ascending to conscious clairvoyance.

But in addition to consciousness, everything else about man has changed as well. The belief that conditions must always have been as they are today is due to nothing but human shortsightedness. Everything has evolved. Nothing has always been as it is today, not even men's relation to each other. You have already gathered from intimations in the last lectures that in older epochs—up to the time when the Christ impulse entered human evolution—the influence of soul upon soul was much stronger. Such was human disposition at that time. A man did not merely hear what was told him in externally audible words: in a certain way he could feel and know something that the other felt and thought vividly, livingly. Love meant something quite different from what it does today, albeit in those times it was largely a matter of blood ties. Nowadays it has taken on more of a psychic character, but it has lost its strength. Nor will it regain this until the Christ impulse shall have entered all human hearts. In olden times active love possessed at the same time a healing property, a powerful balm, for the soul of its recipient.

Coincident with the development of the intellect and of cleverness, qualities that came into being only gradually, these ancient direct influences of soul upon soul dwindled away. The gift of acting upon the other's soul, of causing one's own soul force to stream into it, was unquestionably peculiar to the older peoples; and you must therefore imagine the force that one soul could receive from another as much greater, the influence one soul could exert upon another as much stronger, than is the case today. The external historical documents may report nothing of all this, the tablets and monuments may not mention it; but clairvoyant study of the akashic record nevertheless discloses the fact that in olden times the healing of the sick, for example, was extensively accomplished through a psychic influence passing from the one to the other. And the soul possessed many other powers as well. Though today it sounds like a fairy tale, it is a fact that in those times a man's will, if he so desired and had specially trained himself for the purpose, had the power to act soothingly upon the growth of a plant, to accelerate or retard it. Today but scanty remnants of all this are left.
Human life, then, was very different at that time. No one would have been surprised—given the right mutual relationship—at the passing over of a psychic influence from one person to the other.

It must be kept in mind, however, that two or more are needed if the exercise of a psychic influence of that sort is to take effect. We could imagine the possibility of a man imbued with the power of Christ entering our midst nowadays; but those with the requisite faith in him would be very few in number, so that he would not be able to achieve all that can be accomplished by the influence of one soul upon another. For not only must the influence be exerted: someone must be present who is sufficiently developed to be affected by it. Remembering that formerly those who could receive such influences were more numerous, we should not be surprised to learn that for the healing of the sick there indeed existed the means by which psychic influences could take effect; but also, that influences which today can be transmitted only by mechanical means were at that time applied psychically.

We should keep in mind that the Christ event entered human evolution at a very special point in time. Only the very last remnants, so to say, of those soul currents that flowed from man to man were left as a heritage of the old Atlantean age. Humanity was about to descend ever deeper into matter, and the possibility for such psychic currents to be effective constantly diminished. That was the moment at which the Christ impulse had to enter, the impulse which in its nature could accomplish so very much for those who were still sufficiently receptive.

Those who are really familiar with evolution as it applied to mankind will therefore find it quite natural that the Christ Being, having once entered the body of Jesus of Nazareth in about the thirtieth year of His life, could unfold very special powers in this sheath, for the latter had been developing since time immemorial. We mentioned yesterday that this individuality of Jesus of Nazareth had in one former life been incarnated in ancient Persia, and then, passing through one incarnation after another, had continued to rise in its spiritual development. That is why the Christ could dwell in such a body, and why this body could be sacrificed to Him. This the Evangelists knew well, hence they presented the entire narrative in such a way as to be wholly comprehensible for spiritual research. Only, we must take everything in the Gospels literally—that is, we must first learn to read them. As has been said, the deeper meanings of the miracles we shall learn in due time; but here we can ask, for example, why, precisely in the first of the miracles, it is specially emphasized in dealing with the Marriage in Cana of Galilee that this took place in Cana “of Galilee”. Seek as you will, you can find in old Palestine within the radius then known no second Cana; and in such a case it would seem superfluous to specify the locality. Why, then, does the Evangelist tell us that this miracle occurred in Cana "of Galilee"? Because the important point to be stressed was that something occurred which had to take place in Galilee. It means that nowhere else but in Galilee could Christ have found just those people whose presence was indispensable. As I said, an influence implies not only the one who exerts it, but the others as well—those who are appropriately fitted to receive it. Christ's first appearance would not have been possible within the Jewish community proper, but it was possible in Galilee with its mixture of many different tribes and groups. Just because members of so many peoples from various parts of the world were assembled in one spot, there was far less blood relationship, and above all, far less faith in it, than in Judea, in the narrow circle of the Hebrew people. Galilee was a heterogenous racial mixture.

But what was it to which Christ, in view of His impulse, felt Himself particularly called? We have said that one of His most significant utterances was,

Before Abraham was, was the I am

;

and the other,

I and the Father are one

.

By this He meant: among those who cling to the old forms of life the ego is entrenched in a system of blood relationships. The words I and Father Abraham are one aroused a very special feeling in the true confessor of the Old Testament, a feeling nowadays very difficult to share. What a man calls his own self, circumscribed by birth and death, he sees as transitory. But one who had true faith in the Old Testament, who was influenced by the widespread teachings of that time, asserted—not allegorically, but as a fact: As regards myself I am isolated; but I am a member of a great organism, of a great living whole reaching back to Father Abraham. Just as my finger can remain a living member only as long as it is part of my body, so my memory is contingent upon my feeling myself a member of the great folk organism that goes back to Father Abraham. I am part of the great complex, exactly as my finger is part of my body. Cut off my finger and it ceases to be a finger: it is safe only as long as it is part of my hand, my hand part of my arm, and my arm part of my body; it ceases to have meaning if severed from my hand. And in like manner, I myself have meaning only when I feel myself a member of all the generations through which the blood flows down from Father Abraham. Then I feel sheltered. My individual ego is transient and fleeting, but not so this whole great folk organism way back to Father Abraham. When I sense and feel myself wholly embraced by it I conquer my temporally transient ego: I am sheltered in one great ego, the ego of my people that has come down to me from Father Abraham through the blood of the generations.

That represents the conviction of the Old Testament adherents: all the great events narrated in the Old Testament, everything that today seems miraculous, occurred through the power of the inner experience contained in the words, I and Father Abraham are one. But the time came when men were destined to relinquish this state of consciousness for another, hence it gradually disappeared. That is why Christ could not address those who, on the one hand, had lost the magic power of influencing by means of blood ties, and on the other, still believed only in the common bond with Father Abraham. Clearly, among these Christ could not find the faith necessary for enabling His soul to flow actively into other souls; and for this purpose He had to turn to those who, owing to their mixed blood, no longer clung to this old belief: to the Galileans. That is where His mission had to commence. Even though the old state of consciousness was generally on the wane, still He found in Galilee a medley of peoples that stood at the beginning of the era in which blood became mixed. From all quarters tribes assembled here that had previously been governed solely by the forces of the old blood ties. They were on the point of finding the transition. They vividly retained the feeling that their fathers were still endowed with the old consciousness states, that they possessed the magic powers which act from soul to soul. Among these people Christ could inaugurate His new mission, which consisted in endowing man with an ego consciousness no longer bound to blood relationship; an ego consciousness which could say, It is within myself that I shall find the connection with the spiritual Father Who, instead of letting His blood flow down through the generations, radiates His spiritual force into each individual soul. The ego which is within me, and which is in direct communion with the spiritual Father, was before Abraham was. It is for me, then, to infuse into this ego a force that will be strengthened through my being aware of my connection with the spiritual Father force of the world. I and the Father are one. No longer I and Father Abraham—that is, a physical ancestor.

Such were the people to whom Christ turned, people who had arrived at the point of understanding this, people who, having broken away from the blood ties by intermarriage, needed to find the strong force—not in consanguinity, but in the individual soul: the force that can lead men gradually to express the spiritual in the physical.—Do not ask, Why do we not see things happening today as they happened then? Aside from the fact that he who has the will to see them can see them, we must remember that men have emerged from that state of consciousness and descended into the world of matter; that the period in question represented the boundary line; and that Christ used the last representatives of the previous epoch of human evolution in whom to demonstrate the power of spirit over matter. The signs that were done while the old state of consciousness was still present, but disappearing, were intended as an example and a symbol—a symbol of faith.

Now let us turn to this Marriage in Cana of Galilee itself. If I were to develop in detail all the implications indicated in the John Gospel, in the entire Gospel content, fourteen lectures would certainly not suffice: several years would be needed. But such a literal development of the subject would only serve to confirm what I can suggest in brief elucidations.

The first thing we are told in connection with this first sign is:

There was a marriage in Cana of Galilee

.

Here we must stop to realize that the John Gospel contains not one word that has not a definite meaning. Well, then: why a marriage? Because a marriage brings about on a single occasion what the Christ mission effects with such far-reaching results: it brings people together. And then, a marriage “in Galilee”? It was in Galilee that the ancient blood ties were severed, that mutually alien bloods came to mingle. Now, Christ's task was intimately connected with this mixing of blood, so we are here dealing with intermarriages having the object of creating progeny among people who are no longer related by blood.

What I am now about to say will seem very strange to you. What would people have felt in such a case in very old times when there still prevailed the close or endogamous marriage, as one is inclined to call it in the spiritual-scientific sense? We must realize that the transformation of this close marriage into a distant or exogamous marriage is very much a part of human evolution, and that what I have already said explains what an endogamous marriage means. Among all people of ancient times it was contrary to law to marry outside of the tribe, away from consanguinity. People related by blood, members of the same tribe, intermarried; and this custom of marrying within the tribe, within blood relationship, resulted in the marvel of engendering intense magical force. This can be verified at any time by means of spiritual-scientific research. The descendants of a blood-related tribe possessed, as a consequence of such intermarriage of relatives, magical powers that permitted one soul to act upon another.

Let us imagine that in ancient times we had been asked to attend a wedding, and that the customary drink—in this case, wine—had given out. What would have happened? Provided the right relations existed among the blood-related members of this wedding party, it would have been possible, through the magical power of love arising out of consanguinity, for the water—or whatever was offered later in place of wine—to be sensed as wine as a result of the psychic influence of the people present. Wine is what they would have been drinking if the right magical influence had been exerted by the one person on the rest. Do not tell me this wine would still have been but water! A sensible person would reply to that: For the human being, things are of the nature in which they communicate themselves to his organism: they are what they become for him, not what they look like. I believe that even today many a wine lover would like water if, by means of some influence or other, it appeared to be changed into wine; that is, if it tasted like wine and produced the same effect in his organism. Nothing else is necessary than that a man should take water for wine.—What, then, was required in olden times to render possible such a sign as that of the water in the vessels becoming wine when it was drunk? The magical power deriving from blood relationship, that is what was required. And furthermore, those assembled at the Marriage in Cana of Galilee possessed the psychic capacity for sensing that sort of thing. Only, a transition had to be brought about.

The story continues in the John Gospel:

And the mother of Jesus was there: and both Jesus was called, and his disciples, to the marriage.

And since they lacked wine, the mother of Jesus drew attention to this, and said to Him:

They have no wine.

I said that a transition must be effected if such an event is to take place: the psychic force had to be assisted by something. By what, then? Here we come to the utterance which, as it is usually translated, is really a blasphemy; for I believe it will strike any sensitive person as offensive when, to the statement “they have no wine”, Jesus replies: “Woman, what have I to do with thee? mine hour is not yet come.” From any angle it is impossible to accept that in a document of this sort. Imagine the ideal of love, as the Gospels describe the relations between Jesus of Nazareth and His mother, and then try to imagine Him using the expression, "Woman, what have I to do with thee"! It is not necessary to say more: the rest must be felt. But the point is, these words are not in the text. Examine this passage in the John Gospel and then look up the Greek text. This contains nothing more than the words employed by Jesus of Nazareth in indicating a certain event:

Woman, this passeth over from me unto thee.

What He referred to was that subtle, intimate force which passed from soul to soul, from Him to His mother; and that is what He needed at this moment. Greater signs He was as yet unable to perform: for this the time must gradually ripen. Therefore He says: My time—the time when I shall work through my own force—is not yet come.—For the present, that magnetic psychic union between the soul of Jesus of Nazareth and His mother was still indispensable.

“Woman, this now passeth over from me unto thee.” Otherwise—well, after an utterance like “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” why would she turn to the servants and say, “Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it”? She had to possess the old forces of which nowadays people can have no conception; and she knew that He referred to the blood tie between them, to the bond that should then pass over into the others. Then she knew that something like an invisible spiritual force held sway, capable of effectuating something.—And here let me beg you to read the Gospel—really to read it. I ask how anyone can come to terms with the Gospel who believes that something happened at that wedding—I really don't know what—that six ordinary jars stood there “for the purifying of the Jews”, as we are told; and that according to ordinary observation—without reference to anything such as we have just been considering—the water turned into wine. How could such a thing have come about externally?

What is the meaning of this miracle? And what is the belief in it held by him who stands before you—in fact, the only faith anybody can have in a miracle? Can it be that here one substance was transformed into another for the benefit of those present? No ordinary interpretation will get us far.—We must assume that the jars which stood there contained no water, for nothing is said about their being emptied. But it says they were filled, so if they had been emptied and then refilled—assuming the water had really been changed to wine as by a sleight of hand trick—one would really have to believe that the water which had previously been in the jars had been turned into wine. You see, this does not help: nothing squares.

We must understand that the jars must obviously have been empty, because a special significance attached to the filling of them. “Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it,” the mother had told the servants. What sort of water did Christ need? He needed water fresh from the sources of nature; and that is why it was necessary to specify that the water had just been drawn. The only water suitable for Christ's purpose was such as had not yet lost the inner forces that are inherent in any element so long as it is united with nature. As has been said, the John Gospel contains not one word that is not fraught with deep meaning. Freshly drawn water had to be used because Christ is the Being Who had but recently approached the earth and become associated with the forces that work in the earth itself. Now, when the living forces of the water work, in turn, with “that which flows from me unto thee”, it becomes possible for the event described in the Gospel to take place. The governor of the feast is called, and he is under the impression that something unusual has occurred. He does not know what this was—it is specifically stated that he had not seen what happened—only the servants had seen it; but under the influence of what has taken place he now takes the water for wine. That is stated clearly and distinctly, so we know that through psychic force even an outer element—that is, the physical component of the human body—was affected.

And what did the mother of Jesus of Nazareth herself have to possess in order that at this moment her faith might be sufficiently great to produce such an effect? She needed just what she did indeed possess: the realization that He Who was called her son had become the Spirit of the Earth. Then her strong force combined with His, with that which acted from Him upon her, developed so mighty an influence as to produce the effect described.

Thus we have shown, through the whole constellation of conditions surrounding this first sign, how the unison of souls which results from blood ties produces an effect even in the physical world. It was the first sign, and the Christ force is shown at its minimum: it still needed the intensification resulting from contact with the mother's psychic forces, as well as the additional strength residing in certain forces of nature that remained intact in the freshly drawn water. The active force of the Christ Being is here shown at its least; but what is stressed as especially important is its influence upon the other soul and its calling forth from it an activity which the latter is fitted to perform. The essential point is that the Christ force had the power to render the other soul capable of exerting influences: it engendered in the wedding guests as well the ability to taste the water as wine.—But every real force increases through its own exercise, and the second time it is called upon it is already greater. Just as any ordinary force increases with exercise, so is especially a spiritual force strengthened when it has once been successfully applied.

The second of the signs, as you know from the John Gospel, is the healing of the nobleman's son. By what means was he healed? Here again the right answer will be found only by reading the Gospel in the right way and by concentrating on the crucial words of the chapter in question. In the fiftieth verse of the fourth chapter, after the nobleman had told Jesus of Nazareth his story of distress, we read:

Jesus saith unto him, Go thy way, thy son liveth.
And the man believed the word that Jesus had spoken
unto him, and he went his way.

Again we have two souls in accord, the soul of the Christ and that of the boy's father. And when Christ said, Go thy way, thy son liveth, what effect did this have? It enkindled in the other soul the force to believe all that Christ's words implied. These two forces worked together. Christ's utterance had the power so to kindle the other soul that the nobleman believed. Had he not believed, his son would not have recovered. That is the way one force acts upon another: two are needed. And already here we find a greater measure of the Christ force. At the Marriage in Cana it still required the support of the mother's force in order to function at all. Now it has progressed to the point of being able to impart the kindling word to the nobleman's soul. We behold an intensification of the Christ force.

Passing to the third sign, the healing at the Pool of Bethesda of the man who had lain sick for thirty-eight years, we must again seek the most important words that throw light on the whole subject. They are these:

Jesus saith unto him, Rise, take up thy bed, and walk.

Speaking of his being forced to remain prone, the sick man had previously said that he could not move:

Sir, I have no man, when the water is troubled, to put me into the pool: but while I am coming, another steppeth down before me.

But Christ spoke to him—and it is important that it was on the Sabbath, a day of general rejoicing and great brotherly love—clothing His injunction in the words, Rise, take up thy bed, and walk. This utterance we must take in conjunction with the other equally important one in which He tells him:

Behold, thou art made whole: sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee.

What does that mean? It means that there was a connection between the man's sickness that had persisted for thirty-eight years, and his sin. We need not enquire at the moment whether the sin had been committed in this life or in a former one. The point is that Christ infused into the other's soul the force to accomplish something that reached right down into his psycho-moral nature. Here again we see an intensification of the Christ force. Previously, all that was involved was something intended to produce only a physical effect; but here it is a question of a sickness of which Christ Himself said that it had to do with the man's sin. At this moment Christ was able to intervene in the sick man's very soul. The previous sign still required the presence of the boy's father, but here the Christ force acts directly on the sick man's soul.

A special magic is lent this event by reason of its having been enacted on the Sabbath. Present-day man no longer has any feeling for such things, but the fact that this happened on the Sabbath meant something to a believer in the Old Testament: it was something out of the ordinary; hence the reason why the Jews were so indignant at the sick man was that he carried his bed on the Sabbath. That is an extraordinarily significant detail—people should learn to think when they read the Gospels. They should not consider it a matter of course that the sick man could be cured, that one now walked who for thirty-eight years had not been able to walk. What they should do is ponder a passage such as the following:

The Jews therefore said unto him that was cured, it is the sabbath day: it is not lawful for thee to carry thy bed.

What struck them was not that the man had been cured, but that he carried his bed on the Sabbath.

So it was an integral part of the healing of this sick man that the whole scene should play on the hallowed day. Christ Himself harbored the thought, If the Sabbath is indeed to be dedicated to God, the souls of men must enjoy special strength on this day by virtue of the divine force.—And it was by means of this force that He worked upon the man before Him; that is, it was transmitted to the sick man's own soul. Hitherto the latter had not found in his soul the force that would overcome the consequences of his sin, but now he has it as an effect of the Christ force. Another intensification.—As I have said, the essential nature of the miracles will be dealt with later, and for the moment we will pass on.

The fourth sign is the Feeding of the Five Thousand. Again seeking the most significant passage, we must bear in mind that an event of this sort should not be viewed in the light of present-day consciousness. Had those who wrote about Christ at the time the John Gospel was written believed what our materialistic age believes today, their narratives would have been very different, for quite other things would have struck them as important. In this case they were not particularly surprised even at the phenomenon of five thousand being fed from so small a supply; but what is most important and specially emphasized is the following passage:

And Jesus took the loaves; and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to the disciples, and the disciples to them that were set down; and likewise of the fishes as much as they would.

Just what is it that Christ Jesus does here? In order to bring about what was to take place He makes use of the souls of His disciples, of those who had been with Him and had by degrees matured to the level of His stature. They are a part of the procedure. They surround Him; and in their souls He can now evoke the power of charity: His force flows forth into that of the disciples. Of the manner in which this event could take place we will speak later, but here we must again observe an increase in the Christ force. At the previous sign He infused His force into the man who had lain sick for thirty-eight years, whereas here it acts upon the force of His disciples' souls. What is active here is the intensification of forces that proceeds from the soul of the master to the souls of the disciples. The force has expanded from the one soul to the souls of others: it has grown.

Already at this point, then, there dwells in the disciples' souls the same principle that dwells in the soul of Christ. Anyone inclined to ask what happens as a result of such an influence should observe the facts, should consider what actually occurred when Christ's powerful force acted not alone but kindled the force in other souls, so that it then worked on. There are none today with such living faith: they may believe theoretically, but not with sufficient strength. But not until they do so will they be able to observe what occurred there. Spiritual research knows very well what occurred.

So we observe a step-by-step increase of the Christ force.—The fifth sign, told in the same chapter, begins:

And when even was now come, his disciples went down unto the sea, and entered into a ship, and went over the sea toward Capernaum. And it was now dark, and Jesus was not come to them. And the sea arose by reason of a great wind that blew. So when they had rowed about five and twenty or thirty furlongs, they see Jesus walking on the sea, and drawing nigh unto the ship: and they were afraid.

Modern publishers of the Gospels assign to this chapter the highly superfluous title, “Jesus walks on the sea”—as though that were stated anywhere in this chapter! Where does it say, “Jesus walks on the sea”? It says, “The disciples saw Jesus walking on the sea.” That is the point. The Gospels must be taken literally. It is simply a case of the Christ force having again increased in strength. So powerful had it become as a natural result of its exercise in the previous deeds that not only could it now act from one soul upon another—not only could the soul of Christ communicate itself, in its force, to other souls—but the Christ could live in His own form before the soul of another who was ripe for it.

The event, then, occurred as follows: Someone who is absent possesses so great a force that it acts upon men at a distance, far away. But the influence of the Christ force is now so powerful that it does more than set free a force in the disciples, as had been the case with those who had sat with Him on the mountain: there the force had merely passed over into the disciples in order that the miracle might be performed. Now, although their physical sight could not reach the Christ, they had the power to see Him, to behold His very form. Christ could become visible at a distance to those with whose souls His own had united. His own form is now sufficiently advanced to be seen spiritually. At the moment when the possibility of physical vision disappeared, there arose in the disciples all the more intensely the ability to see spiritually—and they saw the Christ. But the nature of this seeing at a distance is such that the image of the object in question appears in the immediate vicinity.—Again an increase of the Christ power.

The next sign is the healing of the man born blind; and this narrative, as it appears in the John Gospel, is again particularly distorted. Doubtless you have often read the story:

And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did this sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents; but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.

And then He healed him.

We need only ask, could any Christian attitude interpret the matter as follows? Here is a man born blind; his blindness is not a result of his parents' sin, nor of his own; but he was rendered blind by God in order that Christ might come and perform a miracle for the glory of God. In other words, in order that a miraculous act might be ascribed to God, God had first to make the man blind.

The original passage was simply not read correctly. It does not say at all that “the works of God should be made manifest in him”. If we would understand this miracle we must examine the old usage of the word “God”. You can do this most readily by turning to another chapter in which Christ is positively accused of asserting of himself that He and God were one. How does He reply?

Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are Gods?

What Christ meant by this answer was that in the innermost soul of man there is the potential nucleus of a God: something divine. How often have we not pointed out that the fourth principle of the human being is the potential human capacity for the divine! “Ye are Gods.” That is, something divine dwells in you. It is not the human being but something different, not the person of a man as he lives on earth between birth and death; and it is different also from what man inherits from his parents. Whence derives this element of divinity, this human individuality? It passes through repeated earth lives from incarnation to incarnation: it comes over from an earlier earth life, from a previous incarnation. Hence we read, not the man's parents have sinned, nor has his own personality—the personality one ordinarily addresses as “I”; but in a previous incarnation he created the cause of his blindness in this life. He became blind because out of a former life the works of the God within him revealed themselves in his blindness. Christ Jesus here points clearly and distinctly to karma, the law of cause and effect.

What principle in man had to be worked upon if this kind of sickness was to be healed? Not upon what lives as a transitory ego between birth and death: the forces must penetrate deeper, must enter the ego that continues from one life to another. Again the Christ force has increased. Hitherto we have seen it influencing only what is directly before it; now it acts upon the principle that survives human life between birth and death, that continues from life to life. Christ feels Himself the representative of the I Am. As He pours His force into the I Am—as thus the exalted God of Christ communicates Himself to the God in man—the blind man receives the force enabling him to heal himself from within. Now Christ has penetrated to the innermost being of the soul. His force has acted upon the eternal individuality of the sick man and strengthened it by causing His own force to appear in this individuality, thereby influencing even the consequences of former incarnations.

What intensification still remains for the Christ force to achieve? None but the ability to approach another and awaken in him the capacity for enkindling the Christ impulse in himself, so that his whole being is saturated with it and he becomes another, a Christ-permeated man. And that is what occurred in the Raising of Lazarus, where we find still another increase in the Christ force. It has progressed step by step throughout.

Where else in the world could you find a lyrical document of such glorious composition? No other author has mastered composition on such a plane. Who would not bow down in reverence when reading the marvellous step-wise upbuilding in the narrative of these events! Even contemplating the John Gospel only as an artistic composition we cannot but feel deep reverence. It all grows step by step and rises steadily.

One point remains to be elucidated. We have pointed out a number of isolated features tending to show the intensification in the sequence of signs, of miracles; but the narrative embraces a great deal in between, and we must examine the organization of the whole. Tomorrow it will be our task to show that, in addition to the admirable intensification in the miracles, there is definite purpose in the way all the connecting links are embodied: we realize that these could not possibly have been filled in better than was done by the writer of the John Gospel. Today we have considered its artistic composition and found it unthinkable that a work of art could be more perfectly or beautifully composed than is the John Gospel up to the description of the Raising of Lazarus; but only one who can read aright and knows what is essential senses its great and mighty meaning. It is the mission of anthroposophy to bring this meaning before our souls. But this John Gospel contains more. Our expositions of it will be followed by others imbued with a wisdom loftier than ours; but this wisdom will in turn serve to find fresh truths, just as during the past seven years our wisdom has served to find what cannot be found without anthroposophy.

We have arrived at an important point in our studies—a sort of climax—hence we may expect to encounter various difficult passages in elucidating the Gospels. I may therefore be permitted at the beginning of these expositions, to preface the continuation of what was said yesterday with a short survey of the salient features thus far treated.

We know that the nature of mankind's development was essentially different in remote times from what it is today, and we know that the human being shows an increasingly different form as our retrospect reaches farther and farther back to earlier conditions. It has already been mentioned that from our own time, which we may call the Central European cultural epoch, we can look back successively to the Greco-Latin time, to the Egypto-Chaldean period, and then to the era in which the ancient Persian people was led by Zarathustra. Beyond that we arrive at the remote Indian civilization, so very different from ours; and that brings us to a period of cultural evolution that followed immediately upon a great and mighty catastrophe. This cataclysm, running its course in tempestuous events in the air and in the water element, led to the disappearance of that continent which mankind had inhabited before the Indian civilization—ancient Atlantis, situated between Europe-Africa, and America—and to the migration of its people, westward to America and on the other side to the lands of Europe, Asia, and Africa, which had gradually taken on their present configuration. This Atlantean age, especially in the early part, produced human beings who were very differently constituted in respect of their soul from present-day mankind; and what interests us primarily in human evolution is precisely what pertains to the soul, for we know that everything corporeal is a result of psychospiritual development.

What was the nature of the soul life in this ancient Atlantean age? We know that at that time human consciousness was very different from what it became later, and that in a certain respect man had an archaic clairvoyance, but that he was not yet capable of any pronounced self-consciousness, of ego-consciousness. This is achieved only by learning to distinguish oneself from outer objects, and people of that time were not quite able to do this.

Let us imagine for a moment what would happen in our time if we were unable to distinguish ourselves from our surroundings—let us consider the matter in a concise way. Nowadays we ask, Where are the confines of my being? And with a certain justification we answer, from our present-day standpoint, The confines of my human entity are where my skin divides me off from my surroundings. People imagine that they consist only of what their skin encloses, and that everything else is made up of outer objects which they perceive and from which they distinguish themselves. They believe this because they know that if some part is removed from within their skin they are no longer a complete human being, nor can be. From a certain standpoint it is quite correct to say that if you cut off a piece of a man's flesh he is no longer a whole human being.

On the other hand, we also know that we inhale air with every breath; and to the question, where is this air, the answer is, all around us—everywhere where our environment makes contact with us: that is the air we will have within us in the next moment. Now it is outside us, now in us. Cut off this air, remove it, and you can no longer exist. You are less whole than you would be if the hand within your skin were cut off. So the truth of the matter is that we are not bounded by our skin. The surrounding air is part of us, it enters and leaves us, and we have no right arbitrarily to fix the skin as our boundary.

If people would come to understand this—it would have to be arrived at theoretically, as perception provides no means of observing it—it would lead them to ponder on matters not forced upon their attention by the outer world itself. If a man were at all times able to see the air current passing into him, spreading, being transformed, and passing out again, it would never occur to him to say, This hand is more a part of me than the air I inhale. He would count the air as part of himself, and would suspect hallucinations if he fancied himself an independent being capable of existing without his environment.

No such delusion could exist for the Atlantean, for his observation clearly showed him a different state of affairs. He saw the objects in his environment not in sharp outline, but surrounded by colored auras. He did not see a plant as we see it, but more as we see the street lamps on a foggy autumn evening: everything was surrounded by a great colored aura. That was because there is spirit—spiritual beings—in and among all things of the outer world, which the dim clairvoyance still existing at that time enabled the Atlantean to perceive. As the fog fills the space between the lights, so there are spiritual beings everywhere in space. The Atlantean saw these spiritual beings just as you see the fog, hence they constituted for him a kind of vaporous aura investing all outer objects. These themselves were indistinct; but because he saw the spirit he also saw everything of a spiritual nature that streamed in and out of him. And for the same reason he saw himself as a component of his whole environment. He saw currents flowing into his body from all sides, currents you cannot see today. Air is merely the densest substance that enters us: there are far more tenuous ones. Man has lost the power of discerning spirit because he no longer has the old dim clairvoyance; but the man of Atlantis saw the spiritual currents streaming in and out, just as your finger, were it conscious, would see the blood coursing through it and would know that it must wither if it were torn off. Just as the finger would feel, if conscious, so the Atlantean felt himself to be a member of an organism. He felt the currents streaming in through his eyes and ears, and so forth; and he knew that if he were to force himself out of their reach he could not remain a human being. He felt as though poured out into the whole outer world.

The man of Atlantis saw the spiritual world, but he could not distinguish himself from it: he lacked anything like a strong ego sense—self-consciousness in its present meaning. The opportunity to develop this was provided by the fading from his view of all that had emphasized his dependence upon his environment. The cessation of that awareness enabled him to develop his self-consciousness, his egoity, and to do this was the task of post-Atlantean man. After the great Atlantean catastrophe people were organized in such a way that the spiritual world receded from their consciousness, and that they gradually learned to see the outer physical world of the senses ever more clearly and distinctly. But nothing that evolves in the world takes place all at once, but step by step; it proceeds slowly and gradually; and thus the old dim clairvoyance vanished slowly and by degrees. Even today, under given conditions, it is still found as an old heritage in certain people and in mediumistic natures. Something that had reached its climax in a certain era gradually becomes extinct. In the earliest period of postAtlantean times, ordinary people still retained a great deal of the gift of clairvoyance; and what these people saw in the spiritual world was continually supplemented, expanded, and animated by the initiates who were guided to the spiritual world by the methods described in an earlier lecture, and who thus became the messengers of what in former times had been seen to a certain extent by all men.

Better than any external historical research, legends and myths—especially those linked with the oracle sanctuaries—have preserved for us what is true of those old times. In the oracle temples specially selected people were thrown into abnormal states—a dream state, or mediumistic state, as one might say—by reducing them to a consciousness state duller and darker than the ordinary waking state. They were in a condition of diminished consciousness, where they were surrounded by outer objects which, however, they did not see. This was not clairvoyance as it had once existed, but an intermediate state, half dreamlike, half in the nature of clairvoyance. Now, if information was sought concerning certain particular circumstances in the world, or the right mode of procedure in some special matter, the oracles were consulted; for in them was to be found the dim clairvoyance as a heritage of the ancient faculty.

At the beginning of his evolution, then, man was endowed with wisdom: wisdom streamed into him. But this wisdom gradually dwindled away: and even the initiates in their abnormal states—of for they had to be led into the spiritual world by the withdrawal of however, those who were not only initiated in the old sense, but who had advanced with the times and were prophets of the future, realized that a new impulse was indispensable for humanity. An ancient heritage of wisdom had been bestowed upon mankind when it descended from divine-spiritual heights, but it became ever more obscured. In the beginning all men possessed it, then but the few who were thrown into special states of consciousness in the oracles, then only the initiates, and so forth.

The day must come—thus spoke the old initiates who knew the signs of the time—in which this ancient heritage will have dwindled to the point where it is no longer capable of leading and guiding humanity; and this would mean that man would fall a prey to uncertainty and doubt in the world. It would express itself in his willing, his acting, and his feeling. And with the gradual dwindling of wisdom men would become their own unwise leaders: their ego would wax increasingly strong, so that with the recession of wisdom every individual would seek truth in his own ego, would develop his own feelings and will—every man for himself—and men would become ever more isolated, more alienated from each other, and they would understand each other less and less. Since each wants his own thoughts—thoughts that no longer flow out of a unified wisdom—none can understand the other's thoughts; and human feelings, no longer guided by universal wisdom, must eventually come into mutual conflict, as must also human actions. All men would act, think, and feel in opposition to each other, and ultimately mankind would be split up altogether into an aggregation of quarrelling and fighting individuals.

And what was the outer, physical sign that appeared as the expression of this development? It was the transformation mankind experienced in the blood. In very ancient times, as we know, endogamy was customary: people married only within the blood-related tribe. But this custom yielded increasingly to exogamy: the blood of mutually alien tribes became mixed; and that explains the decrease, the dwindling, of the heritage deriving from a remote past.

Let us once more recall Goethe's words which we quoted yesterday:

“My father gave my build to me,
Toward life my sober bearing.
From mother comes my cheerful heart,
My joy in storytelling.”

We connected this assertion with the fact that what the etheric body comprises derives from the maternal element, as handed down from generation to generation, so that every man bears in his own etheric body the legacy of the maternal element, and in his physical body, that of the paternal element. Now, by reason of consanguinity the inheritance, perpetuating itself from etheric body to etheric body, was very potent, and from it derived the old faculty of clairvoyance. The offspring of endogamy inherited with the related blood the old capacity for wisdom in the etheric body. But as blood became more and more mixed—as a result of increasing intermarriage among tribes—the possibility of handing down the ancient wisdom diminished; for as we said yesterday, human blood gradually altered, and the mixing of different bloods obscured the ancient wisdom more and more.

In other words, the blood—bearer of inherited maternal attributes—became ever less fitted to transmit the old faculty of clairvoyance. It simply developed in such a way that people became ever less able to see into the spiritual world. Physically considered, therefore, human blood altered in a manner to render it increasingly incapable of bearing the old wisdom that once had guided man so surely, falling instead more and more into the opposite extreme, becoming the bearer of egotism—that is, of a quality that leads men, as egos, to individual isolation and mutual antagonism. And for the same reason it gradually lost its power of uniting men in love.

We are, of course, still involved in this process of deterioration taking place in the human blood because, in as far as it has its origin in an ancient epoch, it will follow its lingering course to the end of Earth evolution. Therefore an impulse was needed in humanity capable of counteracting this condition. Through consanguinity men would have been led into error and misery, as the old wise men tell us in legends and myths, Men could no longer rely on the legacies of an ancient wisdom: even the oracles, asked for information and advice, divulged only what led to savage conflicts and quarrels. The oracle had foretold, for example, that Laios and Jocasta would have a son who would kill his father and wed his mother. Nevertheless, in the face of this legacy of oracle wisdom, nothing could at that time prevent the blood from falling more and more a prey to error: Oedipus does kill his father and does wed his mother. He commits parricide and incest.

What the old sage meant was this: Once upon a time men possessed wisdom; but even had it been preserved, the development of the ego must inevitably have proceeded, and egotism would have grown so strong that blood would rage against blood. Blood is no longer fitted to lead men upwards when it is guided only by the ancient wisdom. And thus the clairvoyant initiate who gave us the original picture of the Oedipus legend wished to set up a warning for mankind, saying: That is what would happen to you if nothing came to supersede the old oracle wisdom.—And in the Judas legend there is preserved even more clearly an indication of what the old oracle wisdom would have led to. Judas' mother, too, was prophetically told that her son would kill his father and wed his mother, thereby conjuring up untold misery; and it all came to pass in spite of the foreknowledge. This means that the primeval, inherited wisdom is not capable of saving man from the abyss into which he must fall unless a new impulse reaches mankind.

If we now look more closely into the causes of all this we must ask, Why was it inevitable that the ancient wisdom should become unfitted to dominate humanity? The answer to this question can be found by examining nature carefully the origin of the old wisdom in its relation to mankind I have already indicated that in the old Atlantean age a connection existed between the physical body and the etheric body of man that differed greatly from the later relation. In regard to two of the principles of man's nature it can be said that the physical and etheric bodies are so related that they approximately coincide, especially in the region of the head; but this is only the case in our own time. Looking back to the Atlantean period we find the etheric head protruding far beyond its physical counterpart: the etheric body extended past the physical body, particularly in the head region. Now, in the Atlantean epoch human evolution proceeded in such a way that the outline of the physical and of the etheric body became more and more coincident, especially in the head: the etheric body kept withdrawing into the physical body, thereby naturally altering this member of the human being.

That, then, is the essential feature of this phase of human evolution: the etheric body of the human head withdraws more and more into the physical aspect of the head until the two come to coincide. Now, as long as the etheric body was outside the physical head it was subject to conditions quite different from the subsequent ones: it was in touch, on all sides, with currents, with other spiritual beings; and the substance of what thus streamed in and out provided the faculty of clairvoyance in Atlantean times. So the capacity for clairvoyance was due to the incomplete coincidence of the physical and etheric bodies in the head region, a condition admitting from all sides currents endowing the etheric head with clairvoyance. Then followed the time when the etheric body withdrew into the physical body. In a certain way—not completely—it tore itself away from these currents; it began to cut itself off from the currents which had provided the capacity for clairvoyantly penetrating the wisdom of the world. Conversely, when in the old initiations a man's etheric body was withdrawn, his etheric head became interpermeated once more with the surrounding currents, and clairvoyance set in again.

Now, had this contact between the etheric body and the outer world been severed at one stroke, in the middle of the Atlantean age, the old clairvoyance would have vanished far more rapidly than was actually the case. No remnants of it would have remained for the post-Atlantean time, nor would mankind of a later age have retained any recollection of it. As it occurred, however, man preserved a certain contact with the outer currents. And something else took place as well: this etheric body that had cut itself off from the currents of its environment retained, nevertheless, certain remnants of the former capacity for wisdom. Keep well in mind that at the end of the Atlantean epoch, after man had drawn his etheric body into himself, there remained in it a sort of fund, the residue of what had once come to it from without—a small saving, if I may use the term: as if a son had a father, the father is earning money, and the son draws upon him according to his needs. In the same way, man drew upon his environment for all the wisdom he needed, up to the time when his etheric body severed the connection. Keeping to our simile, let us now assume that the son loses his father, there remains for him but a certain portion of his father's money, and he earns nothing to add to it. In time he will come to the end of it and have nothing left. That is the position in which the human being found himself. He had torn himself loose from his father-wisdom, had added nothing to it through his own endeavor, and subsisted on it into the Christian era—indeed, even now he is still living on his inheritance, not on anything he has earned. He lives on his capital, so to speak. In the earliest part of post-Atlantean development a bit of the capital was still left, though without his having himself earned the wisdom: he lived on the interest, as it were, and occasionally requested an additional sum from the initiates. But ultimately the coin of ancient wisdom lost its currency; and when it was given to Oedipus it no longer had any value: this old wisdom did not save him from the most frightful transgression, nor did it save Judas.

That is what took place in the course of human evolution. How did it come about that man gradually exhausted his capital of wisdom? Because in the past he had given access to two kinds of spiritual beings: the Luciferic beings, and later, as a consequence of these, the Ahrimanic or Mephistophelean beings. These prevented him from adding, by his own labor, to the store of old wisdom, for they acted upon his being as follows: the Luciferic beings tended to corrupt his passions and feelings, while the Ahrimanic, the Mephistophelean beings were more concerned with outwardly distorting his view of the world. Had the Luciferic beings not intervened in Earth evolution, man would have developed no such interests in the physical world that drags him down beneath his true status; and if, as a result of the Luciferic influence, the Mephistophelian, the Ahrimanic, the Satanic beings had not taken a-hand, man would know, and would always have known, that underlying every object of the senses there is spirit, and he would look through the surface of the sense world upon the spirit. But Ahriman infused into human observation something like a dark smoke cloud that prevents penetration to the spiritual. Through Ahriman's agency man is enmeshed in lies, in maya, in illusion.—These are the two beings that prevent man from earning any increment to the store of ancient wisdom once bestowed upon humanity; and as a consequence, this heritage has dwindled away and gradually become wholly useless.

Nevertheless, in a certain other respect evolution held to its course. During the Atlantean time the human etheric body merged with the physical body; and it was man's misfortune, so to speak—his fate—to be forced to experience the influence of Lucifer and Ahriman in his physical body in this physical world just at a time when he was God-forsaken, as it were. The result was that the old heritage of wisdom became useless precisely by reason of the influence of the physical body, of living in the physical body. How did this happen? Formerly man did not live in the physical body: he gathered his wisdom from his father's treasury, so to speak—from the ancient fund of wisdom. His source of supplies was outside his physical body, because he himself was outside it in respect of his etheric body; and this source finally dried up. In order to augment his fund of wisdom, man would have needed a treasury in his own body. But this he did not have; and consequently, in default of an inner source of wisdom, there remained less and less of it in his etheric body every time he abandoned his physical body at death. After every death, every reincarnation, the sum of wisdom in his etheric body was less: the etheric body became ever poorer in wisdom.

But evolution advances; and just as in the Atlantean age evolution was such that the etheric body withdrew into the physical body, so future development will proceed in such a way that man will gradually emerge again from his physical body. Whereas in a former age the etheric body kept drawing into the physical—ever deeper, up to the coming of Christ—the time then arrived in which the course of evolution changed. At the moment in which Christ appeared the etheric body began to retrace its course; and already in our present time it is no longer as closely bound to the physical body as it was when Christ was present on earth. And as a result the physical body has become even denser than before. The human being, then, is moving toward a future in which his etheric body will increasingly protrude, and in time it will extend as far as it did in the Atlantean epoch.

Here we can pursue our simile a bit further. If the son, who had formerly lived on his father's fund, spends it all and earns nothing additional, his prospects will become increasingly dismal. But if this man now has a son of his own—that would be the grandson—the latter will not be in the same position as his father. The father at least inherited something and could go on spending, but there remains nothing at all for the grandson, nor does he inherit anything: for the time being he is left with nothing whatever. And in a certain way that describes the course of human evolution. When the etheric body entered the physical, bringing along a supply of divine wisdom from the treasury of the Godhead, it still provided wisdom for its physical body. But the Luciferic and Ahrimanic spirits prevented all augmentation of this wisdom in the physical body—contrived that none should be added. When now the etheric body begins to emerge again it takes nothing with it from the physical body, and the consequence is that if nothing else had intervened man would be heading for a future in which his etheric body, though belonging to him, would contain no vestige of wisdom or knowledge. And with the complete desiccation of the physical body the etheric body would be destitute as well, for nothing could be drawn from the dried-up physical body. Therefore, if the physical body is not to desiccate in that future period, the etheric body must he provided with strength, with the strength of wisdom. Before emerging from the physical body the etheric body should have been endowed with the power of wisdom. Within the physical body it must have received something it can take out with it. Then, when it emerges—provided it has acquired this wisdom—it can react on the physical body, giving it life and preventing its desiccation.

The future evolution of humanity can take one of two courses, of which one is as follows: Man develops without Christ. In this case the etheric body could bring with it nothing from the physical body, because it had received nothing from it: it emerges empty. But conversely, the etheric body cannot animate the physical body, having nothing to give: it cannot prevent the attrition, the withering, of the physical body. Man would gradually forfeit all the fruits of his physical life: they could furnish nothing out of his physical body, which he would therefore have to abandon. But the very purpose for which man descended to earth was to acquire a physical body in addition to his other principles. The germ of the physical body originated in an earlier period, but without its actual formation man would never fulfill his mission on earth. But the influences of Lucifer and Ahriman have entered the picture; and if man acquires nothing in his physical body, if his etheric body withdraws again with nothing to take with it—having even used up the old store of wisdom—then the earth's mission is doomed: the mission of the earth within the universe would fail of fulfillment. Man would carry over nothing into the future but the empty etheric skull which had been abundantly filled when he originally brought it into earth evolution.

But now let us suppose something were to occur at the right moment which would enable man, as his etheric body emerges again, to provide something for it, to animate it, to penetrate it with wisdom as of old: the etheric body would continue to emerge just the same; but now, endowed with new life, new strength, it could employ these for vitalizing the physical body. It could send power and life back into it. But the etheric body itself must first possess these: it would first have to receive this strength and life; and if it succeeds in this the fruits of man's earth life are saved. The physical body will then not simply decay, but rather, this corruptible physical body will assume the configuration of the etheric body, the incorruptible; and man's resurrection, with the harvest reaped in his physical body, is assured.

An impulse had thus to come to the earth through which the exhausted treasure of ancient wisdom might be replenished, through which the etheric body might be endowed with new life, thus enabling the physical element—otherwise destined to corruption—to put on the incorruptible and to become permeated by an etheric body capable of rendering it immortal, of rescuing it from Earth evolution. And that is what Christ brought mankind—this pervasion of the etheric body with life. The transformation of the human physical body that would otherwise be doomed to death, its preservation from corruption, its ability to wear the incorruptible—all this is connected with the Christ. Life was infused into the human etheric body by the Christ impulse—new life, after the old had been spent. And looking into the future, man must tell himself: When my etheric body will ultimately have emerged from my physical body, I should have developed in such a way that it is wholly saturated by the Christ. The Christ must live in me. In the course of my earth development I must by degrees completely permeate my etheric body with the Christ.

What I have just described to you are the deeper processes that elude outer observation. They constitute the spiritual principle underlying the physical evolution of the world.

But what outer form did all this have to take? What was it that entered the physical body through the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings? The tendency to decay, to dissolution—in short, the tendency to die. The germ of death had entered the physical body. Had no Christ come, this death germ would have developed its full power only at the end of Earth evolution, for then the etheric body would be for all time powerless to reanimate man; and at the completion of Earth evolution, that which had come into being as human physical body would fall into decay and the earth's mission itself would end in death. Whenever we encounter death today we can discern in our present life a portent of the universal death that would occur at the end of Earth evolution. Mankind's ancient heritage dwindles but slowly and gradually, and the possibility of being born again and again, of passing from incarnation to incarnation, is due to the life fund originally given man on his way. As regards his purely external life in the successive incarnations, the possibility for life to exist would not be fully exhausted before the end of Earth evolution; but as time goes on the gradual extinction of the race would manifest itself. This would occur piece by piece, and the physical body would continually wither. Had the Christ impulse not come, man would perish member by member as Earth evolution approached its termination.—At present the Christ-Impulse is but at the beginning of its development: only by degrees will it make its way among men; and only future epochs will reveal—and continue to reveal to the very end of Earth evolution—the full significance of Christ for humanity.

But the various human activities and interests have not all been affected alike by the Christ impulse. There are today many such that have not been touched by it at all, that must await a future time. I will give you a striking example of one whole sphere of human activity which at present has not been influenced by the Christ impulse at all. Toward the end of the pre-Christian epoch—say, in the 6th or 7th Century before our era—the primeval wisdom and power were on the wane in so far as human knowledge was concerned. In connection with other phases of life that wisdom long retained a fresh, young forcefulness; but it declined most noticeably in the matter of knowledge. From the eighth, seventh, and sixth centuries B. C. there remained something that may be termed the remnant of a remnant. Were you to hark back even to the Egypto-Chaldean wisdom, not to say that of ancient Persia or India, you would find this wisdom everywhere permeated by true spiritual vision, by the fruits of primeval clairvoyance; and for those endowed to a lesser degree with this faculty the reports of the clairvoyants were available. Such a thing as science other than one based on clairvoyance never existed in the Indian and Persian epochs, nor in still later times; even during the early Greek period there was no science without a basis of clairvoyant research. But then the time approached when this fading clairvoyant research was lost to human science, and for the first time we witness the rise of a human science devoid of clairvoyance—or at least, a science from which clairvoyance was gradually cast out.

Clairvoyance vanishes, as does faith in the revelations of clairvoyants; and during the 6th or 7th Century before the appearance of Christ we see established something we can call a human science, from which the fruits of spiritual research are increasingly eliminated. And this becomes ever more the case: in Parmenides and Heraclitus, in Plato and even in Aristotle—everywhere in the writings of the old naturalists and physicians—you can find ample confirmation that what is known as science was originally permeated by the results of spiritual research. But spiritual science steadily deteriorated and decreased. In connection with our psychic capacity, our feeling and willing, it still endures; but as regards our thinking it is vanishing.

Thus with respect to human thinking, to thinking in terms of science, the influence of the etheric on the physical body had already begun to wane when Christ appeared. Everything of that sort comes about gradually, step by step. Christ came and gave the impulse; but naturally not everyone accepted it at once, and particularly was it rejected in certain spheres of activity. In others it was received, but in the field of science it was positively spurned. Examine for yourselves the science that prevailed in the time of the Roman empire. Look it up in Celsus, where you can read all sorts of rubbish about Christ. This Celsus was a great scholar, but he understood nothing whatever about human thinking as affected by the Christ impulse. He reports:

“There is said to have lived at one time in Palestine a couple known as Joseph and Mary, with whom the sect of Christians originated. But what is told about them is all superstition. The truth is that the wife of this Joseph was once unfaithful to her husband with a Roman captain named Panthera; but Joseph did not know the identity of the child's father.”

That was one of the most popular accounts of the time; and if you follow our contemporary literature you will realize that certain people of the present have not advanced beyond the standard of Celsus. Certainly there are fields in which the Christ-Impulse can take root but slowly, but among those now under discussion it has to this day found no foothold at all. There is one part of man we see withering: it is in the human brain; but when it shall have been influenced by the Christ-Impulse it will revive science in a very different form. Strange as that may sound in this age of scientific fanaticism, it is nevertheless true. That part of the brain assigned to scientific thinking is moving toward a slow death. This illustrates the gradual disappearance of the ancient heritage from scientific thinking. Aristotle still possessed a relatively large store of it, but we see science gradually being drained of it; and science, by reason of the accumulation of external data, will become God-forsaken in respect of its thinking, having nothing left of the old fund. And we see further how it is possible that, no matter how powerfully we experience the Christ, we can no longer establish any contact between the Christ-Impulse and what mankind has achieved in the way of science.

We have tangible evidence of this. Suppose that a man of the 13th Century had been profoundly affected by the Christ-Impulse and had said: We have the Christ-Impulse; like a flood of mighty new revelations it streams to us from the Gospel, and we can permeate ourselves with it.—And suppose further that this man had made it his mission to create a connecting link between science and Christianity: even as early as the 13th Century he would have found nothing in the current science that could have been used for the purpose. He would have had to hark back to Aristotle. Only by collaborating with Aristotle, not with 13th-Century science, would he have been able to interpret Christianity. Science simply became increasingly incapable of making any contact with the Christ principle; hence the 13th-Century scholars had to revert to Aristotle, who still possessed something of the old legacy of wisdom and could thus provide concepts capable of correlating science and Christianity.

But as science grew richer in data and observations it became ever poorer in ideas, until finally the time came when all concepts emanating from the old wisdom disappeared from it. Even the greatest men are, of course, children of their era as far as their scientific activity is concerned. Galileo, for example, could not think from an absolute background, but only as his age thought; and his greatness consists precisely in his having established God-forsaken thinking as such—pure mechanistical thinking. An important revulsion in thought set in with Galileo: the most commonplace phenomena treated by modern physics had quite a different explanation after Galileo's day from what they had previously. Say, someone throws a stone. Today we are told that the stone retains its motion until the latter is counteracted by the influence of another force, the force of inertia. Before Galileo's time a different opinion was held: people were convinced that if the stone was to keep moving it would have to be propelled—something active must be behind it. Galileo taught people to think in an entirely new way, but in a way implying that the world is a mechanism; and the ideal striven for today is a mechanical, mechanistic explanation of the world with the complete elimination of all spirit. And the reason for this is that those portions of the human brain, of the thought apparatus, which constitute the organ of scientific thinking, are already so shrivelled as to be no longer able to infuse new life into concepts, with the result that the latter become more and more poverty-stricken.

One could easily show that science, for all the isolated facts it keeps accumulating, has not enriched the life of mankind by a single concept. Note well that observations are not concepts! Do not imagine that such things as Darwinism and the like have provided humanity with concepts. That is something that others have done—not the scientists, but men who tapped quite different sources. Goethe was such a man: he enriched man's fund of ideas from altogether different sources; and consequently the scientists consider him a dilettante.

The fact is that science has not grown richer in ideas. Far more alive, loftier, grander are those of antiquity. The Darwinian concepts are like squeezed-out lemons: Darwinism merely collected the results of observation and then linked them with poverty-stricken concepts. This trend in science points clearly to the process of gradual death. In the human brain there is a part that is withering, and this is the part that in our time functions in scientific thinking. The reason for this is that the portion of the human etheric body which should animate this shrivelling brain has as yet not grasped the Christ-Impulse. No life will flow into science until the Christ impulse enters the portion of the human brain that is intended to serve science. That is a fact based on the great cosmic laws. If science continues in this way it will become poorer and poorer in concepts, and gradually these will vanish. And increasingly numerous will be the scientists who keep lining up their data, and who will be frightened out of their wits when someone begins to think. Nowadays it is a sore trial for a professor to discover a bit of thinking in a doctor's dissertation submitted to him by some candidate.

But we now have an anthroposophy, and this anthroposophy will increasingly clarify the Christ-Impulse for mankind, thereby imbuing the etheric body with ever more life—with such a wealth of it, in fact, that the etheric body will be able to restore flexibility to that rigid portion of the brain which is responsible for the present trend of scientific thinking. That is an illustration of the manner in which the Christ-Impulse, having in time laid hold on mankind, will reanimate the dying members of the body. The future of the race would see the withering of more and more members; but the flowing in of the Christ-Impulse will increase proportionately with the dwindling of each part; and by the end of the Earth evolution all the parts that would otherwise have perished will be revivified by the Christ-Impulse, which will have saturated the whole etheric body: the human etheric body will have become one with the Christ-Impulse.

The first impetus for this gradual revitalization of mankind, for the resurrection of humanity, was given at a particular moment during a scene most beautifully described in the Gospel of St. John. Think of the Christ as coming into the world a wholly universal Being, and commencing His great work by means of an etheric body completely saturated with His spirit—for the transformation brought about in the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth enabled it to animate even the physical body. At the moment in which the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth, in Whom the Christ now dwelt, became completely a life giver for the physical body, the etheric body of Christ is seen transfigured. And the writer of the John Gospel describes this moment:

Father, glorify thy name. Then came there a voice from heaven, saying, I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again.

The people therefore, that stood by, and heard it, said that it thundered.

What is said is that those who stood by heard thunder; but nowhere does it say that anyone who had not been duly prepared had heard it.

Others said, An angel spake to him.

Jesus answered and said, This voice came not because of me, but for your sakes.

Why? That what had taken place might be understood by all who were near. And Christ clarifies the event:

Now is the judgment of this world: now shall the prince of this world be cast out.

In that moment Lucifer-Ahriman was cast out of the physical body of Christ. There stands the great example which in the future must be realized by all mankind: through the Christ-Impulse the obstacles placed by Lucifer-Ahriman must be cast out of the physical body; and man's earth body must be so vitalized by the Christ-Impulse that the fruits of the earth's mission may be carried over into the time that is to follow this earth epoch.

We have been trying to gain some understanding of the opening chapters of the Gospel of St. Luke. Only through knowledge of happenings in the evolution of humanity to which such lengthy study has had to be devoted is it possible to unravel what the writer of this Gospel has narrated as a kind of historical prelude to the great Christ Event. But we now know something about the Being who in the thirtieth year of his life received the Christ-principle into himself.

To understand what the writer of St. Luke's Gospel tells us about the personality and the deeds of Christ Jesus—that is, of the Individuality who worked in the world for three years as ‘Christ’ in a human body—brief reference must be made to certain aspects of the evolution of humanity of which our age has only a very inadequate idea. Men to-day are in many respects extraordinarily short-sighted, believing that the law of evolution underlying what is happening in humanity at the present time or happened during the last few centuries, has remained unchanged, and that conditions not existing nowadays could never have existed in the past. That is why it is so difficult at the present time for people to understand and freely accept narratives of a past epoch such as that during which Christ was living on the Earth.

The Gospel of St. Luke tells us of the deeds of Christ Jesus on the Earth in such a way that to get at the real meaning of his accounts a clear picture of the stage then reached in evolution is essential.

Attention must again be drawn to what has often been said in the course of our studies, namely that our ancestors—that is, our own souls in other bodies—lived in ancient Atlantis, the continent once stretching between Europe and Africa on the one side and America on the other. When the face of the globe was changed by the Atlantean Deluge, the masses of the people migrated Eastwards and Westwards, and so colonised the Earth. Then, in the post-Atlantean epoch, the various civilizations arose: the ancient Indian, ancient Persian, Egypto-Chaldean, Graeco-Latin, and our own.

It is entirely erroneous to believe that during the post-Atlantean epoch man was always constituted as he is to-day. The fact is that human nature has undergone constant and very great changes. Historical documents cover a few thousand years only and the one and only source of information about the earliest periods of civilization after the Atlantean catastrophe is the imperishable ‘Akashic Chronicle’—a record inaccessible to external research—the character of which has again been briefly indicated in the present lecture-course.

After the Atlantean catastrophe there developed, first, the ancient Indian civilization. This was an epoch when men still lived more in the etheric body, not as deeply in the physical body as was the case later on. Without having developed the Ego-consciousness of to-day, by far the greater majority of the people of ancient India were endowed with dim, shadowy clairvoyance. Their consciousness was dreamlike but they were able to gaze into the depths of existence, into the spiritual world. When studying these things it is very necessary to be aware of the facts connected with the various forms of knowledge and of cognition through the different epochs. Thus we constantly lay stress upon the view of the world held by our ancestors in ancient India and upon the fact that they were clairvoyant in a far higher degree than the men of later times. But if we are to understand the Gospel of St. Luke, attention must be paid to yet another of their characteristics.

In that early epoch, when man's etheric body still projected on all sides beyond the physical body and was less firmly knit with it than is the case to-day, the forces and qualities of the soul had considerably greater power over the physical body. The more deeply the etheric body penetrated into the physical body, the weaker it became and the less power it had over the physical body. In the ancient Atlanteans the etheric head extended very considerably beyond the physical body, but to a certain extent this was still the case in the people of ancient India too, enabling them on the one hand to have clairvoyant consciousness and on the other to wield great power over processes in the physical body.

We can, if we like, make a somewhat remote comparison between a body belonging to the ancient Indian epoch and one belonging to our own. In our time the etheric body has penetrated to the deepest possible extent into the physical body and is therefore closely bound up with it. But we are now at the very verge of the turning-point when the etheric body will emerge again, emancipate itself from the physical body and become more independent. As humanity advances towards the future this will take place to an ever-increasing extent and as a matter of fact the point of closest union has now already been passed. Comparing the body of an ancient Indian with that of a modern man, it can be said that in the Indian body the etheric body was still comparatively free and the soul was able to exert forces that worked right into the physical body. Not being so closely bound to the physical body, the etheric body could immediately take into itself the forces of the soul; this gave it greater power over the physical body, with the result that influences brought to bear upon the soul in that age also had a tremendously strong effect upon the physical body. In the ancient Indian epoch, if one man hated another and spoke words charged with hatred, such words ‘pierced’ the other, penetrated right into the physical organism. The soul still had an actual effect upon the etheric body and the etheric body in turn upon the physical body. The etheric body to-day lacks this power. In those olden times, loving words produced in the other man a sense of release, of warmth, of expansion, affecting his physical body too. Therefore much depended upon whether words were filled with love or hatred, for this had an effect upon all the bodily processes. The strength of such an effect steadily decreased in humanity the more deeply the etheric body penetrated into the physical body.

Things are different nowadays. Words spoken to-day have an effect only upon the soul and people who feel that malicious words actually make something contract within them or that loving words bring a sense of release and happiness have become extremely rare. The peculiar effects we may possibly still feel in our physical heart to-day when loving or malicious words are spoken were experienced with tremendous intensity at the beginning of post-Atlantean evolution. Quite different effects from those now possible could therefore be produced in that age when such influences were brought to bear upon the soul. Words full of the warmth of love may be spoken to-day, but when they come up against the present human organism they are constantly repelled and do not penetrate; for it does not depend only upon how words are spoken, but also, upon how they can be received.

It is therefore not possible to-day to work so directly upon the soul of a man that the effect penetrates into his physical organism. This is not immediately possible, but in a certain way it will again become so, for a future is approaching when the spiritual will reacquire its significance. We can, in fact, already indicate what this will mean in time to come. In our present evolutionary cycle we can do very little to enable whatever love, good will and wisdom may be in our soul to stream directly into the soul of another human being and there be strong enough to work right down into the physical body. Such an effect can only very gradually become possible; nevertheless this spiritual way of working is beginning again on the soil where the spiritual-scientific conception of the world takes root, for this actually strengthens the activity of the soul. Only very rarely to-day is it possible for a word to produce physical effects; but it is possible for human beings to come together in order to receive spiritual truths into their souls. These spiritual truths will gradually gain greater strength in the souls of men and therewith the power to work right into the physical organism. Thus in future time the soul-and-spirit will again acquire great power over the physical and form it into its own image.

In the days of the very ancient Indian civilization, for example, what is called ‘healing’ was a very different matter from what it came to be later on, for all the things are connected with the facts just referred to. Because by working upon the soul a tremendously strong effect could at one time be produced upon the body, it was possible so to impress the soul of another by means of a word charged with the right impulse of will that this soul transmitted the effect to the etheric body, and the latter in turn to the physical body. If there were any realization of what effect it was desirable to bring about, it was possible, in a case of illness, to produce this effect upon the soul and thereby upon the body, resulting in restoration of health. And now imagine this effect intensified to the maximum, the Indian physician controlling the influences and impressions in question, and you will realize that all healing in the ancient Indian epoch was a far more spiritual process than it can be to-day—I say expressly, than it can possibly be to-day. But the time is approaching when such ways of working will again be effective. What is brought down from spiritual heights as a world-conception, as a number of truths corresponding to the great spiritual realities of the Universe this will flow into the souls of men, and as humanity lives on into the future will itself be a source of healing, springing from the inmost being of man himself. Spiritual science is the great remedy for souls in the life awaiting them in future time. Only it must be understood that humanity has been on a descending path of evolution, that the spiritual influences have steadily lost strength, that the lowest point of the process has now been reached, and that the ascent to the level at which we once stood can only be very gradual.

As time went on, effects that were eminently possible in ancient India ceased to be so. A somewhat similar human constitution—one enabling soul to work upon soul was still in existence in Egyptian civilization. The farther back we go in that civilization-epoch, the more evidence is there that one soul was able to produce a direct effect upon another—an effect which could then pass over to the physical organism. This possibility was much rarer among the ancient Persians, for theirs was a different function; they were to give the primary impetus for penetration into the physical world. In respect of the characteristic just mentioned, Egyptian culture was related to that of ancient India much more closely than was the Persian. In ancient Persia the soul began to be enclosed within itself to an increasing extent and to have less and less power over the external organism, because it was to develop self-consciousness. Therefore with the stream of culture in which the spiritual had maintained mastery over the physical, another had to converge—one especially concerned with inner deepening and the development of self-consciousness. In Graeco-Latin culture these two streams came, in a sense, into equilibrium. In that fourth post-Atlantean culture-epoch humanity had already descended just so far into the physical world as to enable a kind of equilibrium to be established between the physical and the soul-and-spirit—in other words, the mastery of soul-and-spirit over the body was about equal in strength to that of the body over the soul. A state of equilibrium had been brought about.

Humanity must however again undergo a kind of ‘cosmic trial’ in order to be able to ascend once more to spiritual heights. Since the Graeco-Latin epoch, everything in man of a corporeal, physical nature has descended still more deeply into materiality. In the age in which we are living, the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, man has actually been driven below the line of equilibrium; to begin with it was only in his inner nature that he could rise to a more theoretical kind of consciousness of the spiritual world. He had to acquire inner strength.

Relatively speaking, then, there was a condition of equilibrium in Graeco-Latin civilization, whereas now, in our epoch, the physical has gained the mastery and dominates the soul-and-spirit which has become powerless in a certain respect and is accepted merely in theory. Man has had to be restricted through the centuries to the acquisition of inner strength—a process not revealed to the consciousness. But little by little it must be possible for a new consciousness to be developed. And when—it will not be until the sixth post-Atlantean epoch—such consciousness has acquired a certain strength through having absorbed more and more spiritual nourishment, man will no longer derive theoretical wisdom from such nourishment but living wisdom, living truth. The spiritual will then be so strong that once again it will have mastery over the physical—now from the other side.

How then can the mission of spiritual science in humanity be explained?

If in our age spiritual science becomes more and more alive in the soul, able not only to stimulate the intellect but to imbue the soul with greater and greater warmth, then the soul will become strong enough to dominate the physical. Certain transitional states are of course inevitable—states which may at first actually appear to denote deterioration or even harm. But these states are only transitional and will give way to the future condition when men will receive spiritual life into their ideas—the condition that will signify in the whole of humanity the mastery of the soul and spirit over the physical and material. Those who are interested in the truths of spiritual science to-day not merely because they stimulate the intellect, but who can be enraptured by and derive living satisfaction from these truths—such men will be the forerunners of those in whom the mastery of the soul and spirit over the physical and material has been achieved.

It has been possible in our own time to present great truths relating to happenings such as we have been studying during the last few days: the momentous fusion of the Buddha-stream with the Zarathustra-stream and all that took place in Palestine at the beginning of our era. We have been able to show how wisdom in the world's evolution created the two figures of the Nathan Jesus-child and the Solomon Jesus-child and through these stupendous happenings brought about the union of streams previously flowing in separation over the Earth.

Different views may be taken of what has been presented in these lectures. Someone may say: ‘To begin with, all this may seem fantastic to the modern mind; yet when I lay on the scales the outer effects of the happenings described, everything seems plausible; in fact the Gospels become intelligible to me only when I apply to them what has been discovered from the Akashic Chronicle.’ Another person may, for instance, be interested in what is related about the two Jesus-children, and say: ‘I can now understand a great deal that hitherto seemed inexplicable.’ Again, someone else may say: ‘When I review all these happenings and the findings of occult investigation concerning the manifestation of the Nirmanakaya of Buddha in the proclamation to the shepherds, and so on—again, when I think of the other stream and of how the Star guided the followers of Zarathustra when their Teacher appeared again on Earth—when I see there how one great stream flowed into another and how forms of spiritual life that were previously separate, united ... when I picture all this I have one outstanding impression—that everything is indescribably beautiful in the process of world-evolution!’ We ourselves can have the same impression of the grandeur and sublimity of it all, and this can kindle the fire of wonder in our souls at what has come to pass in the world.

The great truths can bestow upon us no greater boon than this. The ‘lesser’ truths will satisfy our longing for knowledge; the ‘great’ truths will warm our very souls and we shall say that there is supreme beauty in what is thus made manifest through the happenings of world-existence. If we feel this beauty and splendour, any purely theoretical understanding will be transcended.

What are the words of Christ Jesus as related in the Gospel of St. Luke?

“A sower went out to sow his seed: and as he sowed, some fell by the wayside; and it was trodden down, and the fowls of the air devoured it. And some fell upon a rock; and as soon as it was sprung up, it withered away, because it lacked moisture. And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprang up with it and choked it. And other fell on good ground, and sprang up, and bare fruit an hundredfold. ...” (Luke, VIII, 5–8)

This parable of the Sower given by Christ Jesus to His disciples is applicable to the anthroposophical conception of the world. The seed is the Kingdom of the Gods, the Kingdom of Heaven, the Kingdom of the Spirit. This Kingdom of the Spirit is to pour as seed into the souls of men and take effect on Earth.

There are people who have in their souls only such forces as repel the spiritual view of the world and any consciousness of the realm of the divine-spiritual Beings; such consciousness is made impossible by hindrances existing in the soul and it is repelled immediately. This applies to many people in regard to the words of Christ Jesus; it also frequently applies to what Anthroposophy has to bring into the world to-day; it is repelled; the birds devour it, preventing it from ever penetrating into the soil. Then again, the words of Christ Jesus or the words of spiritual wisdom may be spoken to a soul lacking sufficient depth. Such a soul may be able to understand that these are very plausible truths, but they do not become part of its very substance and being. It may even be capable of giving out the wisdom again, but it has not really become one with the wisdom. This is comparable to the seed that has fallen on rocky ground and cannot germinate. The third kind of seed falls among thornbushes; there it does indeed germinate, but it cannot thrive. The meaning, as Christ Jesus indicates, is that there are people whose souls are so filled with the interests and cares of day-to-day life that although they are capable of understanding the words of spiritual truth, everything else in the soul acts as a thornbush, as a continual obstruction. There are also souls to-day—and they are very numerous—who would willingly assimilate the truths of spiritual science were it not for the suppression exercised by external life. Only very few are able to allow the spiritual truths to unfold in freedom, in the manner of the fourth kind of seed. These are people who begin to experience Anthroposophy as living truth, who receive it into their souls as very life and steep their whole being in it; they are also the pioneers of the strength with which spiritual truths will work in future time. No one, however, in whom the right trust and depth of conviction are not born from his own soul can be persuaded to-day by any external means to believe in the truth and the power of spiritual wisdom.

It is no argument against the effectiveness of spiritual wisdom that in the case of many people to-day the physical organism is not influenced. On the contrary, it might be taken as proof of the soundness of spiritual wisdom that it sometimes has a negative effect upon physical bodies. Someone with poor physical health—a slum child, for instance—who is ailing as the result of having breathed nothing but city air from his earliest years, is not necessarily made healthy by bracing mountain air; it may even make him really ill. Just as this is no argument against the health-giving quality of mountain air, so too the fact that when spiritual wisdom penetrates into certain physical organisms it may temporarily upset them, is no argument against its effectiveness. For it encounters what human bodies have inherited through the course of hundreds and thousands of years, encounters elements that cannot possibly harmonize with it.

Proofs of this cannot yet be found in the outer world; we must penetrate deeply into this wisdom and become firmly convinced of its truth. However much external evidence may eventually be forthcoming, we must be able to penetrate to the inner core of the wisdom and develop conviction in our own being. We are then able to say: If here or there this anthroposophical wisdom is found to be too overwhelming, it is because of unhealthy conditions encountered in human beings themselves. Spiritual wisdom is intrinsically healthy—human beings by no means always! Quite obviously, therefore, it is not possible for all the spiritual wisdom that can become accessible to mankind as time goes on, to be revealed to-day. Care is taken that possible harm shall be avoided just as slum children are not sent into high mountain air that would be harmful for them. Hence it is only from time to time that information appropriate for average human beings can be communicated. If certain deeper truths were revealed to the fullest extent, this would be too overwhelming for men with a particular constitution, having the same effect as high mountain air upon impaired physical health. The great spiritual truths can be unveiled only very gradually, but this will be done in due course and prove to be a universal, health-bringing factor in humanity.

Men must gradually reacquire that ascendancy of the soul-and-spirit over the material which they were obliged to lose. It was being slowly lost from the time of ancient Indian culture until well into the Graeco-Latin epoch. But during the latter epoch there were always human beings in whom as a heritage from olden times the etheric body was still loosened to a certain extent and whose whole organism was amenable to psychic and spiritual influences. It was in that age, therefore, that Christ Jesus appeared. Had He come in our epoch He would not have been able to work as He did at that time or become the great Example for mankind. In our epoch He would have encountered human organisms far more deeply sunk in physical matter. He Himself would have had to descend into a physical organism in which the powerful effects produced by the soul-and-spirit upon the physical would not have been possible as they were at the time of His coming.

This applies not only to Christ Jesus but to others as well, and the evolution of humanity can be understood only in the light of what has been said. It applies, for example, to Buddha and his mission on the Earth. He was the first to proclaim and establish the great teaching of compassion and love and everything connected with that teaching as expressed in the precepts of the Eightfold Path. Do you imagine that if Buddha were to appear to-day he would be able to achieve what he achieved in India? Indeed he would not, for a physical organism in which he was able to reach that stage of development could not exist to-day. Man's physical organism has undergone continual changes in the course of the ages. Buddha was obliged to descend at exactly the point of time when it was possible for him to use an organism enabling him to accomplish the mighty deed of inaugurating the Eightfold Path. Strange as it may seem, it is nevertheless true that all the philosophical and moral teachings since produced by humanity are no more than a feeble beginning of what was established by Buddha. However greatly people may admire different philosophies, however fervent their enthusiasm may be for Kantian thought and other such systems—everything is elementary compared with the all-embracing principles of the Eightfold Path. Humanity can only slowly reach the stage of understanding what lies behind the words of this teaching. At the right moment something of the kind is established in the world for the first time; from this point evolution advances and humanity acquires, but only after long ages, what was first exemplified in a mighty deed. Thus in his day Buddha brought to the world the teaching of love and compassion as a token for coming generations of human beings who must gradually acquire the capacity to recognize and understand from within themselves the principles of the Eightfold Path. In the sixth post-Atlantean epoch of civilization a considerable number of human beings will be capable of this. But a long path has to be trodden before men say to themselves: We can now acquire out of our own souls what Buddha established five or six centuries before our era; we have now become like Buddha in our own souls.

Step by step, humanity must climb to the summit. The first disciples are those who, in the wake of the Individuality concerned, rise to the heights of a great epoch; the capacity to understand what has been achieved then remains with them as a heritage. The rest of humanity ascends slowly and arrives at the goal very much later. But when a considerable number of human beings have reached the stage where the principles of the Eightfold Path can arise as knowledge born of their own souls, not derived from or taught to them by Buddhism—these human beings will have made great progress in another respect as well.

In the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment you can read how the development of the sixteen-petalled ‘lotus-flower’ is connected with the Eightfold Path.¹ Those who have insight into the evolution of humanity can recognize a sign of the extent to which humanity has succeeded in making progress—the sign being the stage of development reached by the sixteen-petalled lotus-flower, which will be one of the chief organs used by men in future time. But when this organ has been developed a certain mastery over the physical will have been established by the soul-and-spirit. Only one who sets out to-day to achieve spiritual development in the esoteric sense can say that he is beginning to make the principles of the Eightfold Path part of his very being. Others ‘study’ them. But of course that too is very useful as a stimulus.

Fundamentally speaking, therefore, it may be said that the soul-and-spirit can work effectively only in those human beings who are beginning to make the spiritual wisdom presented to them an integral part of their souls. To the extent to which the Eightfold Path becomes an actual experience in the soul, to that extent an effect will also be produced upon the physical.

Of course people who are considered very clever nowadays and who swear by materialism, may say: ‘We know someone who followed your advice and tried to develop by making spiritual wisdom come alive within him; but he died at the age of fifty, so the wisdom did little towards prolonging his life!’ This kind of sapient remark is frequently made. The only pity is that contrary instances are not also brought forward. It should be asked how long the person concerned would have lived if he had made no attempt to promote spiritual development and whether in that case he might possibly not have lived beyond the age of forty. That point would have to be decided first! But people will look only at what is actually under their noses!

The mastery wielded by the soul-and-spirit over the physical gradually fell away from humanity until well into the fourth civilization-epoch when there were still enough human beings living in whom the effect of the spiritual upon the physical could be perceived. It was then that Christ came to the Earth. Had He come later, none of the things that were then revealed could have been revealed. Such a stupendous manifestation had necessarily to appear in the world at exactly the right time.

What does the coming of Christ into the world signify?

It signifies that when a man rightly understands Christ he learns to exercise his self-consciousness to the fullest extent and his Ego eventually gains complete mastery over everything that is within him. That is what the coming of Christ signifies. The self-conscious Ego will reconquer everything that mankind has lost in the course of the ages. But just as the teaching of the Eightfold Path had to be established for the first time by Buddha, so too the supremacy of the Ego-principle over all the bodily processes had to be visibly established before the expiration of the old era. If the entry of the Christ-principle into the world had taken place in our present epoch, it would not have been possible for the mighty influences of healing to be exercised upon the environment as they were at that earlier time. Conditions were necessary when there were still in existence human beings whose etheric bodies were sufficiently detached to enable drastic effects to be wrought upon them merely by words or by touch effects of which to-day there can be only faint echoes. Men began to develop the Ego in order to be able to understand the Christ, and through this understanding to re-acquire what they had lost. Through the last surviving examples of humanity belonging to the old era, it was to be shown with what power the Ego worked upon those who were living at that time, for the Ego was present here in its fulness in one human being, in Christ Jesus, as will be the case in the rest of mankind at the end of the Earth period. The Gospel of St. Luke records this in order to show that with Christ there came into the world an Ego which penetrated the human physical, etheric and astral bodies so completely that health-bringing influences could be brought to bear upon the whole physical organism. This had to be demonstrated as a proof that when mankind in the future, after thousands of years, has acquired in full measure the power that can proceed from the Christ-Ego, it will be possible for influences such as streamed into humanity from Christ while He was on Earth, to stream from the Egos of men. This truth had to be revealed but it was only through the humanity of that time that it could have been revealed.

It has been said that there are illnesses which originate in the human astral body. The form these illnesses take is connected with the whole nature of man. If someone to-day has bad moral traits, these may, to begin with, be confined to the life of soul. Because in the modern age the soul does not dominate the body to the extent that it did at the time of Christ Jesus, not every sin will come to expression in an external illness. We are, however, approaching conditions when the etheric body will again emerge and when the greatest care will have to be taken lest the bad traits of the soul, both in a moral and intellectual respect, should manifest physically as illnesses. Many of those semi-psychic, semi-bodily diseases—the so-called ‘nervous’ diseases characteristic of our time—are evidence that this epoch is already beginning. Because in their desires and their thoughts men have absorbed the disharmonies reigning in the outer world to-day, such factors can naturally only express themselves in phenomena such as hysteria and similar disorders. But this is all connected with the particular character of the phase of spiritual development upon which we are now entering, with the loosening and emergence of etheric body.

At the time of Christ's appearance on the Earth there were many human beings in His environment in whom sins and transgressions—but especially defects of character deriving from former bad traits—were expressing themselves in disease. The sin that is actually seated in the astral body and manifests as illness, is called ‘possession’ in the Gospel of St. Luke. It is the condition that sets in when a man attracts alien spirits into his astral body and when his better qualities fail to give him mastery over his whole nature. In human beings in whom the old state of separation between the etheric and physical bodies still persisted, the effects of evil qualities and attributes expressed themselves conspicuously at that time in forms of illness manifesting as ‘possession’. The Gospel of St. Luke tells how such people were healed through the mere proximity and the words of the Individuality now in Christ Jesus and how the evil power working in them was expelled. This is a prefigurement of conditions at the end of Earth evolution, when man's good qualities will exercise a healing influence upon all his other traits.

People do not generally notice the subtler implications concealed behind many narratives in the Gospels, nor realize that reference is often being made to illnesses of a quite different character when, for example, these are described in the passage in St. Luke's Gospel telling of the healing of one sick of the palsy. (Luke V, 17–26). ‘The healing of one paralysed’ would be the correct rendering, for the Greek text here has the word ‘paralelymenos’, denoting one whose limbs are paralysed. It was still known in those times that these forms of illness are due to qualities of the etheric body. When it is said that Christ Jesus healed those who were paralysed, this shows that by the power of his Individuality, effects were produced not only in astral bodies but in etheric bodies too, so that it was possible for men with defects in the etheric body also to be healed. Precisely when Christ speaks of ‘deeper sin’—sin which reaches into the etheric body—He uses a particular expression, clearly indicating that the spiritual factor causing the illness must first be removed. He does not immediately say to the paralysed man: “Stand up and walk!” but concerns Himself with the cause that is penetrating as illness into the etheric body, and says: “Thy sins are forgiven thee!”—meaning that the sin which had eaten its way right into the etheric body must first be expelled. Ordinary biblical research does not enter into these fine distinctions; it does not perceive that what is here being shown is that this Individuality had an influence upon the secrets of the astral body and the etheric body—even upon those of the physical body.

Why in this connection do we speak of the secrets of the physical body as though they were the highest? In outer life itself the effect made by one astral body upon another is quite obvious. You can, for example, wound a man by a word charged with hatred. Something then takes place in his astral body; he hears the word and suffers pain in his astral body. That is an example of mutual action between one astral body and another. Mutual action between one etheric body and another is far more deeply hidden; this involves delicate influences which play from man to man but are never perceived to-day. The most deeply hidden of all are the influences which reach the physical body, because owing to its dense materiality it conceals the working of the spiritual most completely. In the Gospel of St. Luke, however, we are also to be shown that Christ Jesus has power over the physical body. Here we come to a passage that would be quite incomprehensible to materialistic thinkers. It is as well that these lectures are being attended only by people who have some knowledge of spiritual science, for if by chance someone were to come in from the street, what is being said to-day would seem to him pure lunacy, even if he considered the rest only half or quarter mad!

Christ Jesus shows that He is able to see into the very depths of the physical corporeality and to work into it. This is revealed by the fact that His power is also able to have a healing effect upon illnesses rooted in the physical body. But for this to be possible there must be knowledge of the mysterious effects working from the physical body of one human being upon the physical body of another. When it is a matter of working spiritually, man cannot be regarded as a being enclosed in his skin. It has often been said that our finger is wiser than we are ourselves. Our finger knows that the blood can flow through it only if the blood is circulating normally through the whole body; our finger knows that it would wither away if it were severed from the rest of the organism. So too, if he would understand the conditions relating to the physical body, man must know that in respect of his physical organism he belongs to humanity as a whole, that influences are continually passing from one human being to another, and that he can in no way separate his physical health as an individual from the health of the whole of humanity. This principle will be admitted to-day in respect of the coarser influences but not in respect of the finer, because people cannot know the facts. In the following passage from the eighth chapter of St. Luke's Gospel it is the finer, more delicate influences that are indicated.

“And it came to pass, that, when Jesus was returned, the people gladly received him: for they were all waiting for him. And behold, there came a man named Jairus, and he was a ruler of the synagogue: and he fell down at Jesus' feet, and besought him that he would come into his house: For he had one only daughter, about twelve years of age, and she lay a-dying. But as he went the people thronged him. And a woman having an issue of blood twelve years, which had spent all her living upon physicians, neither could be healed of any, came behind him, and touched the border of his garment: and immediately her issue of blood stanched.“ (Luke VIII, 40–44.)

How can the twelve-year-old daughter of Jairus possibly be healed, for she is at the very point of death? This can only be understood if we know that the girl's physical illness was connected with another phenomenon in another person, and that she cannot be healed independently of that other phenomenon. When this, child, now twelve years old, was born, a certain connection existed with another personality—a connection deeply grounded in Karma. Hence we are told that a woman who had suffered from a certain illness for twelve years, passed behind Christ and touched the border of His garment. Why is this woman mentioned here? It is because she was connected karmically with Jairus' child! This twelve-year-old girl and the woman who had suffered for twelve years were deeply connected! And it is not without reason that a secret of number is indicated here: the woman with an illness suffered for twelve years approaches Jesus and is healed—and only now could He enter the house of Jairus and heal the twelve-year-old girl who was believed to be already dead.

Depths as great as these must be explored in order to understand the Karma that weaves between one human being and another! Then we can perceive the third way in which Christ worked—namely, upon the whole human organism. This must be especially borne in mind when we are considering the higher effects produced by Christ as presented in the Gospel of St. Luke.

Thus we are shown quite clearly how the Christ-Ego worked upon all the other members of man's being. That is the essential point. The writer of the Gospel of St. Luke, who gives special prominence in these parts of the Gospel to descriptions of the healings, wished to show how the healing influences proceeding from the Ego indicate the attainment of a lofty level in the evolutionary process; and he shows how Christ worked upon the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body of man. St. Luke has set before us this great Ideal of evolution: ‘Look towards your future! Your Ego, in the present stage of its development, is still weak; as yet it has little mastery. But it will gradually become master of the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body, and will transform them. Before you is set the great Ideal of Christ who reveals to mankind what this mastery can mean!’

It is upon truths such as these that the Gospels are founded—truths which could be recorded only by those who did not rely upon outer documents but upon the testimony of men who were ‘seers’ and ‘servants of the word’. Conviction of what lies behind the Gospels can be acquired only by degrees. But men will gradually grasp with such intensity and strength the nature of the truths upon which the scriptures are founded that this understanding will have an effect upon all the members of the human organism.

• 1. See pp. 75–81 in the revised edition of 1963.